Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What is his fate?”

  “He dies at sunrise.”

  “Say it in boy-talk!” one of the boys called far off, and jeers came back with hysterical shrieks from the girls. But the tumult had died away when Parthenope found herself outside with the two Kelwyns and confronted with Emerance’s absent-minded looks. She was not sure that his part in the incident had been altogether dignified. Perhaps that was because it had apparently brought him into ridicule with these boys; but she resented the ridicule for him, and what Emerance had said interested her. She would like to talk with him about it and convince him that his point of view was not artistic; there was the ideal to be considered in everything, and there were other points which she believed he had not considered as much as she had. But this went out of her mind when he spoke.

  “Why, I didn’t know you were here!” he exclaimed, with a pleasure that imparted itself to her.

  She put out her hand, and he clasped it eagerly. “Yes, I was there near the teacher. I didn’t see you till you rose.” She felt that she ought to have said “quite see you,” but it was too late, now.

  “Are you going home? May I go with you?” he asked, and she felt herself singled out for public notice by his acquaintance, till gradually they made their way through the crowd and up the road together. They found a good many strawberries beside the walls, and they stopped to help the children gather them. At one place he got over the wall and stripped some leaves from a wild-grape vine, which she pinned together with little twigs into baskets to hold the berries. While he helped her fill them he was asking her about the people and events at the Family house, and telling her about his being in Boston. It had been very hot, there, for several days, and he said she was fortunate to be in the country, out of it. She said it had been hot in the country, too.

  It was her chance to make that point about the ideal, but she must have made it very ineffectively, for he only looked dreamily at her when she recurred, abruptly and, she felt, awkwardly, to the incident in the school-house.

  “Yes,” he assented, without apparent consciousness of his assent; “it’s an experiment I should like to try. I’ve thought of it a good deal in my teaching.”

  “What experiment?” she asked.

  “Oh!” He came back from his distance. “I haven’t touched your point. But the experiment I mean is the attempt to teach dramatically. All children delight in make-believe. Why shouldn’t they make-believe with facts instead of fancies?”

  “I don’t believe I understand you,” Parthenope said, awed by the mystery, but still authoritatively. “I don’t believe you could apply the dramatic method to geography or arithmetic, for example.”

  “Don’t you?” he deferred; but he had the courage to say: “Those were just the studies in which I thought it could be best employed: a commercial transaction, on any large or small scale, with buying and selling, and the necessary figuring, would interest the children. Or a lot of them coming from a far country or from round the world, and looking up their travels on maps and globes. Don’t you see?”

  Parthenope shook her head. “It wouldn’t be either good playing or good learning; I’m afraid the children would care more for the fun than the useful knowledge. No, Mr. Emerance, it strikes me as fantastic.”

  “It isn’t, it isn’t!” he protested. “I can convince you—”

  “No, no,” she laughed. “You think it’s practicable because you wish to, and you wish to because you care more for the playing than for the teaching.”

  “If I believed that — You throw light on the very point that has been pressing itself home with me. Sometimes I should like to talk it all out with you.”

  “Well, there’s nothing I like better than throwing light on points,” she said, with the levity with which women know how to defer situations threatening a premature gravity.

  He submitted, and they climbed back over the wall. While they stood waiting for the boys to accomplish their vainglorious feat of getting over unhelped, they heard the sound of wheels, and an open buggy came round a turn of the road. There were two women in the buggy — the teacher and the committee - girl. The teacher was driving, and Parthenope decided that she was the more practical. She seemed as if she were not going to stop after nodding to Parthenope, who said, “Won’t you have some strawberries?” and put up the leaf-basket she was carrying, to the open but politely silent dismay of the Kelwyn boys. “You were very kind to me,” she added, as if some justification were necessary. She was willing that her superior breeding should make itself felt in a superfluity of gratitude.

  “Whoa!” the teacher called to her horse. “How beautiful they are! Oh, thank you! It was very nice of you to come in. We like to have people come to the examinations.”

