One day in the midst of this Sewell was called from his study to see
some one who was waiting for him in the reception-room, but who sent in
no name by the housemaid.
“I don't know as you remember me,” the visitor said, rising awkwardly,
as Sewell came forward with a smile of inquiry. “My name's Barker.”
“Barker?” said the minister, with a cold thrill of instant recognition,
but playing with a factitious uncertainty till he could catch his breath
in the presence of the calamity. “Oh yes! How do you do?” he said; and
then planting himself adventurously upon the commandment to love one's
neighbour as one's-self, he added: “I'm very glad to see you!”
In token of his content, he gave Barker his hand and asked him to be
seated.
The young man complied, and while Sewell waited for him to present
himself in some shape that he could grapple with morally, he made an
involuntary study of his personal appearance. That morning, before
starting from home by the milk-train that left Willoughby Pastures at
4.5, Barker had given his Sunday boots a coat of blacking, which he had
eked out with stove-polish, and he had put on his best pantaloons, which
he had outgrown, and which, having been made very tight a season after
tight pantaloons had gone out of fashion in Boston, caught on the tops
of his boots and stuck there in spite of his efforts to kick them loose
as he stood up, and his secret attempts to smooth them down when he had
reseated himself. He wore a single-breasted coat of cheap broadcloth,
fastened across his chest with a carnelian clasp-button of his father's,
such as country youth wore thirty years ago, and a belated summer scarf
of gingham, tied in a breadth of knot long since abandoned by polite
society.
Sewell had never thought his wife's reception-room very splendidly
appointed, but Barker must have been oppressed by it, for he sat in
absolute silence after resuming his chair, and made no sign of intending
to open the matter upon which he came. In the kindness of his heart
Sewell could not refrain from helping him on.
“When did you come to Boston?” he asked with a cheeriness which he was
far from feeling.
“This morning,” said Barker briefly, but without the tremor in his voice
which Sewell expected.
“You've never been here before, I suppose,” suggested Sewell, with the
vague intention of generalising or particularising the conversation, as
the case might be.
Barker abruptly rejected the overture, whatever it was. “I don't know as
you got a letter from me a spell back,” he said.
“Yes, I did,” confessed Sewell. “I did receive that letter,” he
repeated, “and I ought to have answered it long ago. But the fact is--”
He corrected himself when it came to his saying this, and said, “I
mean that I put it by, intending to answer it when I could do so in the
proper way, until, I'm very sorry to say, I forgot it altogether. Yes,
I forgot it, and I certainly ask your pardon for my neglect. But I can't
say that as it's turned out I altogether regret it. I can talk with you
a great deal better than I could write to you in regard to your”--Sewell
hesitated between the words poems and verses, and finally said--“work.
I have blamed myself a great deal,” he continued, wincing under the hurt
which he felt that he must be inflicting on the young man as well as
himself, “for not being more frank with you when I saw you at home in
September. I hope your mother is well?”
“She's middling,” said Barker, “but my married sister that came to
live with us since you was there has had a good deal of sickness in her
family. Her husband's laid up with the rheumatism most of the time.”
“Oh!” murmured Sewell sympathetically. “Well! I ought to have told you
at that time that I could not see much hope of your doing acceptable
work in a literary way; and if I had supposed that you ever expected
to exercise your faculty of versifying to any serious purpose,--for
anything but your own pleasure and entertainment,--I should certainly
have done so. And I tell you now that the specimens of the long poem you
have sent me give me even less reason to encourage you than the things
you read me at home.”
Sewell expected the audible crash of Barker's air-castles to break the
silence which the young man suffered to follow upon these words; but
nothing of the kind happened, and for all that he could see, Barker
remained wholly unaffected by what he had said. It nettled Sewell a
little to see him apparently so besotted in his own conceit, and he
added: “But I think I had better not ask you to rely altogether upon my
opinion in the matter, and I will go with you to a publisher, and you
can get a professional judgment. Excuse me a moment.”
He left the room and went slowly upstairs to his wife. It appeared
to him a very short journey to the third story, where he knew she was
decking the guest-chamber for the visit of a friend whom they expected
that evening. He imagined himself saying to her when his trial was well
over that he did not see why she complained of those stairs; that he
thought they were nothing at all. But this sense of the absurdity of the
situation which played upon the surface of his distress flickered and
fled at sight of his wife bustling cheerfully about, and he was tempted
to go down and get Barker out of the house, and out of Boston if
possible, without letting her know anything of his presence.
“Well?” said Mrs. Sewell, meeting his face of perplexity with a
penetrating glance. “What is it, David?”
“Nothing. That is--everything! Lemuel Barker is here!”
“Lemuel Barker? Who is Lemuel Barker?” She stood with the pillow-sham
in her hand which she was just about to fasten on the pillow, and Sewell
involuntarily took note of the fashion in which it was ironed.
“Why, surely you remember! That simpleton at Willoughby Pastures.” If
his wife had dropped the pillow-sham, and sunk into a chair beside
the bed, fixing him with eyes of speechless reproach; if she had done
anything dramatic, or said anything tragic, no matter how unjust or
exaggerated, Sewell could have borne it; but she only went on tying the
sham on the pillow, without a word. “The fact is, he wrote to me some
weeks ago, and sent me some specimens of a long poem.”
