It was nearly
midnight
when
the Marches left them and walked away toward the Elevated
station with Fulkerson.
the Marches left them and walked away toward the Elevated
station with Fulkerson.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v13 - Her to Hux
" he demanded of the driver, who
jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his
direction.
"Hasn't been any car along
"Been away? " asked the driver.
for a week.
Strike. "
## p. 7678 (#492) ###########################################
7678
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Oh yes," said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he re-
mained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.
The man asked, "Where to? "
Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said
with uncontrollable fury, "I told you once! Go up to West
Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I'll show you
the place. "
He could not remember the number of Every Other Week
office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home.
He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about
Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had
dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine;
Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's confidence.
There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither
Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office.
"Where's Fulkerson? " he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at
the clock. "I'm afraid he isn't coming back again to-day, if you
wanted to see him. "
Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate
March's room. "That other fellow out, too? "
"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the after-
noon? " asked the old man.
"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been
there a score of times, and found the whole staff of Every Other
Week at work between four and five. "Mr. March, you know,
takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose
Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn't much doing
to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that makes it dull. "
"The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have
everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want
a chance to lay off and get drunk. " Dryfoos seemed to think
that Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young
man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. "I've
got a coupé out there now that I had to take because I couldn't
get a car. If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds
hung. They're waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then
rob the houses-pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to
call out the militia and fire into 'em. Clubbing is too good for
them. "
## p. 7679 (#493) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7679
Conrad was still silent; and his father sneered, "But I reckon.
you don't think so. "
"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
"Oh, you do, do you? Comin' to your senses a little. Gettin'
tired walkin' so much. I should like to know what your gentle-
men over there on the east side think about the strike, any-
way. "
The young fellow dropped his eyes. "I am not authorized to
speak for them. "
"Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not authorized to speak for
yourself? "
"Father, you know we don't agree about these things. I'd
rather not talk -»
"But I'm goin' to make you talk this time! " cried Dryfoos,
striking the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist.
A maddening thought of Christine came over him. "As long as
you eat my bread, you have got to do as I say. I won't have
my children telling me what I shall do and shan't do, or take on
airs of being holier than me. Now you just speak up!
Do you
think those loafers are right, or don't you? Come! "
Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. "I think they
were very foolish to strike at this time, when the elevated
roads can do the work. "
«< Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over
there on the east side that it 'd been wise to strike before we
got the Elevated? »
Conrad again refused to answer; and his father roared, "What
do you think? »
"I think a strike is always bad business. It's war; but some-
times there don't seem any other way for the workingmen to
get justice. They say that sometimes strikes do raise the wages,
after a while. "
-
"Those lazy devils were paid enough already," shrieked the
old man. "They got two dollars a day. How much do you
think they ought to 'a' got? Twenty? "
Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But
he decided to answer. "The men say that with partial work,
and fines, and other things, they get sometimes a dollar, and
sometimes ninety cents a day. "
"They lie, and you know they lie," said his father, rising and
coming toward him. "And what do you think the upshot of it
## p. 7680 (#494) ###########################################
7680
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
all will be, after they've ruined business for another week, and
made people hire hacks, and stolen the money of honest men?
How is it going to end? "
They will have to give in. "
"Oh, give in, heigh! And what will you say then, I should
like to know? How will you feel about it then? Speak! "
"I shall feel as I do now. I know you don't think that way,
and I don't blame you-or anybody. But if I have got to say
how I shall feel, why, I shall feel sorry they didn't succeed; for
I believe they have a righteous cause, though they go the wrong
way to help themselves. "
His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set.
"Do you dare to say that to me? "
"Yes. I can't help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with
those poor men. "
"You impudent puppy! " shouted the old man. He lifted his
hand and struck his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand
with his own left, and while the blood began to trickle from
a wound that Christine's intaglio ring had made in his temple,
he looked at him with a kind of grieving wonder, and said,
"Father! "
The old man wrenched his fist away, and ran out of the
house. He remembered his address now, and he gave it as he
plunged into the coupé. He trembled with his evil passion, and
glared out of the windows at the passers as he drove home; he
only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering eyes, and the blood
slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.
Conrad went to the neat set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable
room and washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound
with the cold water till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not
deep, and he thought he would not put anything on it. After a
while he locked up the office, and started out, he hardly knew
where. But he walked on, in the direction he had taken, till he
found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in front of Bren-
tano's. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling gently
to him, "Mr. Dryfoos! "
## p. 7681 (#495) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7681
CONRAD looked confusedly around, and the same voice said
again, "Mr. Dryfoos! " and he saw that it was a lady speaking to
him from a coupé beside the curbing, and then he saw that it
was Miss Vance.
She smiled when he gave signs of having discovered her, and
came up to the door of her carriage. "I am so glad to meet
you. I have been longing to talk to somebody; nobody seems to
feel about it as I do. Oh, isn't it horrible? Must they fail? I
saw cars running on all the lines as I came across; it made me
sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in? And everybody
seems to hate them so-I can't bear it. " Her face was estranged
with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. «You
must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way;
but when I caught sight of you I had to speak. I knew you
would sympathize. I knew you would feel as I do. Oh, how
can anybody help honoring those poor men for standing by one
another as they do? They are risking all they have in the world
for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes! They are
staking the bread of their wives and children on the chance
they've taken! But no one seems to understand it. No one
seems to see that they are willing to suffer more now, that other
poor men may suffer less hereafter. And those wretched creat-
ures that are coming in to take their places—those traitors! ”
"We can't blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss
Vance," said Conrad.
"No, no! I don't blame them. Who am I, to do such a
thing? It's we-people like me, of my class-who make the
poor betray one another. But this dreadful fighting- this hideous
paper is full of it! »
She held up an extra, crumpled with her
nervous reading. "Can't something be done to stop it? Don't
you think that if some one went among them, and tried to make
them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies
and drive off the new men, he might do some good? I have
wanted to go and try it; but I am a woman, and I mustn't! I
shouldn't be afraid of the strikers, but I'm afraid of what people
would say! " Conrad kept pressing his handkerchief to the cut
in his temple, which he thought might be bleeding, and now
she noticed this. "Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos? You look so
pale. »
"No, it's nothing a little scratch I've got. "
XIII-481
—
-
## p. 7682 (#496) ###########################################
7682
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Indeed you look pale. Have you a carriage? How will you
get home? Will you get in here with me, and let me drive
you? »
"No, no," said Conrad, smiling at her excitement. "I'm per-
fectly well- »
"And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for stopping you
here, and talking in this way? But I know you feel as I do! "
"Yes, I feel as you do. You are right-right in every way.
