These were the terms in which the case presented itself, and though Kelwyn perceived that they were so loosely descriptive as to be morally inapplicable, he could not instantly dismiss them. He had not dismissed them when he told his wife of his purchase. She had often agreed to his theory of the sacredness of all property, and the peculiar sacredness of his, and she had approved of his buying the pistol. But, as she said, she did not wish to see it. He asked her why, angrily, and whether she had not allowed him to get it. She said that she supposed she had, but she did not wish to see it. But the night after their first supper in the old Family house of the Shakers, when the boys had been put to bed, too sleepy for their belated prayers, she asked, in the act of taking out her hair-pins, “Have you got that pistol?”
“Yes, I have,” said Kelwyn.
“Let me see it!”
He went and got it out of his coat-pocket; he had not decided just where to keep it, and offered it to her. “Ugh!” She started back. “Don’t point it!”
“Who’s pointing it?” he retorted. “I’m holding it toward the floor.”
“I didn’t know which the end was. And it might go through the floor and kill somebody. Is it loaded?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am! Look into the cartridge-chambers if you don’t believe me.”
Mrs. Kelwyn backed across the room. “That’s the way half the accidents happen. Don’t point it at your face!” Kelwyn was squinting into the chambers of the revolver. “How do you load it?”
“I’ll show you.” He got the box of cartridges from his trunk, and while his wife stood at the other side of the room he filled the chambers with them. “There!”
“Is that all? Is it loaded now?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have to shoot it off to unload it?”
“No, you can take the cartridges out,” he said, and he showed her how.
“And the cartridges can’t shoot off of themselves?”
“Certainly not.”
“And the pistol can’t shoot without them?”
“Of course it can’t!”
“Give them to me.” He obeyed, and she put the box on the stand at the bedside. “Now put the pistol on the chair on your side, and I shall feel perfectly safe. Promise me you won’t try to load it unless you hear some one coming into the room.”
“Much good it will do then! You mustn’t be ridiculous, my dear. If the pistol is to be of any use I must have it loaded where I can put my hand on it at the slightest alarm. Didn’t you understand that?”
“Yes, I understood it, but I didn’t realize it. I couldn’t bear to have you shoot any one, Elmer. Should you like to?”
“I shouldn’t choose it, but if a tramp—”
“We must risk the tramps. The Kites would hear any one from their room off the kitchen. I’m more afraid of him than of tramps.”
There was no logical sequence in her reasons or sensations, but both were intelligible to Kelwyn.
Shorter men will pityingly protect a tallish woman from her fears when she begins to whimper, and now, when Mrs. Kelwyn began to whimper, Kelwyn pulled her head over on his shoulder, and put his arms around her, and patted her on the back. “Come, come,” he said.
“Oh, Elmer,” she bleated, “we are in such a terrible box!”
“Oh no, we’re not, my dear. It’s been disappointing and disheartening. But it isn’t desperate. You’ll see everything in a different light to - morrow. Besides, we’re not bound to stay here, or to let the Kites stay. The place is ours; we’re masters of the situation.”
He imparted his own courage to her, and he was aware of her having it all when he had succeeded in quieting her nerves. From the distance to which the Shaker holdings had pushed the neighborhood there came not even the sound of dogs barking. The muffled noise of Kite’s horses stamping came from the old Family stable.
The whippoorwills, which seemed to abound in the woods and pastures, filled the moonlight with the whirring of their swift arrowy calls. One of the blood-curdling brood ventured from covert and perched on the, well-curb, where he sat and whistled in his ghastly muted note and would not be hushed away.
Just before daybreak Kelwyn was wakened by Kite swearing joyously at his horses in the stable. He dozed, and two hours later he was roused again by the parley between his tenant-host and the fish-man who halted his cart to join in the morning blasphemy of the farmer, and to sell him a mackerel for the Kelwyns’ breakfast. Mrs. Kelwyn slept through all, and she outslept the two boys, whom their father helped dress when they came tiptoeing in from the next room to see if he were awake.
