“Mr. Dryfoos — it can’t be. Lindau — I have just come from him — is dead.”
XI.
“How did he take it? How could he bear it? Oh, Basil! I wonder you could have the heart to say it to him. It was cruel!”
“Yes, cruel enough, my dear,” March owned to his wife, when they talked the matter over on his return home. He could not wait till the children were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry that he had spoken of it before them. The girl cried plentifully for her old friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then was sorry for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a serious sense that pleased his father. “But as to how he took it,” March went on to answer his wife’s question about Dryfoos— “how do any of us take a thing that hurts? Some of us cry out, and some of us don’t. Dryfoos drew a kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it grieves — there’s something curiously simple and primitive about him — and didn’t say anything. After a while he asked me how he could see the people at the hospital about the remains; I gave him my card to the young doctor there that had charge of Lindau. I suppose he was still carrying forward his plan of reparation in his mind — to the dead for the dead. But how useless! If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here? He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad’s grave. Children,” said March, turning to them, “death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach. Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you. I wonder,” he mused, “if one of the reasons why we’re shut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafter isn’t because if we were sure of another world we might be still more brutal to one another here, in the hope of making reparation somewhere else. Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love on earth, the mystery of death will be taken away.”
“Well” — the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. March— “these two old men have been terribly punished. They have both been violent and wilful, and they have both been punished. No one need ever tell me there is not a moral government of the universe!”
March always disliked to hear her talk in this way, which did both her head and heart injustice. “And Conrad,” he said, “what was he punished for?”
“He?” — she answered, in an exaltation— “he suffered for the sins of others.”
“Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes. That goes on continually.
That’s another mystery.”
He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard his son saying, “I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau died in a bad cause?”
March was startled. He had always been so sorry for Lindau, and admired his courage and generosity so much, that he had never fairly considered this question. “Why, yes,” he answered; “he died in the cause of disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law. No doubt there was a wrong there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt keenly; but it could not be reached in his way without greater wrong.”
“Yes; that’s what I thought,” said the boy. “And what’s the use of our ever fighting about anything in America? I always thought we could vote anything we wanted.”
“We can, if we’re honest, and don’t buy and sell one another’s votes,” said his father. “And men like Lindau, who renounce the American means as hopeless, and let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence — yes, they are wrong; and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause, as you say, Tom.”
“I think Conrad had no business there, or you, either, Basil,” said his wife.
“Oh, I don’t defend myself,” said March. “I was there in the cause of literary curiosity and of conjugal disobedience. But Conrad — yes, he had some business there: it was his business to suffer there for the sins of others. Isabel, we can’t throw aside that old doctrine of the Atonement yet. The life of Christ, it wasn’t only in healing the sick and going about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others. That’s as great a mystery as the mystery of death. Why should there be such a principle in the world? But it’s been felt, and more or less dumbly, blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them. That’s what has created the religious orders in all times — the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our day as much as to the mediaeval past. That’s what is driving a girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the dying.”
“Yes, yes!” cried Mrs. March. “How — how did she look there, Basil?” She had her feminine misgivings; she was not sure but the girl was something of a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as well as the pain; and she wished to be convinced that it was not so.
“Well,” she said, when March had told again the little there was to tell, “I suppose it must be a great trial to a woman like Mrs. Horn to have her niece going that way.”
“The way of Christ?” asked March, with a smile.
“Oh, Christ came into the world to teach us how to live rightly in it, too. If we were all to spend our time in hospitals, it would be rather dismal for the homes. But perhaps you don’t think the homes are worth minding?” she suggested, with a certain note in her voice that he knew.
He got up and kissed her. “I think the gimcrackeries are.” He took the hat he had set down on the parlor table on coming in, and started to put it in the hall, and that made her notice it.
“You’ve been getting a new hat!”
“Yes,” he hesitated; “the old one had got — was decidedly shabby.”
“Well, that’s right. I don’t like you to wear them too long. Did you leave the old one to be pressed?”
“Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardly worth pressing,” said March. He decided that for the present his wife’s nerves had quite all they could bear.
XII.
It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau’s funeral from his house. He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the payment of these vain honors to the dead, for some atonement to his son, and he imagined him finding in them such comfort as comes from doing all one can, even when all is useless.
No one knew what Lindau’s religion was, and in default they had had the Anglican burial service read over him; it seems so often the refuge of the homeless dead. Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the ceremony. She understood that it was for Coonrod’s sake that his father wished the funeral to be there; and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed Coonrod would have been pleased. “Coonrod was a member of the ‘Piscopal Church; and fawther’s doin’ the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for anybody. He thought the world of Coonrod, fawther did. Mela, she kind of thought it would look queer to have two funerals from the same house, hand-runnin’, as you might call it, and one of ’em no relation, either; but when she saw how fawther was bent on it, she give in. Seems as if she was tryin’ to make up to fawther for Coonrod as much as she could. Mela always was a good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod.”
March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos’s endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone warring on in life. He thought, as the priest went on with the solemn liturgy, how all the world must come together in that peace which, struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last. He looked at Dryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider these rites a sufficient tribute, or whether there was enough in him to make him realize their futility, except as a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past. He thought how we never can a
tone for the wrong we do; the heart we have grieved and wounded cannot kindle with pity for us when once it is stilled; and yet we can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow, somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which our passion or our wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.
Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the more intimate contributors of ‘Every Other Week’ to come. Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leighton and Alma, to fill up, as he said. Mela was much present, and was official with the arrangement of the flowers and the welcome of the guests. She imparted this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in the outer hall with his party, and whom he presented in whisper to them all. Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, and was then mutely and seriously polite to the Leightons. Alma brought a little bunch of flowers, which were lost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be unsparingly provided.
It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have Miss Vance come, and reassuring as to how it would look to have the funeral there; Miss Vance would certainly not have come unless it had been all right; she had come, and had sent some Easter lilies.
“Ain’t Christine coming down?” Fulkerson asked Mela.
“No, she ain’t a bit well, and she ain’t been, ever since Coonrod died. I don’t know, what’s got over her,” said Mela. She added, “Well, I should ‘a’ thought Mr. Beaton would ‘a’ made out to ‘a’ come!”
“Beaton’s peculiar,” said Fulkerson. “If he thinks you want him he takes a pleasure in not letting you have him.”
“Well, goodness knows, I don’t want him,” said the girl.
Christine kept her room, and for the most part kept her bed; but there seemed nothing definitely the matter with her, and she would not let them call a doctor. Her mother said she reckoned she was beginning to feel the spring weather, that always perfectly pulled a body down in New York; and Mela said if being as cross as two sticks was any sign of spring-fever, Christine had it bad. She was faithfully kind to her, and submitted to all her humors, but she recompensed herself by the freest criticism of Christine when not in actual attendance on her. Christine would not suffer Mrs. Mandel to approach her, and she had with her father a sullen submission which was not resignation. For her, apparently, Conrad had not died, or had died in vain.
“Pshaw!” said Mela, one morning when she came to breakfast, “I reckon if we was to send up an old card of Mr. Beaton’s she’d rattle down-stairs fast enough. If she’s sick, she’s love-sick. It makes me sick to see her.”
Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father looked up from his plate and listened. Mela went on: “I don’t know what’s made the fellow quit comun’. But he was an aggravatun’ thing, and no more dependable than water. It’s just like Air. Fulkerson said, if he thinks you want him he’ll take a pleasure in not lettun’ you have him. I reckon that’s what’s the matter with Christine. I believe in my heart the girl ‘ll die if she don’t git him.”
Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own good appetite. She now always came down to keep her father company, as she said, and she did her best to cheer and comfort him. At least she kept the talk going, and she had it nearly all to herself, for Mrs. Mandel was now merely staying on provisionally, and, in the absence of any regrets or excuses from Christine, was looking ruefully forward to the moment when she must leave even this ungentle home for the chances of the ruder world outside.
