Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The young sculptor was a find of Langbrith’s in the course of his own aesthetic development. He had seen some idealistic banalities of the artist in an art-dealer’s window, and had liked them so much that he had got Falk to come and look at them, too, and then join him in looking up the sculptor, who, when looked up, proved to be a beautiful, poverty-stricken young Jew, with black hair bushing out over a fine forehead, and, under the forehead, mobile, attentive eyes. He had a profile more Hellenic than Hebraic, and cheeks and chin already blue from shaving a dense beard. It appeared that he had made the banalities to sell, and that he could do stronger if not truer things, as the casts in his studio witnessed. He entered into the motive of the medallion, as Langbrith presented it, with an ardor that matched Langbrith’s, and he roughed it out in the clay so quickly that in twenty-four hours he had something to show his patron. He had conceived so aptly of his patron, if not of his subject, that he flattered the effigy of the elder Langbrith into a likeness of the son, who stood before it in content little short of ecstasy.

  “Falk,” he said, “it has the ancestral look — the look of race. I can see myself in it. That must have been the way my father looked. Wonderful!”

  “It is like you,” Falk said, with a glance at the sculptor, who was watching Langbrith with subtle and shifty eyes. “I always supposed you rather resembled your mother.”

  “Not at all,” Langbrith retorted. “There may be something in our features, but her expression is totally different. I see nothing of my mother in this.”

  “Well, if you’re satisfied, that’s the end of the story.”

  “But look, Falk, look at these old pictures!” At the first question the sculptor had supplied them, and Langbrith now held them in his hand, studying them and then the sketch. “You can see that the outline is the same, and Mr. Lily has read the character into the face which these caricatures belie. It’s the artistic resurrection from the mechanical death of these tintypes. It’s miraculous!”

  “Well, Mr. Lily probably believes in miracles.”

  The sculptor presented an impervious surface to the smile of Falk’s irony, and Langbrith continued to effervesce without heeding his friend.

  “And you’ve taken my notion most delightfully about the inscription, Mr. Lily. It’s just the effect I wanted, fronting the eyes there in those lines of compact capitals, and balanced by that low relief of the mills at the back of the head. Of course, I know that there’s nothing definite in those details yet; but the face is so perfect, so struck as if with a die, that I dread to have you touch it. Do you think you can keep just that look in working it up?”

  The young sculptor pouted his handsome, thick, red lips, and said, “I think so,” stealing a glance from his subject to his patron.

  “Well,” Langbrith sighed, “I shall have to trust you,” and Falk laughed out. “What’s the matter?” Langbrith demanded.

  “Of course you’ll have to trust him! You’re not running this work of art.”

  “Oh, I didn’t understand you. Of course! And how soon can you have it done, Mr. Lily?”

  “How long can you give me?” the sculptor asked.

  “I did think of Decoration Day for the dedication, but I’ve changed my mind about that. I think now I will have it on my father’s birthday — the 29th of June. Could you have it ready by that time?”

  The sculptor seemed considering seriously, and at last he said, reluctantly, as certain people do to enhance the value of a concession, “I think I can, if there’s no delay in the foundry. If there is, you know you can dedicate a gilded plaster copy and put up the bronze later — any time.”

  “Ah, I don’t believe I should like that. It wouldn’t be in character with my father. He always paid cash. I shall trust you to have it ready in time. I know you can have it done.”

  Langbrith remained studying the sketch until Falk’s restiveness obliged him to break from it. The more he saw himself in his portrait of his father, the better he was pleased, and the truer he decided the likeness to be. The family look certainly was there, and what greater truth could he ask? With all the self-satisfaction of the academic side of his nature he rejoiced in what he decided to be an ideal presentation of his father’s face.

  The sculptor followed him and Falk to the door of his studio, and bowed them out.

  “Little Sheeny!” Falk observed, when the door had closed upon them.

  “He says he is an Italian, but he’s all the finer artist for his drop of the ‘indelible blood,’” Langbrith said, still rejoicing.

