THE middle-aged stranger whom I met by chance upon the lower rocks at Mary’s Neck, that salt-washed promontory of the New England coast, was at first taciturn but became voluble when a little conversation developed the fact that we were both from the Midland country. We were indulging in the unexciting pastime of fishing for rock-cod, and the reason for his taciturnity, he explained, was that he had mistaken me for a native of Mary’s Neck; and, when I informed him that nothing was more unlikely than that a native would be fishing for rock-cod, he expressed astonishment that I, a fellow-Midlander, should seem to know anything about what a native would or would not do.
It was certainly a relief, he said, to meet a fellow-being from the Middle West—from “back home” was the way he put it—and I was the first person he could really talk to that he had encountered since his recent arrival at Mary’s Neck. He had been through a great deal in that short time, he told me, and he shook his head ruefully; then, with the confidential trustfulness that one Midlander on foreign soil nearly always reposes in another, he began straightway to tell me all about his troubles. We ceased to annoy the rock-cod with murder, sat upon a ledge over the salty seaweed that heaved and fell with the Atlantic surge, and I listened while he spoke fully of what lay disturbingly upon his mind.
A man’s vocabulary reveals him, and from the first I was interested not only in what this exile said but in how he said it. His manner of speech was characteristic, I thought, of what we sometimes call the “average well-to-do American” of these times; thus, just as one guesses the engine by its sound, so I caught at the creature through words seldom divested of a half-concealed plaintive humor and now and then unintentionally eloquent, and found him genuine. The sun was overhead when he began by informing me that his name was Massey and he came from Logansville, Illinois; but the broken shadows were stretching eastward across the rocks and the light was rosy before his narrative concluded.
Not long after this, we chanced to meet again, in the same manner, and, abandoning our humble pastime, again he talked and again I listened. I have noticed that many of the northern New England people fortify themselves within their reticence, and even in time of distress seem to feel that an open mouth is a breach through which the foe may leap; but when we Midlanders are in difficulties we always need to tell somebody about them. Mr. Massey’s troubles were more like perplexities, those that bemuse the foreigner treading a strange soil and hearing unfamiliar tongues, though sometimes his bewilderments were the deepest indeed, when concerned with his own family. Moreover as this family of his consisted of a wife and two daughters, he seemed to feel that he would not invariably be understood if he talked freely at home; it was necessary to him to open his heart to a fellow-man.
For the greater part of the year my own habitation is at Cobble Reef, several miles distant from the much more populous, lively and affluent resort at Mary’s Neck. After our second meeting, Mr. Massey drove over to Cobble Reef to see me and express himself in a long talk on my modest but breezy verandah; he came again and formed the habit of coming when he had something on his mind. Once, when he telephoned plaintively that he had twisted his ankle, I went to Mary’s Neck, and, without much inquiry, found his cottage, for it was the largest on the crest of the coastal rocks and of itself rather conspicuous evidence of Mr. Massey’s worldly prosperity. He was in a long wicker chair upon his verandah; he welcomed me heartily but expressed regret that his wife and daughters were absent, and then, frowning thoughtfully, added that perhaps it was just as well for us to have the place to ourselves. In fact, I had at no time the pleasure of meeting the Massey ladies, though a moment after I had left him, that day, I saw a shiny big limousine turn into his driveway and caught a glimpse of three charming faces and some pretty clothes.
I had a better view of one of the daughters late in the season on a day when he came to see me. The manner of his arrival was pleasant; he descended from a fine, fawn-colored runabout driven by a dark-eyed pretty girl of twenty, who seemed to take it as entirely a matter of course that three young men of similar age should have squeezed themselves into the rumble-seat. All three scrambled to take the place at her side vacated by Mr. Massey; muscular force was involved, and she used some of this, herself, to settle the contest. When two had been established beside her and the other forced to retire to the rumble, she leaned back, patted the defeated one upon a towsled head, then called to Mr. Massey that she would return for him later, and, settling herself to the controls of her lively machine, whizzed away down the white road that crosses the salt marshes and leads to Mary’s Neck. From his chair on my verandah, Mr. Massey a little anxiously observed the speed of her departure, but sighed resignedly. “That one was Clarissa,” he said. “Pretty much any time you’d happen to see her it would be about the same way—dashing off for somewhere else with three or four of ’em hanging on as well as they can. As a matter of fact, it seems to Mrs. Massey and me that about all we’re getting this end of our summer at Mary’s Neck is just glimpses of both our daughters. Enid’s eighteen and more serious than Clarissa; but they’re both in and out all the time—mostly out.”
