Delphi complete works of.., p.719
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 719
The more he wanted to be kept from running off the more he knew he must not try to be, and he let Trip go back when he would have so gladly helped him up into the hay-loft and slept with him there. He would not have been afraid with Trip, and now he found that he was dreadfully afraid. The lantern-light was a charm against ghosts, but not against rats, and the first thing Pony knew when he got into the barn a rat ran across his foot. Trip would have kept the rats off. They seemed to just swarm in the loft when Pony got up there, and after he hung the lantern on a nail and lay down in the hay they did not mind him at all. They played all around, and two of them got up on their hind legs once and fought, or else danced, Pony could not tell which. He could not sleep, and after a while he felt the tears coming and he began to cry, and he kept sobbing, and could not stop himself.
When Pony’s mother was ready to go to bed she said to Pony’s father: “Did Pony say good-night to you?” and when he said no, she said, “But he must have gone to bed,” and she ran up the stairs to see. She came down again in about half a second and she said, “He doesn’t seem to be there,” and she raced all through the house hunting for him. In the kitchen she saw that the lantern was gone and then she said: “I might have known he was up to some mischief, he was so quiet. This is some more of Jim Leonard’s work. Henry, I want you to go right out and look for Pony. It’s half-past nine.”
Then Pony’s father knew that it would be no use to talk and he started out. But the whole street was quiet, and all the houses were dark as if the people had gone to bed. He went up town and to all the places where the big boys were apt to play at night, and he found Hen Billard and Archy Hawkins, but neither of them had seen Pony since school. They were both sitting on Hen Billard’s front steps, because Archy Hawkins was going to stay all night with him, and they were telling stories. When Pony’s father asked about Pony and seemed anxious they tried to comfort him, but they could not think where Pony could be. They said perhaps Jim Leonard would know.
Then Pony’s father went home, and the minute he opened the front door Pony’s mother called out: “Have you found him?”
His father said: “No. Hasn’t he come in yet?” and he told her how he had been looking everywhere, and she burst out crying.
“I know he’s fallen into the canal and got drowned, or something,” and she wrung her hands together; and then he said that Hen Billard and Archy Hawkins thought Jim Leonard would know, and he had only stopped to see whether Pony had happened to come in, and he was going straight to Jim Leonard’s mother’s house; and Pony’s mother said: “Oh, go, go, go!” and fairly pushed him out of the house.
By this time it was ten o’clock and going on eleven, and all the town was as still as death, except the dogs. Pony’s father kept on until he got down to the river-bank, where Jim Leonard’s mother lived, and he had to knock and knock before he could make anybody hear. At last Jim Leonard’s mother poked her head out of the window and asked who was there, and Pony’s father told her.
He said: “Is Jim at home, Mrs. Leonard?” and she said:
“Yes, and fast asleep three hours ago. What makes you ask?”
Then he had to tell her. “We can’t find Pony, and some of the boys thought Jim might know where he is. I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Leonard. Good-night,” and he went back home.
When he got there he found Pony’s mother about crazy. He said now they must search the house thoroughly; and they went down into the cellar first, because she said she knew Pony had fallen down the stairs and killed himself. But he was not there, and then they hunted through all the rooms and looked under the tables and beds and into the cupboards and closets, and he was not there. Then they went into the wood-house and looked there, and up into the wood-house loft among the old stoves and broken furniture, and he was not there. Trip was there, and he made them think so of Pony that Pony’s mother took on worse than she had yet.
“Now I’m going out to look in the barn,” said Pony’s father. “You stay quietly in the house, Lucy.”
Trip started to go with Pony’s father, but when he saw that he was going to the barn he was afraid to follow him, Pony had trained him so; and Pony’s father went alone. He shaded the candle that he was carrying with his hand, and when he got into the barn he put it down and stood and looked and tried to think how he should do. It was dangerous to go around among the hay with the candle, and the lantern was gone.
Almost from the first Pony’s father thought that he heard a strange noise like some one sobbing, and then it seemed to him that there was a light up in the loft. He holloed out: “Who’s there?” and then the noise stopped, but the light kept on. Pony’s father holloed out again: “Pony! Is that you, Pony?” and then Pony answered, “Yes,” and he began sobbing again.
In less than half a second Pony’s father was up in the loft, and then down again and out of the barn and into the yard with Pony.
His mother was standing at the back door, for she could not bear to stay in the house, and Pony’s father holloed to her: “Here he is, Lucy, safe and sound!” and Pony’s mother holloed back:
“Well, don’t touch him, Henry! Don’t scold the child! Don’t say a word to him! Oh, I could just fall on my knees!”
Pony’s father came along, bringing Pony and the lantern. Pony’s hair and clothes were all stuck full of pieces of hay, and his face was smeared with hay-dust which he had rubbed into it when he was crying. He had got some of Jim Leonard’s mother’s hen’s eggs on him, and he did not smell very well. But his mother did not care how he looked or how he smelled. She caught him up into her arms and just fairly hugged him into the house, and there she sat down with him in her arms, and kissed his dirty face, and his hair all full of hay-sticks and spider-webs, and cried till it seemed as if she was never going to stop.
She would not let his father say anything to him, but after a while she washed him, and when she got him clean she made him up a bed on the lounge and put him to sleep there where she could see him. She said she was not going to sleep herself that night, but just stay up and realize that they had got Pony safe again.
One thing she did ask him, and that was: “What in the world made you want to sleep in the barn, Pony?” and Pony was ashamed to say he was getting ready to run off. He began:
“Jim Leonard—” and his mother broke out:
“I knew it was some of Jim Leonard’s work!” and she talked against Jim Leonard until Pony fell asleep, and said Pony should never speak to him again.
