Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I don’t know how you can.” The wet crunching of heavy boots advanced toward Emerance, and a figure larger than life in the dim luminosity hulked over him. “If I had a match or something! Do you know where we are?”

  “Not far from the edge of the woods. I’ve just got into it.”

  “Well, but whare else are we?”

  “About half a mile from the Shakers’ South Family House.”

  “Oh! You come from there?”

  “Yes; I’m on my way to the Office to sleep.”

  “I guess Fm goin’ to sleep here in the woods, for all I can make out,” the hulking figure said, disconsolately. “No use to feel,” the vague giant added. “If feelin’ could ha’ done it I’d ha’ b’en home an hour ago.”

  “Are you Mr. Kite?” Emerance asked, not desisting from his tactile examination of the case as he went and came round the team.

  “My name’s Kite.”

  “Well, what seems to be the matter?”

  “You tell.”

  “Why don’t you drive home?”

  “Can’t start the hoesis.”

  “Balk?”

  “No! Never!”

  They both stood still.

  “I’ll go back for a lantern,” Emerance said. “Or, wait a moment.” He poked in among the horses’ heels, and rattled at the trace-chains and swingletrees, where the brutes patiently suffered him. “Whoa! Hold on! Yes! Just what I thought. You’ve backed up and caught this off horse’s swingletree into the wheel and locked it, somehow, so it can’t move.”

  “Well!” Kite stupidly commented. “I thought something was wrong there, but I couldn’t see a mite, and—”

  He had recovered his courage, and he now resumed command of the situation. He called to his horse.

  “Hen-ep!” but after a forward strain they stood still in their tracks. The ingenious accident had not happened without due intricacy.

  “Hold on!” Emerance called to him. “I didn’t say I’d got it free yet. It’s caught so that I can’t loosen it unless you can get me something to see by, and even then—”

  “Look here!” Kite said, lunging back to him, with a sound as of cattle breaking through underbrush. “If us two can’t pull it loose I’m goin’ to untackle the hossis and leave the wagon here till mornin’. Ain’t nobody goin’ to run off with it, the wheel locked that way.”

  “Might be a good idea,” Emerance consented, and after they had vainly tugged at the swingletree together it came to that end. Kite untackled his horses and got them by the bridles. “Livin’ about here?” he asked, as a preliminary to parting with Emerance.

  “I’m staying with the Shakers for a few days. I thought I might get some sort of farm work. But they’ve got nothing for me to do.”

  “Used to farm work?”

  “I was brought up to it.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  “Oh, I’ve taught school a good while.”

  “I don’t see,” Kite said, sulkily, rather to himself than Emerance, “how they s’pose I’m goin’ to get that piece of English grass cut.” He made a start, calling over his shoulder to Emerance for good-night, “Well, so long!”

  “Better let me Help you.”

  “I guess I can manage my Hossis alone,” Kite answered, haughtily.

  “I meant the English grass.”

  “Oh! Well. Why, what the — This Hoss is lame!” Emerance came forward out of the blacker darkness to the horses’ heads.

  “I’ll go back with you and we’ll look him over in the barn. I can get into the Shakers’ any time; perhaps you’ll give me a shake-down in your haymow.”

  If the offer of help had been for anything but his horse Kite might have refused it, but as it was he neither consented nor refused. He merely said, letting Emerance take the bridle of the sound horse: “He’s a funny devil. Don’t mind if he tries to nip you. He don’t mean nothing by it, but you want to look out.”

  They went along over the way Emerance had come, splashing through the miry ruts and brushing the wet from the wayside bushes. As they came in front of the Family house, Parthenope had just blown her lamp out and was debating with herself how much of her window she should put down and how much leave up, in precaution against its growing hotter or colder toward morning, when she heard a noise as of the snorting and plunging of horses, with the rattling of chains, and the leathern creaking of harness. Then she heard a voice which she knew for Kite’s saying, “You just ketch a-hold of this other feller a minute, and I’ll git my lantern here in the woodhouse.”

  A voice which she knew for Emerance’s answered, “Look out; there’s a bear in there!”