He sighed again and went on to speak of intimate family matters. Indeed, I suppose that seldom has a man spoken with a more copious freedom to another man not a relative or of old acquaintance. There were times when he related the details of episodes mortifying to himself—told me of things he had thought and done that were of a kind not unknown in other people’s experiences but that most of us feel it is more becoming not to impart. Gradually he formed in my mind a fairly clear impression of contrast or even conflict—something like a semi-historical picture of a Midland family a little convulsed by being out of its native environs; and, since there appears to be something of possible value, or even entertainment, in such a picture, I have here transcribed what presented it to me. The effect seems to be the homely narrative of a Logansville family’s accommodating itself to a New England summer; but there may be something more generally applicable, here and there beneath the surface of Mr. Massey’s talk, or, as I should say, his many talks. In recording them it has seemed only fair to him to preserve them in his own congenial Midland manner and to let him speak for himself.
B. T.
YOU see the Masseys have always had a great name for being home-bodies. Maybe it’s been a mistake, I don’t know; but anyway for three generations—ever since pioneer days—we’ve stuck pretty close around Logansville and done mighty little travelling. For my own part, Logansville’s always been good enough for me and I never did see much use in getting very far away from home. Not that I couldn’t afford it, because I’ve done as well in business as any man could ask—my father owned the gas-plant and I’ve still got it, and I’m president of the Logansville Light and Power Company besides—but two or three trips a year to Chicago on business and to other large cities, maybe, to look over Plants like ours, have usually been enough to satisfy me in the way of gadding about, so to speak. Of course I don’t mean that my family and I practically haven’t ever been out of Logansville. Both the girls went East to school, and they and Mrs. Massey have been to New York pretty often—I’ve had to go there myself sometimes—and they’ve been to Atlantic City and Florida. One or two summers we’ve spent a month or so at a hotel up on Lake Michigan; but it’s a fact I never did see the ocean until we came here to Mary’s Neck this summer, and to tell the truth I didn’t have any particular anxiety to see it. Mrs. Massey and Enid and Clarissa had just about all they could do, I expect, to persuade me that my duty required me to come and look at it.
They’d read about this place in a newspaper article by a summer correspondent, a lady-writer that was pretty enthusiastic about the quaint old Down East fishing village, full of quaint old interesting characters and quaint old interesting furniture and fashionable summer people and storm-bound rocks and sun-washed beaches and all this and that; and so last winter nothing would do but Mrs. Massey should write to a real estate agent in Boston and rent a cottage here for the summer. That article hit her and the girls right between the eyes; they’d read books about just such places, and they’d already pestered me into remodelling our old house to make it Colonial or something—all out of place in Logansville, I told ’em, but they had their way, and they got their way about landing the family here in Mary’s Neck for this summer, too.
They were so excited and so anxious to see the quaint old Down East characters and buy some of the quaint old furniture that they couldn’t even wait for warm weather and hustled me up here with ’em right in April—yes, sir, outside of a taxicab ride in the rain across some of Boston, my first experience of old New England was spang in the middle of a snowstorm. “Stern and rockbound coast”, I should say so! Mrs. Massey and the girls stood out on the front piazza, shivering and taking on about what a grand view it was, while I took the keys the Boston agent had given us and opened the front door and went inside to see what chance there was to get warm. There didn’t seem to be much hope. The fireplaces were all empty, so I went out to the kitchen, and, happening to think, I turned a faucet of the sink and nothing came out. Then I opened the kitchen door and there was a man in rubber boots and these yellow slickers they call oilskins sitting on the back steps.
“Howdy-do,” I said. “I expect you’re probably Zebias Flick, the man Mr. Avery in Boston told us was the caretaker here and would have everything nice and ready for us.”
He didn’t move, or even turn his head; he just sat there on the steps with his back toward me.
“Here!” I said. “Aren’t you this Zebias Flick?”
Well, it didn’t seem to register with him; he didn’t pay any attention at all; he didn’t budge—just sat there like a stone man, and I couldn’t see even his profile because his head was all covered with one of these sou’wester hats that had snow on it. Mrs. Massey and the girls had been delighted in Boston when Mr. Avery told us the caretaker’s name was Zebias Flick; they said it was “too perfect”, that name! But as I stood there in the doorway looking at him, it began to come over me that if this was Zebias I wasn’t taking a great liking to him at first sight.
“Listen!” I said. “Are you snowbound or are you Zebias Flick?”
At that, he stretched out one of his legs, then he stretched out the other one, then he put ’em both under him again and hoisted himself up. He didn’t turn all the way toward me, just part way; but I could see that he had a weazened sort of face with kind of a scattered mustache, and his mouth was moving around underneath it because he was chewing a splinter. But he didn’t say anything; he just gave sort of a cough. That is, it was more like a muffled bark—as if he was afraid if he let himself out in a good hearty cough he might commit himself to something.
“Well, that’s a comfort,” I told him. “Anyhow you can cough a little! Listen, are you Zebias Flick?”
“Well—” he said, “yes.” He took his time to say it, too, and the way he said it struck me as if what he really wanted to say, and would have said if he hadn’t got caught in a jam, was, “Yes and no.”
So then I asked him why in the name of conscience there wasn’t any heat in the house, and he loosened up enough to answer that there might be some wood in the cellar.
