Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Now Powell thought he had reason to laugh. “My influence with Bellam?”

  “Your influence with all the decent people in the neighborhood, and your influence with everybody except Overdale and his crew, as soon as it’s certain that the paper machinery is going in. But I don’t say that he’s here on your account; it’s on Rosy’s. He’s taken with her.”

  “Why, naturally he admires her.”

  “Oh!” Ann broke out at the end of her patience. “Certainly you are the most trying man!”

  “What excuse did he make to her when he brought the brooch?”

  “He didn’t make any. He said he wanted her to have it whether she had lost it or not; he said he couldn’t think of any one else to give it to.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Yes. And of course it flattered her, poor child.”

  “Have you got it here?” Ann took it out of her pocket. “You have dealt with Rosy,” Powell said, reaching his hand for it. “I will deal with Captain Bickler.”

  “I can’t trust you. I will do it.”

  “That wouldn’t be dignified, Ann.”

  “Will you be plain with him?”

  “I will use fairly clear dictionary English with him,” Powell said, beginning to joke again, now that he had the brooch in his keeping. He looked down at it in his palm and turned it over. “It doesn’t seem to be a great many carats fine. But I dare say Rosy isn’t a judge of jewelry. Or Bickler either, for that matter.” Powell hated the duty before him, but it was his duty, and not Ann’s, as she now perceived too.

  XIII

  POWELL was reluctant to think evil of any one, and his early want of perspective in the world made it hard for him to imagine a design of wrong from one social level to another. In the new country to which his family had first come, from the Old World in his own generation, he had not seen much of those differences; his father had left the Old World in abhorrence of the conditions which perpetuated social inequality there, and Powell had been taught by precept, if not practice, that such conditions were wicked and inhuman. His reading as a boy had been largely in the English poetry, where the life of simple villagers and rustics was celebrated as the ideal, and the cruelty of the Great was ascribed to the unjust structure of society. After his reading began to be so exclusively in the Doctrines, the questions of mundane difference sank more and more out of sight; they would settle themselves as man’s conduct grew more in accord with the Interior Sense of the Word.

  Powell left his wife at the cabin busy with some work which she undertook after calling: “Rosy! Oh, Rosy! I wonder where that girl is!” and then setting about it alone, with the comforting conclusion, “Off with the children somewhere, I suppose.” She was inclined to be the less severe with Rosy because of the severity she had been obliged to use with her about the brooch, and she was glad to find her a child still with the other children; she did not want her to feel herself grown up.

  “I will look for them on my way to Bladen’s,” Powell promised. “I want to see if he has any winter apples left.” —

  “I wish we could get some dried peaches to make pies for the raising,” his wife said, casually, at parting; the raising had taken the first place among her cares already.

  He walked southward by the road that curved round the hill and continued on to Spring Grove after it left the hill behind. But it was at the bottom of the hill that by a sudden turn he chanced upon Captain Bickler sitting his horse at the roadside next the river and looking up the shore over a growth of tall pawpaw bushes which covered it there. He was handsomely dressed in his one fine broadcloth suit, and he had an effect of military gallantry, with his slender, graceful figure showing itself above his horse’s neck as he stood up in his stirrups.

  “Any pheasants over there?” Powell called to him for salutation.

  “How do you do, Mr. Powell?” the young man called back, as he dropped into his saddle; and he rode forward and leaned over to give Powell his hand. “Why, no. I don’t know what it was exactly,” he added. “I was just going up to your place. I think I’ve got some news that will please you. The Capital City Whig says — I’ve got yesterday’s paper — that there will be no doubt of that anti-fugitive slave law plank going into the platform at the State convention. I’ve thought so all along myself. I want you to remember that, Mr. Powell.”

  Powell smiled; he saw no reason why he should not give himself that pleasure and still do his duty in behalf of his wife. He took the paper from Bickler, who was holding his thumb at a certain place in it, and read it with satisfaction in its fact and in his own respite. “Yes, the Whig has always been on the right side. I didn’t know you had,” he said, giving the paper back with a sharper glance up at Bickler.

  “Oh yes, I have,” the young man answered. “It won’t do to go too fast if you want to keep your influence in a community like this. It’s all well enough for you, Mr. Powell; you’ve got a different sort of hold, but I have to feel my way. That’s why I wouldn’t like to say just where I stand at present to everybody; but you’ll find me in the right place when the time comes. All well at home? It does me good every time I see Mrs. Powell. She’s about the nicest lady I know.”

  “Thank you, we are all very well,” Powell answered, provisionally.

  Bickler continued, with increasing smoothness: “That’s a great book you lent me. I want to keep it a while longer and go through it carefully. It’s a wonder how he maps the other world out. Makes this world seem all at sixes and sevens.”

  Bickler laughed ingratiatingly; and Powell asked, “Do you mean that he makes too much of a map of the other world? That has been objected by some.”

  “I don’t know if I should say that, exactly,” Bickler answered. “But that idea of the spiritual world being all in the shape of a Grand Man, with the different spirits in the different parts according to their being good or bad — well, some might say that was funny.”

  “I see nothing funny in it,” Powell began, resentfully; and Bickler made haste to save himself.

