Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “You haven’t taken to laudanum, I hope,” the doctor said, returning to his smile. “Well, it was something that gave me bad dreams while it lasted. I thought I had made mischief, and made it out of pure silliness.” The doctor’s smile took on the incredulity that prompted her to go on. “Yes, I did, I made mischief — set the gossip going. You know you have heard it, Dr. Anther — about James Langbrith giving up putting the tablet to his father, and then deciding to do it?” The doctor reluctantly assented. “Well, I did that.” She possessed him, laughing and blushing, of the whole case, and then waited confidently for her acquittal, or, rather, went confidently on without it as something that might be taken for granted. “Before James decided to do it, finally, I was so worked up that I went to Mrs. Langbrith, and coaxed her to ask you to write to him and tell him to go on. She promised, but concluded to write to him herself. By that time he had made up his mind to go on, anyway. You see what a narrow escape you had. I thought I ought to tell you.” The doctor said, “Yes, that’s right,” and then a vagueness came into his gaze that made the girl laugh.

  “Well, I’m going now,” she said.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that.”

  “Well, I’m going before you do.”

  “Hope, you’re a good girl,” Anther said. “I mustn’t praise you to your face; but if any one ever wonders to you that you can keep up as you do, you tell them I say they don’t know anything about it; that there isn’t one in ten thousand that could bear as you do what you have to bear; but don’t ever get to supposing that it’s your duty to be sad about it. It’s your duty to be gay.”

  “Well, that’s what I like being, you know, Dr. Anther. It’s so easy that it doesn’t seem like very much of a duty.”

  She had risen, and she stood prettily smiling at him; and he looked at her, and then suddenly turned his back on her, as if shunning a temptation. He longed to take her in his arms. “Well, I’ll be up in the course of the forenoon.”

  Before he went to see Hawberk he dropped his buggy anchor before the Langbrith mills, and found his way through the works, where the odor of washday from the pulp-vats was only denser than it was outside, to the office partitioned off in a corner of the building. He pushed open the door, which closed with a weighted cord, and shut himself in with John Langbrith.

  The manager was sitting at his desk, and at the opening and closing of the door, which, through the shuddering and muttering of the machinery, made itself seen rather than heard, he got lankly up and took the doctor’s offered hand, which he pushed horizontally back and forth without looking at him. “Good-morning, doctor,” he said, and then he glanced at the papers on his desk with a desperate sigh.

  “John Langbrith,” Anther began, at once, “you know about this scheme of James’s for putting up a tablet to his father?”

  “I’ve heard about it. I heard he had dropped it.”

  “He’s going on with it.”

  “Well, what have I got to do with it? I’ve got enough on my hands looking after my job here in the mills.”

  “Has he consulted you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I advise you to write to him and urge him to stop it.”

  John Langbrith lifted his narrow, yellow eyes and met the doctor’s. “Why?”

  “You know what your brother really was.”

  “So do you. Why don’t you tell James to stop it?”

  “That’s nonsense. Sometime the truth must come out.”

  “You mean that you will give it away?”

  “That’s stuff! But there are others.”

  “Hawberk? What’s his word worth?”

  “Nothing now. But if he pulls up—”

  “He’ll never pull up.”

  “I have hopes of curing him, and I tell you that, when the truth comes out, there will be shame and sorrow for that boy and scandal for the community. It isn’t for me to tell him about his father, and you know his mother can’t. It’s for you, or for Hawberk.”

  “He’s making up to Hawberk’s girl, ain’t he? Then they can fix it with Hawberk. My job is to look after the mills. I’m not going outside of it.”

  “It would be an outrage to let that girl marry the son of the man who ruined her father, and you will be a partaker in the wrong unless you speak. Tell James about it, and let him act from his instincts of honor and justice.”

  “I can’t go outside of my job.”

  “If he’s allowed to go on and marry that poor girl, it will be taking a cruel advantage of her. She will be marrying him blindfold. She will be trapped and fettered and manacled for life.”

  “I can’t go outside of my job.”

  “When the truth is known, and it must be known, the effect with the public will be hardening and depraving beyond that of any bad life openly lived. It will breed a spirit of defiant cynicism, and put a premium on hypocrisy. It will be inconceivably debauching and corrupting. Think it over, Langbrith!”

  “I sha’n’t go outside of my job.”

  The words came with an unexcited dryness which convinced Anther of their finality, and kept him from saying more. But Langbrith followed him to the door with words more forbidding still.

  “I don’t owe that young man anything; let him make a fool of himself any shape he wants to. And I don’t owe this community anything; it may rot for all me. And I don’t owe you anything; you mind your own business! I don’t want you bothering round here any more.”

  Anther made him no answer. He did not blame him greatly. He knew John Langbrith to be as clean a man as his brother had been foul; but he knew that it was not in the measure of his narrow nature to do what he had required of him. His job was the measure of him, and Anther owned to himself that John Langbrith could be safe only in keeping to that.

  He was lifting his hitching-weight into the buggy when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and recognized in its touch the heavy mental method of Judge Garley. “Been asking brother John for help?’’ the judge conjectured.

