Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I don’t believe there would be any flies,” Kelwyn returned; and then she accused him of being infatuated.

  She felt the need of greater strictness with him because she knew herself hopelessly taken with his report, which she did not believe exaggerated. “And the farmer, did you see him or his wife? Because that’s the most important matter.”

  “Yes, I understood that. But they were not living in the neighborhood, and I couldn’t get at them. The man has been in the Shakers’ employ, off and on, and they said his habits were good; they described the woman as a quiet, inoffensive person. They are people who have always had rather a hard time, and have never been able to get a place of their own. They wanted to take this place, but they didn’t feel sure they could meet the rent. I suppose it would be a godsend if we took it for them. But we’re not to consider that The question is whether we want it; and I knew we couldn’t decide till we had seen the people. The Shakers thought they could send the man down in a day or two, and then we could satisfy ourselves.”

  And you haven’t committed yourself?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Well, you have managed very prudently, Elmer,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. She added with an impulse of the sudden fear that springs from security itself, “I hope you haven’t lost the chance.”

  Kelwyn resented the imputation of overcaution, but he only answered, rather loftily, “I don’t think there’s any danger.”

  They began to talk of it as an accomplished fact, and it grew upon them in this vantage. They saw what a very perfect thing it would be if it were the thing at all. They would have complete control of the situation. The house would be their house, and the farmer would be their tenant at will. If they did not like him or his wife, if they did not find them capable or faithful, they could turn them out-of-doors any day; and they could not be turned out themselves, or molested, so long as they paid the Shakers the absurd trifle they asked for rent. It seemed impossible that they could fail of their pleasure in such circumstances, but Mrs. Kelwyn, merely in the interest of abstract knowledge, carried her scrutiny so far as to ask, “And could you turn him out of the farm, too, if they didn’t do well in the house?”

  Kelwyn had really not considered this point, but he said, “I don’t know that I should think it quite right to do that after the man had got his crops in.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, “of course not,” and in a generous revulsion of feeling she added, “It will be a great opportunity for the poor things.”

  “Yes, I have thought of that,” said Kelwyn. “They will have their rent free so long as they behave themselves, and if we find the arrangement works there is no reason why we should not continue it from year to year indefinitely. Of course,” he added, “we mustn’t pretend that we are making the arrangement on their account. We are primarily doing it for ourselves.”

  “Yes, charity begins at home,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, thoughtfully, but there was a vague dissatisfaction in her voice.

  Kelwyn smiled. “Were you thinking it didn’t?” he asked.

  “Why, yes,” she answered, as if surprised into the admission. “Were you, too?”

  “It struck me as rather a hollow-hearted saying; I don’t know why. I never questioned it before. But I fancy it’s something else that begins at home, and that charity begins away from home.”

  “I don’t believe it’s very well to look at those things in that spirit exactly,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. “We can make anything appear ugly by putting it in a strange light. Besides, I don’t think that this is a matter of charity, quite.”

  “No, it’s most distinctly a matter of business. Ethically considered, it is merely a thing that is right in itself, and the good that may flow from it is none the less good for being incidental. That is the way that most of the good in the world has come about. The history of civilization is that of certain people who wished to better their own condition, and made others wish to do the same by the spectacle of their success.” Kelwyn made a mental note of his notion for use in a lecture. It seemed to him novel, but he must think a little more whether it was tenable. Perhaps he could throw it out in the form of a suggestion.

  His wife could not dwell in the region of speculation even with him; it is perhaps the weakness of their sex that obliges women to secure themselves in the practical. She said, “Well, then, all we can do is to wait until the man comes. Then, if we think they can manage for us, we can close the bargain at once. But don’t let the place slip through your fingers, Elmer. The Shakers may have offered it to some one else, and you had better write to them, and tell them we think very well of it, and will decide as soon as we see the man.”

