The Landlord at Lion\'s Head, Complete

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THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD

By William Dean Howells

Part I.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their
beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this
novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight's sojourn on the western
shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the
State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain form
which the earlier French pioneers had named "Le Lion Couchant," but which
their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call "The Camel's
Hump." It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was especially
definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found the scheme
for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to write, this
image suggested the name of 'The Landlord at Lion's Head.' I gave the
title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change it, but
rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to be, the
title could not be better.

I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for the
winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it, with
other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and from
Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the
following summer. It was first serialized in Harper's Weekly and in the
London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper--I forget
which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.

I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain
moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had
such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at
least own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My
only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder and
harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke
through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very
good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of
their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done
and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late
Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more fear of
his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript
in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled
leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly, with a
handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned
relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had liked the
notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay, that he
liked the result even better.

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men,
perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic New England
type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions. What
seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his
ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to share my weakness for
Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his
personality ever since I had got it off the side of an ice-cart many
years before.

At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much
in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing
the hero's experience there from even more intimacy with the university
moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier
fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge
without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the
undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can be
truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by
undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay--the word
may now be obsolete--Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing; though
this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of the least
important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom of the
inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which was always
vexing the heart of Puritanism, and which I had constantly felt one of
the most interesting facts in my observation of New England.

As for the sort of summer hotel portrayed in these pages, it was
materialized from an acquaintance with summer hotels extending over
quarter of a century, and scarcely to be surpassed if paralleled. I had a
passion for knowing about them and understanding their operation which I
indulged at every opportunity, and which I remember was satisfied as to
every reasonable detail at one of the pleasantest seaside hostelries by
one of the most intelligent and obliging of landlords. Yet, hotels for
hotels, I was interested in those of the hills rather than those of the
shores.

I worked steadily if not rapidly at the story. Often I went back over it,
and tore it to pieces and put it together again. It made me feel at times
as if I should never learn my trade, but so did every novel I have
written; every novel, in fact, has been a new trade. In, the case of this
one the publishers were hurrying me in the revision for copy to give the
illustrator, who was hurrying his pictures for the English and Australian
serializations.

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD

I.

If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit was
wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from
the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the
lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion. The flanks and haunches
were vaguely distinguished from the mass; but the mighty head, resting
with its tossed mane upon the vast paws stretched before it, was boldly
sculptured against the sky. The likeness could not have been more
perfect, when you had it in profile, if it had been a definite intention
of art; and you could travel far north and far south before the illusion
vanished. In winter the head was blotted by the snows; and sometimes the
vagrant clouds caught upon it and deformed it, or hid it, at other
seasons; but commonly, after the last snow went in the spring until the
first snow came in the fall, the Lion's Head was a part of the landscape,
as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself.

Long after other parts of the hill country were opened to summer sojourn,
the region of Lion's Head remained almost primitively solitary and
savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that
brawled through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still
rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height
to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a
meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed
all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view
of Lion's Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they came
on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the
Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the
coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that
dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about
the door-yard to look at the Lion's Head, to wonder at it and mock at it,
according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have felt
that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who sold
them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if they were
very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to make much
of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were not rather
lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts scream at
night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem lonesome. When one
of them declared that if she should hear a catamount scream or a bear
growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she presumed we must all
die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a covert slant in her
words, for they were spoken with the same look she wore when she told
them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the black maple sugar
three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned upon their urgence
that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the corners of the house was
her husband, and the three lank boys with him were her sons; that the
children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were
her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but
his white head and sunburned face, into her dress and glanced at them
with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years
old. With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their
conjecture that the space walled off in the farther corner of the orchard
was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the
ladies could see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the
graves they saw were those of her husband's family and of the children
she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lost four. She did
not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed
itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of; the ladies left
her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with
the conviction, briefly imparted to her husband, that they were tonguey.

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in
the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar
would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion's Head stamped on it,
she answered that she got enough of Lion's Head without wanting to see it
on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy
of Lion's Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out
with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her
manner remained the same. It did not change when the excursionists drove
away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter.
When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys
shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion's
Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the
noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the
stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the
farm-house on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from
the silence except when the coaching-parties came.

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the
silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of the
green of the fields and woods all round them: the black-green of pines
and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to the tops of
the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the Lion's Head.
The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving chest, but
his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty of figure
and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed such as had
eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was forty when they
began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the reddish heaps of
her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of the autumnal oak.
She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but since her marriage
at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the children she had
lost. They were born with the taint of their father's family, and they
withered from their cradles. The youngest boy alone; of all her brood,
seemed to have inherited her health and strength. The rest as they grew
up began to cough, as she had heard her husband's brothers and sisters
cough, and then she waited in hapless patience the fulfilment of their
doom. The two little girls whose faces the ladies of the first
coaching-party saw at the farm-house windows had died away from them; two
of the lank boys had escaped, and in the perpetual exile of California
and Colorado had saved themselves alive. Their father talked of going,
too, but ten years later he still dragged himself spectrally about the
labors of the farm, with the same cough at sixty which made his oldest
son at twenty-nine look scarcely younger than himself.