I mustn't keep you. Good-by. " He stepped back to bow, but
she put her beautiful hand out of the window, and when he took
it she wrung his hand hard.
"Thank you, thank you! You are good, and you are just!
But no one can do anything. It's useless! "
The type of irreproachable coachman on the box, whose
respectability had suffered through the strange behavior of his
mistress in this interview, drove quickly off at her signal, and
Conrad stood a moment looking after the carriage. His heart
was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would burst. As he
turned to walk away, it seemed to him as if he mounted upon
the air. The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given.
him, that crush of the hand-he hoped nothing, he formed no
idea from it, but it all filled him with love, and cast out the pain
and shame he had been suffering. He believed that he could
never be unhappy any more; the hardness that was in his mind
toward his father went out of it: he saw how sorely he had tried
him; he grieved that he had done it: but the means, the differ-
ence of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel,- he was
solemnly glad of that since she shared it. He was only sorry for
his father. "Poor father! " he said under his breath as he went
along. He explained to her about his father in his revery, and
she pitied his father too.
He was walking over toward the west side, aimlessly at first,
and then at times with the longing to do something to save those
mistaken men from themselves, forming itself into a purpose.
Was not that what she meant, when she bewailed her woman's
helplessness? She must have wished him to try if he, being a
man, could not do something: or if she did not, still he would
try; and if she heard of it, she would recall what she had said,
and would be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of her
pleasure in what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it
was; but when he came to a street-car track he remembered it,
## p. 7683 (#497) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7683
and looked up and down to see if there were any turbulent
gathering of men, whom he might mingle with and help to keep
from violence. He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as if
at the same moment,- for in his exalted mood all events had
a dream-like simultaneity,- he stood at the corner of an avenue,
and in the middle of it, a little way off, was a street car, and
around the car a tumult of shouting, cursing, struggling men.
The driver was lashing his horses forward, and a policeman was
at their heads, with the conductor, pulling them; stones, clubs,
brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men trying to
move them. The mob closed upon them in a body; and then
a patrol wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of
policemen leaped out and began to club the rioters. Conrad could
see how they struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows
on their skulls sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the riot-
ers ran in all directions.
One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad
stood, and then he saw at his side a tall old man with a long
white beard. He was calling out at the policeman: "Ah yes!
Glup the strikerss-gif it to them! Why don't you co and glup
the bresidents that insoalt your lawss, and gick your Boart of
Arpidration out of toors? Glup the strikerss-they cot no friendts!
They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you! "
The officer whirled his club, and the old man threw his left
arm up to shield his head. Conrad recognized Lindau, and now
he saw the empty sleeve dangle in the air, over the stump of
his wrist. He heard a shot in that turmoil beside the car, and
something seemed to strike him in the breast. He was going to
say to the policeman, "Don't strike him! He's an old soldier!
You see he has no hand! " but he could not speak, he could
not move his tongue. The policeman stood there; he saw his
face: it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue,
fixed, perdurable; a mere image of irresponsible and involun-
tary authority. Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the
heart by that shot fired from the car.
March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at
the same moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the
policeman, who left him where he fell, and joined the rest of
the squad in pursuing the rioters. The fighting round the car
in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his horses into a gal-
lop, and the place was left empty.
## p. 7684 (#498) ###########################################
7684
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had
implored him to keep away from the rioting; but he could not
have left Lindau lying there if he would. Something stronger
than his will drew him to the spot, and there he saw Conrad
dead beside the old man.
IN THE Cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that
night she was supported partly by principle, but mainly by the
potent excitement which bewildered Conrad's family and took all
reality from what had happened.
It was nearly midnight when
the Marches left them and walked away toward the Elevated
station with Fulkerson. Everything had been done by that time
that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfac-
tion in the business-like dispatch of all the details which attends
each step in such an affair, and helps to make death tolerable
even to the most sorely stricken. We are creatures of the
moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one
interest at a time fills these. Fulkerson was cheerful when they
got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March experienced a
rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought not
to have experienced. But she condoned the offense a little in
herself, because her husband remained so constant in his grav-
ity; and pending the final accounting he must make her for
having been where he could be of so much use from the first
instant of the calamity, she was tenderly, gratefully proud of all
the use he had been to Conrad's family, and especially his mis-
erable old father. To her mind March was the principal actor
in the whole affair, and much more important in having seen
it than those who had suffered in it. In fact, he had suffered
incomparably.
"Well, well," said Fulkerson, "they'll get along now.
We've
done all we could, and there's nothing left but for them to bear
it. Of course it's awful, but I guess it'll come out all right. I
mean," he added, "they'll pull through now. "
"I suppose," said March, "that nothing is put on us that we
can't bear. But I should think," he went on musingly, "that
when God sees what we poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed
round with this eternal darkness of death, he must respect us. "
"Basil! " said his wife. But in her heart she drew nearer to
him for the words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.
## p. 7685 (#499) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7685
“Oh, I know,” he said, "we school ourselves to despise human
nature. But God did not make us despicable; and I say, what-
ever end he meant us for, he must have some such thrill of
joy in our adequacy to fate as a father feels when his son shows
himself a man. When I think what we can be if we must, I
can't believe the least of us shall finally perish. "
"Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of us," said
Fulkerson, with a piety of his own.
"That poor boy's father! " sighed Mrs. March. "I can't get
his face out of my sight. He looked so much worse than death. "
"Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March. "It's life that
looks so in its presence. Death is peace and pardon. I only
wish poor, poor old Lindau was as well out of it as Conrad
there. "
"Ah, Lindau! He has done harm enough," said Mrs. March.
"I hope he will be careful after this. "
son.
March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the
case, which inexorably held him responsible for Conrad's death.
"Lindau's going to come out all right, I guess," said Fulker-
"He was first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night. "
He whispered in March's ear, at a chance he got in mounting the
station stairs: "I didn't like to tell you there at the house, but
I guess you'd better know: they had to take Lindau's arm off
near the shoulder. Smashed all to pieces by the clubbing. "
In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the be-
reaved family whom the Marches had just left lingered together,
and tried to get strength to part for the night. They were all
spent with the fatigue that comes from heaven to such misery
as theirs, and they sat in a torpor in which each waited for the
other to move, to speak.
Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine rose and went
out of the room without saying a word, and they heard her going
up-stairs. Then Mela said, "I reckon the rest of us better be
goun' too, father. Here, let's git mother started. "
She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair;
but the old man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from
the next room. Between them they raised her to her feet.