  She was pleased, but if she was impressed by Parthenope’s politeness she was not suppressed.

  Emerance went round to the other side of the buggy, which began to move on again, and Parthenope, through her own talk with the teacher, heard the committee-girl saying: “I was very much interested by what you said to the boys. I’m afraid it wasn’t much understood.”

  “I didn’t expect it to be entirely,” Emerance answered. “But I chose to take my chance. We must try to say something for that side when we can.”

  “Oh yes,” the girl agreed. “And you mustn’t be discouraged by me. Perhaps they will understand it afterward.” But she seemed a little shy of Emerance, as a queer person of distinction, and she added to the teacher, “Nelly, I guess if we don’t hurry we shall be late for tea.”

  “Well, I should say as much!” the teacher answered, gayly. “It was nearly five when we left the school, and it’s full five now. Well, good - afternoon,” she called over her shoulder to Parthenope when the horse had started forward at a pull of the reins.

  In like manner the committee - girl called back to Emerance, “Well, good-afternoon,” and he and Parthenope called after them, “Good-bye.”

  “Those are very able girls. They are both going to the Centennial, I hear,” he said; and though “able girls” seemed a funny phrase to Parthenope, she did not remark on it.

  “Yes?” she prompted him.

  “I went in,” He continued, “before the examinations began, and they showed me some of the children’s work in drawings. They were after nature — leaves; and there were geometrical designs; very creditable. I thought their pupils were well forward in all their studies; didn’t you?”

  “I only got in for the ‘scene,’” Parthenope answered; and now she thought he would tell her why he had been so particularly interested in that. But he did not. He only said:

  “The committee man — or girl — said there used to be sixty little ones in that school, and now there are barely half. But the population all about is decreasing. It makes it rather melancholy, don’t you think, to find so few houses?”

  “Yes, indeed. And in the woods you come on old chimneys and cellars and bits of garden. I’m afraid of ghosts when I see them.”

  “They are the ghosts,” the young man said. Parthenope had been deciding that Emerance would not have talked so exclusively to the committee - girl and now so much more of her if his mind had not been on the pretty teacher. She was pretty; Parthenope was not going to hide it from herself, and, indeed, she did not know why she should.

  She recurred to the teacher openly: “I’ve been trying to think whether her rivalling the morning hour, with all that gold in her mouth, is disfiguring or not. Perhaps it’s charming, or makes her the more charming.”

  Emerance gave her a candid stare.

  “Oh! You haven’t followed my leaps and bounds back to that pretty teacher,” she exulted, without knowing she exulted, and in her joy she had strength to demand, “What is that point you want the light of wisdom on?” But again she saw that Emerance had not followed her.

  When he did arrive, with a man’s successive steps, he said: “Oh! Perhaps I should have to talk too much about myself.”

  “I can understand why yo
u should hate that. There’s nothing I dislike so much. But I should like to hear when you’re ready.”

  “I sha’n’t forget your promise,” he said.

  “And I,” she challenged him, “shouldn’t mind keeping it at once.”

  He hesitated, and then he said, thoughtfully, “It’s always a question how much good you can do by interfering with people when you find them going wrong.”

  “Like those boys, you mean? If you want me to be perfectly frank, Mr. Emerance, I think there were two chances of being absurd to one of being useful in that case.”

  “And you thought me absurd?”

  “I didn’t say that; I say you took the chances.”

  “And one ought never to take such chances?”

  “I didn’t say that, either.” She stiffened a little at his pursuit.

  “But you think one oughtn’t to act on impulse?”

  “I can only say for myself,” she returned, “that I never do.” She remembered the incident of giving the coffee to the bear in time to save herself. “That is, I never do as a rule. And I believe it’s the only safe rule. One’s impulse may turn out inspiration, but it’s taking chances, and one oughtn’t to take chances. That’s gambling!” Having levelled him with the dust, she relented from her superiority gently, almost tenderly. Certainly she relented encouragingly in asking, “Don’t you think so?”

