Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  If chance had saved him from responding to this, it was by too bare a chance that he should now succeed as a playwright instead of a player. He had been willing to experiment with either career; he was, as he said, an empiricist; he was a mere opportunist, as she would have said later; and he had no decision of character. Yet he had charm, charm that she felt now in his mere presence, in his nearness to her. What his charm was she could not have said, unless it was his goodness. It must be that, for now, when she was so blest in him, she did not feel any more or any less than she felt at the very beginning that he was good. There was rest in that, there was peace. When at last she lifted her head back and looked at her sketch, she turned her face up to ask him, “Is it anything like?”

  “It’s wonderful,” he said, stooping on one knee beside her and bringing his face close to hers to get her point of view. “I don’t understand how you do it. Is it — is it — good?” he pursued, humbly.

  “Good enough for me, if you think it’s wonderful.” She turned her eyes to his, and a mist came between them. “But otherwise I think it’s rather feeble. You’re not going to marry a Rosa Bonheur, you know.” She laughed, and he laughed with her; they did not know why.

  “We’ll keep it as a memento of that first day,” he suggested.

  “Well,” she assented, rising.

  She felt in the pocket which women’s dresses had in that day, and Emerance saw from her face that she found it empty. He divined also that she wished to pay the man, if not the bear, for posing, and he said, “Let me give him something.”

  She stared absently and then submitted. “I suppose you’ll have to, after this. It isn’t the first time.”

  The bear-leader took the money, and, after recognizing himself in Parthenope’s sketch, he said goodbye, with ceremonies in which the bear was obliged to share. Then they went away down the road, and Raney started toward the barn. But Parthenope stayed him with a question which had occurred to her through her knowledge of French while she was sketching and trying not to be conscious of Emerance.

  “What was that he kept saying to you about the brave boy?”

  Raney grinned. “He want me to thank Arthur for bring him something to eat in that shanty in the woods when he’ll be sick with his bear.”

  “When he was sick in the shanty?” she pursued.

  “With rheumatism after that big storm.”

  “And Arthur carried food to him?” Raney nodded. “Well! But what kind of food did you carry him?” Arthur had now become the centre of a general interest which did not inconvenience him, and he kept a stolid reserve under the pressure of this question.

  Raney answered for him, still grinning, “The man said he bring those pies.”

  “Well, Mr. Arthur!” his mother, who had hurried back from the kitchen, burst out in the sudden light which the fact cast upon a dark point of history, “so you was the rat, was you? I’ll attend to you when I get round to you once,” she threatened him, but with such open pride and joy in his guilt as not to alarm him seriously. It was not his principle to show any kind of feeling, and he now remained cold amidst the rays of wonder centring upon him from all eyes.

  “Emerance,” Kelwyn said from that side of his mind which his wife never felt sure she approved, “we seem to be standing in the presence of a hero. What do you think ought to be done with him? It’s all very well for a hero to feed pies to a sick bearleader and his bear — the bear ate the pies, too?” he turned to the boy who rubbed the path with his toe and dropped his gaze. “But is it right for a hero to steal his mother’s pies for the purpose?”

  “I suppose,” Emerance reflected, “that it’s always a question whether a child can steal, strictly speaking, from its parents; and I’ve understood that strategy of all kinds, even to the supression of truth, is allowable in a hero.”

  “But if such a hero were a pupil of yours, what would you do with him?”

  “Well, I should begin by keeping him after school and looking carefully into the case.”

  “How perfectly cold - blooded!” Parthenope broke out. “I think he did right, and I should praise him before the whole school.”

  Emerance looked round at her with returning seriousness. “I doubt if you could do that exactly.”

  “So impossible is it,” Kelwyn interposed, “for a woman to enter into any question of sociology.”

  “But if he were your son, Cousin Elmer?”

  “Ah, there we have the personal appeal, the inevitable womanly, at once. Boys,” he called to his children, “did you know that Arthur was taking his mother’s pies and feeding them to the man and the bear?”

  “Yes, papa,” they answered, cheerfully, in their succession.

  “And why didn’t you tell us?” their mother put in; she had now joined the group before the house. “Didn’t you know it was wrong for Arthur to take his mother’s pies? Why didn’t you tell your father?”

  “He said the bear would eat us,” the boys explained with full confidence in their justification.

  “It seems to have been very simple,” Kelwyn said to his wife. He turned again to his children. “Did Arthur say why he was taking the pies to the bear-man?”

  “He said he was going to run away with the man when he got well?”

  “Ah, that’s simpler still,” Kelwyn said, and when his children entreated him, “May we go and play with Arthur?” he answered, “Yes — provisionally — you may.”

  The case had passed beyond Mrs. Kelwyn’s protests; but she found solace in the thought that they were playing with Arthur for the last time. Mrs. Kite went into the house with another promise to give it to her son, and Parthenope said to Kelwyn: “If you are joking, I am sure I’m not, and I approve of what Arthur did. He couldn’t let the creatures starve. What do you think, Elder Nathaniel?” she turned to the Shaker, who had stood by, a silent witness.