"Ain't there anybody a-goin' to set up with it? " she asked, in
her hoarse pipe. "It appears like folks hain't got any feelin's in
New York. Woon't some o' the neighbors come and offer to set
up, without waitin' to be asked ? »
## p. 7686 (#500) ###########################################
7686
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Oh, that's all right, mother. The men'll attend to that.
Don't you bother any," Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round
her mother with tender patience.
"Why, Mely, child! I can't feel right to have it left to hire-
lin's, so. But there ain't anybody any more to see things done
as they ought. If Coonrod was on'y here- »
"Well, mother, you are pretty mixed! " said Mela, with a
strong tendency to break into her large guffaw. But she checked
herself and said, "I know just how you feel, though. It keeps
a-comun' and a-goun'; and it's so and it ain't so, all at once;
that's the plague of it. Well, father! Ain't you goun' to come? "
"I'm goin' to stay, Mela," said the old man gently, without
moving. "Get your mother to bed, that's a good girl. "
"You goin' to set
set up with him, Jacob? " asked the old
woman.
"Yes, 'Liz'beth, I'll set up. You go to bed. "
"Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it'll do you good to set
up. I wished I could set up with you; but I don't seem to have
the stren'th I did when the twins died. I must git my sleep,
I don't like very well to have you broke of your rest,
Jacob, but there don't appear to be anybody else. You wouldn't
have to do it if Coonrod was here. There I go ag'in! Mercy!
so's to-
-
mercy! "
"Well, do come along, then, mother," said Mela; and she got
her out of the room, with Mrs. Mandel's help, and up the stairs.
From the top the old woman called down: "You tell Coon-
rod - »
She stopped, and he heard her groan out, "My Lord!
my Lord! »
He sat, one silence, in the dining-room where they had all
lingered together; and in the library beyond the hireling watcher
sat, another silence. The time passed, but neither moved; and
the last noise in the house ceased, so that they heard each other
breathe, and the vague, remote rumor of the city invaded the
inner stillness. It grew louder toward morning, and then Dry-
foos knew from the watcher's deeper breathing that he had fallen
into a doze.
He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was;
the place was full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that
Fulkerson had brought, and that lay above the pulseless breast.
The old man turned up a burner in the chandelier, and stood
looking on the majestic serenity of the dead face.
## p. 7687 (#501) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7687
He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the
stairway in the hall. She was in her long white flannel bed-
gown, and the candle she carried shook with her nervous tremor.
He thought she might be walking in her sleep; but she said
quite simply, "I woke up, and I couldn't git to sleep ag'in with-
out comin' to have a look. " She stood beside their dead son with
him. "Well, he's beautiful, Jacob. He was the prettiest baby!
And he was always good, Coonrod was; I'll say that for him. I
don't believe he ever give me a minute's care in his whole life.
I reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I
don't know as I ever done much to show it. But you was always
good to him, Jacob; you always done the best for him, ever
since he was a little feller. I used to be afraid you'd spoil him.
sometimes in them days; but I guess you're glad now for every
time you didn't cross him. I don't suppose since the twins died
you ever hit him a lick. ”
She stooped and peered closer at the
face. "Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye? "
Dryfoos saw it too, the wound that he had feared to look
for, and that now seemed to redden on his sight. He broke
into a low wavering cry, like a child's in despair, like an ani-
mal's in terror, like a soul's in the anguish of remorse.
ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE
From Venetian Life. Copyright 1867 and 1872, by W. D. Howells. Reprinted
by permission of the author, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
I
THINK it does not matter just when I first came to Venice.
Yesterday and to-day are the same here. I arrived one win-
ter morning about five o'clock, and was not so full of Soul as
I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I was resolved not
to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated boat so
called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage.
The porter who seized my valise in the station inferred from
some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and
ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a gondola.
I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom
I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare-
say every traveler recollects,― the merciless tribe who hold your
## p. 7688 (#502) ###########################################
7688
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a dis-
pleasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Vene-
tians call them gransieri, or crab-catchers: but as yet I did not
know the name or the purpose of this poverino at the station, but
merely saw that he had the Venetian eye for color; in the distri-
bution and arrangement of his fragments of dress he had pro-
duced some miraculous effects of red, and he was altogether as
infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would like to meet
in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink my
body in the Grand Canal, as in all Venetian keeping I felt that
he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly
know now whether to exult or regret that I did not understand
him, and left him empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew
again the blessings which he had advanced me, as we pushed out
into the canal; but I heard nothing, for the wonder of the city
was already upon me. All my nether spirit, so to speak, was
dulled and jaded by the long, cold railway journey from Vienna,
while every surface sense was taken and tangled in the bewilder-
ing brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite sur-
prise as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches
as he issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon
her peerless strangeness. There is something in the blessed
breath of Italy (how quickly, coming south, you know it, and how
bland it is after the harsh transalpine air! ) which prepares you
for your nocturnal advent into the place; and O you! whoever
you are, that journey toward this enchanted city for the first
time, let me tell you how happy I count you! There lies before
you for your pleasure the spectacle of such singular beauty as no
picture can ever show you nor book tell you,- beauty which you
shall feel perfectly but once, and regret forever.
For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze
and bustle of the station down the gloom and silence of the
broad canal, I forgot that I had been freezing two days and
nights; that I was at that moment very cold and a little home-
sick. I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful silence,
broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. Then on either
hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the dark
waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
brought balconies and columns and carven arches into moment-
ary relief, and threw long streams of crimson into the canal.
I
## p. 7689 (#503) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7689
could see by that uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not
how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by any pang for the decay
that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty of Venice,
I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think
all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but
they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupt-
ing the sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and pres-
ent mixed there, and the moral and material were blent in the
sentiment of utter novelty and surprise. The quick boat slid
through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events gave it the
impulse that carried it beyond and safely around sharp corners
of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress
through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of
palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of
sense and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life
in Venice.
Dark funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the
gondoliers had warned each other at every turning with hoarse,
lugubrious cries; the lines of balconied palaces had never ended;
here and there at their doors larger craft were moored, with dim
figures of men moving uncertainly about on them. At last we
had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into one of the
smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness
only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But
always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with
its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
stars below: but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lone-
someness, and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could
not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary
passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of the time,
and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness,
and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the
gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever asso-
ciated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise
of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated im-
agination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts
of the Situation (as we say in the journals)? To move on was
relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled with
good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture
of all these emotions when, slipping from the cover of a bridge,
the gondola suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a
## p. 7690 (#504) ###########################################
7690
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
closely barred door. The gondoliers rang and rang again, while
their passenger
"Divided the swift mind,"
in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely
barred could possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges
for candles and service. But as soon as the door opened, and
he beheld the honest swindling countenance of a hotel portier,
he felt secure against everything but imposture; and all wild ab-
surdities of doubt and conjecture at once faded from his thought
when the portier suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin
too much.