  They talked a great deal of the affair for the next day or two, and they somehow transmuted the financial disability of their prospective-tenants into something physical; they formed the habit of speaking of them as “those poor little people,” and with perhaps undue sense of their own advantage they figured them as of anxious and humble presence, fearful of losing the great chance of their lives. It was impossible, in this view of them, for the Kelwyns to intend them anything but justice. Without being sentimentalists, they both saw that they must not abuse those people’s helplessness in any way. They decided that they would offer to pay them the full amount of board which they usually paid for board in the summer, after taking out, of course, a certain sum for the rent during the time they were with them; the rest of the year’s rent they would forgive them. This seemed to the Kelwyns very handsome on their part, and the fact that they were to have the range of the whole house, instead of two rooms, as they had hitherto had at farm-houses, did not appear to them too much in the circumstances.

  IV

  THEY had no right to complain, but it certainly did not comport with their prepossessions that the farmer, when he came, should arrive in the proportions of a raw-boned giant, with an effect of hard-woodedness, as if he were hewn out of hickory, with the shag-bark left on in places; his ready-made clothes looked as hard as he. He had on his best behavior as well as his best clothes, but the corners of his straight wide mouth dropped sourly at moments, and Kelwyn fancied both contempt and suspicion in his bony face, which was tagged with a harsh black beard. Those unpleasant corners of his mouth were accented by tobacco stain, for he had a form of the tobacco habit uncommon in New England; his jaw worked unceasingly with a slow, bovine grind; but when the moment came, after a first glance at Kelwyn’s neat fireplace, he rose and spat out of the window; after Mrs. Kelwyn joined them in her husband’s study, he made errands to the front door for the purpose of spitting.

  Kelwyn expected that she would give him a sign of her instant rejection of the whole scheme at sight of the man, who had inspired him with a deep disgust; but to his surprise she did nothing of the kind; she even placated the man, by a special civility, as if she divined in him an instinctive resentment of her husband’s feeling. She made him sit down in a better place than Kelwyn had let him take, and she inspired him to volunteer an explanation of his coming alone, in the statement he had already made to Kelwyn, that he guessed the Woman would have come with him, but the Boy had got a pretty hard cold on him, and she was staying at home to fix him up.

  Kelwyn said, to put a stop to the flow of sympathy which followed from his wife, that he had been trying to ask Mr. Kite something about the cooking, but he thought he had better leave her to make the inquiries.

  “Oh yes,” she said, brightly. “You can give us light bread, I suppose?”

  The man smiled scornfully, and looked round as if taking an invisible spectator into the joke, and said, “I guess the Woman can make it for you; I never touch it myself. We have hot biscuit.”

  “We should like hot bread too, now and then,” Mrs. Kelwyn said.

  “You can have it every meal, same’s we do,” the man said.

  “We shouldn’t wish to give Mrs. Kite so much trouble,” Mrs. Kelwyn remarked, without apparent surprise at the luxury proposed. “I suppose she is used to broiling steak, and�
��”

  “Always fry our’n,” the man said, “but I guess she can broil it for you.”

  “I merely thought I would speak of it. We don’t care much for pies; but we should like a simple pudding now and then; though, really, with berries of all kinds, and the different fruits as they come, we shall scarcely need any other desserts. We should expect plenty of good sweet milk, and we don’t like to stint ourselves with the cream. I am sure Mrs. Kite will know how to cook vegetables nicely.”

  “Well,” the farmer said, turning away from the Kelwyns to his invisible familiar for sympathy in his scorn, “what my wife don’t know about cookin’, I guess ain’t wo’th knowin’.”

  “Because,” Mrs. Kelwyn continued, “we shall almost live upon vegetables.”

  “I mean to put in a garden of ’em — pease, beans, and squash, and sweet-corn, and all the rest of ‘em. You sha’n’t want for vegetables. You’ve tasted the Shaker cookin’?”

  “My husband dined with them the day he was up there.”

  “Then he knows what Shaker cookin’ is. So do we. And I guess my wife ain’t goin’ to fall much below it, if any.”

