Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Ah-h-h!” he breathed.

  “She had found peace in her reliance, her perfect faith in your conscience, in your sense of justice, and your instinct of right; and, if you will allow me to say so, you were most sacredly bound not to let any perverse scruple, any self-indulgent misgiving, betray her trust in you. You are a man, with a man’s larger outlook, and you should have been the perspective in which she could see the whole matter truly. If you have failed her in this, you have been guilty of something worse than anything you accuse yourself of. Take the thing at its worst! I refuse to consider that she ever allowed her fancy to stray from her duty, but suppose that you were in love with her, in that unconscious way you imagine: who was hurt, who was deceived by it? What harm was done? I will go farther, and ask what harm was there, even if you knew you were in love with her? You let no one else know it — her, least of any.” The words, when I had got them out, shocked me; they certainly did not represent my own feeling about such a situation; I was glad my wife had not heard them; and I saw the horror of me that came into Nevil’s face. I felt myself getting hot and red, and I hastened to add, “You will forgive me, if I try to put before you the mere legal, practical, matter-of-fact view of the affair”; and I could not help remembering that it was also the romantic view, which I had found celebrated in many novels, as something peculiarly fine and noble and high, something heroic in the silently suffering lover. “I admit that I have no right to speak to you at all—”

  “Go on; I invite you to speak,” he said gently.

  “Then I will say that my only desire is to-to — how shall I say it? — urge that this is altogether an affair of the future, and that if you allow the unhappy past, which is dead, and ought to be buried with Faulkner, to dominate you, or to shape your relations, you seem to me to be—”

  I found myself talking sophistries, and I had nothing to say when he took up the word where I broke off.

  “Recognizing the fact that the future is the creature, the mere consequence of the past! Without what has been, nothing can be. Oh, we have looked at it in every light! At first, when she told me, I was as bold, as defiant, as a man can be who finds himself unjustly defamed. I said that if ever we had felt reluctance or doubt in our allegiance to the dead, now it was our right, our duty to feel none. We should accuse ourselves if we admitted that any accusal could lie against us. The very innocence of our lives demanded vindication; we should be recreant to our good consciences if we did not treat that wretched figment of a dreaming craze as it deserved. For a moment — for an hour — we were happy in the escape which my defiance won for us, and we built that future without a past, which you think can stand. It fell to ruin. We had deceived each other, but the deceit could not last. Our very indignation at the treason imputed to us by Faulkner’s dream made us examine our hearts, and question each other. We could not tell when our love began, and that mystery of origin which love partakes of with eternity, and which makes it seem so divine a thing, became a witness against us. We said that if we could not make sure that no thought we had ever had of each other in his lifetime was false to him, then we were guilty of all, and we must part.”

  “Oh,” I groaned out, “what mere madness of the moon!”

  “It was not I who pronounced our sentence; she saw herself that it must be so; it was she who sent me from her.”

  “Yes; only a woman could be capable of it, could be such a moral hypochondriac! But if she sent you away, and you know, as you must know, that in her heart she wished you to stay, why not in Heaven’s name go back to her?”

  “Ah, you think I didn’t go back! You think we parted once only! We parted a hundred times!”

  “But,” I said, “you will see it all differently to-morrow, and you must go back to her, and whether she bids you go or not, you must never leave her.”

  “And what sort of life would that be? A life of defiance, of recklessness, a mere futureless present! I am a priest of the Church, and I teach submission, renunciation, abnegation, here below, where there can be no true happiness, for the sake of a blessed eternity. Shall I cleave to this love which we feel cannot innocently be ours, and preach those things with my lying tongue, while my life preaches rebellion, indulgence, self-will? Every breath I drew would be hypocrisy. What heart should I have to counsel or admonish others in temptation, when I was all rotten within myself? What—”

  “Ah, but only listen a moment! This would be all well enough if you were guilty of what you accuse yourself! But don’t you see that in this reasoning, or this raving, of yours, you have violated the very first principle, the very highest principle of law? You have held yourself guilty till you were proven innocent, and you offer no proof that you are guilty, not the least proof in the world. You are only afraid that you are guilty; it amounts to that, and it amounts to nothing more; for I hold that Faulkner’s crazy jealousy forms no manner of case against you. I confess that though I may have seemed to imply the contrary, I should not feel it lawful for you to marry his widow if you had ever allowed yourself to covet his wife. But you never did; the very notion of such a thing fills you with such shame and horror that you accuse yourself of it. I know that kind of infernal juggle of the morbid conscience; but I thank Heaven I have my own conscience in such good training now that it accuses me of nothing I haven’t done; it finds it has quite enough to do in dealing with the facts; I don’t supply it with any fancies! It ought to be on your conscience not to leave that noble and beautiful creature to be the prey of doubts and fears, of ifs and ands, that will blast her whole life with the shame of a thief who has given up his booty to escape punishment! Suppose you look at that side of it! You say you left her because she bade you, but she bade you only because she knew you believed you ought to go; and now you must go back to her not only for her sake and for your sake, but in the interest of human enlightenment, from the duty every educated man has to resist the powers of darkness that work upon our nerves through the superstitions of the childhood of the world. You not only ought not to let Faulkner’s dream have any deterrent influence with you, but, as you saw yourself, exactly and entirely because of his dream you ought to act in defiance of it, if you have the good conscience which you’ve said nothing yet to prove you haven’t.”

