Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And not fighting,” Minver suggested to me.

  “ — and when she asked him what the matter was he could not account for them, either. But he said, one day, that the fear of death seemed to be lifted from his soul, and that made her shudder.”

  Rulledge fetched a long sigh, and Minver interpreted, “Beginning to feel that it’s something like now.”

  “He said that for the first time within his memory he was rid of that nether consciousness of mortality which had haunted his whole life, and poisoned, more or less, all his pleasure in living. He had got a reprieve, or a respite, and he felt like a boy — another kind of boy from what he had ever been. He was full of all sorts of brilliant hopes and plans. He had visions of success in business beyond anything he had known, and talked of buying the place he had taken, and getting a summer colony of friends about them. He meant to cut the property up, and make the right kind of people inducements. His world seemed to have been emptied of all trouble as well as all mortal danger.”

  “Haven’t you psychologists some message about a condition like that!” I asked.

  “Perhaps it’s only the pathologists again,” said Minver.

  “The alienists, rather more specifically,” said Wanhope. “They recognize it as one of the beginnings of insanit — folie des grandeurs as the French call the stage.”

  “Is it necessarily that?” Rulledge demanded, with a resentment which we felt so droll in him that we laughed.

  “I don’t know that it is,” said Wanhope. “I don’t know why we shouldn’t sometimes, in the absence of proofs to the contrary, give such a fact the chance to evince a spiritual import. Of course it had no other import to poor Mrs. Ormond, and of course I didn’t dream of suggesting a scientific significance.”

  “I should think not!” Rulledge puffed.

  Wanhope went on: “I don’t think I should have dared to do so to a woman in her exaltation concerning it. I could see that however his state had affected her with dread or discomfort in the first place, it had since come to be her supreme hope and consolation. In view of what afterward happened, she regarded it as the effect of a mystical intimation from another world that was sacred, and could not he considered like an ordinary fact without sacrilege. There was something very pathetic in her absolute conviction that Ormond’s happiness was an emanation from the source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the consciousness persists, comes to a death-bed. That the dying are not afraid of dying is a fact of such common, such almost invariable observation—”

  “You mean,” I interposed, “when the vital forces are beaten so low that the natural dread of ceasing to be, has no play? It has less play, I’ve noticed, in age than in youth, but for the same reason that it has when people are weakened by sickness.”

  “Ah,” said Wanhope, “that comparative indifference to death in the old, to whom it is so much nearer than it is to the young, is very suggestive. There may be something in what you say; they may not care so much because they have no longer the strength — the muscular strength — for caring. They are too tired to care as they used. There is a whole region of most important inquiry in that direction—”

  “Did you mean to have him take that direction?” Rulledge asked, sulkily.

  “He can take any direction for me,” I said. “He is always delightful.”

  “Ah, thank you!” said Wanhope.

  “But I confess,” I went on, “that I was wondering whether the fact that the dying are indifferent to death could be established in the case of those who die in the flush of health and strength, like, for instance, people who are put to death.”

  Wanhope smiled. “I think it can — measurably. Most murderers make a good end, as the saying used to be, when they end on the scaffold, though they are not supported by religious fervor of any kind, or the exaltation of a high ideal. They go meekly and even cheerfully to their death, without rebellion or even objection. It is most exceptional that they make a fight for their lives, as that woman did a few years ago at Dannemora, and disgusted all refined people with capital punishment.”

  “I wish they would make a fight always,” said Rulledge, with unexpected feeling. “It would do more than anything to put an end to that barbarity.”

  “It would be very interesting, as Wanhope says,” Minver remarked. “But aren’t we getting rather far away? From the Ormonds, I mean.”

  “We are, rather,” said Wanhope. “Though I agree that it would be interesting. I should rather like to have it tried. You know Frederick Douglass acted upon some such principle when his master attempted to whip him. He fought, and he had a theory that if the slave had always fought there would soon have been an end of whipping, and so an end of slavery. But probably it will be a good while before criminals are—”

  “Educated up to the idea,” Minver proposed.

  “Yes,” Wanhope absently acquiesced. “There seems to be a resignation intimated to the parting soul, whether in sickness or in health, by the mere proximity of death. In Ormond’s case there seems to have been something more positive. His wife says that in the beginning of those days he used to come to her and wonder what could be the matter with him. He had a joy he could not account for by anything in their lives, and it made her tremble.”

