Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Have you got through?”

  “I’ve got tired; or, rather, I’ve got bored. I thought I would go up to the camp.”

  “You’re not going to lie on the ground, there?” she asked, with the importance and authority of a woman who puts herself in charge of a sick man, as a woman always must when there is such a man near her.

  “I would be willing to be under it, such a day as this,” he said. “But I’ll take the shawl, if that’s what you mean. I thought it was here?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” said Louise; and he let her go into the parlor and bring it out to him. She laid, it in a narrow fold over his shoulder; he thanked her carelessly, and she watched him sweep languidly across the buttercupped and dandelioned grass of the meadow-land about the house, to the dark shelter of the pine grove at the north. The sun struck full upon the long levels of the boughs, and kindled their needles to a glistening mass; underneath, the ground was red, and through the warm-looking twilight of the sparse wood the gray canvas of a tent showed; Matt often slept there in the summer, and so the place was called the camp. There was a hammock between two of the trees, just beyond the low stone wall, and Louise saw Maxwell get into it.

  Matt came out on the piazza in his blue woollen shirt and overalls and high boots, and his cork helmet topping all.

  “You look like a cultivated cowboy that had gobbled an English tourist, Matt,” said his sister. “Have you got anything for me?”

  Matt had some letters in his hands which the man had just brought up from the post-office. “No; but there are two for Maxwell—”

  “I will carry them to him, if you’re busy. He’s just gone over to the camp.”

  “Well, do,” said Matt. He gave them to her, and he asked, “How do you think he is, this morning?”

  “He must be pretty well; he’s been writing ever since breakfast.”

  “I wish he hadn’t,” said Matt. “He ought really to be got away somewhere out of the reach of newspapers. I’ll see. Louise, how do you think a girl like Sue Northwick would feel about an outright offer of help at such a time as this?”

  “How, help? It’s very difficult to help people,” said Louise, wisely. “Especially when they’re not able to help themselves. Poor Sue! I don’t know what she will do. If Jack Wilmington — but he never really cared for her, and now I don’t believe she cares for him. No, it couldn’t be.”

  “No; the idea of love would be sickening to her now.”

  Louise opened her eyes. “Why, I don’t know what you mean, Matt. If she still cared for him, I can’t imagine any time when she would rather know that he cared for her.”

  “But her pride — wouldn’t she feel that she couldn’t meet him on equal terms—”

  “Oh, pride! Stuff! Do you suppose that a girl who really cared for a person would think of the terms she met them on? When it comes to such a thing as that there is no pride; and proud girls and meek girls are just alike — like cats in the dark.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Matt; the sunny glisten, which had been wanting to them before, came into his eyes.

  “I know so,” said Louise. “Why, do you think that Jack Wilmington still—”

  “No; no. I was just wondering. I think I shall run down to Boston to-morrow, and see father — Or, no! Mother won’t be back till to-morrow evening. Well, I will talk with you, at dinner, about it.”

  Matt went off to his mowing, and Louise heard the cackle of his machine before she reached the camp with Maxwell’s letters.

  “Don’t get up!” she called to him, when he lifted himself with one arm at the stir of her gown over the pine-needles. “Merely two letters that I thought perhaps you might want to see at once.”

  He took them, and glancing at one of them threw it out on the ground. “This is from Ricker,” he said, opening the other. “If you’ll excuse me,” and he began to read it. “Well, that is all right,” he said, when he had run it through. “He can manage without me a little while longer; but a few more days like this will put an end to my loafing. I begin to feel like work, for the first time since I came up here.”

  “The good air is beginning to tell,” said Louise, sitting down on the board which formed a bench between two of the trees fronting the hammock. “But if you hurry back to town, now, you will spoil everything. You must stay the whole summer.”

  “You rich people are amusing,” said Maxwell, turning himself on his side, and facing her. “You think poor people can do what they like.”

  “I think they can do what other people like,” said the girl, “if they will try. What is to prevent your staying here till you get perfectly well?”

  “The uncertainty whether I shall ever get perfectly well, for one thing,” said Maxwell, watching with curious interest the play of the light and shade flecks on her face and figure.

  “I know you will get well, if you stay,” she interrupted.

  “And for another thing,” he went on, “the high and holy duty we poor people feel not to stop working for a living as long as we live. It’s a caste pride. Poverty obliges, as well as nobility.”

  “Oh, pshaw! Pride obliges, too. It’s your wicked pride. You’re worse than rich people, as you call us: a great deal prouder. Rich people will let you help them.”

  “So would poor people, if they didn’t need help. You can take a gift if you don’t need it. You can accept an invitation to dinner, if you’re surfeited to loathing, but you can’t let any one give you a meal if you’re hungry. You rich people are like children, compared with us poor folks. You don’t know life; you don’t know the world. I should like to do a girl brought up like you in the ignorance and helplessness of riches.”

  “You would make me hateful.”

  “I would make you charming.”

  “Well, do me, then!”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t like it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because — I found it out in my newspaper work, when I had to interview people and write them up — people don’t like to have the good points they have, recognized; they want you to celebrate the good points they haven’t got. If a man is amiable and kind and has something about him that wins everybody’s heart, he wants to be portrayed as a very dignified and commanding character, full of inflexible purpose and indomitable will.”

