Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, do let them, Cousin Carry,” Parthenope joined in their prayer.

  She was standing by the wheel with them, and Emerance challenged her with, “Why don’t you come, too?”

  “I hadn’t been asked,” she answered.

  “Well, neither had the boys.”

  “I’m not a boy.”

  “Oh, then I ask you.”

  “Shall I, Cousin Carry?” Parthenope asked, in feigned subjection.

  Mrs. Kelwyn said, as if the subjection were real “Why, certainly,” and the young man and young girl, with the two boys, struck into a wood-path from the road.

  Mrs. Kite overtook the halting vehicle with a modest effect of not seeing it, but Mrs. Kelwyn, with the air of one who might as well suffer for a sheep as a lamb, called to her, “Won’t you let us take you home, Mrs. Kite?”

  “Why, yes,” Mrs. Kite replied, with a ladylike acquiescence, which was partly temperamental and partly from the feeling of proprietorial right in the vehicle. She climbed to Mrs. Kelwyn’s side, and as Kelwyn started up the horse she said, “Elder Rufus gave it to us married folks pretty strong, didn’t he?”

  Mrs. Kelwyn answered aloof, “I thought it in very poor taste.”

  “Well, I don’t know. The more you see of the Shakers the more you think there is something to what they say. I don’t know as I should want to be one of them; but, the way I look at a couple like Tad Alison and his wife, I don’t think marriage is always such a great success.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Mrs. Kelwyn returned, severely, “ that life among the Shakers would be a great success if the men were drunkards and the women were slatterns.”

  Mrs. Kite laughed with smooth cheerfulness. “Well, I guess that’s something so.” She did not apparently take to herself the reproach of slattern, but if she had done so she would still have been secure in her husband’s one most conspicuous virtue — he, as she often said, chewed and he smoked, but he never touched a drop.

  XIX

  ON their way home by the road which they had taken with Mrs. Kite the Kelwyns found the air as sultry, if not as close, as it had been in the Shaker meeting-house. But for the young people in the woods it renewed its freshness and sweetness, as if the trees of the forest had drawn it in deep silent breaths from the heart of the earth and respired it from their leaves. The boys ran before the girl and the young man into the shadow and then ran back to them, and again ran forward and lagged behind them, in a theory of going a walk which is common to dogs and boys.

  Parthenope and Emerance found themselves in a grass-grown track among the trees, which he said must have been a wagon-road for hauling out the timber when the forest was cut twenty years before. It grew fainter and vaguer as they advanced, and could scarcely be discerned when it ended in what had been a clearing, but was now grown up to underbrush and brambles, with here and there an old apple-tree looking scared amid the wildings round it. A weedy pit, with the brick and mortar of a fallen chimney in it, was the cellar of a vanished house, and near this pit there yawned suddenly at his feet a well-hole, like a cyclopean eye, with the sinister gleam of water far down in it. He called to Parthenope to keep the boys back, and hastened to cover it with pieces of the mouldering joists and boards lying about.

  “That gave me a good start,” he said. “I wonder why the ruin of an old home like this is so dreadful.”

  “You said that such ruins were ghosts.”

  “Yes; I wonder why we should be afraid of the dead, anyway? I remember that after my father died I was afraid to be in the room with him, though he had never shown me anything but love and kindness all my life.”

  “I can’t remember my father at all,” the girl said. “Or my mother, either. But if their spirits came back and told me who they were I don’t believe I should be afraid of them.”

  “I must be nearer the aboriginal savage and his superstitions. The curious thing is that we modem people don’t believe in our superstitions.”

  “Yes, that is true, and it is curious. But I don’t like bad signs. If that gypsy girl had told my fortune wrong, it would have made me miserable.”

  “I don’t believe I should have minded that,” he said.

  They talked on, noting their characteristic likenesses and unlikenesses to each other, sitting on a rough-hewn log that had once been the threshold of the house, while the boys played cautiously about, keeping near them, as from a sense of the loneliness of the place.