  “Nay, it is hard dealing with children; they must be judged according to their limited experience.”

  “Well, let us hope we shall be judged according to our limited experience, too,” Kelwyn ended the inquiry.

  Elder Nathaniel now took leave of the Kelwyns, so sadly and sweetly that they all felt a premature homesickness at their parting. “I am sorry,” he said, “that you are not going to stay and help us put the Kites out of the house. We shall surely not let them remain,” he ended, severely.

  “Oh, you mustn’t turn them out now,” Kelwyn said. “At least, not for anything we’ve suffered. The few weeks we’ve been here do seem rather more like months, but it hasn’t been all suffering, by any means. It’s been, in some respects, highly educational; at least, it’s been instructive. I shall understand the sociology of the present, if not of the past, the better for my experience of the Kites. They seem a reversion to a type antedating Puritanism, which I couldn’t imagine finding in New England.”

  “Yee, that is interesting,” Elder Nathaniel assented, and they had some moments of philosophy, which Mrs. Kelwyn interrupted with hospitable insistances that the Elder should stay to dinner, and so drove him away.

  Mrs. Ager came over again from her house with some little cakes she had baked for provisioning the boys on their journey to their new home, and she bestowed them on Mrs. Kelwyn with assurances, intentionally loud enough for Mrs. Kite to hear in her kitchen, that they were not made with rancid butter or milk not fit for the pigs. She wrought herself into such a generous rage that she forgot to say good-bye, and had to shout her farewell from her own door when she got home.

  “Ain’t she great?” Mrs. Kite asked, with humorous appreciation, as she came forward to the Kelwyns. “Well, I guess your dinner’s ready for you, if you are. I’ll bring it right in.”

  They had a gayer meal than they had enjoyed since Parthenope and Emerance had first sat down with them, and their pleasure in it was not blighted by the skill of Mrs. Kite. There was no perceptible change for the better, either in the material or its treatment; but it was offered with a good-will and a regret that went far t
o supplement the stores of their own provision; and something like affection for the unteachable amiability of the woman qualified their sense of her final impossibility.

  The Kelwyns were naturally much distracted from their victual by the anomalous aspect of the situation through the novel relation of Parthenope and Emerance to it. Having once firmly agreed with Parthenope that the relation was absolutely non-existent till it had been submitted to her aunt Julia and received her perfect, her even eager approval, Mrs. Kelwyn made such concession to it as to propose putting the young people together at the table. Parthenope rejected the notion, but when the boys had early excused themselves their father opened a small bottle of currant wine the Shaker sisters had given him, and proposed a toast significantly impersonal, “To the Future.”

  Before they left the table Benson’s team appeared under their windows, and the two men had to go down and load it with the trunks and boxes which had already been gathered in the hallway below. They shared this labor with Raney and with Kite, who had stayed from his harvest in a conception of duty to his parting guests. Mrs. Kite cordially, almost tenderly, joined Mrs. Kelwyn and Parthenope in washing and packing the china and silver which belonged to the Kelwyns; she paused to say that she guessed she would not find anybody like them very soon.

  When all was done, it appeared that Benson had not judged it necessary to stay and drive his wagon to the stone cottage, since Emerance, in all probability, could be trusted to do so, and to bring it back to him when it was unloaded. As it stood, finally, the wagon was so heaped with freight that the whole family could not hope to find transportation on it. It did not help that the Kelwyn boys were nowhere to be found. But when they had been looked for everywhere, they came running from the pasture, where they were seen afar in a distress that was not at first intelligible even when they came within hearing.

  “He’s dead, papa! He’s dead, papa!” they called; but, as they were visibly followed at a discreet interval by the Kite boy, it could not be his death which they were lamenting, and when Francy had been twitched into coherence by his mother he sobbed out, “We wanted to ride him to the new house, and now he’s dead in the pasture and we can’t ride him.”

  “We can’t r-i-i-de him,” Carl corroborated the report with tears.

  “Who’s dead? What’s dead? What can’t you ride?” their mother demanded.

  “The horse!” they roared together. “The old, white one that Arthur give us.”

  “Well, stop crying,” their father intervened, “and don’t say ‘give’ us; I’ve told you before. Of course you can’t ride him if he’s dead and you want to go anywhere.”

  Arthur Kite arrived on the scene. “Guess he must ‘a’ died in the night,” he explained, importantly.

  “And what are we going to do-o-o?” the little Kelwyns wailed; and then, as from an inspiration, their eyes flashed hopefully through their tears. “Oh, may we ride on top of the trunks, papa?” Francy asked, and, “May we ride on the trunks, mamma?” Carl slightly varied him.

  “I don’t see how we’re all going to ride on the trunks,” Kelwyn remarked, after a critical glance at the load.

  “Guess ye won’t have to,” Kite said, turning his back on Kelwyn for a better effect of politeness. “Raney’s got the carryall hitched up, and he’ll take ye over.”

  It was easy to be ungracious with Kite, and Kelwyn was aware of being so. “Very well; we shall have to accept your offer. What shall I pay you?”

