Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And you can’t say,” Mrs. Braile continued with a certain note of indignation as for unjust neglect of the pair, “but what James Redfield and Jane has got along very well together.”

  “Oh, yes, they’ve got along,” the Squire assented. “He’s got along with her, and she’s got along with the children — plenty of them. I reckon she’s what he wanted, and they’re what she did.”

  The stranger looked a little puzzled.

  “That instinct of maternity,” the Squire explained. “You may have noticed it in women — some of them.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes,” Mr. Mandeville assented. He did not seem greatly interested.

  “She’s always been just crazy about ‘em,” Mrs. Braile explained. “Beginnin’ with Nancy Billin’s’s little girl. Well!”

  “Yes,” the Squire amplified. “It was the best thing, or at least the strongest thing in Jane. I don’t say anything against it, mother,” he said tenderly to his wife. “Jane was a good girl, especially after she got over her faith in Dylks, and she’s a good woman. At least, Jim thinks so.”

  Mrs. Braile contented herself as she could with his ironical concession.

  The stranger looked at his watch; he jumped to his feet. “Nine o’clock! Mrs. Braile, I’m ashamed. But you must blame your husband, partly. Good night, ma’am; good — Why, look here, Squire Braile!” he arrested himself in offering his hand. “How about the obscurity of the scene where Joe Smith founded his superstition, which bids fair to live right along with the other false religions? Was Leatherwood, Ohio, a narrower stage than Manchester, New York? And in point of time the two cults were only four years apart.”

  “Well, that’s a thing that’s occurred to me since we’ve been talking. Suppose we look into it to-morrow? Come round to breakfast — about six o’clock. One point, though: Joe Smith only claimed to be a prophet, and Dylks claimed to be a god. That made it harder, maybe for his superstition.”

  THE END

  THE VACATION OF THE KELWYNS

  AN IDYL OF THE MIDDLE EIGHTEEN-SEVENTIES

  This posthumous novel appeared in 1920. Howells had left the book complete, but untitled at his death and the title was chosen by the publisher, Harper. The novel’s central theme is the difficulties faced by those in privileged, wealthy positions that wish to create social equality and transcend class barriers. Despite this intellectual theme, however, the novel is presented as an ‘idyll’, drawing on Howells’s nostalgic recollections of an American summer during the mid-eighteen-seventies, a time when the USA was celebrating its centenary.

  Title page of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  Frontispiece of the first edition

  I

  KELWYN’S salary as a lecturer in the post-graduate courses would not have been enough for his family to live upon; but his wife had some money of her own, and this with his salary enabled them to maintain themselves upon the scale of refined frugality which was the rule in the university town, and to indulge, now and then, a guarded hospitality. Like the other university people, they spent their whole income on their living, except the sum which Kelwyn paid for his life insurance. They kept two maids, and had, in common with four other university families, the use of one undivided one-fifth of a man, who took care of their furnace and shovelled the snow off their paths in winter, and cut their grass in the spring and fall; in the summer when they were away they let the grass tangle at will.

  Mrs. Kelwyn passed this season largely in a terror of moths, especially the hairy sort called buffalo-bugs, which began to introduce themselves by that name at the date of our story. In dreams and in many a fearful revery she saw them gorging themselves upon her carpets and furniture and blankets and all her other woollens, and treating the camphor the things were put up in as an agreeable condiment. She was, in fact, a New England housekeeper of the most exacting sort, with a conscience that gave those she loved very little peace, in its manifold scruples, anxieties, and premonitions. She was so far in the divine confidence as to be able to prophesy events with much precision, especially disastrous events, and especially disastrous events which her husband thought would not come to pass. In this, as in other things, she was entirely devoted to him and to their children; to hear her talk you would suppose there was a multitude of them.

  She pampered Kelwyn and flattered him, and she did what she could to make him believe that because he had, after many years as a post-graduate student, become a post-graduate lecturer, he was something different from other men, and merited attention from destiny. He was really a very well-read and careful scholar in his department of Historical Sociology, with no thought of applying his science to his own life or conduct. In person, he was not tall, but he was very straight; he carried himself with a sort of unintentional pomp, and walked with short, stiff steps. He was rather dim behind the spectacles he wore; but he was very pleasant when he spoke, and his mind was not as dry as his voice; when pushed to the wall he was capable of a joke; in fact, he had a good deal of ancestral Yankee humor which he commonly repressed, but which came out in the stress put upon him by his wife’s requisitions in hypothetical cases of principle and practice. He suffered at times from indigestion; but he was indefatigably industrious, and had thought the blond hair thin on his head in places; he wore a reddish mustache.

  He was either not quite so tall as his wife, or he looked not quite so tall, because of her skirts, and her aquiline profile; she seemed always to have him in charge when they were together, which made him appear smaller still; they were both of about the same blondness, though hers tended rather more to dust color.