  With the weight dangling by its strap, Anther said, “Yes, I have.”

  “Well, you didn’t get it, I presume. Brother John likes the safe side, which happens in this case to be the inside. I have been considering the matter you laid before me the other day, and my advice is to drop it.”

  “I sha’n’t drop it!” Anther answered, sharply.

  The judge did not mind his wilfulness. “At this late day, nothing can be done — nothing but mischief can be done — by drawing the frailties of our departed brother from their dread abode.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “Well, that merely proves that I saw it in the right light at first, before taking time to reflect upon it. It increases my respect for myself without diminishing my regard for you, my dear friend. You can accomplish nothing whatever by the course you propose to pursue. An exposure would come from you with a peculiarly bad grace; it is hardly necessary for me to say why; and it would only convince the young man that you were his father’s enemy. You could not count upon his mother’s corroboration in such an event.”

  “I could count upon her truth, in any event.”

  The judge slowly shook his large head. “Not if she is the good woman I take her to be.” Anther nervelessly dropped the hitching - weight, and it fell so near the judge’s foot that he looked down at it, though he did not move. “My dear friend, you would stand unaided and alone, and the outraged sentiment of the community would be against you. The sentimentality of the community would overwhelm you. Your exposure of the boy’s father would be attributed to the worst motive, in the absence of any, and the tide of pity for him would bear you down.”

  “Look here, Judge Garley,” Anther said, “would you deliver the dedication address, if you were asked, knowing what you do?”

  “There will be time to consider that point when I have been asked. I may say in general terms that I would refuse to do nothing that I was required by my sense of public duty to do.”

  “It’s a p
ity you went out of politics,” Anther said, dryly. He got a new grip of his anchor-strap, and lifted the weight into his buggy. Then he lifted himself in.

  But the judge laid a detaining hand on the frame of the lowered top, and questioned with an anxious smile: “Anther, I hope you are not about to do anything precipitate?”

  Anther braced himself for an angry reply, and then fell back against the seat. “Oh, precipitate! I don’t know that I’m going to do anything at all.”

  “Well, that’s right,” the judge said, and let him drive away.

  XXII

  THE twenty-ninth of June was fixed for the dedication of the tablet, and the time that passed before that date seemed by no means too long for the work of preparation. The young sculptor, under the inspiration of Langbrith’s frequent visits, worked with such ardor that he finished the bas-relief early enough to send the model to Chicopee, and have it cast in the bronze which alone satisfied Langbrith’s sense of the sincerity essential in the tribute he was paying to his father’s memory; and Falk owned that the sculptor had done his work well. He had done it with a touch that suggested the most modem sculpture, and yet preserved a sort of allegiance to the stem Puritan nature of the subject. Royal Langbrith was there not only in the life, but in what his son felt to be that high personal character proper to him. Here was a man, not of the immediate moment, but of that hour of the later eighteen-sixties which created the immediate moment; the hour of the Republic’s supreme consciousness, when all the American forces, redeemed from their employment in the waste of war, were given to enterprises which have since enriched us, and, under the direction of such captains of industry as Langbrith’s father, have pressed forward to the commercial conquest of the world. The face, which the sculptor had imagined from the son’s face more than from the likenesses supplied him, wore not the old-fashioned Websterian frown of the ante-bellum Americans, when there was no greatness but political greatness in the popular ideal, but had almost an eager smile, full of business promptness, and yet with refined intelligence, a sagacity instantly self-helpful, but ultimately not unkindly. The son’s heart glowed within him as he looked at it, and he offered it the ancestor-worship of a man proud of his race, of a dreamer idealizing the future from the past. He wished Hope could see it with him, and the wish reddened him with a conscious blush.

  He wrote home to his mother, declaring his entire satisfaction with the work, and predicting her own; and he betrayed his impatience for the event which should appeal with that sculptured face to the gratitude of the community at Saxmills. During his childhood and boyhood, when he had looked out upon the place always as through the windows of his father’s house, with a sense of being in it but not of it, he had nourished the arrogant, yet affectionate, longing to dominate it by winning its kindness for himself and his name. His impassioned reveries abounded in dramas of his acceptance by the matter-of-fact little Yankee town, in a sort of seigniorial supremacy, which should be its voluntary acknowledgment of what the Langbriths had done for it; and during the absences of his college years he had not wholly lost this ambition. His temperament had kept him from great knowledge of the world, and such knowledge as he had grown into had given his boyish fancies practical shape rather than destroyed them. He might be a disagreeable fool, as he often approved himself to his acquaintance, but he was not finally an ignoble fool.

  At the bottom of Langbrith’s heart still rankled the obscure resentment for Dr. Anther’s obscure indifference to his scheme that he had instantly felt when he first spoke of the scheme before the village magnates in his mother’s house. The bruise of that obstruction against which he had so unexpectedly struck remained, and nothing could assuage the hurt but Anther’s conviction of wrong and his confession of it. He wondered at times if his mother had ever spoken of the matter to Anther. He had peremptorily forbidden her to do so, in the first letter he wrote home afterwards, but he had hoped she would. Yet no word came from her concerning it, and he could only suppose that she had too faithfully obeyed him. At times, he questioned his own impressions of the fact, and doubted whether it happened, with the significance which his veneration for his father and his affection for Dr. Anther both gave it; and again he could not rid himself of the belief that it had happened in the form and meaning which it first seemed to have.

