Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes, there isn’t one unfavorable thing. He’s made such a wonderful gain in strength. Cough better; he sleeps better than he ever has. His appetite Has increased. He takes walks and doesn’t get so tired. They will be here in April if He keeps on gaining. And I had such a bad dream again last night about Felix! I suppose it was that miserable Bickler’s talking about Rosy and thinking she was dead. I hated to tell you what my dream was this morning, and now I needn’t tell you. Let’s go and look at their room. We ought to get it plastered right away, if we don’t the others, so that it will be good and dry for them.”

  The Powells were standing on the sawn-off piece of sill which formed their provisional doorstep, and Ann had opened and read her letter there. As they turned to go in she caught sight over her shoulder of a boy on a horse splashing through the tail-race and waving what seemed a letter in his hand toward them.

  “Oh, what can it he, Owen?” she implored.

  Powell went down to the road to meet the boy. “It’s a telegraphic despatch,” he called to her; it was too early in the history of telegraphing to call the thing a telegram. He fumbled in his pocket for money to pay the boy, and Ann suffered at the door.

  “Oh, open it, open it!” she lamented.

  Powell opened it slowly as he came toward her. Then, standing beside her, with his encouraging smile still on his face, he read mechanically: “Felix died last night. Coming north with him. Have written. Jessamy.”

  “My dream!” Ann said. “Oh, poor Jessamy!” And then she looked at her husband’s face, and she said, “Oh, poor Owen!” She knew that he loved Felix, as in large families the eldest is apt to love the youngest, with fatherly affection.

  She cried. Owen did not cry with tears, but he whimpered like a child controlling itself.

  “He didn’t think,” Ann said, finding help in the detail, “when he sent me that bag of coffee that he was going to die before I used half of it. Where will she have the funeral? They will bring him to Tuskingum. We must be there to meet Jessamy.”

  The circumstances of their sorrow softened their sorrow, and their sorrow softened others toward them a little. The new miller promised he would stay until they could get somebody, and Owen left Richard to look after the younger children while he went with their mother to the funeral.

  Ann told Richard about it when she came back. All the brothers of Felix had been at the funeral, but only one of them had talked as if he would come to the mills. He was the next to Owen in age, and was most in sympathy with him religiously. But he had not been able to wind up his business, as he said, and he was uncertain whether he could sell out.

  “If he comes here,” Richard’s mother said to him, “I suppose we must go, and if he doesn’t I don’t know how we are to stay. I don’t believe your father could make enough out of the mills to keep them going; he’s only got along with your poor uncle’s help. I’m sorry for your poor father every way; I know he likes this dreadful place, and that it will be a struggle for him to go out into the world again and find something. You must help him all you can, Richard.”

  She took the boy’s hand and smoothed it with her own. “Oh, surely we can get something, mother,” he said, and his adventurous spirit fired at the notion of getting it by some miraculous chance. “I don’t believe it’s too late yet for us to go to California. I could go ahead.”

  “You mustn’t think of that, Dick, dear. But you might go down to the City and look round. You have such good business faculty. I have been thinking about it already, for we must settle somewhere or have the prospect of it before the winter. Your father has friends among the New Church people there, and you could see them for him.”

  The two talked the chances over, and took more and more courage from their talk. Powell was out looking after the pigs and hens; he had almost a personal understanding with the pigs in their wildness among the fallen leaves on the hillside, and with the chickens in their home-loving tameness about the back yard; his familiarity always made it difficult to part with them for the ends that pork and poultry seem appointed to in the order of Providence; at such moments he owned that he was inclined to a vegetable diet. Now he came in flushed with interest in certain characters among them, and already so cheered from his contact with nature that Ann tried to hide her gloom from him; she knew he had not really forgotten his brother, and that he had comforted himself from supernature as well as nature.

  “You’ll be wanting supper, Owen,” she said, putting on an apron over her dress, “and I reckon the children will, too.”

  “Why, yes, I suppose I will, though I didn’t realize that I was hungry. I declare, I never saw such a sunset. It blazed through the trees on the western side of the hill like a fire. Do you know,” he added, fallenly, “that I wanted to tell Felix about it. Isn’t it strange? But perhaps he was seeing it too where he is.”

  Ann could not say; she left him sitting before the hearth in the latticed bower which was to have been their parlor; and presently the cheerful hiss of frying made itself heard from the kitchen, where she was busy over the stove, while the children were setting the supper-table in the other latticed bower which was to have been the dining-room.

  Richard had gone to get some apples from the Bladen orchard, where the Powells were always welcome without special leave. Lizzie Bladen was there picking mushrooms, and he helped her fill her apron with them before he filled his own hat and pockets with apples. They did not talk much; only a few shy words. She asked him if his father and mother had got back from the funeral, and she said she would like to see Tuskingum again. Dick was cautious even with her, and he said he believed if they ever left the mills they would go to the City to live.

  She said, “I would like to see the City once, but I would rather live in Tuskingum.”

