Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  At the word Parthenope leaned forward at the first angle of interest, and he said, rather more to her than the others: “It isn’t all fun. At least it wasn’t for me. I believe ladies don’t mind washing dishes—”

  “As far as egg-shell china, we don’t,” the girl distinguished.

  “I had no egg-shell china, and I minded the dishwashing. It was on that account that I was tempted to give up cooking, until I happened to think of wooden plates and paper plates, which could be cleansed by fire instead of water.”

  “But they,” Parthenope instructed him, “want the woods and fields for a background; between walls they are hideous.”

  “They are not finally hideous,” Emerance answered, with the deference that young men show in differing with girls, but not with all the submission she would have liked. “Their form is elementary yet, but that is something that might be studied, and their decoration might be carried much further than it has been.”

  “I suppose so,” she assented, and then she suggested a step she believed he had missed. “But there would still be the pots and pans.”

  “I didn’t know she had such a practical mind,” Kelwyn said, jocosely, to his wife.

  “Of course a woman would think of that,” Mrs. Kelwyn explained.

  “There would still be the pots and pans,” the young man owned. “You can’t boil and stew in wood, and you can’t roast and broil on paper. But I’ve no doubt something could be cheaply substituted for wood and paper that could be as easily destroyed. Perhaps—” Loud shrieks, as of a joyful dismay, rose from the roadside green under the dining-room windows: the voices of the two Kelwyn boys, and the voice of the Kite boy, who lifted it in a kind of mocking, as if at a mixed emotion in the others. To these the voice of Mrs. Kite was joined. “You come here, Arthur Kite; come right here, this minute! Boys, you look out he don’t catch you! Mrs. Kelwyn!”

  At this appeal Mrs. Kelwyn called severely to her husband across the table, “Elmer!” and then they both went to a window. Parthenope ran to another, where, seeing that Emerance modestly held back, she made room for him. Leaning over the sill together, they saw slouching toward the house the figure of a man in a flat cap, a short velvet jacket, and immensely wide velvet trousers, with shoes as broad almost and as flat as his cap; he supported his steps with a heavy staff and led by a chain a bear of about his own stature. The chain was attached to a ring in the bear’s muzzled nose, and Emerance glanced for a moment from him at the pretty head beside him, as if involuntarily noting that the hair on it was of the same cinnamon color as the bear. He breathed a little sigh such as one gives when one has suddenly got the right word for something.

  The man and the bear both looked hot and unhappy. The bear strained his small eyes round and upward, and the man let his glance follow, but neither made as if to stop, and the Kelwyns, who had called their children up to them, began to feel that they had been needlessly anxious; the boys begged their father to make the man stay. While Kelwyn hesitated, the hired man, Raney, came round the corner of the house and called to the bear-leader in French. The poor are too much preoccupied with their poverty to be surprised at things which give the well-to-do the pleasurable emotion of the unexpected, and the man merely looked round at the sound of the familiar words. Then, as if he uttered the general wish, Raney called to him again and bade him make the bear dance.

  It seemed a great cruelty, for the heat had been gradually mounting ever since morning, but Kelwyn did not interfere, even at his wife’s urgence of the question of danger; he let the man, who had halted, slowly turn and come back. The bear, with a groan of compliance, rose to his hind legs and caught between his paws the staff which the man tossed him. But it seemed that he was not going to dance at once. He had histrionic gifts which were to be shown first in Le bon Filleul qui va la Chasse, and the staff was to play the part of a gun. At the successive stage directions of his leader he discovered the game, shouldered the gun, and fired. But apparently he always missed at first; at last when he hit, he was obliged to represent the victim himself. As Un beau Mort, he rolled in death, palpitant and stertorous; then he came to life, and rose to his hind legs and tilled the ground with his pole in the character of Le bon Jardinier. The dramatic passages of the entertainment now ended, and the ballet began. It was not intricate, but it was elaborate, and was faithfully performed to the music of the wild, brutal chant of which bear-leaders have the secret. The bear pranced and waddled, and snorted and panted through his muzzle while the man followed him up and retreated. The scene held the spectators spellbound till Parthenope put herself in the bear’s place and cried out, “I should think the poor thing would die of the heat!”