“The water isn’t turned on, either,” I told him, and I asked him if the current was on for the lights and the electric range in the kitchen.
“Dun’t know as ’tis,” he said.
“Well, how do we get our water and light?”
This question seemed to strike him as one that opened up a field of thought entirely new to him, and I had to repeat it twice. Then he came back at me with the snappy suggestion: “Telephone mebbe.”
“All right, where’s the telephone?”
“Dun’t know as it’s been connected.”
“Listen!” I said. “Mr. Avery told me you were supposed to be the caretaker here, and the people that rent this cottage are more or less expected to employ you during the summer as kind of a hired man. Do you think if I made a settlement with you right now at a reasonable figure you could take up your duties and get some fires going in the house and the water connected and the lights on and kind of brighten things up generally? What about it?”
“Well,” he said, and he turned more away from me, “I dun’t know as I cal’lated on being around here this season. Had a mind to lobster some down Kitter’s Cove way.”
“Listen!” I said. “How much do you want?”
“Well—” he said, and he stopped chewing his splinter for so long that the end of it that stuck out beyond his mustache got snow on it.
I began making offers to him, raising them pretty fast because I’d only brought a light overcoat and I was pretty shivery. Finally, when I thought I’d gone about as far over the limit for a hired man as even an Eastern summer resort could expect, he began chewing his splinter again, at least enough to wobble the snow off of it; and pretty soon after that he seemed to make up his mind to come into the house and start in to be fairly busy, so I concluded that the terms were satisfactory. Then, the next day, the cook and a couple of housemaids Mrs. Massey had hired in Boston came up, and, feeling that we were beginning to get settled a little, I went out to take a look around and see where I was going to find somebody to talk to.
Of course Mrs. Massey and Clarissa and Enid are just as pleasant a family as a body could wish for; but they incline a good deal to topics that don’t appeal to me so terribly and that pretty often are ’way out of a practical man’s field of thought, and over my head, maybe. And besides that, a man always has a kind of powerful need to talk to other men quite a little, instead of just to women, no matter how nice those women are. Out our way in the Middle West everybody knows how easily talking goes on between man and man, so to speak; nobody’s ever afraid to talk to anybody else, and of course in Logansville everybody knows everybody else and there’s quite a power of talking goes on all the time. Well, I always supposed it was just the same all over the country, and that a man could hardly go anywhere where it wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world to start up a conversation—but when I thought that I’d never been to Mary’s Neck in New England.
I went into the grocery store in the village and bought some supplies right liberally. There were several men in there; one or two, I could tell from their clothes, were fishermen, and they kind of seemed to smell like it, and two or three were in overalls. “Well, gentlemen,” I said, “I hope we’ll have some better weather before long.” I said this because that’s always a good way to start a conversation, and besides, I’d already heard some of the inhabitants of Mary’s Neck calling out things about the weather to one another as they passed on the road. The very day we arrived I heard one of the villagers shout across the street to another in the midst of the snowstorm, “Snowin’!” and the other called back, “Yes, ’tis!” So I thought this might be an agreeable way to begin. But nobody paid any attention; nobody even looked at me, and I felt a little embarrassed.
“Well, most likely,” I said, trying to make myself feel more comfortable, “I guess most likely it’s liable to clear up pretty soon.”
They just stood there, mostly with their hands in their pockets, and looked out toward the village street; so I waited to see if they weren’t going to have a little politeness, maybe. After a while, one of ’em began to move his lower jaw, which I’ve learned since is a sort of preliminary sign a citizen of these parts makes to indicate that if you stand around and wait long enough he’s liable to say something. When this one got the motion worked up to where he was ready, he spoke to a fisherman standing near him. “Cap’,” he said, “you hear about old man Lingle’s mistake?”
“No,” the one he called “Cap’ ” told him. “Ain’t.”
“No?” the first one said. “Old man Lingle was settin’ front his prop’ty at Pebble Cove when a little vessell come round the Point. She sprung a plank and went right down to the bottom with a young man aboard of her. He was makin’ a mite of a fuss; but he scarcely left a ripple, and it turned out to be old Mrs. Cadwalader’s son that keeps the fish store over t’ the Cove. After the funeral she come around, and it seemed like she wanted to take old man Lingle to task. ‘Mr. Lingle,’ she says, ‘why didn’t you rescue my son? There you stood right on the shore with your dory as handy as need be and my son hollering for help only a mite of a distance away in the water. Why didn’t you git in that dory and go out and haul him aboard?’ Ole man Lingle seemed to feel bad about it. ‘Why, Mrs. Cadwalader,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t ’a’ had such a thing happen for the world! If I’d ’a’ dreamed it was your son you know me better than to think I’d ever stood there jest lookin’ on like. Mrs. Cadwalader,’ he says, ‘you’ll have to excuse me; I thought it was one o’ them summer people.’ ”
Then, when he finished, nobody said anything and they all stood just the way they were before, without any expressions on their faces, staring out through the front windows of the store as if they didn’t have anything except that to do for the next day or so. It struck me as kind of chilling, so to speak, and I gave up trying to be sociable with that lot; but I didn’t do much better with any of the other inhabitants I ran across, though I made quite a number of attempts to strike up pleasant relations with them if such there were.
