Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The miller paused long enough before answering to spit to the leeward of the horseman. “What news?” he grunted, with his pipe between his teeth.

  “About the mills. You’re sold out of house and home,” the horseman said.

  “I know it,” the miller answered, but so quietly that Captain Bickler must have felt at a loss how to go on. He said, with his eyes fixed in uneasy inquiry on the miller’s white mask, “They’re to put in paper machinery, I hear, in about a year from now.”

  The pipe fell from the miller’s teeth and broke at the bay mare’s feet.

  “Well, what of that?” he demanded.

  “Nothing. But I think it’s a damn shame.”

  “Yes. Is it any of your damn business?”

  The lawyer took the retort as a joke, and forced a laugh. “Well, I just wanted you to know how we feel about it around here.”

  “Well, now I know.”

  “The Larrabees ought to have let you have notice. Wasn’t there some kind of promise?” The miller said nothing, and the lawyer added, “Well, you know where to come if you want any law; that’s all. It won’t cost you anything.” He waited for whatever answer did not come, then he shook his rein and rode from under the glare of the miller’s floury face, down into the road and across the tail-race.

  Overdale looked after him with a pang such as holds one motionless and mute, while he felt the drunken dream which still hung in his brain shape itself as with an electric pulse into something definite, a prophecy of death, capriciously derived, but distinctly dated in event.

  IV

  IN the month that passed between the sale of the mills and the coming of Owen Powell with his boys, Overdale had begun trying to look upon his dread as something he should be ashamed to own. His success was greatest when he woke in the morning, for that moment when disaster seems improbable and death is not in the world. Through the forenoon the shadow of his fear was in abeyance, and at noon it shrank, like the shadow that he cast in the sun, almost to nothing, and troubled him as little as at dawn. The familiar tasks, the traits of custom and habit, made him forget it; the murmur of the grist-mill working so smoothly and quietly, and the shrill hissing of the sawmill filled his sense and stilled the dread within. As he sat smoking his pipe and looking out on the road, where now and then a farmer jogged by and sent him a hello, it seemed impossible that he should be troubled by it again. All the things of every-day life denied it. The ducks and geese waded about the edges of the pool backed up from the head-race, and made a vulgar, friendly clamor; his hounds slouched by drowsily in the warm sunlight, with their air of weariness from coon-hunting the night before; his pigs rooted among the leaves on the hillside, or paraded to and fro under the mill door, greedy for their noonday feed; the turkeys and chickens strayed over the open space before the mill and among the saw-logs, or rustled through the dry stalks of the corn. At times from the heart of the field came the note of a quail; from the pastures the sad trill of a belated meadow-lark.

  The inward stress which these sights and sounds combined to banish had not yet grown to be that second consciousness through which everything must pass from the world to him, taking color of its dread. But when the shadow of the mill began to lengthen before it in the afternoon, and at last to be lost in the shadow of the western upland beyond the island, the miller found his place at the door intolerable, and went to look for something to do in the mill. If there was nothing, he left it and walked up the path beside the race to the sawmill, where the loud noise put him in some heart again, and he shouted in talk with Bellam. When he went back after his supper the rush of the water on wheels beat dreadfully upon him, and he ran up-stairs to light his lamp. The light cheered him for a little time, and he was glad of the growing cool of the evenings, that he might have some excuse to kindle a fire in his stove and listen to its roar. But his feints and defenses were of brief effect, and in the night hours that he spent in solitude he had but one other resource.

  The neighbors saw that he had begun to drink a great deal; he offered his jug to all who came, and tilted it up himself whether they joined him or not; but no one could say that he had seen him drunk. His fear was like a strong poison in his veins; the fiery liquor did not consume him, but was consumed in him; it only raised his heart to the level of other men’s. The day when Powell came with his boys and began work upon their cabin the last of the farmers who rode away from the mill door left Overdale clinging to the rope that had lowered the grist to his horse’s back, and listening to the blows of the hammer in the cabin. They fell like shocks upon the miller’s heart; the invisible forces there seemed to embody his fear to him, and it passed crazily through him that he might wreak his anguish on them and annul his fear. The notion, diffuse as the floating dust that settled on the cobwebs in the mill, gathered shape in the will at least to look upon the impersonation of his fear; and with finally no clearer purpose than this he took his shotgun with him from the corner of his room when he yielded to his longing. If Powell, when he awoke that night and made his joke about his hard bed, could have looked through the window black before his eyes, he might have owned for once that there was danger in the world. But it would have been like him to contend afterward that Overdale was there through mere curiosity; and the miller himself, after he had looked upon his enemy’s face and heard his friendly voice, might not have confessed any other motive.

  He stumbled back to his den in the mill and roused the fire in his stove, and then he went out to the door again to look at the night. It could hardly be called the night any longer. The pallor of dawn was beginning to steal into the east; a planet shone sharp above the kindling sun, and the stars crisply twinkled about the sky; but there was that warning of day in the air which did not need the corroboration of a cock crow sounding faintly from one of the distant farms. Overdale drowsed where he stood; he flung himself upon the buffalo robe in the corner of the warm room and fell into a heavy sleep.