  “Probably it didn’t. I don’t think there was anything that could make Mrs. Ormond tremble, unless it was the chance that Ormond would get the last word,” said Minver.

  No one minded him, and Wanhope continued: “Of course she thought he must be going to have a fit of sickness, as the people say in the country, or used to say. Those expressions often survive in the common parlance long after the peculiar mental and moral conditions in which they originated have passed away. They must once have been more accurate than they are now. When one said ‘fit of sickness’ one must have meant something specific; it would be interesting to know what. Women use those expressions longer than men; they seem to be inveterate in their nerves; and women apparently do their thinking in their nerves rather than their brains.”

  IV.

  Wanhope had that distant look in his eyes which warned his familiars of a possible excursion, and I said, in the hope of keeping him from it, “Then isn’t there a turn of phrase somewhat analogous to that in a personification?”

  “Ah, yes — a personification,” he repeated with a freshness of interest, which he presently accounted for. “The place they had taken was very completely furnished. They got it fully equipped, even to linen and silver; but what was more important to poor Ormond was the library, very rich in the English classics, which appeared to go with the house. The owner was a girl who married and lived abroad, and these were her father’s books. Mrs. Ormond said that her husband had the greatest pleasure in them: their print, which was good and black, and their paper, which was thin and yellowish, and their binding, which was tree calf in the poets, he specially liked. They were English editions as well as English classics, and she said he caressed the books, as he read them, with that touch which the book-lover has; he put his face into them, and inhaled their odor as if it were the bouquet of wine; he wanted her to like it, too.”

  “Then she hated it,” Minver said, unrelentingly.

  “Perhaps not, if there was nobody else there,” I urged.

  For once Wanhope was not to be tempted off on another scent. “There was a good deal of old-fashioned fiction of the suspiratory and exclamatory sort, like Mackenzie’s, and Sterne’s and his followers, full of feeling, as people understood feeling a hundred years ago. But what Ormond rejoiced in most were the poets, good and bad, like Gray and Collins and Young, and their contemporaries, who personified nearly everything from Contemplation to Indigestion, through the whole range of the Vices, Virtues, Passions, Propensities, Attributes, and Qualities, and gave them each a dignified capital letter to wear. She said he used to come roaring to her with the passages in which these personifications flourished, and read them off with mock admiration, and then shriek and sputter with laughter. You know
the way he had when a thing pleased him, especially a thing that had some relish of the quaint or rococo. As nearly as she would admit, in view of his loss, he bored her with these things. He was always hunting down some new personification, and when he had got it, adding it to the list he kept. She said he had thousands of them, but I suppose he had not so many. He had enough, though, to keep him amused, and she said he talked of writing something for the magazines about them, but probably he never would have done it. He never wrote anything, did he?” Wanhope asked of me.

  “Oh, no. He was far too literary for that,” I answered. “He had a reputation to lose.”

  “Pretty good,” said Minver, “even if Ormond is dead.”

  Wanhope ignored us both. “After awhile, his wife said, she began to notice a certain change in his attitude toward the personifications. She noticed this, always expecting that fit of sickness for him; but she was not so much troubled by his returning seriousness. Oh, I ought to tell you that when she first began to be anxious for him she privately wrote home to their family doctor, telling him how strangely happy Ormond was, and asking him if he could advise anything. He wrote back that if Ormond was so very happy they had better not do anything to cure him; that the disease was not infectious, and was seldom fatal.”

  “What an ass!” said Rulledge.

  “Yes, I think he was, in this instance. But probably he had been consulted a good deal by Mrs. Ormond,” said Wanhope. “The change that began to set her mind at rest about Ormond was his taking the personifications more seriously. Why, he began to ask, but always with a certain measure of joke in it, why shouldn’t there be something in the personifications? Why shouldn’t Morn and Eve come corporeally walking up their lawn, with little or no clothes on, or Despair be sitting in their woods with her hair over her face, or Famine coming gauntly up to their back door for a hand-out? Why shouldn’t they any day see pop-eyed Rapture passing on the trolley, or Meditation letting the car she intended to take go by without stepping lively enough to get on board? He pretended that we could have the personifications back again, if we were not so conventional in our conceptions of them. He wanted to know what reason there was for representing Life as a very radiant and bounding party, when Life usually neither shone nor bounded; and why Death should be figured as an enemy with a dart, when it was so often the only friend a man had left, and had the habit of binding up wounds rather than inflicting them. The personifications were all right, he said, but the poets and painters did not know how they really looked. By the way,” Wanhope broke off, “did you happen to see Hauptmann’s ‘H�nnele’ when it was here?”