  “I don’t see,” said Louise, “why you think I’m weak, and low-minded, and undignified.”

  Maxwell laughed. “Did I say something of that kind?”

  “You meant it.”

  “If ever I have to interview you, I shall say that under a mask of apparent incoherency and irrelevance, Miss Hilary conceals a profound knowledge of human nature and a gift of divination which explores the most unconscious opinions and motives of her interlocutor. How would you like that?”

  “Pretty well, because I think it’s true. But I shouldn’t like to be interviewed.”

  “Well, you’re safe from me. My interviewing days are over. I believe if I keep on getting better at the rate I’ve been going the last week, I shall be able to write a play this summer, besides doing my work for the Abstract. If I could do that, and it succeeded, the riddle would be read for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I should have a handsome income, and could give up newspaper work altogether.”

  “Could you? How glorious!” said Louise, with the sort of maternal sympathy she permitted herself to feel for the sick youth. “How much would you get for your play?”

  “If it was only reasonably successful, it would be worth five or six thousand dollars a year.”

  “And is that a handsome income?” she asked, with mounting earnestness.

  He pulled himself up in the hammock to get her face fully in view, and asked, “How much do you think I’ve been able to average up to this time?”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid I don’t know at all about such things. But I should like to.”

  Maxwell let himself drop back into the hammock. “I think I won
’t humiliate myself by giving the figures. I’d better leave it to your imagination. You’ll be sure to make it enough.”

  “Why should you be ashamed of it, if it’s ever so little?” she asked. “But I know. It’s your pride. It’s like Sue Northwick wanting to give up all her property because her father wrote that letter, and said he had used the company’s money. And Matt says it isn’t his property at all, and the company has no right to it. If she gives it up, she and her sister will have nothing to live on. And they won’t let themselves be helped — any more than — than — you will!”

  “No. We began with that; people who need help can’t let you help them. Don’t they know where their father is?”

  “No. But of course they must, now, before long.”

  Maxwell said, after the silence that followed upon this. “I should like to have a peep into that man’s soul.”

  “Horrors! Why should you?” asked Louise.

  “It would be such splendid material. If he is fond of his children—”

  “He and Sue dote upon each other. I don’t see how she can endure him; he always made me feel creepy.”

  “Then he must have written that letter to conciliate public feeling, and to make his children easier about him and his future. And now if you could see him when he realizes that he’s only brought more shame on them, and forced them to beggar themselves — it would be a tremendous situation.”

  “But I shouldn’t like to see him at such a time. It seems to me, that’s worse than interviewing, Mr. Maxwell.”

  There was a sort of recoil from him in her tone, which perhaps he felt. It seemed to interest, rather than offend him. “You don’t get the artistic point of view.”

  “I don’t want to get it, if that’s it. And if your play is going to be about any such thing as that—”

  “It isn’t,” said Maxwell. “I failed on that. I shall try a comic motive.”

  “Oh!” said Louise, in the concessive tone people use, when they do not know but they have wronged some one. She spiritually came back to him, but materially she rose to go away and leave him. She stooped for the letter he had dropped out of the hammock and gave it him. “Don’t you want this?”

  “Oh, thank you! I’d forgotten it.” He glanced at the superscription, “It’s from Pinney. You ought to know Pinney, Miss Hilary, if you want the true artistic point of view.”

  “Is he a literary man?”

  “Pinney? Did you read the account of the defalcation in the Events — when it first came out? All illustrations?”

  “That? I don’t wonder you didn’t care to read his letter! Or perhaps he’s your friend—”

  “Pinney’s everybody’s friend,” said Maxwell, with an odd sort of relish. “He’s delightful. I should like to do Pinney. He’s a type.” Louise stood frowning at the mere notion of Pinney. “He’s not a bad fellow, Miss Hilary, though he is a remorseless interviewer. He would be very good material. He is a mixture of motives, like everybody else, but he has only one ambition: he wants to be the greatest newspaper man of his generation. The ladies nearly always like him. He never lets five minutes pass without speaking of his wife; he’s so proud of her he can’t keep still.”

  “I should think she would detest him.”

  “She doesn’t. She’s quite as proud of him as he is of her. It’s affecting to witness their devotion — or it would be if it were not such a bore.”

  “I can’t understand you,” said Louise, leaving him to his letter.

  XV.

  Part of Matt Hilary’s protest against the status in which he found himself a swell was to wash his face for dinner in a tin basin on the back porch, like the farm-hands. When he was alone at the farm he had the hands eat with him; when his mother and sister were visiting him he pretended that the table was too small for them all at dinner and tea, though he continued to breakfast with the hands, because the ladies were never up at his hour; the hands knew well enough what it meant, but they liked Matt.

  Louise found him at the roller-towel, after his emblematic ablutions. “Oh, is it so near dinner?” she asked.

  “Yes. Where is Maxwell?”

  “I left him up at the camp.” She walked a little way out into the ground-ivy that matted the back-yard under the scattering spruce trees.

