Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Not to me, James, or to any one that I know of. Everybody knows it. It’s an old thing, and nobody talks of it, except new-comers. And there are not many new-comers here.”

  “No,” Langbrith assented, with a smile. “Saxmills is static.”

  His mother may not have known just what he meant, or it may have been from the country habit of making no comment in response to what was not a question.. She asked, “Will you have some more coffee, James?”

  “No; but have them keep it hot for old Falk.”

  “I will have some fresh for him.”

  “There never was such thoughtful hospitality as yours, mother,” Langbrith said, rising and going round the table to where she had risen too, and putting his arm fondly across her shoulders. She was almost as tall as he, and their likeness showed as he laid his face against hers and rubbed his cheek on her own. “I believe that when I wake up in the other world you will be there to offer me something nice to eat. Old Falk is having a tremendously good time, don’t you think?”

  Mrs. Langbrith said, “Everything has been done for him that could be, by everybody.”

  “And I’m glad it’s happened to Falk, too. A great many of the fellows don’t know what a good fellow he is. They don’t get hold of him. Falk is proud, and that makes him shy. Last year I wouldn’t have thought of bringing him here, or getting him to come here. His people out in Kentucky are Germans, and they’ve always gone with the Germans. If Falk hadn’t come to Harvard, he never would have got into American society. Fellows from out that way, where the Germans are rather thick, say that the third generation gets in, and sometimes the second if the first has got rich. But Falk’s father is only a very musical doctor with a German practice, and no social instincts or aspirations. Of course, it’s Falk’s work in Caricature that’s brought him forward with the best fellows. He’s going to be a great artist, I believe, and I want to have a hand in helping him. It’s difficult. He would rather say a nasty thing than a nice thing to you, and that doesn’t cement friendship with everybody. But the way is not to mind it. He’s all right at heart, if he wasn’t so proud.”

  “I don’t think it’s very polite,” Mrs. Langbrith ventured.

  “Well, no,” her son owned, “but it’s better than being slimy.”

  XII

  LANGBRITH and his friend took the Northern Express in the afternoon, which would bring them to Boston just in time for dinner. Mrs. Langbrith gave them such a heavy lunch that, what with the sleep they had still to make up from the night before, they drowsed half the way to town in the smoking-car, which they had to themselves until the train began to stop at the suburban stations. Before this happened they woke, and Falk took a sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket, and spread it on the little stationary table between them which the commuters used for playing cards.

  “How would that do for the next cartoon?” he asked.

  He pushed it towards Langbrith, who smoothed it out again, and examined it carefully. “I don’t know what it means,” he said, at last.

  “Neither do I,” Falk said. “I want you to joke it, so that I shall.”

  Langbrith continued to look at the drawing, but apparently with less and less consciousness of it. He returned to it in pushing it away. “I don’t know that I feel much like joking, to-day.”

  Falk crumpled the drawing up in his hand and threw it on the floor. “There oughtn’t to be any to-morrows. There ought to be nothing but yesterdays. Then we could manage.”

  “What do you mean?” Langbrith demanded. “You’re thinking you went too far.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw you going.”

  They were silent, and then Langbrith said, with a laugh, “Well, if I went too far, I wasn’t met halfway.”

  “He laughs bitterly,” Falk interpreted. “He has got his come-uppings.”

  Langbrith looked angrily at him. Then his look softened, if that is the word, into something more like sulking than anger, and he said, “Sometimes I think you hate me, Falk.”

  “No, you don’t. You merely think you deserve it. What have you been doing? You might as well out with it now as later; I don’t want you coming in to-night when I’ve got into my first sleep.”

  “If I could only hope to make you understand!” Langbrith sighed. “It isn’t merely our having known each other since she and I were kids, and always been more or less together. And it isn’t the country freedom between fellows and girls. You could appreciate both those things. But you’re so confoundedly hard that you wouldn’t see why I should feel a peculiar tenderness — a kind of longing to shield her and save her: I don’t know! — when I think of her home life, and what it must be. I know what a brave fight she puts up against its seeming any way anomalous, and that makes her all the more pathetic. It makes her all the more fascinating — to a man of my temperament. She knows that, and that is why she is so defiant. I never knew she was so beautiful till this time. Weren’t you struck with it yourself, Falk?”

  Falk nodded, and smoked on.

  “The complication of qualities in her, and the complication of her conditions, are what make it impossible to decide whether one has gone too far or not. Her way of taking it doesn’t help you out a bit. She takes everything as if you didn’t mean it. «Of course, she knows that I’m in love with her. Everything I do tells her so, and so long as it isn’t put into words, it seems all right. But when it comes to words, she won’t stand it.”

  “She threw you down? Is that it?”

  Langbrith frowned, and then smiled, as if forgiving the slang that might well have offended against the dignity of the fact. He even adopted it. “Not just threw me down, I should say.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “Nothing. But I was in the mood for making her answer something more than she would answer, and I shouldn’t have left her without, if it hadn’t been for her father coming on the scene. He was an element that I hadn’t counted on, and he made the whole thing luridly impossible. He seemed to cast the malign shadow of his own perdition over her.”

