The Kentons

William Dean Howells

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783849657727
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

W. D. Howells is quite in his best vein in 'The Kentons.' Like all of his work, this possesses that quality which we expect in a classic, but rarely look for and more rarely find in contemporary fiction, of repaying the closest and most minute reading, and it is this fact which seems most surely to guarantee a long life to his books. It is of no use to gallop through Mr. Howells; the habitual gallopers invariably find him dull and wonder what his admirers see in him. The proper way to enjoy him is to have or get a sense of humor, and then to settle down in the most leisurely of moods to chuckle over the delicate irony, the sly little digs, the genial humor of his pages. Possibly the taste for W. D. Howells, like the taste for Henry James, is natural rather than acquired, but it is to be said that in both cases it grows rapidly with indulgence. There is much in getting the peculiar point of view from which Mr. Howells looks out upon the world. It is a delightful chance that has brought us the family history of the Kentons, who will be remembered as figuring in the back ground of 'Their Silver Wedding Journey' —especially the fine-looking, depressed Grand Army man on the steamer, who seemed to desire nothing so much as to get back to his square brick house at Tuskingum. It may be confidently said that no more typically American family has been created in fiction than these Kentons, as they are drawn for us in these later pages. Of course, there is room for discussion as to what the typical American is—whether the New Englander, or the Southerner, or the Westerner, or the new and alien hyphenated elements which our younger writers are celebrating as the real thing. Yet a strong case may be made out for the American of the type represented in fiction most fully by Mr. Howells, and the younger Henry James, on the score that it represents more of those ideals and characteristics which have been regarded as peculiarly American than any other type. The plot of the story is slight, but in the end the reader knows the Kentons more thoroughly and more intimately than almost any real family except his own. Altogether, the novel has the charm of what is typical.

IX.

Ellen did not move or manifest any consciousness when the steamer left her dock and moved out into the stream, or take any note of the tumult that always attends a great liner’s departure. At breakfast-time her mother came to her from one of the brief absences she made, in the hope that at each turn she should find her in a different mood, and asked if she would not have something to eat.

“I’m not hungry,” she answered. “When will it sail?”

“Why, Ellen! We sailed two hours ago, and the pilot has just left us.”

Ellen lifted herself on her elbow and stared at her. “And you let me!” she said, cruelly.

“Ellen! I will not have this!” cried her mother, frantic at the reproach. “What do you mean by my letting you? You knew that we were going to sail, didn’t you? What else did you suppose we had come to the steamer for?”

“I supposed you would let me stay, if I wanted to: But go away, momma, go away! You’re all against me—you, and poppa, and Lottie, and Boyne. Oh, dear! oh, dear!” She threw herself down in her berth and covered her face with the sheet, sobbing, while her mother stood by in an anguish of pity and anger. She wanted to beat the girl, she wanted to throw herself upon her, and weep with her in the misery which she shared with her.

Lottie came to the door of the state-room with an arm-load of long-stemmed roses, the gift of the young Mr. Plumpton, who had not had so much to be entreated to come down to the steamer and see her off as Boyne had pretended. “Momma,” she said, “I have got to leave these roses in here, whether Ellen likes it or not. Boyne won’t have them in his room, because he says the man that’s with him would have a right to object; and this is half my room, anyway.”

Mrs. Kenton frowned and shook her head, but Ellen answered from under the sheet, “I don’t mind the roses, Lottie. I wish you’d stay with me a little while.”

Lottie hesitated, having in mind the breakfast for which the horn had just sounded. But apparently she felt that one good turn deserved another, and she answered: “All right; I will, Nell. Momma, you tell Boyne to hurry, and come to Ellen as soon as he’s done, and then I will go. Don’t let anybody take my place.”

“I wish,” said Ellen, still from under the sheet, “that momma would have your breakfast sent here. I don’t want Boyne.”

Women apparently do not require any explanation of these swift vicissitudes in one another, each knowing probably in herself the nerves from which they proceed. Mrs. Kenton promptly assented, in spite of the sulky reluctance which Lottie’s blue eyes looked at her; she motioned her violently to silence, and said: “Yes, I will, Ellen. I will send breakfast for both of you.”

When she was gone, Ellen uncovered her face and asked Lottie to dip a towel in water and give it to her. As she bathed her eyes she said, “You don’t care, do you, Lottie?”

“Not very much,” said Lottie, unsparingly. “I can go to lunch, I suppose.”

“Maybe I’ll go to lunch with you,” Ellen suggested, as if she were speaking of some one else.

Lottie wasted neither sympathy nor surprise on the question. “Well, maybe that would be the best thing. Why don’t you come to breakfast?”

“No, I won’t go to breakfast. But you go.”

When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone. Before the young man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table, her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not be made worse, and so she remained silent. Judge Kenton sat with his eyes fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast for him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish dependence. Lottie offered him another alternative by absently laying hold of his napkin on the table.

“That’s mine,” he said, with husky gloom.

