Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The cottage, when we reached it, afforded a relief by its extremely remarkable prettiness. Though it was so near the sea, it was almost hidden in trees, and as Faulkner said, if you did not purposely look out to the water, you could easily imagine yourself in the depths of the country. As we sat on the veranda that shaded three sides of the house, he named the different points on the coast, with the curious accuracy which some people like to achieve in particulars wholly unimportant to other people. I suppose he had amused the sad leisure of his sickness in verifying the geography, and I tried to be interested in it, though I was so much more interested in him. He sat deeply sunken in a low Japanese arm-chair of rushes, with his long lean legs one crossed on the other, and fondling the crook of his stick with his thin right hand, while he looked out to seaward under the brim of his hat pulled down to his eyes. Nevil went directly to his room when we reached the cottage, and after a little while Mrs. Faulkner took my wife away to show her the house, which was vast and extravagantly furnished for a summer cottage. “It had gone unlet until very late in the season,” Faulkner said, “and you’ve no idea how cheap we got it. I suppose it’s a little out of society, off here on this point; you see it’s quite alone; but as we’re out of society too, it just suits us.”

  He looked after his wife as she left the veranda with Mrs. March, and I fancied in his glance at her buoyant, strenuous grace and her beauty of perfect health, something of the despair with which a sick man must feel the whole world slipping from his hold, too weak to close upon the most precious possession and keep it for his helplessness even while he stays.

  The ladies were gone a good while, and he rambled on incessantly as if to keep me from thinking about his condition; or at least I fancied this, because I could not help thinking of it. Just as they returned, he was asking me, “Do you remember our talking that night about Kant’s dreams, and—” He stopped, and called out to my wife, “Well, don’t you think we are in luck?”

  “Luck doesn’t express it, Mr. Faulkner. You’re in clover, knee-deep. I didn’t imagine there was such a place, anywhere.”

  “After lunch we must show you our old garden, as well as the rocks,” said Faulkner. “At present I don’t see how we could do better than stay where we are.”

  I thought he was going to recur to the subject he had dropped at sight of the returning ladies, but he did not. He asked my wife if Mrs. Faulkner had shown her the copy they had made of Murillo’s Madonna, and he talked about its qualities with an authoritative ignorance of art which I should have found amusing in different circumstances. He had made a complete collection of all the engravings of this Madonna, and of all the sentimental Madonnas of the Parmesan school. He considered them very spiritual, and said he would show them to us, some time; he always carried them about with him; but he wanted to keep something to tempt us back another day. He asked her if she cared for rare editions, and said he wished he had his large paper copies with him. He told her I would remember them, and I pretended that I did. I do not think Faulkner had read much since I saw him. He talked about Bulwer and Dickens and Cherbuliez and Octave Feuillet as if they were modern. But nobody came up to Victor Hugo. Of course we had both read Les Miserables? Mrs. Faulkner, he said, was crazy about a Russian fellow: Tourguénief Had we read him, and could we make anything out of him? Faulkner could not, for his part. Were we ever going to have any great poets again? Byron was the last that you could really call great.

  His wife listened in a watchful abeyance to see if he needed anything, or felt worse, or was getting tired. From time to time he sent her for some book, or print, or curio that he mentioned, and whenever she came back, he gave her first that deadly look. Afterward, I fancied that he despatched her on these errands to make experiment of how the sight of her would affect him at each return.

  The sea stretched a vast shimmer of thin grayish blue under the perfect sky; and the ships moved half sunk on its rim, or seemed buoyantly lifting from it for flight in the nearer distance. The colors were those of an aquarelle, washes of this tint and that, bodyless and impalpable, and they were attenuated to the last thinness in the long yellow curve of beach, and the break of the shallow rollers upon it. Faulkner said they never got tired of looking; there was one effect on the wide wet beach, which he wished we could see, when people were riding toward you, and seemed to be walking on some kind of extraordinary stilts.

  Mr. Nevil came down, and then Mrs. Faulkner said it must be near lunch-time, and asked my wife and me if we would not like to go to our room first.

  V

  AS SOON AS the door closed upon us, my wife broke out: “Well, my dear! it’s just as I imagined. What a tiresome creature! And how ignorant and arrogant! Is that what you call a cultivated person in the West?”

  “Well, I don’t think I shall quite hold myself responsible for Faulkner; I’ll own he hasn’t improved since I saw him last. But I always told you he was a sentimentalist.”

  “Sentimentalist! He’s one sop of sentiment; and as conventional! Second-rate and second-hand! Why my dear! Could you ever have thought there was anything to that man?”

  “Well, certainly more than I do at present. But I don’t recollect that I ever boasted him Apollo and the nine Muses all boiled down into one.”

  She did not relent. “Why, compared with him, that Mr. Nevil is a burning and a shining light.”

  “Nevil has certainly gathered brilliancy somehow,” I admitted.

  “It’s quite like such a man as Faulkner to want a three-cornered household. I think the man who can’t give up his intimate friends after he’s married, is always a kind of weakling. He has no right to them; it’s a tacit reflection on his wife’s heart and mind.”