So I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of
that complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had
caught the most alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot
wholly perish while any fragment of her sculptured walls nods to
its shadow in the canal; I had been penetrated by a deep sense
of the mystery of the place, and I had been touched already
by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its presence
offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after
my arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable
record; but I would not wholly forget how, though isolated from
all acquaintance and alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at
home in Venice from the first. I believe it was because I had
after my own fashion loved the beautiful, that I here found the
beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship,
speaking a language which even in its unfamiliar forms I could.
partly understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice
from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence
of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt at
home: indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and
grandeur only very imperfectly; but wherever I wandered through
the quaint and marvelous city I found the good company of
"The fair, the old;"
and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice,
and I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with
a kind of relief.
My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowl-
edge of locality has since taken away. They began commonly
## p. 7691 (#505) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7691
with some purpose or destination, and ended by losing me in the
intricacies of the narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent
little streets in the world, or left me cast away upon the un-
familiar waters of some canal as far as possible from the point
aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my blun-
dering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to sur-
render by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls or the sudden
brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innu-
merable churches of the city were equally victorious, and contin-
ually took me prisoner. But all places had something rare and
worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture,
at least interesting squalor and picturesque wretchedness; and I
believe I had less delight in proper Objects of Interest than in
the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome winter
damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and
beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above.
Every court had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keep-
ing of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of
the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic with
empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched
the lofty windows with obsolete hats.
I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice
led me from the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets
of shops that branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the
quaint recesses of the courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys,
where the dull little oil lamps vied with the tapers burning before
the street-corner shrines of the Virgin in making the way ob-
scure, and deepening the shadows about the doorways and under
the frequent arches. I remember distinctly among the beautiful
nights of that time, the soft night of late winter which first
showed me the scene you may behold from the Public Gardens
at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in
the east (a solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water,
and striking its moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and
glanced athwart the vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark,
and saw all the lights from the Piazzetta to the Giudecca, mak-
ing a crescent of flame in the air, and casting deep into the
water under them a crimson glory that sank also down and down
## p. 7692 (#506) ###########################################
7692
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and
delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church
and palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the
gondola drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons
seemed to rise and sink with the light palpitations of the waves
like pictures on the undulating fields of banners; the stark rig-
ging of a ship showed black against the sky; the Lido sank from
sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to sleep
by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that
gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above
me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those trem-
bling towers in the lagoons one rich full sob burst from the
heart of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene,
and suffused the languid night with the murmur of luxurious,
ineffable sadness.
But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful,
and whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no
matter how low its origin or humble its composition; and the
magnificence of that moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than
I won from the fine spectacle of an old man whom I saw burn-
ing coffee one night in the little court behind my lodgings, and
whom I recollect now as one of the most interesting people I
saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the air of that
neighborhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant berry,
and all day long this patient old man-sage, let me call him—
had turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over
an open fire, after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in
Venice. Now that the night had fallen, and the stars shone
down upon him, and the red of the flame luridly illumined him,
he showed more grand and venerable than ever. Simple, abstract
humanity has its own grandeur in Italy; and it is not hard here
for the artist to find the primitive types with which genius loves
best to deal. As for this old man, he had the beard of a saint
and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the squalor of a
beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur
of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if
he had been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel
of fortune, and doing men instead of coffee brown, he could not
have looked more sadly and weirdly impressive. When presently
he rose from his seat and lifted the cylinder from its place, and
## p. 7693 (#507) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7693
the clinging flames leaped after it, and he shook it, and a
volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him,—
then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and
turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
magnificence.
At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled
by the æsthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes.
of baked Indian meal to the soldiers in the military station near
the Piazza, and whom I often noted from the windows of the
little caffè there, where you get an excellent caffè bianco (coffee
with milk) for ten soldi and one to the waiter. I have reason to
fear that this boy dealt over-shrewdly with the Austrians, for a
pitiless war raged between him and one of the sergeants.
His
hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive; and
he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lus-
trous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a
jacket and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was
the elasticity of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet incased in
wooden shoes. Habitually came a barrel-organist and ground
before the barracks, and
"Took the soul
Of that waste place with joy";
and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and
threw his whole soul as it were into the crank of his instru-
ment, my beloved ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy
in his arms, and thus embraced, to whirl through a wild inspira-
tion of figures, in which there was something grotesquely rhyth-
mic, something of indescribable barbaric magnificence, spiritualized
into a grace of movement superior to the energy of the North and
the extravagant fervor of the East. It was coffee and not wine
that I drank; but I fable all the same that I saw reflected in
this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of dancing
in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon
sea-washed sands in marble structures of airy and stately splen-
dor, and gave to architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.
So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with
Venice; and being newly from a land where everything, mor-
ally and materially, was in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on
the picturesque ruin, the pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of
## p. 7694 (#508) ###########################################
7694
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
everything about me here. It was not yet the season to behold
all the delight of the lazy outdoor life of the place; but never-
theless I could not help seeing that great part of the people,
both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do, and that
nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
When however I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a
spectator of this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my
share of the common indolence, I found it a grievous burden.
Old habits of work, old habits of hope, made my endless leisure
irksome to me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained, fairly
and finally, that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished but after
all merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken
wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of
the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote
from incentive and sensation.
For such is Venice; and the will must be strong and the faith
indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of
her stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God's purpose of a great
moving, anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have
yielded, as after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle
incredulity possesses you; and if you consent that such a thing is
as earnest and useful life, you cannot help wondering why it
need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but cor-
rupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the
beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some
unconscious way to regard her fate as my own; and when I
began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it was
as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crum-
bling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not
so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so
many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light,
color, canals, and palaces. One's conscience, more or less un-
comfortably vigilant elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult
to remember that fact is more virtuous than fiction. In other
years, when there was life in the city, and this sad ebb of
prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might have been
some incentive to keep one's thoughts and words from lapsing
into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to
gain. But now, what matter?
## p. 7695 (#509) ###########################################
7695
YOG
THOMAS HUGHES
(1823-1896)
HE early life of Thomas Hughes was that of the typical Eng-
lish school lad; and luckily he had the genius to express in
literature the daily incidents of that life, with a freshness of
sympathy, a vigorous manliness, and a moral insight that make his
stories a revelation of boy nature.
jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his
direction.