  Mrs. Kelywn saw the reasonableness of the apprehension, and with Raney’s intervention she brought the ballet to a close. The boys were openly disappointed; but the bear was made to turn some lop-sided somersaults, which consoled them, and then the bear-leader called for some water, and Mrs. Kite brought it in a hand-basin, which the bear lay down to embrace with both paws, plunging his muzzle deep into the water and showing a joy pitiful to see. When he had sopped it all up the man asked for another basinful, and swashed it against the hairy breast of the bear which responded with grunts of rapture. He was so much refreshed that when the man lengthened his chain he climbed to the first crotch of the doorside elm, where he sat looking sleepily into the window to which the Kelwyn boys, with the unforbidden, if unbidden, company of the Kite boy, had rushed up-stairs to gloat upon him in the closest intimacy.

  The bear-leader was himself a sight hardly less pitiable than the bear. He stood pallid and dripping with sweat; and with that dull, tormented air which seems proper to bear-leaders he told Raney the scant story of himself and his bear. He had himself taken the bear in the mountains near Toulouse; it was only fifteen months old now, and it was a little cub when he took it. He pulled on its chain; it reluctantly descended from its perch, and the two set off, equally inarticulate, after the man’s growled thanks for the reward which had been thrown him from the windows whither he scarcely lifted his eyes. Mrs. Kite and Raney stood watching him, and Raney said to the windows that he would rather work than do that; he added that he was going away to work for his board and two dollars and a half a day in Chester. He sauntered off toward the barn, and Mrs. Kite supplied for him the fact which Raney was perhaps too indifferent, or too proud, to declare himself: that his father lived in Nashua, where he owned a house of eight tenements, which he let for fifty dollars a month; there were a good many Kanucks living in Nashua. She then went indoors, and the others, who were still looking, as if helplessly, out of the window, were surprised by a sudden roar of thunder.

  XI

  “Why, I believe we’re going to have a storm!” Mrs. Kelwyn said. They all took their heads in apprehensively, but the two women put theirs out again curiously and made sure of the clouds which were beating up from the horizon and getting blacker and blacker below, while above they whitened densely toward the zenith. “Elmer,” she continued to her husband, “did you think it was gathering for a storm?”

  “I’m sure I hadn’t noticed,” he answered. Parthenope said, with an inquiring glance at Emerance, “I’m sure I hadn’t, either.”

  “I thought I heard thunder once before,” the young man answered her. “But I was so much absorbed in the show that I didn’t think of getting back to the Shakers’. Now I must make a run for it. Good-bye — good-bye!” He addressed himself to one after another and started for the door. “I think I left my hat below—”

  “Why,” Kelwyn as host interposed, “you mustn’t think of going now till the rain’s over.”

  “No, certainly not,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, less hospitably, but more finally.

  Emerance urged, with another glance out of the window: “I’m afraid I must. I’m ashamed to have intruded on you so long.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn rose to the occasion. “Not at all. I’m always so afraid of lightning.”

  “I don’t know that I should be much
protection; but—” He glanced at the sky again.

  “I wonder,” Parthenope said, impartially, “why we always feel safer if there are others.”

  “I suppose it’s really not so safe,” Emerance suggested.

  She combated this from her experience. “My aunt and I always get together in the middle hall, where there’s no chimney, and she makes the servants come, too, and shuts all the doors and lights the gas; and then we scarcely notice it.”

  “It will be well to close the windows, won’t it?” Kelywn asked, referring himself to the young man. The sky had blackened upward; the flashes were almost incessant; the wind came in rapid gusts, as if the storm were panting in from the outside. The room darkened.

  The men moved each toward a window; a blinding glare came with an instant crash; Mrs. Kelwyn shrieked: “You’ll be killed! Shut them, shut them!”

  They dashed the sashes down as a torrent of rain beat against the glass. Mrs. Kelwyn’s instincts put her in control. “Elmer! Come here away from the window! Mr. Emerance! Boys, stand back to the wall; but not against it, not tight together! Thennie — Arthur Kite, why aren’t you with your mother? But mercy! Mrs. Kite will be killed down there over the cook-stove — iron is such a conductor. Mrs. Kite! Mrs. Kite!” She ventured to the door and shrieked toward the kitchen. “Come here with us! You’ll be struck by lightning!”

