Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  That helped keep her from fearing herself permanent in it; but there were other evenings when Powell put the harp in order after one of its frequent seasons of disuse and complicated disability. In form it was not as other harps are; it was triangular, with a slantting bar at top instead of the traditional sinuous arch; but he held that this structural aberration did not affect its musical potentiality and was of antique authority. For the present he struck the strings somewhat at hazard, but if he accompanied them with his voice loudly enough, he could drown anything like dissonance in their response. His wife listened with tolerance, if not unfailing acceptance, to his performance, and his children, without closely examining the evidence of their senses, thought that he played as well as sang the piece which he liked best to give them:

  “When in death I shall calm recli-i-ne, Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear; Tell her it lived upon smi-i-les and wi-i-ne Of the brightest hue while it lingered here. Bid her not shed one tear of sorrow, To sully a heart so brilliant and light, Bu-u-t balmy drops of the red grape borrow, To bathe the relic from morn till night.”

  VI

  His harp was one out of many proofs which Powell was always giving of his ingenious aptness with his hands and of his inventive skill. In the leisure from his failing business which had latterly grown so much too great he contrived himself a barometer, for which he long wanted a glass tube till once his eldest boy returned from a visit to his birthplace Up the River, bringing from the glass-works there a tube in the barrel of a gun which an uncle had given him. It exactly fitted the barrel and came endeared to Powell’s humor by the novelty of its conveyance; he framed it in a cedar case which he carved for it, and it entered upon a long lease of usefulness in predicting fair and rainy weather. It was really a more practicable instrument than the harp, or even the flute which he got for the next younger boy, and then left him to nature in the art of playing on it. He believed that you could do what you wished to do if you wished it potently enough; and he left the boy likewise to nature in his struggles with the grammars of some foreign languages which he began attempting while he was failing with the flute. He did not struggle very hard with the grammars; he preferred his reveries of triumphs achieved without a struggle which he could indulge when to other eyes he seemed to be hoeing com, or not hoeing, or wandering with the family gun on his shoulder through the woods. He amused his father, who called him the Dreamer, and let him off from going to school. Powell was more this boy’s companion than his eldest son’s, though he respected the business faculty of the other so much and relied upon his help in all practical matters; he talked most with the younger, and tried to have him like the same authors, but the boy could not always share his father’s tastes; he could not like Burns, though he liked Scott’s poetry enough for his father’s purposes and he liked Byron a little.

  He could follow his father still less in the ingenious use of his hands, but there he could at least admire its effects with the rest. Before the family came to the mills, but when it was decided that the change from a grist-mill to a paper-mill was not to be made at once, Powell gratified his artistic instinct by cutting a stencil plate for the heads of the flour-barrels. He studied from nature a sycamore leaf, and crowned it with the legend of New Leaf Mills. When this, by the application of a shoe-brush, transferred its shape to a sheet of white pasteboard, it commanded the respect of the whole household. Ann herself could not deny it her praise, though she abhorred every mention of the mills; the children exulted in it as the anticipation of their brightest hopes; their young aunt was generously indignant in her admiration of it when Felix said, with his melancholy smile: “You can make so many other things, Owen, that it’s no wonder you never made your fortune. If the mills fail you can support us all by stencil-cutting,” and Powell had an affectionate laugh with him.

  When he transferred his family to New Leaf, he lost no time in preparing for the navigation of the river. He shaped a skiff, very graceful and fit in its lines, from two elastic boards for the sides and a broad plank for the bottom, which was his pride and the joy of his boys, who stole in it on the wild ducks they never could shoot; he built a flatboat, commodious for the whole family, and on the still Sunday afternoons of the Indian Summer he made them all, mother and children, go with him up the stream, so wide and still above the dam. He punted against the slow current, walking down the gunwale with a pole pressed against his shoulder, as he told them the keel-boatmen used to do on the Ohio River; and then he let it drift back to the dam while they lay in the straw-strewn floor of the boat, and he talked and the rest listened, or he joked with them. When the mother did not wish to joke, for even in this safety from the intrusive neighborhood she could not forget her exile, Powell had to turn from his talking and laughing and hearten her with promises from his unfailing faith in the future. But the small pleasure she had in those flatboat voyages was spoiled one Sunday when they found the boat gone and had to wait till some of their bold young neighbors brought it back. Powell scolded them, saying, if it was worth having, it was worth asking for; and the fellow would not betray that one of Powell’s boys, flattered into authority by their asking him for it, had said he did not believe his father would mind their taking it. It was the Dreamer who had done this, and now he longed with his whole soul to own that he had given those fellows leave to take the boat, but he could not own it for the shame it must bring him. He passed days of wistful inability trying for some form of avowal by which he should appear so noble to his father that his father would praise him rather than blame him, but he could not contrive anything so imperatively magnanimous; or anything which would not lead to his going with his father and apologizing to those neighbors for his want of candor. He could not imagine any outcome creditable to himself even with his mother, who was so tender with him, but would not spare him in such a wrong, and he let her remain in her fear of the revenge which the neighbors would take on his father, though it never came to more than an increase of intangible ill-will.

