Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she would die if she kept on as she was going; and then the girl escaped to the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time between the stove and the table.
“I presume it’s your coming, Mr. Westover,” Mrs. Durgin went on, with the comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the young. “I don’t know why she should make a stranger of you, every time. You’ve known her pretty much all her life.”
“Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with his dog,” said Whitwell.
“Poor Fox!” Mrs. Durgin sighed. “He did have the least sense for a dog I ever saw. And Jeff used to be so fond of him! Well, I guess he got tired of him, too, toward the last.”
“He’s gone to the happy hunting-grounds now. Colorady didn’t agree with him-or old age,” said Whitwell. “I don’t see why the Injuns wa’n’t right,” he pursued, thoughtfully. “If they’ve got souls, why ha’n’t their dogs? I suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa’n’t any certainty about the Injuns themselves!”
“You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell,” the painter confessed. “But I can’t prove they haven’t.”
“Nor dogs, neither, I guess,” said Whitwell, tolerantly. “It’s curious, though, if animals have got souls, that we ha’n’t ever had any communications from ‘em. You might say that ag’in’ the idea.”
“No, I’ll let you say it,” returned Westover. “But a good many of the communications seem to come from the lower intelligences, if not the lower animals.”
Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust. “Well, I guess that’s something so. And them old Egyptian devils, over there, that you say discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about as good as a man. What’s that,” he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, “Jackson said in his last letter about their cat mummies?”
“Well, I guess I’ll finish my supper first,” said Mrs. Durgin, whose nerves Westover would not otherwise have suspected of faintness. “But Jackson’s letters,” she continued, loyally, “are about the best letters!”
“Know they’d got some of ’em in the papers?” Whitwell asked; and at the surprise that Westover showed he told him how a fellow who was trying to make a paper go over at the Huddle, had heard of Jackson’s letters and teased for some of them, and had printed them as neighborhood news in that side of his paper which he did not buy ready printed in Boston.
Mrs. Durgin studied with modest deprecation the effect of the fact upon Westover, and seemed satisfied with it. “Well, of course, it’s interestin’ to Jackson’s old friends in the country, here. They know he’d look at things, over there, pretty much as they would. Well, I had to lend the letters round so much, anyway, it was a kind of a relief to have ’em in the paper, where everybody could see ‘em, and be done with it. Mr. Whit’ell here, he fixes ’em up so’s to leave out the family part, and I guess they’re pretty well thought of.”
Westover said he had no doubt they were, and he should want to see all the letters they could show him, in print and out of print.
“If Jackson only had Jeff’s health and opportunities—” the mother began, with a suppressed passion in her regret.
Frank Whitwell pushed back his chair. “I guess I’ll ask to be excused,” he said to the head of table.
“There! I a’n’t goin’ to say any more about that, if that’s what you’re afraid of, Frank,” said Mrs. Durgin. “Well, I presume I do talk a good deal about Jackson when I get goin’, and I presume it’s natural Cynthy shouldn’t want I should talk about Jeff before folks. Frank, a’n’t you goin’ to wait for that plate of hot biscuit? — if she ever gits it here!”
“I guess I don’t care for anything more,” said Frank, and he got himself out of the room more inarticulately than he need, Westover thought.
His, father followed his retreat with an eye of humorous intelligence. “I guess Frank don’t want to keep the young ladies waitin’ a great while. There’s a church sociable over ‘t the Huddle,” he explained to Westover.
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” Mrs. Durgin put in. “Why didn’t he say so.”
“Well, the young folks don’t any of ’em seem to want to talk about such things nowadays, and I don’t know as they ever did.” Whitwell took Westover into his confidence with a wink.
The biscuit that Cynthia brought in were burned a little on top, and Mrs. Durgin recognized the fact with the question, “Did you get to studyin’, out there? Take one, do, Mr. Westover! You ha’n’t made half a meal! If I didn’t keep round after her, I don’t know what would become of us all. The young ladies down at Boston, any of ‘em, try to keep up with the fellows in college?”
“I suppose they do in the Harvard Annex,” said Westover, simply, in spite of the glance with which Mrs. Durgin tried to convey a covert meaning. He understood it afterward, but for the present his single-mindedness spared the girl.
She remained to clear away the table, when the rest left it, and Westover followed Mrs. Durgin into the parlor, where she indemnified herself for refraining from any explicit allusion to Jeff before Cynthia. “The boy,” she explained, when she had made him ransack his memory for every scrap of fact concerning her son, “don’t hardly ever write to me, and I guess he don’t give Cynthy very much news. I presume he’s workin’ harder than ever this year. And I’m glad he’s goin’ about a little, from what you say. I guess he’s got to feelin’ a little better. It did worry me for him to feel so what you may call meechin’ about folks. You see anything that made you think he wa’n’t appreciated?”