  “A bear? What’s a bear doin’ in my woodhouse?” She heard Emerance explaining and Kite threatening to have the bear and his leader out of that, he did not care what happened, and then Emerance protesting, and at last the tinkling note of Mrs. Kite calling, as from an open doorway: “Here’s your lantern, Alvin; I got it out for you. Where have you been? I kep’ supper for you; but it’s pretty cold now, I guess, or it will be by the time you get through with your hossis. That Raney there with you?”

  “No, it’s a feller that helped me with the hossis, back here in the woods a piece. He’s goin’ to sleep in the bam; I want you should bring him out something to eat.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Kite answered back. “But you want to be careful who you let sleep in the barn, Alvin. Does he smoke?”

  “No, I don’t smoke, Mrs. Kite. And I’m not hungry. I shall do very well.”

  “Why, that you, Mr. Emerance?”

  “Quiet! Whoa! Whoa! These horses smell the bear. Take hold of his head, Mrs. Kite! Whoa there! Back up!”

  The red blot of a lantern came wavering from the door below, and, dipping and jerking through the dark, indicated the progress of Mrs. Kite toward the place where the horses made their terror heard.

  A vague envy pierced Parthenope’s heart. She dropped on her knees at the window and put her head out to see all that she could of the drama which was more audible than visible. She would have liked to be there in Mrs. Kite’s place, holding the lantern and helping the men. She wanted to call, “Wait for me, Mrs. Kite; I’m coming!” and she wanted to do this so much that it seemed to her as if she had done it. But she knew she had not, and after a cry from Mrs. Kite, “He’s got away!” and her husband’s blast of curses and the rush of a clashing and snorting horse, with the pursuit of a man who must have been Emerance from his distant call, “It’s all right; I’ve got him,” she did nothing bolder than put her head farther out of the window and try to see better. But she could only hear Emerance coming back with the Horse and then his renewed struggle in getting him past the woodhouse; Kite must have already got by with the other horse, for his swearing sounded farther off, in the direction of the barn.

  The struggle of the man and the brute ended in the man’s triumph; the red blot of the lantern followed with Mrs. Kite toward the barn. It was a long time before it came flickering back, but Parthenope could have waited till morning. She heard voices lifted, the voice of Kite saying, “Well, don’t oversleep yourself,” and the voice of Mrs. Kite calling, “Well, we’ll have breakfast at five o’clock,” and then she realized that Emerance was going to sleep in the barn. It was not the hardship of it, but the shame of it that made her wish to shake her kindred from their sleep and shock them into the hospitality they ought to offer from their superfluity of shelter in the great empty Family house; and when the Kites had got back within eavesdropping at their door under her window she caught certain generalities from them which she could not help knowing had a particular bearing on the case.

  “I hated to leave him out there,” Mrs. Kite said, “but there wa’n’t a place where I could think to put him; I’d have made Arthur get in with me, but the child’s bed wouldn’t have been big enough, and Albert and Raney have only got one between them. I shouldn’t mind the bats, but the rats runnin’ all over him! Well, some folks don’t seem to care for any
one else.”

  “No,” Kite agreed. “Want you to slave your life out for ‘em, but when it comes to doin’ for anybody else, they got both hoofs in the troth every time.”

  “He’s full as well educated as they be. He talks as correct.”

  “I don’t care about the talkin’. It’s the doin’ I look at. He stood by like a major. Hadn’t been for him, I guess I should ha’ slep’ in the woods to-night, let alone the barn. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world. One thing, I’m glad I ain’t their kind.”

  “We should ha’ had to call ’em up out of their sleep,” Mrs. Kite tittered.

  “Should we ha’ minded bein’ called out of our sleep?”

  “No; but then we don’t bange round all day!”

  “That’s about the size of it, I guess. If we’d wore ourselves out findin’ fault, we’d want our rest.”

  The Kites shut themselves in with the comfort of their opinions, and Parthenope heard no more. She left that question of how much window she should keep open, and crept into bed and tried to think of what could be said in defence of the Kelwyns. She loved her cousin, and in spite of what she felt to be the crude justice of the case against her she was indignantly loyal to her, and the more so because she knew that she and not Kelwyn was chiefly at fault. But had not they both treated Emerance as they would not have treated one whose place in the world they were surer of? Had not she herself been a little too topping in some particulars of consciousness? She did not abate even in her actual humiliation all sense of that superiority which she felt toward people she did not exactly understand; and undoubtedly she did not understand this very anomalous Mr. Emerance. But she could have wished at last that she had not insisted on giving the bear coffee herself; and in the one-sided colloquy she now held with Mr. Emerance she at once confessed that she had been very headstrong, and made him say that he had not thought of her action as an instance of obstinacy but rather of admirable courage. She wished that she had the courage to knock at Mrs. Kelwyn’s door and tell her that Mr. Emerance was going to sleep in the barn; but this, for more reasons than one, would have taken more courage than she had. It seemed to her that she should never get to sleep, but there are few moral causes that can keep youth awake the whole night, and Parthenope slept long before morning.

  The hay in the barn was the last year’s hay, and Emerance’s bed was not so sweet as it was soft. But it was not the first time he had slept on old hay in a barn; he had dreamed Fourths of July in when he was a boy on such a bed, and sometimes when he was an older boy, coming home from a dance later than he wished his father to know, he had crept into the mow over the stall where he had bedded his horse, and got a full night’s rest between three o’clock and six of the morning. His reminiscences did not so perfume the hay but its mustiness was too much for him till he turned on his back and faced the roof, where the stars looked back at him through the crevices of the old shingles. He suspected that the small chirpings and squeakings from the rafters were the vigils of bats, but they were as possibly the somnambulic notes of swallows; and the logic of the situation was that he would be fast asleep before the rats would leave the oats in the bins of the horses below and begin their question of him in his loft.

  He wondered if the Shakers would let him help Kite cut that piece of English grass. He did not wish to stay with them unless he could be of use; but he wished to stay with them, if indeed it was they with whom he wished to stay. The horses champed their oats, and pounded the floor with their hoofs, and heaved deep sighs of comfort. As if with no interval, he heard a loud clamor of cocks and a shouting of robins, and a fabric of joyous sound seemed risen from the earth to the sky where now the sun and not the stars shone down through the roof.

  When the Kelwyns gathered for their eight-o’clock breakfast, and Mrs. Kite had left their coffee on the table, she smoothly reappeared with a plate of gems in her hand.

  “Mr. Emerance made ‘em, and he thought you would like a pan, and I been trying to keep ’em warm; but it’s so late that I don’t know as I have, exactly.”

  At the fact unfolded, bit by bit, from Parthenope’s admissions, Kelwyn showed a helpless regret; but Mrs. Kelwyn defended herself. “It can’t be helped now. But you ought to have insisted upon his staying, Elmer. Then nothing of all this would have happened.”

  In the late evening Kite came home alone from the English meadow. The Kelwyns heard him telling his wife that Mr. Emerance had gone to the Shakers’ for the night, and they felt a rise of self-respect in the fact that he was not going to sleep another night in the bam. They were able to convict him of a certain want of consideration for them in having slept there at all. But the next morning, when Kelwyn went over to the Shakers’ for his mail, he brought back word that Emerance had left by an early train; the Office Sisters thought, for Boston. Kelwyn was somehow crestfallen at the fact, and they all went rather dully through the

  XIV

  FOR Parthenope the unexpected drama of her first afternoon seemed far removed in time. The woodhouse stood open and empty, as if consciously showing the absence of the bear and his leader, whom Mrs. Kite reported seeing make off toward the woods in the morning after when she got up to kindle the kitchen fire. Only one thing happened in the interval now following to divert the girl’s thoughts from their centripetal tendency; and the excitement of this she shared with the whole household. It was the disappearance of a series of Mrs. Kite’s pies from the hanging-shelf in the cellar where she had put them on Saturday night with her own hands duly numbered. Day after day, pie after pie, they disappeared for nearly a week, and then ceased to disappear. The fact would have suggested tramps; but the cellar doors remained locked, and Kelwyn contended that though a succession of tramps might steal pies of Mrs. Kite’s make not the same tramp or tramps would continue to steal them. The hypothesis of rats was untenable because of the height of the shelf, but in view of the fact that there is nothing rats cannot do, it was decided that the pies had been taken by rats. When the pies were no longer taken the hypothesis of rats was rejected, and then the excitement passed into a lulling sense of mystery.