  None of us had, and we waited rather restively for the passing of the musing fit which he fell into. After a while he resumed at a point whose relation to the matter in hand we could trace:

  “It was extremely interesting for all reasons, by its absolute fearlessness and freshness in regions where there has been nothing but timid convention for a long time; but what I was thinking of was the personification of Death as it appears there. The poor little dying pauper, lying in her dream at the almshouse, sees the figure of Death. It is not the skeleton with the dart, or the phantom with the shrouded face, but a tall, beautiful young man, — as beautiful as they could get into the cast, at any rate, — clothed in simple black, and standing with his back against the mantlepiece, with his hands resting on the hilt of a long, two-handed sword. He is so quiet that you do not see him until some time after the child has seen him. When she begins to question him whether she may not somehow get to heaven without dying, he answers with a sort of sorrowful tenderness, a very sweet and noble compassion, but unsparingly as to his mission. It is a singular moment of pure poetry that makes the heart ache, but does not crush or terrify the spirit.”

  “And what has it got to do with Ormond?” asked Rulledge, but with less impatience than usual.

  “Why, nothing, I’m afraid, that I can make out very clearly. And yet there is an obscure connection with Ormond, or his vision, if it was a vision. Mrs. Ormond could not be very definite about what he saw, perhaps because even at the last moment he was not definite himself. What she was clear about, was the fact that his mood, though it became more serious, by no means became sadder. It became a sort of solemn joy instead of the light gaiety it had begun by being. She was no sort of scientific observer, and yet the keenness of her affection made her as closely observant of Ormond as if she had been studying him psychologically. Sometimes the light in his room would wake her at night, and she would go to him, and find him lying with a book faced down on his breast, as if he had been reading, and his fingers interlaced under his head, and a kind of radiant peace in his face. The poor thing said that when she would ask him what the matter was, he would say, ‘Nothing; just happiness,’ and when she would ask him if he did not think he ought to do something, he would laugh, and say perhaps it would go off of itself. But it did not go off; the unnatural buoyancy continued after he became perfectly tranquil. ‘I don’t know,’ he would say. ‘I seem to have got to the end of my troubles. I haven’t a care in the world, Jenny. I don’t believe you could get a rise out of me if you said the nastiest thing you could think of. It sounds like nonsense, of course, but it seems to me that I have found out the reason of things, though I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’ve only found out that there is a reason of things. That would be enough, wouldn’t it?’”

  V.

  At this point Wanhope hesitated with a kind of diffidence that was rather charming in him. “I don’t see,” he said, “just how I can keep the facts from this on out of the line of facts which we are not in the habit of respecting very much, or that we relegate to the company of things that are not facts at all. I suppose that in stating them I shall somehow make myself responsible for them, but that is just what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to do anything more than give them as they were given to me.”

  “You won’t be able to give them half as fully,” said Minver, “if Mrs. Ormond gave them to you.”

  “No,” Wanhope said gravely, “and that’s the pity of it; for they ought to be given as fully as possible.”

  “Go ahead,” Rulledge commanded, “and do the best you can.”

  “I’m not sure,” the psychologist thoughtfully said, “that I am quite satisfied to call Ormond’s experiences hallucinations. There ought to be some other word that doesn’t accuse his sanity in that degree. For he apparently didn’t show any other signs of an unsound mind.”

  “None that Mrs. Ormond would call so,” Minver suggested.

