Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was Falk’s own fault if he did not conceive from Langbrith’s tenderness the ideal of what a good son should be in all points. But, as the Western growth of a German stock transplanted a generation before, he may not have been qualified to imagine the whole perfection of Langbrith’s behavior from the examples shown him. His social conditions in the past may even have been such that the ceremonial he witnessed did not impress him pleasantly; but, if so, he made no sign of displeasure. He held his peace, and beyond grinning at Langbrith’s shoulders, as he followed him out to the dining-room, he did not go. He seemed to have made up his mind that, without great loss of self-respect, he could suffer himself to be used in illustration of Langbrith’s large-mindedness with other people whom Langbrith wished to impress. At any rate, it had been a choice between spending the Easter holiday at Cambridge, or coming home with Langbrith; and he was not sorry that he had come. He was getting as much good out of the visit as Langbrith.

  One night, when Mrs. Langbrith came timidly into the library to tell the two young men that dinner was ready — she had shifted the dinner-hour, at her son’s wish, from one o’clock to seven — Langbrith turned from the shelf where he had been looking into various books with his friend, and said to his mother, in giving her his arm: “I can’t understand why my father didn’t have a book-plate, unless it was to leave me the pleasure of getting one up in good shape. I want you to design it for me, will you, Falk?” he asked over his shoulder. Without waiting for the answer, he went on, instructively, to his mother: “You know the name was originally Norman.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, with a gentle self inculpation.

  “Yes,” her son explained. “I’ve been looking it up. It was Longuehaleine, and they translated it after they came to England into Longbreath, or Langbrith, as we have it. I believe I prefer our final form. It’s splendidly suggestive for a bookplate, don’t you think, Falk?” By this time he was pushing his mother’s chair under her, and talking over her head to his friend. “A boat, with a full sail, and a cherub’s head blowing a strong gale into it: something like that.”

  “They might think the name was Longboat, then,” said Falk.

  Mrs. Langbrith started.

  “Oh, Falk has to ‘have his joke,” her son explained, tolerantly, as he took his place; “nobody minds Falk. Mother, I wish you would give a dinner for him. Why not? And we could have a dance afterwards. The old parlors would lend themselves to it handsomely. What do you say, Falk?”

  “Is it for me to say I will be your honored guest?”

  “Well, we’ll drop that part. We won’t feature you, if you prefer not. Honestly, though, I’ve been thinking of a dinner, mother.”

  Langbrith had now taken his place, and was poising the carving knife and fork over the roast turkey, which symbolized in his mother’s simple tradition the extreme of formal hospitality. She wore her purple silk in honor of it, and it was what chiefly sustained her in the presence of the young men’s evening dress. This was too much for her, perhaps, but not too much for the turkey. The notion of the proposed dinner, however, was something, as she conceived it, beyond the turkey’s support. Without knowing just what her son meant, she cloudily imagined the dinner of his suggestion to be a banquet quite unprecedented in Saxmills society. Dinners there, except in a very few houses, were family dinners, year out and year in. They were sometimes extended to include outlying kindred, cousins and aunts and uncles who chanced to be in town or came on a visit. Very rarely, a dinner was made for some distinguished stranger: a speaker, who was going to address a political rally in the afternoon, or a lecturer, who was to be heard in the evening at the town-hall, or the clerical supply in the person of one minister or another who came to be tried for the vacant pulpit of one of the churches. Then, a few principal citizens with their wives were asked, the ministers of the other churches, the bank president, some leading merchant, the magnates of the law or medicine. The dinner was at one o’clock, and the young people were rigidly excluded. They were fed either before or after it, or farmed out among the neighboring houses till the guests were gone. Ordinarily, guests were asked to tea, which was high, with stewed chicken, hot bread, made dishes and several kinds of preserves and sweet pickles, with many sorts of cake. The last was the criterion of tasteful and lavish hospitality.

