Mrs. Enderby was heard saying affably, across the table to Hope: “I didn’t know young people took such an interest in those things. You ought to talk with Mr. Enderby. I’m afraid he finds me very lukewarm.”
“Oh, well, then, I’ll talk with you, Mrs. Enderby,” Langbrith promised. “There’s nothing I like so much as lukewarmness on these subjects. I’d no idea I should get into such hot water with Miss Hawberk. I believe she’s a walking delegate in disguise!”
“Well,” the girl said, “I shouldn’t like anything better than to lead your hands out on a strike. I think it would be fun.”
Mrs. Enderby said “Oh!” in compliance with the convention that one ought to be shocked by such audacity, but really amused with it.
“You’ll find me in the ranks of labor, if you ever do lead a strike,” Langbrith said, gallantly deserting his colors.
Hope went on: “I should like to be a great labor leader and start a revolution.”
“What salary would yoù want?” Langbrith asked.
“About half the profits of the employers!” the girl came back.
“Well, we must talk to Uncle John about that. He manages the mills. But if your strike cut the profits down to nothing?”
“There, there!” Mrs. Enderby interposed. “You mustn’t let your joke go too far.”
“Oh, I haven’t been joking,” Hope said.
“I was never more in earnest,” Langbrith followed, laughing.
His laughing provoked her. She wanted, somehow, to turn their banter into earnest — to say something saucy to him, something violent; something that would show Mrs. Enderby that she was not afraid of him. At the same time, she believed she did not care for Mrs. Enderby or what she might think, and in the midst of her insurrection it seemed to her that he was handsomer than she had ever supposed — that he had beautiful eyes. She noticed, for the first time, that they were gray, instead of black.
“How do you like my flowers?” he asked, as if their talk had been of the decorations of the table.
“Oh, did they all come out of your conservatory?” she returned, with an amiability which she could not account for. “It looks very pretty from here.” She glanced down the table, with a quick turn of her little head, towards the glass extension of the room, where the plants bedded in the ground showed their green and bloom in masses under the paper lanterns, and the fine spray of an inaudible fountain glimmered.
“Yes, doesn’t it? Everything that my mother touches flourishes.”
“Oh, I know that!” the girl said, with an intonation of wonder and reverence.
“There are very few things,” he said, from his proud satisfaction, “that my mother can’t do better than anybody else.”
“Did you have to go to Harvard to find that out? Everybody in Saxmills knew it!”
“But you haven’t,” he reverted, “said what you thought of the arrangement.” He indicated the flowers on the table with a turn of his head.
Another mood seized her. “You can’t spoil flowers!”
“Well, I did my worst.” He wished her to know that he had suggested their arrangement.
Mrs. Enderby was talking with her left-hand neighbor. Langbrith lowered his voice slightly in asking: “Are you going to give me the first dance, Hope?”
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely; and then indifferently, “I suppose I must begin by dancing with somebody.”
He laughed and they were silent, while she kept herself from panting by drawing each breath very slowly and smoothly. Her breast heaved and her nostrils dilated.
There came a quick clash on the glass roof of the conservatory. “Rain?” she said. “Goodness! How are we going to get home?”
“Oh, don’t even talk of going home,” he implored, and she laughed.
He looked down the table to catch his mother’s eye, and give her the sign for rising with the ladies and leaving the room. That was a main part of his innovation and a thing unprecedented. But he had agreed with Falk that the stroke could be broken by each giving his arm, in the new fashion, to his partner, and taking her back to the library. The other men did not understand, and waited, on foot, for the cue from him. He lost his head, which seemed to whirl on his shoulders, and he was stooping to offer his arm to Hope when he remembered Mrs. Enderby.
He was stupefied into the awkwardness of saying, “Oh, I beg your pardon!”
The rector’s wife laughed, from a woman’s perennial joy in the sight of such feeling as his. “Oh, I shouldn’t have minded.”
Hope gave an imitation of not having noticed, which none but a connoisseur could have distinguished from the genuine.
VIII
“DR. ANTHER, I want to introduce Mr. Falk a little more particularly to my oldest and best friend.”
“Will he know what to do with such a treasure?” Dr. Anther returned Falk’s tentative bow with smiling irony, while he reached with his left hand for the cigars which Langbrith offered him.
Every one was still on foot, after leaving the ladies in the library, and Langbrith said to the group: “Sit down, gentlemen,” and placed himself before answering the doctor. “Yes, I think he will. You smoke, don’t you, Dr. Enderby? And you, Judge? Matthewson, I know, doesn’t. Start the madeira after the sun, Harry.” He pushed the cigars towards the elders and the decanter towards the young man, whom he bade give the smokers the candle. “Yes,” he went on, to put Falk and Dr. Anther at ease with each other, “Falk’s father is a physician, and my physician is the only father I have known.”