She tossed it back to him with prompt disdain and a deeply eye-lashed glance at a napkin on her right. The young man who sat next it said, with a smile, “Perhaps that’s yours-unless I’ve taken my neighbor’s.”

Lottie gave him a stare, and when she had sufficiently punished him for his temerity said, rather sweetly, “Oh, thank you,” and took the napkin.

“I hope we shall all have use for them before long,” the young man ventured again.

“Well, I should think as much,” returned the girl, and this was the beginning of a conversation which the young man shared successively with the judge and Mrs. Kenton as opportunity offered. He gave the judge his card across the table, and when the judge had read on it, “Rev. Hugh Breckon,” he said that his name was Kenton, and he introduced the young man formally to his family. Mr. Breckon had a clean-shaven face, with an habitual smile curving into the cheeks from under a long, straight nose; his chin had a slight whopper-jaw twist that was charming; his gay eyes were blue, and a full vein came down his forehead between them from his smooth hair. When he laughed, which was often, his color brightened.

Boyne was named last, and then Mr. Breckon said, with a smile that showed all his white teeth, “Oh yes, Mr. Boyne and I are friends already—ever since we found ourselves room-mates,” and but for us, as Lottie afterwards noted, they might never have known Boyne was rooming with him, and could easily have made all sorts of insulting remarks about Mr. Breckon in their ignorance.

The possibility seemed to delight Mr. Breckon; he invited her to make all the insulting remarks she could think of, any way, and professed himself a loser, so far as her real opinion was withheld from him by reason of his rashness in giving the facts away. In the electrical progress of their acquaintance she had begun walking up and down the promenade with him after they came up from breakfast; her mother had gone to Ellen; the judge had been made comfortable in his steamer-chair, and Boyne had been sent about his business.

“I will try to think some up,” she promised him, “as soon as I HAVE any real opinion of you,” and he asked her if he might consider that a beginning.

She looked at him out of her indomitable blue eyes, and said, “If it hadn’t been for your card, and the Reverend on it, I should have said you were an actor.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Breckon, with a laugh, “perhaps I am, in a way. I oughtn’t to be, of course, but if a minister ever forces himself, I suppose he’s acting.”

“I don’t see,” said Lottie, instantly availing herself of the opening, “how you can get up and pray, Sunday after Sunday, whether you feel like it or not.”

The young man said, with another laugh, but not so gay, “Well, the case has its difficulties.”

“Or perhaps you just read prayers,” Lottie sharply conjectured.

“No,” he returned, “I haven’t that advantage—if you think it one. I’m a sort of a Unitarian. Very advanced, too, I’m afraid.”

“Is that a kind of Universalist?”

“Not—not exactly. There’s an old joke—I’m not sure it’s very good—which distinguishes between the sects. It’s said that the Universalists think God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians think they are too good to be damned.” Lottie shrank a little from him. “Ah!” he cried, “you think it sounds wicked. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not clerical enough to joke about serious things.”

He looked into her face with a pretended anxiety. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with a little scorn. “I guess if you can stand it, I can.”

“I’m not sure that I can. I’m afraid it’s more in keeping with an actor’s profession than my own. Why,” he added, as if to make a diversion, “should you have thought I was an actor?”

“I suppose because you were clean-shaved; and your pronunciation. So Englishy.”

“Is it? Perhaps I ought to be proud. But I’m not an Englishman. I am a plain republican American. May I ask if you are English?”

“Oh!” said Lottie. “As if you thought such a thing. We’re from Ohio.”

Mr. Breckon said, “Ah!” Lottie could not make out in just what sense.

By this time they were leaning on the rail of the promenade, looking over at what little was left of Long Island, and she said, abruptly: “I think I will go and see how my father is getting along.”

“Oh, do take me with you, Miss Kenton!” Mr. Breckon entreated. “I am feeling very badly about that poor old joke. I know you don’t think well of me for it, and I wish to report what I’ve been saying to your father, and let him judge me. I’ve heard that it’s hard to live up to Ohio people when you’re at your best, and I do hope you’ll believe I have not been quite at my best. Will you let me come with you?”

Lottie did not know whether he was making fun of her or not, but she said, “Oh, it’s a free country,” and allowed him to go with her.

His preface made the judge look rather grave; but when he came to the joke, Kenton laughed and said it was not bad.

“Oh, but that isn’t quite the point,” said Mr. Breckon. “The question is whether I am good in repeating it to a young lady who was seeking serious instruction on a point of theology.”

“I don’t know what she would have done with the instruction if she had got it,” said the judge, dryly, and the young man ventured in her behalf:

“It would be difficult for any one to manage, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” Kenton assented, and Lottie could see that he was thinking Ellen would know what to do with it.

She resented that, and she was in the offence that girls feel when their elders make them the subject of comment with their contemporaries. “Well, I’ll leave you to discuss it alone. I’m going to Ellen,” she said, the young man vainly following her a few paces, with apologetic gurgles of laughter.

“That’s right,” her father consented, and then he seized the opening to speak about Ellen. “My eldest daughter is something of an invalid, but I hope w...