  “Well, in his case, I don’t think she was such a bad judge,” Wanhope returned. “She was a tolerably unbalanced person herself, but she wasn’t altogether disqualified for observing him, as I’ve said before. They had a pretty hot summer, as the summer is apt to be in the Housatonic valley, but when it got along into September the weather was divine, and they spent nearly the whole time out of doors, driving over the hills. They got an old horse from a native, and they hunted out a rickety buggy from the carriage-house, and they went wherever the road led. They went mostly at a walk, and that suited the horse exactly, as well as Mrs. Ormond, who had no faith in Ormond’s driving, and wanted to go at a pace that would give her a chance to jump out safely if anything happened. They put their hats in the front of the buggy, and went about in their bare heads. The country people got used to them, and were not scandalized by their appearance, though they were both getting a little gray, and must have looked as if they were old enough to know better.

  “They were not really old, as age goes nowadays: he was not more than forty-two or -three, and she was still in the late thirties. In fact, they were

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita —

  in that hour when life, and the conceit of life, is strongest, and when it feels as if it might go on forever. Women are not very articulate about such things, and it was probably Ormond who put their feeling into words, though she recognized at once that it was her feeling, and shrank from it as if it
were something wicked, that they would be punished for; so that one day, when he said suddenly, ‘Jenny, I don’t feel as if I could ever die,’ she scolded him for it. Poor women!” said Wanhope, musingly, “they are not always cross when they scold. It is often the expression of their anxieties, their forebodings, their sex-timidities. They are always in double the danger that men are, and their nerves double that danger again. Who was that famous salonni�re — Mme. Geoffrin, was it? — that Marmontel says always scolded her friends when they were in trouble, and came and scolded him when he was put into the Bastille? I suppose Mrs. Ormond was never so tender of Ormond as she was when she took it out of him for suggesting what she wildly felt herself, and felt she should pay for feeling.”

  Wanhope had the effect of appealing to Minver, but the painter would not relent. “I don’t know. I’ve seen her — or heard her — in very devoted moments.”

  “At any rate,” Wanhope resumed, “she says she scolded him, and it did not do the least good. She could not scold him out of that feeling, which was all mixed up in her retrospect with the sense of the weather and the season, the leaves just beginning to show the autumn, the wild asters coming to crowd the goldenrod, the crickets shrill in the grass, and the birds silent in the trees, the smell of the rowan in the meadows, and the odor of the old logs and fresh chips in the woods. She was not a woman to notice such things much, but he talked of them all and made her notice them. His nature took hold upon what we call nature, and clung fondly to the lowly and familiar aspects of it. Once she said to him, trembling for him, ‘I should think you would be afraid to take such a pleasure in those things,’ and when he asked her why, she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him; but he understood, and he said: ‘I’ve never realized before that I was so much a part of them. Either I am going to have them forever, or they are going to have me. We shall not part, for we are all members of the same body. If it is the body of death, we are members of that. If it is the body of life, we are members of that. Either I have never lived, or else I am never going to die.’ She said: ‘Of course you are never going to die; a spirit can’t die.’ But he told her he didn’t mean that. He was just as radiantly happy when they would get home from one of their drives, and sit down to their supper, which they had country-fashion instead of dinner, and then when they would turn into their big, lamplit parlor, and sit down for a long evening with his books. Sometimes he read to her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and he said he hadn’t had such a bath of poetry since he was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid nights, which were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of the gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and walk up and down the long veranda. Once, when he coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm and walked her up and down, and he said: ‘Isn’t it like a ship? The earth is like a ship, and we’re sailing, sailing! Oh, I wonder where!’ Then he stopped with a sob, and she was startled, and asked him what the matter was, but he couldn’t tell her. She was more frightened than ever at what seemed a break in his happiness. She was troubled about his reading the Bible so much, especially the Old Testament; but he told her he had never known before what majestic literature it was. There were some turns or phrases in it that peculiarly took his fancy and seemed to feed it with inexhaustible suggestion. ‘The Angel of the Lord’ was one of these. The idea of a divine messenger, embodied and commissioned to intimate the creative will to the creature: it was sublime, it was ineffable. He wondered that men had ever come to think in any other terms of the living law that we were under, and that could much less conceivably operate like an insensate mechanism than it could reveal itself as a constant purpose. He said he believed that in every great moral crisis, in every ordeal of conscience, a man was aware of standing in the presence of something sent to try him and test him, and that this something was the Angel of the Lord.