  V

  WHEN Powell came back from town with his whole family to take possession of his new home, early in October, nothing about the place had kept quite the poetic aspect which rejoiced him when he first came with his boys. He was forced now to see it with the unsparing eyes of his wife, which robbed it of the glamour it had worn to his retrospective vision. The touches of construction and decoration which he had given the cabin showed bungling and ineffective; the floor wavered in spite of his relaying or on account of it; the repairs of the clapboarded roof did not keep out the rain, or, later, the snow when it came.

  The pigs of the earlier tenants of the cabin had been sold to the miller, but they had not forgotten the comfort of their former home. When they had finished their midday feed before the mill they hurried to the cabin, and beaded the cleft between the door and the threshold with their pink snouts and appealed to the charity of the Powells with sharp menace and soft insinuation. After their evening feed they resorted to the warm chimney-back, at the base of the gable, as they had always done; the boys made forays into the dark to dislodge them, but the pigs returned before the boys were well indoors again. The mother could not share the younger children’s pleasure in making believe they were wolves; she remembered the real wolves of the mystical region which they knew from her abhorrence as Out on Sandy, where she used to hear them howling through the dark when she was a little girl; and she told the children the comfortable grunting of the quiescent pigs was nothing like it.

  There was an echo of it in the nightly baying of the coon-dogs that came hulking to the mill at the heels of the farmers’ horses on grist-day and showed themselves large, lop-eared, liver-colored hounds. They were of no use by day, but by night when the moon was up, and they had treed a coon in some deadening where the girdled walnuts and hickories shone like bleached skeletons in the light, they called the boys and the loutish men of the farms from their beds to the supreme joy of the local year. There were other pleasures of the region which the women shared: the frolics where they met with the men for parching co
rn and candy-pulling; the huskings and apple-peelings, where neighborly help was given for neighborly hospitality; and the house-raisings and barn-raisings, where the women gathered and waited upon the men at the meals they had cooked for them. Separately the women had their quiltings, and the men at Christmas had their shooting-matches, where turkeys were the prizes of their rifles; they had their squirrel-hunts, in which the squirrel was the unit of every kind of game; and their wild frolics, where the jug went round and the stag-dance shook the beams and rafters. Quoits and foot-races and jumping-matches drew the men together, but the sexes united again in revivals and baptisms and spelling-matches. A fierce religiosity, choosing between salvation and perdition, was the spiritual life which an open atheist here and there sweepingly denied. Camp-meetings assembled old and young from far and near; the instinctive communism of the pioneer times prolonged itself in the social life by mutual help in the things which could not be done in severalty. But otherwise the farmers dwelt apart on their wide acreages in a solitude unbroken from Sunday to Sunday for their wives. When they came to the mill with their grists the men made it the center of neighborhood gossip or political debate, but, except for a visit with their women to one of the small towns of the region for buying or selling, they kept to their houses, or preferably their barns. The barns oftener than the houses were of frame and clapboarded; the dwellings were mostly reproductions of the log cabins of the first settlers; they repeated the primitive shapes of the past, but the logs were squared and plastered like those of the Powells’ cabin. The few houses were of brick, and faced upon the road with two front doors, one for visits of ceremony from the neighboring wives, and the other never opened except for weddings or funerals.

  The Powells had come from town without provision for the winter, and they had to trust for supplies to the farmers, who sometimes granted them surlily and sometimes cheerfully, but always as a favor. Owen went for them with his boys or sent the boys alone with the small one-horse wagon provisionally representing the dignity of the New Leaf enterprise to the lords of three or four hundred acres, who took the road with teams of tall Hambletonians, shining with fatness in their brass-mounted harness. The farmers viewed the one-horse wagon with silent scorn or kindly derision; but they opened for Powell’s money the caves in their gardens where they kept their winter store of apples, potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, taking and giving odor and savor under a low roofing sodded over and banked in with earth against the frost.

  Some of the kindlier farmers were German or Scotch-

  Irish folk from western Pennsylvania, with here and there a French-Canadian family, but mostly the people were Virginians and Marylanders of a fierceness bred by contact with slavery and with a poor white revolt in their hearts against any one imaginably their betters. But their revolt did not include the superiority of the retired merchant who had come out from town and lived with his motherless daughter in a house having more than any the stateliness of a mansion. The gentleness of the Bladens was akin by blood to the fierceness of the rudest tribe of the neighborhood, and how the shy, pure girl could keep herself uncontaminate from that savage cousinhood was a riddle which remained unread for Ann Powell; she only saw that the tribe paid the Bladens, father and daughter alike, a deference which they rendered to no one else.

