In describing the incident to his wife Ewbert stopped at this point, and then passed on to say that after they got to talking Hilbrook seemed more and more gratified, and even glad, to see him.
“Everybody’s glad to see you, Clarence,” she broke out, with tender pride. “But why do you say, ‘After we got to talking’? Didn’t you go to talking at once?”
“Well, no,” he answered, with a vague smile; “we did a good deal of listening at first, both of us. I didn’t know just where to begin, after I got through my excuses for coming, and Mr. Hilbrook didn’t offer any opening. Don’t you think he’s a very handsome old man?”
“He has a pretty head, and his close-cut white hair gives it a neat effect, like a nice child’s. He has a refined face; such a straight nose and a delicate chin. Yes, he is certainly good-looking. But what” —
“Oh, nothing. Only, all at once I realized that he had a sensitive nature. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have realized it before. I had somehow taken it for granted that he was a self-conscious hermit, who lived in a squalid seclusion because he liked being wondered at. But he did not seem to be anything of the kind. I don’t know whether he’s a good cook, for he didn’t ask me to eat anything; but I don’t think he’s a bad housekeeper.”
“With his bed unmade at eight o’clock in the evening!”
“He may have got up late,” said Ewbert. “The house seemed very orderly, otherwise; and what is really the use of making up a bed till you need it!”
Mrs. Ewbert passed the point, and asked, “What did you talk about when you got started?”
“I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them.”
“Well, what did he say about them?”
“That he wasn’t interested in them. He had been once, but he was not now.”
“I can understand that,” said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. “Books are crowded out after your life fills up with other interests.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Mrs. Ewbert followed him up.
“So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook’s life hadn’t filled up with other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history, though he was not reticent about it. I proposed the history of his cousin in the boyish days which he said they had spent together; but he seemed no more interested in his cousin than in himself. Then I tried his dog and his pathetic sufferings, and I said something about the pity of the poor old fellow’s last days being so miserable. That seemed to strike a gleam of interest from him, and he asked me if I thought animals might live again. And I found — I don’t know just how to put it so as to give you the right sense of his psychological attitude.”
“No matter! Put it any way, and I will take care of the right sense. Go on!” said Mrs. Ewbert.
“I found that his question led up to the question whether men lived again, and to a confession that he didn’t or couldn’t believe they did.”
“Well, upon my word!” Mrs. Ewbert exclaimed. “I don’t see what business he has coming to church, then. Doesn’t he understand that the idea of immortality is the very essence of Rixonitism! I think it was personally insulting to you, Clarence. What did you say?”
“I didn’t take a very high hand with him. You know I don’t embody the idea of immortality, and the church is no bad place even for unbelievers. The fact is, it struck me as profoundly pathetic. He wasn’t arrogant about it, as people sometimes are, — they seem proud of not believing; but he was sufficiently ignorant in his premises. He said he had seen too many dead people. You know he was in the civil war.”
“No!”
“Yes, — through it all. It came out on my asking him if he were going to the Decoration Day services. He said that the sight of the first great battlefield deprived him of the power of believing in a life hereafter. He was not very explanatory, but as I understood it the overwhelming presence of death had extinguished his faith in immortality; the dead riders were just like their dead horses” —
“Shocking!” Mrs. Ewbert broke in.
“He said something went out of him.” Ewbert waited a moment before adding: “It was very affecting, though Hilbrook himself was as apathetic about it as he was about everything else. He was not interested in not believing, even, but I could see that it had taken the heart out of life for him. If our life here does not mean life elsewhere, the interest of it must end with our activities. When it comes to old age, as it has with poor Hilbrook, it has no meaning at all, unless it has the hope of more life in it. I felt his forlornness, and I strongly wished to help him. I stayed a long time talking; I tried to interest him in the fact that he was not interested, and” —
“Well, what?”
“If I didn’t fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?”
V.
It was some time after the Ewberts had given up expecting him that old Hilbrook came to return the minister’s visit. Then, as if some excuse were necessary, he brought a dozen eggs in a paper bag, which he said he hoped Mrs. Ewbert could use, because his hens were giving him more than he knew what to do with. He came to the back door with them; but Mrs. Ewbert always let her maid of all work go out Sunday evening, and she could receive him in the kitchen herself. She felt obliged to make him the more welcome on account of his humility, and she showed him into the library with perhaps exaggerated hospitality.