VII
THE coffee that morning was worse than the tea; the milk was speckled from the cellar rafters again; the mackerel had been fried in lard. But the Kelwyn boys enjoyed the hot soggy biscuit, with the sugared butter on them; and then they asked to be excused, and stole out to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Kite’s boy, who had lurked at the kitchen door through the meal, looking in and luring the young Kelwyns when his mother passed to and fro.
“Now, Elmer,” Mrs. Kelwyn began, in a tone of reinvigorated virtue which in itself was an irritation to his spent nerves. It is one of the advantages of marriage that both the parties to the compact are seldom in the same mind or mood, and one of its disadvantages that with this useful variance they are as often hurtful as helpful to each other. They cannot always agree about a question, though they see both sides of it. If one is cheerful they keep a sort of balance, though the other is gloomy, even though they do not unite in a final gayety.
Mrs. Kelwyn made a sort of pause after challenging her husband’s attention, and he was rasped into rasping out, “Well?”
“Well, you see for yourself it won’t do.”
“Did I say it would do?”
“No, I don’t mean that. But last night you said I would see it differently in the morning.”
“That was to keep you from breaking down altogether. And it seems to have carried you through the night pretty well.”
“Yes, and I appreciate that. But now we have got to face the facts, and the facts are that she won’t do, and can’t do, and don’t seem to care to do. Now what shall you do?”
“It seems to me it’s for you to say what I shall do,” he temporized. “I’ll do whatever you say.”
Mrs. Kelwyn was appeased by the comparatively soft answer when she might have encountered active defiance. “I suppose that I could go to the kitchen and teach her, but do you think it is my place to do that?”
In their earlier life together, when life was simpler, it had sometimes happened that in the intervals of general housework girls whom they could alone afford to keep, Mrs. Kelwyn had not only cooked, but had done all her work. He aided her about it, and they always looked back rather fondly to those times when they seemed to draw closer to each other in their mutual help. It had now passed vaguely through his mind that she might, indeed, do just the thing she suggested; and something in his silence must have said so to her wifely subtlety.
“Well, then, I can tell you, Elmer,” she continued, as if he had spoken, “I’m not going to do it. I might as well ask you to go out and show him about his farm-work.” She knew very well that this did not follow, but he did not say so; he did not say anything; and she had to resume: “Besides, she couldn’t learn, and she wouldn’t wish to. We must go and see the Shakers at once. They are our landlords.”
“Well, I’ll get the horse.”
Mrs. Kelwyn lamented: “How precipitate you are! I want to talk it over first.”
It came to some such point again and again, but the days went by and the Kelwyns had done nothing decided. There were alleviations, or illusions of alleviations, when the Kites seemed to do better, or when the Kelwyns had become so used to their doing badly that they had lost the sense of better things. They accused themselves of lapsing into barbarism, of degenerating, and in a measure they were really corrupted by the many comforts
, almost mounting to luxury, of the situation. Their housing had not ceased to be less delightful than at first, and Mrs. Kite’s housekeeping, when it was spread over the twenty-five rooms of the old Family house, ceased to have a positive ineffectiveness. If she did not sweep or dust, it was because the prevalent cleanliness demanded no sweeping or dusting from her: the cleanliness was as if permanent, like the floors, and walls, and windows. With Kite’s six feet of rugged strength between him and the tramps, Kelwyn slept more securely than if he had in each hand a revolver united with its cartridges. By day he went berrying in the pastures with his boys and the Kite boy, or wrote on the sociological lectures which were to be so impressive as to leave no room for question of a professorship with the overseers. He was inactively conscious that besides the small Kite boy, there was in the household a half-grown boy who had been adopted by the Kites, and a Canadian hired man, who helped about the place and did odd jobs of carpentering for the neighborhood. His name was René, and to make others sure of it he spelled it Raney. Like her husband and the big boy, he seemed to look up to the woman with implicit deference and admiration, which in its way became one of Mrs. Kelwyn’s trials, and remained for her to the last a baffling anomaly.