  The women were better than the men, and they with the other farm wives of the little neighborhood which had formed itself within a mile of the mills came to offer Ann what welcome they knew how to give. With a few she found herself in neighborly kindness; but if she could have got away she would have been glad never to see any of them again. For her it was all a reversion to the barbarism of the new country where her childhood was passed, and which she had so gladly escaped from to the civility of the towns where she had lived ever since she left the farm with her young husband. Now, when they were both middle-aged people, she seemed to have been dragged back to conditions worse than those of the backwoods. Nothing at New Leaf Mills made her days endurable but the promise of the early coming of her sisters-in-law to form the heart of the communal body nebulously projected in the vision of their husbands. The change from town had been simple enough for Owen Powell, who had brought only the hope of a starry future from the ruin of his affairs; but his brothers had each to sell out or close up his business, and the delay was protracting itself to an end that seemed to his wife further off every day.

  She could have borne the visits of the farmers’ wives, but she could not bear the visits of the farmers, who came on wet days to sit with her husband before the cabin fire. Their coats dripped with the rain, and their stoga-boots, that reeked of the pig-pen and the barnyard, gave out their stench in the heat while they told their long stories and cracked their old jokes and spat in the hot ashes or the bristling coals where she must cook the family supper when they were gone.

  They had begun at once to call Powell by his first name, which she resented as a token of the general lapse from the town civilities she prized, and which she resented the more because she perceived that no friendliness went with the freedom. They could not help despising a man apparently so unfit to cope even tentatively and provisionally with the business he had undertaken. Felix Powell soon added a two-horse team and a blue-painted wagon of the proper pattern to the scanty equipment of Owen’s first days at New Leaf, but even this did not convince the neighbors of that future of universal prosperity which they believed they had been promised.

  Owen Powell was personally unimpressive in his circumstances; yet he was finally of a dignity which in spite of his wife’s fears the neighbors did not growingly infringe. It was not their fault that they could not imagine him; he knew this; but it was not in him to feel unkindness toward them for it. He felt the sort of liking for them which tolerance breeds. If they laughed at his wit, he laughed at their rude drolling; he did not resent their conceit or their tedious advice; he knew as well as his wife that they were boors, and not pioneers; but it did not make him unhappy. It amused him that they cherished the largest landowners among them as a sort of social chiefs because of their more acres and their better horses, and valued their consequence above his own civilization. With his Quaker origin he could not mind their calling him by his given name or even trying for a nickname from it; but he could not help sharing his wife’s relief whenever the last of his visitors hulked out of the cabin door, which they did not always remember to shut after them.

  The family was safe from them after nightfall. Then, when Mrs. Powell and her little girls had cleared the supper away, she sat down with her family in the firelight, while Powell read to them by the candles which in his retrospective romance he had cast in some old-fashioned candle-molds of their earliest housekeeping. He read poetry sometimes, sometimes a book of travel, sometimes a novel; on Sunday nights he read a chapter from Swedenborg’s Heavenly Arcana or a Memorable Relation of Things Seen and Heard in the Spiritual World, or a New Church sermon, which, by the virtue inherent in sermons, soon had the children scattered about him on the floor. When they were gathered up and got to bed, the boys in the cabin loft and the little girls in their mother’s room, Powell and his wife lingered awhile before the fire to talk of that future which had lured them to New Leaf Mills, but which from time to time needed for her the constructive touches he was so willing to give it.

  She lived in the memories which he promised it should renew in the things dear to her home-keeping heart. All her married days she had worked hard with head and hand to get together and keep together the few things which dignified her simple house in town. There were notably six cane-seated chairs which Felix had given her for the distinction of her parlor, and which she now hid in her own room rather than set them out in the place where those hulking farmers could spoil them; she would indulge some of the neighbors’ wives with the use of them when these worthier women came alone; she would show them her pieces of old silver, and in moments of signal intimacy bring out her black silk and her best bonnet, which could not otherwise be seen; for the Powells
did not go to the service of any sect of the Old Church in the village where the country women wore their finery. She had her air-tight parlor stove put up in her bedroom, with the bookcase which held her husband’s library, and his portrait done in his young manhood, and the mahoganyframed engraving of Swedenborg which visibly attested Owen’s religious persuasion and hers. She kept her flowered carpet there, sacred from the men’s boots, for the parlor of the new house. Powell was to begin building it in the spring, as the first of that group of dwellings in which the brothers were to embody their community to the sense of the neighborhood, and she trusted in that house with a faith potently helped by the accumulation of black-walnut logs at the sawmill for the weather-boarding and shingles which were to cover the frame in and save the cost of paint by their natural coloring. She measurably believed in all the things of her husband’s faith, even in the harp which he had made in his hours of leisure with his own hand, and which he expected some day to play upon when he had the opportunity of learning how; failing that hitherto, he already struck it with a hopeful if uncertain touch.

  He was so wholly her spiritual life that she could give herself altogether to her house and her family; and if she was an earth-bound spirit it was because she realized in her home a heaven such as she could not imagine elsewhere. Of course she expected in due course that immortality which the Doctrines promised her with such scientific precision; but for the present she was content with the affection which came back to her here from those whom she loved and who made her paradise. If the log cabin and the conditions which it implied were not the setting for this paradise which her house in town had been, this could be fitly domiciled again when the new house was built after the plans which Owen’s invention supplied, and which he had begun to draw out in the evening as soon as they were settled for the winter in the cabin.