There was only one person showed any willingness to be friendly; but it didn’t turn out very well. He was an elderly-looking man with a right nice likeable kind of face, and he was sawing wood just outside of a big barn that stands close to an old stone fence on the back road; I was walking by there and I stopped and sat down on the fence and watched him for a while. By-and-by he quit sawing and wiped his forehead, and I spoke to him.
“Pretty good exercise, sawing wood,” I said; and he put his hand behind his ear and came up close to me.
“Wha’d you say? I’m hard o’ hearin’.”
So I got up and leaned close to his ear and said it again, louder, and he astonished me because he broke into a right amiable smile, the first thing of that kind I’d seen since I came to Mary’s Neck. Well, sir, it warmed me all up, and I thought to myself that here at last I’d found one fellow-being, as it were, that I could come and talk to, and I was lonesome enough to take the trouble of trying to make him hear me. He said he’d always enjoyed sawing wood; and we began to have a real nice conversation until I happened to ask him whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. He didn’t seem to understand me at first, so I shouted the question louder in his ear, and then, all at once, he reached out and grabbed my hat off my head and went into the barn with it. He stayed in there a minute; then he came out and walked up to the stone fence where I was and put my hat on my head again. He didn’t say anything while he was doing all this and it seemed so peculiar that I felt kind of embarrassed and didn’t say anything, either. Then he went over to his bucksaw and picked up a stick of wood and threw it at me. I dodged it; but he threw another one and was reaching down to get more, so I left.
On the way home I got to wondering why he’d taken my hat into the barn, so I took it off and looked at it. It was a new grey soft hat with a black band around it, and he had written DAMU on the front of the band in chalk. It struck me as a singular word; but I thought I saw what he meant, and when I got back to the cottage I told Zebias Flick about this old man and where he lived and what he’d done to my hat, and I asked Zebias if he knew him. It was warmer, and Zebias had found a blade of grass that he had in his mouth; afterwhile it began to move up and down where it came out between some of his mustache, and finally he said:
“Might be I might; might be I mightn’t.”
“Well, who is he?”
“I couldn’t say,” he told me. “I couldn’t say even if I was a mind to.”
“Look here,” I said, “that old man isn’t right in his head. I might have known that, myself, at the start, from the willingness he showed to talk to me; but naturally a person that begins to throw cordwood at you just because you ask him whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat—well, in a place as small as this, of course everybody would certainly know who he is. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never even heard of him?”
“I couldn’t state,” Zebias said. “I dun’t take no interest in politics.”
That’s all I could get out of him. But our cook, a woman named Joanna Gillwife, was originally from somewhere Down East, herself, and had made some acquaintances in the village, and the next evening she came into the living-room and told Mrs. Massey and me all about that old man. Of course, as anybody knew, he wasn’t right in his head; but he was strong and handy and perfectly gentle—except to strangers—so his family had always kept him in Mary’s Neck instead of sending him away, and he was Zebias Flick’s own cousin.
So that’s the way it was, you see. I was kind of thrown back completely, as it were, on the society of Mrs. Massey and the girls.
WELL, of course they’d found out by this time that we’d come to Mary’s Neck pretty early in the season—a good deal before the season was due to get ready to commence, in fact. “It isn’t like Atlantic City,” Mrs. Massey said, “or those other places where people go practically at any time. Joanna Gillwife has cooked several summers for families in other places along the shore and she tells me none of the cottagers to speak of will be here before June and most of ’em won’t be along until a couple of months from now, and the hotels won’t open till then, either. I thought Mr. Avery did seem rather surprised about our wanting to come in April and I s’pose we really were rushing things a little.”
But of course Clarissa and Enid both said they’d known all about that. Anybody that knew anything understood that the season at places like Mary’s Neck didn’t begin until along in June, at least, they said, and they told me the kind of people that had cottages at Mary’s Neck were probably mostly resting themselves at home in the eastern cities for a while after being in Florida and other southern resorts for some of the winter. The fact that they wouldn’t be here for quite a while yet was a great advantage for us, Enid and Clarissa said, because when the season opened everything would be in such a sociable rush they wouldn’t have time for anything, and now, the way things were, we’d have a long, peaceable period to get acquainted with the neighborhood in and find the quaint old characters and do some antiquing. What if we did have a few snowstorms, they asked, and they said they wished they had even more time before the pow-wowing and ruckus of the sociable season opened.