  “I ain’t afraid of lightnin’,” Mrs. Kite’s voice came sweetly back. “Me and Raney are watchin’ it. I hope Mr. Kite’s got under some tree with his hossis.”

  “Shut your door and come up here,” Mrs. Kelwyn commanded, but there was no answer to this, and the interest of Mrs. Kite’s disobedience was lost in the tremendous drama of the elements. The world was wrapt in a darkness which the swift flashes rent from it, moment after moment, and showed it naked, dishevelled with the wind and deluged with rain.

  “This is a storm,” Kelwyn remarked, inadequately, and his wife said:

  “I never saw anything like it. Did you, Mr. Emerance?” She felt the need of hearing some voice besides her own amid the horror, and she appealed to her guest at the risk of making him feel more at home than she might have wished. If it had not been for the storm she would have liked to ask herself some questions about him. But she did not wait for his answer before calling to her cousin, “Where are you, Parthenope?”

  “Here, in the middle of the room,” the girl answered. “Right by you.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn, who had somehow thought she was with Emerance dangerously near the window, where he stood, said, with relief, “Oh!” At the same time a formless shout came from Emerance, and the next flash showed him pointing at something he saw through the window. She was torn between anxiety and curiosity. “What is it? What is it?” she implored. “Elmer! Parthenope! Why—”

  It was the girl who obeyed the stronger instinct, and, running to the window, saw, through the shimmer of the lightning and the wind-driven welter of the rain, the figures of the bear-leader and the bear floundering toward the barn where it stretched in a line with the house toward the woods.

  “What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Kelwyn demanded.

  Before Parthenope could answer, the voice of Mrs. Kite came: “Raney, go out and tell him he can’t go into our barn! His bear’ll drive the hossis crazy.”

  “Ketch me go out in that rain,” Raney’s voice replied. “No hosses there, anyway, till Mr. Kite come back.”

  “Well, that’s so,” Mrs. Kite assented, in a lapse to her habitual ease of mind. “But we got to watch out when he does come. U-u-ugh!”

  A long chain of flame swung from the woods beyond the open fields across the road, and from its hither end a vast globe of bluish fire dropped as if at the door, and the air was torn with an explosion which shook the house in every fibre; through the darkness and silence which followed, little crimson flakes like pieces of burning paper dropped earthward. A groan came from Mrs. Kelwyn; wails came from the boys; the hysterical laughter of Mrs. Kite, the shouts of Raney and Arthur, mixed with a cry from Parthenope. With her thought still on what she had last seen before that blinding flash and deafening roar, she entreated Emerance, “Oh, where are they, where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Yes! Yes! There they are in the road—”

  “They’ve been killed!” she shrieked. “They’re both lying down! Oh, Cousin Carry, Cousin Elmer!” She put her hands over her eyes, and, with her whirling toward them, the Kelwyns pressed forward, forgetful of danger and duty, and by the successive flashes they saw in the streaming highway the bear and his leader prostrate and motionless.

  “I don’t believe they’re dead,” Emerance said. “I’m going to see—”

  “I’m going with you,” Parthenope defied all forbidding.

  They had run toward the door, followed by a cry of cumulative warning from Mrs. Kelwyn.

  “You’ll be killed — you’ll be wet through.”

  But the rain, in one of those sudden arrests which ensue upon such a violent burst, had ceased, and there was only the drip of the elms which overhung the road, where the play of the lightning now showed Emerance and Parthenope bringing help to the bear and his leader, Raney had joined them; but Mrs. Kite kept within her door, as firmly persuaded as Mrs. Kelwyn that her first duty was to herself. She could not keep her boy from running out to see the rescue, and in this Mrs. Kelwyn had the advantage; her boys preferred to look on with her from her window. Kelwyn said he was going to help, too, but his wife’s will was stronger.

  “Don’t think of such a thing. You know they are doing everything, and if you go out into this storm you will die — you will be laid up with rheumatism.”