  Clearly, it was nothing of all this that Mrs. Langbrith’s son had in mind. After his first year in college, when he had been so homesick that everything seemed perfect under his mother’s roof in his vacation visits, he began to bring fellows with him. Then he began to make changes. The dinner-hour was advanced from mid-day to evening, and he and his friends dressed for it. He had still to carve, for the dinner in courses was really unmanageable and unimaginable in his mother’s house-keeping; but he professed a baronial preference for carving, and he fancied an old-fashioned, old-family effect from it. The service was such as the frightened inexperience of the elderly Irish second-girl could render; under Langbrith’s threatening eye, she succeeded in offering the dishes at the left hand, and, though she stood a good way off and rather pushed them at the guests, the thing somehow was done. At least, the covered dishes were no longer set on the table, as they used always to be.

  Mrs. Langbrith had witnessed the changes with trepidation but absolute acquiescence even at the first, and finally with the submission in which her son held her in everything. In the afternoon, when he and his friend, whoever it might be, put on their top-hats and top-coats and went out to call on the village girls, who did not know enough of the world to offer them tea, she spent the interval before dinner in arranging for the meal with the faithful, faded Norah. After dinner, when the young men again put on their top-hats and top-coats to call again upon the village girls, whom they had impressed with the correctness of afternoon calls, and to whom they now relented in compliance with the village custom of evening calls, Mrs. Langbrith debated with Norah the success of the dinner, studied its errors, and joined her in vows for their avoidance.

  IV

  The event which confronted Mrs. Langbrith in her son’s words, as he sat behind the turkey and plunged the carving-fork into its steaming and streaming breast, was so far beyond the scope of her widened knowledge that she mutely waited for him to declare it.

  “People,” he went on, “have been so nice to Falk and me, that I think we ought to make some return. I put the duty side first, because I know you’ll like that, mother, and it will help to reconcile you to the fun of it. Falk is such a pagan that he can’t understand, but it will be for his good, all the same. My notion is to have a good, big dinner — twelve or fourteen at table, and then a lot in afterwards, with supper about midnight. What do you say, mother? Don’t mind Falk, if you don’t agree quite.”

  “There is no Falk, Mrs. Langbrith,” the young fellow said, with an intelligence which comforted her and emboldened her against her son.

  “I don’t see—” she began, and then she stopped.

  “That’s right!” her son encouraged her.

  “James,” she said, desperately, “I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

  “I don’t want you to do it.” He laughed exultantly. “I propose to do it myself. I will have the whole thing sent up from Boston.” Between her gasps, he went on: “All I have got to do is to write an order to White, the caterer, with particulars of quantity and quality, the date and the hour, and it comes on the appointed train with three men in plain clothes; two reappear in lustrous dress-suits at dinner and supper, and serve the things the other has cooked at our range. I press the button, White does the rest. He brings china, cutlery, linen — everything. All you have to do is to hide Jerry in the bam and keep Norah up-stairs to show the ladies into the back chamber to take off their things. You can put our own cook under the sink. You’ll be astonished at the ease of the whole thing.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Langbrith said, “it will be easy, but—”

  “But would it be right?” her son tenderly mocked. “What did I tell y
ou?” he asked towards his friend. “In New England, the notion of ease conveys the sense of culpability. My mother is afraid she would have a bad conscience. If she took all the work and worry on herself, she would feel that she was paying the penalty of her pleasure beforehand; if she didn’t, she would know that she must pay for it afterwards. Isn’t that so, mother? But now you leave it to me, you dear old thing.” Langbrith ran round the table and kissed her on top of the head, and made her blush like a girl, as he patted her shoulder. “Just imagine I was master, and you couldn’t help yourself.” He went back to his place. “What was the hugest dinner you ever had in the old time?”

  She hesitated, as if for his meaning. “Mr. Langbrith once entertained a company of six gentlemen, who came up here and talked of locating some cotton-mills. We called it ‘supper.’”