  I saw that I had touched some points that had escaped him; we talked a long time, and at last I pulled out my watch in a scare, lest I had overstaid my time. I jumped to my feet. “Good heavens! I’ve lost my train!”

  Nevil looked at his watch. “You have Eastern time; there’s nearly a whole hour yet. I’ll go to the station with you.”

  I would not sit down again. “Suppose, then, we let the driver take my bag, and we walk? We can talk better.”

  “You are very good,” he said; “I should like that.”

  The night was dark, and we had the seclusion of a room for our talk, as we walked along together; and in the vast depot, starred with its gas jets far overhead, there was an unbroken sense of communion. Long before we parted, Nevil had consented to revise his own conclusions, and so far to take my view of the situation as at least to see Hermia again, and lay it before her.

  My spirits rose with my success, and I set myself to cheer the melancholy in which he assented to my urgence. I understood afterward that he was yielding to reason against that perverse and curious apparatus which we call the conscience; and I perceived that he was loath to have me leave him, as if he were afraid to be left alone, or wished to be still farther convinced. He followed me into the sleeping car, and there he fell into the hands of that rich and cordial parishioner of his whom I remembered meeting when I went down to the steamer at East Boston to see Nevil off for Europe. The gentleman recalled himself to my recollection, and rejoiced that we were to be fellow-travellers as far as Albany.

  Nevil could not hide his disappointment and vexation from me, though his parishioner did not see it. He made us both light cigars with him in the smoking-room, and he talked us silent. The car began to move, and I said, “Well, g
ood-by,” and followed Nevil out upon the platform for a last word. “Remember your promise! Better get off!”

  “Oh, I sha’n’t forget that. If I live, I will see her again, and tell her all you have said. And I thank you — thank you—” Clinging to my hand, he pressed it hard, and stepped backward from the car to the ground. I saw him look up at me, and then he gave a wild cry, and I could feel the car grinding him up against the stone jamb of the archway through which the train was passing. There was a hideous crashing sound from his body, and I jumped at the bell-rope. The train stopped; Nevil stood upright, with his face turned toward the light, and a strange effect of patience in his attitude. When the train slowly backed and set him free, he dropped forward a crushed and lifeless lump.

  IX

  HERMIA DIED a year later, and was buried by Faulkner’s side; his mother lived on for several years.

  It was inevitable, of course, that Hermia should accept Nevil’s death as a judgment; we become so bewildered before the mere meaninglessness of events, at times, that it is a relief to believe in a cruel and unjust providence rather than in none at all. What is probably true is that she sank under the strain of experiences that wrung the finest and most sensitive principles of her being, or, as we say, died of a broken heart.

  My wife and I have often talked of her and Nevil, and have tried to see some way for them out of the shadow of Faulkner’s dream into a sunny and happy life. As they are both dead, we have dealt with them as arbitrarily as with the personages in a fiction, and have placed and replaced them at our pleasure in the game, which they played so disastrously, so that we could bring it to a fortunate close for them. We have always denied, in the interest of common-sense and common justice, any controlling effect to the dream itself; except through their own morbid conscientiousness, their exaggerated sensibility. We know people, plenty of them, who would have been no more restrained from each other by it than by a cobweb across their path: Hermias who would never have told their Nevils of it; Nevils who, if they had known it, would have charged their Hermias on their love to spurn and trample upon it. That evil dream had power upon the hapless pair who succumbed to it only because they were so wholly guiltless of the evil imputed to them.

  Our Nevil’s death, violent and purely accidental as it was, seemed to us a most vague and inconclusive catastrophe, and no true solution of the problem. Yet our Hermia being what she was, and Nevil being Nevil, we saw that it was impossible Faulkner’s dream should not have always had power upon them; and the time came when we could regard their death without regret. I myself think that if Nevil had seen Hermia again, as he promised me, it would have been only to renew in her and in himself their strength for renunciation; and I have sometimes imagined a sort of dramatic friendship taking the place of their love, and uniting their lives in good works, or something of that kind. But I have not been satisfied with this conception; it is too like what I have found carried out in some very romantic novels; and my wife has always insisted that if they had met again, they would have married, and been unhappy. She insists that they could not have kept their self-respect and their perfect honor for each other, if they had married. But this again seems abominably unfair: that they should suffer so for no wrong; unless, indeed, all suffering is to some end unknown to the sufferer and the witnesses, and no anguish is wasted, as that friend of Nevil’s believed. We must come to some such conclusion; or else we must go back to a cruder theory, and say that they were all three destined to undergo what they underwent, and that what happened to them was not retribution, not penalty in any wise, since no wrong had been done, but simply fate.

