Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth, or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels.

  I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters in the un fenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again. So did the sun of the surviving B — s. The mother turned her household goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap for her son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards the town of X — , gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled after the bereavement of a single week.

  X

  OUR new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding.

  In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and our home was fashioned according to his plans.

  It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town — from the pitiful little village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.

  I try to give merely a child’s impressions of our life, which were nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for my mother especially, who could get no help, or only briefly and fitfully, in the work that fell to her. What her pleasures were I can scarcely imagine. She was cut off from church-going because we were Swedenborgians; short of Cincinnati, sixty miles away, there was no worship of our faith, and the local preaching was not edifying, theologically or intellectually.

  Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of mental and spiritual refreshment. Otherwise, my father read us a service out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to us — Scott or Moore or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.

  In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river. One such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flat boat, which we kept on the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck the swift current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again.

  It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam, where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves and the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe; and life was rich unspeakably.

  I recollect the complex effect of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights when my brother used to row across the river to the cabin of the B — s, where the poor man and his children lay dying in turn, and I wondered and shuddered at his courage; but there is one night that remains single and peerless in my memory.

  My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s — for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter — and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well into the night when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stand in a park-like freedom from underbrush, and the grass grows dense and rich among them.

  We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the closely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed not only to liberate me from the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy. Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that whatever perishes there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.

  XI

  OUR log-cabin stood only a stone’s cast from the gray old weather-tinted gristmill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. A soft sibilance ordinarily prevailed over the dull, hoarse murmur of the machinery; but late at night, when the water gathered that mysterious force which the darkness gives it, the voice of the mill had something weird in it like a human moan.

  It was in all ways a place which I did not care to explore alone. It was very well, with a company of boys, to tumble and wrestle in the vast bins full of golden wheat, or to climb the slippery stairs to the cooling-floor in the loft, whither the little pockets of the elevators carried the meal warm from the burrs, and the blades of the wheel up there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution. But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid basement, the angry whirl of the burrs under the hoppers, the high windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a pleasure to the boy’s sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians, of course, made it their ambush.

  With the saw-mill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not keep the grist-mill’s unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when the upright-saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet smell of the bruised woody fibres, or then when the circular-saw wailed through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood touched it again, and it broke again into its long lament.

  The warm sawdust in the pits below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought up the logs or carried away the lumber. How we should have l
ived through all these complicated mechanical perils I cannot very well imagine now; but there is a special providence that watches over boys and appoints the greater number of them to grow up in spite of their environment.

  Nothing was ever drowned in those swift and sullen races, except our spool-pig, as they call the invalid titman of the herd in that region; though once one of the grist-miller’s children came near giving a touch of tragedy to their waters. He fell into the race just above the sawmill gate, and was eddying round into the rush upon its wheel, when I caught him by his long yellow hair, and pulled him out. His mother came rushing from her door at the outcry we had all set up, and perceiving him safe, immediately fell upon him in merited chastisement. No notice, then or thereafter, was taken of his preserver by either of his parents; but I was not the less a hero in my own eyes.

  XII

  I CANNOT remember now whether it was in the early spring after our first winter in the log-cabin, or in the early part of the second winter, which found us still there, that it was justly thought fit I should leave these vain delights and go to earn some money in a printing-office in X — . I was, though so young, a good compositor, swift and clean, and when the foreman of the printing-office appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the place of a delinquent hand, there was no question with any one but myself that I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly upon me — a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence, pierced my heart and filled my throat, and blinded me with tears.

  The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day’s grace was granted me, and then my older brother took me to X — , where he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky, apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must always be associated for me with the despair that then filled my soul, and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked, and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. All the time I had every fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing, especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing, and how at every moment she was looking; I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about there.

  The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gayety, when they came in, added to my desolation.

  The man said supper was about ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father came; but in my own mind it was closed.

  My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either of us; we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that boardinghouse, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a year’s absence.

  Again I was called to suffer this trial, the chief trial of my boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only by the experience of survival from it, but by various circumstances.

  This time I went to D — , where one of my uncles was still living, and he somehow learned the misery I was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in D — . I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, who stood to me for all that was at once naturally and conventionally refined, a type of gracious loveliness and worldly splendor.

