As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed it aside with a scream of rage; she flashed at him, and with both hands made a feline pass at the face he bent toward her. He sprang back, and after an instant of stupefaction he pulled open the door behind him and ran out into the street.
“Well, Christine Dryfoos!” said Mela, “Sprang at him like a wild-cat!”
“I don’t care,” Christine shrieked. “I’ll tear his eyes out!” She flew up-stairs to her own room, and left the burden of the explanation to Mela, who did it justice.
Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in his studio, reeking with perspiration and breathless. He must almost have run. He struck a match with a shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass. He expected to see the bleeding marks of her nails on his cheeks, but he could see nothing. He grovelled inwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar; it was all so just and apt to his deserts.
There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on the mantel which he had kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area. He took it and sat looking into the muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him. It slipped through his hand and struck the floor, and there was a report; he sprang into the air, feeling that he had been shot. But he found himself still alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as one of Christine’s finger-nails might have left.
He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact that he had got his punishment in the right way, and that his case was not to be dignified into tragedy.
XVIII.
The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French steamer. There was no longer any business obligation on them to be civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason in the attention they offered. ‘Every Other Week’ had been made over to the joint ownership of March and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a hardness on Dryfoos’s side which certainly left Mrs. March with a sense of his incomplete regeneration. Yet when she saw him there on the steamer, she pitied him; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife, with her twitching head, and her prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely out, while she clung to Mrs. March’s hand where they sat together till the leave-takers were ordered ashore, was less pathetic. Mela was looking after both of them, and trying to cheer them in a joyful excitement. “I tell ’em it’s goun’ to add ten years to both their lives,” she said. “The voyage ‘ll do their healths good; and then, we’re gittun’ away from that miser’ble pack o’ servants that was eatun’ us up, there in New York. I hate the place!” she said, as if they had already left it. “Yes, Mrs. Mandel’s goun’, too,” she added, following the direction of Mrs. March’s eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel, speaking to Christine on the other side of the cabin. “Her and Christine had a kind of a spat, and she was goun’ to leave, but here only the other day, Christine offered to make it up with her, and now they’re as thick as thieves. Well, I reckon we couldn’t very well ‘a’ got along without her. She’s about the only one that speaks French in this family.”
Mrs. March’s eyes still dwelt upon Christine’s face; it was full of a furtive wildness. She seemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself from looking as if she were looking for some one. “Do you know,” Mrs. March said to her husband as they jingled along homeward in the Christopher Street bob-tail car, “I thought she was in love with that detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time; and that he was amusing himself with her.”
“I can bear a good deal, Isabel,” said March, “but I wish you wouldn’t attribute Beaton to me. He’s the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of yours.”
“Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you’ll both get rid of him, in the reforms you’re going to carry out.”
These reforms were for a greater economy in the management of ‘Every Other Week;’ but in their very nature they could not include the suppression of Beaton. He had always shown himself capable and loyal to the interests of the magazine, and both the new owners were glad to keep him. He was glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretence of indifference, when they came to look over the new arrangement with him. In his heart he knew that he was a fraud; but at least he could say to himself with truth that he had not now the shame of taking Dryfoos’s money.
March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points where it had seemed indispensable to spend, as long as they were not spending their own: that was only human. Fulkerson absorbed Conrad’s department into his, and March found that he could dispense with Kendricks in the place of assistant which he had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that March was overworked. They reduced the number of illustrated articles, and they systematized the payment of contributors strictly according to the sales of each number, on their original plan of co-operation: they had got to paying rather lavishly for material without reference to the sales.
Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and went on his wedding journey out to Niagara, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line of travel that the Marches had taken on their wedding journey. He had the pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebec on the same boat on which he first met March.
They have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners. At first Mrs. March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson’s speaking of her husband as the Ownah, and March as the Edito’; but it appeared that this was only a convenient method of recognizing the predominant quality in each, and was meant neither to affirm nor to deny anything. Colonel Woodburn offered as his contribution to the celebration of the copartnership, which Fulkerson could not be prevented from dedicating with a little dinner, the story of Fulkerson’s magnanimous behavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial moment when it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos or give up March. Fulkerson winced at it; but Mrs. March told her husband that now, whatever happened, she should never have any misgivings of Fulkerson again; and she asked him if he did not think he ought to apologize to him for the doubts with which he had once inspired her. March said that he did not think so.