  Kelwyn’s father had been first a farm boy, and then a country merchant, who reserved him for an intellectual career; and his career since he first entered school had been as purely intellectual as if he had been detached from the soil by generations of culture and affluence. His associations had always been with nice people, in college and afterward; he liked that sort, and they liked him, for Kelwyn was a pleasant fellow, and was noticeably a gentleman, if not a gentleman by birth. In America society does not insist that one shall be a gentleman by birth; that is generally impossible; but it insists that he shall be intelligent and refined, and have the right sort of social instincts; and then it yields him an acceptance which ignores any embarrassing facts in his origin, and asks nothing but that he shall ignore them too. Kelwyn did this so completely that he never thought of them. His father and mother were now dead, and he had been an only child, so that he had not even a duty to the past. All his duties were to the present, and they were so agreeable that he could easily discharge them with conscience and credit. In a day when people were just beginning to look into sociology, and most people were still regarding it as the driest branch on the tree of knowledge, he made it one of the most important of the post-graduate courses at the university. The students liked him, and they took such a gratifying interest in their work under him that some of them had a habit, which he encouraged, of coming to talk with him about it at his house out of hours. He made them very welcome in his library, and even offered to offer them cigars, which they refused out of regard to Kelwyn’s not smoking himself; and when one of them would begin, “Do you think, Mr. Kelwyn,” and then go on to ask him some question on one of his favorite points in the morning’s lecture, Kelwyn would feel that his office was a very high one, and could not be magnified too much.

  His wife often wished tha
t the faculty and the board of overseers could know the influence he had with the students; but, in fact, Kelwyn’s usefulness was well known to them, and his promotion to an underprofessorship in the body of the university was only a question of time. He was respected outside of the university as well as in it. In politics he was a reformer, and he was faithful in a good deal of committee work, when his college work alone was killing him, as Mrs. Kelwyn said more than once. She herself did not shirk a share in the local charities, and she would have done more in that way, if she had not felt that Mr. Kelwyn and the children had the first claim upon her.

  II

  ROBUST health would not have been in keeping with Kelwyn’s vocation or circumstances; but his digestion was not so delicate as Mrs. Kelwyn believed when she took him every summer away from the well-netted comfort of his study (they had wire nettings at every door and window of the house, and even over the tops of the chimneys, for it had been found that mosquitoes sometimes got in down the flues) and set him unnetted amid the insects of the open country. She had thought a great deal about the best places to go to, and she had gone to a great many places, each better in prospect and worse in retrospect than the other, but sufficing, for the time, to hold Kelwyn from his books, and give him what she called a rest; he felt it as an anguish of longing to get back to his work. They had not as yet imagined having a country house of their own, such as nearly everybody of their condition has now; even the summer shell was little known in the early eighteen-seventies, and the cheap and simple cottages of the better sort common in our day were undreamed of. Like other nice families of their circumstance and acquaintance, thirty or thirty-five years ago, the Kelwyns engaged board during the winter at some farm-house in the Massachusetts or New Hampshire hill country, going up to look at the place on a mild day of the January thaw, and settling themselves in it early in June. Their understanding would be for good beds and plain country fare, with plenty of milk and eggs and berries; and they would get mattresses of excelsior faced on one side with refuse wool; and premature beef and tardy lamb, with last year’s potatoes, and no leaf of the contemporary vegetation till far into July. Kelwyn himself had a respite from all this during commencement week, when he went home and slept in his own dwelling, taking his meals at the nearest boarding-house, where they had the spring fruits and vegetables, tender steak, and cream such as never appeared upon the unstinted milk of the farm.

  Mrs. Kelwyn’s ideal was a place where there were no other boarders, and where they could have their meals at a table of their own, apart from the farmer’s family; but even when she could realize this it was not in the perfection that her nerves demanded. If she made Kelwyn take all the rooms in the house, still there was some nook where the farmer’s wife contrived to stow a boarder who ate with the farm family, or a visiting friend who woke the Kelwyns at dawn with the plaint of the parlor organ; the rest of the day they had the sole use of the parlor, and could keep the organ pacified. The farmer’s wife imagined that she had fulfilled the agreement for a private table when she had put everything on it at once, and shut the Kelwyns in to take care of themselves. After the first relay of griddle - cakes she expected them to come out to the kitchen for the next; and to get hot water from the kettle and cold water from the pump, as they needed either. Kelwyn did not mind this so much as his wife, who minded it chiefly for his sake as wholly out of keeping with the dignity of a university lecturer; for it fell to him mostly to do these things.

  In the last place she had so often undergone the hardship of making Kelwyn hurry out untimely in the morning to fill the wash-pitcher, forgotten overnight by the hostess, that she was quite disheartened, and came home in the fall feeling that she must give up the notion of farm board thereafter, and try to find some small hotel not too public and not too expensive for them. The winter passed and the spring was well advanced, and still they had not found just such a hotel as they wanted, though they had asked among all the nice people they knew, and Kelwyn had looked several of the places up. He would have been willing to try another farm-house, and still more willing to pass the summer in town, under his own well-shaded roof; but Mrs. Kelwyn was not willing to do either, and he was by no means resting from his search, but merely rejoicing in a little respite, when one day he received a very odd visit.

