THE family tree of the Van Nicht family was not the sort of family tree
you think I mean, although they had one of that variety too. This was a
real tree. It was an elm--the biggest elm and the broadest and the most
majestic elm in the entire state, and in the times of its leafage cast
the densest shade of any elm to be found anywhere, probably. For more
than one hundred years the Van Nicht family had lived in its shadow.
That was the principal trouble with them--they did live in the shadow.
I'll come to that later.
Every consequential visitor to Schuylerville was taken to see the Van
Nicht elm. It was a necessary detail of his tour about town. Either
before or after he had viewed the new ten-story skyscraper of the
Seaboard National Bank, and the site for the projected Civic Centre, and
the monument to Schuyler County's defenders of the Union--1861-'65--with
a dropsical bronze figure of a booted and whiskered infantryman on top
of the tall column, and the Henrietta Wing Memorial Library, and the
rest of it, they took him and they showed him the Van Nicht elm. So
doing, it was incumbent upon them to escort him through a street which
was beginning to wear that vacillating, uncertain look any street
wears while trying to make up its mind whether to keep on being a quiet
residential byway in an old-fashioned town or to turn itself into an
important thoroughfare of a thriving industrial centre. You know the
kind of street I aim to picture--with here an impudent young garage
showing its shining morning face of red brick in a side yard where there
used to be an orchard, and there a new apartment building which has
shouldered its way into a line of ancient dwellings and is driving its
cast-iron cornices, like rude elbows, into the clapboarded short ribs of
its neighbours upon either side.
At the far, upper end of that street, upon the poll of a gentle
eminence, uplifted the Van Nicht elm. It was for sundry months of the
year a splendid vast umbrella, green in the spring and summer and yellow
in the fall; and in the winter presented itself against the sky line as
a great skeleton shape, without a blemish upon it, except for a scar
in the bark close down to the earth to show where once there might have
been a fissure in its mighty bole. No grass, or at least mighty little
grass, grew within the circle of its brandishing limbs. It was as though
the roots of the tree sucked up all the nourishment that the soil might
hold, leaving none for the humble grass to thrive upon.
It was in the winter that the house, which stood almost directly under
the tree, was most clearly revealed as a square, ugly domicile of
grey stone, a story and a half in height, lidded over by a hip roof of
weathered shingles; with a deeply recessed front door, like a pursed and
proper mouth, and, above it, a row of queer little longitudinal windows,
half hidden below the overhang of the gables and suggesting so many
slitted eyes peering out from beneath a lowering brow. You saw, too,
the mould that had formed in streaky splotches upon the stonework of
the walls and the green rime of age and dampness that had overspread the
curled shingles and the peeling paint, turning to minute scales upon
the woodwork of the window casings and the door frames. Also you saw
one great crooked bough which stretched across the roof like a menacing
black arm, forever threatening to descend and crush its rafters in. This
was in winter; in summertime the leaves almost completely hid the house,
so that one who halted outside the decrepit fence, with its snaggled and
broken panels, must needs stoop low to perceive its outlines at all.
The carriage or the automobile bearing the prominent guest and the
chairman of the local reception committee would halt at the end of the
street.
“That,” the chairman would say, pointing up grade, “is the Van Nicht
elm. Possibly you've heard about it? Round here we call it the Van
Nicht family tree. It is said to be the largest elm in this part of the
country. In fact, I doubt whether there are any larger than this one,
even up in New England. And that's the famous old Van Nicht homestead
there, just back of it.
“Its got a history. When Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht came here
right after the Revolutionary War--he was a colonel in the Revolution,
you know--he built the house, placing it just behind the tree. The
tree must've grown considerably since then, but the house yonder hasn't
changed but mighty little all these years. It's the oldest building in
Schuyler County. As a matter of fact, the town, with this house for
a starter, sort of grew up down here on the flat lands below. The old
colonel raised a family here and died here. So did his son and his
grandson. They were rich people once--the richest people in the county
at one time.
“Why all the land from here clear down to Ossibaw Street--that's six
blocks south--used to be included in the Van Nicht estate. It was a farm
then, of course, and by all accounts a fine one. But each generation
sold off some of the original grant, until all that's left now is that
house, with the tree and about an acre of ground more or less. And I
guess it's pretty well covered with mortgages.”