  “That’s because we are more used to it, I suppose,” Richard said. When he remembered on the way home that he had said we, it seemed as if he had been rather bold. After supper he told his mother what Lizzie Bladen had said about Tuskingum, and she answered, Indeed she would rather live in Tuskingum, too, but she knew there was no chance for his father there; and they spent the evening planning for him in the City, while Powell was busy looking over his accounts by the parlor fire. He ended with more courage in the possibilities of the mills than he had when talking it over with Ann on their way back from the funeral. He had then taken the burden of her mood, but now he rose from his dejection. There was no longer any question of turning them into paper-mills or carrying out the scheme of a semi-communal settlement at New Leaf. That must be all given up, and Powell gave it up not without a pang then and there, though he must often recur to it regretfully afterward. What, seemed practicable was some arrangement with Overdale, who could contribute his experience and look to the joint profits of the concern for his compensation, while Powell would supply the capital for carrying it on. He did not at once determine where the capital was to come from, but on reflection it appeared to him that his brother David, whether he did or did not decide to take hold actively himself, might arrange to let him have something to keep on with.

  The scheme still wore so hopeful an aspect in the morning that he approached Overdale confidently with it. He could not help believing that somehow the man’s nature should have been changed by his experiences, and, though this was quite as unreasonable, in his philosophy, as the saving effect of a death-bed repentance, he could not persuade himself that Overdale was not cherishing a secret amity toward him and would not be glad to show himself a friend if occasion offered, especially if the occasion embraced an obvious advantage. But when he opened the matter Overdale bluntly refused, not quite with his old savagery, but still gruffly and finally. He said that he was going away from New Leaf as soon as he could get away. He was going to sell his stock and furniture at vendue, and stay with his wife’s family near Spring Grove for the winter and then move West in the spring.

  He did not vouchsafe an explanation or offer an acknowledgment of Powell’s good-will; and Powell, i
n philosophizing the fact to Ann, who had tried to dissuade him from approaching Overdale with his suggestion, interested himself without rancor in the study of human nature which the incident afforded. He decided that Overdale kept his moroseness on as a cloak to hide the shame he felt before him because Powell knew the cause of his baseless terror in the past. The fight against this terror had drawn out the man’s strength, and he could have died valiantly fighting, but his rescue had left him cowed. While the foreboding remained his secret he could keep his selfrespect, but when it became known he could not continue without humiliation in the presence of the man who shared it. In a sort of way he was perhaps grateful to Powell, and his attack on Bickler might be taken as an expression of gratitude which otherwise he could not own. He was like a man who had been dignified by the vision of a specter and then cast down by finding it a shadow or a dead tree. Or perhaps it was only the man’s nature to be surly and to find a supreme satisfaction in thwarting an expectation of friendliness; he was merely fulfilling the design of the Power which makes ugliness and makes beauty by the same creative impulse.

  Powell allowed this possibility, which Ann, in language less psychological, suggested when she said she was glad that he was to have nothing to do with the sulky wretch, and hoped that now he would not try to make anything of him again. She did not otherwise betray her satisfaction in an event which took from Powell his last hope of remaining at New Leaf Mills. She realized too keenly the disappointment which she could not share, and she tried to make her gradual preparations for leaving the place as tacit as possible. Yet of course they could not be carried on, or even fairly begun, without his knowledge and connivance, and when she found him going about the wonted routine as if he were always to go about it she felt the necessity of coming to open terms. For a while she watched him dreamily denying by his actions the situation which his thoughts must have owned, and then she spoke.

  “I know you hate to go, Owen,” she said one evening, when he came in from a walk with the children and was building a fire on the parlor hearth.

  He looked round, with his face still hidden from her by the blaze behind his head. “To go?”

  “Surely you don’t think we can keep on staying here?”

  He sank back upon his heels where he knelt. “No, certainly not. But I see no occasion for hurry. If David should decide to come, perhaps we could arrange—”

  “No, we couldn’t, Owen, and you know it well enough. This house wouldn’t be big enough for both families — let alone the living from the mills. Oh, don’t you see, my dear, that we have got to go whether David comes here or not?”

  “Yes,” he said, so dispiritedly that she had hardly the heart to press on, as she knew she must. “I suppose so.”

  “Don’t you know so?”

  “I know it, but I don’t realize it. I will try to realize it, my dear,” he said.

  “You must at once,” she persisted. “Richard and I, here, have been talking it over, and I want you to let him go down to the City and look round for something you can get hold of. He has such good business faculty I know he can find something. We don’t see why you shouldn’t get hold of the New Church bookstore—”

  “Ann,” he said, and he got to his feet as he spoke, “I thought of that the instant you spoke of the City. It is strange that the same thing should have been in both of our minds at once,” he said, tasting the mystical quality of the fact.