  “Do you suppose,” Emerance asked, at a tangent, “that if this were the ruin of a Shaker family house it would be creepy?”

  The girl reflected. “No, I don’t suppose it would. They seem like ghosts now, and I don’t believe they would want to haunt any place after they had got done with it. Besides — I don’t know how to express it exactly — their life wouldn’t have gone deep enough into it to keep them rooted.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Emerance said, and he added, “Very interesting, indeed. Does their life seem so superficial, then?”

  “Not that, exactly. But living that way in common, it seems more spread out — thinner.”

  “I wonder if they feel that?” he mused. “There is something in what you say.”

  “You oughtn’t to make fulsome compliments,” she said, stealing a look at him over her shoulder.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re surprised that I can think at all.”

  “Oh no, oh no! Merely that — now this will offend you worse — that you care to think.”

  “That doesn’t offend me, if it distinguishes between me and other girls. I don’t believe they like to think. Do men?”

  He laughed. “Not usually.”

  “Well, now, I am going to think very boldly,” she said, and as he looked at her inquiringly she rose and shook some clinging bark and chips from her skirt. “I think we shall be late for dinner if we don’t hurry home.”

  They joined in a light-hearted laugh. She called to the boys, and they all struck through the woods into a piece of pasture-land beyond. It was a narrow strip dividing them from the highway, where a house stood, with a woman in the open door at the back brushing out her long hair. She saw them coming, and shouted to them to look out or they would be mired in the swampy ground which she pointed at with her brush. She beckoned them to the path that led across the pasture to her house.

  “It’s that drunkard’s,” Parthenope explained. “He lent Mrs. Kite a book, an old novel, and I read the first volume. I wonder if we could get the second.”

  “We might try,” Emerance suggested.

  “For the sake of experiment?”

  “Well, yes.”

  They found the man sitting on the front doorstep smoking, with his unkempt brood about him. The youngest, a little barefooted boy of two years, sat beside him playing with the edge of an axe; the others stared up at the strangers with an interest which their father did not seem to share, even when Parthenope had courage to ask about the book. He answered civilly that she was welcome to the other volume. He went back into the house for it, and returned with two volumes. He forgot, he said, that there were three in all, and he seemed to have read them. Emerance took them; they were volumes of an early American romance, in the original edition.

  “You know these are worth money?” Emerance said.

  “They belong to an uncle of mine; I couldn’t sell them.” The man’s gaunt slip of a wife had joined them, with her hair now coiled in her neck; she was still pretty. “Go and get the rest,” he ordered, without looking at her, and she came again with her arms full of the same author and screeched her comments, which he received without a word or glance in her direction. But there seemed a community of pride between them in the possession of something that others could value; neither of them were of such evil or unhappy countenance as Parthenope said she had expected when they had thanked them for the volumes which Emerance carried away for her.

  The Kelwyn boys ran ahead with the effect of having escaped with their lives from t
he boys and dogs silently surrounding them during the parley.

  It seemed by an afterthought that the woman screamed after the girl, “Well, call again!”

  Parthenope said she would, and that Mrs. Alison must come and see Mrs. Kelwyn. “I don’t know,” she confided to Emerance, “ whether I ought to have done that, but, if she comes, I can see her. Wasn’t it dreadful, that child playing with the axe, and his father and mother walking over him and not paying the least attention? I wonder how such children get through the world.”

  “Perhaps,” Emerance suggested, “there’s a good deal more of what used to be called overruling Providence than people will allow nowadays.”

  “There must be. Oh, boys, see the rabbit!” she called to the little Kelwyns, and she pointed to the young wild thing loping across the road before them.

  Emerance began to whistle softly, and the rabbit stopped and sat up, with its long ears quivering and its body throbbing with the strong pulse of its frightened heart. When the warbling note ceased, it vanished at a gallop into the wayside brambles.

  “How beautiful!” the girl sighed. “I wish I could have done that.”

  “You had only to whistle.”