  “I never thought of it in that way,” he owned.

  “Well,” she conceded, “I don’t know that I ever did myself. But I can look back and see that I must always have been governed by some such principle, and if that is so, oughtn’t you to regard impulse as something coming within the region of ethics? Oughtn’t you to regard it as immoral?” Parthenope had been in the habit of posing girls with this sort of talk. But in her heart it rather surprised her that she should have posed a young man by it when Emerance said: “I should like to think the point over. I shouldn’t like to assent to it — it’s interesting — on impulse.”

  “Oh no,” she returned, with bright tolerance. Then she did not know but he was making fun of her.

  XVII

  MRS. KITE, sitting at her door in the long leisure of the summer afternoon, called to Parthenope as she came round the corner of the house with Emerance and the boys: “Your folks have gone to the village to get some baker’s bread. I forgot to set mine last night. Why, Mr. Emerance! When did you get back?” She came gracefully forward to meet him, and he took off his hat to her as they shook hands.

  “This morning. I hope you’re all well, Mrs. Kite.”

  “I guess we’re always well,” she tinkled back. “Mr. Kite will be glad to see you; and Raney and Albert, too.”

  “Has Mr. Kite got any work for me?” Emerance asked, laughing.

  I don’t know as he has. But you better stay to supper and ask.”

  “No, Mrs. Kite,” Parthenope interposed, with an impulse from her old indignation at her cousins’ inhospitality to Emerance, “he’s engaged to take supper with us.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Kite easily assented; “first come, first served. I don’t know as I have got very much to offer visitors this evening.”

  Emerance looked from one to the other with a troubled countenance. Mrs. Kite turned away, smiling contentedly, and Parthenope from her doorstep, as she sank down on it, asked, easily, from her satisfied superiority, “Won’t you Have a threshold, Mr. Emerance?”

  “Why, yes, thank you.” He took his place on the wide stone lintel and faced her from the door-jamb opposite that against which she leaned, with the trouble still in his eyes.

  She laughed with sudden misgiving. “You didn’t like my implying that I had asked you to stay already?”

  “Well, I can’t say that. I liked it well enough; but that is one of the things I am uncertain about.” The two boys came to the girl’s knee and asked, successively, “May we go and play with Arthur?”

  “Yes, run along,” she consented, and when the boys ran along, in that order of their years which regulated their whole lives, she pressed her question.

  “I was thinking,” he answered, “about the Shakers. They have the perpetual comfort of saying the thing that is.”

  “And not even implying the thing that is not?” she pursued him, in his reluctance.

  “Now you are too hard on me! I didn’t mean to—”

  “Let me see what you were thinking? I know you didn’t. But isn’t there such a thing as carrying the truth too far? I believe you often hurt people’s feelings by that, and cruelty is as bad as fibbing. Worse.”

  “The Shakers never hurt people’s feelings; they are never cruel.”

  “Why don’t you join them, then?”

  “Ah,” he said, “that is a hard question.”

  “Then you are quibbling as badly as I was.” He looked at her with a knot of mystification between his brows. Suddenly she started forward. “What in the world is that?”

  He glanced round over his shoulder, and then rose, the more fully to take in the apparition. A large van, drawn by two horses, was coming up the road out of the shelter of the woods, and as it drew nearer it showed, gayly painted, a framework of wood under a dark tenting of oilcloth, all in very good repair, and with a certain consciousness of state in its leisurely advance. “It looks,” Emerance said, absently, “like a circus-wagon strayed or stolen.”

  “No,” Parthenope exulted, getting to her feet, “it’s a gypsy-van. Where are the boys? They mustn’t miss it.”

  They had not missed it. They had followed it out of the shadow of the woods, and Arthur Kite, who was with them, was already testing the temper of the swarthy men and of the three dogs which had accompanied it, a dog on either side, and another dog keeping sullenly under it.