  Kelwyn wrote at his lectures all the morning, and Mrs. Kelwyn worked at her mending in the afternoon. The girl took long rambles with the Kelwyn boys through the woods and over the fields, when they would rather have been about the mischief in which the Kite boy abounded; but they submitted to her companionship, and the Kite boy made his excursions on the old white horse alone. He had found pasturage for him in a wood-lot which he made believe his mother had given to him for that use, and in the horse’s toothless incapacity for grazing he had fed him with soft mushes when he could filch the cornmeal for them and escape with them from the kitchen door. He had a hardy contempt for such pleasures as straw-berrying in the meadow, where the grass crept thinly up into the shelter of the pines, and where, over the mat of the fallen needles, the vines hung their crimson berries in clusters like chimes of fairy bells. The possibility of chipmunks and woodchucks reconciled him somewhat more to blueberrying in the burnt lands, which the forest fires had left charred, but which a dense growth of bushes had almost consoled for their blight, between the Family house and the pond in the chestnut woods; when Francy Kelwyn sprang shrieking from a clump of blueberry bushes, with the blood streaming from a dozen punctures in his smooth-shorn head, where a swarm of yellow-jackets had stung him, the Kite boy seemed to feel that his sacrifice had met some recognition, and he joyously invited the sufferer to remain with him and fight the enemy.

  Mrs. Kelwyn lived in an unremitting anxiety concerning him. He was the confidant of nature in the most occult intimacies of animal life; he assisted with the same zeal at the births and deaths of the barn-yard; and Mrs. Kelwyn, who kept her boys as well as she could from sharing his bolder knowledge, could not always prevent them from claiming the previous acquaintance of the pork and veal and poultry which came to the table. She felt him to be a dangerous part of the hardships which she and her family endured in the keeping of his, and
as noxious to her children’s morals as his mother to their digestions.

  Mrs. Kite had quite lapsed from the ideal which she had imagined from Emerance’s example, and was the worse for her efforts to remember the things she imagined from it. Yet, if she had not been a wonder of such satisfied inefficiency, certain qualities of here might have won upon the tolerance if not the liking of the Kelwyns; preposterous as it was, she sometimes affected, them as a lady, or as a conditional entity which would have evolved in time into some ornamental type rather than another. Her cooking could be ignored in the supplies of canned foods and of baker’s bread from the village grocery, and now and then it was ameliorated by Parthenope’s visits to the kitchen, which Mrs. Kite suffered with placid indifference and Mrs. Kelwyn permitted with protests against the violation of principle involved. For the girl they were tinged with pensive associations from the gay afternoon and evening when she had been the handmaid of Emerance in the preparation of the picnic feasts of the memorable day which had ended in such inconclusion.

  The week she had meant to spend with her cousins passed, but at a little urgence she stayed on. She could not exactly say that she had come to them merely for a fresh point of view; that would have been rather ungracious; but she said that she had been wondering whether it might not be better for her aunt’s health, and usefuler for her own art, to go to Europe for the summer, and spend the winter there. She wished to talk the matter over with the Kelwyns; for the present, however, they all put it by.

  XV

  THE fame of Parthenope’s coffee-making had spread from Mrs. Kite to the Shakers, and one afternoon some of the Sisters came, at Mrs. Kelwyn’s invitation, to see the girl make it and to drink it when it was made. Coffee, in their ethics, was not quite a sin; it was more like a venial excess; if now and then it must be permitted, as in their experience it was, then they might be partially redeemed from error if the coffee were very good. They clustered, dovelike in their soft drab, around the table where Parthenope watched the machine, and admired her beauty and grace and fashion in muted asides to Mrs. Kelwyn. When the smoking coffee spilled from the spout they broke into subdued cries of wonder, and when the girl filled their cups with it, one after another, and soothed its sparkle from the bottle of cream which they had brought with them for a present, they felt sure that such coffee as that could not hurt anybody; Sister Saranna said so, and they all said so.