  This visit was paid him by a quaintly dressed old man, who said he was an Elder of the people called Shakers, and that he had come to Kelwyn because of some account he had read of the kind of work he was doing in the university, and had thought he would be pleased, in his quality of lecturer on Historical Sociology, to know something of the social experiment of the Shakers. It presently appeared that he had counted so much upon Kelwyn’s interest in it as to believe that he might make it the theme of a lecture, and he had come with a little printed tract on the Shaker life and doctrine which he had written himself, and which he now gave Kelwyn with the hope, very politely expressed, that it might be useful to him in the preparation of his lectures. The whole affair was to Kelwyn’s mind so full of a sweet innocence that he felt it invited the most delicate handling on his part, and he used all the niceness he was master of in thanking the old man for his pamphlet, without giving him the expectation that he would really treat of Shakerism before the students of his post-graduate course. Inwardly he was filled with amusement at the notion of his august science stooping to inquire into such a lowly experiment as that of those rustic communists; but outwardly he treated it with grave deference, and said that he should have the greatest pleasure in reading the pamphlet of the Elder. He was curious enough to ask some questions about the Family to which his visitor belonged, and then about the general conditions of Shakerism. It amused him again when his visitor answered, from a steadfast faith in its doctrine, that his sect was everywhere in decay, and that his own Family was now a community of aging men and women, and must soon die out unless it was recruited from the world-outside. He seemed to feel that he had a mission to the gentler phases of this world, and he did not conceal that he had come with some hope that if the character of Shakerism could be truly set forth to such cultivated youth as must attend Kelwyn’s lectures, considerable accessions from their number might follow. The worst thing in the present condition of Shakerism, he said, was that the community was obliged to violate the very law of its social being, for the brethren were too feeble to work in the fields themselves, and were forced to employ hireling labor. Kelwyn learned from his willing avowals that they had some thousands of acres which they could only let grow up in forests for the crops of timber they would finally yield, and that it was not easy always to find tenants for the farms they had to let. He spoke of one farm which would be given, with one of the Family dwellings, to a suitable tenant at a rent so ridiculously low that Kelwyn said, with a laugh, if the Shakers would furnish the house, though twenty-five rooms were rather more than his family needed, he did not know but he might take the farm himself for the summer. He went into a little history of their experience of farm board and the defeat of their aspirations for a house that they could control without putting the care of housekeeping upon his wife; and he ended by confessing that at the present moment they were without any prospects whatever for the summer.

  III

  THE Elder did not seem to enter very eagerly into the matter, as if he were not expected to do so; he said it would not he easy to find just what they wanted, and when he took his leave he left Kelwyn with the feeling that he regarded his aspiration with a certain cautious disapproval. Kelwyn made a joke of this to his wife, in telling her of his visitor, and he was the more surprised, two days later, to get a letter from him saying that he had talked over with the Family Kelwyn’s notion of furnishing the house, and they had decided to act upon it if he was still disposed to hire the place for a year. In this case, the Elder wrote, they knew of a man and his wife who would be willing to come into the house and board them at a much lower rate than usual, if he could have the produce of the farm, and the house for the rest of the year afte
r they left it. The rent would be the same as for the house unfurnished.

  Kelwyn’s wife first provisionally disciplined him for giving his correspondent a groundless hope that he would do anything so wild; but when he convinced her that he was innocent she began to find it not such a bad scheme, and she ended by driving him off that very day to look at the place, which was just over the border in southern New Hampshire. There was no time to be lost, for the Shakers might offer it to somebody else if he did not act promptly. She made him telegraph them that he was coming, and the boy who drove him over to the Shaker village from the station carried his despatch to them. He came home in a rapture with the place. The house, which had been left vacant by the shrinkage of the community, was almost as vast as a college dormitory, but it was curiously homelike at the same time, with a great kitchen, and a running spring of delicious water piped into it; a dining-room which had been the Family refectory and looked eastward through the leaves of embowering elms across beautiful country to Mount Ponkwasset in the distance; the choice of a multitude of airy bedrooms; and the hall where the Shaker Family used to dance for a parlor or sitting-room. The only trouble was that they might be lost in the huge mansion; but, if they settled themselves on one floor, they could perhaps find one another at meal-times. Kelwyn drew a plan, and showed how they could take the second story, and leave the first to the farmer’s family. The whole house was deliciously cool, and there were fireplaces where they could have a blaze in chilly weather, and cheer themselves with the flame at night. The high open plateau where the house stood, not far from the Shaker village which had dried away from it, was swept by pure breezes that blew in at every window, and made mosquitoes impossible and nettings superfluous.

  “Flies,” Mrs. Kelwyn suggested.