"Hasn't been any car along
"Been away? " asked the driver.
for a week.
Strike. "
## p. 7678 (#492) ###########################################
7678
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Oh yes," said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he re-
mained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.
The man asked, "Where to? "
Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said
with uncontrollable fury, "I told you once! Go up to West
Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I'll show you
the place. "
He could not remember the number of Every Other Week
office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home.
He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about
Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had
dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine;
Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's confidence.
There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither
Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office.
"Where's Fulkerson? " he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at
the clock. "I'm afraid he isn't coming back again to-day, if you
wanted to see him. "
Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate
March's room. "That other fellow out, too? "
"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the after-
noon? " asked the old man.
"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been
there a score of times, and found the whole staff of Every Other
Week at work between four and five. "Mr. March, you know,
takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose
Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn't much doing
to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that makes it dull. "
"The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have
everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want
a chance to lay off and get drunk. " Dryfoos seemed to think
that Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young
man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. "I've
got a coupé out there now that I had to take because I couldn't
get a car. If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds
hung. They're waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then
rob the houses-pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to
call out the militia and fire into 'em. Clubbing is too good for
them. "
## p. 7679 (#493) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7679
Conrad was still silent; and his father sneered, "But I reckon.
you don't think so. "
"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
"Oh, you do, do you? Comin' to your senses a little. Gettin'
tired walkin' so much. I should like to know what your gentle-
men over there on the east side think about the strike, any-
way. "
The young fellow dropped his eyes. "I am not authorized to
speak for them. "
"Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not authorized to speak for
yourself? "
"Father, you know we don't agree about these things. I'd
rather not talk -»
"But I'm goin' to make you talk this time! " cried Dryfoos,
striking the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist.
A maddening thought of Christine came over him. "As long as
you eat my bread, you have got to do as I say. I won't have
my children telling me what I shall do and shan't do, or take on
airs of being holier than me. Now you just speak up!
Do you
think those loafers are right, or don't you? Come! "
Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. "I think they
were very foolish to strike at this time, when the elevated
roads can do the work. "
«< Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over
there on the east side that it 'd been wise to strike before we
got the Elevated? »
Conrad again refused to answer; and his father roared, "What
do you think? »
"I think a strike is always bad business. It's war; but some-
times there don't seem any other way for the workingmen to
get justice. They say that sometimes strikes do raise the wages,
after a while. "
-
"Those lazy devils were paid enough already," shrieked the
old man. "They got two dollars a day. How much do you
think they ought to 'a' got? Twenty? "
Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But
he decided to answer. "The men say that with partial work,
and fines, and other things, they get sometimes a dollar, and
sometimes ninety cents a day. "
"They lie, and you know they lie," said his father, rising and
coming toward him. "And what do you think the upshot of it
## p. 7680 (#494) ###########################################
7680
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
all will be, after they've ruined business for another week, and
made people hire hacks, and stolen the money of honest men?
How is it going to end? "
They will have to give in. "
"Oh, give in, heigh! And what will you say then, I should
like to know? How will you feel about it then? Speak! "
"I shall feel as I do now. I know you don't think that way,
and I don't blame you-or anybody. But if I have got to say
how I shall feel, why, I shall feel sorry they didn't succeed; for
I believe they have a righteous cause, though they go the wrong
way to help themselves. "
His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set.
"Do you dare to say that to me? "
"Yes. I can't help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with
those poor men. "
"You impudent puppy! " shouted the old man. He lifted his
hand and struck his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand
with his own left, and while the blood began to trickle from
a wound that Christine's intaglio ring had made in his temple,
he looked at him with a kind of grieving wonder, and said,
"Father! "
The old man wrenched his fist away, and ran out of the
house. He remembered his address now, and he gave it as he
plunged into the coupé. He trembled with his evil passion, and
glared out of the windows at the passers as he drove home; he
only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering eyes, and the blood
slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.
Conrad went to the neat set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable
room and washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound
with the cold water till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not
deep, and he thought he would not put anything on it. After a
while he locked up the office, and started out, he hardly knew
where. But he walked on, in the direction he had taken, till he
found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in front of Bren-
tano's. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling gently
to him, "Mr. Dryfoos! "
## p. 7681 (#495) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7681
CONRAD looked confusedly around, and the same voice said
again, "Mr. Dryfoos! " and he saw that it was a lady speaking to
him from a coupé beside the curbing, and then he saw that it
was Miss Vance.
She smiled when he gave signs of having discovered her, and
came up to the door of her carriage. "I am so glad to meet
you. I have been longing to talk to somebody; nobody seems to
feel about it as I do. Oh, isn't it horrible? Must they fail? I
saw cars running on all the lines as I came across; it made me
sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in? And everybody
seems to hate them so-I can't bear it. " Her face was estranged
with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. «You
must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way;
but when I caught sight of you I had to speak. I knew you
would sympathize. I knew you would feel as I do. Oh, how
can anybody help honoring those poor men for standing by one
another as they do? They are risking all they have in the world
for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes! They are
staking the bread of their wives and children on the chance
they've taken! But no one seems to understand it. No one
seems to see that they are willing to suffer more now, that other
poor men may suffer less hereafter. And those wretched creat-
ures that are coming in to take their places—those traitors! ”
"We can't blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss
Vance," said Conrad.
"No, no! I don't blame them. Who am I, to do such a
thing? It's we-people like me, of my class-who make the
poor betray one another. But this dreadful fighting- this hideous
paper is full of it! »
She held up an extra, crumpled with her
nervous reading. "Can't something be done to stop it? Don't
you think that if some one went among them, and tried to make
them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies
and drive off the new men, he might do some good? I have
wanted to go and try it; but I am a woman, and I mustn't! I
shouldn't be afraid of the strikers, but I'm afraid of what people
would say! " Conrad kept pressing his handkerchief to the cut
in his temple, which he thought might be bleeding, and now
she noticed this. "Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos? You look so
pale. »
"No, it's nothing a little scratch I've got. "
XIII-481
—
-
## p. 7682 (#496) ###########################################
7682
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Indeed you look pale. Have you a carriage? How will you
get home? Will you get in here with me, and let me drive
you? »
"No, no," said Conrad, smiling at her excitement. "I'm per-
fectly well- »
"And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for stopping you
here, and talking in this way? But I know you feel as I do! "
"Yes, I feel as you do. You are right-right in every way.
I mustn't keep you. Good-by. " He stepped back to bow, but
she put her beautiful hand out of the window, and when he took
it she wrung his hand hard.
"Thank you, thank you! You are good, and you are just!
