The Shadow Of A Dream. William Dean Howells
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I first stumbled against Jim Nevil. He was standing up as tall and straight morally as he does physically, but he managed to meet me on my own level without seeming to stoop to it. He was ordained of God, then, and his life had a message for every one; for me it seemed to have a special message, and what he did for me was what he lived more than what he said. He talked to me, of course, but it was his example that saved me. You must know Nevil. Yes, he's a noble fellow, and you can't have any true conception of friendship till you have known him. Just see that moon!" Faulkner stopped abruptly, and threw up his head.
The perfect orb seemed to swim in the perfect blue. The words began to breathe themselves from my lips:
"'The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;'"
and he responded as if it were the strain of a litany:
"'Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;'"
and I spoke:
"'The sunshine is a glorious birth;'"
and he responded again:
"'But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath passed a glory from the earth.'"
His voice broke in the last line and faded into a tremulous whisper. It was the youth in both of us, smitten to ecstasy by the beauty of the scene, and pouring itself out in the modulations of that divine stop, as if it had been the rapture of one soul.
He took his arm from my shoulders, and turned about without any ceremony of adieu, and walked away, head down, with shuffling, slippered feet.
We met several times, very pleasantly, and with increased liking. Then he took offence, as capricious as his former fancy, at something I wrote, and sent me an angry note, which I answered in kind. Not long afterward I went abroad on a little money I had saved up, and when I came home, I married, and by an ironical chance, found myself; with my aesthetic tastes, my literary ambition, and my journalistic experience, settled in the insurance business at Boston. I did not revisit the West, but I learned by letters that our dear little city out there had become a formidable railroad centre; everybody had made or lost money, and Faulkner had become very rich through the real estate which had long kept him land-poor. One day I got a newspaper addressed in his handwriting, which brought me the news of his marriage. The name of the lady struck me as almost factitiously pretty, and I could well imagine Faulkner provisionally falling in love with her because she was called Hermia Winter. The half-column account of the wedding described the Rev. James Nevil as "officiating"; and something in the noisy and bragging tone of the reporter in dealing with this important society event disadvantaged the people concerned in my mind. I chose to regard it all as cruder and louder than anything I remembered of the place in old days; but my wife said that it was characteristically Western, and that probably it had always been like that out there; only I had not felt it while I was in it, though, as she said, I was not of it.
She was a Bostonian herself; and it was useless to appeal to the society journalism of her own city in proof of the prevalence of that sort of vulgarity everywhere. She laughed at the name Hermia, and said it sounded made-up, and that she had no doubt the girl's name was Hannah. I thought I had my revenge afterward when a friend wrote me about the marriage, which was a surprise to everybody; for it had always been supposed that Faulkner was going to marry the beautiful and brilliant Miss Ludlow, long, perhaps too long, the belle of the place. The lady whom he had chosen was the daughter of a New England family, who had lived just out of town in my time and had never been in society. She was a teacher in Bell's Institute, and Faulkner met her there on one of his business visits as trustee. She was a very cultivated girl, though; and they were going abroad for their wedding-journey. My correspondent had a special message from Faulkner for me, delivered on his wedding night. He remembered me among the people he would have liked to have there; he was sorry for our little quarrel and was to blame for it; he was coming home by way of Boston, and was going to look me up.
My wife said, Well, he seemed a nice fellow; but it only showed how any sort of New England girl could go out there and pick up the best. For the rest, she hoped they would not hurry home on my account; and if all my Western friends, with their free ideas of hospitality, were going to call on me, there would be no end to it. It was the jealousy of her husband's past every good wife feels that spoke; but long before I met Faulkner again we had both forgotten all about him.
II
ONE DAY seven or eight years later, when I was coming up from Lynn, where we had board for a few weeks' outing in August, I fell in with Dr. Wingate, the nervous specialist. We were members of the same dining club, and were supposed to meet every month; we really met once or twice during the winter, but then it was a great pleasure to me, and I tried always to get a place next him at table. I found in him, as I think one finds in most intelligent physicians, a sympathy for human suffering unclouded by sentiment, and a knowledge of human nature at once vast and accurate, which fascinated me far more than any forays of the imagination in that difficult region. Like physicians everywhere, he was less local in his feelings and interests than men of other professions; and I was able better to overcome with him that sense of being a foreigner, and in some sort on sufferance, which embarrassed me (quite needlessly, I dare say) with some of my commensals: lawyers, ministers, brokers, and politicians. I had a sort of affection for him; I never saw him, with the sunny, simple-hearted, boyish smile he had, without feeling glad; and it seemed to me that he liked me, too. His kindly presence must have gone a long way with his patients, whose fluttering sensibilities would hang upon his cheery strength as upon one of the main chances of life.
We rather rushed together to shake hands, and each asked how the other happened to be there at that hour in the morning. I explained my presence, and he said, as if it were some sort of coincidence: "You don't say so! Why, I've got a patient over at Swampscott, who says he knows you. A man named Faulkner."
I repeated, "Faulkner?" In the course of travel and business I had met so many people that I forgave myself for not distinguishing them very sharply by name, at once.
"He says he used to know you in your demi-semi-literary days, and he rather seemed to think you must be concealing a reputation for a poet, when I told him you were in the insurance business, and I only knew of your literary tastes. He's a Western man, and he met you out there."
"Oh!" said I. "Douglas Faulkner!" And now it was my turn to say, "You don't say so! Why of course! Is it possible!" and I lost myself in a cloud of silent reminiscences and associations, to come out presently with the question, "What in the world is he doing at Swampscott?"
The doctor looked serious; and then he looked keenly at me. "Were you and he great friends?"
"Well, we were not sworn brothers exactly. We were writers on rival newspapers; but I rather liked him. Yes, there was something charming to me about him; something good and sweet. I haven't met him, though, for ten years."
"He seemed to be rather fond of you. He said he wished I would tell you to come and see him, the next time I met you. Odd you should turn up there in the station!" By this time we were in the train, on our way to Boston.
"I will," I said, and I hesitated to add, "I hope there's nothing serious the matter?"
The doctor hesitated too. "Well, he's a pretty sick man. There's no reason I shouldn't tell you. He's badly run down; and--I don't like the way his heart behaves."
"Oh, I'm sorry--"
"He had just got home from Europe, and was on his way to the mountains when he came to see me in Boston, and I sent him to the sea-side. I came down last night--it's the beginning of my vacation--to see him, and spent the night there. He's got the Mallows place--nice old place. Do you know his wife?"
"No; he married after I came East. What sort of person is she?" I asked.
I remembered my talk with my wife about her and her name, and I felt that it was really a triumph for me when the doctor said: "Well, she's an exquisite creature.