Enid is the artistic one, and for the last year or so she’s had artistic theories I don’t understand at all, and she gets sensitive about ’em, too; but she claims she isn’t bigoted against the old in art because she’s just as much interested in antiques as her mother and sister are. Sometimes she gets me nervous about both art and antiques; she has a way of looking as if she knew secrets about both that I couldn’t ever hope to learn, and now and then if I ask questions in such matters she has a cold, hurt look that’s right upsetting for a parent to endure. Clarissa and Mrs. Massey, too, can do a little in that line when it comes to antiques, and, during those first days of ours at Mary’s Neck, the three of them were pretty often frosty with me, besides being expensive. They weren’t having the same kind of oppressive time I was, not a bit of it. They were just revelling, as they said, in the delicious old quaintness of Mary’s Neck and everything else up and down that strip of coast. They had magazines and read books about all such matters—getting themselves posted up on whatever was old enough to be worth anything—and already they’d gone fairly wild antiquing, as they called it. Our car and the chauffeur had got here from Logansville, and they went out antiquing all over Mary’s Neck and up and down the coast and through the country and to inland towns as much as sixty or seventy miles away, almost every day; and what they brought home with ’em—my soul!
Of course, they’d had the fever a good while back before we ever thought of coming to Mary’s Neck, and they’d bought a few terrible-looking things on their trips away from Logansville; but I hadn’t got myself accustomed to the idea at all. The way I was brought-up, my father and mother, like everybody else in our part of the country, always used to feel a little set up and superior whenever we could afford to buy something new. The principal idea people had about the pleasure of being well off was getting rid of old things and buying new ones; and that’s always seemed to me the natural way of human nature, because it’s the way of progress. Even the ancient orientals must have had that idea or else why was everybody so anxious to trade old lamps for new in the Arabian Nights story of Aladdin? I can’t seem to keep myself from feeling that there’s something upside-down about all this antiquing; but Enid and Clarissa and their mother fairly hoot at me when I air such notions, and they tell me I’m a barbarian and then start in to try and educate me some more. It’s pretty uphill work for them, I guess.
They came home late one afternoon when we’d been here about ten days, and the car was so full that about all you could see of the three of them was their heads sticking out above the packages; and when the chauffeur and I had helped to carry all that truck into the house I couldn’t make myself heard, there was so much going on in the way of exclamations. Enid and Clarissa just danced around the dining-room table where they had their plunder laid out, and kept shouting: “Look at this! Look at that!” till I was pretty nearly dazed.
“We’re going to re-furnish this whole cottage with antiques,” they told me. “Just look at the treasures we’ve found!”
Well, I looked at them; and all I saw seemed to me to be the worst kind of second-hand truck I’d ever laid my eyes on. A good deal of it was pewter, and if there’s anything on earth I despise—we used to be ashamed to have any of it in the house when I was a boy—it’s pewter! Then there was a good deal of that cheap old kind of glass we used to use in Logansville before we could afford cut-glass; there were rusty iron candle-sticks with snuffers; there were some ratty old stable-lanterns, and heaven knows what all! The worst thing in the lot, I thought—even worse than a glass hen sitting on glass eggs in a glass basket—was a great big china dog. He was lying down on kind of an oval plate, and too sizable for a mantelpiece ornament—he was kind of spanielish; but you couldn’t tell what kind of a dog he was, unless being a china dog made him some kind of a dog. He had four awful-looking yellowish spots on him; but for the rest of him he was glistening bald all over, and the expression on what was intended to be his face honestly made me sort of sick. As a matter of fact, this dog was one of those things you don’t want to look at but you can’t help doing it. I’d look at him a while; then I’d walk away and try to forget about him; then I’d have to come back to see if he really did look as horrible as I thought he did, and then I’d just stand staring at him and swallowing.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” Enid asked me.
I said he was. “You haven’t got it in mind to take him back to Logansville, have you?” I asked her.
At that, all three of ’em went for me. This dog, it seemed, was the finest thing they’d found in all their ransackings of the country around Mary’s Neck; it was old Chippingale ware or old Cheswood or something—I never could get the antiquing lingo straight. Anyhow, it was a great find and they’d got it at a tremendous bargain; but that seemed to be true of everything they bought. They were always talking of the “finds” they made; and they seemed to consider themselves pretty remarkable discoverers. It didn’t matter if something they bought was sitting right out in the show-window of an antique store, they always said they “found” it, and pretty often they were sure the antique dealer hadn’t understood the value of the things they bought, or maybe had got confused and put the wrong price-mark on something that was worth at least three times what they’d paid for it.
What they “found” was mostly the kind of extinct ornamental efforts I’ve just been talking about, though they’d also brought home a few old chairs with rush-seats, a couple of farmerish-looking tables and a ghastly sort of thing with mushmelon sized knobs on it that Clarissa told me was a “beautiful old Colonial wig-stand”, and I hate to think what she paid for it—she could have bought a gas-driven lawnmower with the same money. What they wanted most, of course, was furniture; but Mrs. Massey said that “really good things” and “fine, rare old pieces” in that line were scarce; the antique stores seemed to have been pretty well combed over for Colonial furniture.