  “Every drop of blood in his body is indelible. He ought to be a puller-in. He could sell you any misfit in the store. I’ll do a puller-in at a Roman statuary’s for Caricature, and I’ll have this fellow working off a Mercury on you, come up from your Sabine papyrus-mill.”

  “If you didn’t like it, Falk—”

  “Why not say so? What good would that have done, with your infatuation? Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t like it. There’s a lot of infernal chic about it. In its way it’s damnably good, but it’s you, you poor innocent, right over again, and that’s what he was aiming at from the first moment he got those eyes of his afloat on you.”

  “If that’s the way you feel—” Langbrith began, half turning.

  Falk caught him by the coat lapel and pulled him round again. “What are you going to do? Countermand it? You couldn’t get a better job, and the poor devil needs the job. Don’t I tell you it’s good? It’s all the better for having so much of you in it, if I do say it that hate to. Come! you’ve blundered and he’s swindled into the very thing. Let him go on!”

  Langbrith moved reluctantly forward. “If I could trust you, Falk—”

  “You’ve got to.”

  “I never can make you understand how I feel about my father. He’s a religion with me, and anything that seems to belittle him or belie him is a profanation. If I didn’t feel that somehow the fellow had got my father into the thing, I wouldn’t let him go on. Of course, I can see that he has had to work back from me — get the life into it from me! But, apart from the question of the likeness, don’t you think it’s good?”

  “Haven’t I said so? The fellow has done it mighty well.”

  “He has taken all my suggestions,” Langbrith said, reaching out for a little more kindness.

  “Yes, and Saint-Gaudensized them. That’s all right. That was the thing to do. At this time of day he couldn’t get away from Saint-Gaudens.”

  “I’m anxious to have him go on,” Langbrith dreamily continued, “because he can get it done in time, and I don’t know who else could.” He hesitated, as he must, even in the intimacy of his confidence with Falk, before adding: “I’ve just told Hope that I’m having him do it. I’ve told her that I had taken it up again.”

  “Why, had you dropped it?”

  “Yes,” Langbrith owned, uneasily. “We had a little misunderstanding about having the dedication on Decoration Day. Falk, I want to tell you; but you’re so sharp—”

  “Oh, go on. I’ll spare you on condition that you’re honest.”

  “Well, you know she didn’t approve of that idea, and she put it in such a light about its not being fair to take the day from the old soldiers whom it belonged to that I saw it just as she did, and I telegraphed her—”

  “Telegraphed!” Falk opened his mouth for a laugh, but shut it again without laughing.

  “Oh, laugh! I don’t care now! And she came back at me with a letter that cut me to the quick. She’s terribly sarcastic, or can be. She made all sorts of fun of me for thinking my agreement with her opinion so important that it could not wait for a letter. Of course, she put it in the way of mocking at herself, saying that she never supposed before that she was of so much consequence that her opinions had to be accepted by telegraph. It ground me awfully, and I took it like a perfect ass.”

  “Naturally!” Falk interjected.

  “Oh, don’t mind me!” Langbrith exulted. “I wish I could always be an ass to such pur
pose. I wrote back to her that she needn’t be anxious hereafter, for I had given up the whole scheme of the tablet, and I should never trouble her again by my method of asking or acknowledging her opinions.”

  “That sounds so wise that it must be true,” said Falk. “Go on. I thought I knew you, my young friend, but you are unfathomable.”

  “I begin to believe it. And that brought a letter from her, protesting against my giving up — very dignified and impersonal, and all that; but I was still so sore that I let her letter go unanswered a couple of days, and then there came another from her, entreating me to go on with my plan, and saying if I didn’t she never could forgive herself; that she had not meant anything by what she said of my telegraphing; that it was only fun, and I oughtn’t to take it in earnest; but if I must, she withdrew it all. She said she knew that if it got about that I was going to give up the plan it would make all sorts of talk and be very disagreeable.”