But no one can do anything. It's useless! "
The type of irreproachable coachman on the box, whose
respectability had suffered through the strange behavior of his
mistress in this interview, drove quickly off at her signal, and
Conrad stood a moment looking after the carriage. His heart
was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would burst. As he
turned to walk away, it seemed to him as if he mounted upon
the air. The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given.
him, that crush of the hand-he hoped nothing, he formed no
idea from it, but it all filled him with love, and cast out the pain
and shame he had been suffering. He believed that he could
never be unhappy any more; the hardness that was in his mind
toward his father went out of it: he saw how sorely he had tried
him; he grieved that he had done it: but the means, the differ-
ence of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel,- he was
solemnly glad of that since she shared it. He was only sorry for
his father. "Poor father! " he said under his breath as he went
along. He explained to her about his father in his revery, and
she pitied his father too.
He was walking over toward the west side, aimlessly at first,
and then at times with the longing to do something to save those
mistaken men from themselves, forming itself into a purpose.
Was not that what she meant, when she bewailed her woman's
helplessness? She must have wished him to try if he, being a
man, could not do something: or if she did not, still he would
try; and if she heard of it, she would recall what she had said,
and would be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of her
pleasure in what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it
was; but when he came to a street-car track he remembered it,
## p. 7683 (#497) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7683
and looked up and down to see if there were any turbulent
gathering of men, whom he might mingle with and help to keep
from violence. He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as if
at the same moment,- for in his exalted mood all events had
a dream-like simultaneity,- he stood at the corner of an avenue,
and in the middle of it, a little way off, was a street car, and
around the car a tumult of shouting, cursing, struggling men.
The driver was lashing his horses forward, and a policeman was
at their heads, with the conductor, pulling them; stones, clubs,
brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men trying to
move them. The mob closed upon them in a body; and then
a patrol wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of
policemen leaped out and began to club the rioters. Conrad could
see how they struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows
on their skulls sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the riot-
ers ran in all directions.
One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad
stood, and then he saw at his side a tall old man with a long
white beard. He was calling out at the policeman: "Ah yes!
Glup the strikerss-gif it to them! Why don't you co and glup
the bresidents that insoalt your lawss, and gick your Boart of
Arpidration out of toors? Glup the strikerss-they cot no friendts!
They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you! "
The officer whirled his club, and the old man threw his left
arm up to shield his head. Conrad recognized Lindau, and now
he saw the empty sleeve dangle in the air, over the stump of
his wrist. He heard a shot in that turmoil beside the car, and
something seemed to strike him in the breast. He was going to
say to the policeman, "Don't strike him! He's an old soldier!
You see he has no hand! " but he could not speak, he could
not move his tongue. The policeman stood there; he saw his
face: it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue,
fixed, perdurable; a mere image of irresponsible and involun-
tary authority. Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the
heart by that shot fired from the car.
March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at
the same moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the
policeman, who left him where he fell, and joined the rest of
the squad in pursuing the rioters. The fighting round the car
in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his horses into a gal-
lop, and the place was left empty.
## p. 7684 (#498) ###########################################
7684
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had
implored him to keep away from the rioting; but he could not
have left Lindau lying there if he would. Something stronger
than his will drew him to the spot, and there he saw Conrad
dead beside the old man.
IN THE Cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that
night she was supported partly by principle, but mainly by the
potent excitement which bewildered Conrad's family and took all
reality from what had happened.
It was nearly midnight when
the Marches left them and walked away toward the Elevated
station with Fulkerson. Everything had been done by that time
that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfac-
tion in the business-like dispatch of all the details which attends
each step in such an affair, and helps to make death tolerable
even to the most sorely stricken. We are creatures of the
moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one
interest at a time fills these. Fulkerson was cheerful when they
got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March experienced a
rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought not
to have experienced. But she condoned the offense a little in
herself, because her husband remained so constant in his grav-
ity; and pending the final accounting he must make her for
having been where he could be of so much use from the first
instant of the calamity, she was tenderly, gratefully proud of all
the use he had been to Conrad's family, and especially his mis-
erable old father. To her mind March was the principal actor
in the whole affair, and much more important in having seen
it than those who had suffered in it. In fact, he had suffered
incomparably.
"Well, well," said Fulkerson, "they'll get along now.
We've
done all we could, and there's nothing left but for them to bear
it. Of course it's awful, but I guess it'll come out all right. I
mean," he added, "they'll pull through now. "
"I suppose," said March, "that nothing is put on us that we
can't bear. But I should think," he went on musingly, "that
when God sees what we poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed
round with this eternal darkness of death, he must respect us. "
"Basil! " said his wife. But in her heart she drew nearer to
him for the words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.
## p. 7685 (#499) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7685
“Oh, I know,” he said, "we school ourselves to despise human
nature. But God did not make us despicable; and I say, what-
ever end he meant us for, he must have some such thrill of
joy in our adequacy to fate as a father feels when his son shows
himself a man. When I think what we can be if we must, I
can't believe the least of us shall finally perish. "
"Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of us," said
Fulkerson, with a piety of his own.
"That poor boy's father! " sighed Mrs. March. "I can't get
his face out of my sight. He looked so much worse than death. "
"Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March. "It's life that
looks so in its presence. Death is peace and pardon. I only
wish poor, poor old Lindau was as well out of it as Conrad
there. "
"Ah, Lindau! He has done harm enough," said Mrs. March.
"I hope he will be careful after this. "
son.
March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the
case, which inexorably held him responsible for Conrad's death.
"Lindau's going to come out all right, I guess," said Fulker-
"He was first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night. "
He whispered in March's ear, at a chance he got in mounting the
station stairs: "I didn't like to tell you there at the house, but
I guess you'd better know: they had to take Lindau's arm off
near the shoulder. Smashed all to pieces by the clubbing. "
In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the be-
reaved family whom the Marches had just left lingered together,
and tried to get strength to part for the night. They were all
spent with the fatigue that comes from heaven to such misery
as theirs, and they sat in a torpor in which each waited for the
other to move, to speak.
Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine rose and went
out of the room without saying a word, and they heard her going
up-stairs. Then Mela said, "I reckon the rest of us better be
goun' too, father. Here, let's git mother started. "
She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair;
but the old man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from
the next room. Between them they raised her to her feet.
"Ain't there anybody a-goin' to set up with it? " she asked, in
her hoarse pipe. "It appears like folks hain't got any feelin's in
New York. Woon't some o' the neighbors come and offer to set
up, without waitin' to be asked ? »
## p. 7686 (#500) ###########################################
7686
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
"Oh, that's all right, mother. The men'll attend to that.