The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotel in easy reach of the city; but they returned early to Mrs. Leighton’s, with whom they are to board till spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson’s bachelor apartment for housekeeping. Mrs. March, with her Boston scruple, thinks it will be odd, living over the ‘Every Other Week’ offices; but there will be a separate street entrance to the apartment; and besides, in New York you may do anything.
The future of the Leightons promises no immediate change. Kendricks goes there a good deal to see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes to see Alma. He has seemed taken with her ever since he first met her at Dryfoos’s, the day of Lindau’s funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, he justly argues with March that there can be no harm in it, and that we are liable to be struck by lightning any time. In the mean while there is no proof that Alma returns Kendricks’s interest, if he feels any. She has got a little bit of color into the fall exhibition; but the fall exhibition is never so good as the spring exhibition. Wetmore is rather sorry she has succeeded in this, though he promoted her success. He says her real hope is in black and white, and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her original aim of drawing for illustration.
News has come from Paris of the engagement of Christine Dryfoos. There the Dryfooses met with the success denied them in New York; many American plutocrats must await their apotheosis in Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation. Shortly after their arrival they were celebrated in the newspapers as the first millionaire American family of natural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capital of civilization; and at a French watering-place Christine encountered her fate — a nobleman full of present debts and of duels in the past. Fulkerson says the old man can manage the debtor, and Christine can look out for the duellist. “They say those fellows generally whip their wives. He’d better not try it with Christine, I reckon, unless he’s practised with a p
anther.”
One day, shortly after their return to town in the autumn from the brief summer outing they permitted themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance. At first they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhood which she wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gayly, on seeing them, and though she hurried by with the sister who accompanied her, and did not stay to speak, they felt that the peace that passeth understanding had looked at them from her eyes.
“Well, she is at rest, there can’t be any doubt of that,” he said, as he glanced round at the drifting black robe which followed her free, nun-like walk.
“Yes, now she can do all the good she likes,” sighed his wife. “I wonder — I wonder if she ever told his father about her talk with poor Conrad that day he was shot?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. In any event, it would be right. She did nothing wrong. If she unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to die for God’s sake, for man’s sake.”
“Yes — yes. But still—”
“Well, we must trust that look of hers.”
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM
CONTENTS
Part First. Faulkner
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Part Second. Hermia
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Part Third. Nevil
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Part First. Faulkner
I
DOUGLAS FAULKNER was of a type once commoner in the West than now, I fancy. In fact, many of the circumstances that tended to shape such a character, with the conditions that repressed and the conditions that evolved it, have changed so vastly that they may almost be said not to exist any longer.
He was a lawyer, with a high ideal of professional honor, and in his personal relations he was known to be almost fantastically delicate, generous, and faithful. At the same time he was a “practical” politician; he adhered to his party in all its measures; he rose rapidly to be a leader in it, and was an unscrupulous manager of caucuses and conventions. For a while he was editor of the party organ in his city, and he wrote caustic articles for it which were rather in the line of his political than his personal morality. This employment was supposed to be more congenial. than his profession to the literary taste for which he had a large repute among his more unliterary acquaintance. They said that Faulkner could have been an author if he had chosen, and they implied that this was not worth while with a man who could be something in law and politics. Their belief had followed him from Muskingum University, where he was graduated with distinction in letters and forensics. The school was not then on so grand a scale as its name, and a little of the humanities might have gone a long way in it; but Faulkner was really a lover of books, and a reader of them, whether he could ever have been a writer of them or not; and he kept up his habit of reading after he entered active life.
It was during his editorial phase that I came from the country to be a writer on the opposition newspaper in his city, and something I did caught his fancy: some sketch of the sort I was always trying at, or some pert criticism, or some flippant satire of his party friends. He came to see me, and asked me to his house, for a talk, he said, about literature; and when I went I chose to find him not very modern in his preferences. He wanted to talk to me about Byron and Shelley, Scott and Cooper, Lamartine and Schiller, Irving and Goldsmith, when I was full of Tennyson and Heine, Emerson and Lowell, George Eliot and Hawthorne and Thackeray; and he rather bored me, showing me fine editions of his favorites. I was surprised to learn that he was only a few years older than myself: he had filled my mind so long as a politician that I had supposed him a veteran of thirty, at least, and he proved to be not more than twenty-six. Still, as I was only twenty-two I paid him the homage of a younger man, but I remember deciding that he was something of a sentimentalist. He seemed anxious to account for himself in his public character, so out of keeping with the other lives he led; he said he was sorry that his mother (with whom he lived in her widowhood) was out of town; she was the inspiration of all his love of literature, he said; and would have been so glad to see me. I was flattered, for the Faulkners were of the first social importance; they were of Virginian extraction. From his library he took me into what he called his den, and introduced me to a friend of his who sat smoking in a corner, and whom I saw to be a tall young Episcopal clergyman when he stood up. The night was very hot; Faulkner had in some claret punch, and the Rev. Mr. Nevil drank with us. He did not talk much, and I perceived that he was the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship which was very romantic on Faulkner’s side, and which appeared to date back to their college days. That was now a good while ago, but they seemed to be in the habit of meeting often, and to have kept up their friendship in all its first fervor. Mr. Nevil was very handsome, with a regular face, and a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, still, earnest blue eyes. He looked physically and spiritually wholesome; but Faulkner certainly did not look wholesome in the matter of his complexion at least. It was pale, with a sort of smokiness, and his black, straight hair strung down in points over his forehead; his beautiful dark eyes were restlessly brilliant; he stooped a little, and he was, as they say in the West, loose-hung. I noticed his hands, long, nervous, with fingers that trembled, as he rested their tips, a little yellowed from his cigar, on a book.
