Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Our first camp was in our pretty Goodale Park, where I used to walk and talk with the sculptor Ward, and try the athletic feats in which he easily beat me. Now the pine sheds covered the long tables, spread with coffee and pork and beans, and the rude bunks filled with straw, and here and there a boy volunteer frowzily drowsing in them. It was one of the many shapeless beginnings which were to end in the review of the hundred thousands of seasoned soldiers marching to their mustering out in Washington after four years of fire and blood. No one could imagine that any of these boys were to pass through that abyss, or that they would not come safely out. Even after the cruel disillusion of Manassas the superstition of quick work remained with the North, and the three years’ quota of Ohio was filled almost as jubilantly as the three months’, but not quite so jubilantly. Sons and brothers came with tears to replace fathers and brothers who had not returned from Manassas, and there was a funeral undertone in the shrilling of the fifes and the throbbing of the drums which was not so before. Life is like Hamlet and will oftentimes “put an antic disposition on,” which I have never been one to refuse recognition, and now I must, with whatever effect from it, own a bit of its mockery. One of our reporters was a father whose son had been among the first to go, and word came that the boy had been killed at Manassas. I liked the father as I had liked the son, and the old man’s grief moved me to such poor offer of consolation as verse could make. He was deeply touched, but the next day another word came that the boy was alive and well, and I could not leave my elegiacs with his father, who was apparently reluctant to renounce the glory of them, although so glad. But he gave them back, and I depersonalized them by removing the name of the young soldier, and finally printed them in the volume of poems which two or three people still buy every year.

  XIV

  It was a question now whether I could get the appointment of a consulate which I had already applied for, quite as much, I believe, upon the incentive of my fellow-citizens as from a very natural desire of my own. It seemed to be the universal feeling, after the election of Lincoln, that I who had written his life ought to have a consulate, as had happened with Hawthorne, who had written the life of Franklin Pierce. It was thought a very fitting thing, and my fellow-citizens appeared willing I should

  Looking into the State House grounds toward the broad flight of steps before the west front of the building

  have any consulate, but I, with constitutional unhopefulness, had fixed my mind upon that of Munich, as in the way to further study of the German language and literature, and this was the post I asked for in an application signed by every prominent Republican in the capital, from the Governor down. The Governor was now William Dennison, who afterward became Postmaster-General, and who had always been my friend, rather in the measure of his charming good will than my merit, from my first coming to Columbus; Chase had already entered Lincoln’s Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. But in spite of this backing the President, with other things on his mind, did not respond in any way until some months had dragged by, when one day I received without warning an official envelope addressed to me as “Consul at Rome, now at Columbus, Ohio.” Rome was not exactly Munich, and the local language and literature were not German, but I could not have expected the State Department to take cognizance of a tacit ideal of mine, and the consulate was at any rate a consulate, which perhaps most of my friends supposed was what I wanted. It was welcome enough, for I was again to be dropped from the high horse which I had been riding for nearly a year past; one of those changes in the State Journal which Greeley, in his unsolicited lecture, had imputed to it for unworthiness was at hand, and the gentleman who was buying a controlling share in it might or might not wish to write the editorials himself. At any rate the Roman consulship was not to be declined without inquiry, but as there was no salary, and the consul was supposed to live upon the fees taken, I tried to find out how much the fees might annually come to. Meanwhile I was advised by prudence to accept the appointment provisionally; it would be easy to resign it if I could not afford to keep it; and I waited to see what the new proprietor meant to do.

  Apparently he meant to be editor as well as proprietor, and Price and I must go, which we made ready to do as soon as the new proprietor came into his own. Three or four times in my life I have suffered some such fate as I suffered then; but I never lost a place except through the misfortune of those who gave it me; then with whatever heart I could I accepted the inevitable. At the worst, I was yet “Consul at Rome now at Columbus,” and I had my determination to work. I was never hopeful, I was never courageous, but somehow I was dogged. I had no overweening belief in myself, and yet I thought, at the bottom of my soul, that I had in me the make of the thing I was bent on doing, the thing literature, the greatest thing in the world.

  When our new proprietor arrived Price and I disabled his superiority, probably on no very sufficient grounds, but he had the advantage in not wanting our help, and I decided to go to Washington and look personally into the facts of the Roman consulship. As perhaps some readers of this may know, it ultimately turned into the Venetian consulship, but by just what friendly magic, has been told with sufficient detail in a chapter of Literary Friends and Acquaintance and need not be rehearsed here. As for Price, he had nothing at all before him, but he was by no means uncheerful. We had certainly had a joyous though parlous year together; our jokes could not have been numbered in a season when the only excuse for joking was that it might as well be that as weeping, though probably we had our serious times, especially when we foreboded a fresh dismay in our chief at some escapade in derision or denunciation of the well-meaning patriots’ efforts to hold the Union together with mucilage.

  But the time came when all this tragical mirth was to end. We found that we did not dislike the new owner, and he liked us well enough, but he was eager to try his hand at our work, and some time early in August we quitted the familiar place. If there was any form of adieu with our gentle chief I do not remember it, and in fact my mind holds no detail of our parting except the last hour of it, when we found ourselves together at midnight in the long, gloomy barn then known as the Little Miami Depot, where we were to take our separate ways in the dark which hid us from each other forever. We walked up and down a long time, talking, talking, talking, laughing, promising each other to be faithful in letters, and wearing our souls out in the nothings which people say at such times with the vain endeavor to hold themselves together against the fate which is to sunder them in the voluntary death of parting. We heard the whistle of an approaching train, we shook hands, we said good-by, and then in a long wait repeated the nothings again and again. But my train on the Central Ohio was already there; and as Price obeyed the call to board his train for Cleveland, I mounted mine for Washington, and we never saw each other again. It is long since he died, and I who still survive him after fifty years offer his memory this vow of abiding affection. If we somewhere should somewhen meet, perhaps it will be with a fond smile for the time we were young and so glad together, with so little reason.

  THE END

  Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts — Howells’ final resting place

  Howells’ grave