  “You don’t want to pay me anything,” Kite said, moving away to his own door and leaving Kelwyn to settle with himself what he should pay Raney.

  The question which pair should go with the baggage and which should go in the carryall was determined by Parthenope, who ordered Emerance to find safe perches for the Kelwyn boys, and then mounted on her own trunk, which had been put on in front, and, when all was ready, bade Emerance get up beside her. If she had come into her empire with misgiving, she ruled it with none; all the morning she had commanded him in the successive details; the shadow of old-maidhood which had once hovered near her had vanished in the radiant sense of her matronly power over the man whom she was treating already like a lifelong vassal, and who submitted gladly to her commands. There had been a moment when she questioned, in the warmth of her feelings, whether she should not kiss Mrs. Kite in taking leave; but finally she decided not, and shook hands with her as if she had been taking leave of a society hostess.

  “Now you come over and see me,” she charged the girl, who answered:

  “I should like to, Mrs. Kite, but I’m going up to Boston on Saturday, and I don’t believe there’ll be time. But I sha’n’t forget you, you may be sure.”

  The Kelwyns said much the same, except that they would stop some day when they were passing; and Mrs. Kite, on her part, offered to look them up. There was no leave-taking with Kite, but at the last moment there was a loud cry from the Kelwyn boys.

  “We haven’t said good-bye to Arthur!” Their belated remembrance of him did not visibly move their stoical comrade as he stood beside his mother.

  “Well, say it, then,” their father said, impatiently, and Parthenope suggested that Arthur should climb up and say good-bye to them. But her plan did not satisfy the boys’ ideal of friendship, and Emerance ended it by jumping from his place and lifting them down.

  It appeared then that they wished to kiss Arthur, who took their embrace as if that kind of thing had never happened to him before, while his mother said, with amusement, “Well, the land!” Francy , with permission, gave him his knife for a keepsake, and Carl gave him a piece of lead-pencil. He, in his turn, gave them a small mud-turtle, which had survived captivity in the accumulations of his pocket; they were to share it between them as a souvenir, and feed it with earthworms if it could be got to eat them.

  Emerance now put the boys, still calling their goodbyes to their stolid comrade, into their places and took his own place beside Parthenope. Then, with a backward look at the Kelwyns, to see that she was not seen, she passed one hand through his arm and locked it into the other.

  “Can you drive if I do that?” she asked.

  “I will make the experiment,” he answered, with his head bent low toward her.

  “And are you happy?” she murmured, tenderly. “As happy as you expected to be?”

  “Oh yes,” he sighed. “If Professor Kelwyn had put those people out of the house I’m afraid he would have had a lifelong regret. But now, in going himself, in owning defeat at the hands of fate, he’s won a victory that will always be a joy to him. I’m so glad for him.”

  “Yes,” she said, in sinking a little from Emerance. But she pulled herself back with a sublime resolution never to let him know her disappointment After all, was not it finer, his not thinking of themselves, or of their selfish happiness, at this supreme moment? Could she stand so much impersonality through life, though? She decided that she could, and she said, bravely: “Oh, do go on, Ellihu,” and at her bidding he chirruped to Benson’s horses, which moved obediently, while she pushed still closer to him. “Well, now we’ve started in life together!”

  Mrs. Kelwyn could not say quite the same of herself and her husband, but she felt as if she were almost beginning the world again, she was so richly content to be leaving her recent experience wholly behind her. She was therefore vexed the more with Kelwyn when he broke from a vague silence to say vaguely as if continuing aloud an inner strain of thinking:

  “I suppose I might have been more patient, though whether with the patience of Job we could ever have brought them to our point of view, taught them anything? But oughtn’t we to have tried harder?”

  His wife knew what he meant. “You think I ought to have gone into the kitchen and labored with her? Mr. Emerance did that and you saw what it came to.”

  “Oh yes, you’re right. But I wish I had a better conscience in it all. It doesn’t seem my private debt that troubles me, but my private portion of the public debt which we all somehow owe to the incapable
, the inadequate, the — the — shiftless.”

  “Oh, very well,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, with the effect of renunciation which seldom failed to dismay Kelwyn. “If you are going to put that into your lectures you will lose all your influence.”

  He laughed sadly. “Then I won’t do it. If I can’t exert my influence without losing it I won’t exert it.” The notion pleased him, and now he laughed cheerfully.

  THE END

  The Shorter Fiction

  William Dean Howells with his wife, Elinor Mead, whom he married in 1862. The marriage was a long and happy one, ending with Elinor’s death in 1910.

  SUBURBAN SKETCHES

  CONTENTS

  MRS. JOHNSON

  DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

  A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

  BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

  A DAY’S PLEASURE

  A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

  SCENE

  JUBILEE DAYS

  THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

  SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS.

  FLITTING

  MRS. JOHNSON

  It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the horse-car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew itself from its sister drop, or could be better identified by the people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks gave, as it peered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots abandoned hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and mutilated ground, added their interest to the scene. A shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own house (which had been built some years earlier), while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly upon the embankments lifting its base several feet above the common level.