  Her refuge from this fear, as from her father’s troubles, was in the visits which Felix and Jessamy paid her in her exile. The Indian Summer lingered late into November, and on one of the dim afternoons Felix Powell drove from town to the mills with his wife. Ann kissed them, and got out for the early supper that best china which she could not have touched at any other time without a pang for the lost state which it symbolized. But for the dear young pair who seemed a part of the town life she had lost, she hurried forward one of the meals which her family thought matchless in cookery. Her husband sat the feast through with his innate gaiety of heart heightened by his brother’s presence, and did not seem to note any vagueness in the talk of Felix about the enterprise which he reported his progress in pioneering. If Ann felt something unwonted in the tone of her brother-in-law, pride kept her from pressing any question of it; and during a visit which left Powell with his spirits as high as ever, she could not bear to dash them with her secret fears. The most tangible reason for her fears was nothing more tangible than her sister’s letting fall in their women’s talk together her belief that Felix would never be willing to live beyond the sound of church-bells; and Ann remembered, with a sinking heart, that there were no church-bells within three miles of New Leaf Mills. She bade them both a cheerful good-by when they drove away from the cabin in their buggy, looking back, one on each side, to prolong their farewells, with smiles and nods; then she turned and ran back into the cabin with her apron over her head.

  “What is the matter, what is the matter, my poor girl?” Powell entreated her, and she said, Oh, nothing; she was not feeling very well. But after the children were abed and she was alone with him she told him what she was afraid of.

  “They will never come here in the world, Owen. She let it out in that about the church-bells. I don’t blame either of them. Who would want to live in such a God-forsaken hole?”

  “Not quite a hole, my dear,” he tried to comfort her, “though it may look like one from the inside.” He became fasci
nated with his notion, and added: “But it isn’t really such a bad hole, even from the inside; and we will soon better it. I don’t wonder you’re disheartened with a winter in the cabin before you, but we shall begin to build our new house as soon as the frost is out of the ground in the spring. I have got together most of the logs already; and I was thinking” — but Powell had, perhaps, just that moment thought—” that we would go in the morning and definitely choose the site of the house. I have an idea that the level at the foot of the hill, just opposite the mill, would be the proper place. But you shall decide yourself.”

  She probably knew that this decision of hers would be directed by his judgment, but she could not refuse the consolation his promise offered her, and with her reliance on his hopes she began to doubt her fears. A mild Sunday morning dawned in pale sunshine, and after the breakfast, which her little girls helped her redd up, she went for the walk with her husband and children which he considered so much better for them all than a religious service of the Old Church. No chime invited them to their worship, but when they had climbed the hill above the site fixed for their new house, he made her listen and almost made her hear the sound of a bell from the village three miles to the southward. The children were sure that they heard it, and Powell triumphed in their agreement. “There!” he said. “If Felix can’t live beyond the sound of the church-going bell, he can come up here, any Sunday morning when the wind is right, and hear it.”

  He shared the shock which Ann felt at sight of the huddle of neglected graves on the hilltop, with their sunken barrows and their slanting stones, and the miller’s pigs rooting for the mast among the dead leaves; but he said that she must not judge their neighbors too harshly for the neglect; the state of these graves did not express the callousness it would in a more enlightened community. At any rate, one of the first things he should set about doing, as soon as he could spare the time, would be sawing out a lot of palings to fence the graveyard. That would be a lesson in civilization which could offend no one; he had perceived that he must not begin to educate the neighborhood without due tenderness for its barbarity. While he talked with the mother and cajoled her from her gloom into the sunshine of his own spirit, till she yielded with the lamentation, “Oh, Owen, Owen!” the children foraged for the fallen hickory-nuts, and filled the little bags they had brought with them. They came to him to show their store, and he made the elder even up with the younger ones for a lesson in the unselfishness which he told them was not only one of the first attributes of the angels in Heaven, but was due always from the stronger to the weaker in this world. Then he gave his hand to their mother and lifted her from the little knoll, where they had been lying, and raced her down the hillside. The young children ran screaming joyously after, and the elder boys bore with what patience they might the incorrigible youthfulness of their father.

  It was the last pleasant day of a long series of pleasant days. In the night the autumnal haze turned to mist, the clouds gathered, and the boys, sleeping in the cabin loft, woke in rapture at the sound of rain on the clapboards over their heads and the pelting of the finer drops in their faces. The rain lasted, off and on, for a week, and by grist-day the open space before the mill, which had been so pleasant to their bare feet with its velvety dust, was trodden into mire by the miller’s pigs, and then patted smooth by the web feet of his geese, and again cut by the wheels and pitted by the hoofs of teams bringing in the farmers’ wheat for storage.

  It was at the sawmill that Powell spent most of his time, coming home to his meals with aches and pains unfelt during the years of his town life, but now ungrudgingly recognized as experiences of his rustic past. He had mastered such simple science of the sawmill work as Bellam was able to impart, and he had applied his universal genius to the invention of improvements in the double tramway which carried the sawn lumber down from the mill and brought the logs up into it. The iron dogs which held the sticks of timber in place, and the cogs that pushed them against the saw, received some creative touches, and he added to the other equipments a circular saw that bit diagonally half through Bellam’s thumb the first time he pressed upon it the block of walnut which it was shredding into shingles for the new house. Owen stayed the sufferer in his burst of terror and put back the dangling fragment, which he secured so skilfully in place that, though it always stood a little awry afterward, it remained a monument to his surgery.

