Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “He got to go somewhere,” Raney protested, sullenly.

  “Take them to the woodhouse, then.”

  After a hesitation of self-respect, Raney led the way with a Suivez-moi.”

  On the stairs the girl stopped and looked at her hand, and Emerance asked again, “Did he hurt you?”

  This time she answered, more gently, “Oh no,” and she laughed. “I would do it, you know. I was merely frightened by his jaws shutting so. But it was only mechanical.”

  “Oh yes: he didn’t mean to bite,” Emerance said; and when they went in to the Kelwyns she made haste to declare:

  “I insisted on giving ‘ first aid’ to the bear myself, and I thought he had bitten me. But he only shut his mouth mechanically.” The word seemed to repeat itself mechanically, and she laughed as she had laughed before. Then, rather white and tremulous, she hurried away toward her room.

  Mrs. Kelwyn ran after her, and did not come hack at once. When she returned the electrical storm was passing; but the weather had settled for a steady downpour, and she said: “Of course, Mr. Emerance, you won’t dream of trying to get to the Shakers’ till it stops. You must stay and take supper with us, if we have any. Mrs. Kite is so uncertain—”

  “And it’s been a very demoralizing afternoon for everybody,” Kelwyn continued for her. “But I dare say Mrs. Kite will pull herself together in time.” The young man said, “I hate to trouble you,” and then he ventured, after a moment, “If Mrs. Kite is very much preoccupied, do you think she would mind my trying a few tricks with her cook-stove?” To Mrs. Kelwyn’s look of uncertainty he added, “Then I could feel as if I were earning my board. I should like to get supper for you,” he ended, explicitly.

  Mrs. Kelwyn was seldom at a loss for a decision, but now she cast glances of misgiving at her husband. He refused the responsibility, but her boys asked in chorus, “May we help him to get supper, mamma?” Emerance had not waited. The boys had followed him into the kitchen, where the Kelwyns presently heard him in amicable colloquy with Mrs. Kite. A third voice joined itself to theirs, and Kelwyn said, “Why, is that Parthenope?”

  “Oh, I dare say!” his wife answered, impatiently. “She seemed quite unnerved, and I made her lie down. But I knew she would be up as soon as I left her. I suppose she went down the back way.”

  “Well, she wasn’t very seriously wounded,” Kelwyn consoled himself. “And we couldn’t have allowed him to get our supper without letting some one help him.”

  “No,” she consented. “Of course it’s better for Thennie to offer. But it’s rather odd. I can’t make him out. He seems to have been too many things — what I call a Jack of all trades.”

  “In this case if he’s master of one,” Kelwyn said, “I shall forgive him. I think I’m going to be hungry. It’s turning cold, I fancy, or else the damp has got in. I believe I’ll make up a trash-wood fire on the hearth and dry the place out.”

  He went for an armful of pine sticks, and when he came back Mrs. Kelwyn was returning from the kitchen. “I thought I ought to look in to show that I appreciated — But I didn’t stay; Thennie might think I was following her up. I don’t know that I liked his being in his shirt-sleeves. To be sure, with those woollen outing shirts that the young men are beginning to wear! And he’s given the boys some dough, and they’re as happy as kings. And Parthenope seems to be useful in spite of her scare. I think she’s rather ashamed of her whole performance.”

  Kelwyn had laid his fire and was going to touch a match to it when her attention was directed to it, and she wished to lay it differently. In the lulls of their dispute they heard Mrs. Kite in the kitchen from time to time:

  “There! Do you mean to tell me that that’s what they’re for? Well, I heard of gem-pans fast enough from the Shaker ladies, but I didn’t think these were them. And will they raise just from the heat? Arthur, you keep your hands off, or I’ll — Goin’ to broil it? We always fry ours; I don’t suppose I could get a bit of broiled steak down Mr. Kite any more than — That the way you make an omelet? I’ve heard of ‘em, but I never expected to see one. And you don’t let the tea stay a minute? And you got to have fresh boiled water every time? Well, no wonder I couldn’t seem to suit jour folks. You mind my settin’ here? If you do, just say the word, and I’ll—”

  Her talk came with the sounds of walking to and fro, with serious answers from Emerance and gay comments from Parthenope, with shrill, despairing resentments of the Kite boy’s aggressions from the Kelwyn boys, the clash of stove-doors and stove-lids, and the hiss of broiling.

