The young woman gasped, and retreated from them, staring at them as she paced slowly backward. She turned and ran, with a cry of laughter, towards the black figure of her silent mother at the end of the veranda.
At the door of their room Lorenzo left Althea. “I will go and see about the cars now. You get the things all ready, so that we needn’t lose any time if the cars start anyways soon.” He spoke with an austerity which was like something left of the tone he had used in rebuking that young woman. It was gone when he came back, and called gently, on the outside of the door, “Althea!”
“Yee, Lorenzo,” her voice answered, come in!”
He opened the door, and stood staring at her from the threshold. She sat dressed in her garb of Shakeress — the plain, straight gown of drab, the drab shawl crossed upon her breast, the close collar that came up to her chin; her face was hidden in the depths of the Shaker bonnet.
“Well, well!” he murmured, huskily.
“Sit down, Lorenzo,” she said.
“There ain’t much time, Althea. The cars start in about half an hour, and—” he glanced about the room, where, on chairs and sofas, were strewn the finery that Althea had worn during the day; the packages of her afternoon purchases had been torn open, and their contents scattered about on the floor. His eye caught upon a fashionable gown of gray stuff. “That your travelling-dress, Althea?” he asked, feebly.
“I have got on my travelling-dress, Lorenzo. I am going back to the Family.”
“Yee,” he vaguely assented.
“I tried to put that dress on,” she continued; “I couldn’t.” She paused, as if for him to say something, but he did not say anything. “I have thought it all out at last, Lorenzo. I don’t blame the earthly order; it’s the best thing there is in the world-outside. But we have known the heavenly order, and if — even if — we were to be very happy together—”
She stopped, and he said,” Yee.”
“Or, that isn’t it, either. They may be all wrong in what they taught us in the Family.”
Lorenzo cleared his throat. “It did seem so — for a spell.”
“But whether it was right or whether it was wrong, whether it was true or whether it was false, it’s too strong for me now, and it would be too strong as long as I lived. I have got to go back.”
“Have you thought what they will say?”
“Haven’t I thought what they would say every minute since I stole out of the Family house like a thief and ran away? But I don’t care what they will say. They will take me back, I know that, and that is all I care for.”
“Yee.”
“I want you should let me go as far as Fitchburg with you, and then I can easily get to Harshire.”
He stared at her. “Althea, do you think I am going to let you go back alone?” he asked, solemnly. “I am going back to Harshire with you.”
“Nay, Lorenzo, I have thought that out too. I blame myself for getting married to you.”
“I wanted to full as much as you did, Althea. It was my fault too.”
“I thought — I thought if it was over I should feel differently, and see it as folks do in the world-outside.”
“Yea, I knew that, Althea. I wouldn’t have let you if I hadn’t understood it so. I could see how your mind was workin’.”
“But I can’t see it so, Lorenzo! The more I look at it the worse it seems for us!”
“It’s strange,” he mused, aloud, “that we can’t look at it in their light. Is it a sin for all the world?”
“It isn’t a sin for the world, for the world hasn’t the same light as ours. But we should be shutting our eyes to the light!”
“Yee,” he assented, sadly.
“But, Lorenzo,” she entreated, passionately, “if you say for me to stay in the world-outside with you and be your wife, I will do it! Do you say so? Do you say so?” She came towards him with her hands clasped, and her face wild in the depths of her Shaker bonnet, where her tears shone dimly. “I’m nothing! What do I care for myself? It’s only the truth I care for, and the light! But if you say so, Lorenzo, the light of the world shall be my light, the darkness shall be my light!”
There was a moment before he answered, “Nay, I don’t say so, Althea!”
“Oh!” She fell back in her chair and began to sob.
“Do you think,” he asked, “that I could be anyways comfortable knowin’ that you wanted to live the angelic life, and I was draggin’ you down to the earthly?”
“The angelic life wouldn’t be anything without you, Lorenzo,” she said, tenderly, but with a confusion of purpose which was not, perhaps, apparent even to herself.
“Nor the earthly order without you,” he answered, solemnly. He added, with that mixture of commonplace which was an element in his nature, “I presume, if I wanted to stay in the world-outside, I could get a divorce easy enough; but if I can’t have you, I don’t want to stay. If you can’t feel that it’s right for you to live in the earthly order, I know it can’t be right for me either. We can do like so many of them have done: we can go back to the Family, and live there separate. It will be a cross, but it won’t be any more of a cross for us than it is for the others that have separated; and maybe — maybe we ought to bear a cross.”
“Don’t try to make me cry, Lorenzo!”
He looked round the room again, disordered with the pretty things she had flung about. “I declare,” he said, dreamily, “that hat’s got to look like you.”
“Lorenzo!”
“If you’ve got on everything you need, Althea, we’ll leave these things here. We sha’n’t want ’em any more where we’re goin’.” He stopped,, and they stood looking at each other. “Althea, we have got to tell them everything we’ve done when we get back.”
“Yee.”
“Do you believe, Althea,” he said, in a voice that came like a thick whisper from his throat, “that they would think any the worse of you if I was to — kiss you?”
“I don’t know, Lorenzo.”
“It would be for good-bye, just once; and it would be my fault, and not yours.”