  “Good phrase,” Falk murmured.

  “Oh, don’t mock me, old fellow!” Langbrith implored. “Of course, his being what he is wouldn’t make me give her up, though I believe it would make her give me up. Poor wretch! You can’t think how amusing he was, with the wild romances he got off to me by the dozen in the two or three minutes we talked together. Do you remember that wonderful liar in one of Thackeray’s stories, or sketches, who says he has just come from the Russian embassy in London, where he had seen a Russian princess knouted by secret orders of the Czar? It was something like that. That fellow must have been an opium-eater, too. One good thing about it,” Langbrith resumed, after a pause not broken by Falk, “my mother thinks the world of Hope. She’s always having her at the house, when she will come. I think she does it because my father was his friend in his better days, and she feels that he would like to have her do it. She is just so loyal to his memory. If she could imagine any wish for him, now, after twenty years, I believe she would want to carry it out, the same as if he were alive.”

  Falk still said nothing, and Langbrith broke off to say, “There was something that gravelled me last night, a little. I don’t know whether you noticed it.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, Dr. Anther’s snubbing way of meeting what I said of that medallion of my father which I suggested for the public library. It embarrassed me before the judge and Dr. Enderby; it made me feel like a fool. He had no business to do it. But, perhaps, he was merely not noticing. All the same, I’m going to do it. I think it’s a shame that in a place which a man has done so much for as my father did for Saxmills there shouldn’t be any public record of him. I’ll do it to show them they ought to have done it themselves, if for nothing else. But I know all this bores you,” Langbrith ended, vexed with his evident failure to interest his friend.

  Falk yawned, but he said, with more than the usual scanty kindness he showed for
the wounds of Langbrith’s vanity, “No, no, I’m just stupid from last night. One doesn’t have such a good time for nothing.”

  “It was a good time, wasn’t it?” Langbrith gratefully exulted.

  Falk said, “Fine.” He yawned again, and Langbrith lapsed into a smiling muse, in which he was climbing the hill with Hope Hawberk, flattered in the fondness she suffered him to show her, and sweetly contraried by her refusal to say the words which would have sealed the bond between them. Was it, he wondered, with a swelling throat, because she wished to let him feel himself wholly free, in the event of some disgrace or disaster to herself from her father? He would live to prove that he would not be free: that he was hers as she was his, and nothing on earth could part them. That would make right, it would consecrate, all his past love-making. Once he would have thought that no harm, if it had come to nothing. But now, in his knowledge of another world, with a different code, it was not to be thought of but as part of a common future for them which it began. He wanted to put the case concretely before Falk, but he could not. He could not generalize, as he would have liked to do, on that difference of code between city and country, with the risk of Falk’s making his abstractions concrete in some such way as only a blow could answer. Falk had his limitations. After all, he was only half an American, and he could only half understand an American’s feelings. He retreated from the temptation, and lost himself in a warm revery of the future, which he forecast in defiance of every obstacle.

  He thought what friends Hope and his mother had always been, and he knew that there could be nothing but glad response in his mother’s heart to the feeling that was in his for Hope. Then he began to think of his mother apart from Hope, and of what she might have been like when she was a girl. She was younger even than Hope when she was married. She had been many more years a widow than a maid; and, in the light of his own love for Hope, he wondered if his mother had ever thought of marrying again. His father had been twice her age when he married her. Langbrith knew this in the casual way in which children know something of their parents’ history, and his father must have been an uncommon man to have won her with that difference of years between them, and to have kept her constant to his memory so many years after his death. After all, how little she had ever said of him! Langbrith romanced her as not being able, from deep feeling, from a grief ever new, to speak of him, and he ached at heart to think how his father’s personality seemed buried in his grave with his body. A tender, chivalrous longing to champion his forgotten father, to rehabilitate this vanished personality, replaced his heartache, and again he was indignant with Dr. Anther for his indifference, his coldness. He said to himself that he must have an explanation from Dr. Anther; he would write to him, and ask just what he meant. Perhaps he meant nothing. But he must be sure. Then he would see that young sculptor, that Italian, and tell him what he wanted; talk it over with him; find if he had any notions of his own.

  The train slowed into the North station about five o’clock, just when he knew his mother would be talking with old Norah about the supper, to which, in his absence, she would revert from the late dinner. She would be bidding Norah tell the cook that she did not want anything but a cup of tea and a little milk-toast. Poor old mother! What a savorless, limp life she lived there alone! Yet it could not be otherwise, when he was away. How much she depended upon him! Somehow, he must manage for her to live with Hope and him. She must go out to Paris with them, where they should go after their marriage, and when they came back to Saxmills, where they would always have their summer home, she must be put bade mistress in the old house.

  XII

  THE neighbor over the way who saw Anther drop the hitching-weight of his buggy in front of the Langbrith house, late in the afternoon of the lengthening April day, decided that Mrs. Langbrith had been overdoing. She watched for him to come out until she could stay no longer at the window without making her own tea late, but she did not see him come out at all.