It was a chilly evening of April, and so early that the lamp was not lighted; but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father’s looks in his last years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid. It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose of leaving it.
Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about the place except his chickens, — they took care of themselves. Ewbert urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character, that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them company, — they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth, he asked how the old dog was getting on.
“Oh, he’s dead,” said Hilbrook, and the minister’s heart smote him with a pity for the survivor’s forlornness which the old man’s apathetic tone had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and said how much Hilbrook must miss him.
“Well, I don’t know,” Hilbrook return
ed. “He wa’n’t much comfort, and he’s out of his misery, anyway.” After a moment he added, with a gleam of interest: “I’ve been thinkin’, since he went, of what we talked about the other night, — I don’t mean animals, but men. I tried to go over what you said, in my own mind, but I couldn’t seem to make it.”
He lifted his face, sculptured so fine by age, and blinked at Ewbert, who was glad to fancy something appealing in his words and manner.
“You mean as to a life beyond this?”
“Ah!”
“Well, let us see if we can’t go over it together.”
Ewbert had forgotten the points he had made before, and he had to take up the whole subject anew, he did so at first in an involuntarily patronizing confidence that Hilbrook was ignorant of the ground; but from time to time the old man let drop a hint of knowledge that surprised the minister. Before they had done, it appeared that Hilbrook was acquainted with the literature of the doctrine of immortality from Plato to Swedenborg, and even to Mr. John Fiske. How well he was acquainted with it Ewbert could not quite make out; but he had recurrently a misgiving, as if he were in the presence of a doubter whose doubt was hopeless through his knowledge. In this bleak air it seemed to him that he at last detected the one thing in which the old man felt an interest: his sole tie with the earth was the belief that when he left it he should cease to be. This affected Ewbert as most interesting, and he set himself, with all his heart and soul, to dislodge Hilbrook from his deplorable conviction. He would not perhaps have found it easy to overcome at once that repugnance which Hilbrook’s doubt provoked in him, if it had been less gently, less simply owned. As it was, it was not possible to deal with it in any spirit of mere authority. He must meet it and overcome it in terms of affectionate persuasion.
It should not be difficult to overcome it; but Ewbert had not yet succeeded in arraying his reasons satisfactorily against it when his wife returned from her work in the kitchen, and sat down beside the library table. Her coming operated a total diversion, in which Hilbrook lapsed into his apathy, and was not to be roused from it by the overtures to conversation which she made. He presently got to his feet and said he mast be going, against all her protests that it was very early. Ewbert wished to walk home with him; but Hilbrook would not suffer this, and the minister had to come back from following him to the gate, and watching his figure lose itself in the dark, with a pang in his heart for the solitude which awaited the old man under his own roof. He ran swiftly over their argument in his mind, and questioned himself whether he had used him with unfailing tenderness, whether he had let him think that he regarded him as at all reprobate and culpable. He gave up the quest as he rejoined his wife with a long, unconscious sigh that made her lift her head.
“What is it, Clarence?”
“Nothing” —
“You look perfectly exhausted. You look worried. Was it something you were talking about?”
Then he told her, and he had trouble to keep her resentment in bounds. She held that, as a minister, he ought to have rebuked the wretched creature; that it was nothing short of offensive to him for Hilbrook to take such a position. She said his face was all flushed, and that she knew he would not sleep, and she should get him a glass of warm milk; the fire was out in the stove, but she could heat it over the lamp in a tin cup.
VI.
Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.
The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers, just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this position, and urged it upon all his hearers; but in the moment of doing so a point that old Hilbrook had made in their talk suddenly presented itself. He experienced inwardly such a collapse that he could not be sure he had spoken, and he repeated his declaration in a voice of such harsh defiance that he could scarcely afterwards bring himself down to the meek level of the closing prayer.
As they walked home together, his wife asked, “Why did you repeat yourself in that passage, Clarence, and why did you lift your voice so? It sounded like contradicting some one. I hope you were not thinking of anything that wretched old man said?”
With the mystical sympathy by which the wife divines what is in her husband’s mind she had touched the truth, and he could not deny it. “Yes, yes, I was,” he owned in a sort of anguish, and she said: —
“Well, then, I wish he wouldn’t come about any more. He has perfectly obsessed you. I could see that the last two Sundays you were preaching right at him.” He had vainly hoped she had not noticed this, though he had not concealed from her that his talk with Hilbrook had suggested his theme. “What are you going to do about him?” she pursued relentlessly.
