New Leaf Mills E-Book

William Dean Howells

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 213

Beschreibung

Mr. Howells would, we imagine, be the last person in the world to suppose that, in "New Leaf Mills," he had produced a work in any way comparable with his own masterpieces. But, slight as the new story is, it has all the charm of his inimitable style, and exhales all the sweetness of the personality which has made him the most beloved of our men of letters. He has simply gone back to the time of his Ohio boyhood sixty years ago, and fished out of his recollections the materials for a picture of the way in which simple people then lived on what was then the western fringe of our civilization. He tells the story of Owen Powell and his family, who finds it hard to make a living in town, buys an old mill in the country, with the aim of establishing a cooperative community of the type which then hovered before men's minds as likely to furnish the solution of the social problem. He wishes to turn over a new leaf, and this suggests a name for the enterprise. The plan is given up in the end, and not very much happens in between—there is a house-raising, and a surly miller who resents the intrusion of the new owner, and a hired girl who mysteriously disappears, and that is about all, except a great deal of talk, tinctured with Swedenborgianism, which is Owen Powell's spiritual stay in all his reverses. It is a book which helps us to understand our forbears of a generation or two ago, and is an undeniably veracious transcript of their life.

Leseprobe

New Leaf Mills

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

New Leaf Mills, W. D. Howells

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849657871

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

I1

II5

III8

IV.. 12

V.. 14

VI19

VII24

VIII27

IX.. 30

X.. 38

XI43

XII46

XIII50

XIV.. 54

XV.. 57

XVI61

XVII66

XVIII69

XIX.. 73

XX.. 77

XXI82

XXII87

XXIII94

I

The opinions of Owen Powell marked a sharp difference between him and most of his fellow-townsmen in the town of the Middle West, where he lived sixty years ago. A man who condemned the recent war upon Mexico as a wicked crusade for the extension of slavery, and denounced the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law as infernal, would have done well to have a confession of spiritual faith like that of his neighbors; but here Owen Powell was still more widely at variance with them. He rejected the notion of a personal devil, and many others did that ; but his hell was wholly at odds with the hell popularly accepted ; it was not a place of torment where the lost sinner was sent, but a state which the transgressor himself chose and where he abode everlastingly bereft of the sense of better things. Even so poor a hell saved Powell from the reproach of Universalism ; but in a person so one-ideaed, as people then said, through his abhorrence of slavery, it was not enough. He was valued, but he was valued in spite of his opinions; they were distinctly a fact to his disadvantage in that day and place.

His younger brother Felix, after the wont of prosperous merchants, kept out of politics, and he carried his prayer-book every Sunday to the Episcopal service.

But he quietly voted with Owen, and those who Counted on a want of sympathy between the brothers were apt to meet with a prompt rebuff from Felix. He once stopped his subscription and took away his advertising from the Whig editor who spoke of a certain political expression of Owen's (it was in a letter to the editor's paper) as having the unimportance of small potatoes, and he extorted a printed retractation of the insult before he renewed his patronage. He felt, more than any of his words or acts evinced, the beauty of the large benevolent intention which was the basis of Owen's character, and he was charmed, if he was not convinced, by his inextinguishable faith in mankind as a race merely needing good treatment to become everything that its friends could wish; by his simple courage, so entire that he never believed in danger; and by his sweet serenity of temperament. Felix was in delicate health, and he was given to some vague superstitions. He had lost several children, and he believed that he had in every case had some preternatural warning of their death ; his young wife, who was less openly an invalid, shared his beliefs, as well as his half-melancholy fondness for his brother. She liked to have Owen Powell's children in her childless house; and she had some pretty affectations of manner and accent which took them with the sense of elegance in a world beyond them.

They came to her with their mother every Sunday night, and heard their father and uncle talk of their boyhood in the backwoods ; of their life in a log cabin, and of the privations they had gladly suffered there. The passing years had endeared these hardships to the brothers, but their wives resented the early poverty which they held precious ; and they hated the memory of that farm where the brothers had lived in a log-cabin, and had run wild, as it appeared from the fond exaggeration of their reminiscences, in bare feet, tattered trousers, and hickory shirts. Sometimes the brothers reasoned of the questions of theology upon which the mind of the elder habitually dwelt; but Felix disliked argument, and Owen affectionately forbore to assail him as a representative of the Old Church. After the pioneer stories, the children fell asleep on the sofa and the carpet, and did not wake till they heard the piano, where their young aunt used to sing and their uncle accompany her with his flute; he remained associated in their memories with the pensive trebles of his instrument and the cadences of her gentle voice.