  “But I can’t whistle.”

  “I will teach you, so that you can charm the next rabbit.”

  “A good many girls are learning to whistle now. I think they are overdoing it,” she evaded him.

  That afternoon, when Emerance was taking leave before going back to the Shakers’, where a lodging had been fitted up for him in what he confessed was the house ordinarily occupied by tramps, Mrs. Kelwyn had a burst of hospitality which carried her so far that she said, “Why don’t you come and stay here with us till the Shakers can provide properly for you?”

  No one could have been more surprised than her husband; but he said, as if the thing were not at all surprising: “Yes; why not? We have some eighteen or twenty rooms that you could have, if you don’t want beds in them all. And you would be a brother in misfortune.”

  This was more than his wife meant him to say, but it was not more than enough to overcome the young man’s reluctance, apparently. His reluctance was silent, however, and, after a longish pause, he said, “If you wouldn’t mind my coming till the Shakers have some of their rooms free—”

  “Why, certainly,” Kelwyn said, “as long or as short a time as you like.”

  “And you would let me pay for my board—”

  “It seems to me, Mr. Emerance, that you have been working for your board all along,” Mrs. Kelwyn hastily interposed, as if to keep her husband from saying it and taking the credit of their hospitality from her.

  ‘”Oh, but that was different. That was merely in the abstract.”

  “Make it as much in the concrete as you like,” Kelwyn cut in before his wife could think of the antithesis; and on terms that allowed Emerance to contribute a fair share to the general expense for provisions, and to exercise the right of intervening between the Kelwyns and Mrs. Kite’s cooking when it became intolerable, the affair was arranged with the provisionality which he exacted. Parthenope had listened at the beginning in a dispassionate silence which she felt her due, but she did not wait for the end of the treaty. When he came out, Emerance found her sitting on the threshold stone with a listless and absent air.

  “I don’t know but you’ll think I have acted on an impulse,” he said, with the gladness of his heart fading a little from his face at his doubt of hers.

  “Yes?” she asked, indifferently. “What have you done?”

  “I’ve let your cousins take pity on me and give me food and shelter.”

  “Is it so had as that?”

  “Not quite; they are to let me work for my living. All the same, I feel like an intruder, but I had no one to advise me.”

  “Do you mean me?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I couldn’t very well have advised you not to stay,” she said as carelessly as before, but she added more kindly, “I am an intruder, too, you know.” Then throwing her pretence of listlessness and absence to the winds she ended, “And as for impulse, I don’t think I’ve been much guided by principle myself.”

  “Since when?” he asked, smiling gratefully.

  “You think you couldn’t say?”

  “I might if I were driven into a corner.”

  “I won’t drive you into a corner. I think you are very good. Perhaps you would let me help you work for a living. Or teach me how to work for mine, I mean.”

  “As far as I know I will. I suppose I shall always be a pedagogue of one kind or other.”

  She considered now that he needed a little rap to restore a manly tone in him. It was the duty of a woman to keep a man from ever taking an unmanly tone, and if Emerance was humbled by an unworthy consciousness she would uplift him by humbling him still more.

  “It’s a noble calling, pedagogy; I can’t think of anything higher than teaching the more advanced branches of cookery.”

  Emerance looked at her and then he laughed. But whether at her irony or his own sense of deserving it she did not care. She laughed, too.

  XX

  THE simple idyl of the passing days varied little in its dramatic range, though there was difference enough in its incidents to keep the fancy and the sympathy amused. One morning when Parthenope and Emerance were getting the common breakfast, there came a family of organ-grinders, who paused under the elms as if arrested there by the scent of the coffee stealing from the kitchen. There were two men — an older man who sat silently apart in the shade and a young man who came forward and offered to play. He had the sardonic eyes of a goat, but the baby in the arms of a young mother had a Napoleonic face, classic and mature. She herself was beautiful, and she said they were all from the mountains near Genoa and were presently on their way to the next town. They were peasants, but they had a grace which made Parthenope sigh aloud in her thought of the contrast they offered to the mannerless uncouthness of the Yankee country-folks. The woman complained of the heat, but sweetly; and the young man said they liked their wandering life; the old man smiled benignly, but said nothing, except to thank Parthenope beautifully when she served him first with the coffee and bread which she brought out for the whole family.