  Matt followed, and watched the homing and departing bees around the hives in the deep, red-clovered grass near the wall.

  “Those fellows will be swarming before long,” he said, with a measure of the good comradeship he felt for all living things.

  “I don’t see,” said Louise, plucking a tender, green shoot from one of the fir boughs overhead, “why Mr. Maxwell is so hard.”

  “Is he hard?” asked Matt. “Well, perhaps he is.”

  “He is very sneering and bitter,” said the girl. “I don’t like it.”

  “Ah, he’s to blame for that,” Matt said. “But as for his hardness, that probably comes from his having had to make such a hard fight for what he wants to be in life. That hardens people, and brutalizes them, but somehow we mostly admire them and applaud them for their success against odds. If we had a true civilization a man wouldn’t have to fight for the chance to do the thing he is fittest for, that is, to be himself. But I’m glad you don’t like Maxwell’s hardness; I don’t myself.”

  “He seems to look upon the whole world as material, as he calls it; he doesn’t seem to regard people as fellow beings, as you do, Matt, or even as servants or inferiors; he hasn’t so much kindness for them as that.”

  “Well, that’s the odious side of the artistic nature,” said Matt, smiling tolerantly. “But he’ll probably get over that; he’s very young; he thinks he has to be relentlessly literary now.”

  “He’s older than I am!” said Louise.

  “He hasn’t seen so much of the world.”

  “He thinks he’s seen a great deal more. I don’t think he’s half so nice as we supposed. I should call him dangerous.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t say that, exactly,” Matt returned. “But he certainly hasn’t our traditions. I’ll just step over and call him to dinner.”

  “Oh, no! Let me try if I can blow the horn.” She ran to where the long tin tube hung on the porch, and coming out with it again, set it to her lips and evoked some stertorous and crumby notes from it. “Do you suppose he saw me?” she asked, running back with the horn.

  Matt could not say; but Maxwell had seen her, and had thought of a poem which he imagined illustrated with the figure of a tall, beautiful girl lifting a long tin horn to her lips with outstretched arms. He did not know whether to name it simply The Dinner Horn, or grotesquely, Hebe Calling the Gods to Nectar. He debated the question as he came lagging over the grass with his cushion in one hand and Pinney’s letter, still opened, in the other. He said to Matt, who came out to get the cushion of him, “Here’s something I’d like to talk over with you, when you’ve the time.”

  “Well, after dinner,” said Matt.

  Pinney’s letter was a long one, written in pencil on one side of long slips of paper, like printer’s copy; the slips were each carefully folioed in the upper right hand corner; but the language was the language of Pinney’s life, and not the decorative diction which he usually addressed to the public on such slips of paper.

  “I guess,” it began, “I’ve got onto the biggest thing yet, Maxwell. The Events is going to send me to do the Social Science Congress which meets in Quebec this year, and I’m going to take Mrs. Pinney along and have a good time. She’s got so she can travel first-rate, now; and the change will do her and the baby both good. I shall interview the social science wiseacres, and do their proceedings, of course, but the thing that I’m onto is Northwick. I’ve always felt that Northwick kind of belonged to yours truly, anyway; I was the only man that worked him up in any sort of shape, at the time the defalcation came out, and I’ve got a little idea that I think will simply clean out all competition. That letter of his set me to thinking, as soon as I read it, and my wife and I bo
th happened on the idea at the same time; clear case of telepathy. Our idea is that Northwick didn’t go to Europe — of course he didn’t! — but he’s just holding out for terms with the company. I don’t believe he’s got off with much money; but if he was going into business with it in Canada, he would have laid low till he’d made his investments. So my theory is that he’s got all the money he took with him except his living expenses. I believe I can find Northwick, and I am not going to come home without trying hard. I am going to have a detective’s legal outfit, and I flatter myself I can get Northwick over the frontier somehow, and restore him to the arms of his anxious friends of the Ponkwasset Company. I don’t know yet just how I shall do it, but I guess I shall do it. I shall have Mrs. Pinney’s advice and counsel, and she’s a team; but I shall have to leave her and the baby at Quebec, while I’m roaming round in Rimouski and the wilderness generally, and I shall need active help.

  “Now, I liked some things in that Abstract article of yours; it was snappy and literary, and all that, and it showed grasp of the subject. It showed a humane and merciful spirit toward our honored friend that could be made to tell in my little game if I could get the use of it. So I’ve concluded to let you in on the ground floor, if you want to go into the enterprise with me; if you don’t, don’t give it away; that’s all. My idea is that Northwick can be got at quicker by two than by one; but we have not only got to get at him, but we have got to get him; and get him on this side of Jordan. I guess we shall have to do that by moral suasion mostly, and that’s where your massive and penetrating intellect will be right on deck. You won’t have to play a part, either; if you believe that his only chance of happiness on earth is to come home and spend the rest of his life in State’s prison, you can conscientiously work him from that point of view. Seriously, Maxwell, I think this is a great chance. If there’s any of that money he speaks of we shall have our pickings: and then as a mere scoop, if we get at Northwick at all, whether we can coax him over the line or not, we will knock out the fellow that fired the Ephesian dome so that he’ll never come to time in all eternity.