  Kelwyn thought that he ought to show himself on the scene in his quality of a host courteous to his guest. But as often as he proposed this his wife forbade him on one pretext or another. At last she said: “Elmer, don’t say that again! I wouldn’t have Parthenope think we noticed!”

  Then he said, “Oh!” A moment later the kitchen door was set officiously open by Mrs. Kite, and a procession of Parthenope and the Kelwyn boys came in bearing the firstlings of the feast; against a glare from the stove the figure of Emerance was silhouetted in the act of lifting the broiler from the clinging flames of the fat, and then he reappeared with his coat on, and between his hands the platter holding the beefsteak saved from the morning’s purchase, and now serving as the chief dish at a meal that almost rose to the dignity of dinner.

  Mrs. Kite followed with a heaping plate of gems. “You’ve got to excuse me, Mrs. Kelwyn, if I almost forgot your supper. But I guess you won’t miss anything. I’ve been so anxious about him, out in all this rain, and I want you should save him a bite of everything, so he can see what gems and omelet are like for once in his life.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn added some graces of jam and marmalade, and olives from the store she had brought into the country for occasions of feasting, and at the end of a meal from which her boys dropped torpid to their bed, their father philosophized the effect with himself as one of returning self-respect. His wife and her cousin were carrying the remnants out to Mrs. Kite in the kitchen, forbidding help from the men whom they left sitting each at a corner of the hearth.

  “It is odd,” Kelwyn explained, “but it is true that under the regimen of Mrs. Kite I’ve had the sense of sinking lower and lower in my own opinion. I haven’t been able to recognize myself as a gentleman. You understand?”

  “I get your drift,” the younger man said, with a smile of interest which brightened into speculation. “I wonder how much of what we call our personal dignity is really impersonal.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “How much is safeguarded from without, how much from within? Whether we are still in the bondage of the old superstition that the things which defile a man are those which happen to him rather than those which happen from him?”

  It would not do for a lecturer on historical sociology to seem to himself at a loss on a point like that, and Kelwyn asked, in his turn, “Hasn’t it always been so?”

  “Yes; or else I suppose we shouldn’t have been instructed against it. As yet I don’t believe there’s much personal dignity in the world. It’s impersonal, what there is of it. Why, for instance,” he pursued, “should you have felt degraded by the bad housekeeping of this woman, and especially her bad cooking? Or wasn’t it that, concretely, that you meant?”

  Kelwyn reflected, and he owned from his conscience: “Yes, I fancy that’s just what I meant. And in the light you put it in it is rather droll. There seems to “Have been some force in the environment that vulgarized — that surrounded me with the social atmosphere of a mechanics’ boarding-house. There have been times when I rose from Mrs. Kite’s table — I can’t call it ours — with the feeling that I was not fit for society — that I ought to resign my position in the university.” He exaggerated, smiling and inviting Emerance to smile; but the young man smiled only indirectly, and he said, with apparent irrelevance, “I have heard a few of your lectures.”

  This was something still further restorative; Kelwyn felt that he was getting securely back to
his level. “Ah!” he prompted, hoping for praise, but decently wishing that he did not.

  “Yes,” the young man responded, “I have been interested in the subject.” He dismissed that aspect of it. “But I don’t think environment is quite the name for the thing. If you put people who are used to simpler things than yourself in your place here, would they be humiliated by the environment?”

  “Yes, I think they would, if they were people of any refinement at all,” Kelwyn had a sense of generous democracy in urging.

  “They might be people of another kind of refinement. They might not feel the woman’s shiftlessness as much as you, and yet be grieved for her by it.”

  “I believe,” Kelwyn said, “we have always tried to consider her.”

