The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
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if it strayed afterwards, and include her. He conspicuously kissed her every morning when he came down to breakfast, and he kissed her at night when she would have escaped to bed without the rite.
It was Falk’s own fault if he did not conceive from Langbrith’s tenderness the ideal of what a good son should be in all points. But, as the Western growth of a German stock transplanted a generation before, he may not have been qualified to imagine the whole perfection of Langbrith’s behavior from the examples shown him. His social conditions in the past may even have been such that the ceremonial he witnessed did not impress him pleasantly; but, if so, he made no sign of displeasure. He held his peace, and beyond grinning at Langbrith’s shoulders, as he followed him out to the dining-room, he did not go. He seemed to have made up his mind that, without great loss of self-respect, he could suffer himself to be used in illustration of Langbrith’s large-mindedness with other people whom Langbrith wished to impress. At any rate, it had been a choice between spending the Easter holiday at Cambridge, or coming home with Langbrith; and he was not sorry that he had come. He was getting as much good out of the visit as Langbrith.
One night, when Mrs. Langbrith came timidly into the library to tell the two young men that dinner was ready—she had shifted the dinner-hour, at her son’s wish, from one o’clock to seven—Langbrith turned from the shelf where he had been looking into various books with his friend, and said to his mother, in giving her his arm: “ I can’t understand why my father didn’t have a book-plate, unless it was to leave me the pleasure of getting one up in good shape. I want you to design it for me, will you, Falk?” he asked over his shoulder. Without waiting for the answer, he went on, instructively, to his mother: “You know the name was originally Norman.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said, with a gentle self-inculpation.
“Yes,” her son explained. “I’ve been looking it up. It was Longuehaleine, and they translated it after they came to England into Longbreath, or Langbrith, as we have it. I believe I prefer our final form. It’s splendidly suggestive for a bookplate, don’t you think, Falk?” By this time he was pushing his mother’s chair under her, and talking over her head to his friend. “A boat, with a full sail, and a cherub’s head blowing a strong gale into it: something like that.”
“ They might think the name was Longboat, then,” said Falk.
Mrs. Langbrith started.
“ Oh, Falk has to have his joke,” her son explained, tolerantly, as he took his place; “nobody minds Falk. Mother, I wish you would give a dinner for him. Why not? And we could have a dance afterwards. The old parlors would lend themselves to it handsomely. What do you say, Falk?”
“ Is it for me to say I will be your honored guest?”
“Well, we’ll drop that part. We won’t feature you, if you prefer not. Honestly, though, I’ve been thinking of a dinner, mother.”
Langbrith had now taken his place, and was poising the carving knife and fork over the roast turkey, which symbolized in his mother’s simple tradition the extreme of formal hospitality. She wore her purple silk in honor of it, and it was what chiefly sustained her in the presence of the young men’s evening dress. This was too much for her, perhaps, but not too much for the turkey. The notion of the proposed dinner, however, was something, as she conceived it, beyond the turkey’s support. Without knowing just what her son meant, she cloudily imagined the dinner of his suggestion to be a banquet quite unprecedented in Saxmills society. Dinners there, except in a very few houses, were family dinners, year out and year in. They were sometimes extended to include outlying kindred, cousins and aunts and uncles who chanced to be in town or came on a visit. Very rarely, a dinner was made for some distinguished stranger: a speaker, who was going to address a political rally in the afternoon, or a lecturer, who was to be heard in the evening at the town-hall, or the clerical supply in the person of one minister or another who came to be tried for the vacant pulpit of one of the churches. Then, a few principal citizens with their wives were asked, the ministers of the other churches, the bank president, some leading merchant, the magnates of the law or medicine. The dinner was at one o’clock, and the young people were rigidly excluded. They were fed either before or after it, or farmed out among the _ neighboring houses till the guests were gone. Ordinarily, guests were asked to tea, which was high, with stewed chicken, hot bread, made dishes and several kinds of preserves and sweet pickles, with many sorts of cake. The last was the criterion of tasteful and lavish hospitality.
Clearly, it was nothing of all this that Mrs. Langbrith’s son had in mind. After his first year in college, when he had been so homesick that everything seemed perfect under his mother s roof in his vacation visits, he began to bring fellows with him. Then he began to make changes. The dinner-hour was advanced from mid-day to evening, and he and his friends dressed for it. He had still to carve, for the dinner in courses was really unmanageable and unimaginable in his mother’s housekeeping, but he professed a baronial preference for carving, and he fancied an old-fashioned, old-family effect from it. The service was such as the frightened inexperience of the elderly Irish second-girl could render; under Langbrith’s threatening eye, she succeeded in offering the dishes at the left hand, and, though she stood a good way off and rather pushed them at the guests, the thing somehow was done. At least, the covered dishes were no longer set on the table, as they used always to be.
Mrs. Langbrith had witnessed the changes with trepidation but absolute acquiescence even at the first, and finally with the submission in which her son held her in everything. In the afternoon, when he and his friend, whoever it might be, put on their top-hats and top-coats and went out to call on the village girls, who did not know enough of the world to offer them tea, she spent the interval before dinner in arranging for the meal with the faithful, faded Norah. After dinner, when the young men again put on their top-hats and top-coats to call again upon the village girls, whom they had impressed with the correctness of afternoon calls, and to whom they now relented in compliance with the village custom of evening calls, Mrs. Langbrith debated with Norah the success of the dinner, studied its errors, and joined her in vows for their avoidance.
IV
The event which confronted Mrs. Langbrith in her son’s words, as he sat behind the turkey and plunged the carving fork into its steaming and streaming breast, was so far beyond the scope of her widened knowledge that she mutely waited for him to declare it.
“ People,” he went on, “ have been so nice to Falk and me, that I think we ought to make some return. I put the duty side first, because I know you’ll like that, mother, and it will help to reconcile you to the fun of it. Falk is such a pagan that he can’t understand, but it will be for his good, all the same. My notion is to have a good, big dinner—twelve or fourteen at table, and then a lot in afterwards, with supper about midnight. What do you say, mother? Don’t mind Falk, if you don’t agree quite.”
“There is no Falk, Mrs. Langbrith,” the young fellow said, with an intelligence which comforted her and emboldened her against her son.
“I don’t see—she began, and then she stopped.
“That’s right!” her son encouraged her.
“James,” she said, desperately, “I wouldn’t know how to do it.”
“I don’t want you to do it.” He laughed exultantly. “ I propose to do it myself. I will have the whole thing sent up from Boston.” Between her gasps, he went on: “All I have got to do is to write an order to White, the caterer, with particulars of quantity and quality, the date and the hour, and it comes on the appointed train with three men in plain clothes; two reappear in lustrous dress-suits at dinner and supper, and serve the things the other has cooked at our range. I press the button, White does the rest. He brings china, cutlery, linen— everything. All you have to do is to hide Jerry in the barn and keep Norah up-stairs to show the ladies into the back chamber to take off their things. You can put our own cook under the sink. You’ll be astonished at the ease of the whole thing.”
“ Yes,” Mrs. Langbrith said, “it will