  “I can imagine them. Can’t you, Falk? The moneyed man to supply the funds, the lawyer to draw up the papers, the civil engineer to survey the property. Very solemn, and a little pompous, but secretly ready for a burst if the opportunity offered under the right auspices; something like an outing of city officials.”

  “They were very pleasant gentlemen,” Mrs. Langbrith interposed, as from her conscience.

  “Oh, I dare say they were when they had tasted my father’s madeira. But about our dinner now? I don’t think we’d better have more than twelve, and I should want them equally divided between youth and age.”

  Mrs. Langbrith looked at him as if she did not quite understand him, and he said:

  “Have Jessamy Colebridge and Hope Hawberk and Susie Johns and Bob Matthewson — he’s a good fellow — and make out the half-dozen with Falk and me; we’re both good fellows. Then, on your side of the line, yourself first of all, mother, and the rector and his wife, and Judge and Mrs. Garley, and — who else? Oh, Dr. Anther, of course! I want Falk to meet the doctor — the dearest and quaintest old type in the world. I don’t know why he hasn’t been in to see us, mother. Has he been here lately?”

  “He was here a day or two before you came,” Mrs. Langbrith answered, with her eyes down. “Perhaps he has been waiting for me to call. Well, what do you think of my dinner-party?”

  “It seems very nice,” Mrs. Langbrith sighed. “And haven’t you any preferences? Nobody you want to turn down?”

  “It will be a good deal of a surprise for Saxmills,” she suffered herself to say.

  “I flatter myself it will. I have been telling Falk that the mixed assembly of old and young is unknown in Saxmills.”

  Falk had not troubled himself to take part in the discussion, if it was that, but had given himself to the turkey and the cranberry sauce, with the mashed potatoes and the stewed squash, which Mrs. Langbrith had very good. Her son had obliged her to provide claret, which Falk now drank out of an abnormal glass with a stout stem and pimpled cup, hitherto dedicated to currant wine, before saying: “It astonished me less than if I had been used to something different all my life. You ought to have tried the other thing on me.”

  “Well, I only supposed from the smartness of the people in your Caricature pictures that you had always lived in a whirl of fashion.”

  “That shows how little you know of fashion,” said Falk, and Langbrith laughed with the difficult joy of a man who owns a hit.

  Mrs. Langbrith glanced from one to the other; from her son, with his long, distinguished face (he had decided that it was colonial), to the dark, aquiline type of Falk, with his blade hair, his upward-pointed moustache, his pouted lips, and his prominent, floating, brown eyes! In her abeyance, she was scared at the bold person who was not afraid of her son.

  “Well,” said Langbrith, “I shall have to find some one to illustrate my vers de société who knows enough of the world for both.”

  “You couldn’t!” Falk insinuated.

  Mrs. Langbrith did not quite catch the point, but her son laughed again. “No one ever distances you, Falk!”

  He discussed the arrangement of the affair with his mother. At the end, as she rose, obedient to his sign, and he came round to give her his arm, he said: “After all, perhaps, it wouldn’t be well to strike too hard a blow. If you think you can get it up by Saturday night, mother, we’ll drop the notion of having White. Make it tea, with turkey at one end of the table and chicken pie at the other, and all the sweet pickles and preserves and kinds of cake you can get together; coffee straight through, and a glass of the old Langbrith madeira to top off with.”

  V

  MRS. LANGBRITH went into the library with her son and his friend by the folding doors from the dining room, but only to go out of the door which opened into the hall, and escape by that route to the kitchen for an immediate conference with the cook.

  The young men dropped into deep leather chairs at opposite comers of the fireplace, after lighting their cigars. Probably, the comfort of his seat suggested Langbrith’s reflection: “It is a shame I never knew my father. We should have had so much in common. I couldn’t imagine anything more adapted to the human back than these chairs.”