“I don’t want you should bear the blame. If you were to do it, it would be — because I let you.”
He caught her to his breast; she laid her arms tenderly about his neck; their heads were both hidden in her Shaker bonnet.
“Now come,” he said.
They walked along towards the station rapidly, Lorenzo some paces ahead of Althea, and they looked as if they did not belong together. A young fellow in a light wood-colored surrey, with a pair of slender sorrels, drew up to the sidewalk, and called to Lorenzo, “Carriage! Want a ca—” His eye strayed from Lorenzo to the figure of Althea in her Shaker dress. He pushed up his hat, and the cigar which he was smoking dropped from his parting lips. They passed him without looking up, but his head was drawn round after them, as if by a magnetic attraction, and he remained staring at them over his shoulder till they were lost to sight at the corner turning to the station.
THE END
THE LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD
First published in 1897, this novel’s title derives from its setting – a country house in New Hampshire, near a mountain peak resembling a lion’s head. The eponymous landlord is Jeff, whose lowly ambitions (to be the landlord of a country house turned hotel) and the class conflicts in which he finds himself caught up, form the central themes of the novel. Jeff is one of Howells’s most unusual protagonists, due to his overt sexuality and exaggerated masculinity.
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
Part I.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.<
br />
XXI.
XXII.
XIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
Part II.
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXIX
XXX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XXXIII.
XXXIV.
XXXV.
XXXVI.
XXXVII.
XXXVIII.
XXXIX
XL.
XLI.
XLII.
XLIII
XLIV
XLV.
XLVI
XLVII.
XLVIII
XLIX.
L.
LI.
LII.
LIII.
LIV.
LV
Part I.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight’s sojourn on the western shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain form which the earlier French pioneers had named “Le Lion Couchant,” but which their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call “The Camel’s Hump.” It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was especially definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found the scheme for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to write, this image suggested the name of ‘The Landlord at Lion’s Head.’ I gave the title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change it, but rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to be, the title could not be better.
I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for the winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it, with other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and from Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the following summer. It was first serialized in Harper’s Weekly and in the London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper — I forget which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.
I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at least own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder and harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more fear of his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly, with a handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had liked the notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay, that he liked the result even better.
I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men, perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic New England type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions. What seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to share my weakness for Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his personality ever since I had got it off the side of an ice-cart many years before.
At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing the hero’s experience there from even more intimacy with the university moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can be truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay — the word may now be obsolete — Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing; though this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of the least important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom of the inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which was always vexing the heart of Puritanism, and which I had constantly felt one of the most interesting facts in my observation of New England.
As for the sort of summer hotel portrayed in these pages, it was materialized from an acquaintance with summer hotels extending over quarter of a century, and scarcely to be surpassed if paralleled. I had a passion for knowing about them and understanding their operation which I indulged at every opportunity, and which I remember was satisfied as to every reasonable detail at one of the pleasantest seaside hostelries by one of the most intelligent and obliging of landlords. Yet, hotels for hotels, I was interested in those of the hills rather than those of the shores.
I worked steadily if not rapidly at the story. Often I went back over it, and tore it to pieces and put it together again. It made me feel at times as if I should never learn my trade, but so did every novel I have written; every novel, in fact, has been a new trade. In, the case of this one the publishers were hurrying me in the revision for copy to give the illustrator, who was hurrying his pictures for the English and Australian serializations.
KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.
I.
If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit was wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion. The flanks and haunches were vaguely distinguished from the mass; but the mighty head, resting with its tossed mane upon the vast paws stretched before it, was boldly sculptured against the sky. The likeness could not have been more perfect, when you had it in profile, if it had been a definite intention of art; and you could travel far north and far south before the illusion vanished. In winter the head was blotted by the snows; and sometimes the vagrant clouds caught upon it and deformed it, or hid it, at other seasons; but commonly, after the last snow went in the spring until the first snow came in the fall, the Lion’s Head was a part of the landscape, as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself.
Long after other parts of the hill country were opened to summer sojourn, the region of Lion’s Head remained almost primitively solitary and savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that brawled through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view of Lion’s Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they came on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about the door-yard to look at the Lion’s Head, to wonder at it and mock at it, according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have felt that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who sold them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if they were very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to make much of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were not rather lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts scream at night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem lonesome.
When one of them declared that if she should hear a catamount scream or a bear growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she presumed we must all die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a covert slant in her words, for they were spoken with the same look she wore when she told them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the black maple sugar three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned upon their urgence that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the corners of the house was her husband, and the three lank boys with him were her sons; that the children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but his white head and sunburned face, into her dress and glanced at them with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years old. With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their conjecture that the space walled off in the farther corner of the orchard was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the ladies could see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the graves they saw were those of her husband’s family and of the children she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lost four. She did not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of; the ladies left her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with the conviction, briefly imparted to her husband, that they were tonguey.
The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion’s Head stamped on it, she answered that she got enough of Lion’s Head without wanting to see it on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy of Lion’s Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her manner remained the same. It did not change when the excursionists drove away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter. When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion’s Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the farm-house on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from the silence except when the coaching-parties came.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 584
