The Kentons

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THE KENTONS

By William Dean Howells



I.

The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the
average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they had
spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had grown
easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their
comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short
outings, which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper
Lakes in the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well
anywhere as in the great square brick house which still kept its four
acres about it, in the heart of the growing town, where the trees they
had planted with their own hands topped it on three aides, and a spacious
garden opened southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton had his
library, where he transacted by day such law business as he had retained
in his own hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife's room and sit
with her there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their girls, where
they could hear them laughing with the young fellows who came to make the
morning calls, long since disused in the centres of fashion, or the
evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great world. She sewed,
and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or they played
checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she found
herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let him
make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes he
laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good
comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be. They had long ago
quarrelled out their serious differences, which mostly arose from such
differences of temperament as had first drawn them together; they
criticised each other to their children from time to time, but they
atoned for this defection by complaining of the children to each other,
and they united in giving way to them on all points concerning their
happiness, not to say their pleasure.

They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war,
and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice of
the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five
years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second son
died when he was yet a babe in his mother's arms, and there was an
interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their
eldest son was already married, and settled next them in a house which
was brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less
ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had grown
naturally into a share of his father's law practice, and he had taken it
all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a show of giving
it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton was well on in
the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had become mainly the
legal business of a large corporation. In this form it was distasteful
to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in his hands, but
he gave much of his time, which he saved his self-respect by calling his
leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the war.

In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his
youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on the
whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian, Pennsylvanian,
and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of foreign strains,
were of the purest American stock, and spoke the best English in the
world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of happiness, and had
incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate in the State. The
growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had increased only to five
thousand during the time he had known it, which was almost an ideal
figure for a county-town. There was a higher average of intelligence
than in any other place of its size, and a wider and evener diffusion of
prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less brilliant, perhaps,
than that of some other localities, but it was fully up to the general
Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the national achievement in
the greatest war of the greatest people under the sun. It, was Kenton's
pride and glory that he had been a part of the finest army known in
history. He believed that the men who made history ought to write it,
and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged his companions in
arms to set down everything they could remember of their soldiering, and
to save the letters they had written home, so that they might each
contribute to a collective autobiography of the regiment. It was only in
this way, he held, that the intensely personal character of the struggle
could be recorded. He had felt his way to the fact that every battle is
essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of fortuities; and it was not
strange that he should suppose, with his want of perspective, that this
universal fact was purely national and American. His zeal made him the
repository of a vast mass of material which he could not have refused to
keep for the soldiers who brought it to him, more or less in a humorous
indulgence of his whim. But he even offered to receive it, and in a
community where everything took the complexion of a joke, he came to be
affectionately regarded as a crank on that point; the shabbily aging
veterans, whom he pursued to their workbenches and cornfields, for, the
documents of the regimental history, liked to ask the colonel if he had
brought his gun. They, always give him the title with which he had been
breveted at the close of the war; but he was known to the younger,
generation of his fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr.
Kenton in the presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his
children she called him Poppa, as they did.

The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father's affairs
without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the
popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined
with his mother in a respect for Kenton's theory of the regimental
history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a
little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their
party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history,
but she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly or
indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for
parties and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from
young men and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays,
for circuses and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and she
devoted herself to her pleasures without the shadow of chaperonage, which
was, indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.

In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set
bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who, upon
the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs, drew
their mother's notice to his sister's excesses in carrying-on, and
required some action that should keep her from bringing the name, of
Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and
lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up
from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in
his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which
he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the
literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been
written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his
elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it
apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able to
take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an
importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none of
the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a
bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from
unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister
promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified
gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell
from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy, just
as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at moments
when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His stately but
vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond his years, but
this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the humiliation of
his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the easier prey of
Lottie's ridicule. He got on best, or at least most evenly, with his
eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because she took all life
so; and she was able to interpret him to his father when his intolerable
dignity forbade a common understanding between them. When he got so far
beyond his depth that he did not know what he meant himself, as sometimes
happened, she gently found him a safe footing nearer shore.