There came a lime when the summer days were clouded in their home by an increasing care, which they felt at second hand from their father and mother ; then there came a Sunday night when there were no rosy visions of the past ; and, by the matter-of-fact light of the Monday following, Felix saw that the affairs of his brother were hopeless. Owen's book and drug store had never been a flourishing business, and now it had gone from bad to worse beyond retrieval. On the afternoon of the morning when the store was not opened, he walked with his boys a long way into the country. It was very sultry, and he repeated a description of summer from Thompson's Seasons. As they returned along the river-shore he pointed out the lovely iridescence of the mussel-shells which he picked up, and geologized in passing on the stratification of the rocks in the bank.

An interval of suspense followed this stressful time, which their young memories took little note of. On the Sunday evenings at their uncle's the talk seemed to the children to be all of a plan for going to live in the country. Apparently, there was to be a property which the brothers were to hold in common, and it was to be bought as soon as the younger could get his business into shape. Two brothers in other towns were to be invited to close up their affairs and join in the enterprise. Then, with something of the unsurprising inconsequence of dreams, the notion of a farm had changed in the children's apprehension to the notion of a mill, and more dimly a settlement of communal proportions about it. They heard their elders discussing the project one night when they woke from their nap, and crowded about their mother's chair for warmth, with the fire now burning low upon the hearth.

" The best plan," their uncle said, " will be to find a mill privilege with the buildings already on it. We could take out the burrs," which the boys understood later were millstones, " and put in paper machinery. When we were once settled there, we could ask people that we found adapted to join us, but at first it would have to be a purely family concern."

" Yes," their father said. " One condition of our being able to do any good from the start would be our unquestionable hold of the management. That would be the only orderly method. I would give all hands a share in the profits, so as to interest and attach them, but till they were educated up to our ideas they oughtn't to be allowed any control."

Felix cleared his throat by a husky effort habitual with him before speaking again. " We could indirectly benefit them from the beginning enough to satisfy any reasonable expectation."

After that it might have been weeks before the enterprise took clearer shape. From time to time the children forgot it; they played through the long summer vacation; but when the first keen mornings of the autumn came, and the neighbors' children went by with their books, they did not return to school. The privilege, with a gristmill and sawmill on it, had been found and bought, they did not know where, any more than how, but it was ten or twelve miles from the town in another county. Their father and mother had driven out with their aunt and uncle to look at it; their uncle had taken his gun, and he brought back some squirrels in the bottom of his carriage; he said that he had almost got a shot at a wild turkey. With such facts before them Owen's boys could not understand why their mother should be low-spirited about going to live at the mills. They heard their father talking with her after they went to bed, and she said : " But all that wildness makes my heart sink. I had enough of that when I was a girl, Owen. You know I never liked the country to live in."

" I know, I know. But we shall soon Have quite a village about us. At any rate, we shall have a chance to begin life again."

" Oh yes. But it's beginning so far back."

In the morning she was cheerfuller, and their father told the children that they were to move out to the mills at once, and that he was to have charge of the property till the paper machinery could be put into the gristmill. At the sawmill he was to get out the stuff for a new house that was to be built; but their hearts leaped when he told them that they were to live that winter in a log cabin.

It was Sunday, and the night was the last they spent at their uncle's in the old way. It was not quite the old way, though. The piano was not opened, and the flute lay shut in its case. The brothers went over their plans, and they spoke of whom they might invite to join them after their success became apparent. It seemed that they meant to be careful, and ask only those who could take up the enterprise in an enlightened spirit. Owen Powell believed that a responsive feeling would be awakened in the neighbors when they saw that the new-comers did not wish merely to make money for themselves, but to benefit all by improvements that» would increase the price of their land and give employment to their children.

Felix listened with his melancholy smile, absently rolling his cigar between his thumb and finger. " What shall we call the place ?" he asked.

" I don't know," Owen said. " Something that would imply our purpose of turning over quite a new leaf."

They talked further of the details of their undertaking, and the children went on with their play. They were dramatizing their arrival at the mills, and one of them was shouting to a supposed inhabitant, " Is this place New Leaf Mills ?"

" Hey ? Hey ?" their uncle called to them. " What's that?"

" We're just playing," they explained.

" New Leaf — New Leaf Mills," he repeated, musingly. " That wouldn't be bad. What made you think of that name ?" He bent a sidelong glance on the conscious group.

The eldest of the boys ventured, " Why, father said you would turn over a new leaf at the mills, and we just called them that."

"Yes, yes! Very good," he said. "Do you hear that, Owen? We've got a name for our place. We can stencil it on our flour-barrels now, and when we get in our paper machinery, we can make it our watermark."

 

II

The leaves were falling from the maples along the road, hut they still hung brown and harsh on the sycamores that fringed the island between the tail-race and the river when Owen Powell and two of his boys passed the groaning and whistling mill and stopped with their wagon at the door of the old cabin. It was empty, but the door yielded to the hand that drew the leathern latch-string and lifted the rude wooden latch, and Powell made his boys note that this was a genuine log cabin, such as the pioneers of old dwelt in, and just such as he had himself lived in when a boy. He said that the string might have hung out of the cabin door of Daniel Boone; within, the ladder that climbed to the loft from a corner of the room could have led to the sleep that came from being chased by Indians; the hearth, that stretched half across the end of the cabin, was of the right backwoods dimensions; he excused the ax-hewn whitewashed walls as the sophistication of an age which had outgrown the round logs, chinked with moss and daubed with clay, of the true primitive architecture.

When he went back to the wagon to get their tools and provisions after the first moments of rejoicing, he dispersed the cows and pigs surrounding it as gently as if they had been a deputation from the neighbors who hung about the door of the mill and viewed with sardonic amusement the sole greeting offered the newcoiners. They waited in silence till the Powells had gone into the cabin again, but they shouted together in laughter when the miller appeared at an upper door and launched a curse at the cabin walls. They tried to provoke him to greater bitterness as he rested his weight by one hand upon the rope that lowered the bags of flour to the backs of their horses; then one after another they mounted upon the balanced load and jogged away from the mill.

Powell was glad to find that his hand had not forgotten the cunning of one of the several crafts to which he had turned it in his early life when he came to glaze the broken panes in the small, weather-worn sashes of the four windows lighting the two rooms of the cabin ; he had to replace the rotten flooring with smooth-sawn boards of poplar instead of the riven oak puncheons of pioneer times, but he was consoled to find that the floor of the garret could best be mended by throwing loose planks over its cracks and knot-holes. After their day's work was done, he strolled out with his boys to explore the region in which he hoped to found a new home. Prom the road that crossed the tailrace below the gristmill and crept eastward into the woods rose an isolated hill to a height notable in that country of broad bottomlands. It was steep on the north, next to the mill ; it sloped more gently away toward the south, but on the east and west it was steep again. It was thickly wooded with broad-girthed oaks, slim maples and ashes, and a host of shag-bark hickories hanging full of the nuts that now shone white through the gaping seams of their greenish-brown husks, and dropped about the feet of the Powells as they climbed upward through the fallen leaves. A company of pigs feeding on the mast under the trees lifted their heads at the approaching steps with looks of impudent defiance; then they hooted in alarm and ran down the sides of the hill, just as they did in the passage which Powell remembered from Bloomfield's poem of " The Farmer Boy." A covey of quails throbbed away from a pile of brush ; a squirrel clattered up the shaggy side of one of the hickories. The simple incidents touched his heart as he climbed to the top of the hill and looked out upon the peaceful landscape. Below was the huge gristmill, gray and weather-beaten, but strong as when first built; a wall of primeval forest lowered the eastern horizon, but north and south the woods retreated and left the interval yellow with a hundred acres of standing corn, and green with broad spaces of meadowland. The straight ribbon of the headrace stretched to the full dam of New Leaf Mills, whose smooth water spread up into the woods on the north. On the western hillsides were the openings of farms, where the blue smoke curled from the cabin chimneys. On the east a road stole out of the woods, down between the cornfields and the meadows, and lost itself in the woods upon the island framed between the millraces and the river ; another road wound round the hill and kept the course of the river southward out of sight.

The gristmill fronted an acre of open space, with the hitching-rail for the farmers' horses in the middle, and a few rods beyond it crouched the sawmill among piles of lumber and saw-logs. The saw, which had been hissing sharply at its work, now stopped for so long a breath that Powell knew the water-gate had been closed for the night, and the soft treble of the gristmill alone filled the nearer silence. Prom a distance the melancholy note of a farm boy calling his cows in the woods struck upon his ear; the miller appeared in the open space with a measure of bran under his arm, and, calling " Pig, pig, pig, poo-ee !" was answered from the fence comers and wayside nooks with greedy cries, and then with shrill laments and plaintive protests against the kicks which he distributed among them with savage fairness. He held the measure in his left hand like a tambourine, and danced a goblin figure with his floury face bobbing to and fro and up and down as he leaped and kicked.

" Come, boys," said Powell ; " I see the other New Leafers are having their supper. It's time for ours, too."

They descended to their cabin and broiled their rashers of pork on the hickory coals; the tea-kettle swung from the crane above, and sang to itself ; almost with the last mouthful they stretched themselves on the floor, and, with the scanty bedding they had brought under and over them, they fell asleep.

In the night one of the boys woke, and saw his father sitting up, and heard him softly groaning.

" What are you doing, father ?" he asked, sitting up himself and speaking for the companionship of his own voice in the weird play of the firelight dying on the hearth.

" I was wondering," Powell said, " whether we hadn't laid these boards with the hard side up."

They had a laugh together, and lay down to sleep again. Before he slept the boy fancied something at the window, a face looking in like the white-painted face of a clown with dark streaks running downward from the corners of the mouth ; it vanished, and in the morning, he thought he had dreamed it. He told his father, and his father said, " Very likely ; one might dream anything on a bed like that."

III

The miller at New Leaf Mills had been there many years before that name was imagined ; so many that he felt the mills a part of himself. He always meant to buy the privilege, with the farm on the shore above the dam and the island in the river. He was not afraid that the property would be sold away from him; he had been as good friends with the two old brothers who owned the mills as it was in his nature to be; and he somehow thought they shared his expectation that he should one day buy them.

He was not of the Virginian poor white stock which mostly peopled the region up and down the river; he had wandered into the place from somewhere farther north when he was a half-grown boy, and finished his growth in the family of the old miller to whom he had apprenticed himself and whom he succeeded in his house and home after marrying his daughter. He was now a man of forty, surly, solitary, and of a rude force of will and savage temper such as none of the farmers who stored their wheat with him in the deep bins of the mill would have cared to trifle with. Some of them called him Jacob and some Jake in the neighborhood familiarity, but with him they did not pass to the jokes or pranks they played among themselves. He was sometimes hospitable with his jug, but no one ventured to make free with it ; and usually he was a sober man for the time and place. When he heard that the Larrabee brothers had sold the mills away from him without giving him warning, he thought first of his gun, and of going to the little town where they lived, and killing them each with a barrel of it; then he thought of his jug, perhaps because both the gun and the jug stood in the same corner. But after faltering a moment between them he only cleared the place of the farmers, who had come with their grists, and went over to the sawmill, where he presented himself in such violent pantomime that the saw-miller, Bellam, stopped his saw in the middle of a log and submissively joined him in the spree with which Overdale began to solemnize his wrong.