  “Yes, I think you’re quite right, there,” I said, waiting for her to put the restorative touches to the bang which the sea-breeze had made a little too limp for social purposes; and we went over together the list of households we knew in which the husband supplemented himself with a familiar friend. We agreed that it was the innocence of our life that made it so common, but we said all the same that it was undignified and silly and mischievous. It kept the husband and wife apart, and kept them from the absolutely free exchange of tendernesses at any and every moment, and forbade them the equally wholesome immediate expression of resentments, or else gave their quarrels a witness whom they could not look at without remembering that they had quarrelled in his presence. We made allowance for the difference in the case of Nevil and the Faulkners; there was now at least a real reason for his being with them; they would have been singularly lonely and helpless without him.

  “They have no children!” said my wife. “That says it all. They are really not a family. Oh, dear! I hope it isn’t wicked for us to be so happy in our children, Basil.”

  “It’s a sin that I think I can brazen out at the Day of Judgment,” I answered. “What does she say when you have her alone with another woman?”

  “Well, there you’ve hit upon the true test, my dear. If a person’s genuine, and not a poseuse, she’s more interesting when you have her alone with another woman, than when you have her with a lot of men. And Mrs. Faulkner stands the test. Yes, she’s a great creature.”

  “Why, what did she say?”

  “Say? Nothing! You don’t have to say anything. You merely have to be.”

  “Oh! That seems rather simple.”

  “Stuff! You know what I mean. You’re the true blue, if you don’t begin to fade or change your tone, in the least. If you remain just what you were, and are not anxious to get away. If you have repose, and are unselfish enough to be truly polite. If you make the other woman that you’re alone with feel that she’s just as well worth while as a man. And that can’t be done by saying. Now do you understand?”

  “Yes; and it appears difficult.”

  “Difficult? It’s next to impossible!”

  “And it can all be conveyed by manner?”

  “Of course we talked—”

  “She must have flatte
red you enormously.”

  “She praised you!”

  “Oh!” I said, in admiration of the way my point was turned against me. But I was not satisfied with my wife’s judgment of Faulkner. I could not say it was unjust to the facts before her; but I felt that something was left out of the account: something that she as a woman and an Easterner could not take into the account. We men and we Westerners have a civilization of our own.

  She went on to say, “Of course, I couldn’t be with her for a quarter of an hour, and especially after I had seen what he was, without understanding her marriage. She’s a great deal younger than he is; and she was earning her own living, poor thing, and perhaps Supporting her family—”

  “Oh, oh! What jumps!”

  “At any rate, she was poor, and they were poor; and she was dazzled by his offer, and might easily have supposed herself in love with him. Her people would be flattered too, if they were not quite up to her, and he was a great swell among you, out there, and rich, and all that. Of course, she simply had to marry him. And then — she outgrew him. With her taste and her sense, it could only be a question of time. I know she was writhing inwardly through all his pretentious, ignorant talk about art and literature; but with her ideal of duty, she would rather die than let anybody see that she didn’t think him the greatest and wisest of human creatures. They have no children; and that might be fatal to any woman that was less noble and heroic than she is. But she’s simply made him her child, since his sickness, and devoted herself to him, and that’s been their salvation. She won’t let herself see any fault in him, or anything offensive or conceited or petty.”

  “Did she tell you all this?”

  “What an idea! I knew it from the way she kept lugging him in, and relating everything to him. You could see she was simply determined to do it.”

  “Oh, then you’ve romanced all this about her! Suppose I begin, now, and romance poor old Faulkner?”

  “You’re welcome — if you can make anything out of him.”

  “Well, of course, I’m at a disadvantage. In the first place, he isn’t quite so pretty as his wife—”

  “No, he isn’t!”

  “And his name isn’t Hermia, or Hannah.”

  “Oh, it is Hermia!” my wife interrupted. “I’m satisfied of that. But what geese her parents must have been to call her so!”

  I ignored the interpolation. “And he hasn’t got a regular two-horse carriage of a walk, nor immortal eyes with starlike sorrows in them; he seems plainer and limper than ever, poor old fellow. Ah, my dear, our miseries don’t embellish our persons very much, whatever they do for our souls; and Faulkner’s good looks—”

  My wife had quite finished repairing her disordered bang, and we had abandoned ourselves entirely to controversy. A knock at the door startled us, and it was Mrs. Faulkner’s voice which said outside, “Lunch is ready.”

  My wife seized my wrist melodramatically, and almost at the moment of answering, in a sweet, high society tone, “Yes, yes, thank you! We’re quite ready too!” she hissed in my ear, “Basil! Do you suppose she heard you?”

  “If she did,” I said, “she must have thought I was praising Faulkner’s beauty.”