Don't you bother any," Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round
her mother with tender patience.
"Why, Mely, child! I can't feel right to have it left to hire-
lin's, so. But there ain't anybody any more to see things done
as they ought. If Coonrod was on'y here- »
"Well, mother, you are pretty mixed! " said Mela, with a
strong tendency to break into her large guffaw. But she checked
herself and said, "I know just how you feel, though. It keeps
a-comun' and a-goun'; and it's so and it ain't so, all at once;
that's the plague of it. Well, father! Ain't you goun' to come? "
"I'm goin' to stay, Mela," said the old man gently, without
moving. "Get your mother to bed, that's a good girl. "
"You goin' to set
set up with him, Jacob? " asked the old
woman.
"Yes, 'Liz'beth, I'll set up. You go to bed. "
"Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it'll do you good to set
up. I wished I could set up with you; but I don't seem to have
the stren'th I did when the twins died. I must git my sleep,
I don't like very well to have you broke of your rest,
Jacob, but there don't appear to be anybody else. You wouldn't
have to do it if Coonrod was here. There I go ag'in! Mercy!
so's to-
-
mercy! "
"Well, do come along, then, mother," said Mela; and she got
her out of the room, with Mrs. Mandel's help, and up the stairs.
From the top the old woman called down: "You tell Coon-
rod - »
She stopped, and he heard her groan out, "My Lord!
my Lord! »
He sat, one silence, in the dining-room where they had all
lingered together; and in the library beyond the hireling watcher
sat, another silence. The time passed, but neither moved; and
the last noise in the house ceased, so that they heard each other
breathe, and the vague, remote rumor of the city invaded the
inner stillness. It grew louder toward morning, and then Dry-
foos knew from the watcher's deeper breathing that he had fallen
into a doze.
He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was;
the place was full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that
Fulkerson had brought, and that lay above the pulseless breast.
The old man turned up a burner in the chandelier, and stood
looking on the majestic serenity of the dead face.
## p. 7687 (#501) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7687
He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the
stairway in the hall. She was in her long white flannel bed-
gown, and the candle she carried shook with her nervous tremor.
He thought she might be walking in her sleep; but she said
quite simply, "I woke up, and I couldn't git to sleep ag'in with-
out comin' to have a look. " She stood beside their dead son with
him. "Well, he's beautiful, Jacob. He was the prettiest baby!
And he was always good, Coonrod was; I'll say that for him. I
don't believe he ever give me a minute's care in his whole life.
I reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I
don't know as I ever done much to show it. But you was always
good to him, Jacob; you always done the best for him, ever
since he was a little feller. I used to be afraid you'd spoil him.
sometimes in them days; but I guess you're glad now for every
time you didn't cross him. I don't suppose since the twins died
you ever hit him a lick. ”
She stooped and peered closer at the
face. "Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye? "
Dryfoos saw it too, the wound that he had feared to look
for, and that now seemed to redden on his sight. He broke
into a low wavering cry, like a child's in despair, like an ani-
mal's in terror, like a soul's in the anguish of remorse.
ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE
From Venetian Life. Copyright 1867 and 1872, by W. D. Howells. Reprinted
by permission of the author, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
I
THINK it does not matter just when I first came to Venice.
Yesterday and to-day are the same here. I arrived one win-
ter morning about five o'clock, and was not so full of Soul as
I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I was resolved not
to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated boat so
called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage.
The porter who seized my valise in the station inferred from
some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and
ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a gondola.
I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and
desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom
I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare-
say every traveler recollects,― the merciless tribe who hold your
## p. 7688 (#502) ###########################################
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WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a dis-
pleasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Vene-
tians call them gransieri, or crab-catchers: but as yet I did not
know the name or the purpose of this poverino at the station, but
merely saw that he had the Venetian eye for color; in the distri-
bution and arrangement of his fragments of dress he had pro-
duced some miraculous effects of red, and he was altogether as
infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would like to meet
in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink my
body in the Grand Canal, as in all Venetian keeping I felt that
he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly
know now whether to exult or regret that I did not understand
him, and left him empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew
again the blessings which he had advanced me, as we pushed out
into the canal; but I heard nothing, for the wonder of the city
was already upon me. All my nether spirit, so to speak, was
dulled and jaded by the long, cold railway journey from Vienna,
while every surface sense was taken and tangled in the bewilder-
ing brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be
nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite sur-
prise as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches
as he issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon
her peerless strangeness. There is something in the blessed
breath of Italy (how quickly, coming south, you know it, and how
bland it is after the harsh transalpine air! ) which prepares you
for your nocturnal advent into the place; and O you! whoever
you are, that journey toward this enchanted city for the first
time, let me tell you how happy I count you! There lies before
you for your pleasure the spectacle of such singular beauty as no
picture can ever show you nor book tell you,- beauty which you
shall feel perfectly but once, and regret forever.
For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze
and bustle of the station down the gloom and silence of the
broad canal, I forgot that I had been freezing two days and
nights; that I was at that moment very cold and a little home-
sick. I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful silence,
broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. Then on either
hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the dark
waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which
brought balconies and columns and carven arches into moment-
ary relief, and threw long streams of crimson into the canal.
I
## p. 7689 (#503) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7689
could see by that uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not
how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by any pang for the decay
that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty of Venice,
I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think
all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but
they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupt-
ing the sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and pres-
ent mixed there, and the moral and material were blent in the
sentiment of utter novelty and surprise. The quick boat slid
through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events gave it the
impulse that carried it beyond and safely around sharp corners
of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress
through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of
palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of
sense and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life
in Venice.
Dark funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the
gondoliers had warned each other at every turning with hoarse,
lugubrious cries; the lines of balconied palaces had never ended;
here and there at their doors larger craft were moored, with dim
figures of men moving uncertainly about on them. At last we
had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into one of the
smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness
only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But
always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with
its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling
stars below: but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lone-
someness, and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could
not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary
passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of the time,
and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness,
and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the
gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever asso-
ciated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise
of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated im-
agination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts
of the Situation (as we say in the journals)? To move on was
relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled with
good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture
of all these emotions when, slipping from the cover of a bridge,
the gondola suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a
## p. 7690 (#504) ###########################################
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WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
closely barred door. The gondoliers rang and rang again, while
their passenger
"Divided the swift mind,"
in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely
barred could possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges
for candles and service. But as soon as the door opened, and
he beheld the honest swindling countenance of a hotel portier,
he felt secure against everything but imposture; and all wild ab-
surdities of doubt and conjecture at once faded from his thought
when the portier suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin
too much.