“I don’t know, — I don’t know, indeed,” said Ewbert; and perhaps because he did not know, he felt that he must do something, that he must at least not leave him to himself. He hoped that Hilbrook would come to him, and so put him under the necessity of doing something; but Hilbrook did not come, and after waiting a fortnight Ewbert went to him, as was his duty.
VII.
The spring had advanced so far that there were now days when it was pleasant to be out in the soft warmth of the afternoons. The day when Ewbert climbed to the Hilbrook homestead it was even a little hot, and he came up to the dooryard mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and glad of the southwestern breeze which he caught at this point over the shoulder of the hill. He had expected to go round to the side door of the house, where he had parted with Hilbrook on his former visit; but he stopped on seeing the old man at his front door, where he was looking vaguely at a mass of Spanish willow fallen dishevelled beside it, as if he had some thought of lifting its tangled spray. The sun shone on his bare head, and struck silvery gleams from his close-cropped white hair; there was something uncommon in his air, though his dress was plain and old-fashioned; and Ewbert wished that his wife were there to share his impression of distinction in Hilbrook’s presence.
He turned at Ewbert’s cheerful hail, and after a moment of apparent uncertainty as to who he was, he came down the walk of broken brick and opened the gate to his visitor.
“I was just out, looking round at the old things,” he said, with an effort of apology. “This sort of weather is apt to make fools of us. It gets into our heads, and before we know we feel as if we had something to do with the season.”
“Perhaps we have,” said the minister. “The spring is in us, too.”
The old man shook his head. “It was once, when we were children; now there’s what we remember of it. We like to make believe about it, — that’s natural; and it’s natural we should make believe that there is going to be a spring for us somewhere else like what we see for the grass and bushes, here, every year; but I guess not. A tree puts out its leaves every spring; but by and by the tree dies, and then it doesn’t put out its leaves any more.”
“I see
what you mean,” said Ewbert, “and I allow that there is no real analogy between our life and that of the grass and bushes; yet somehow I feel strengthened in my belief in the hereafter by each renewal of the earth’s life. It isn’t a proof, it isn’t a promise; but it’s a suggestion, an intimation.”
They were in the midst of a great question, and they sat down on the decaying doorstep to have it out; Hilbrook having gone in for his hat and come out again, with its soft wide brim shading his thin face, frosted with half a week’s beard.
“But character,” the minister urged at a certain point,— “what becomes of character? You may suppose that life can be lavished by its Origin in the immeasurable superabundance which we see in nature. But character, — that is a different thing; that cannot die.”
“The beasts that perish have character; my old dog had. Some are good and some bad; they’re kind and they’re ugly.”
“Ah, excuse me! That isn’t character; that’s temperament. Men have temperament, too; but the beasts haven’t character. Doesn’t that fact prove something, — or no, not prove, but give us some reasonable expectation of a hereafter?”
Hilbrook did not say anything for a moment. He broke a bit of fragrant spray from the flowering currant — which guarded the doorway on his side of the steps; Ewbert sat next the Spanish willow — and softly twisted the stem between his thumb and finger.
“Ever hear how I came to leave Hilbrook, — West Mallow, as it was then?” he asked at last.
Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly in Hilbrook’s interest, that he had not paid much attention to it.
“Thought there wa’n’t much in it? Well, that’s right, generally speakin’. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain’t goin’ to go over it. I don’t care any more about it now than if it had happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I didn’t. I presume they like to make out that I’ve grieved over it ever since. Sho! It’s forty years since I gave it a thought, that way.” A certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. “I’ve read of folks mournin’ all their lives through, and in their old age goin’ back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin’. But it ain’t true; I don’t suppose I care any more for losin’ her now than Josiah would for gettin’ her if he was alive. It did make a difference for a while; I ain’t goin’ to deny that. It lasted me four or five years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went to the war,” — Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,— “and we had one child. So you may say that I was well over that first thing. It wore out; and if it wa’n’t that it makes me mad to have folks believin’ that I’m sufferin’ from it yet, I presume I shouldn’t think of it from one year’s end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin’ him would kill me. It didn’t. It appeared one while as if I couldn’t live without him, and I was always contrivin’ how I should meet up with him somewhere else. I couldn’t figure it out.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1049