  “Yes, it is,” she owned, glad of his interest, even though it was so far from a practical interest.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “it was an influx from the spiritual world in both our minds. We must act upon it,” he continued, with increasing energy; and that night he took the matter up with Richard and Ann. “Yes,” he concluded, as he rose to wind the clock, “the outlook is very hopeful. You could get something to do, Dick, until I could work you into the business, or perhaps I should need you from the start; certainly I should want your help for a while. I have an idea that a New Church periodical of some sort could be made to pay.” Ann looked a little troubled at this conjecture, but she would not discourage it.

  “As jet we have nothing west of the Alleghanies in the way of a periodical. And in that event I should certainly require your help, Dick. You could solicit subscriptions and advertising.” He planned it vividly out. Then as he paused, with the shovel in his hand before covering the fire for the night, he asked, “When do you think he had better start, Ann?”

  “Why, the sooner the better,” she said. “I could get him ready by to-morrow afternoon, poor boy; he hasn’t so much to take with him. He could walk to Spring Grove and take the railroad cars for the City there.”

  “I don’t know about the sinews of war,” Powell mused, feeling in his pocket and finding a silver dollar there. “I declare, I hadn’t realized since I left Tuskingum that we were poor! We shall realize it more and more, Ann, in the City. We have been rich here, for we haven’t wanted anything; we shall have many wants there. I suppose a dollar wouldn’t go far there even with Dick; the hotels are a dollar a day.”

  “Oh, if you are going to look at it in that light!” Ann lamented.

  “I’m not. Walters has been talking about buying our pigs. I could send word in the morning, and if he pays cash in part we can start Dick off like a prince with five dollars in his pocket.”

  “And I’m not afraid but what I can get something to do while I’m looking up the business for you, father,” Dick said. “If Uncle Ben’s boat happens to be in, I can stay on that till she goes out.”

  “That is true,” Powell admitted. “Well, we will see what a night brings forth,” and now he covered the fire.

  XXIII

  THE farmer who wanted the pigs had not changed his mind about them, but he had changed his mind about the price and about the amount of cash which he would pay when he came to look them over in the morning, so that in the afternoon Dick started for the City with three dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket; it seemed to him a good deal, and he regarded it as capital which would readily multiply. His heart was full of the hope of adventure, and he walked along with his brother, the Dreamer, toward Spring Grove. His brother thought it would be fine to tell about the adventures which Dick thought it would be fine to have; and that was the great difference between them. They were sorry to part, but the younger would not have gone with Dick if he could. When they came to the point where they had agreed that he was to turn back neither of them had any thought of his going farther. They kissed each other in the fashion of their childhood, and then Dick kept on, and his brother stood a moment watching him in the pale afternoon light of the early November day and wondering how it would feel to be going off in the night to a place where he knew no one. He dreamed instantly an awful dream of himself in the supposed case, but he did not notice that Dick had no overcoat and no precaution against a change of weather except the comforter he wore stringing from his shoulders. He, no more than his father, knew that they were poor, and Dick did not mean to be poor for more than a day or two, if there was any faith in adventure. He carried a little linen bag which his mother had made and put in it a shirt and two pairs of home-knit socks for his sole baggage. After he rounded the southern slope of the hill, which hid the new house from sight, he came to the Bladens’ house, with the orchard next the road. Dick thought he would get over the fence and pick up an apple or two When he put his hands on the top rail to spring over, he saw Lizzie Bladen under the best tree. She came toward the fence with one of the apples in her hand; and he thought her coloring was like the apple she held out to him — the ivory, almost sallow, white of the bellflower, brightened by her gentle dark eyes.

  “Don’t you want it?” —

  He took it absently. “I’m going to the City, he explained, as if his equipment needed explanation first of all.

  “I heard so,” the girl answered, looking down at the foot she was pushing against a tuft of grass.

  Then neither of them spoke until Dick said at last, “Th
ank you for the apple, Lizzie.”

  “You’re entirely welcome. Would you like more?”

  “No, this will be plenty.” Somehow it seemed now as if more apples would spoil her gift. “Well, I must be going, Lizzie.”

  “Good-by, Dick.”

  Neither could say more; and it was the last time they saw each other. —

  For the rest of the family the days began to go with a sort of eager swiftness. The children were on fire with wild notions of the City; but the father went about the usual work of the place, overseeing the sawmill chiefly and keeping a slighter supervision of the grist-miller, who would have resented more and was, as he sometimes reminded Powell, just staying on to accommodate.

  That week Overdale had his vendue, and auctioned off his pigs and poultry, and the larger household stuff which he did not care to take away. It was a stirring event for the neighborhood, and culminated in the departure of the miller and his family the next day for Spring Grove on the new wagon which he had bought to move West in. The children were scattered in different vantages of the bedding, and on the top, in a sort of triumph, rode the sloom deeply hidden in her sunbonnet. The miller drove, and Powell thought that as he passed the new house to cross the tail-race he might stop to say good-by. But he did not stop, and Powell did not attempt to stay him. Ann watched his passing with regret for Powell’s letting him. “Don’t you think you’d better go out and speak, Owen?”

  “I’ve decided not. It’s better as it is — it might afflict him to have me. It’s more in his nature so, and he can manage better.”