“Oh, you’re very good, James!” the doctor said, forgiving to the genuine feeling in the young fellow’s voice the patronage of his words: “I can’t say less than that no son of mine has given me less trouble.” The two laughed together, and Falk smiled conditionally, as if he suspected that this country practitioner had his knife out. “Are you going in for medicine, too?” the doctor asked.
“Worse yet,” Langbrith answered for him. “He’s going in for art. I don’t know whether my mother has shown you any copies of Caricature which I send her. But, if she has, you know Falk’s work. It’s the best part of Falk. Falk is Caricature himself — with my poor help in joking a picture now and then.”
“This puts me on my good behavior at once,” Anther said. “Mr. Falk may be looking for types.”
“No, no; Falk’s types always look for him,” said Langbrith. “Won’t you sit down?”
“I’ve been sitting,” Anther said, and he walked, Falk with him, towards the conservatory.
“Well, it’s a change, and your smoke will help the plants,” Langbrith called, and he turned to take part in the talk of the judge and the rector, to which Matthewson was listening with the two sorts of deference respectively due to the law and to the church.
“Well, Mr. Falk,” Anther said, “I suppose we must make the best of being two such remarkable people. I hope you’re enjoying your visit to Saxmills.”
“Oh, very much,” Falk answered, smiling less conditionally.
“I don’t know that it’s much adapted to pictorial satire.”
“You must make allowance for the stately layout Langbrith gives his friends,” said Falk, and the gleam of intelligence in the doctor’s shaggily pent-roofed eyes satisfied him of his ground.
“The place has always struck me as very picturesque,” the doctor continued. “Of course, I don’t know; but a good head of water seems to imply broken ground, and if there’s a fall, such as we have here, it means up and down hill and the broken banks and the rapids and other things that you artists are supposed to care for.”
“I don’t know whether we really do — or I do,” the young man said, modestly. “I’m rather more for the figure, I reckon.”
“Western?” the doctor asked, with a lift of the pent-roofs.
“Northern Kentucky; Catletsburg.”
“Curious! I thought of settling in that place, myself, before I came to Saxmills. Not New England people?”
“No, my people wer
e German. My grandfather came out after the 1848 revolutions.”
“Oh, indeed! Rather odd I should meet some one from Catletsburg at this late day. I’ve hardly thought of it since I gave up going there. Except for a run to New York, at times, I have been twenty-two years in Saxmills, and I don’t suppose I shall ever go anywhere else to live. In that time, a man’s life shapes itself to the environment, and new surroundings hurt. Don’t you find it so?”
“Well, I’m just trying my first twenty-two years.”
“To be sure,” the doctor laughed. “I suppose you and James are thrown a good deal together at Harvard.”
“This last year, yes. Since he took the editorship of Caricature.”
“Oh, indeed! He must be very popular, then, to have that?”
“Not very,” Falk answered, tranquilly. He looked steadily at the doctor, in breaking off his cigar ash, as if asking his eyes how far he might go. Then he said, in a low tone, but with a certain indifference as to being overheard in his manner: “A good many of the fellows think he’s an ass. They can’t stand him. But they make a mistake. He’s got a lot of ability. He doesn’t do himself justice.”
“How?” the doctor asked, blowing his smoke out.
“Too patronizing. But he doesn’t mean anything by it, as I know. All you have got to do is to call him down. He stands that first rate, if he likes you, or if he thinks you are right. And he stands by his friends.”
“I’m glad to hear so much good of him. Naturally, I’m interested in him, knowing his — mother so long.”
Falk asked — from a feeling that the doctor had meant to say “family” rather than “mother”— “You knew his father?”
“Oh yes, but he died when James was a very little child.”
“He seems to have a sort of ancestor worship for him,” said Falk, with a slight amusement in his face.
“Yes,” the doctor dryly allowed.
Langbrith was talking gayly with his other guests at the farther end of the table, where his voice rose in somewhat noisy dominance. He seemed to be laying down the law on some point; and the others to be politely submitting rather than agreeing.
Anther stood looking at him. He turned to Falkland, with his face slightly canted towards Langbrith, he asked from one side of his mouth, “You’ve noticed his portrait in the library?”
“Jimmy doesn’t let you escape that!” Falk said. “How do you like it?”
“You mean artistically?”
“No, personally. How does the face strike you?”
“Well, I don’t think I could worship an ancestor like that. Perhaps it isn’t a good likeness.”
“It was painted from a photograph.”
“Yes, so he said. And that sort of portrait seems always to fail in conveying character.”
Doctor Anther made no reply for some time. In fact, he made no reply at all. He asked, “And such character as it does convey?”
“Well, he looks too much like a cat that has been at the cream. And it isn’t the feline slyness alone that’s there: there’s the feline ferocity. Perhaps it’s like a tiger that’s been at the cream.”
The doctor said gravely, “The artist had never seen Langbrith in life. You don’t find anything of that sort in James?”