It was a volume of De Quincey, on whom we all came together in literature, and we happened to talk especially of his essay on Kant, and of the dreams which afflicted the philosopher’s old age, and which no doubt De Quincey picturesquely makes the most of. Then we began to tell our own dreams, the ghastlier ones; and Faulkner said he sometimes had dreams, humiliating, disgraceful, loathsome, that followed him far into the next day with a sense of actual occurrence. He was very vivid about them, and in spite of the want of modernity in his literary preferences, I began to think he might really have been a writer. He said that sometimes he did not see why we should not attribute such dreams to the Evil One, who might have easier access to a man in the helplessness of sleep; but Nevil agreed with me that they were more likely to come from a late supper. Faulkner submitted, but he said they were a real affliction, and their persistence in a man’s waking thoughts might almost influence his life.
When I took my leave he followed me to his gate, in his bare head and slippers; it was moonlight, and he walked a long way homeward with me. We led a very simple life in our little city then, and a man might go bareheaded and slipper-footed about its streets at night as much as he liked. Now and then we met a policeman, and Faulkner nodded, with the facile “Ah, Tommy!” or “Hello, Mike!” of a man inside politics. I told him I envied him his ability to mingle with the people in that way, and he said it was not worth while.
“You are on the right track, and I hope you’ll stick to it. We ought to have some Western authors; the West’s ripe for it. I used to have the conceit to think I could have done something myself in literature, if I’d kept on after I left college.”
I murmured some civilities to the effect that this was what all his friends thought.
“Well, it’s too late, now,” he said, “if ever it was early enough. I was foredoomed to the law; my father wouldn’t hear of anything else, and I don’t know that I blame him. I might have made a spoon, but I should certainly have spoiled a horn. A man generally does what he’s fit for. Now there’s Nevil — Don’t you like Nevil?”
I said, “Very much,” though really I had not thought it very seemly for a clergyman to smoke, and drink claret punch: I was very severe in those days.
Faulkner went on: “Nevil’s an instance, a perfect case in point. If ever there wa
s a human creature born into the world to do just the work he is doing, it’s Nevil. I can’t tell you how much that fellow has been to me, March!” This was the second time we had met; but Faulkner was already on terms of comradery with me; he was the kind of man who could hold no middle course; he must stand haughtily aloof, or he must take you to his heart. As he spoke, he put his long arm across my shoulders, and kept it there while we walked. “I was inclined to be pretty wild in college, and I had got to running very free when I first stumbled against Jim Nevil. He was standing up as tall and straight morally as he does physically, but he managed to meet me on my own level without seeming to stoop to it. He was ordained of God, then, and his life had a message for every one; for me it seemed to have a special message, and what he did for me was what he lived more than what he said. He talked to me, of course, but it was his example that saved me. You must know Nevil. Yes, he’s a noble fellow, and you can’t have any true conception of friendship till you have known him. Just see that moon!” Faulkner stopped abruptly, and threw up his head.
The perfect orb seemed to swim in the perfect blue. The words began to breathe themselves from my lips:
“‘The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;’”
and he responded as if it were the strain of a litany:
“‘Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;’”
and I spoke:
“‘The sunshine is a glorious birth;’”
and he responded again:
“‘But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath passed a glory from the earth.’”
His voice broke in the last line and faded into a tremulous whisper. It was the youth in both of us, smitten to ecstasy by the beauty of the scene, and pouring itself out in the modulations of that divine stop, as if it had been the rapture of one soul.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 431