  VI

  THE LUNCH was a proof of Mrs. Faulkner’s native skill as a house-keeper, in all its appointments, and of her experience and observation of certain details of touch and flavor, acclimated and naturalized to the American kitchen from the cuisines of southern Europe. It meant money, but not money alone; it meant sympathy and appreciation and the artistic sense. I could see that my wife ate every morsel with triumph over me: I could feel that without looking at her: and she rendered merit to Mrs. Faulkner for it all, as much as if she had cooked it, created it. In fact I knew that my wife had fallen in love with her: and when you have fallen in love with a married woman you must of course hate her husband, especially if you are another woman.

  I thought this reflection rather neat, and I wished that I could have a chance to put it to my wife; but none offered till it was forever too late; none offered at all in effect. After lunch we went that walk they had planned, and this time Faulkner took the two ladies in charge, or rather he fell to them, that he might tacitly be under his wife’s care. I heard him, as I lagged behind with Nevil, devoting himself to Mrs. March with his decorative politeness, and I longed in vain to beg the poor man to spare himself.

  Nevil and I spoke irrelevancies till we had dropped back out of ear-shot. Then he asked, “How do you find Faulkner?” and looked at me.

  There was no reason why I should not be honest. “Well, I confess he gave me a great shock.”

  “When he had that seizure?”

  “Yes.”

  “But generally speaking?”

  “Generally speaking he seems to me a very sick man.”

  “You see him at his best,” said Nevil; and he fetched a deep sigh. “This is an exceptionally good day with him.”

  “Does he suffer often in that way?”

  “Yes, rather often.”

  “And is he in danger at such times?”

  “The greatest. The chance is that he will not live through such a seizure; he may die at any moment without the seizure. Any little excitement may bring on the paroxysm. I suppose it was seeing you unexpectedly.”

  “Of course, I didn’t know we should meet him.”

  “Oh, no one was to blame,” said Nevil. “The inevitable can’t be avoided. Somehow it must come.”

  We were silent. Then I said, “He seemed to be in great agony.”

  “I suppose we can’t imagine such agony.”

  “And is there no hope for him?”

  “I understand, none at all.”

  “And he must go on suffering that way till — It’s horrible! He’d better be dead!” I said, remembering the atrocity of the anguish which Faulkner’s face had betrayed: the livid lips, the suffused eyes, the dumb ache visible in every fibre of his dull, copper-tinted visage.

  “Ah!” said Nevil, with another long, quivering sigh. “We mustn’t allow ourselves to say such things, or even to think them. The appeal to death from the most intolerable pain, it’s going from the known to the unknown. Death is in the hands of God, as life is; he giveth and he taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord! Blessed, blessed!” He dropped his head, and lifted it suddenly. “We must say that all the more when we see such hopeless, senseless torment as Faulkner’s. I’ve often tried to think what Christ meant by that cry of his on the cross, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ It couldn’t have been that he doubted his Father; that’s monstrous. But perhaps in the exquisite torture that he suffered, his weak, bewildered human nature forgot, lost for the dire moment, the reason of pain.”

  “And is there any reason for pain?” I asked, sceptically. “Or any except that it frays away the tissues whose tatters are to let the spirit through?”

  “I used not to think so, and I used to groan in despair when I could see no other reason for it. What can we say about the pain that does not end in death? Is it wasted, suffered to no end? Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man work wisely, usefully, definitely, and God work stupidly, idly, purposelessly? It’s impossible! Our whole being denies it; whatever we see or hear, of waste or aimlessness in the universe, which seems to affirm it, we know to be an illusion: our very nature protests it so. But I could not reason to the reason, and I owe my release to the suggestion of a friend whose experience of suffering had schooled him to clearer and deeper insight than mine. He had perceived, or it had been given him to feel, that no pang we suffer in soul or sense is lost or wasted, but is suffered to the good of some one, or of all. How, we shall some time know; and why. For the present the assurance that it is so is enough for me, and it enables me to be patient with the suffering of a man who is more to me than any brother could be. Sometimes it seems to me the clew to the whole labyrinthine mystery of life and death, of Being and Not-being.”

  “It’s a great thought,” I said. “It’s
immensely comforting. What does Faulkner think of it? Have you ever suggested it to him?”

  I could not tell whether he fancied an edge of irony in my question; but it seemed as if he spiritually withdrew from me a little way, and then disciplined himself and returned. “No,” he said, gently. “Faulkner rejects everything. As he says, he is going it blind. He says it will soon be over with him, and then if he sleeps, it will be well with him, and if he wakes, it can’t be worse with him than it is now; and so he won’t worry about the why or wherefore of anything, since he can’t help it.”

  “That doesn’t seem a bad kind of philosophy,” I mused aloud.

  “No. Whatever we call such a frame of mind, it’s practically trust in God. And I don’t judge Faulkner, if his resignation is sometimes rather contemptuous in its expression. I wish it were otherwise; but I doubt if he’s always quite master of himself.”

  We walked slowly on. Faulkner, I knew, was aware of his condition, and I thought his courage splendid, in view of it. I wondered if his wife knew it as fully as he; probably she did; and when I considered this, I appeared to myself the most trivial of human beings, though I am not so sure now that I was. We are all what the absence, not the presence, of death has made us.