This, in substance, was what the guide would tell the distinguished
stranger. This, in substance, was what was told to young Olcott on
the day after he arrived in Schuylerville to take over the editorial
management of the Schuylerville News-Ledger. Mayor T. J. McGlynn was
showing him the principal points of interest--so the mayor had put it,
when he called that morning with his own car at the Hotel Brain-ard,
where Olcott was stopping, and invited the young man to go for a tour of
inspection of the city, as a sort of introductory and preparatory course
in local education prior to his assuming his new duties.
While the worthy mayor was uttering his descriptive remarks Olcott bent
his head and squinted past the thick shield of limbs and leaves. He saw
that the door of the house, which was closed, somehow had the look of
about always being closed, and that most of the windows were barred with
thick shutters.
“Appears rather deserted, doesn't it?” said the newcomer, striving to
show a proper appreciation of the courtesy that was being visited upon
him. “There isn't any one living there at present, is there?”
“Sure there is,” said Mayor McGlynn. “Old Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht,
4th, who's the present head of the family, and his two old-maid sisters,
Miss Rachael and Miss Harriet--they all live there together. Miss
Rachael is considerably older than Miss Harriet, but they're both
regular old maids--guess they always will be. The brother never married,
either--couldn't find anybody good enough to share the name, I suppose.
Anyhow he's never married. And besides I guess it keeps him pretty busy
living up to the job of being the head of the oldest family in this end
of the state. That's about all he ever has done.”
“Then he isn't in any regular business or any profession?”
“Business!” Mayor McGlynn snorted. “I should say not! All any one of the
Van Nichts has ever done since anybody can remember was just to keep on
being a Van Nicht and upholding the traditions and the honours of the
Van Nichts--and this one is like all his breed. The poorer he gets the
more pompous and the more important acting he gets--that's the funny
part of it.”
“Apparently not a very lucrative calling, judging by the general aspect
of the ancestral manor,” said Olcott, who was beginning now to be
interested. “How do they manage to live?”
“Lord knows,” said the mayor. “How do the sparrows manage to live? I
guess there're times when they need a load of coal and a market basket
full of victuals to help tide 'em over a hard spell, but naturally
nobody would dare to offer to help them. They're proud as Lucifer
themselves, and the town is kind of proud of 'em. They're institutions
with us, as you might say.”
McGlynn, who, as Olcott was to learn later, was a product of new
industrial and new political conditions in the community, spoke with
the half-begrudged admiration which the self-made so often have for the
ancestor-made.
“We ain't got so very many of the real aristocrats in this section any
more, what with all this new blood pouring in since our boom started
up; and even if they are as poor as Job's turkey, these Van Nichts still
count for a good deal round here. Money ain't everything anyway, is
it?... Well, Mr. Olcott, if you've seen enough here, we'll turn round
and go see something else.” He addressed his chauffeur: “Jim, suppose
you take us by the new hosiery mills next. I want Mr. Olcott to see one
of the most prosperous manufacturing plants in the state. Employs nine
hundred hands, Mr. Olcott, and hasn't been in operation but a little
more than three years. That's the way this town is humping itself. You
didn't make any mistake, coming here.”
As the car swung about, Olcott gave the Van Nicht place a backward
scrutiny over his shoulder and was impressed by its appearance into
saying this:
“It strikes me as having a mighty unhealthy air about it. I'd say
offhand it was a first-rate breeding spot for malaria and rheumatism.
I wonder why they don't trim up that big old tree and give the sunshine
and the light a chance to get in under it.”
“For heaven's sake and your own, don't you suggest that to the old boy
when you meet him,” said McGlynn with a grin. “He'd as soon think of
cutting off his own leg as to touch a leaf on the family tree. It's
sacred to him. It represents all the glory of his breed and he venerates
it, the same as some people venerate an altar in a church.”
“Then you think I will be likely to meet him? I'd like to--from what you
tell me, he must be rather a unique personality.”
“Yes, he's all of that--unique, I mean. And you're pretty sure to meet
him before you've been in town many months. He seems to regard it as his
duty to call on certain people, after they've been here a given length
of time, and extend to them the freedom of the town that his illustrious
great-granddaddy founded. If you're specially lucky--or specially
unlucky--he may even invite you to call on him, although that's an
honour that doesn't come to very many, even among the older residents.
The Van Nichts are mighty exclusive and it isn't often that anybody sees
what the inside of their house looks like--let alone a stranger.... Say,
Jim, after we've seen the hosiery mills, run us on out past the County
Feeble-Minded and Insane Asylum. Mr. Olcott will enjoy that!”
Within a month's time from this time, Mayor McGlynn's prophecy was to
come true. On a morning in the early part of the summer 01 Olcott sat
behind his desk in his office adjoining the city room on the second
floor of the _News-Ledger_ building, when his office boy announced a
gentleman calling to see Mr. Olcott personally.
“See who it is, will you, please, Morgan?” said Olcott to his assistant.
Morgan had arrived less than a week before, having been sent on by the
syndicate which owned a chain of papers, the _News-Ledger included_, to
serve under the new managing editor. The syndicate had a cheery little
way of shuffling the cards at frequent intervals and dealing out fresh
executives for the six or eight dailies under its control and ownership.
“I'm busy as the dickens,” added Olcott as Morgan got up to obey; “so if
it's a pest that's outside, give him the soft answer and steer him off!”
In a minute Morgan was back with a cryptic grin on his face.
“You'd better see him--he's worth seeing, all right,” said Morgan.
“Who is it?” asked Olcott.
“It's somebody right out of a book,” answered Morgan; “somebody giving
the name of Something Something Van Nicht. I didn't catch all the first
name--I was too busy sizing up its proprietor. Says he must see you
privately and in person. I gather from his manner that if you don't see
him this paper will never be quite the same again. And honestly, Olcott,
he's worth seeing.”
“I think I know who it is,” said Olcott, “and I'll see him. Boy, show
the gentleman in!”
“I'll go myself,” said Morgan. “This is a thing that ought to be done in
style.”
Olcott reared back in his chair, waiting. The door opened and Morgan's
voice was heard making formal and sonorous announcement: “Mr. Van
Nicht.” And Olcott, looking over his desk top, saw, framed in the
doorway, a figure at once picturesque and pitiable.
The first thing, almost, to catch his eye was a broad black stock
collar--the first stock collar Olcott had ever seen worn by a man in
daytime. Above it was a long, close-shaven, old face, with a bloodless
and unwholesome pallor to it, framed in long, white hair, and surmounted
by a broad-brimmed, tall-crowned soft hat which had once been black
and now was gangrenous with age. Below it a pair of sloping shoulders
merging into a thin, meagre body tightly cased in a rusty frock coat,
and below the coat skirts in turn a pair of amazingly thin and rickety
legs, ending in slender, well-polish-ed boots with high heels. In an
instantaneous appraisal of the queer figure Olcott comprehended these
details and, in that same flicker of time, noted that the triangle of
limp linen showing in the V of the close-buttoned lapels had a fragile,
yellowish look like old ivory, that all the outer garments were
threadbare and shiny in the seams, and that the stock collar was decayed
to a greenish tinge along its edges. Although the weather was warm, the
stranger wore a pair of grey cotton gloves.
“Good morning,” said Olcott, mechanically putting a ceremonious and
formal emphasis into the words and getting on his feet.
“Good morning, sir, to you,” returned the visitor in a voice of
surprising volume, considering that it issued from so slight a frame.
“You are Mr. Olcott?”
“Yes, that's my name.” And Olcott took a step forward, extending his
hand.
“Mine, sir, is Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.” The speaker paused midway
of the floor to remove one glove and to shift it and his cane to the
left hand. Advancing, with a slight limp, he gave to Olcott a set of
fingers that were dry and chilly and fleshless. Almost it was like
clasping the articulated bones of a skeleton's hand.
“I have come personally, sir, to pay my respects and, as one
representing the--ah--the old régime of our people, to bid you welcome
to our midst.”
“Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit
impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused.
“Won't you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?”
“I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out
of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott
had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward
edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his
posture with a stiff and stately investure.
Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This
personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a
book--an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted
shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels.
“He wasn't really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and
then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to
posterity. But Charlotte Brontë endowed him with his conversation.” What
Olcott said--aloud--was something fatuous and commonplace touching on
the state of the weather.
“I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your
sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate
you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of
journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of
your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which,
therefore, I assume you are responsible.”
“Well,” said Olcott, “we try to get out a reasonably live sheet.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Van Nicht, “but I do not refer to the aspect of
your news columns. I am speaking with reference to a feature lately
appearing in your Sunday edition, in what I believe is known as your
magazine section. I have observed that, beginning two weeks ago, you
inaugurated a department devoted to the genealogies of divers of our
older and more distinguished American families. As I recall, the
subjects of your first two articles were the Adams family, of
Massachusetts, and the Lee family, of Virginia. It may interest you to
know, sir--I trust indeed that it may please you to know--that I,
personally, am most highly pleased that you should seek to inculcate in
the minds of our people, through the medium of your columns, a knowledge
of those strains of blood to which our nation is particularly indebted
for much of its culture, much of its social development, many of its
gentler and more graceful influences. It is a most worthy movement
indeed, a most commendable undertaking. I repeat, sir, that I
congratulate you upon it.”
“Thank you,” said Olcott. “This coming Sunday we are going to run a yarn
about the Gordon family, of Georgia, and after that I believe come the
Clays, of Kentucky.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The names you have mentioned
are names that are permanently embalmed in the written annals of our
national life. But may I ask, sir, whether you have taken any steps as
yet to in-corporate into your series an epitome of the achievements
of the family of which I have the honour to be the head--the Van Nicht
family?”
“Well, you see,” explained Olcott apologetically, “these articles are
not written here in the office. They are sent to us in proof sheets as a
part of our regular feature service, and we run 'em just as they come to
us. Probably--probably”--he hesitated a moment over the job of phrasing
tactfully his white lie--“probably a story on your family genealogy will
be coming along pretty soon.”
“Doubtlessly so, doubtlessly so.” The assent was guilelessly emphatic.
“In any such symposium, in any such compendium, my family, beyond
peradventure, will have its proper place in due season. Nevertheless,
foreseeing that in the hands of a stranger the facts and the dates
might unintentionally be confused or wrongly set down, I have taken upon
myself the obligation of preparing an accurate account of the life and
work of my illustrious, heroic and noble ancestor, Colonel Cecilius
Jacob Van Nicht, together with a more or less elaborate _résumé_ of the
lives of his descendants up to and including the present generation.
This article is now completed. In fact I have it upon my person.”
Carefully he undid the top button of his coat and reached for an inner
breast pocket. “I shall be most pleased to accord you my full permission
for its insertion in an early issue of your publication.” He spoke with
the air of one bestowing a gift of great value.
Olcott's practised eye appraised the probable length of the manuscript
which this volunteer contributor was hauling forth from his bosom and,
inside himself, Olcott groaned. There appeared to be a considerable
number of sheets of foolscap, all closely written over in a fine, close
hand.
“Thank you, Mr. Van Nicht, thank you very much,” said Olcott, searching
his soul for excuses. “But I'm afraid we aren't able to pay much for
this sort of matter. What I mean to say is we are not in a position
to invest very heavily in outside offerings. Er--you see most of our
specials--in fact practically all of them except those written here
in the office by the staff--come to us as part of a regular syndicate
arrangement.”
Here Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, attained the physically
impossible. He erected his spine straighter than before and stiffened
his body a mite stiffer than it had been.
“Pray do not misunderstand me, sir,” he stated solemnly. “I crave no
honorarium for this work. I expect none. I have considered it a duty
incumbent upon me to prepare it, and I regard it as a pleasure to tender
it to you, gratis.”
“But--I'd like to be able to offer a little something anyway--”
“One moment, if you please! Kindly hear me out! With me, sir, this has
been a labour of love. Moreover, I should look upon it as an impropriety
to accept remuneration for such work. To me it would savour of the
mercenary--would be as though I sought to capitalise into dollars and
cents the reputation of my own people and my own stock. I trust you get
my viewpoint?”
“Oh, yes, indeed”--Olcott was slightly flustered--“very creditable of
you, I'm sure. Er--is it very long?”
“No longer than a proper appreciation of the topic demands.” The old
gentleman spoke with firmness. “Also you may rely absolutely upon the
trustworthiness and the accuracy of all the facts, as herein recited.
I had access to the papers left by my own revered grandfather, Judge
Cecilius Van Nicht, 2d, son and namesake of the founder of our line,
locally. I may tell you, too, that in preparing this compilation I was
assisted by my sister, Miss Rachael Van Nicht, a lady of wide reading
and no small degree of intellectual attainment, although leading a life
much aloof from the world--in fact, almost a cloistered life.”
He arose, opened out the sheaf of folded sheets, pressed them flat with
a caressing hand and laid them down in front of Olcott. He spoke now
with authority, almost in the tone of a superior giving instructions
regarding a delicate matter to an underling:
“I feel warranted in the assumption that you will not find it necessary
to alter or curtail my statements in any particular. I have had some
previous experience in literary endeavours. In all modesty I may
say that I am no novice. A signed article from my pen, entitled The
Influence of the Holland--Dutch Strain Upon American Public Life, From
Peter Stuyvesant to Theodore Roosevelt, was published some years since
in the New York _Evening Post_, afterward becoming the subject of
editorial comment in the Springfield _Republican_, the Hartford
_Courant_ and the Boston _Transcript_. At present I am engaged in a
brief history of one of our earlier presidents, the Honourable Martin
Van Buren. I have the honour to bid you a very good day, sir.”
Olcott ran the story in his next Sunday issue but one. It stretched
the full length of two columns and invaded a third. It was tiresome and
long-winded. It was as prosy as prosy could be. To make room for it a
smartly done special on the commercial awakening of Schuyler County was
crowded out. Olcott's judgment told him he did a sinful thing, but he
ran it. He went further than that. Into the editorial page he slipped a
paragraph directing attention to “Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht's timely
and interesting article, appearing elsewhere in this number.”
He had his reward, though, in the comments of sundry ones of his local
subscribers. From these comments, made to him by letter and by word of
mouth, he sensed something of the attitude of the community toward
the Van Nicht family. As he figured, this sentiment was a compound of
several things. It appeared to embody a gentle intolerance for the shell
of social exclusiveness in which the present bearers of the name had
walled themselves up, together with a sympathy for their poverty and
their self-imposed state of lonely and neglected aloofness, and
still further down, underlying these emotions and tincturing them, an
understanding and an admiration for the importance of this old family as
an old family--an admiration which was genuine and avowed on the part of
some, and just as genuine but more or less reluctantly bestowed on the
part of others. It was as Mayor McGlynn had informed Olcott on their
first meeting. The Van Nichts were not so much individuals, having a
share in the life of this thriving, striving, overgrown town, as they
were historical fixtures and traditional assets. Collectively, they
constituted something to be proud of and sorry for.
Soon, too, he had further reward. One afternoon a small and grimy boy
invaded his room, without knocking, and laid a note upon his desk.
“Old guy downstairs, with long hair and a gimpy leg, handed me this yere
and gimme fi' cents to fetch it up here to you,” stated the messenger.
The note was from Mr. Van Nicht, as a glance at the superscription told
Olcott before he opened the envelope. In formal terms Olcott was thanked
for giving the writer's offering such prominence in the pages of his
valuable paper and was invited, formally, to call upon the undersigned
at his place of residence, in order that undersigned might more fully
express to Mr. Olcott his sincere appreciation.
On the whole, Olcott was glad of the opportunity to view the inside
of that gloomy old house under the big tree out at the end of Putnam
Street. He wanted to see more of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, and
to see something of the other two dwellers beneath that ancient roof.
Olcott had dreams of some day writing a novel; some day when he had the
time. Most newspaper men do have such dreams; or else it is a play they
are going to write. Meanwhile, pending the coming of that day, he was
storing up material for it in his mind. Assuredly the bleached-out,
pale, old recluse in the black stock would make copy. Probably his
sisters would be types also, and they might make copy too. Olcott
answered the note, accepting the invitation for that same evening.
It was a night of crystal-clear moonlight, and Olcott walked up Putnam
Street through an alchemistic radiance which was like a path for a Puck
to dance along. But the shimmering aisle broke off short, when he had
turned in at the broken gate and had come to the edge of the shade of
the Van Nicht elm. Under there the shadow lay so thick and dense that,
as he groped through it to the small entry porch, finding the way by the
feel of his feet upon the irregular, flagged walk, he had the conviction
that he might reach out with his hands and gather up folds of the
darkness in his arms, like ells of black velvet. The faint glow which
came through a curtained front window of the unseen house was like a
phosphorescent smear, plastered against a formless background, and only
served to make the adjacent darkness darker still. If the moonlight
yonder was a fit place for the fairies to trip it, this particular spot,
he thought, must be reserved for ghosts to stalk in.
Fumbling with his hands, he searched out the heavy door knocker. Its
resounding thump against its heel plate, as he dropped it back in place,
made him jump. At once the door opened. Centred in the oblong of dulled
light which came from an oil lamp burning upon a table, behind and
within, appeared the slender, warped figure of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van
Nicht, 4th. With much ceremony the head of the house bowed the guest in
past the portals.
Almost the first object to catch Olcott's eye, as he stepped in, was a
portrait which, with its heavy frame, filled up a considerable portion
of the wall space across the back breadth of the square hallway into
which he had entered. Excepting for this picture and the table with the
oil lamp upon it and a tall hat-tree, the hall was quite bare.
Plainly pleased that the younger man's attention had been caught by the
painted square of canvas, Mr. Van Nicht promptly turned up the wick of
the light, and then Olcott, looking closer, saw staring down at him the
close-set black eyes and the heavy-jowled, foreign-look-ing face of an
old man, dressed in such garb as we associate with our conceptions of
Thomas Jefferson and the elder Adams.
“My famous forbear, sir,” stated Olcott's host, with a great weight of
vanity in his words, “the original bearer of the name which I, as his
great-grandson, have the honour, likewise, of bearing. To me, sir, it
has ever been a source of deep regret that there is no likeness
extant depicting him in his uniform as a regimental commander in the
Continental armies. If any such likeness existed, it was destroyed
prior to the colonel's removal to this place, following the close of the
struggle for Independence. This portrait was executed in the later years
of the original's life--presumably about the year 1798, by order of his
son, who was my grandfather. It was the son who enlarged this house, by
the addition of a wing at the rear, and to him also we are indebted for
the written records of his father's gallant performances on the field of
honour, as well as for the accounts of his many worthy achievements in
the lines of civic endeavour. Naturally this portrait and those records
are our most precious possessions and our greatest heritages.
“The first Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was by all accounts a great scholar
but not a practised scribe. The second of the name was both. Hence our
great debt to him--a debt which I may say is one in which this community
itself shares.”
“I'm sure of it,” said Olcott.
“And now, sir, if you will be so good, kindly step this way,” said Mr.
Van Nicht. “The light, I fear, is rather indifferent. This house has
never been wired for electricity, nor was it ever equipped with gas
pipes. I prefer to use lights more in keeping with its antiquity and its
general character.”
His tone indicated that he did not in the least hold with the vulgarised
and common utilities of the present. He led the way diagonally across
the hall to a side door and ushered Olcott into what evidently was the
chief living room of the house. It was a large, square room, very badly
lighted with candles. It was cluttered, as Olcott instantly perceived,
with a jumble of dingy-appearing antique furnishings, and it contained
two women who, at his appearance, rose from their seats upon either side
of the wide and empty fireplace. Simultaneously his nose informed him'
that this room was heavy with a pent, dampish taint.
He decided that what it mainly needed was air and sunshine, and plenty
of both.
“My two sisters,” introduced Mr. Van Nicht. “Miss Rachael Van Nicht, Mr.
Olcott. Miss Harriet Van Nicht, Mr. Olcott.”
Neither of the two ladies offered her hand to him. They bowed primly,
and Olcott bowed back and, already feeling almost as uncomfortable as
though he had invaded the privacy of a family group of resident shades
in their resident vault, he sat down in a musty-smell-ing armchair near
the elder sister.
Considered as such, the conversation which followed was not
unqualifiedly a success. The brother bore the burden of it, which meant
that at once it took on a stiff and an unnatural and an artificial
colouring. It was dead talk, stuffed with big words, and strung with
wires. There were semioccasional interpolations by Olcott, who continued
to feel most decidedly out of place. Once in a while Miss Rachael Van
Nicht slid a brief remark into the grooves which her brother channelled
out. Since he was called upon to say so little, Olcott was the better
off for an opportunity to study this lady as he sat there.
His first look at her had told him she was of the same warp and texture
as her brother; somewhat skimpier in the pattern, but identical in the
fabric. Olcott decided though that there was this difference: If the
brother had stepped out of Dickens, the sister had escaped from between
the hasped lids of an old daguerreotype frame. Her plain frock of some
harsh, dead-coloured stuff--her best frock, his intuition told him--the
big cameo pin at her throat, the homely arrangement of her grey hair,
her hands, wasted and withered-looking as they lay on her lap, even her
voice, which was lugubriously subdued and flat--all these things helped
out the illusion. Of the other sister, sitting two-thirds of the way
across the wide room from him, he saw but little and he heard less. The
poor light, and the distance and the deep chair in which she had sunk
herself, combined to blot her out as a personality and to efface her
from the picture. She scarcely uttered a word.
As Olcott had expected beforehand, the talk dealt, in the main, with the
Van Nicht family, which is another way of saying that it went back of
and behind, and far beyond, all that might be current and timely and
pertinent to the hour. There was no substance to it, for it dealt with
what had no substance. As he stayed on, making brave pretense of being
interested, he was aware of an interrupting, vaguely irritating sound
at his rear and partly to one side of him. Patently the sound was coming
from without. It was like a sustained and steady scratching, and it had
to do, he figured, with one of the window openings. He took a glance
over his shoulder, but he couldn't make out the cause; the window was
too heavily shrouded in faded, thick curtains of a sad, dark-green
aspect. The thing got on his nerves, it persisted so. Finally he was
moved to mention it.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, taking advantage of a pause, “but isn't
somebody or something fumbling at the window outside?”
“It is a bough of the family elm,” explained Mr. Van Nicht. “One of the
lower boughs has grown forward and downward, until it touches the side
of the house. When stirred by the breeze it creates the sound which you
hear.” Internally Olcott shivered. Now that the explanation had been
vouchsafed the noise made him think of ghostly fingers tapping at the
glass panes--as though the spirit of the tree craved admittance to the
dismal circle of these human creatures who shared with it the tribal
glory.
“Don't you find it very annoying?” he asked innocently. “I should think
you would prune the limb back.” He halted then, realising that his
tongue had slipped. There was a little silence, which became edged and
iced with a sudden hostility.
“No human hand has ever touched the tree to denude it of any part of its
majestic beauty,” stated Mr. Van Nicht with a frigid intonation. “Whilst
any of this household survives to protect it, no human hand ever shall.”
From the elder sister came a murmur of assent.
The conversation had sagged and languished before; after this it sank
to a still lower level and gradually froze to death. After possibly ten
minutes more of the longest and bleakest minutes he ever recalled having
weathered, Olcott, being mentally chilled through, got up and, making a
show of expressing a counterfeit pleasure of having been accorded this
opportunity of meeting those present, said really he must be going now.
In their places Miss Rachael Van Nicht and her brother rose, standing
stiff as stalagmites, and he knew he was not forgiven. It was the
younger sister who showed him out, preceding him silently, as he betook
himself from the presence of the remaining two.
Close up, in the better light of the hall, Olcott for the first time
perceived that Miss Harriet Van Nicht was not so very old. In fact, she
was not old at all. He had assumed somehow that she must be sered and
soured and elderly, or at least that she must be middle-aged. With this
establishment he could not associate any guise of youth as belonging.
But he perceived how wrong he had been. Miss Harriet Van Nicht most
assuredly was not old. She could not be past thirty, perhaps she was not
more than twenty-five or six. It was the plain and ugly gown she wore, a
dun-coloured, sleazy, shabby gown, which had given her, when viewed from
a distance, the aspect of age--that and the unbecoming way in which she
wore her hair slicked back from her forehead and drawn up from round her
ears. She had fine eyes, as now he saw, with a plaintive light in them,
and finely arched brows and a delicate oval of a face; and she was small
and dainty of figure. He could tell that, too, despite the fit of the
ungraceful frock.