  “Oh, I don’t mean funny in the ridiculous sense. I mean strange and — and new; that’s all.”

  “I think I can make it appear to you in its true light,” Powell said, putting his hand on the neck of Bickler’s horse and caressing it with a mounting kindness for Bickler himself. “We are so used to thinking of Heaven as in the sky over our heads and Hell as a pit under our feet that it is hard for us to conceive of them otherwise; but a very little reflection will convince you that the topography — if I may so express it — of the spiritual world is much more reasonably represented by our human figure, which was made in the likeness of the Divine.”

  From time to time the young man said, “Yes, yes,” and, “To be sure,” and, “I reckon you’re right.” The horse stamped in the soft road, and sent gentle shivers over its silken surface, and tossed its fine head up and down, jingling its bit.

  Powell at last took his hand away, saying, “You cannot go amiss if you look at it in the light of the Science of Correspondences.”

  Bickler assented with a sigh: “I’ll keep that in mind. It’s a mighty new idea. But now about the two delegates from this township to the county convention. Can I count on your support if I arrange to have you sent as one of them?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Powell assented, with the cordiality due a man who had shown such an intelligent interest in the matters he had laid before Bickler. “But I ought to say that I don’t think there is the least probability of my being sent. It may be different after we get the paper machinery in and the neighbors see that we mean to be as good as our word, but at present I realize that I am anything but popular in the neighborhood.”

  Bickler laughed the notion away. “Why, Mr. Powell, there’s never been a man here more respected.

  You’ll see, when the people turn out to your raising. When is the raising to be?”

  “Just as soon as we can bring matters to a head with the carpenters, and my brother Felix can arrange
to be with us. He’s winding up his business as fast as he can, and I am in hopes that my other brothers can join us soon. By the way, there’s a point on which I should like to consult you; my wife and I have differed about it somewhat. But I have detained you long enough already.”

  “Well, I am in something of a hurry, that’s a fact,” the young man said. “But any time I can be of service to you—”

  He indicated with a large flourish that he was at Powell’s disposition. “For the time being, as between Mrs. Powell and you, we’ll leave it that I’m on Mrs. Powell’s side.” He laughed at his joke, and it was something that Powell could not refuse to enjoy.

  “Oh, I believe I’m on her side too,” he said; and now the young man laughed again, and shook his rein, and his horse ambled away.

  At Mrs. Powell’s coming into the talk, something came into her husband’s mind, but too warily for him to seize it. When Bickler was almost out of sight, and quite beyond earshot, he realized that he had not given him back the brooch.

  He followed vaguely homeward in the same direction, wondering what he should say to his wife. When he came in sight of her standing at the cabin door, she called to him, “Did you ask the Bladens about the dried peaches?”

  “I declare,” he said, stopping short with the relief a man finds in balancing one trouble against another, “I forgot all about the Bladens. I’ll go right back—”

  “No, no,” she said, coming out to him. “I’ve engaged some from Hurvey; he just went by. But where in the world have you been all this time?”

  Then Powell had to confess what he felt to be the greater guilt of his other forgetfulness. When they had talked it over, Ann said, disappointedly, “Oh, well, you can do it the next time you meet him. I do hope that no harm will come from the delay.”

  “Oh, there isn’t the least danger,” Owen answered, light-hearted at escaping so easily.

  “Better let me have the brooch. I’ll remember to give it to Captain Bickler,” his wife suggested.

  “No, Ann. It’s for me to do it. And I shall certainly not forget another time.”

  XIV

  THE children came home together, and directly afterward Rosy appeared alone.

  “Why, Rosy,” Mrs. Powell called out to her, “I thought you and the children went off together.”

  The eldest of the little girls answered for her. “So we did, mother, but Rosy wanted to go and see what was in the pawpaws by the river-bank, and we were afraid. We thought Rosy had got lost.”

  Rosy laughed. “I came up over the hill. I’ll get you the water.”

  She went toward Mrs. Powell, who still had the teakettle in her hand on the way to the well. There was something evasive in her looks, which arrested Ann in a sort of distraction. “Well, you may, Rosy. I’m about beat out with this hot weather. I don’t feel as if I could go near that stove. Now you set the table, children,” she commanded her little ones.

  “Oh, mother, we hate to go in yet,” they pleaded, through the eldest girl. “Can’t we have supper over by the new house?” The other children stood with their hands ready to clap and their feet to jump into the air at her consent.

  The younger boys counted with the little girls in the family. Richard almost counted with his father and mother; he shared his mother’s cares; his next brother, who somewhat darkled after him, had an ideal of devotion to her which he realized in many reveries. The eldest of the girls was like Richard; she had been a third hand for her mother about the house, but now that Rosy had come she became one of the little girls again. She played with them in the tall rows of rustling corn stretching far away in the eighty-acre field behind the cabin; she helped them build little cabins of twigs over the wild flowers; they all painted gloves on their hands with mulberry juice. Richard loved adventure; he wished to go to California and dig gold; his brother liked dreaming of himself in stately and splendid characters and situations, but he hated the trouble of any active undertaking; once when he went to visit his uncle in Tuskingum and see the boys he used to know he was deathly homesick. But the brothers were as good friends as elder and younger brothers usually are.