  Ann refused to hear the particulars which the children would so willingly have furnished; they had enjoyed the most favorable places in the front row of the crowd which Bellam’s lamentations had called to witness their father’s skill; she told them she should be only too glad if they got away from the mills in pieces large enough to hold their lives. Overdale was left alone in the grist-mill during the affair, and he showed no more interest than Ann in the procession which took the saw-miller to his home on the island, mounted on a led horse, and supported in his seat by eager hands. When the doctor came he justified the popularity which Powell had won; he said that just the right thing had been done for Bellam’s thumb, and that nothing was left for him but to dress it now and then.

  VII

  POWELL had been careful not to add to the grudge in Overdale which he could not ignore, and he had left him in full control of the grist-mill until the paper machinery should be put in; the miller was told that the new owners would be glad to have him stay, and he signified a surly willingness to remain, more by staying than by saying that he would stay. His life did not vary under the new ownership; he came and went from his house beyond the sawmill so early before dawn and late after dark that he was seen to come and go only at noonday; he slept in the grist-mill, as he had always done. His sprees were wilder, but they were not so frequent, and they ended sooner in the drunken sleep in which the machinery was apt to run riot. The saw-miller had always taken leave to shut off the water at these times, and during Bellam’s disability Powell put himself briefly in authority. He no more disliked Overdale than he disliked any other fellow-creature, and he accounted for the miller’s rudeness toward himself as the impatience of a man who was somehow sick beyond self-command. What his sickness was, whether of soul or body, He could not make out. Sometimes he thought he must be the prey of a disease which he was trying to keep secret from himself; sometimes he conjectured that the miller had some misdeed of the past on his mind; he decided that more probably he was the victim of some form of hypochondria. He philosophised him to Ann, without effect other than to alarm her own safety.

  “Well, Owen, be careful not to provoke him with you, if he’s crazy in some way, or beginning to go crazy. Oh, I wish we had never seen the mills! Now, you keep out of his way all you can, Owen, or I won’t have a minute’s peace, day or night.”

  “You needn’t be afraid of my taking any chances,” Powell promised, in the cheerfulness he always had in disowning the possibility of danger; and then he began to laugh softly to himself as if he had not half taken her anxiety in.

  “What is it?” she asked, hopelessly.

  “Oh, nothing. But Elder Griswell says it’s the religion that is working in Overdale; all you’ve got to do is to throw the religion out, and nothing will throw it out like immersion. That will bring the religion to the surface, just like measles, and then Overdale will be all right.”

  Ann laughed too at a phase of the Old Church theology which Powell could make so amusing. But her anxiety returned upon her when she went to pay that first visit to the miller’s wife which the woman had failed to make her as the new-comer. She had talked the matter over with her husband and had decided to waive ceremony in a case of what she had decided to be uncouth shyness and not intentional offense in the gaunt, silent slattern, whom she characterized in a parlance of her own as a harmless sloom. Her magnanimity was rewarded by such politeness in Mrs. Overdale as standing with her door ajar and speechlessly regarding the visitor outside.

  “May I come in, Mrs. Overdale?” Ann asked; and the sloom set her door a little farther open.


  “Why, I reckon,” she said; and when Ann entered, she so far realized her obligation to hospitality as to ask, “Won’t you set?”

  She pushed Ann one of the wooden chairs of the dining-room, which was also the living-room of the low-ceiled, close-shuttered room, and then took a rocking chair herself and silently rocked in front of her while she studied her visitor’s face in an abstraction scarcely broken by her brief assents to Ann’s suggestions about the weather. But Ann soon came to the end of these, and then the miller’s wife broke the silence that followed.

  “Your man got anything ag’inst him?”

  Ann recalled the backwoods use of pronouns by which wives and husbands shunned explicit mention of each other.

  “Why, no, Mrs. Overdale. What should Mr. Powell have against your husband?”

  After a season of dreamy reflections the sloom responded, “I don’t know, but it ‘pears like, from his tell, that your man wanted to do him a mischief.”

  “What in the world do you mean? What kind of mischief should my husband want to do yours?”

  “Well, he don’t come round much, exceptin’ fur his meals. But from his tell one night after he’d been at the jug, when he wouldn’t have any supper, ‘pears like your man was goin’ to kill him, or somepin. He kep’ savin’ your folks buyin’ the privilege would be the death of him.”’

  A hot flush of anger followed the cold thrill of dismay which the woman’s first words had sent through Ann Powell. “Well, I can tell you what, Mrs. Overdale, I won’t have any such talk about Mr. Powell in the neighborhood.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Overdale listlessly interrupted, “I reckon he don’t talk any. I reckon he don’t talk much to me when he’s sober. It’s on’y when he’s been at the jug.”

  “He had better keep away from the jug, then,” Ann began again; but the miller’s wife put in: