II

Whether the currency of _The Pilot's Story_ and the _Atlantic_

publication of my Heinesque poems added to my reputation in our city I

could not say. It was the belief of my senior on the newspaper that our

local recognition was enervating and that it had better go no farther,

but naturally I could not agree with a man of his greater age and

observation, and it is still a question with me whether recognition

hurts when one has done one's best. I cannot recall that I ever tried to

invite it; I hope not; but certainly I worked for it and hoped for it,

and I doubt if any like experiment was ever received with more generous

favor than ours by a community which I had reasons for knowing was

intelligent if not critical. Our paper, if I may say it, was always good

society, but after a while and inevitably it became an old story, or at

least an older story than at first, though it never quite ceased to be

good society. There remained the literary interest, the æsthetic

interest for me, after the journalistic interest had waned; there was

always the occasion, or the occasion could always be made. Passages in

those old letters home remind me that we talked long and late about _The

Marble Faun_ one night at a certain house; at another we talked about

other books from nine o'clock on, I imagine till midnight. At another

the young lady of the house "sang about a hundred songs." At still

another the girl hostess said, "You haven't asked me to sing to-night,

but I will sing," and then sang divinely half the night away, for all I

know. There was a young lady who liked German poetry, and could talk

about Goethe's lyrics; and apparently everywhere there were the talking

and the laughing and the singing which fill the world with bliss for

youth.

Perhaps I sacrifice myself in vain by my effort to impart the sense of

that past which faded so long ago; perhaps some readers will hold me

cheap for the fondness which recurs to it and lingers in it. But I

believe that I prize its memories because they seem so full of honor and

worship for the girlhood and womanhood which consecrate it in my

remembrance. Within this gross world of ours as it now is, women are

still so conditioned that they can lead the life of another and a better

world, and if they shall ever come to take their rightful share of the

government of the world as men have made it I believe they will bring

that other and better world of theirs with them and indefinitely

advance the millennium. I have the feeling of something like treason to

the men I knew in that time, when I own that I preferred the society of

women to theirs, but I console myself with the reflection that they

would probably have said the same as to mine. Our companionship could

hardly have chosen itself more to my liking. It was mainly of law

students, but there was here and there one engaged in business, who was

of a like joking and laughing with the rest. We lived together in a

picturesque edifice, Gothic and Tudor, which had been meant for a

medical college, and had begun so, and then from some financial

infirmity lapsed to a boarding-house for such young men as I knew,

though we were not without the presence of a young married pair, now and

then, and even a young lady, a teacher or the like, who made us welcome

when we ended a round of evening calls outside by calling on them from

room to room. In my boyhood days at Columbus I was sometimes hustled off

the sidewalk by the medical students coming from the College, then in

its first prosperity, and taking up the whole pavement as they swept

forward with interlinked arms. This was at noontime, when they were

scarcely less formidable than the specters which after dark swarmed from

the dissecting-room, and challenged the boy to a trial of speed in

escaping them. Now the students had long been gone from the College and

I dwelt in its precincts with such other favorites of fortune as could

afford to pay three dollars and a half a week for their board. The table

was even super-abundant, and the lodging was almost flatteringly

comfortable after experience of other places. I can only conjecture that

the rooms we inhabited had been meant for the students or professors

when the College was still a medical college. They were large, and to my

untutored eye, at least, were handsome, and romantically lighted by

windows of that blend of Tudor and Gothic which I have mentioned, but

their architecture showed more on the outside than on the inside, and of

course the pinnacles and towers of the edifice were more accessible to

the eye without. It was the distinction of people who wished to be known

for a correct taste to laugh at the architecture of the College, and

perhaps they do so still, but I was never of these. For me it had, and

it has, a charm which I think must have come from something like genius,

if not quite genius, in the architect, to whose daring I would like to

offer this belated praise. At any rate it was the abode of entire

satisfaction to me in those happy years between 1857 and 1860 when I

could not have wished other companionship than I had there.

There could have been no gayer table than we kept, where we made the

most of one another's jokes, and were richly personal in them, as youth

always is. The management was of the simplest, but not incompatible with

dignity, for the landlord waited upon the table himself, and whoever the

cook might be, the place was otherwise in the sole charge of an elderly

maid, with a curious defect of speech, which kept her from answering,

immediately or ultimately, any question or remark addressed to her. We

valued her for this impediment because of the pathetic legend attaching

to it, and we did not value her the less, but the more, because she was

tall and lank and uncouth of face and figure, though of a beauty in her

absolute faithfulness to her duties and the kindness beyond them which

she always showed. The legend was that in her younger if not fairer time

she had been married, and when one day her husband, suddenly killed in

an accident, was brought home to her, she tried to speak, but could not

speak, and then ever afterward could only speak after great stress, and

must often fall dumb, and go away without speaking.

[Illustration: _The Medical College at Columbus. Mr. Howells had a room

in the third story above the main entrance_]

I do not know whether we really believed in this or not, but we behaved

as if we did, and revered the silent heroine of the tragedy as if it

were unquestionably true. What kept me from trying to make it into a

poem I cannot say, but I would like to think it was that I felt it above

rather than below the verse of even the poet I meant to be. How many

rooms she had charge of I could as little say, but I am certain that

there were two of us young men in each of them. My own room-mate was a

poet, even more actual than myself, though not meaning so much as I to

be always a poet; he was reading law, and he meant to practise it, but

he had contributed two poems to the _Atlantic Monthly_ before any of

mine had been printed there. This might have been a cause of bitterness

with me; his work was certainly good enough to be a cause of bitterness,

and perhaps I was not jealous because I felt that it would be useless; I

should like to believe I was not even jealous of him for being so

largely in society before I was. Later, when we came in from our evening

calls, we sometimes read to each other, out of what books I could not

say now, but probably some poet's; certainly not our own verse: he was

too wise for that and I too shy.

He was then reading law, and sometime in my middle years at Columbus he

left us to begin his law practice farther West. In noticing his

departure as a friendly journalist should I obeyed his wish not to speak

of him as a poet; that, he said, would injure him with his new public;

but whether it would or not I am not sure; the Western community is

sometimes curiously romantic, and does not undervalue a man for being

out of the common in that way. What really happened with him was that,

being of a missionary family and of a clerical tradition, he left the

law in no great time and studied divinity. It was a whole generation

afterward before I saw him again; and now his yellow hair and auburn

beard of the early days were all one white, but his gentle eyes were of

the old hazel, undimmed by the age that was creeping upon us both. He

had followed me with generous remembrance and just criticism in my

fiction; and again he made me a sort of professional reproach for

dealing in my novels (notably in _A Modern Instance_) with ethical

questions best left to the church, he thought. I thought he was wrong,

but I am not sure that I so strenuously think so now; fiction has to

tell a tale as well as evolve a moral, and either the character or the

principle must suffer in that adjustment which life alone can

effectively manage. I do not say ideally manage, for many of the

adjustments of life seem to me cruel and mistaken. If it is in these

cases that religion can best intervene, I suppose my old friend was

right; at any rate, he knows now better than I, for he is where there is

no manner of doubt, and I am still where there is every manner of doubt.

I believe, in the clerical foreshadowing of his future, perhaps, he was

never of those wilder moments of our young companionship when we roamed

the night under the summer moon, or when we forgathered around the table

in a booth at the chief restaurant, and over a spirit-lamp stewed the

oysters larger and more delicious than any to be found now in the sea;

or when, in the quarter-hours of digestion which we allowed ourselves

after our one-o'clock dinner we stretched ourselves on the grass, often

sunburnt brown, before the College and laughed the time away at anything

which pretended itself a joke.

We collegians were mostly Republicans as most of the people we knew

were. A few young men in society were not, but they were not of our

companionship, though we met them at the houses we frequented, and did

not think the worse of them for being Democrats. In fact, there was no

political rancor outside of the newspapers, and that was tempered with

jocosity. Slavery had been since the beginning of the nation, the

heritage of the states from the colonies, and it had been accepted as

part of the order of things. We supposed that sometime, somehow, we

should be rid of it, but we were not sanguine that it would be soon; and

with so many things of pressing interest, the daily cares, the daily

pleasures, the new books, the singing and laughing and talking in the

pleasant houses, I could leave the question of slavery in abeyance,

except as a matter of paragraphing. There had been as many warnings of

calamity to come as ever a people had. There had been the breaking of

solemn promises from the South to the North; there had been the bloody

fights between the sections in Kansas and the treacheries of the

national government; there had been the quarrels and insults and

violences in Congress; there had been the arrests and rescues of

fugitive slaves; there had been the growth of hostile opinion, on one

side fierce and on the other hard, maturing on both sides in open hate.

There had been all these portents, and yet when the bolt burst from the

stormy sky and fell at Harper's Ferry we were as utterly amazed as if it

had fallen from a heaven all blue.