The old man said nothing at table, but, when Mela went up to see if she could do anything for Christine, he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the facts of her last interview with Beaton.
She gave them as fully as she could remember them, and the old man made no comment on them. But he went out directly after, and at the ‘Every Other Week’ office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson’s room and asked for Beaton’s address. No one yet had taken charge of Conrad’s work, and Fulkerson was running the thing himself, as he said, till he could talk with Dryfoos about it. The old man would not look into the empty room where he had last seen his son alive; he turned his face away and hurried by the door.
XIII.
The course of public events carried Beaton’s private affairs beyond the reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with ‘Every Other Week.’ In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as it seemed, and long before it could be put in effect it appeared still simpler to do nothing about the matter — to remain passive and leave the initiative to Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconsciousness and let recognition of any change in the situation come from those who had caused the change. After all, it was rather absurd to propose making a purely personal question the pivot on which his relations with ‘Every Other Week’ turned. He took a hint from March’s position and decided that he did not know Dryfoos in these relations; he knew only Fulkerson, who had certainly had nothing to do with Mrs. Mandel’s asking his intentions. As he reflected upon this he became less eager to look Fulkerson up and make the magazine a partner of his own sufferings. This was the soberer mood to which Beaton trusted that night even before he slept, and he awoke fully confirmed in it. As he examined the offence done him in the cold light of day, he perceived that it had not come either from Mrs. Mandel, who was visibly the faltering and unwilling instrument of it, or from Christine, who was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos, whom he could not hurt by giving up his place. He could only punish Fulkerson by that, and Fulkerson was innocent. Justice and interest alike dictated the passive course to which Beaton inclined; and he reflected that he might safely leave the punishment of Dryfoos to Christine, who would find out what had happened, and would be able to take care of herself in any encounter of tempers with her father.
Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this conclusion; but they were used there to these sudden absences of his, and, as his work for the time was in train, nothing was made of his staying away, except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was apt to excite in the literary department. He no longer came so much to the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one there except Miss Woodburn, whom he never missed. Beaton was left, then, unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny, when he read in the morning paper, over his coffee at Maroni’s, the deeply scare-headed story of Conrad’s death and the clubbing of Lindau. He probably cared as little for either of them as any man that ever saw them; but he felt a shock, if not a pang, at Conrad’s fate, so out of keeping with his life and character. He did not know what to do; and he did nothing. He was not asked to the funeral, but he had not expected that, and, when Fulkerson brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos’s house, it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away. In his sort, and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad’s father; Beaton had a peculiar tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel if it were he who had been killed in Conrad’s place, as it might very well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility; and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau’s obsequies.
He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau’s funeral. Beaton roared out, “Come in!” as he always did to a knock if he had not a model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not come in. Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people’s difficulties with it, suddenly jerked the door open. The two men stood confronted, and at first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived. Each would have been willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible. Beaton snorted some
sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not try to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or two, and Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from the chair which he told him to take. He noticed, as the old man sank tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father, and also that he looked very much like Christine. Dryfoos folded his hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall of the muscles on either side of his chin. He had forgotten to take his soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just as he sat.
Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into which he fell at first. “Young man,” he began, “maybe I’ve come here on a fool’s errand,” and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.
But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, “I don’t know what you mean.” “I reckon,” Dryfoos answered, quietly, “you got your notion, though. I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done. But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you didn’t feel like she had any right to question you up as if we suspected you of anything mean, I want you to say so.”
Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.
“I ain’t very well up in the ways of the world, and I don’t pretend to be. All I want is to be fair and square with everybody. I’ve made mistakes, though, in my time—” He stopped, and Beaton was not proof against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong physical ache. “I don’t know as I want to make any more, if I can help it. I don’t know but what you had a right to keep on comin’, and if you had I want you to say so. Don’t you be afraid but what I’ll take it in the right way. I don’t want to take advantage of anybody, and I don’t ask you to say any more than that.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 427