“What I wish,” she told me, “is that I knew some way to get inside of a few of these delicious old houses in this neighborhood. There’s where the best old pieces are—if there were any way in the world to get at them! Some of these families have been living in the same house for generations, and the place is just full of the most wonderful old concealed treasures. The girls and I have done everything we could to get a look at them; we’ve used every bit of tact we possess; but these people up here in New England are so queer! We haven’t got inside a single old house.”
“No,” I said, “I should think maybe you mightn’t have. That seems fairly plausible to me.”
“But we’re going to keep on trying,” Clarissa put in. “It makes my mouth water to think what must be inside some of these houses, and we’re not going to rest until we see for ourselves. We’ll make it before long; you just wait!”
But they had to go on waiting quite a little while longer; then one day they didn’t get home till so late that dinner had been ready half an hour before they drove up and came bouncing out of the car. They were just wild, though they hadn’t bought anything and didn’t have any packages with ’em at all. They’d got into one of the delicious old houses at last, and the three of ’em tried to tell me all about it at the same time, and they were so excited it took me quite a while to make out what had happened. We were half through dinner before I could get the girls to let their mother have the floor to herself and tell me.
“There was never anything so absolutely perfect in the world!” she said. “I never dreamed they would let us in, and at first they weren’t going to; but Enid looked so pretty and so pleading the dear old man simply couldn’t resist her!”
“What dear old man?” I asked. “What dear old man?”
“The old man at this wonderful old house,” she told me. “He’s simply the sweetest old thing I ever——”
“And don’t forget his darling old wife,” Clarissa broke in. “They were simply the dearest, quaintest, sweetest old couple in the world! The most perfect old New England characters!”
“Absolutely!” Enid had to have her say. “You could see right away they were absolutely characters. They were the most perfectly quaint——”
“Yes,” Mrs. Massey said, “they certainly were! And even after they let us into the front parlor, and we saw how wonderful it was, I was just sure they weren’t going to consent to our seeing the rest of the house. I think if Clarissa hadn’t developed such a crush on the old lady they never would have done it. You never saw such a place in your life—absolutely a treasure house!”
“Why, it’s absolutely a museum!” Enid told me. “There’s hardly a thing in it that isn’t a museum piece, father. And all that priceless, wonderful stuff has been there for generations and generations in the old couple’s family! That’s the most wonderful thing about it all—they haven’t the remotest idea of what it’s worth themselves; so that if we ever get around the dear old things enough to persuade them to sell us such treasures, why, the bargains we could make would just take your breath!”
“Didn’t you offer to buy anything?” I asked her.
“Offer to buy their family heirlooms? No, we certainly didn’t! We knew too much for that; they’d have been insulted. That isn’t the way to handle these people; you’d never get anywhere if you spoke of buying anything the very first day you got into the house. You have to lead up to it gradually; but after you once get them into the mood to sell——”
“Yes,” Clarissa said, “that’s when you begin to get the bargains. Why, Moses Brazinga told me, himself, about a woman that picked up a Hayes-and-Wheeler butterdish for two dollars at a farmhouse, and he offered her a hundred and twenty-five dollars for it and could have sold it to a New York collector for three hundred; but she knew what she’d got, and she wouldn’t sell it. She was from Chicago, he told me.”
Maybe “Hayes-and-Wheeler butterdish” wasn’t what Clarissa said, exactly—I never can get the straight of these things—but it was something like that, and Moses Brazinga is an antiquity dealer Mrs. Massey and the girls were always talking about. He has an antiquity store over at Lodgeport, a town about twenty miles from Mary’s Neck, and they’d bought some coal-oil lamps from him only the day before. (I thought these lamps would look out of place in the house of the president of the Logansville Light and Power Company; but the girls said that didn’t matter.) Anyhow, after Clarissa had told about the Hayes-and-Wheeler butterdish and Moses Brazinga and the Chicago lady, Mrs. Massey said that was just nothing to what happened to a picture collector she’d been reading about. He’d found some old paintings stored in a wood-shed up in the White Mountains and bought them for eight dollars and a half, and they turned out to be worth over seventy-five thousand. So then Enid broke out and told about things like that she’d heard of, and they all three began talking at once about old pieces of glass and iron and pewter and rags or rugs or something that people had “found” or “picked up”, and that turned out to be worth enough to buy a first class automobile. And they said it was going to be just this way about the delicious old house they’d been in that day and were raving over.
“Well, but look here!” I said. “Hold on a minute! I thought you were telling me what a sweet old couple they are that live in this house you’re talking so much about. If their furniture and bric-à-bric and all this and that are worth such a lot of money and they don’t know it, you ought to tell ’em, oughtn’t you? You wouldn’t want to persuade them to sell you something for four dollars that’s worth four hundred?”
I didn’t get very far with that. They all three began to educate me again in the methods proper to antiquing; and then Enid got the floor to herself.