  The island was the mystery and the desire of all the children; the boys had their Indian fights there, and they could go for a drink of well-water, when they were heated in battle, to Bellamys cabin; Mrs. Bellam drew the water with a bucket at the end of a long pole, and gave it to them in a gourd dipper. Richard was the friend and companion of Bellam in the sawmill; he helped him there; and Bellam helped the boys build the tent-shaped hut of boards their father planned for kiln-drying the flooring for the new house; sometimes he sat up with Richard at night, and when the boy fell asleep Bellam] shifted the boards and kept the fire going good and hot in the big oblong stove which they used for seasoning the lumber.

  He liked to talk about the raising, and was as eager for it as the Powells themselves. He told just what he should do, and bespoke certain duties and privileges. Among the men in the neighborhood he most truly valued Powell and honored him; he said, whenever he could get any one to look at his thumb, that he reckoned if it had not been for Mr. Powell he would not have had any thumb by that time. He was welcome to Mrs. Powell in the cabin; when it came once to her offering him her cane-seat rocking-chair he said, “If I had a cheer like this, I’d stay at home all Sunday and rock.”

  A few weeks before the time fixed for the raising in August, what people called the flux broke out, and many were sick. One of the Bellam children was taken, and then another, till all were taken. Lizzie Bladen and Richard helped their father and mother nurse them, sitting up through the night in the hot little single room of the cabin, and all but one of the children died in turn. Richard watched with the dead, a thing his brother could not have done to save himself alive; and Lizzie Bladen shared his watch, and walked home with him in the dim dawns across the island and through the sawmill.

  It came Bellam’s own turn, and he was very sick for a week; then he seemed to be getting well; but in the early morning when his wife and Richard were lifting him to make him more comfortable on his pillow he fell back and died. Mrs. Bellam said: “Now he’ll be so disapp’inted about the raisin’. He ‘lowed all along to do the most of it hisself, by his tell.” That night Richard could not keep himself from telling his brother about it, and how solemn it seemed coming home with Lizzie Bladen. If it had not been for her not being afraid he said he could not have stood it. His brother listened with his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth, and silent in the horror of an experience which his fancy made tenfold his own. He knew that twenty Lizzie Bladens with twenty times her courage would not have helped him stand such a thing as seeing a man die. His brother slept, but the vision of what his brother had seen filled the dark of the cabin loft for the boy.

  Bellam was buried beside the new graves of his children in the neglected place on the hill which Powell had not yet got the stuff out for fencing, in his preoccupation with the material for the new house. The minister at Spring Grove was sick, and could not come; Powell felt it would be a sacrilege to let Elder Griswell perform the service at the grave; he took the duty upon himself, and he had a peculiar joy in using the New Church Book of Worship. He always said that one ought not to proselyte, but in the remarks he made he contrived to bring in a good deal of the Doctrines, and apparently no one felt the worse for them, if they were none the wiser. The chance use of a passage from Revelation suggested the peculiar applicability of the Science of Correspondences to the mysteries of that book, and Powell branched off at some length on the interpretation of the words he had quoted. He recognized with humorous consciousness that his excursion had the more interest with his hearers because it involved an exposition of the spiritual sense of the word horse; but afterward he blamed himself for yielding to his opportunity, and he could not make Ann say she had liked it. At the close he announced that out of respect for the dead the raising, which would be a kind of frolic, was postponed for the present. He spoke of the great interest which Bellam ha
d taken in the building of the new house, and how touching it had been for him to know this. Mrs. Bellam shed tears, and whispered to the neighbor at her elbow: “Just what I tole Richard. He’ll be so disapp’inted, s’d I.”

  The whole countryside came to Bellam’s funeral, which was the climax of the general affliction; with his death the epidemic began to abate, and with some cool days toward the end of August it disappeared. Overdale did not come to the funeral, but he showed his white mask at the mill door as the procession passed, and then went in and shut off the water, so that the mill was silent at the time of the burial. When the people came away, the mill was running again, and, some of them thought, furiously. They said in the low tones to which the recent solemnity had reduced their utterance that they reckoned Overdalo had been at his jug again; they moralized the fact as a great pity for so smart a man as he was when sober.

  Captain Bickler arrived too late for the funeral; he had been electioneering in another part of the county; and he told Powell he was truly sorry, for he would have liked to address the friends. It was an occasion which he might have hoped to improve politically, perhaps, but Powell was himself so moved by the whole affair that he could not make the ironical comment which tempted him. The sight of Bickler reminded him of the brooch which he had not yet returned to him; he felt in his waistcoat pocket for it, and he was rather glad to find that he had left it in his week-day clothes; it would have been no more the occasion for its return than for the irony which he forebore.

  Though he had postponed the raising out of respect for Bellam, he had done so with a reluctance which Ann more than half shared with him. Felix and Jessamy had arranged to come out to the raising on the date fixed, and now Ann was afraid that they might not be able to come. But there was no help for it, and Powell held so strongly to their coming, if they possibly could, that he almost convinced Ann they would be sure to come.