She and Pony’s father sat up all night talking, and about daybreak he recollected that he had left the candle burning in the barn, and he ran out with all his might to get it before it set the barn on fire. But it had burned out without catching anything, and he was coming back to the house when he met Jim Leonard sneaking towards the barn door. He pounced on him, and caught him by the collar, and he said as savagely as he could: “What are you doing here, Jim?”
Jim Leonard was too scared to speak, and Pony’s father hauled him to the house door, and holloed in to Pony’s mother: “I’ve got Jim Leonard here, Lucy”; and she holloed back:
“Oh, well, take him away, and don’t let me see the dreadful boy!” and Pony’s father said:
“I’ll take him home to his mother, and see what she has to say to him.”
All the way down to the river-bank he did not say a word to Jim Leonard, but when they got to Jim Leonard’s mother’s house, there she was with her pipe in her mouth coming out to get chips to kindle the fire with, and she said:
“I’d like to know what you’ve got my boy by the collar for, Mr. Baker?”
Pony’s father said: “I don’t know myself; I’ll let him tell you. Pony was hid in the barn last night, and I just now caught Jim prowling around on the outside. I should like to hear what he wanted.”
Jim Leonard did not say anything. His mother gave him one look, and then she went into the house and came out with a table-knife in her hand.
She said, “I reckon I can get him to tell you,” and she went to a pear-tree that there was before her house and cut a long sucker from the foot of it. She came up to Jim and then she said: “Tell!”
She did not have to say it twice, and in about half a second he told how Pony had intended to run off and how he put him up to it, and everything. Pony’s father did not wait to see what Jim Leonard’s mother did to Jim.
When Pony woke in the morning he heard his mother saying: “I could almost think he had bewitched the child.”
His father said: “It really seems like a case of mesmeric influence.”
Pony was sick for about a week after that. When he got better his father had a very solemn talk with him, and asked why he ever dreamed of running away from his home, where they all loved him so. Pony could not tell. All the things that he used to be so mad about were like nothing to him now, and he was ashamed of them. His father did not try hard to make him tell. He explained to him what a miserable boy he would have been if he had really got away, and said he hoped his night’s experience in the barn would be a lesson to him.
That was what it turned out to be. But it seemed to be a lesson to his father and mother, too. They let him do more things, and his mother did not baby him so much before the boys. He thought she was trying to be a better mother to him, and, perhaps, she did not baby him so much because now he had a little brother for her to baby instead, that was born about a week after Pony tried to run off.
THE END
THE KENTONS
CONTENTS
I.
II.
III.
IV
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XV.
XXVI.
I.
The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they had spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had grown easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short outings, which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper Lakes in the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well anywhere as in the great square brick house which still kept its four acres about it, in the heart of the growing town, where the trees they had planted with their own hands topped it on three aides, and a spacious garden opened southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton had his library, where he transacted by day such law business as he had retained in his own hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife’s room and sit with her there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their girls, where they could hear them laughing with the young fellows who came to make the morning calls, long since disused in the centres of fashion, or the evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great world. She sewed, and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or they played checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she found herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let him make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes he laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be. They had long ago quarrelled out their serious differences, which mostly arose from such differences of temperament as had first drawn them together; they criticised each other to their children from time to time, but they atoned for this defection by complaining of the children to each other, and they united in giving way to them on all points concerning their happiness, not to say their pleasure.
They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war, and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice of the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second son died when he was yet a babe in his mother’s arms, and there was an interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their eldest son was already married, and settled next them in a house which was brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had grown naturally into a share of his father’s law practice, and he had taken it all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a show of giving it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton was well on in the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had become mainly the legal business of a large corporation. In this form it was distasteful to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in his hands, but he gave much of his time, which he saved his self-respect by calling his leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the war.
In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on the whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian, Pennsylvanian, and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of foreign strains, were of the purest American stock, and spoke the best English in the world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of happiness, and had incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate in the State. The growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had increased only to five thousand during the time he had known it, which was almost an ideal figure for a county-town. There was a higher average of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider and evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was fully up to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under the sun. It, was Kenton’s pride and glory that he had been a part of the finest army known in history. He believed that the men who made history ought to write it, and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged his companions in arms to set down everything they could remember of their soldiering, and to save the letters they had written home, so that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography of the regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely personal character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his way to the fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with his want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of material which he could not have refused to keep for the soldiers who brought it to him, more or less in a humorous indulgence of his whim. But he even offered to receive it, and in a community where everything took the complexion of a joke, he came to be affectionately regarded as a crank on that point; the shabbily aging veterans, whom he pursued to their workbenches and cornfields, for, the documents of the regimental history, liked to ask the colonel if he had brought his gun. They, always give him the title with which he had been breveted at the close of the war; but he was known to the younger, generation of his fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr. Kenton in the presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his children she called him Poppa, as they did.
The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father’s affairs without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined with his mother in a respect for Kenton’s theory of the regimental history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history, but she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly or indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for parties and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from young men and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays, for circuses and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and she devoted herself to her pleasures without the shadow of chaperonage, which was, indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.
In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who, upon the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs, drew their mother’s notice to his sister’s excesses in carrying-on, and required some action that should keep her from bringing the name, of Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able to take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none of the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy, just as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at moments when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His stately but vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond his years, but this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the humiliation of his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the easier prey of Lottie’s ridicule. He got on best, or at least most evenly, with his eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because she took all life so; and she was able to interpret him to his father when his intolerable dignity forbade a common understanding between them. When he got so far beyond his depth that he did not know what he meant himself, as sometimes happened, she gently found him a safe footing nearer shore.