“You see, father,” she told me, “these things that old couple own are only worth a certain amount to them, and that’s what we’d pay them; so they’d get the full value as far as they, themselves, are concerned. If they sold to a dealer, they’d hardly get anything at all and probably be terribly cheated. Besides, you see, we don’t propose to sell what we buy; we just want the things to keep, for our own pleasure in their beauty. We wouldn’t dream of selling them to make money!”
“I see,” I told her. “I’m glad you wouldn’t expect to. I won’t worry about it any more.”
Well, they talked about that old house and the things in it and the quaint old couple off and on till bedtime; they talked almost as much about the old couple as they did about the coming sociable season that’d begin when the cottagers got here. This was such a regular subject with them that by now the cottagers were usually referred to just as “they”. Probably more than a dozen times a day I’d hear Mrs. Massey and Clarissa and Enid saying something about what we ought to do “before they come” or “after they get here”, and once I even overheard a whisper when the three of ’em were in the next room—I couldn’t tell which of ’em said it: “Joanna Gillwife says nobody is practically anybody unless they own their own cottage; we ought to get him to buy this place before they come.”
That was kind of a disturbing whisper to me, and the evening I’m speaking of I preferred hearing them talk about the old couple. As a matter of fact, they got me kind of stirred up and curious to see these two old characters and where they lived, though of course I knew I wouldn’t understand a thing about their rare old house and furniture, even if I went there. The girls and their mother held off the next day and didn’t go near the place—they said it would be better policy—but they did go the afternoon after that and a couple of times more, and then they told me they thought the old couple were kind of coming round to the point where they’d be willing to sell a few things maybe. Mrs. Massey had almost come out in the open and talked price with them, so she was beginning to feel right encouraged.
“Why don’t you come with us to-morrow?” she asked me. “It would help you to learn what beautiful fine old things really are if you’d see them in their natural surroundings in that exquisite old house.”
I said no, at first, though the truth is I had kind of a hankering to go, and pretty soon I let them persuade me. They told me to be careful not to talk much, and I think they were a little nervous about my possibly saying something that might offend the quaint old couple; but the next afternoon we drove out there—it wasn’t far beyond the village—and stopped the car outside the white picket gate at the end of a brick walk that led up to the house. It was a nice-looking, white-painted farmhouse with green shutters; but it was so old-fashioned and plain that for my part I never would have made any great fuss over it. The old couple were sitting on a wooden bench out in the front yard, and when I got a good look at them I thought probably that if I hadn’t been told so much about how perfect they were I wouldn’t have made any particular fuss over them, either.
Their name was Cheever, Mrs. Massey said when she introduced me, and they were so much alike you could almost have taken him out of his own rusty black clothes and put him into hers without seeing much difference. They had grey hair and weazened faces and silver spectacles, and they didn’t look like people that ever gushed much. I guess maybe they were a right nice likeable old couple, if they wanted to be; but they hardly said a thing when Mrs. Massey and the girls began making a to-do over them. Most of the time when they were paid a compliment they’d just put a hand behind their ear and say, “Hey?” and then, if the compliment was repeated loud enough to hear, they’d scratch somewhere.
At least that’s the way they impressed me; but I was glad I’d come, because I’d never seen anything like them before.
AFTER I’d stood around looking on a while, the old man seemed to notice me; then he took a big brass key out of his pocket and opened up the front door with it—it seems they’re great people around here to keep everything locked up, even when they’re right on the premises.
The girls followed him and the old lady into the front parlor; but Mrs. Massey gave me a pinch on the arm and kept me in the little front hall.
“Just look at that!” she whispered. “Just look at that staircase!”
Well, I looked at it, and it was certainly as mean a little staircase as I ever saw in my life. It came almost right down to the front door, and it was steep and narrow and twisted enough for a monkey, and had a miserable old strip of faded carpet running up it.
“Yes,” I said. “Terrible.” Because of course I thought that was why she wanted me to look at it.
“It’s gorgeous!” she told me. “Look at the spiral of that mahogany rail! Maybe they’d sell that darling old stair-carpet with it.”
I looked at her. “With it?” I asked her. “You mean you want to buy their staircase? Buy their staircase?”
“We’ll have to talk to ’em about that,” she whispered. “Look at that low boy!”
“Where?” I said, because I wanted to see one. I’d been hearing a lot of talk about low boys and high boys, and of course I understood by this time that some sort of furniture was implied. “Where’s any low boy?”
She pointed to an ornery little table with some drawers underneath the top of it. “It’s got cubbyhole legs and duck feet,” she said. Anyhow she said something like that; I’m pretty sure it was duck feet. “Now come in and see the high boy,” she said.