  The van stopped before the door, and Mrs. Kite came out to welcome it. Because she did so, perhaps, Parthenope remained standing on her threshold, with Emerance below her. “You want to come and see how nice it is inside,” Mrs. Kite called to them. “It’s a regular room.”

  But Parthenope sat down again, and from the back door of the van the figure of a large, elderly woman descended and came toward her. She was very dark, with coal-black eyes and coal-black hair turning ashen. She wore a flowing dress of white with a green calash bonnet, and a green barbaric scarf loosely twisted round her neck; yet higher on her throat she had a deep necklace of branchy coral, and she bore a various burden of baskets and trays of laces, cheap jewels, combs, brushes, soaps, and many knickknacks. Without speaking, she first spread her treasures on the grass, and when she had disposed of them in a glittering array, to which her eyes and her white teeth and the jewels in her ears gleamed responsive, she invited the pretty miss to buy, squatting behind her wares and hugging her knees with hands which she detached now and then to take up the beads, or the machine laces which she pretended to have made herself, and dangling them before the girl. As she offered them she talked, answering willingly enough, at the young man’s prompting, that she had lived twenty years in Canada, and had come from England, and this was her first trip in the United States. She was quite patient of Parthenope’s refusals to buy, and said: “Look into our wagon, miss. My granddaughter is there; she will read your hand.”

  “Your granddaughter?” Parthenope answered. “Don’t you want to look in?” she turned to Emerance, as if to justify her own weakness by his yielding, too.

  “Why, yes,” he assented, following her quick flight from the doorway to the van.

  It was luxuriously appointed, with cushioned seats, cotton lace curtains, and mirrors. A comfortable bed was set crosswise of the rear, and on the thickly rugged floor, with her back to a frowzy boy on the front seat, crouched a lazy-eyed little maid, with her feet drawn close up under her. While the boy spoke now and then to the dogs in his Romany, she answered Emerance’s questions in indifferent but not unamiable composure, to the effect chiefly that she was sixteen years old, and the wagon cost five hundred dollars, and her father dealt in horses. The man had untethered two co
lts from the tail of the wagon, and, holding by their halter - ropes, was letting them graze beside it. The old woman pressed toward the door with her trays and baskets. “Let her tell your fortune, my pretty young lady. She knows the stars. She has got charms, and if there’s anything bad in your stars the charm will make it all right. You needn’t be afraid. I can see by looking at you that you will be very happy.”

  The gypsy girl rose and came nearer. “You must put out your hand,” she bade Parthenope, who glanced at Emerance’s grave face, in which she read misgiving. She perversely put out her hand in resentment of his tacit interference.

  The gypsy studied it. “You will be married, and your husband will be a tall, thin man, with gray eyes and light hair.” Parthenope was conscious of the impudent portraiture of Emerance, but he seemed not to recognize it. “You will have to look out, because he will be very strong-willed, and you are set in your ways, too. You will quarrel and you will want to part, but you will make it up and live happy. He will die before you do, but so old you won’t want to marry again. Fifty cents.”

  The demand came like a part of the prediction, and it was a moment before Parthenope realized her indebtedness. At the same time, she realized her insolvency with an alarm that extorted from her the cry, “But I haven’t any money!”

  She had given her money to Kelwyn for safe-keeping on her arrival, going to him for her small occasions. Now he was away, and she knew that Mrs. Kelwyn had no change lying about.

  “You can borrow it, pretty lady,” the old gypsy urged, caressingly. The girl crept back to her place and lounged there, looking at Parthenope with a smile of indifference.

  “I will ask Mrs. Kite for the money,” Parthenope said. But she came back from her errand rueful. “The landlady’s husband is away. But my cousin, who has my money, will be back soon from the village and I will pay you.”

  The old woman said something in Romany to the man with the colts; he answered gruffly. “He says we have got to go now; we can’t wait. The charm comes for the fifty cents, too; it will keep the quarrel from being bad.”