“No, he’s like his mother in looks.”
“Oh yes. Don’t you find — as an artist — Miss Hawberk very striking?”
“Wonderful. If I may speak as an artist. That cloud of hair hanging over her little face, and those coal-black eyes, and that red mouth between the pale cheeks! If I were a painter, which I’m not, and never shall be, I should want nothing better than to spend my life studying such a face.”
“Her father,” the doctor said, looking at Falk, as if to question how much he knew already, “is an extraordinary man.”
“So Langbrith tells me. He told me about him.”
“Oh, then,” said the doctor with the effect of implying that there need be nothing more said on that point; “you must stop me when I seem to be asking unwarrantable things. Do you think that James—”
“Doctor! Won’t you come here?” Langbrith called to him from the other end of the table where he was sitting. “I’ve got three stubborn men against me here, on a point which I want you to settle in my favor.”
“Somebody must give way, and you know I can’t,” the rector said, using the well-known words of the Boston lady who appealed to reason against her adversaries.
“What is this point that only one of you can agree on?” the doctor asked, coming up.
Langbrith laughed with high good humor, as if still in the afterglow of Hope Hawberk’s playful hostilities. The qualities which gave his classmates the question whether he was not an ass were in abeyance. Even if he showed no such deference as Matthewson paid to the judge or the clergyman, he was withheld from patronizing them by the instinct of hospitality. At the worst, his superiority took the form of pressing the wine on them, and insisting that they had failed to get good cigars.
“Oh, I expect there will be two, now, doctor,” he crowed. “It’s a question of taste. I don’t know how we got to talking about it — do you, judge? or you, Dr. Enderby? But we were speaking of that immediate acquiescence of a community in a change of name — like that of Groton Junction to Ayer Junction. The pill-man gave a town-hall, or something like that, to the place, and the bargain was struck. Said, done: and from that day to this nobody has mentioned Groton Junction even by a slip of the tongue, though the school at Groton keeps the old name alive and honored. The judge, here, and Dr. Enderby were saying it was a pity that we had to keep such an ugly and indistinctive name as ‘Saxmills,’ and I was defending it, just because it was ugly and indistinctive. I was saying that the whole American thing was ugly and indistinctive, and that, if there was any choice, it was more so in New England than elsewhere. But now I want to tell you all something,” and he went eagerly on, as if to forestall any interruptive expression of opinion from the others on a point which did not really matter. He glanced at Falk, where he stood blowing rings of smoke into the air at the door of the conservatory, as if about to demand his nearer presence, but apparently decided to include him by lifting his voice. “There was a time when a change of name was suggested here. Did you ever know about it?” he asked the doctor.
The doctor shook his head with indifference.
“No? Well, that was just like my father, if I read his character right. He would have consulted with you, if he had not decided of himself to suppress the whole thing from himself, and by himself. It was after he had built the library, and given it to the town. There was a dedication, and all that; and in a little diary — one of those little pocket-almanac diaries, you know — which I came across the other day among my father’s papers, I found this laconic entry: ‘Library dedication. Had been some talk of changing Saxmills to Langbrith, but I squelched that so thoroughly that nobody peeped about it.’ Do you recall any such talk?”
Anther shook his head again. “It was before my time, here.”
“And mine,” the judge said.
The rector did not think it worth while saying it was before his, apparently; he was such a new-comer. But he said: “It was almost a pity he squelched it. Langbrith would have been a fine name.”
The young man could scarcely conceal his satisfaction. “Oh, it would have been rather too romantic and Old English for a New England paper-mill town. I’m afraid it would have given the expectation of laid note, with deckelled edges.” The rector owned that there might be something in that, but he insisted that the name was fine.
“I think my father was right. And it was like him; don’t you think so, doctor?”
“Very,” Anther assented briefly.
“I can imagine just how he would have squelched it when the committee — there must have been a committee — came to propose the new name to him. I should not have liked to be in their shoes. He was not a man, as I imagine him, to have stood anything he considered nonsense.” Langbri
th looked at the doctor for confirmation, but Anther smoked on in silence. Langbrith was probably too well pleased to note his silence with offence. He asked abruptly, “Is that a good likeness of him in the library?”
“It was painted from a photograph, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Still, if it’s well done, it would convey his personality.”
“It’s fairly — characteristic.”
Falk, from his station between the conservatory doors, grinned.
Langbrith frowned slightly. “It doesn’t suit me, quite. And this brings me to something I want to talk with you gentlemen about. I’ve been thinking, for some time, of offering the town a medallion likeness of my father to be put up in front of the library somewhere.” He looked round at the others, but they waited as if for him to develop his idea fully. “My notion is, something in bronze; a low relief, of course, and a profile, or three-quarters face. The difficulty is about getting that view of him. The thing in the library is a full face, and I don’t feel somehow that it does him justice. Do you, doctor?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 794