  He looked round once more to his familiar in boastful contempt, and even laughed. Kelwyn’s mouth watered at the recollection of the Shaker table, so simple, so wholesome, and yet so varied and appetizing, at a season when in the absence of fresh garden supplies art had to assist nature so much.

  “Oh, I am sure we shall be very well off,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. “We shall bring our own tea — English breakfast tea.”

  “Never heard of it,” Kite interrupted. “We always have Japan tea. But you can bring whatever you want to. Guess we sha’n’t steal it.” This seemed to be a joke, and he laughed at it.

  “Oh no,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, in deprecation of the possibility that she might have given the ground for such a pleasantry. “Well, I think I have spoken of everything, and now I will leave you two to arrange terms.”

  “No, no! Don’t go!” her husband entreated. “We’d better all talk it over together so that I can be sure that I am right.”

  “That’s the way I do with my wife,” Kite said, with a laugh of approval.

  The Kelwyns, with each other’s help, unfolded to him what they had proposed doing. As they did so, it seemed to them both a very handsome proposal, and they were aware of having considered themselves much less in it than they had feared. As it appeared now, they had thought so much more of their tenants than they had imagined that if it had not been too late they might have wished they had thought less. Afterward they felt that they had not kept many of the advantages they might very well have kept, though again they decided that this was an effect from their failure to stipulate them, and that they remained in their hands nevertheless.

  Kite sat listening with silent intensity. He winked his hard eyes from time to time, but he gave no other sign of being dazzled by their proposal.

  “You understand?” Kelwyn asked, to break the silence which the farmer let ensue when he ended.

  “I guess so,” Kite answered, dryly. “I’ll have to talk to the woman about it. You must set it down, so I can show it to her the way you said.”

  “Certainly,” Kelwyn said, and he hastily jotted down the points and handed the paper to Kite; it did not enter into Kite’s scheme of civility to rise and take it. He sat holding the paper in his hand and staring at it.

  “I believe that’s right?” Kelwyn suggested.

  “I guess so,” said Kite.

  “I don’t believe,” Mrs. Kelwyn interposed, “that Mr. Kite can make it out in your handwriting, my dear. You do write such a hand!”

  “Well, I guess I will have to get you to read it,” Kite said, reaching the paper to Kelwyn, without rising, but letting him rise to get it.

  Kelwyn read it carefully over, dwelling on each point. Kite kept a wooden immobility; but when Kelwyn had finished he reared his length from the lounge where it had been half folded, and put his hat on. “Well, I’ll show this to the woman when I get back, and we’ll let you know how we feel about it. Well, good-morning.” He got himself out of the house with no further ceremony, and the Kelwyns remained staring at each other in a spell which they found it difficult to break.

  “Don’t you suppose he could read it?” she asked, in a kind of a gasp.

  “I have my doubts,” said Kelwyn.

  “He didn’t seem to like the terms, did you think?”

  “I don’t know. I feel as if we had been proposing to become his tenants, and had been acting rather greedily in the matter.”

  “Yes, that was certainly the effect. Do you believe we offended him in some way? I don’t think I did, for I was most guarded in everything I said; and unless you went against the grain with him before I came down—”

  “I was butter in a lordly dish to him, before you came down, my dear!”

  “I don’t know. You were letting him sit in a very uncomfortable chair, and I had to think to put him on your lounge. And now, we’re not sure that he will accept the terms.”

  “Not till he has talked it over with the ‘woman.’ I almost wish that the woman would refuse us.”

  “It gives us a chance to draw back, too. He was certainly very disagreeable, though I don’t believe he meant it. He may have been merely uncouth. And, after all, it doesn’t matter about him. We shall never see him or have anything to do with him, indoors. He will have to hitch up the horse for us, and bring it to the door, and that will be the end of it. I wish we knew something about her, though.”

  “He seemed to think his own knowing was enough,” Kelwyn mused. “She is evidently perfection — in his eyes.”

  “Yes, his pride in her was touching,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. “That was the great thing about him. As soon as that came out, it atoned for everything. You can see that she twists him round her finger.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s a merit or not.”