  They had an only child, to whom her cousin’s presence in the house was a constant joy. Over them all hung the shadow of fragile health, and I look back at them through the halo of their early death; but the remembrance can not make them kinder than they really were. With all that, I was homesick still. I fell asleep with the radiant image of our log-cabin before my eyes, and I woke with my heart like lead in my breast.

  I did not see how I could get through the day, and I began it with miserable tears. I had found that by drinking a great deal of water at my meals I could keep down the sobs for the time being, and I practised this device to the surprise and alarm of my relatives, who were troubled at the spectacle of my unnatural thirst.

  Sometimes I left the table and ran out for a burst of tears behind the house; every night after dark! Cried there alone. But I could not wholly hide my suffering, and I suppose that after a while the sight of it became intolerable. At any rate, a blessed evening came when, returning from work, I found my brother waiting for me at my uncle’s house; and the next morning we set out for home in the keen, silent dark before the November dawn.

  We were both mounted on the italicfooted mare, I behind my brother, with my arms round him to keep on better; and so we rode out of the sleeping town, and into the lifting shadow of the woods. They might have swarmed with ghosts or Indians; I should not have cared; I was going home.

  By-and-by, as we rode on, the birds began to call one another from their dreams, the quails whistled from the stubble fields, and the crows clamored from the tops of the deadening; (The trees girdled, and left to die and decay, standing.

  ) the squirrels raced along the fence-rails, and, in the woods, they stopped half-way up the boles to bark at us; the jays strutted down the shelving branches to offer us a passing insult and defiance.

  Presently, at a little clearing, we came to a log-cabin; the blue smoke curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the soft, low hum of a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew dripped round us; and I was profoundly at peace. The homesick will understand how it was that I was as if saved from death.

  At last we crossed a tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log-cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was “company.”

  It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely-fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through all the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and admired the familiar outside of the house as freshly as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood-fires blazed upon the hearths, and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.

  I must have gone through the old log-cabin to see how it looked without us, but I have no recollection of ever entering its door again, so soon had it ceased to be part of my life. We remained in the new house, as we continued to call it, for two or three months, and then the changes of business which had been taking place without the knowledge of us children called us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and the pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode in city streets again. We went to live in the ordinary brick house of our civilization, but we had grown so accustomed, with the quick and facile adaptation of children, to living in a
house which was merely lathed, that we distinguished this last dwelling from the new house as a “plastered house.”

  Some of our playmates of the neighborhood walked part of the way to X — with us boys, on the snowy morning when we turned our backs on the new house to take the train in that town. A shadow of the gloom in which our spirits were steeped passes over me again, but chiefly I remember our difficulties in getting our young Newfoundland dog away with us; and our subsequent embarrassments with this animal on the train, where he sat up and barked out of the window at the passing objects, and finally became seasick, blot all other memories of that time from my mind.

  XIII

  I HAD not seen the old place for thirty years, when, four years ago, I found myself in the pretty little town of X — , which had once appeared so lordly and so proud to my poor rustic eyes, with a vacant half-day on my hands. I hired a buggy and a boy, and had him drive me down to that point on the river where our mills at least used to be.

  The road was all strange to me, and when I reached my destination that was stranger still. The timber had been cut from the hill and island, and where the stately hickories had once towered and the sycamores drooped there was now a bald knob and a sterile tract of sand, good hardly for the grazing of the few cows that cropped its scanty herbage. They were both very much smaller: the hill was not the mountain it had seemed, the island no longer rivalled the proportions of England.

  The grist - mill, whose gray bulk had kept so large a place in my memory, was sadly dwarfed, and in its decrepitude it had canted backwards, and seemed tottering to its fall. I explored it from wheel-pit to cooling-floor; there was not an Indian in it, but, ah! what ghosts! ghosts of the living and the dead; my brothers’, my playmates’, my own! At last, it was really haunted. I think no touch of repair had been put upon it, or upon the old saw-mill, either, on whose roof the shingles had all curled up like the feathers of a frizzly chicken in the rains and suns of those thirty summers past. The head-race, once a type of silent, sullen power, now crept feebly to its work; even the water seemed to have grown old, and anything might have battled successfully with the currents where the spool-pig was drowned and the miller’s boy was carried so near his death.