The pyrotechnics of the evening were typically reluctant. Emerance had charge of them, with Raney’s help; but the pin-wheels caught and hung fizzing instead of revolving with a coruscation of sparks; the rockets shot sideways and ascended in unexpected tangeats; the Roman candles alone did well, and each of the boys was allowed to fire one off. The two Kelwyn boys had their hands held by their father; the Kite boy grasped his candle unhelped, and fired it into his family circle.
This had been enlarged by the return of his mother, who had come back with a serener self-satisfaction than she had shown before she went. She had begun by telling Parthenope and Emerance that she guessed she would get supper herself that evening, and in the meal she prepared she had so perfectly reverted to the original type of her cookery that the Kelwyns made their supper of canned tongue and of tea that they had brewed on the table.
At the show of fire-works she put on the hostess, as if the entertainment was hers, and invited the neighbors who came, out of apparent proportion to the scanty population, to take eligible places with her family. Lurking on the edge of this inner group Parthenope found the wife of the drunkard Alison, and when the display was over, she asked the wild girlish creature into the house. She stood with her baby in her arms while Mrs. Kelwyn bade her an exemplary good night, driving her boys before her to their beds; she followed their going with a sort of scorn.
“Your aunt got nothing but them two boys?” she asked.
“My cousin? That’s all.”
“My! I got six.”
“Why, how old are you?”
“I’m under twenty-nine, I guess.”
“And I’m twenty-seven myself.”
“You’re a regular old maid.”
“Well,” Parthenope retorted, with amusement, “you’re a regular young mother.”
“It’s full as bad, you mean. Well, I don’t know but it is. Sometimes I feel as if I should go crazy with ’em all, but then again I don’t know what I should do without ’em when Tad gets on one of his tears. You hear that Shaker Elder preach agin marryin’ last Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“I heard tell what he said. I guess He don’t know everything. If he did he wouldn’t said so much about the children. I guess there’d be more divorces and more killin’s if it wa’n’t for them. Tad ain’t bad when he’s himself, but when he’s been at the jug he don’t know what he’s up to. Well, there! I don’t know as I ought to talk to a young lady about such things, but it’s kind of curious about children. I thought I shouldn’t ever feel to’ds the rest the same as I did to the first; but there, the last is always the first, if you can understand.”
“I think I can,” Parthenope answered, gravely.
“It’s always the baby till the next baby comes. I guess they all have their turn of bein’ the first. Sometimes it don’t seem as if I could get through the trouble they give. But I hain’t ever lost a single one; I believe if I did it would about kill me. I should like the Shakers to understand that. The Shaker ladies do, I guess!”
Parthenope asked her if she would not sit down, but she said she guessed not; she guessed she must be going. “I guess your cousin thought it was time, too.” She looked around the great room. “My, but this is a nice place! I wish Jasper’d give us the chance. And he would, too, I believe, if he could ha’ placed any dependence on Tad. I could ha’ cooked for you! I bet.” Parthenope thought it best not to respond, and the mother said, “Well, I must be goin’.”
She shifted her baby from one arm to the other, and the child looked at Parthenope with sweet, sleepy eyes. “Oh, you dear!” the girl cooed to it. “May I kiss you good night, baby?”
“I guess she’s clean enough,” the mother said, pulling her baby’s stiff little dress straight. “I like to Have my children know it’s the Fourth. The rest has been to the Sunday-school picnic. I guess my hoys are waitin’ for me outside now. Say by-by to the lady. Well, she’s too sleepy, I guess. One thing,” she turned to Parthenope in parting, “Don’t you let them Shakers get around you with their talk. I’ve had as hard a time as any, but it’s more of an even thing than they say, marryin’ is. I know, and they don’t. Well, good night to you,” she ended abruptly.
Kelwyn was going to town in the morning, and Emerance with Parthenope drove to the station with him. She had errands at the village stores, and then the two started home together. At a turn where a wood road left the highways he proposed to follow it into the Shaker forest, in the belief that it would come out where he had seen a wood road going in near the old Family house. The woods, damped and cooled by an overnight rain, were scented with the leaves and bark of the trees, and the rich, melancholy odor of the rotting logs, felled or fallen long ago and left in an immemorial decay. They did not hurry because they could not, and also because they would not. At times Emerance got out and led the horse over a space where the road had forgotten itself, and helped it to remember where it was going. After such a moment he remounted to his place beside the girl with a long sigh of satisfaction.
“Are you so tired?” she asked, with a smile for his sigh. “You had better let me get out and lead the horse after this.”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” he answered; “I was just thinking that I would like to ask you something — ask you about something—” He lifted his eyes and looked at her, but her face was averted. “Will you answer frankly?”
She now, as if she had gained time enough, faced him, and asked in answer, “Do you find it so difficult to be frank?”
“Sometimes. Or always with myself. Don’t you?” She hesitated. “I can tell better when I know what you want to ask.”
He did not respond to her prompting, but interposed a generalization.
“I suppose my indecision, my want of a fixed purpose in life, comes from my love of experimenting.”
“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?” she returned.
But he did not answer. He said, “You know I am going to the Centennial next week.”
“Oh yes,” she caught herself from betraying her surprise. “That is, I didn’t know it.”
“Yes, I’ve an idea it might be a turning-point for me. I’ve wasted too much time between doing and not doing; and something tremendously practical, like the Centennial, might have instruction for me.”
“I understand,” she said, but she did not. She was really wondering what he meant.
“I have been freer with my time,” he said, with the air of explaining, “because it seemed all to belong to me to do the most or the least with it for myself and very indirectly for other people. But of late I have begun to think — to hope — that my time might be more important, more directly important, to others; and I have wanted to decide upon the future without so much loss of the present.”
“Yes,” she said, evasively; “I think that we all live too much in the future. We ought to make more of the present, oughtn’t we?”
“That was what I meant,” he answered, with a breath irrelevantly deep. “I have had too many strings to my bow, I’m afraid. In a sort of way, or up to a certain point, I believe I could be one of several things. What I have been is a teacher, but I have sometimes thought of the law and sometimes of the ministry. They are a long road, though, and though I have so much time I have not so much money. Then I have thought of journalism; I have done some newspaper work, and I could get a reporter’s place. But there is something else, more to my fancy if not my reason. I suppose I’ve left mentioning it to the last because it mightn’t appear so wise to — others. Do you remember that day at the school examination?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Parthenope said, and there flashed upon her the vision of that pretty young teacher with the golden hair and the gold filling in her teeth. But she dismissed it with the instant perception that the teacher could not be in the line of his thinking as a vocation.
“I have always been fond of the theatre,” he went on. “I have tried to make my school-boys realize the beauty of truth in their school theatrica
ls. I have a very dear friend who is a great actor — though all the world doesn’t know it yet, as it will some day. He is a great citizen too, and we met first at a reform meeting, where I heard him speak. He let me come to some of his rehearsals, where he was training his company for one of his plays; he is a dramatist as well as an actor. Once, toward the end of my last summer’s vacation, he gave me a small part for a week to fill a vacant place.”
He had gone on incoherently, rapidly; now he paused promptingly, and she asked, “And did you like it?”
“It was the greatest joy of my life,” he answered. Then, as she remained silent, he added, rather blankly:
“You don’t like the notion? You don’t approve of the theatre?”
“I? But I don’t see what I have to do with it. It is very interesting.”
“And you don’t think me a less serious person because I love the theatre?”
“No, no; I know that there have been very good actors and actresses,” she said, from the ethicism which must always be the first thing with her. “My father and mother,” she particularized, “knew Charlotte Cushman when they were all living in Rome.”
“Did they? But you mustn’t misunderstand. If I didn’t love the art of the theatre I am afraid I shouldn’t care for what we call the ‘good’ it can do. If the art didn’t come first I would rather be a minister. A minister must be an actor, you know.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes. But — I had better go on perhaps—”
“Do.” She could only be monosyllabic.
“It’s merely this: I enjoyed the acting, but first I want to live it. I want to act in a play of my own. I have an idea for one. I have the scene and the persons, but I want the experience. I will tell you about it.”
“Yes.”
“Of course, it has to be a love-story and it has to end well.”
He seemed to be consulting her, and she said, “If it isn’t a tragedy, of course it must end well.”
He laughed. “It isn’t exactly a comedy, either. Life isn’t, you know.”
“No,” she said in a sudden rueful sense of life’s anomalies.
“I thought of having the scene partly in a Shaker community; the principal characters wouldn’t be Shakers, but there are features of the Shaker life that would be very effective on the stage. Their dancing—”
“But that’s a part of their worship!” she broke in, horrified, and the more resolute not to yield the point because she felt its temptation for him.
“That’s true. But the Greek drama represented moments of worship. The Agamemnon of Æschylus, you know, begins with an act of worship.” She looked unconvinced, and he added: “To be sure, it was their own worship. I must think it over; I wouldn’t do anything to wound the Shakers for the world.”
“Of course not. Well?” she prompted.
He flicked at a fly with the limp whip-lash, and then he drew the lines taut and started the horse from his sleep-walking into a waking-walk. “I haven’t worked it out yet in my own mind. I can’t tell you, now. May I tell you when I come back from the Centennial?”
“Does the hero go to the Centennial?”
“Yes, the hero goes to the Centennial.”
“That is new. Does the heroine go, too?”
“That’s what I don’t know yet; I’m going to find out. What do you think of my notion?”
“Of going to the Centennial?”
“No, the larger notion: living a play and acting it.” She knew this was what he had meant, and she felt that in a manner they had changed natures; he was now direct and she was elusive.
“Oh, that is too large a question for me.”
“You don’t like the notion.”
“You mustn’t say that. I don’t like the notion of being judge. I don’t feel” — Parthenope did not realize how novel this attitude was for her— “competent to judge.” If the problem had not been so many-sided, if the dilemma had not had so many horns, if she had not felt so bound to him, her answer might have been different. As it was, she took refuge in an appearance little short of antipathetic reluctance.
“Ah,” he said, “I see you don’t like it. Well!” He set his jaw, but whether with the resolve to submit to her dislike or defy it she had not quite the courage to ask herself.
XXII
“Mr. EMERANCE is going to the Centennial, he says,” Parthenope began, abruptly, when she came in upon Mrs. Kelwyn, sitting distraught in the great dancing-room of the Family house which served them as a parlor, where she was pulling over some sewing.
“Is he?” Mrs. Kelwyn answered, absently.
“Yes; next week. Don’t you think it’s rather strange he’s not mentioned it before?”
Mrs. Kelwyn only heaved a long, inattentive sigh in answering, “Well, it may be the best thing.”
“He thinks it will decide his future in life. He is trying to think whether he had better be a lawyer, or a minister, or an actor, or a dramatist, or keep on a plain teacher.”
“An actor?” Mrs. Kelwyn caught at the word. “What nonsense!”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“When did he say that?”
“Just now — on the way home. He says he loves the art of the theatre, but he believes it can do a great deal of good. I suppose it can,” the girl sighed, questioningly. “But what I don’t like is any person’s being of so many minds. He is too experimental altogether.”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Kelwyn said. “A good many young men must be so, especially when they are at all gifted.”
“Is Mr. Emerance so very gifted? How does he show it?” Parthenope somehow liked her cousin’s praise of him; and she was willing to provoke more of it by her blame. “If I were a man I should have one aim in life, and I should keep to it till I died. I wouldn’t let anything swerve me from it.”
Mrs. Kelwyn answered, in a certain remoteness from the case of Mr. Emerance: “It is very hard to keep to a single purpose — for men. The best of them can’t do it. I have just been blaming Elmer for his indecision, but I’m not sure I was right. Men see so many sides.”
“Cousin Elmer? I supposed he had never had but one ideal!”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” Mrs. Kelwyn almost moaned; “it’s this terrible situation. We don’t either of us know what to do next.”
“Why, has anything new happened?”
“I don’t know whether it’s new or not. Yes, I suppose it is. Brother Jasper has just been here to tell us that he has heard a bad account of the man he was going to put in the Kites’ place. He has an ugly temper, and he made a scandal where he came from by courting his present wife while the first was dying of consumption. Jasper must have had it on his conscience to let us know; he was worried in the spring by the Kites’ failure to get ready for us. But he let us come, and perhaps now he wants to make it up to us.”
“It seems to me,” the girl said, from her remoteness, “that country people are very strange about their marriages. No wonder the Shakers don’t approve of marriage.”
“Then,” Mrs. Kelwyn continued, ignoring the generality, “there has been a pettifogging lawyer here from the village to see the Kites. I’m afraid they are going to make trouble for us.”
“Why, they can’t have you arrested?”
“Not arrested, exactly; but they might sue us, or something like that. I don’t know what. But we have started in the direction of putting them out of the place, and it seems we can’t stop. There seems to be no end to it all. Did you have a pleasant drive?”
“Yes — yes. Very pleasant.”
The two boys came running up from below and announced, “The old Shaker gentleman is down-stairs.”
“Elder Nathaniel?” Mrs. Kelwyn conjectured. “You go down and see him, Thennie dear. He’s coming about the Kites, of course. I don’t believe I could bear to talk the situation over any more just now. When did Mr. Emerance say he was going to the Centennial?”
“He didn’t say what day. It seems to be rath
er sudden. But if it’s going to decide his future for him, he may think he can’t go too soon. It’s a good deal for the hundredth anniversary of our Independence to decide!”
Parthenope fancied herself saying this to Emerance, but it was really addressed to Mrs. Kelwyn, who answered, remotely: “Yes, yes. Do go down and see what Elder Nathaniel has to say.”
The girl found the old man sitting on the threshold-stone gently fanning himself with his wide straw hat, in the wind of which his thin white hair waved where it hung long in his neck. Two rocking-chairs stood on the turf under the great elm, and “Let us sit down here, Elder Nathaniel,” she said, leading the way to them; “that stone is so uncomfortable.”
“Oh, nay,” he returned; but he followed her, and they sat down together facing each other. “I am sorry Friend Kelwyn is not here. The boys said he had gone to Boston.”
“Yes, and Mrs. Kelwyn asked me to excuse her for not coming down; she is very tired.”
“She has been worried by what Jasper told them about those folks he was going to put here?”
“A little. But, Elder Nathaniel” — she left the question of the Kelwyns in the larger interest of a general inquiry—” are all the married people about here divorced, or living unhappily, or something?”
“Oh, nay,” the Elder answered, with a certain wariness. “There are many couples here living rightly in the earthly order.”
“Because,” she explained, “I never heard of such things in Boston.”
“People know more about each other in the country,” he said.
“Do you mean,” she asked, “that there is just as much unhappiness among the married people in Boston, only we don’t know it?”
“Nay, I didn’t say that.”
“Then” — she went forward at a great bound—” why don’t the Shakers approve of marriage?”
“We approve of it in the earthly order,” he answered. “ But we believe the angelic life is better. In the resurrection there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 938