  He pointed out that it was not raining and there was not the least risk; in the end he had to content himself with thinking that perhaps she was right, after all.

  Parthenope came hurrying in. “He’s breathing,” she panted, thickly. “Mr. Emerance wants some brandy. Have you got any?”

  “Now, Elmer!” Mrs. Kelywn said, disappearing and reappearing at her chamber door. “What will you say now to my bringing what was left in the bottle you wanted me to throw away?”

  “Is the bear breathing, too, Cousin Thennie?” Francy wistfully entreated, and Carl, with the same gentleness, implored, “Is the bear breathing, too, Cousin Thennie?”

  “Yes, yes!” she called back over her shoulder to them as she ran out with the brandy. “That is—”

  “I’m so glad the bear’s breathing, too, mamma,” and, “I’m so glad the bear’s breathing, too, mamma,” the boys said, in the order of their ages.

  Their mother twitched each of them by the hand. “Hush! Be good boys!”

  “Can’t we go out?” they asked, in due succession. “Arthur’s there.”

  “Certainly not. It might kill you.”

  “If the bear’s alive he ought to be secured,” Kelwyn said, judicially.

  “Well, don’t you try to secure him,” his wife exposed him in his brave impulse. “There! Raney is chaining him to the hitching-post now!”

  Raney was really taking this provisional measure of safety; but the bear to the spectators above showed no more signs of returning consciousness than his leader, who sat in the mud with his head fallen forward and supported under his limply hanging arms by Parthenope; while Emerance knelt before him, trying to make him drink the brandy. In despair with his failure he cast his eye upward and Kelwyn caught their reproach.

  “I am certainly going down to help,” Kelwyn was afterward always proud to remember now saying, and before his wife could prevent him he ran down-stairs and dropped on his knees beside Emerance. Between them they managed to get the man’s mouth open and let a little brandy trickle into it. Then the bear-leader gropingly possessed himself of the bottle and tilted it to his lips. A strong shiver ran through his frame, and Parthenope divined that she might withdraw her support. Kelwyn, having fulfilled his duty to humanity, returned to his family, and the bear-leader’s first thought was of his own.

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nbsp; “Ou est-ce quest l’ours?” he growled, and Raney vaingloriously exhibited his passive capture.

  XII

  THE man dragged himself painfully toward the prostrate beast, and examined him for the signs of life with hoarsely murmured laments. He put the brandy to the bear’s muzzle without effect; then he sank on his heels and growled to Raney, in their language, “If there were some coffee very hot!”

  Parthenope understood, and she shouted up to Mrs. Kelwyn at the window, “Light the spirit-lamp under the coffee-pot!” The zeal of saving life had penetrated to Mrs. Kelwyn also, and she obeyed the order blindly. When Parthenope came following her mandate Mrs. Kelwyn was indignant that her succor should have been invoked for the bear; but it was now too late. The girl caught the pot from the flame, and, pouring all the coffee out into a bowl, hurried below with it.

  The man slipped the muzzle from the bear and pried the beast’s jaws apart.

  “Better let me give it him,” Emerance suggested, offering to take the bowl from Parthenope. It was an odd moment for her superiority to assert itself, but this was the moment it chose.

  “If you will help keep the bear’s mouth open,” she said, severely, “I will pour the coffee in,” and she emptied the bowl into the red chasm, which suddenly shut like a trap. She caught her hand away with a little whoop.

  “Oh, did he snap you?” the young man asked, anxiously.

  “Not at all,” she snubbed his anxiety. “Don’t notice it.”

  No one else seemed to have noticed it, and the bearleader slipped back the muzzle and, still kneeling beside the bear, waited results. The coffee wrought the miracle which the brandy had failed to work; the bear came to with a strong shudder, and rose to his hind legs with a heart-shaking roar which sent his deliverers flying. A crash of thunder followed, and the storm began again. Of the actors in the recent drama none remained on the scene but the bear and his leader. They began making for the barn again, and Mrs. Kite screamed: “Raney, tell him he mustn’t go to the barn! If Mr. Kite comes home and finds that bear in the barn he’ll shoot him!”