“Just before you preached that sermon on the tender mercies of the
wicked?”
“Yes,” faltered Sewell. “I had been waiting to show you the letter.”
“You waited a good while, David.”
“I know--I know,” said Sewell miserably. “I was waiting--waiting--” He
stopped, and then added with a burst, “I was waiting till I could put it
to you in some favourable light.”
“I'm glad you're honest about it at last, my dear!”
“Yes. And while I was waiting I forgot Barker's letter altogether. I put
it away somewhere--I can't recollect just where, at the moment. But that
makes no difference; he's here with the whole poem in his pocket, now.”
Sewell gained a little courage from his wife's forbearance; she knew
that she could trust him in all great matters, and perhaps she thought
that for this little sin she would not add to his punishment. “And
what I propose to do is to make a complete thing of it, this time. Of
course,” he went on convicting himself, “I see that I shall inflict
twice the pain that I should have done if I had spoken frankly to him
at first; and of course there will be the added disappointment, and the
expense of his coming to Boston. But,” he added brightly, “we can save
him any expense while he's here, and perhaps I can contrive to get him
to go home this afternoon.”
“He wouldn't let you pay for his dinner out of the house anywhere,” said
Mrs. Sewell. “You must ask him to dinner here.”
“Well,” said Sewell, with resignation; and suspecting that his wife was
too much piqued or hurt by his former concealment to ask what he now
meant to do about Barker, he added: “I'm going to take him round to a
publisher and let him convince himself that there's no hope for him in a
literary way.”
“David!” cried his wife; and now she left off adjusting the shams, and
erecting herself looked at him across the bed, “You don't intend to do
anything so cruel.”
“Cruel?”
“Yes! Why should you go and waste any publisher's time by getting him
to look at such rubbish? Why should you expose the poor fellow to the
mortification of a perfectly needless refusal? Do you want to shirk the
responsibility--to put it on some one else?”
“No; you know I don't.”
“Well, then, tell him yourself that it won't do.”
“I have told him.”
“What does he say?”
“He doesn't say anything. I can't make out whether he believes me or
not.”
“Very well, then; you've done your duty, at any rate.” Mrs. Sewell
could not forbear saying also, “If you'd done it at first, David, there
wouldn't have been any of this trouble.”
“That's true,” owned her husband, so very humbly that her heart smote
her.
“Well, go down and tell him he must stay to dinner, and then try to
get rid of him the best way you can. Your time is really too precious,
David, to be wasted in this way. You _must_ get rid of him, somehow.”
Sewell went back to his guest in the reception-room, who seemed to have
remained as immovably in his chair as if he had been a sitting statue of
himself. He did not move when Sewell entered.
“On second thoughts,” said the minister, “I believe I will not ask you
to go to a publisher with me, as I had intended; it would expose you to
unnecessary mortification, and it would be, from my point of view, an
unjustifiable intrusion upon very busy people. I must ask you to take
my word for it that no publisher would bring out your poem, and it never
would pay you a cent if he did.” The boy remained silent as before, and
Sewell had no means of knowing whether it was from silent conviction or
from mulish obstinacy. “Mrs. Sewell will be down presently. She wished
me to ask you to stay to dinner. We have an early dinner, and there will
be time enough after that for you to look about the city.”
“I shouldn't like to put you out,” said Barker.
“Oh, not at all,” returned Sewell, grateful for this sign of animation,
and not exigent of a more formal acceptance of his invitation. “You
know,” he said, “that literature is a trade, like every other vocation,
and that you must serve an apprenticeship if you expect to excel. But
first of all you must have some natural aptitude for the business you
undertake. You understand?” asked Sewell; for he had begun to doubt
whether Barker understood anything. He seemed so much more stupid than
he had at home; his faculties were apparently sealed up, and he had lost
all the personal picturesqueness which he had when he came in out of the
barn, at his mother's call, to receive Sewell.
“Yes,” said the boy.
“I don't mean,” continued Sewell, “that I wouldn't have you continue
to make verses whenever you have the leisure for it. I think, on
the contrary, that it will give a grace to your life which it might
otherwise lack. We are all in daily danger of being barbarised by the
sordid details of life; the constantly recurring little duties which
must be done, but which we must not allow to become the whole of life.”
Sewell was so much pleased with this thought, when it had taken form in
words, that he made a mental note of it for future use. “We must put a
border of pinks around the potato-patch, as Emerson would say, or else
the potato-patch is no better than a field of thistles.” Perhaps because
the logic of this figure rang a little false, Sewell hastened to add:
“But there are many ways in which we can prevent the encroachment of
those little duties without being tempted to neglect them, which would
be still worse. I have thought a good deal about the condition of our
young men in the country, and I have sympathised with them in what seems
their want of opportunity, their lack of room for expansion. I have
often wished that I could do something for them--help them in their
doubts and misgivings, and perhaps find some way out of the trouble for
them. I regret this tendency to the cities of the young men from the
country. I am sure that if we could give them some sort of social
and intellectual life at home, they would not be so restless and
dissatisfied.”