In the long evenings following the early supper, which in their eagerness to have it over they despatched promptly, Kelwyn sat with his family on the door-step, and listened to the hermit thrushes in the woods near by and then later to the muted whistling of the whippoorwills that whirred through the cool, damp air close about them and dropped like soft clots of earth in the grass. Now and then the Kites, unbidden, but unforbidden, joined them; the woman gliding back and forth in the dusk, after a fashion she had, and talking in her high, sweet voice; and the man listening to her with rapt admiration. One evening he told of his boyhood in northern Vermont, where he was born, and of the bears that came down from the hills and frightened the children going to school. He made a picture of the poor hard life his people had lived, and Kelwyn felt himself in danger of getting on human terms with him. Another evening he was mowing the grass around his wife’s clothes-line under the apple-trees, and he called to the Canadian farm-hand, who was in the way frolicking with the big boy, “Look out, Raney; I’ll couper your legs.” He drove his scythe into the ground.
“You’ll couper some little stones,” Raney joked back. He threw himself into one of the trees, and hung from a limb by his toes, and Mrs. Kite said:
“You didn’t know my husband could talk French. Well, he was brought up, part of the time, close to Montreal.”
She was proud of his talking French, though she must have known he could not read English; and apparently they had standing in the neighborhood. One evening a slattern woman with a baby in her arms, and a barefooted ragged little girl hanging to her skirt, came down the road, and halted across the way from the group at the door. “Look a-here, Mr. Kite, I want to know what you been say in’ to Tad about me. He’s turned me out-o’-doors.”
Kite was letting his horse crop the doorside grass while it cooled in the twilight, after a hot day’s work, and he answered, between jerks at the halter and curses of the beast, that he had not been saying anything. “But I can tell you, Tad and you are both as ugly as the devil; I sha’n’t meddle with you: but you’re a disgrace to the whole neighborhood. You go home and tell him I say if he don’t stop turnin’ you out-o’-doors he’ll get where he’ll want somebody should turn him out.”
Mrs. Kite watched the woman away in silence; then she explained to Mrs. Kelwyn: “He’s that drunken Tad Alison lives down the road here a piece, and they fight the whole while. I don’t see why they can’t live peaceable. One thing, Mr. Kite’s talked to ’em enough.” She put on the air of social leadership; she caught sight of the big boy coming from the bam with a pail in each hand, and said, with smooth selfapproval, “Well, I guess I must go and see after my milk.”
The Kelwyns passed from moods of hopeful forbearance to moods of intolerant despair, but there was no change in their condition. Often it seemed to them like a bad dream they were living, and once Kelwyn said that he felt as he did in a nightmare when he knew he should wake and find it was only a nightmare. But a month passed in their nightmare, and they did not wake from it. Then one morning they got back to that point where they must go and see the Shakers, and once more Kelwyn said he would get the horse.
He really went out to the barn and asked Kite to bring the horse and buggy to the house. Kite had his team hitched to his mower, and was beginning to curse them out into the road toward the mowing-piece of the Shakers.
He glared at Kelwyn, who stood firm for a man whose soul shook within him, and swore under his breath. But the terms of their contract seemed to recur to him, and he dropped the reins and went about harnessing the old mare appointed for the Kelwyns’ use. Kelwyn returned to the house with the perspiration starting in the palms of his hands, and did not come out again till he came out under Mrs. Kelwyn’s lee: by that time Kite had left the buggy at the door, and was hulking back to the barn full of hushed blasphemy from the crown of his flap-brimmed straw hat to the soles of his high-topped rubber boots.