  Of course there is always the human possibility that the dream was a divination of facts; that Hermia and Nevil were really in love while Faulkner lived, and were untrue to him in their hearts, which are the fountains of potential good and evil; but knowing them to be what they were, we have never admitted this hypothesis for a moment. For any one to do so, my wife says, would be to confess himself worse than Faulkner dreamed them to be. She does not permit it to be said, or even suggested, that our feelings are not at our bidding, and that there is no sin where there has been no sinning.

  THE END

  A BOY’S TOWN

  CONTENTS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  I.

  EARLIEST EXPERIENCES.

  I call it a Boy’s Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things. He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angels ascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, and he knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy’s world. Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep the ignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence; heaven has been shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These will not know what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope that the ungrown-up children will, and that the boys who read Harper’s Young People will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing — they have been used so often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody’s boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular.

  THE “FIRST LOCK.”

  It seems to me that my Boy’s Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another river, called the Old River, which was the Miami’s former channel, and which held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it The Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it was not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and a First Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but the Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy was very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had a Hydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill power through the heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the Big Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran under mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streams and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long they had boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice of the mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Then there were the Commons; a wide expanse of open fields, where the cows were pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and practised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses.

  There were flocks of wild ducks on the Reservoirs and on Old River, and flocks of kildees on the Commons; and there were squirrels in the woods, where there was abundant mast for the pigs that ran wild in them, and battened on the nuts under the hickory-trees. There were no other nuts except walnuts, white and black; but there was no end to the small, sweetish acorns, which the boys called chinquepins; they ate them, but I doubt if they liked them, except as boys like anything to eat. In the vast corn-fields stretching everywhere along the river levels there were quails; and rabbits in the sumac thickets and turnip patches. There were places to swim, to fish, to hunt, to skate; if there were no hills for coasting, that was not so much l
oss, for there was very little snow, and it melted in a day or two after it fell. But besides these natural advantages for boys, there were artificial opportunities which the boys treated as if they had been made for them; grist-mills on the river and canal, cotton-factories and saw-mills on the Hydraulic, iron-founderies by the Commons, breweries on the river-bank, and not too many school-houses. I must not forget the market-house, with its public market twice a week, and its long rows of market-wagons, stretching on either side of High Street in the dim light of the summer dawn or the cold sun of the winter noon.

  The place had its brief history running back to the beginning of the century. Mad Anthony Wayne encamped on its site when he went north to avenge St. Clair’s defeat on the Indians; it was at first a fort, and it remained a military post until the tribes about were reduced, and a fort was no longer needed. To this time belonged a tragedy, which my boy knew of vaguely when he was a child. Two of the soldiers were sentenced to be hanged for desertion, and the officer in command hurried forward the execution, although an express had been sent to lay the case before the general at another post. The offence was only a desertion in name, and the reprieve was promptly granted, but it came fifteen minutes too late.

  I believe nothing more memorable ever happened in my Boy’s Town, as the grown-up world counts events; but for the boys there, every day was full of wonderful occurrence and thrilling excitement. It was really a very simple little town of some three thousand people, living for the most part in small one-story wooden houses, with here and there a brick house of two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy’s father came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretched eastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, the county buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a few other stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from it to the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy’s fancy, where he might get lost — the sum of all disaster — if he ventured away from the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on its southwestern border. It was the great political year of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” when the grandfather of our President Harrison was elected President; but the wild hard-cider campaign roared by my boy’s little life without leaving a trace in it, except the recollection of his father wearing a linsey-woolsey hunting-shirt, belted at the waist and fringed at the skirt, as a Whig who loved his cause and honored the good old pioneer times was bound to do. I dare say he did not wear it often, and I fancy he wore it then in rather an ironical spirit, for he was a man who had slight esteem for outward shows and semblances; but it remained in my boy’s mind, as clear a vision as the long cloak of blue broadcloth in which he must have seen his father habitually. This cloak was such a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and men wore it in America then instead of an overcoat. To get under its border, and hold by his father’s hand in the warmth and dark it made around him was something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that brought him a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could ever give. He used to be allowed to go as far as the street corner, to enjoy it, when his father came home from the printing-office in the evening; and one evening, never to be forgotten, after he had long been teasing for a little axe he wanted, he divined that his father had something hidden under his cloak. Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he had brought him the little axe, but his father said, “Feel, feel!” and he found his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in a zeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far he learned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfy yourself with anything, even hard work. Some of my readers may have found that out, too; at any rate, my boy did not keep the family in firewood with his axe, and his abiding association with it in after-life was a feeling of weariness and disgust; so I fancy that he must have been laughed at for it. Besides the surfeit of this little axe, he could recall, when he grew up, the glory of wearing his Philadelphia suit, which one of his grandmothers had brought him Over the Mountains, as people said in those days, after a visit to her Pennsylvania German kindred beyond the Alleghanies. It was of some beatified plaid in gay colors, and when once it was put on it never was laid aside for any other suit till it was worn out. It testified unmistakably to the boy’s advance in years beyond the shameful period of skirts; and no doubt it commended him to the shadowy little girl who lived so far away as to be even beyond the street-corner, and who used to look for him, as he passed, through the palings of a garden among hollyhocks and four-o’clocks.