Sewell felt as if he had been preaching to a dead wall; but now the
wall opened, and a voice came out of it, saying: “You mean something to
occupy their minds?”
“Exactly so!” cried Sewell. “Something to occupy their minds. Now,” he
continued, with a hope of getting into some sort of human relations with
his guest which he had not felt before, “why shouldn't a young man on
a farm take up some scientific study, like geology, for instance, which
makes every inch of earth vocal, every rock historic, and the waste
places social?” Barker looked so blankly at him that he asked again,
“You understand?”
“Yes,” said Barker; but having answered Sewell's personal question, he
seemed to feel himself in no wise concerned with the general inquiry
which Sewell had made, and he let it lie where Sewell had let it drop.
But the minister was so well pleased with the fact that Barker had
understood anything of what he had said, that he was content to let the
notion he had thrown out take its chance of future effect, and rising,
said briskly: “Come upstairs with me into my study, and I will show you
a picture of Agassiz. It's a very good photograph.”
He led the way out of the reception-room, and tripped lightly in his
slippered feet up the steps against which Barker knocked the toes of his
clumsy boots. He was not large, nor naturally loutish, but the
heaviness of the country was in every touch and movement. He dropped the
photograph twice in his endeavour to hold it between his stiff thumb and
finger.
Sewell picked it up each time for him, and restored it to his faltering
hold. When he had securely lodged it there, he asked sweetly: “Did you
ever hear what Agassiz said when a scheme was once proposed to him by
which he could make a great deal of money?”
“I don't know as I did,” replied Barker.
“'But, gentlemen, _I've no time to make money_.'” Barker received the
anecdote in absolute silence, standing helplessly with the photograph in
his hand; and Sewell with a hasty sigh forbore to make the application
to the ordinary American ambition to be rich that he had intended.
“That's a photograph of the singer Nilsson,” he said, cataloguing the
other objects on the chimney-piece. “She was a peasant, you know,
a country girl in Norway. That's Grévy, the President of the French
Republic; his father was a peasant. Lincoln, of course. Sforza, throwing
his hoe into the oak,” he said, explaining the picture that had caught
Barker's eye on the wall above the mantel. “He was working in the field,
when a band of adventurers came by, and he tossed his hoe at the tree.
If it fell to the ground, he would keep on hoeing; if it caught in the
branches and hung there, he would follow the adventurers. It caught, and
he went with the soldiers and became Duke of Milan. I like to keep the
pictures of these great Originals about me,” said Sewell, “because in
our time, when we refer so constantly to law, we are apt to forget
that God is creative as well as operative.” He used these phrases
involuntarily; they slipped from his tongue because he was in the habit
of saying this about these pictures, and he made no effort to adapt them
to Barker's comprehension, because he could not see that the idea would
be of any use to him. He went on pointing out the different objects in
the quiet room, and he took down several books from the shelves that
covered the whole wall, and showed them to Barker, who, however, made no
effort to look at them for himself, and did not say anything about them.
He did what Sewell bade him do in admiring this thing or that; but if
he had been an Indian he could not have regarded them with a greater
reticence. Sewell made him sit down from time to time, but in a sitting
posture Barker's silence became so deathlike that Sewell hastened to get
him on his legs again, and to walk him about from one point to another,
as if to keep life in him. At the end of one of these otherwise aimless
excursions Mrs. Sewell appeared, and infused a gleam of hope into her
husband's breast. Apparently she brought none to Barker; or perhaps he
did not conceive it polite to show any sort of liveliness before a lady.
He did what he could with the hand she gave him to shake, and answered
the brief questions she put to him about his family to precisely the
same effect as he had already reported its condition to Sewell.
“Dinner's ready now,” said Mrs. Sewell, for all comment. She left
the expansiveness of sympathy and gratulation to her husband on most
occasions, and on this she felt that she had less than the usual
obligation to make polite conversation. Her two children came downstairs
after her, and as she unfolded her napkin across her lap after grace she
said, “This is my son, Alfred, Mr. Barker; and this is Edith.” Barker
took the acquaintance offered in silence, the young Sewells smiled
with the wise kindliness of children taught to be good to all manner
of strange guests, and the girl cumbered the helpless country boy with
offers of different dishes.
Mr. Sewell as he cut at the roast beef lengthwise, being denied by his
wife a pantomimic prayer to be allowed to cut it crosswise, tried to
make talk with Barker about the weather at Willoughby Pastures. It had
been a very dry summer, and he asked if the fall rains had filled up the
springs. He said he really forgot whether it was an apple year. He also
said that he supposed they had dug all their turnips by this time. He
had meant to say potatoes when he began, but he remembered that he had
seen the farmers digging their potatoes before he came back to town, and
so he substituted turnips; afterwards it seemed to him that dig was not
just the word to use in regard to the harvesting of turnips. He
wished he had said, “got your turnips in,” but it appeared to make no
difference to Barker, who answered, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and “Yes,
sir,” and let each subject drop with that.