  In fact, it was the doctor who appeared to have been overdoing. He looked so tired to Mrs. Langbrith that she asked him if he would not have a cup of tea. Upon second thought, she asked him if he would not have it with her. Supper would be ready very soon; and, without waiting for a refusal, she went into the kitchen to hurry it, and to have the cook add something to the milk-toast for the man-appetite, to which her hospitality was ministering with more impulsiveness and spontaneity than the wont of village hospitality is.

  When they sat down together at the table, he did not eat much and he talked little; but he seemed to feel gratefully the comfort of the place and presence. She came into authority with him, as a woman does when the man dear to her is depressed. Her affection for him came out in little suggestions and insistencies about the food. Like most physicians, he kept his precepts for himself and his practices for his patients. He now ate rather recklessly, and he preferred the unwholesome things. At first she had to press him, and then she had to check him. At last she had to say to Norah, who came in with successive plates of the hot cakes which he devoured, “That will do, Norah,” and, when he had swept the final batch upon his plate and soaked them in butter and syrup, and then cut their layers into deep vertical sections, and gorged these with a kind of absent gluttony, while she looked on in patient amaze, she rose and led the way from the table into the parlor.

  It lay beyond the library and had windows to the north and east. The library was lighted from the east alone, like the dining-room in the wing. The main house was square, and divided by an ample hall from front to back. Beyond the hall, the two drawing-rooms opening from it balanced the parlor and library. There was a fire of logs burning on the parlor hearth, and its glow alone lighted the place when the two came into it. He went first to the window and looked at his horse. When he came away she pulled down the curtains and shut out what was left of the pale day and the disappointment of the neighbor who had been waiting for the reappearance of the persons of a drama not played for her.

  Mrs. Langbrith took the chair at the corner, and invited Anther to the deeper one in front of the fire by her action.

  “I oughtn’t to stay,” he said, looking at his watch. But he sat down. Neither of them made haste to take up any talk for the entertainment of the other. What they were to say was to come because they were both thinking the same things, from interests that were no longer separable. Yet he began with as great apparent remoteness as possible from their common interests. “Hawberk is at home again,” he said, as if that followed from his saying he ought not to stay.

  “James told me,” she responded. “He saw him last night.”

  “And he has begun again.”

  “Yes, I knew that from the way that James said he talked. It doesn’t seem much use his ever going.”

  “It prolongs his life, if that’s any use. If he hadn’t pulled up completely, from time to time, he would have been dead ten years ago. It is a curious case. Mostly they keep on and on, till they kill themselves, but Hawberk seems disposed to see how much relief can be got out of it with the least danger. At the rate he is going, he can live as long as anybody. Of course, the moral effect always follows the indulgence of a morbid appetite. What did he say to James?”

  “He just told him some of his wild stories. He boasted of being Mr. Langbrith’s greatest friend.”

  “So he was, in a kind of way. An involuntary friend,” Anther said, with a smile. She smiled, too, strangely enough, but as people can smile, in dealing with an old wrong when it offers an ironical aspect to them. But she said, “Sometimes I wish it could be known what a deadly enemy Mr. Langbrith had been to him. Why shouldn’t I tell it? I ought to feel guilty for not telling it. He robbed him, as much as if he had taken his money out of his pocket.”

  “No doubt about that; and once it might have been best to own the fact publicly. But sometimes it seems to me that time is past. A wrong like that seems to gather a force that enslaves those who have done nothing worse than leave it unacknowledged through a good motive. You
haven’t been silent for your own sake.”

  “I am not sure it hasn’t been for my own sake.”

  “I am.

  “I wonder,” she said, “that Mr. Hawberk hasn’t told it himself.”

  “Well, possibly, he thinks that it wouldn’t be credited, that it would be regarded as one of his wild inventions; that is, he thinks that when he is in his soberer moments. When he is under the influence of the drug, he likes to make pleasing romances, and has no desire to mix a tragical ingredient in them.”

  “Then Mr. Langbrith has ruined a soul!”

  “Yes,” Anther admitted, “he has done something like that. And the most terrible thing is, that he holds the man in bondage now much more securely than he could have held him living. If they were both still alive, there would be some means of righting the wrong that has been done. Some pressure could be brought upon him to make him do Hawberk justice.”

  “No, no, he would know how to get out of that.” She rose and closed the door opening into the library. She had meant to do it quietly, and without self-betrayal; but, in the nervous stress that was on her, she brought it to with a clash, and then she felt obliged to explain: “It always seems as if it were listening,” and Anther knew that she meant the portrait over the library mantel.

  “At any rate,” the doctor resumed, “he makes it hard for you to do him justice now. You do the best you can, and perhaps it is the best that any one could do. I suppose that a moralist, like Enderby, for instance, would say that the secrecy which Hawberk’s misfortune promotes is the worst part of it. You pay Hawberk an income from a stolen invention, and he goes about bragging of the inventions which he has in the hands of Boston capitalists. Perhaps it is not even possible for him to tell the truth, in the perversion of his nature through his habit.”

  “What was he like before he took to it, Dr. Anther?” she asked, from the security she felt in shutting out the portrait. “I know that he took it up in the misery he felt at being trapped and robbed, and it was his only escape.”