So we went into the parlor and I looked at the high boy but didn’t think much of it. Then old Mr. and Mrs. Cheever took us all over the house. To me, the whole place seemed to be just a plain farmhouse full of kind of homely old-fashioned things with nothing in it I’d ever care to buy or feel I had to see around me; but I never heard anything like the way Mrs. Massey and the girls carried on together in whispers. Every minute or so one of ’em would come and grab me by the arm and whisper to me, too, sort of fiercely, “Carved knees!” they’d say, or “Will you look at those snake feet!” or something like that. Most of the time I was walking with old Cheever; but he never said a word except when we got to the kitchen where there was a flint-lock musket hanging over the miserable old fireplace among a lot of out-of-date cooking utensils, and I asked him how old it was.
“Seventeen-thirty-six, B. C.,” he said, and I never heard a hoarser voice. “Either Seventeen-thirty-six, B. C. or Seventeen-thirty-seven, B. C.”
“B. C.?” I asked him. “B. C.?”
“No,” he said, “A. D.” That’s everything he said all the time we were in there, so I could see that Mrs. Massey and the girls were right about his being a pretty quaint old New England character.
In one corner of the kitchen there was a contraption that Enid went just crazy over. It didn’t amount to anything. I could have made one like it, myself, out of old pine boards if I’d wanted to, which I certainly didn’t; but she dragged me over to it and made me look at some figures that had been scratched near the base of it with a nail or something.
“Look at that!” she whispered. “Seventeen-fifty-nine! A pine corner-cupboard dated Seventeen-fifty-nine with a scallop-shell impediment and chock full of absolutely priceless pewter. I’ll simply die if they refuse to sell it!”
“What were you thinking of offering ’em for it?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she whispered to me. “It’s worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars without the pewter, and I’ve simply got to have that pewter, too. Mother and Clarissa and I have made up our minds that we simply cannot live unless we get this corner-cupboard with the pewter, and the high boy and the low boy, and the three four-poster beds and that wonderful duck-foot dining-room table, and the Chippingale chair and the harp-backed chair and the set of blue china and the old silver tea-set and ladle and the staircase and——”
“Hold on,” I said, and I wiped my forehead. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? These old Cheevers intend to go on living here, don’t they? How on earth could you expect ’em to do it with the staircase ripped out—and all these other——”
“Never mind,” she told me. “They’re used to living in the simplest way. Come on.” So we went back to the parlor where the others already were, and Mrs. Massey was talking to the old couple about the high boy.
“Of course I know it’s a delicate matter,” she said, “to press you to name a price for a thing that’s associated in your minds with former members of your family. But of course, since you feel you could bring yourselves to part with it——” She was being so polite about it that she just stopped there and waited for them to speak; but she had to wait so long that finally it got embarrassing. “Well,” she said, “if you could just bring yourselves to name a price——” And she laughed a little, as if she were apologizing.
I saw that Mrs. Cheever was going to say something because her under jaw was beginning to move a little; so afterwhile, when she got herself ready like that, she said, “It’s got clor and boiled feet.”
It seemed to me that Mrs. Massey was surprised that the old lady knew so much about her high boy’s feet. “Oh—has it?” she said. “I’d hardly noticed that.” But here, it struck me, that she was trying to be diplomatic, because she went on, “Of course it’s nice; but so far as rarity is concerned it isn’t very——”
“It’s got clor and boiled feet,” the old lady broke in, “and it’s got the original brasses and cubbyhole legs and a broken impediment.”
It seemed to me from the way she said this that she was fixing to drive quite a bargain; but Enid began talking to me in a low voice—we were standing over by the doorway—and she told me the old lady didn’t know anything at all about the high boy. “Those points are just some she picked up from hearing us talk about it,” Enid said. “We ought to’ve been more cautious, I guess; we made altogether too much fuss over the high boy the first time we came. I think mother ought to’ve begun with the chandelier.”
“My goodness!” I said. “You don’t expect to buy the chandelier right out of these people’s ceiling, do you?” It surprised me, too, that anybody’d want a chandelier like that; it was a little old glass one with candles.
“Sh!” Enid told me. “It’s waterproof; but they don’t know it.” Then she stepped forward and kind of took charge, as it were. “We might as well begin by telling Mr. and Mrs. Cheever exactly what we’re interested in, I think. Now, in this room, there’s the high boy and the chandelier and the two samplers and the wing chair——”
“And the secretary,” Clarissa put in. “Don’t forget the secretary and the andirons and the——”
“Wait a minute,” I said; because I thought we’d be there a pretty long time if things weren’t put on a more businesslike basis, so to speak. “Why don’t one of you just sit down here and write out a list of all the things you want in the whole house, in case Mr. and Mrs. Cheever are willing to sell ’em to you; then they could take your list and look it over and write down whatever price they decide on opposite the articles. Wouldn’t that be the best way to get somewhere?”
Mr. and Mrs. Cheever didn’t say anything; but my family fell in with the plan, and Clarissa sat down at the secretary and wrote out the list, with her mother and Enid bending over her and putting in whatever she happened to forget. When they had it finished, I looked at it, and it made me feel pretty embarrassed—though of course I realized the old couple could buy new household goods to begin their life over again with.