  “I’ve expressed myself badly if I’ve suggested otherwise,” the young man returned, with gravity. “I’m trying to imagine the sort of religious — it isn’t the word — spiritual culture which seems to have pretty well gone out of the world, if it was ever much in it, and which once considered the uncultivated on their own ground and not on that of their superiors. I’m not sure — yet — that this sort of culture didn’t implicate a certain amount of sentimentality. I should like to ask your opinion.”

  “Yes,” Kelwyn said, after taking a moment for thought, “I should think it did. And I suppose we should agree that sentimentality is always to be avoided.”

  “Why, I’m not sure — yet,” the young man surprised him by answering.

  “Then I don’t know that I follow you.”

  “I suppose what I am driving at is this — or something like this: as long as we are in the keeping of our customary circumstances, the thing which we call environment and by which we always understand the personal environment, whether we recognize the fact or not, has very little influence on our character. If you had had these people serving you in your house at home you would not have felt degraded by the manner or make of their service? — For that’s what it comes to here.”

  “No, I suppose we shouldn’t. That is — I should like to give the point further reflection.”

  “The personal environment would be the same in both cases. But in one case you could keep your own level in spite of it, and in the other case you feel degraded by it. So the real agency would be in the circumstances, wouldn’t it? The conditions?”

  “It’s an interesting point,” Kelwyn allowed.

  “Perhaps I can put it in another way,” Emerance resumed. “If we had all been at a picnic together, and I had offered to be your cook, as I did when I proposed going into Mrs. Kite’s kitchen and getting your supper just now, we should have been remanded in common to the Golden Age, or at least to the Homeric epoch, and you would have found it poetic, primitive, delightful. But here we were not remanded to a period sufficiently remote — at least I wasn’t. I only got back so far as the era of the sons of the farm-houses who have served you in the kitchen and helped wait on you at table, and it gave you a little start when I sat down with you.”

  “You have no right to say that—”

  “But isn’t it true?” The young man laughed, and rose briskly and went to the window and looked out. “Starlight!” he exclaimed. “I must be going!”

  “But surely,” Kelwyn began, rising in protest, “we hoped you would stay the night — Mrs. Kelwyn will wish — It will be late for you at the Shakers’, and that bit of road through the woods — you won’t be able to see your way.”

  “I shall get to the Shakers’ in time for people who never lock their doors; and the stretch of black road through the woods will add a strain of mystery to my experience; I shall have the weird pleasure of feeling my way.” He added, musingly: “I imagine that the animals that prowl by night feel their way much oftener than they see it. I shall be remanded to my animal instincts. You would call it degraded?” He looked at Kelwyn with the eyes of a poet rather than a sociologist, but he broke abruptly from his question. “Good-night. Please say good-night for me to the—”

  “But you mustn’t go without — Let me call them!”

  “No, no! Don’t!”

  Before Kelwyn could hinder, Emerance had found his hat and was gone.

  XIII

  When Mrs. Kelwyn and Parthenope came in from the kitchen, “Where is Mr. Emerance?” the elder woman asked with her tongue and the younger with her eyes.

  “He has just gone; he insisted on going — he wouldn’t let me call you.”

  “Well!” Mrs. Kelwyn said, and Parthenope said nothing. “Didn’t you ask him to stay? I expected him to stay!”

  “Of course. But he was quite determined.”

  “Very strange!” Mrs. Kelwyn was as silent for a while as Parthenope. Then she sighed with relief. “Perhaps it is just as well. He is a strange being. Only we oughtn’t to seem ungrateful.”

  “I have been trying with all my might not to seem ungrateful,” Kelwyn retorted, in exasperation with the burden he felt unjustly cast upon him. “If you had been here you would have thought him still stranger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have had a sociological inquiry.”

  “Nonsense, Elmer!”

  “That is what I thought it amounted to.”

  “What was it?” she pursued him, and he repeated their talk in its essentials.

  Mrs. Kelwyn listened in mounting disapproval. But at the end she did not express her censure directly. It was Parthenope who said: “I think that was rather snobbish.”