II.

One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the
corn-field that an early frost had blighted, and told his wife that they
must give it up. He said, in his weak, hoarse voice, with the catarrhal
catching in it, that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm
any longer. The oats had hardly been worth cutting, and now the corn was
gone, and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock; if
they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes. Have a
vendue, and sell out everything before the snow flew, and let the State
take the farm and get what it could for it, and turn over the balance
that was left after the taxes; the interest of the savings-bank mortgage
would soon eat that up.

The long, loose cough took him, and another cough answered it like an
echo from the barn, where his son was giving the horses their feed. The
mild, wan-eyed young man came round the corner presently toward the porch
where his father and mother were sitting, and at the same moment a boy
came up the lane to the other corner; there were sixteen years between
the ages of the brothers, who alone were left of the children born into
and borne out of the house. The young man waited till they were within
whispering distance of each other, and then he gasped: "Where you been?"

The boy answered, promptly, "None your business," and went up the steps
before the young man, with a lop-eared, liver-colored mongrel at his
heels. He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of
the porch. "Dinner over?" he demanded.

His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy's hands and face,
all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch of
yellow hair, and said: "You go and wash yourself." At a certain light in
his mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his
dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down on
the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the
mountain before them. They heard the boy whistling behind the house, with
sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face while he
whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled sound, and
sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing into the
towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the scuffling of his
feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

"Been after them woodchucks ag'in," his father huskily suggested.

"I guess so," said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed
vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The father began a statement of his affairs.

The mother said: "You don't want to go into that; we been all over it
before. If it's come to the pinch, now, it's come. But you want to be
sure."

The man did not answer directly. "If we could sell off now and get out to
where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land--" He stopped, as if
confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had hoped he
might not find in his way this time.

His wife laughed grimly. "I guess, if the truth was known, we're too poor
to get away."

"We're poor," he whispered back. He added, with a weak obstinacy: "I
d'know as we're as poor as that comes to. The things would fetch
something."

"Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim's hands," said
the woman.

"We should till spring, maybe. I d'know as I want to face another winter
here, and I d'know as Jackson does."

The young man gasped back, courageously: "I guess I can get along here
well enough."

"It's made Jim ten years younger. That's what he said," urged the father.

The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed. "I don't believe it 'll
make you ten years richer, and that's what you want."

"I don't believe but what we should ha' done something with the place by
spring. Or the State would," the father said, lifelessly.

The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind. "Say, mother, a'n't
you never goin' to have dinner?" He was standing in the doorway, with a
startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness
of the hair. His clothes were bedrabbled down the front with soap and
water.

His mother rose and went toward him; his father and brother rose like
apparitions, and slanted after her at one angle.

"Say," the boy called again to his mother, "there comes a peddler." He
pointed down the road at the figure of a man briskly ascending the lane
toward the house, with a pack on his back and some strange appendages
dangling from it.

The woman did not look round; neither of the men looked round; they all
kept on in-doors, and she said to the boy, as she passed him: "I got no
time to waste on peddlers. You tell him we don't want anything."

The boy waited for the figure on the lane to approach. It was the figure
of a young man, who slung his burden lightly from his shoulders when he
arrived, and then stood looking at the boy, with his foot planted on the
lowermost tread of the steps climbing from the ground to the porch.

III.

The boy must have permitted these advances that he might inflict the
greater disappointment when he spoke. "We don't want anything," he said,
insolently.

"Don't you?" the stranger returned. "I do. I want dinner. Go in and tell
your mother, and then show me where I can wash my hands."

The bold ease of the stranger seemed to daunt the boy, and he stood
irresolute. His dog came round the corner of the house at the first word
of the parley, and, while his master was making up his mind what to do,
he smelled at the stranger's legs. "Well, you can't have any dinner,"
said the boy, tentatively. The dog raised the bristles on his neck, and
showed his teeth with a snarl. The stranger promptly kicked him in the
jaw, and the dog ran off howling. "Come here, sir!" the boy called to
him, but the dog vanished round the house with a fading yelp.

"Now, young man," said the stranger, "will you go and do as you're bid?
I'm ready to pay for my dinner, and you can say so." The boy stared at
him, slowly taking in the facts of his costume, with eyes that climbed
from the heavy shoes up the legs of his thick-ribbed stockings and his
knickerbockers, past the pleats and belt of his Norfolk jacket, to the
red neckcloth tied under the loose collar of his flannel outing-shirt,
and so by his face, with its soft, young beard and its quiet eyes, to the
top of his braidless, bandless slouch hat of soft felt. It was one of the
earliest costumes of the kind that had shown itself in the hill country,
and it was altogether new to the boy. "Come," said the wearer of it,
"don't stand on the order of your going, but go at once," and he sat down
on the steps with his back to the boy, who heard these strange terms of
command with a face of vague envy.

The noonday sunshine lay in a thin, silvery glister on the slopes of the
mountain before them, and in the brilliant light the colossal forms of
the Lion's Head were prismatically outlined against the speckless sky.
Through the silvery veil there burned here and there on the densely
wooded acclivities the crimson torch of a maple, kindled before its time,
but everywhere else there was the unbroken green of the forest, subdued
to one tone of gray. The boy heard the stranger fetch his breath deeply,
and then expel it in a long sigh, before he could bring himself to obey
an order that seemed to leave him without the choice of disobedience. He
came back and found the stranger as he had left him. "Come on, if you
want your dinner," he said; and the stranger rose and looked at him.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Thomas Jefferson Durgin."

"Well, Thomas Jefferson Durgin, will you show me the way to the pump and
bring a towel along?"

"Want to wash?"

"I haven't changed my mind."

"Come along, then." The boy made a movement as if to lead the way
indoors; the stranger arrested him.

"Here. Take hold of this and put it out of the rush of travel somewhere."
He lifted his burden from where he had dropped it in the road and swung
it toward the boy, who ran down the steps and embraced it. As he carried
it toward a corner of the porch he felt of the various shapes and
materials in it.

Then he said, "Come on!" again, and went before the guest through the dim
hall running midway of the house to the door at the rear. He left him on
a narrow space of stone flagging there, and ran with a tin basin to the
spring at the barn and brought it back to him full of the cold water.

"Towel," he said, pulling at the family roller inside the little porch at
the door; and he watched the stranger wash his hands and face, and then
search for a fresh place on the towel.

Before the stranger had finished the father and the elder brother came
out, and, after an ineffectual attempt to salute him, slanted away to the
barn together. The woman, in-doors, was more successful, when he found
her in the dining-room, where the boy showed him. The table was set for
him alone, and it affected him as if the family had been hurried away
from it that he might have it to himself. Everything was very simple: the
iron forks had two prongs; the knives bone handles; the dull glass was
pressed; the heavy plates and cups were white, but so was the cloth, and
all were clean. The woman brought in a good boiled dinner of corned-beef,
potatoes, turnips, and carrots from the kitchen, and a teapot, and said
something about having kept them hot on the stove for him; she brought
him a plate of biscuit fresh from the oven; then she said to the boy,
"You come out and have your dinner with me, Jeff," and left the guest to
make his meal unmolested.

The room was square, with two north windows that looked down the lane he
had climbed to the house. An open door led into the kitchen in an ell,
and a closed door opposite probably gave access to a parlor or a
ground-floor chamber. The windows were darkened down to the lower sash by
green paper shades; the walls were papered in a pattern of brown roses;
over the chimney hung a large picture, a life-size pencil-drawing of two
little girls, one slightly older and slightly larger than the other, each
with round eyes and precise ringlets, and with her hand clasped in the
other's hand.

The guest seemed helpless to take his gaze from it, and he sat fallen
back in his chair at it when the woman came in with a pie.

"Thank you, I believe I don't want any dessert," he said. "The fact is,
the dinner was so good that I haven't left any room for pie. Are those
your children?"

"Yes," said the woman, looking up at the picture with the pie in her
hand. "They're the last two I lost."

"Oh, excuse me--" the guest began.

"It's the way they appear in the spirit life. It's a spirit picture."

"Oh, I thought there was something strange about it."

"Well, it's a good deal like the photograph we had taken about a year
before they died. It's a good likeness. They say they don't change a
great deal at first."

She seemed to refer the point to him for his judgment, but he answered
wide of it:

"I came up here to paint your mountain, if you don't mind, Mrs.
Durgin-Lion's Head, I mean."

"Oh yes. Well, I don't know as we could stop you if you wanted to take it
away." A spare glimmer lighted up her face.

The painter rejoined in kind: "The town might have something to say, I
suppose."

"Not if you was to leave a good piece of intervale in place of it. We've
got mountains to spare."

"Well, then, that's arranged. What about a week's board?"

"I guess you can stay if you're satisfied."

"I'll be satisfied if I can stay. How much do you want?"

The woman looked down, probably with an inward anxiety between the fear
of asking too much and the folly of asking too little. She said,
tentatively: "Some of the folks that come over from the hotels say they
pay as much as twenty dollars a week."

"But you don't expect hotel prices?"

"I don't know as I do. We've never had anybody before."

The stranger relaxed the frown he had put on at the greed of her
suggestion; it might have come from ignorance or mere innocence. "I'm in
the habit of paying five dollars for farm board, where I stay several
weeks. What do you say to seven for a single week?"

"I guess that 'll do," said the woman, and she went out with the pie,
which she had kept in her hand.

IV.

The painter went round to the front of the house and walked up and down
before it for different points of view. He ran down the lane some way,
and then came back and climbed to the sloping field behind the barn,
where he could look at Lion's Head over the roof of the house. He tried
an open space in the orchard, where he backed against the wall enclosing
the little burial-ground. He looked round at it without seeming to see
it, and then went back to the level where the house stood. "This is the
place," he said to himself. But the boy, who had been lurking after him,
with the dog lurking at, his own heels in turn, took the words as a
proffer of conversation.

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