  “She had probably told about your telegraphing to some of the other girls,” Falk interpreted. “Susie Johns, likely. Or even Jessamy Colebridge.”

  “That was what I thought at first, and it made me madder still.”

  “Yes, you are that kind of ass,” Falk assented. “So I decided not to answer that second letter. And then came one that was fairly imploring. It was dated a day later, and she said in it that she was so miserable she had to write again, and she should not rest till she heard I was going on with my plan.”

  “You must have felt proud.”

  “No, I didn’t. I felt ashamed.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Oh, I deserve anything you can say. She kept up the effect of joking, but she must have been serious, or she wouldn’t have written three times.”

  “And having brought the suppliant to her knees, what did the Prince of Saxmills graciously deign to answer?”

  “The P. of S. had already answered the second letter, on second thoughts. He had written to tell her not to think of the matter again; for, on looking it all over, he found that he couldn’t relinquish the plan now. He tried to make his decision seem unrelated to her, because he didn’t think it fair to take the advantage she had given him.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Falk said. “It’s a little fact that enables me to continue your acquaintance, which I was just going to drop. Langbrith, don’t you know that that girl is one of the most—”

  “I think I don’t need any one to tell me what she is,” Langbrith interrupted, haughtily. Then he instantly stooped from his height. “But I appreciate your feeling, and I thank you. I was glad that I had answered her second letter, and that my answer and her third had crossed, because I got a letter from my mother with the third from Hope, saying Hope had been to see her, and had told her the trouble she was in. I shouldn’t have liked her to think I had done for my mother, even, what I wouldn’t do for her.”

  “Yes, you saved your distance. I congratulate you.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you,” said Langbrith, fondly. “And you think — you think, don’t you, that the whole situation looks rather favorable for me?”

  “Oh, come now! I can’t go into that, Langbrith. It’s more than I bargained for.”

  Langbrith went on dreamily: “She must have been a good deal troubled. She asked my mother how it would do to get Dr. Anther to write to me, and my mother had to put her off by promising to ask him herself. Afterwards she decided not to ask, but to write to me instead. I rather wish she had asked the doctor,” he concluded, meditatively.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, there is something that has rankled in me ever since the night of our supper-dance — the way Anther took my proposal of the tablet. Didn’t you notice anything peculiar in his manner?”

  “He didn’t seem to take a great deal of interest,” Falk owned.

  “He is the oldest living friend of my father. I didn’t like it. I had it out with my mother, the next morning, and perhaps that made her reluctant to ask him to take any part in it. She is very proud where there is any question of slight to me, and I suppose she felt as I did about my father. Perhaps she found she couldn’t do what she promised Hope. But that’s a small matter. The great thing is that I hadn’t waited for her letter before writing to Hope. I can’t be too glad of that. I should have hated even to seem to have done for another what I hadn’t done for her. I’m hard hit, and you know it, Falk, and now you’ve got to listen. That girl is the rarest human creature on this earth.”

  “Why not say in the universe, and be done with it?”

  “Because I don’t want to wrong her by any sort of extravagance. She’s so perfect, she has such poise, such spiritual proportion — through her sense of humor, I suppose — that any sort of excess seems an insult to her. She’s wonderful: I see that more and more. Sometimes, when I think of her hard life with that opium-eating father of hers and that belated old Puritan of a grandmother, and how her days must pass between the horrors of his narcotic and her religious frenzies, I wonder she can keep her sanity. But she is the sanest and sweetest and wholesomest and loveliest soul alive. She doesn’t seem any more related to her surroundings or origin than the singing that you hear come out of a church window in summer, and that you can’t connect with the stifling and perspiring congregation inside. It’s disembodied worship, and she’s just joyous girlhood incarnate.”

  “Oh, Lord! I can’t stand much more of this!” Falk groaned.