Mrs. Kelwyn was preoccupied in dramatizing her scene with the Office Brother at the Shakers, and did not notice the fury of Kite. She rehearsed the scene aloud most of the way to the Office, and it appeared that the action was to fall altogether to Kelwyn; she was to remain one of the mute witnesses whose silence contributes on the stage to render dialogue effective.
At the door Brother Jasper met them with a letter, which he said he was just going to carry them: he wanted to ask them how they were getting on, anyway.
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Kelwyn answered, with a certain provisonality, and opened the letter after glancing at the superscription, and noting to her husband: “It’s from Cousin Thennie — Good gracious!” she gasped out, after a glimpse of the open sheet. “She’s coming to stay over Sunday! Well, she mustn’t; she can’t! Elmer, you must stop her! You must telegraph her! With everything going from bad to worse, you must see yourself that she can’t come. Now, what are you going to do?” she demanded, and at the same time she appealed from his face of helpless dismay to the Office Sisters’ faces of helpless sympathy. “I was just com-
“ ing to you,” she explained, “to know what in the world we can do about the Kites. They are impossible.”
The Office Sisters made a gentle movement of hopeless intelligence. Sister Saranna broke the silence with, “I don’t know as I want to criticise Jasper any, but I was afraid!” She shut her lips and softly shook her head, capped in stiff white gauze from the nape of her neck to the rims of her steel-bowed spectacles.
“And here’s my cousin,” Mrs. Kelwyn intensified the case, “coming out over Sunday for a little rest! A little rest in that house! Will you telegraph and stop her, Elmer?” She pushed the letter at him and he had to take it. “Drive to the station instantly, and I will stay and explain to the Sisters, and see what can be done. Don’t lose an instant!”
“But won’t it be rather awkward,” he began, “stopping her?”
“Don’t say such a thing, Elmer! Will it be graceful to let her come? Oh, go!”
With a man’s fatuous wish to escape from present trouble, no matter what destruction his flight leads to, Kelwyn went out of the door, and his wife heard him drive off, as she dropped into a rocking-chair and began to unfold her trouble to the Sisters, seated in rocking-chairs before her. At the climaxes she made pauses, and in the pauses the three women rocked excitedly toward one another.
At the last climax of all Mrs. Kelwyn arrested herself in the act of plunging violently forward on her rocker and asked, “What’s that?” It was a sound like the unfolding and folding of a newspaper, which seemed to be made purposely loud, as if to warn them of some unseen presence, or to keep a hidden witness from the involuntary guilt of eavesdropping. The noise came from the sort of parlor, or reading-room, which opened across the hallway from the Office. “Is there some one over there?”
>
The taciturn Sister tittered, and Saranna said: “Poor Jasper! I don’t know what’s to become of him, now. He was just going to ask if you could take the young man, there, in with you.”
“A boarder!” Mrs. Kelwyn thought she had shrieked it, but she had only gasped it, in the sort of hoarse whisper that people use in nightmares.
“Well, no,” Saranna said. “More like a roomer. He could get his meals here, I guess. But all our rooms that we give to the world outside are taken up by the visiting Brothers from Canbury for the week that’s to come.”
“We couldn’t think of it,” Mrs. Kelwyn returned, promptly, and a shade indignantly.
There came another newspaper stir from across the hallway, as if the young man in the parlor had heard but had tried not to hear.
Saranna said, an octave lower: “That’s what I told Jasper. But he seemed to think that if you felt lonely any, when Friend Kite was away, daytimes, it might comfort you to have another man about the house. I mean if Friend Kelwyn has to go to Boston, ever.” Mrs. Kelwyn suspended her answer with a frown. “Does he want to stay all summer?”
“He could come over here when the visiting Brothers are gone. He wants to work in the garden for us.” Mrs. Kelwyn did not relax her frown. “Is he a laboring-man?”
“I don’t know as he is.” Saranna rocked, and smoothed her lap with one hand, while she kept the other on her breast. “He ain’t sunburnt any, and his hands don’t look it.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 927