On the second story of the mill where the runs of stone were, with the bolting-cloths and the barreling-machine, a small space had been portioned off to serve as an office and a sleeping-room for Overdale when he ran the burrs at night. On dull days it was haunted by country loafers sodden with rain and drink; when he came in the loafers usually slunk out with the dogs that shared the buffalo robe forming his bed. He now pushed Bellam into his den and steeped his brain in whiskey raw from the still two miles away; and he drank so deep of the scathing liquor himself that Bellam drunkenly argued with him that no man ought to swill so much whiskey as that under any provocation. He pleaded tenderly with the miller, who had such longing for pity through his fury that when Bellam put out his hand with a maudlin wish to soothe him Overdale caught it and rushed him crazily through the mill, shouting out the details of the bad news with a flame of oaths. " Yes, they've sold the mills, and never give me a show. Sold 'em to a pack of lily-livered city folks that don't know an elevator from a cooling-floor, and couldn't dress a burr to save their souls from brimstone. Look at that run of stones! I've dressed 'em ever since they came into the mill, and there ain't flour anywhere on the river up to the flour they turn out ; I can tell their tune as far as I can hear it ! Who'll set the bolting-cloths when I'm gone? They'll be barreling shorts, I'll take my oath, in less than a month, and their flour won't be worth a curse in the market. Shorts? It'll be bran!"

Bellam ventured in a doubt of getting so far away as the end of his sentence which gave stateliness to his speech, " I thought you said it was going to be turned into a paper-mill !"

"Hell, yes! So I did. The burrs has got to come out; and they'll be setting up a lot of milk-poultice tubs in their place, and you won't see clean wheat in the bins any more, but rags all over the place, and the air fit to kill you with the steam and stink."

He plunged about among the machinery with Bellam's rough hand in one of his and a smoky lamp held even with his forehead in the other, throwing gigantic formless shadows on the walls, and on the windows delicately laced with cobwebs and drifted with the floating flour. The two men stumbled to the basement, where the tall turbine wheels stood motionless in their tubs, with the water sullenly wasting under them, and then clambered back to the floor, where the elevator filled the cups of its long belt with wheat and followed it to the top of the mill where it discharged them into the machine which blew it clean of cockle and smut and left it ready for the hoppers. Everything was in order, and at every point Overdale poured out his boastful lamentation. He gathered, as he passed the different heaps where they lay, now a handful of wheat, now of bran, now of middlings ; he stopped at the bins under the bolting-cloths and swept up a double handful of the flour, white, airy, clinging and light as April snow, and played with it, testing its smoothness with tipsy pathos; and so lapsed from his noisy grief in a dumb despair.

As the miller grew silent Bellam grew sleepy; he was dimly aware at last of being dragged back to Overdale's den and kicked forward onto the buffalo robe with a soft and muffled kick. When he woke the machinery of the mill was rattling and whistling round him; and he could hear the mad hum of the burrs, which sent out a gun-powdery odor from the flints triturated under the empty hoppers. He tumbled tremulously down to the gates to shut off the fearful head of water rushing on the wheels, and found Overdale stretched on the wet stones beside them. The miller's face was always white from the flour, but now it was of such a different white that Bellam thought he was dead. He dragged him within reach of the spray from the tubs, and the miller opened his eyes. He opened his mouth, too, and blasphemed so lucidly that there could be no doubt for Bellam that he was in his right mind; without bating a curse he jumped to his feet and shut off the water. Bellam took the path that led to the sawmill and started the saw where he had stopped it the evening before, and then waited in a drowse till breakfast-time. As he went home to his cabin on the island, past the gristmill, he saw Overdale sitting in the doorway of the second story. The machinery had got back its mellow note of contented industry, and the miller was smoking a quiet pipe. He drew down his shaggy brows in his habitual frown of greeting as Bellam passed, but neither spoke, though Overdale quelled in himself a crazy impulse to ask the saw-miller about the dream which was hanging cloudily in his brain. It was as if Bellam must know about it if he had broken in upon it when be pulled Overdale from the stones beside the wheels. Overdale was not sure that he was dreaming it precisely then, but he seemed to have first become aware of it when he came to himself, and he was conscious of an instant effort to resist it and put it away. That would have been easier if the thing had been at once anything but a formless dread in which the sale of the mills away from him had begun to weigh like doom. As nearly as he could grasp the significance of it, with his rude mind, unused to any hold on mystery, it meant that the mills from being the daily wont of him had suddenly become a vital part, and that he could not be separated from them and live. He would not have put his vague foreboding in these words if he could have put it in any, as yet. It was there in his sense, destined to gather weight and point, and have power upon him from every superstitious vagary which he had heretofore supposed unheeded hearsay, but which he should hereafter find inexorably remembered.