After Westover got back into his own room, some one knocked at his door, and he found Whitwell outside. He scarcely asked him to come in, but Whitwell scarcely needed the invitation. “Got everything you want? I told Cynthy I’d come up and see after you; Frank won’t be back in time.” He sat down and put his feet on top of the stove, and struck the heels of his boots on its edge, from the habit of knocking the caked snow off them in that way on stove-tops. He did not wait to find out that there was no responsive sizzling before he asked, with a long nasal sigh, “Well, how is Jeff gettin’ along?”
He looked across at Westover, who had provisionally seated himself on his bed.
“Why, in the old way.” Whitwell kept his eye on him, and he added: “I suppose we don’t any of us change; we develop.”
Whitwell smiled with pleasure in the loosely philosophic suggestion. “You mean that he’s the same kind of a man that he was a boy? Well, I guess that’s so. The question is, what kind of a boy was he? I’ve been mullin’ over that consid’able since Cynthy and him fixed it up together. Of course, I know it’s their business, and all that; but I presume I’ve got a right to spee’late about it?”
He referred the point to Westover, who knew an inner earnestness in it, in spite of Whitwell’s habit of outside jocosity. “Every right in the world, I should say, Mr. Whitwell,” he answered, seriously.
“Well, I’m glad you feel that way,” said Whitwell, with a little apparent surprise. “I don’t want to meddle, any; but I know what Cynthy is — I no need to brag her up — and I don’t feel so over and above certain ‘t I know what he is. He’s a good deal of a mixture, if you want to know how he strikes me. I don’t mean I don’t like him; I do; the fellow’s got a way with him that makes me kind of like him when I see him. He’s good-natured and clever; and he’s willin’ to take any amount of trouble for you; but you can’t tell where to have him.” Westover denied the appeal for explicit assent in Whitwell’s eye, and he went on: “If I’d done that fellow a good turn, in spite of him, or if I’d held him up to something that he allowed was right, and consented to, I should want to keep a sharp lookout that he didn’t play me some ugly trick for it. He’s a comical devil,” Whitwell ended, rather inadequately. “How d’s it look to you? Seen anything lately that seemed to tally with my idee?”
“No, no; I can’t say that I have,” said Westo
ver, reluctantly. He wished to be franker than he now meant to be, but he consulted a scruple that he did not wholly respect; a mere convention it seemed to him, presently. He said: “I’ve always felt that charm in him, too, and I’ve seen the other traits, though not so clearly as you seem to have done. He has a powerful will, yes—”
He stopped, and Whitwell asked: “Been up to any deviltry lately?”
“I can’t say he has. Nothing that I can call intentional.”
“No,” said Whitwell. “What’s he done, though?”
“Really, Mr. Whitwell, I don’t know that you have any right to expect me to talk him over, when I’m here as his mother’s guest — his own guest — ?”
“No. I ha’n’t,” said Whitwell. “What about the father of the girl he’s goin’ to marry?”
Westover could not deny the force of this. “You’d be anxious if I didn’t tell you what I had in mind, I dare say, more than if I did.” He told him of Jeff’s behavior with Alan Lynde, and of his talk with him about it. “And I think he was honest. It was something that happened, that wasn’t meant.”
Whitwell did not assent directly, somewhat to Westover’s surprise. He asked: “Fellow ever done anything to Jeff?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t know that they ever met before.”
Whitwell kicked his heels on the edge of the stove again. “Then it might been an accident,” he said, dryly.
Westover had to break the silence that followed, and he found himself defending Jeff, though somehow not for Jeff’s sake. He urged that if he had the strong will they both recognized in him, he would never commit the errors of a weak man, which were usually the basest.
“How do you know that a strong-willed man a’n’t a weak one?” Whitwell astonished him by asking. “A’n’t what we call a strong will just a kind of a bull-dog clinch that the dog himself can’t unloose? I take it a man that has a good will is a strong man. If Jeff done a right thing against his will, he wouldn’t rest easy till he’d showed that he wa’n’t obliged to, by some mischief worse ‘n what he was kept out of. I tell you, Mr. Westover, if I’d made that fellow toe the mark any way, I’d be afraid of him.” Whitwell looked at Westover with eyes of significance, if not of confidence. Then he rose with a prolonged “M — wel-l-l! We’re all born, but we a’n’t all buried. This world is a queer place. But I guess Jeff ‘ll come out right in the end.”
Westover said, “I’m sure he will!” and he shook hands warmly with the father of the girl Jeff was going to marry.
Whitwell came back, after he had got some paces away, and said: “Of course, this is between you and me, Mr. Westover.”
“Of course!”
“I don’t mean Mis’ Durgin. I shouldn’t care what she thought of my talkin’ him over with you. I don’t know,” he continued, putting up his hand against the door-frame, to give himself the comfort of its support while he talked, “as you understood what she mean by the young ladies at Boston keepin’ up with the fellows in college. Well, that’s what Cynthy’s doin’ with Jeff, right along; and if he ever works off them conditions of his, and gits his degree, it’ ll be because she helped him to. I tell you, there’s more than one kind of telepathy in this world, Mr. Westover. That’s all.”
