The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
I saw him last night when I went home with Hope.”
“I thought he was away at the Retreat.”
“It seems not. At any rate, he was at home, and she didn’t seem surprised at his being there. It isn’t like alcoholism, is it? It doesn’t make him violent? So that he ever hurts them?”
“Oh no, not at all. Did Hope seem troubled?”
“No. She slipped into the house behind him, when he came out to the gate to talk to me. He was disposed to be rather expansive. Just in what way do you understand that he has been an affliction to them?”
“He has kept them poor.”
“Well, that might be remedied. And it isn’t the worst thing that could happen. A great many people are poor and happy. You don’t mean that they’re ever in anything like want?”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Langbrith sighed. “He has some of his inventions in the hands of other people, who pay him a percentage on them, and it is secured so that it goes to his family, instead of to him. The worst of him is that they can’t put the least dependence on him. They can’t trust anything he says. He is very kind to them when he is with them, and he is proud of Hope. But they can’t believe a word from him.”
“ He got off twenty inventions to me, in as many sentences, while we stood talking over the gate. I had a notion of something of the kind you say. Doesn’t he ever blunder into the truth? He said my father and he used to be great chums. Was there nothing in that?”
“They were friends at one time, certainly.”
“ Until he began to give way to all kinds of invention. Then, of course, it had to come to an end. Well, it’s interesting to know that he can sometimes make a straight statement. Don’t think I don’t feel the awfulness of it, mother. I do, and I pity Hope, and I can understand how she can’t help thinking that she is put wrong by it with—people. I suppose it’s that that makes her a little defiant, a little doubtful of—Have you ever, or has she ever, mentioned the subject?”
“ Not to me, James, or to anyone that I know of. Everybody knows it. It’s an old thing, and nobody talks of it, except newcomers. And there are not many new-comers here.”
“No,” Langbrith assented, with a smile. “Saxmills is static.”
His mother may not have known just what he meant, or it may have been from the country habit of making no comment in response to what was not a question. She asked, “Will you have some more coffee, James?”
“No; but have them keep it hot for old Falk.”
“ I will have some fresh for him.”
“ There never was such thoughtful hospitality as yours, mother,” Langbrith said, rising and going round the table to where she had risen too, and putting his arm fondly across her shoulders. She was almost as tall as he, and their likeness showed as he laid his face against hers and rubbed his cheek on her own. “I believe that when I wake up in the other world you will be there to offer me something nice to eat. Old Falk is having a tremendously good time, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Langbrith said, “Everything has been done for him that could be, by everybody.”
“And I’m glad it’s happened to Falk, too. A great many of the fellows don’t know what a good fellow he is. They don’t get hold of him. Falk is proud, and that makes him shy. Last year I wouldn’t have thought of bringing him here, or getting him to come here. His people out in Kentucky are Germans, and they’ve always gone with the Germans. If Falk hadn’t come to Harvard, he never would have got into American society. Fellows from out that way, where the Germans are rather thick, say that the third generation gets in, and sometimes the second if the first has got rich. But Falk’s father is only a very musical doctor with a German practice, and no social instincts or aspirations. Of course, it’s Falk’s work in Caricature that’s brought him forward with the best fellows. He’s going to be a great artist, I believe, and I want to have a hand in helping him. It’s difficult. He would rather say a nasty thing than a nice thing to you, and that doesn’t cement friendship with everybody. But the way is not to mind it. He’s all right at heart, if he wasn’t so proud.”
“ I don’t think it’s very polite,” Mrs. Langbrith ventured.
“Well, no,” her son owned, “but it’s better than being slimy.”
XI
Langbrith and his friend took the Northern Express in the afternoon, which would bring them to Boston just in time for dinner. Mrs. Langbrith gave them such a heavy lunch that, what with the sleep they had still to make up from the night before, they drowsed half the way to town in the smoking-car, which they had to themselves until the train began to stop at the suburban stations. Before this happened they woke, and Falk took a sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket, and spread it on the little stationary table between them which the commuters used for playing cards.
“ How would that do for the next cartoon?” he asked.
He pushed it towards Langbrith, who smoothed it out again, and examined it carefully. “ I don’t know what it means,” he said, at last.
“ Neither do I,” Falk said. “ I want you to joke it, so that I shall.”
Langbrith continued to look at the drawing, but apparently with less and less consciousness of it. He returned to it in pushing it away. “I don’t know that I feel much like joking, today.”
Falk crumpled the drawing up in his hand and threw it on the floor. “There oughtn’t to be any tomorrows. There ought to be nothing but yesterdays. Then we could manage.”
“What do you mean?” Langbrith demanded.
“You’re thinking you went too far.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw you going.”
They were silent, and then Langbrith said, with a laugh, “Well, if I went too far, I wasn’t met halfway.”
“He laughs bitterly,” Falk interpreted. “He has got his come-uppings.”
Langbrith looked angrily at him. Then his look softened, if that is the word, into something more like sulking than anger, and he said, “Sometimes I think you hate me, Falk.”
“No, you don’t. You merely think you deserve it. What have you been doing? You might as well out with it now as later; I don’t want you coming in tonight when I’ve got into my first sleep.”
“If I could only hope to make you understand!” Langbrith sighed. “ It isn’t merely our having known each other since she and I were kids, and always been more or less together. And it isn’t the country freedom between fellows and girls. You could appreciate both those things. But you’re so confoundedly hard that you wouldn’t see why I should feel a peculiar tenderness—a kind of longing to shield her and save her: I don’t know!—when I think of her home life, and what it must be. I know what a brave fight she puts up against its seeming any way anomalous, and that makes her all the more pathetic. It makes her all the more fascinating—to a man of my temperament. She knows that, and that is why she is so defiant. I never knew she was so beautiful till this time. Weren’t you struck with it yourself, Falk?”
Falk nodded, and smoked on.
‘‘The complication of qualities in her, and the complication of her conditions, are what make it impossible to decide whether one has gone too far or not. Her way of taking it doesn’t help you out a bit. She takes everything as if you didn’t mean it. Of course, she knows that I’m in love with her. Everything I do tells her so, and so long as it isn’t put into words, it seems all right. But when it comes to words, she won’t stand it.”
“She