  Before it happened he had imagined asking Anther, as foremost of the Saxmills men who had known his father, to deliver the dedicatory address; but, with this bruise, this doubt, in his mind, it was impossible to do that; and he felt himself less able to demand the explanation from Anther which he sometimes trembled upon the point of asking than to turn to some one else for the address. He would have preferred Anther to all others, even if Anther had not been his father’s old friend; for the doctor had his repute as a speaker of simple effectiveness; his oration at the celebration of the first Decoration Day after the great war was remembered still in Saxmills with the exaggerated admiration which history compels when it becomes tradition. It seemed to Langbrith that no one could do such justice to the quiet, almost disdainful virtues of his father as the quiet, almost disdainful powers of his father’s friend. But now he had to devolve for the office of orator upon Judge Garley, a speaker of most respectable gifts, but pompous and ponderous, and of a personal ignorance of the man to be commemorated which, in Langbrith’s estimation, all but disqualified him. The sweet in the bitter was the hope that Anther might feel the slight of being passed over, and be duly humiliated; but this did not so much console Langbrith as it might if he had not been hurt in his love as well as his pride.

  The judge met the doctor driving through the town the day after he had Langbrith’s letter requesting him to make the address, and he overcame a certain embarrassment he had in telling his old friend of it.

  “I congratulate you,” the doctor said, with ironical dryness; but he did not ask the judge if he had consented.

  “I do not know,” the judge said, “whether you will approve of my accepting the invitation.”

  “Oh, approve!” the doctor said, with deprecation which was also ironical.

  But the judge showed no resentment. “I didn’t think it was fair to bother you with the matter, or else I should have come to speak with you before writing. But I did not see how I could decline, and I believe you will be satisfied with the manner in which I shall treat the subject.”

  Anther, if he was too much vexed to try penetrating the reserve which the judge’s words invited him to explore, felt also that he had no right to take any tone of censure with him. He said, “You couldn’t refuse without wounding the boy’s feelings.”

  “That was what I felt,” the judge answered, with relief. “I might have pleaded an excuse of some kind, such as intended absence from the place, but I did not like to do so, in view of the fact that I shall be detained here by some business that is coming up at the time. He asked for an early answer, so that he might get ready some biographical material he wishes to supply me with.”

  There was a twinkle in the judge’s legal eye, and a smile at the corner of his legal mouth, and he responded with a laugh to the doctor’s remark: “In addition to what I have given you?”

  “Yes; I need all that I can get on account of that!” The judge roared at his own fun, and Anther drove slowly away at the jog-trot which was his horse’s habitual gait when they were both absorbed in thought. Their heads hung down with the same droop, and the horse looked as if he might be revolving the same distasteful thought as the doctor, with the same sense of helplessness.

  Within the week that followed Anther was stopped at different times in his progresses through the main street of Saxmills by different, leading citizens, who invited him to consult with them upon points of the common interest. James Langbrith seemed not to have rested, after getting Judge Garley’s reply, before addressing himself to the selectmen, the high-school principal, and the Sunday-school superintendent, as well as the chief officers of the Sons of Pythias and the Saxmills Cadets, inviting their co-
operation in the ceremony which he had so much at heart. Each of these dignitaries now addressed himself to Dr. Anther, in his succession, with the confident belief that Dr. Anther, as the oldest friend of Royal Langbrith in the community, and as the close friend of his son and widow, would be most concerned in the affair, and would perhaps have some inside authority and information to impart. He had necessarily to disappoint their hopes, but he found himself putting on more and more the air of at least civic sympathy, which they seemed to demand of him. He could not, indeed, show them his real mind without awakening a suspicion he was far from wishing to rouse, without starting gossip that would grow into scandal, and involve the Langbrith s and himself in mischievous conjecture. He carried his compliance with their obvious expectation to a point where it became almost intolerably irksome, without seeing the point at which he could refuse compliance. When it came to Mrs. Enderby’s calling gayly to him from the sidewalk, and halting him, like the rest, to announce that the rector had just had a letter from young Mr. Langbrith asking him to take part in the dedicatory ceremonies, Anther’s soul rose in insurrection. “But you knew he had written, I suppose,” the lady said.

  “No, I certainly didn’t,” he answered, with a sharpness which suggested to her the possibility that the doctor resented the young man’s not consulting so old and so near a friend, but suggested it not so forcibly as to withhold her from saying: “Yes, he has asked Dr. Enderby and Father Cody, and Mr. Alway of the ‘orthodox’ church” — she said “orthodox” with the effect of humoring local usage, but also of putting the word between quotation marks— “all to take part. I believe Father Cody is to ask the blessing, and Mr. Alway is to make the opening prayer. Mr. Langbrith has asked my husband to say something from the altruistic stand-point, as it bears upon what his father did for labor in his time by profit-sharing, and, incidentally, if he pleases, to draw any lessons as to character building from the example of his personality.”