  In the understanding of their pastoral situation tacit between them, “What part of the idyl should you call this?” she asked Emerance when the Italians departed, scattering benedictions behind them; and he answered:

  “Oh, a little dramatic interlude.”

  “I don’t see much drama in it,” she said, looking after them down the road. “I wish they could have taken me with them. I could have got a tambourine, and played and danced, and people would have brought me out coffee.”

  “Not as good as you make,” Emerance was sure. “Your gems are burning; I can smell them here,” she said, and she fled before him into the kitchen.

  There seemed some mysterious property in his nature which had the virtue of turning the prose of every day into the poetry of every other day, but her youth accepted the poetry without the scrutiny which might have proved self-analysis in the end.

  They let the Kelwyns take the carryall for the village shopping, and stayed at home that day, Parthenope to put the house in order, and Emerance to hoe the corn, which had been outstripped by the weeds in the hot weather. About noon an Irish linen-peddler showed a sulky visage in the doorway. Emerance came in from the garden, as if casually, and then they invited the peddler in, too; being so civilly treated, he promptly grew humbler and told his simple tale. He had been an iron-puddler in a Pittsburg foundry, and had turned linen-peddler because he was out of work. But prosperity fled before him as he wandered eastward. He did not sell much linen at the farm-houses; people thought they could get things cheaper at the stores, and generally he travelled by rail from village to village, and so found what market he could. Parthenope gave him a glass of lemonade, and then he shouldered his pack and strode out into the furnace of the heat, while they remained and p
hilosophized his case.

  “I could never be a peddler,” she said, thoughtfully. “I should not have the courage to push in.”

  “But if necessity had the courage, and pushed you in?”

  “It seemed impudence in his case at first. I’m glad it wasn’t. How hard life seems when you come face to face with it!”

  They tried to be sad, but they could not. Perhaps life as they saw it reflected in each other’s eyes was not hard; the trouble they borrowed did not really harass them.

  A storm came up and raged for an hour without cooling the air. One of the clouds hung so low as to mix with the pines in the horse - pasture, where the ghostly estray which the Kite boy had turned out to grass there wavered in and out of sight as the lightning rent the lowering vapor.

  “This is like the day when the bear-leader came,” Parthenope mused aloud. “I hope my cousins and the boys are under shelter.”

  “Oh, they have turned in somewhere with this storm coming up.”

  “I’ve often wondered what became of that bearleader. What does become of bear-leaders when they are not leading their bears?” she questioned on. “They must find it hard to get lodgings. Are there hotels where they make a specialty of taking in bears and their leaders, do you suppose?”

  They played with the question and then dropped it in gay hopelessness.

  Emerance came to the window, where she was looking down, and saw a wayfarer leaving the kitchen steps with the hand-out which Mrs. Kite never refused his tribe.

  He was squalid enough, but sometimes the tramps were interesting. Parthenope sketched one: a little, sailorlike Frenchman, with a swarthy face and black eyes and thin gold earrings that twinkled together. He stood for his portrait with his hands full of Mrs. Kite’s cold griddle - cakes, smiling, and he finally accepted a ten-cent note with charming effusion.

  Another day, at the close of a long afternoon’s ramble with Emerance, as they were emerging from a wood-road into the highway, a tramp as far out of the average as this acceptable little Frenchman was in his way seemed to rise from the ground like a human cloud. He was a gigantic negro, with a sullen, bestial face, which looked the wickeder because of his vast, naked feet. He had his boots and a very good new-looking hand-bag slung on a stick. He faltered a moment, glaring at them with bloodshot eyes, and then lurked away into the shadow of the woods.