XXXIX
Westover understood from Whitwell’s afterthought that it was Cynthia he was anxious to keep ignorant of his misgivings, if they were so much as misgivings. But the importance of this fact could not stay him against the tide of sleep which was bearing him down. When his head touched the pillow it swept over him, and he rose from it in the morning with a gayety of heart which he knew to be returning health. He jumped out of bed, and stuffed some shavings into his stove from the wood-box beside it, and laid some logs on them; he slid the damper open, and then lay down again, listening to the fire that showed its red teeth through the slats and roared and laughed to the day which sparkled on the white world without. When he got out of bed a second time, he found the room so hot that he had to pull down his window-sash, and he dressed in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero without knowing that the dry air was more than fresh. Mrs. Durgin called to him through the open door of her parlor, as he entered the dining-room: “Cynthy will give you your breakfast, Mr. Westover. We’re all done long ago, and I’m busy in here,” and the girl appeared with the coffee-pot and the dishes she had been keeping hot for him at the kitchen stove. She seemed to be going to leave him when she had put them down before him, but she faltered, and then she asked: “Do you want I should pour your coffee for you?”
“Oh yes! Do!” he begged, and she sat down across the table from him. “I’m ashamed to make this trouble for you,” he added. “I didn’t know it was so late.”
“Oh, we have the whole day for our work,” she answered, tolerantly.
He laughed, and said: “How strange that seems! I suppose I shall get used to it. But in town we seem never to have a whole day for a day’s work; we always have to do part of it at night, or the next morning. Do you ever have a day here that’s too large a size for its work?”
“You can nearly always find something to do about a house,” she returned, evasively. “But the time doesn’t go the way it does in the summer.”
“Oh, I know how the country is in the winter,” he said. “I was brought up in the country.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said, and she gave him a stare of surprise before her eyes fell.
“Yes. Out in Wisconsin. My people were emigrants, and I lived in the woods, there, till I began to paint my way out. I began pretty early, but I was in the woods till I was sixteen.”
“I didn’t know that,” she repeated. “I always thought that you were—”
“Summer folks, like the rest? No, I’m all-the-year-round folks originally. But I haven’t been in the country in the winter since I was a boy; and it’s all been coming back to me, here, like some one else’s experience.”
She did not say anything, but the interest in her eyes, which she could not keep from his face now, prompted him to go on.
“You can make a beginning in the West easier than you can in the East, and some people who came to our lumber camp discovered me, and gave me a chance to begin. I went to Milwaukee first, and they made me think I was somebody. Then I came on to New York, and they made me think I was nobody. I had to go to Europe to find out which I was; but after I had been there long enough I didn’t care to know. What I was trying to do was the important thing to me; not the fellow who was trying to do it.”
“Yes,” she said, with intelligence.
“I met some Boston people in Italy, and I thought I should like to live where that kind of people lived. That’s the way I came to be in Boston. It all seems very simple now, but I used to think it might look romantic from the outside. I’ve had a happy life; and I’m glad it began in the country. I shouldn’t care if it ended there. I don’t know why I’ve bothered you with my autobiography, though. Perhaps because I thought you knew it already.”
She looked as if she would have said something fitting if she could have ruled herself to it; but she said nothing at all. Her failure seemed to abash her, and she could only ask him if he would not have some more coffee, and then excuse herself, and leave him to finish his breakfast alone.
That day he tried for his picture from several points out-of-doors before he found that his own window gave him the best. With the window open, and the stove warm at his back, he worked there in great comfort nearly every afternoon. The snows kept off, and the clear sunsets burned behind the summit day after day. He painted frankly and faithfully, and made a picture which, he said to himself, no one would believe in, with that warm color tender upon the frozen hills. The soft suffusion of the winter scene was improbable to him when he had it in, nature before his eyes; when he looked at it as he got it on his canvas it was simply impossible.
In the forenoons he had nothing to do, for he worked at his picture only when the conditions renewed themselves with the sinking sun. H
e tried to be in the open air, and get the good of it; but his strength for walking had failed him, and he kept mostly to the paths broken around the house. He went a good deal to the barn with Whitwell and Jombateeste to look after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and champing gave him a sort of animal pleasure. The blended odors of the hay-mows and of the creatures’ breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their bodies diffused through the cold obscurity.
When the wide doors were rolled back, and the full day was let in, he liked the appeal of their startled eyes, and the calls they made to one another from their stalls, while the men spoke back to them in terms which they seemed to have in common with them, and with the poultry that flew down from the barn lofts to the barn floor and out into the brilliant day, with loud clamor and affected alarm.
In these simple experiences he could not imagine the summer life of the place. It was nowhere more extinct than in the hollow verandas, where the rocking-chairs swung in July and August, and where Westover’s steps in his long tramps up and down woke no echo of the absent feet. In-doors he kept to the few stove-heated rooms where he dwelt with the family, and sent only now and then a vague conjecture into the hotel built round the old farm-house. He meant, before he left, to ask Mrs. Durgin to let him go through the hotel, but he put it off from day to day, with a physical shrinking from its cold and solitude.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 606