Kenton's theory was that he did not distinguish among his children.
He said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world,
but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them for
the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most
shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered
his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more
accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had
social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife that
Nelly knew ten times as much.

Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew all
the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German
scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving school,
when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in
Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the first
book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual
honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with the
judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at the
moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father explained
to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and would just,
as he said, show them a few of the documents he had collected. He made
Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand on the most
characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet what one dared
that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she was literary
enough.

She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any one
who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the most
cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more
beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them, and
Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them. No one
seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man came who
was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it was doubtful
whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too transparent to hide
her feeling from her father and mother, who saw with even more grief than
shame that she could not hide it from the man himself, whom they thought
so unworthy of it.

He had suddenly arrived in Tuskingum from one of the villages of the
county, where he had been teaching school, and had found something to do
as reporter on the Tuskingum 'Intelligencer', which he was instinctively
characterizing with the spirit of the new journalism, and was pushing as
hardily forward on the lines of personality as if he had dropped down to
it from the height of a New York or Chicago Sunday edition. The judge
said, with something less than his habitual honesty, that he did not mind
his being a reporter, but he minded his being light and shallow; he
minded his being flippant and mocking; he minded his bringing his
cigarettes and banjo into the house at his second visit. He did not mind
his push; the fellow had his way to make and he had to push; but he did
mind his being all push; and his having come out of the country with as
little simplicity as if he had passed his whole life in the city. He had
no modesty, and he had no reverence; he had no reverence for Ellen
herself, and the poor girl seemed to like him for that.

He was all the more offensive to the judge because he was himself to
blame for their acquaintance, which began when one day the fellow had
called after him in the street, and then followed down the shady sidewalk
beside him to his hour, wanting to know what this was he had heard about
his history, and pleading for more light upon his plan in it. At the
gate he made a flourish of opening and shutting it for the judge, and
walking up the path to his door he kept his hand on the judge's shoulder
most offensively; but in spite of this Kenton had the weakness to ask him
in, and to call Ellen to get him the most illustrative documents of the
history.

The interview that resulted in the 'Intelligencer' was the least evil
that came of this error. Kenton was amazed, and then consoled, and then
afflicted that Ellen was not disgusted with it; and in his conferences
with his wife he fumed and fretted at his own culpable folly, and tried
to get back of the time he had committed it, in that illusion which
people have with trouble that it could somehow be got rid of if it could
fairly be got back of; till the time came when his wife could no longer
share his unrest in this futile endeavor.

She said, one night when they had talked late and long, "That can't be
helped now; and the question is what are we going to do to stop it."

The judge evaded the point in saying, "The devil of it is that all the
nice fellows are afraid of her; they respect her too much, and the very
thing which ought to disgust her with this chap is what gives him his
power over her. I don't know what we are going to do, but we must break
it off, somehow."

"We might take her with us somewhere," Mrs. Kenton suggested.

"Run away from the fellow? I think I see myself! No, we have got to
stay and face the thing right here. But I won't have him about the house
any more, understand that. He's not to be let in, and Ellen mustn't see
him; you tell her I said so. Or no! I will speak to her myself." His
wife said that he was welcome to do that; but he did not quite do it. He
certainly spoke to his daughter about her, lover, and he satisfied
himself that there was yet nothing explicit between them. But she was so
much less frank and open with him than she had always been before that he
was wounded as well as baffled by her reserve. He could not get her to
own that she really cared for the fellow; but man as he was, and old man
as he was, he could not help perceiving that she lived in a fond dream of
him.

He went from her to her mother. "If he was only one-half the man she
thinks he is!"--he ended his report in a hopeless sigh.

"You want to give in to her!" his wife pitilessly interpreted. "Well,
perhaps that would be the best thing, after all."

"No, no, it wouldn't, Sarah; it would be the easiest for both of us, I
admit, but it would be the worst thing for her. We've got to let it run
along for a while yet. If we give him rope enough he may hang himself;
there's that chance. We can't go away, and we can't shut her up, and we
can't turn him out of the house. We must trust her to find him out for
herself."

"She'll never do that," said the mother. "Lottie says Ellen thinks he's
just perfect. He cheers her up, and takes her out of herself. We've
always acted with her as if we thought she was different from other
girls, and he behaves to her as if she was just like all of them, just as
silly, and just as weak, and it pleases her, and flatters her; she likes
it."

"Oh, Lord!" groaned the father. "I suppose she does."

This was bad enough; it was a blow to his pride in Ellen; but there was
something that hurt him still worse. When the fellow had made sure of
her, he apparently felt himself so safe in her fondness that he did not
urge his suit with her. His content with her tacit acceptance gave the
bitterness of shame to the promise Kenton and his wife had made each
other never to cross any of their children in love. They were ready now
to keep that promise for Ellen, if he asked it of them, rather than
answer for her lifelong disappointment, if they denied him. But,
whatever he meant finally to do, he did not ask it; he used his footing
in their house chiefly as a basis for flirtations beyond it. He began to
share his devotions to Ellen with her girl friends, and not with her girl
friends alone. It did not come to scandal, but it certainly came to
gossip about him and a silly young wife; and Kenton heard of it with a
torment of doubt whether Ellen knew of it, and what she would do; he
would wait for her to do herself whatever was to be done. He was never
certain how much she had heard of the gossip when she came to her mother,
and said with the gentle eagerness she had, "Didn't poppa talk once of
going South this winter?"

"He talked of going to New York," the mother answered, with a throb of
hope.

"Well," the girl returned, patiently, and Mrs. Kenton read in her
passivity an eagerness to be gone from sorrow that she would not suffer
to be seen, and interpreted her to her father in such wise that he could
not hesitate.




II.

If such a thing could be mercifully ordered, the order of this event had
certainly been merciful; but it was a cruel wrench that tore Kenton from
the home where he had struck such deep root. When he actually came to
leave the place his going had a ghastly unreality, which was heightened
by his sense of the common reluctance. No one wanted to go, so far as he
could make out, not even Ellen herself, when he tried to make her say she
wished it. Lottie was in open revolt, and animated her young men to a
share in the insurrection. Her older brother was kindly and helpfully
acquiescent, but he was so far from advising the move that Kenton had
regularly to convince himself that Richard approved it, by making him say
that it was only for the winter and that it was the best way of helping
Ellen get rid of that fellow. All this did not enable Kenton to meet the
problems of his younger son, who required him to tell what he was to do
with his dog and his pigeons, and to declare at once how he was to
dispose of the cocoons he had amassed so as not to endanger the future of
the moths and butterflies involved in them. The boy was so fertile in
difficulties and so importunate for their solution, that he had to be
crushed into silence by his father, who ached in a helpless sympathy with
his reluctance.

Kenton came heavily upon the courage of his wife, who was urging forward
their departure with so much energy that he obscurely accused her of
being the cause of it, and could only be convinced of her innocence when
she offered to give the whole thing up if he said so. When he would not
say so, she carried the affair through to the bitter end, and she did not
spare him some, pangs which she perhaps need not have shared with him.
But people are seldom man and wife for half their lives without wishing
to impart their sufferings as well as their pleasures to each other; and
Mrs. Kenton, if she was no worse, was no better than other wives in
pressing to her husband's lips the cup that was not altogether sweet to
her own. She went about the house the night before closing it, to see
that everything was in a state to be left, and then she came to Kenton in
his library, where he had been burning some papers and getting others
ready to give in charge to his son, and sat down by his cold hearth with
him, and wrung his soul with the tale of the last things she had been
doing. When she had made him bear it all, she began to turn the bright
side of the affair to him. She praised the sense and strength of Ellen,
in the course the girl had taken with herself, and asked him if he,
really thought they could have done less for her than they were doing.
She reminded him that they were not running away from the fellow, as she
had once thought they must, but Ellen was renouncing him, and putting him
out of her sight till she could put him out of her mind. She did not
pretend that the girl had done this yet; but it was everything that she
wished to do it, and saw that it was best. Then she kissed him on his
gray head, and left him alone to the first ecstasy of his homesickness.

It was better when they once got to New York, and were settled in an
apartment of an old-fashioned down-town hotel. They thought themselves
very cramped in it, and they were but little easier when they found that
the apartments over and under them were apparently thought spacious for
families of twice their numbers. It was the very quietest place in the
whole city, but Kenton was used to the stillness of Tuskingum, where,
since people no longer kept hens, the nights were stiller than in the
country itself; and for a week he slept badly. Otherwise, as soon as
they got used to living in six rooms instead of seventeen, they were
really very comfortable.

He could see that his wife was glad of the release from housekeeping, and
she was growing gayer and seemed to be growing younger in the inspiration
of the great, good-natured town. They had first come to New York on
their wedding journey, but since that visit she had always let him go
alone on his business errands to the East; these had grown less and less
frequent, and he had not seen New York for ten or twelve years. He could
have waited as much longer, but he liked her pleasure in the place, and
with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he went about with her
to the amusements which she frequented, as she said, to help Ellen take
her mind off herself. At the play and the opera he sat thinking of the
silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its leafless maples, and
the life that was no more in it than if they had all died out of it; and
he could not keep down a certain resentment, senseless and cruel, as if
the poor girl were somehow to blame for their exile. When he betrayed
this feeling to his wife, as he sometimes must, she scolded him for it,
and then offered, if he really thought anything like that, to go back to
Tuskingum at once; and it ended in his having to own himself wrong, and
humbly promise that he never would let the child dream how he felt,
unless he really wished to kill her. He was obliged to carry his
self-punishment so far as to take Lottie very sharply to task when she
broke out in hot rebellion, and declared that it was all Ellen's fault;
she was not afraid of killing her sister; and though she did not say it
to her, she said it of her, that anybody else could have got rid of that
fellow without turning the whole family out of house and home.

Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she
did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull
propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was as
afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was thrown
back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became friends in their
common dislike of New York; and pending some chance of bringing each
other under condemnation they lamented their banishment from Tuskingum
together. But even Boyne contrived to make the heavy time pass more
lightly than she in the lessons he had with a tutor, and the studies of
the city which he carried on. When the skating was not good in Central
Park he spent most of his afternoons and evenings at the vaudeville
theatres. None of the dime museums escaped his research, and he
conversed with freaks and monsters of all sorts upon terms of friendly
confidence. He reported their different theories of themselves to his
family with the same simple-hearted interest that he criticised the song
and dance artists of the vaudeville theatres. He became an innocent but
by no means uncritical connoisseur of their attractions, and he surprised
with the constancy and variety of his experience in them a gentleman who
sat next him one night. Boyne thought him a person of cultivation, and
consulted him upon the opinion he had formed that there was not so much
harm in such places as people said. The gentleman distinguished in
saying that he thought you would not find more harm in them, if you did
not bring it with you, than you would in the legitimate theatres; and in
the hope of further wisdom from him, Boyne followed him out of the
theatre and helped him on with his overcoat. The gentleman walked home
to his hotel with him, and professed a pleasure in his acquaintance which
he said he trusted they might sometime renew.

All at once the Kentons began to be acquainted in the hotel, as often
happens with people after they have long ridden up and down in the
elevator together in bonds of apparently perpetual strangeness. From one
friendly family their acquaintance spread to others until they were,
almost without knowing it, suddenly and simultaneously on smiling and
then on speaking terms with the people of every permanent table in the
dining-room. Lottie and Boyne burst the chains of the unnatural kindness
which bound them, and resumed their old relations of reciprocal censure.
He found a fellow of his own age in the apartment below, who had the same
country traditions and was engaged in a like inspection of the city; and
she discovered two girls on another floor, who said they received on
Saturdays and wanted her to receive with them. They made a tea for her,
and asked some real New Yorkers; and such a round of pleasant little
events began for her that Boyne was forced to call his mother's attention
to the way Charlotte was going on with the young men whom she met and
frankly asked to call upon her without knowing anything about them; you
could not do that in New York, he said.