  “His taste?” Falk asked, between whiffs.

  “Everything in the house is his taste. I don’t believe my mother has changed a thing. He must have been a strong personality.” Langbrith followed his friend’s eye in its lift towards his father’s portrait over the mantel.

  “I should think so,” Falk assented.

  “Those old New England faces,” Langbrith continued, meditatively, “have a great charm. From a child, that face of my father’s fascinated me. As I got on, and began to be interested in my environment, I read into it all I had read out of Hawthorne about the Puritan type. I put the grim old chaps out of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and the Twice-Told Tales into it, and interpreted my father by them. But, really, I knew very little about him. My mother’s bereavement seemed to have sealed her lips, and I preferred dreaming to asking. A kid is queer! Once or twice when I did ask, she evaded answering; that was after I was old enough to understand, and I didn’t press my questions. He was much older than she; twenty years, I believe. He couldn’t have been a Puritan in his creed; he was a Unitarian, as far as church-going went, and I believe my mother is a Unitarian yet; but she goes to the Episcopal Church, which makes itself a home for everybody, and she likes the rector, You’ll like him, too, Falk.”

  “He won’t talk theology to me, I suppose,” Falk grumbled.

  “He’ll talk athletics with you. The good thing about a man of his church is that he’s usually a man of the world, too. He’s an Enderby, you know.”

  “I shouldn’t be much the wiser, if I did,” Falk said.

  “I wouldn’t work that pose so hard, Falk. You can’t get even with the Enderbys by ignoring them; and you can’t pretend it’s meekness that makes you profess ignorance. The only thing I don’t like about you is your peasant pride.”

  “I still have hopes of winning your whole heart then. I’ll study your peasant humility.”

  Langbrith made as if he had not noticed the point. He rose and moved restively about the room, and then came back to his chair again, and said, as if he had really been thinking of something else: “If I should decide to take up dramatic literature, I believe I’ll go to Paris to continue my studies, and perhaps we’ll keep on there together. I wish we could! Can’t you manage it, somehow? Those things of yours in Caricature have attracted attention; and if Life has asked you to send something, why couldn’t you get a lot of orders, and go out with me?”

  “Gentle dreamer!” Falk murmured.

  “No, but why not, really?”

  “Because a lot of orders are not to be got for the asking, and I’m a bad hand at asking. I think my cheek is good for applying to a New York paper for a chance to do scenes in court, and hurry-pictures of fires, and the persons in a vivid accident; but I don’t think it would hold out to invite Harper’s or Scribner’s to have me do high-class studies abroad for them. I may be a fool, but I am not that kind of fool. Unless,” Falk hastened to anticipate, “I�
��m all kinds.”

  Langbrith was apparently not watching for the chance snatched from him. “Well, I think you could do it, somehow,” he insisted. “I’m going to Paris for my post-graduate business, and I’ve set my heart on having you with me. I wonder,” he mused aloud, “why I like you so much, Falk?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Falk returned, without apparent interest in the mystery.

  “You’re always saying nasty things to me,” Langbrith pursued. “You take every chance to give me a dig.”

  “It’s all that keeps you in bounds.”

  “No—”

  “Yes, it is; your arrogance would naturally splay all over the place. But just at present, you’re in the melting mood that saps everybody’s manhood towards the end of the senior year. If I didn’t watch myself, I should feel a tenderness for you at times.”

  “Would you, really, Falk?” Langbrith appeared touched, and interested.

  “I shall never know, for I don’t mean to be taken off my guard.”

  “What a delightful fellow you are, Falk!”

  “Do you think so? I should suppose you were a woman.”

  “Oh, it isn’t the women alone that love you, old man. I love you because you are the only one who is frank with me.”

  “It takes courage to be candid with a prince. But, thank Heaven, I have it.”

  “Oh, pshaw! There’s nobody by to admire your sarcasms.”

  “I’m satisfied with you, my dear boy.”