  “When I think of her,” Langbrith went on, careless of his sufferings, “I seem to myself the most contemptible and unworthy caricature of humanity — full of every kind of ridiculous imperfection and detestable defect; a wrong-headed, stubborn mule, with an instinct for kicking at the wrong time and in the wrong place, with a hide so thick and a fibre so coarse that any suggestion for its own good, short of a big stick, is lost on it.”

  “Well, now,” Falk got in his revenge, “you can understand just how you seem to other people a good deal of the time when you’re not thinking of her.”

  XXI

  “WHAT’S this I hear?” Hope’s grandmother required of the gayety which, even beyond the girl’s cheerful wont, marked her rebound from her trouble after Langbrith’s second letter came. “Folks are sayin’ that James is not goin’ to put that inscription of his father on the library, and then again that he is. You know anything about it, Hope?”

  “Yes, I know all about it, grandma. They’re right both ways. He wasn’t and he is, unless he’s changed his mind again.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s written to tell me.”

  The old woman’s eyes flared on the smile in the girl’s. “What’s James Langbrith writin’ to you so much for?”

  “He seems to like to.”

  “You engaged to him?”

  “Not at present, grandma.”

  “Better see’t you ain’t. I don’t like the breed any too well. I hain’t ever been satisfied at the way he got your father out of the business, and your mother wa’n’t at the time. But she’s in her grave now, and your father can’t ever be got to say a sensible word about it; just praises him up, if you try to talk with him, when everybody knows that Royal Langbrith never drew an unselfish breath. He never went to church and he never darkened anybody’s doors in the place, and why he gave that library to the town nobody will ever know. It wa’n’t like him to give anything; and I guess if your father could be got to tell the truth once, folks would sing a different song. I don’t like your closemouthed kind, that force one out of partnership and never say why nor wherefore.”

  A yell from the chamber in the half-story over the room where the two women sat at breakfast offered itself an apt explanation. Groans and sighs followed, and gasps of prayer and thanksgiving, and then muffled fumblings and stumblings on the floor, as of a man getting out of bed and dressing.

  “My! how it does always go through me!” the old woman quavered. “I don’t see how you can take it so, Hope! I can’t seem to get used to it!”

 
“I was born used to it,” the girl answered, with a patience that was cheerful, even smiling. “He hasn’t had such a dream for a good while. He must have been at the laudanum bottle, instead of the other. I’ll just look.” She ran quickly up the crooking stairs, and her voice made itself heard in fond reproach. “Now, father, how could you? What’s the use of my trying to trust you? And don’t you see what it does? Just throws away all the good effects, and brings us back where we were before.”

  “Yes,” she reported triumphantly to her grandmother, as she reappeared with a large, empty bottle in her hand. “It’s just as I supposed, and I’ve got to go and tell Dr. Anther as soon as I’ve taken lather some coffee. Will you put it on the stove, grandma, while I help him dress? I must hurry.”

  She found Anther at his office, after his somewhat later breakfast, and he could not refuse to smile when she reported the fact in its humorous aspect, with an unbroken trust in the fortunate result.

  “I guess we’ve got to begin again, Dr. Anther,” she said, uncovering the empty bottle. “You see what father’s been doing!”

  “How came you to notice?” he asked.

  “Oh, a dream that almost raised the roof,” she laughed. “I should have thought it was the skeleton-man and the green dwarf both, but I didn’t ask. When I found this, it wasn’t necessary.” She offered him the bottle, which he received with a face losing its sympathetic cheerfulness. Her eager nerves took alarm at his gravity. “You don’t think he’s worse?”

  “Oh no” — the doctor came back to his professional reassurance— “it’s a little disappointment when we had got him so far along, that’s all. But it’s not a thing to discourage us. We shall have to begin over again, as you say.” He set the bottle aside. “I’ll bring it to him, and have a talk with him.”

  “Oh, do!” the girl said, back in her gayety again. “Your talks do him more good than the medicine, I believe. I wanted to have a talk with you myself the other day.”