  Kelwyn said, “I don’t think it was snobbish exactly.”

  “If he was ashamed of what he had done it was snobbish,” she insisted.

  “People,” Mrs. Kelwyn generalized, “who have risen above their origin are apt to be sensitive about such things. We can’t wonder at that.”

  “No,” Kelwyn assented, so remote from his own origin that he did not wince. His mother had done her own work, and his father used to build the kitchen fire for her before he went down and swept out his store. “But I shouldn’t say he was a snob, exactly. If you speculate about such intimate things you are in danger of being misunderstood. But I thought his inquiry was rather interesting. I thought there was something in what he said.”

  “You are always so open-minded, Elmer,” his wife applauded. “That, I think, is your greatest trait. It’s what gives you your influence.”

  “I like to be fair,” he so far accepted, her praise.

  “There is such a thing as being too fair,” Parthenope said, with scorn. “Don’t waste your fairness on Mr. Emerance, Cousin Elmer. He thought we would despise him for cooking our supper, and he was meanly writhing through his philosophy. Was he despising us, I wonder, for cleaning up the dishes after him?”

  “He would feel it was different with women,” Kelwyn was beginning, but she cut in with the demand:

  “Because women are naturally servile?”

  “Because they are naturally domestic. But what he said really interested me. It seemed a survival of the sort of question that vexed Emerson and Lowell in their turn.”

  “But I don’t think Emerson and Lowell would have shown that they were ashamed of getting supper,” the girl retorted.

  “They were perplexed by their relation to those who got it for them,” Kelwyn insisted.

  “Well, good-night, Cousin Elmer. Cousin Carry, good-night. I believe I’m going to bed.”

  Kelwyn looked at his wife. “Isn’t this rather a strange turn that Parthenope is taking?”

  “I don’t know. Of course she is a little disappointed at his not waiting for her to come back.” Kelwyn’s look deepened into a stare. Husbands live all their lives with their wives, and do not learn the difference between men and women in the most elementary things. “Can you make out who or what he is? Did he drop any hint about himself? Did he give you any clew?”

  “I didn’t ask for any. He had told us all I know. He seems to have been a teacher in the public schools and a pupil in the cooking-schools. We’ve had practical proof of his gifts in one wa
y, and he has tried to show himself a social philosopher with me. I must say his omelets are good, whatever his ideas are.”

  Mrs. Kelwyn said, with apparent irrelevance: “You can see that her curiosity is piqued by him. That’s what made her so severe. Is he going to stay long with the Shakers?”

  “Really, I don’t know. It appears that they have no room for him, from what you have told me. And I don’t understand that they have any work.”

  “They would let him stay somehow. You know they never turn anybody away. It would be simply impossible to let him come here. And I am very glad he didn’t stay the night.” After a while she resumed, briefly: “I’ve been afraid that the intimacy was advancing faster than the acquaintance would bear. It was very intimate, their getting the supper together, that way; it was domestic. And now, her condemning him so harshly! I don’t like that. Yes, I’m glad he’s gone.”

  The stars of the summer sky twinkled in the pools of the road and glinted from the dripping foliage of the wayside bushes. As Emerance kept on toward the blackness of the woods, the wagon-track lost its distinctness and dwindled into two parallel ruts which the grass overhung the more densely from the drenching of the recent rain. Before he entered the shadow his shoes were soaked through, but the moisture gave him a pleasure, and he exulted in the rich solitude and gloom. Presently he was aware of not being alone. There was a damp smell of horses and the sound of their long, sighing breath, and then there was a burst of blasphemy from a man who was apparently swearing to himself.

  “Hello, there! Where you goin’? You’ll be right bunt into my hossis, fust thing you know!”

  Emerance stopped and retorted, “What are you doing here with your horses, anyway, in the middle of the road?”

  The cursing voice responded: “Where’d you want me to be with my hossis? Something’s broke ‘th my wagon. Got a match?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Emerance said. “But can’t I help you somehow?”