  “It’s a great merit in such a man. She is probably his superior in every way. You can see how he looks up to her.”

  “Yes,” Kelwyn admitted, rather absently. “Did you have a feeling that he didn’t exactly look up to us?”

  “He despised us,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, very promptly. “But that doesn’t mean that he won’t use us well. I have often noticed that in country people, even when they are much smoother than he was, and I have noticed it in working-people of all kinds. They do despise us, and I don’t believe they respect anybody but working-people, really, though they’re so glad to get out of working when they can. They think we’re a kind of children, or fools, because we don’t know how to do things with our hands, and all the culture in us won’t change them. I could see that man’s eye taking in your books and manuscripts, and scorning them.”

  “I don’t know but you’re right, Carry, and it is very curious. It’s a thing that hasn’t been taken into account in our studies of the conditions. We always suppose that the superiors despise the inferiors, but perhaps it is really the inferiors that despise the superiors, and it’s that which embitters the classes against one another.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, “what I hope is that the wife may have education enough to tolerate us, if we’re to be at their mercy.”

  “I hope she can read writing, anyway,” Kelwyn said. “And it’s droll, but you’ve hit it in what you say; it’s been growing on me, too, that they will have us at their mercy. I had fancied that we were to have them at ours.”

  The scheme looked more and more doubtful to the Kelwyns. There were times when they woke together in the night, and confessed the same horror of it, and vowed each other to break it off. Yet when daylight came it always looked very simple, and it had so many alluring aspects that they smiled, at their nightly terrors. It was true, after all, that they could command the situation, and whether they cared to turn the Kites out of the farm or not, they could certainly turn them out of the house if they proved unfit or unfaithful. They would have, for the first time, a whole house to themselves,
for they should allow the Kites only servants’ quarters in it, and they would have the whole vast range and space for very little more money than they had ordinarily paid for farm board. They could undoubtedly control the table, and if the things were not good they could demand better. But a theory of Mrs. Kite grew upon Mrs. Kelwyn the more she thought of Kite’s faith in his wife, which comforted her in her misgivings. This was the theory of her comparative superiority, which Mrs. Kelwyn based upon the probability that she could not possibly be so ignorant and uncouth as her husband. It was, no doubt, her ambition to better their lot which was urging him to take the farm, and she would do everything she could to please. In this view of her, Mrs. Kelwyn resolved to meet her half-way; to be patient of any little failures at first, and to teach the countrywoman town ways by sympathy rather than by criticism. That was a duty she owed her, and Mrs. Kelwyn meant to shirk none of her duties, while eventually claiming all her rights. She said this to herself in her reveries, and she said it to her husband in their conferences during the days that followed one another after Kite’s visit. So many days followed before he made any further sign that Mrs. Kelwyn had time to work completely round from her reluctance to close the engagement with him, or his wife, rather, and to have wrought herself into an eagerness amounting to anxiety and bordering upon despair lest the Kites should not wish to close it. With difficulty she kept herself from making Kelwyn write and offer them better terms; she prevailed with herself so far, indeed, as to keep from making him write and ask for their decision. When it came unurged, however, she felt that she had made such a narrow escape that she must not risk further misgivings even. She argued the best from the quite mannerly and shapely letter (for a poor country person) which Mrs. Kite wrote in accepting the terms they offered. She did not express any opinion or feeling in regard to them, but she probably knew that they were very good; and Mrs. Kelwyn began to be proud of them again.

  V

  IT was the afternoon of such a spring day as comes nowhere but in New England that the Kelwyns arrived at their summer home. There was a little edge of cold in it, at four o’clock, which the bright high sun did not soften, and which gave a pleasant thrill to the nerves. The blue sky bent over the earth a perfect dome without the faintest cloud. The trees, full foliaged, whistled in the gale that swept the land, and billowed the long grass, and tossed the blades of the low corn. ‘All was sweet and clean, as if the spirit of New England housekeeping had entered into Nature, and she had set her house in order for company.