So I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of
that complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had
caught the most alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot
wholly perish while any fragment of her sculptured walls nods to
its shadow in the canal; I had been penetrated by a deep sense
of the mystery of the place, and I had been touched already
by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its presence
offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant
occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.
I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after
my arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable
record; but I would not wholly forget how, though isolated from
all acquaintance and alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at
home in Venice from the first. I believe it was because I had
after my own fashion loved the beautiful, that I here found the
beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship,
speaking a language which even in its unfamiliar forms I could.
partly understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice
from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence
of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt at
home: indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and
grandeur only very imperfectly; but wherever I wandered through
the quaint and marvelous city I found the good company of
"The fair, the old;"
and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice,
and I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with
a kind of relief.
My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowl-
edge of locality has since taken away. They began commonly
## p. 7691 (#505) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7691
with some purpose or destination, and ended by losing me in the
intricacies of the narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent
little streets in the world, or left me cast away upon the un-
familiar waters of some canal as far as possible from the point
aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my blun-
dering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to sur-
render by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls or the sudden
brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innu-
merable churches of the city were equally victorious, and contin-
ually took me prisoner. But all places had something rare and
worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture,
at least interesting squalor and picturesque wretchedness; and I
believe I had less delight in proper Objects of Interest than in
the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome winter
damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and
beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above.
Every court had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keep-
ing of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of
the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic with
empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the
sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched
the lofty windows with obsolete hats.
I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice
led me from the brilliancy of St. Mark's and the glittering streets
of shops that branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the
quaint recesses of the courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys,
where the dull little oil lamps vied with the tapers burning before
the street-corner shrines of the Virgin in making the way ob-
scure, and deepening the shadows about the doorways and under
the frequent arches. I remember distinctly among the beautiful
nights of that time, the soft night of late winter which first
showed me the scene you may behold from the Public Gardens
at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I
turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in
the east (a solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water,
and striking its moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and
glanced athwart the vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark,
and saw all the lights from the Piazzetta to the Giudecca, mak-
ing a crescent of flame in the air, and casting deep into the
water under them a crimson glory that sank also down and down
## p. 7692 (#506) ###########################################
7692
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and
delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church
and palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the
gondola drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons
seemed to rise and sink with the light palpitations of the waves
like pictures on the undulating fields of banners; the stark rig-
ging of a ship showed black against the sky; the Lido sank from
sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to sleep
by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that
gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above
me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those trem-
bling towers in the lagoons one rich full sob burst from the
heart of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene,
and suffused the languid night with the murmur of luxurious,
ineffable sadness.
But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful,
and whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no
matter how low its origin or humble its composition; and the
magnificence of that moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than
I won from the fine spectacle of an old man whom I saw burn-
ing coffee one night in the little court behind my lodgings, and
whom I recollect now as one of the most interesting people I
saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the air of that
neighborhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant berry,
and all day long this patient old man-sage, let me call him—
had turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over
an open fire, after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in
Venice. Now that the night had fallen, and the stars shone
down upon him, and the red of the flame luridly illumined him,
he showed more grand and venerable than ever. Simple, abstract
humanity has its own grandeur in Italy; and it is not hard here
for the artist to find the primitive types with which genius loves
best to deal. As for this old man, he had the beard of a saint
and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the squalor of a
beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur
of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to
do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if
he had been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel
of fortune, and doing men instead of coffee brown, he could not
have looked more sadly and weirdly impressive. When presently
he rose from his seat and lifted the cylinder from its place, and
## p. 7693 (#507) ###########################################
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7693
the clinging flames leaped after it, and he shook it, and a
volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him,—
then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and
turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless
magnificence.
At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled
by the æsthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes.
of baked Indian meal to the soldiers in the military station near
the Piazza, and whom I often noted from the windows of the
little caffè there, where you get an excellent caffè bianco (coffee
with milk) for ten soldi and one to the waiter. I have reason to
fear that this boy dealt over-shrewdly with the Austrians, for a
pitiless war raged between him and one of the sergeants.
His
hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive; and
he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lus-
trous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a
jacket and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was
the elasticity of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet incased in
wooden shoes. Habitually came a barrel-organist and ground
before the barracks, and
"Took the soul
Of that waste place with joy";
and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and
threw his whole soul as it were into the crank of his instru-
ment, my beloved ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy
in his arms, and thus embraced, to whirl through a wild inspira-
tion of figures, in which there was something grotesquely rhyth-
mic, something of indescribable barbaric magnificence, spiritualized
into a grace of movement superior to the energy of the North and
the extravagant fervor of the East. It was coffee and not wine
that I drank; but I fable all the same that I saw reflected in
this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of dancing
in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that
combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon
sea-washed sands in marble structures of airy and stately splen-
dor, and gave to architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.
So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with
Venice; and being newly from a land where everything, mor-
ally and materially, was in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on
the picturesque ruin, the pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of
## p. 7694 (#508) ###########################################
7694
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
everything about me here. It was not yet the season to behold
all the delight of the lazy outdoor life of the place; but never-
theless I could not help seeing that great part of the people,
both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do, and that
nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse.
When however I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a
spectator of this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my
share of the common indolence, I found it a grievous burden.
Old habits of work, old habits of hope, made my endless leisure
irksome to me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained, fairly
and finally, that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished but after
all merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken
wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of
the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote
from incentive and sensation.
For such is Venice; and the will must be strong and the faith
indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of
her stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God's purpose of a great
moving, anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have
yielded, as after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle
incredulity possesses you; and if you consent that such a thing is
as earnest and useful life, you cannot help wondering why it
need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but cor-
rupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the
beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some
unconscious way to regard her fate as my own; and when I
began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it was
as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written
against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crum-
bling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not
so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so
many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light,
color, canals, and palaces. One's conscience, more or less un-
comfortably vigilant elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult
to remember that fact is more virtuous than fiction. In other
years, when there was life in the city, and this sad ebb of
prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might have been
some incentive to keep one's thoughts and words from lapsing
into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the
whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to
gain. But now, what matter?
## p. 7695 (#509) ###########################################
7695
YOG
THOMAS HUGHES
(1823-1896)
HE early life of Thomas Hughes was that of the typical Eng-
lish school lad; and luckily he had the genius to express in
literature the daily incidents of that life, with a freshness of
sympathy, a vigorous manliness, and a moral insight that make his
stories a revelation of boy nature.