At the outer door, which she held ajar for his passage, she spoke, and
instantly he was moved by a certain wistfulness in her tones.
“It was a pleasure to have you come to see us, Mr. Olcott,” she said,
and he thought she meant it too. “We see so few visitors, living here
as we do. Sometimes I think it might be better for us if we kept more
in touch with people who live in the outside world and know something of
it.”
“Thank you, Miss Van Nicht,” said Olcott, warming. “I'm afraid, though,
I made a rather unfortunate suggestion about the tree. Really, I'm very
sorry.”
Her face took on a gravity; almost a condemning expression came into it.
And when she answered him it was in a different voice.
“A stranger could not understand how we regard the Van Nicht elm,” she
said. “No stranger could understand! Good night, Mr. Olcott.”
At the last she had made him feel that he was a stranger. And she had
not shaken hands with him either, nor had she asked him to call again.
He made his way out, through the black magic of the tree's midnight
gloom, into the pure white chemistry of the moonlight; and having
reached the open, he looked back. Except for that faint luminous
blotch, like smeared phosphorus, showing through the blackness from
beyond the giant tree, nothing testified that a habitation of living
beings might be tucked away in that drear hiding place. He shrugged his
shoulders as though to shake a load off them and, as he swung down
the silvered street in the flawless night, his thoughts thawed out. He
decided that assuredly two of the Van Nichts must go into the book which
some day, when time served, he meant to write.
They belonged in a book--those two poor, pale, sapless creatures,
enduring a grinding poverty for the sake of a vain idolatry; those joint
inheritors of a worthless and burdensome fetish, deliberately preferring
the shadow of a mouldy past for the substance of the present day. Why,
the thing smacked of the Oriental. It wasn't fit and sane for white
people--this Mongolian ancestor-worship which shut the door and drew
the blind to every healthy and vigorous impulse and every beneficent
impulse. Going along alone, Olcott worked himself into quite a brisk
little fury of impatience and disgust.
He had it right--they belonged in a book, those two older Van Nichts,
not in real life. And into a book they should go--into his book. But the
younger girl, now. It was a pitiable life she must lead, hived up there
in that musty old house under that terrific big tree with those two grim
and touchy hermits. On her account he resented it. He tried to picture
her in some more favourable setting. He succeeded fairly well too.
Possibly, though, that was because Olcott had the gift of a brisk
imagination. At times, during the days which followed, the vision of
Harriet Van Nicht, translated out of her present decayed environment,
persisted in his thoughts. He wondered why it did persist.
Nearly a month went by, during which he saw no member of that weird
household. One day he encountered upon the street the brother and went
up to him and, rather against the latter's inclination, engaged him in
small talk. It didn't take long to prove that Mr. Van Nicht had very
little small talk in stock; also that his one-time air of distant and
punctilious regard for the newspaper man had entirely vanished. Mr. Van
Nicht was courteous enough, with an aloof and stand-away courteousness,
but he was not cordial. Presently Olcott found himself speaking, from
a rather defensive attitude, of his own ancestry. He came of good New
England stock--a circumstance which he rarely mentioned in company, but
which now, rather to his own surprise, he found himself expounding at
some length. Afterward he told himself that he had been merely casting
about for a subject which might prove congenial to Mr. Van Nicht and
had, by chance, hit on that one.
If such were the care, the expedient failed. It did not in the least
serve to establish them upon a common footing. The old gentleman
listened, but he refused to warm up; and when he bade Olcott good day
and limped off, he left Olcott profoundly impressed with the conviction
that Mr. Van Nicht did not propose to suffer any element of familiarity
to enter into their acquaintanceship. Feeling abashed, as though he had
been rebuked after some subtle fashion for presumption and forwardness,
Olcott dropped into the handiest bar and had a drink all by
himself--something he rarely did. But this time he felt that the social
instinct of his system required a tonic and a bracer.
Within the next day or two chance gave him opportunity for still further
insight into the estimation in which he was held by other members of the
Van Nicht family. This happened shortly before the close of a cool and
showery July afternoon. Leaving his desk, he took advantage of a lull
in the rain to go for a solitary stroll before dinner. He was briskly
traversing a side street, well out of the business district, when
suddenly the downpour started afresh. He pulled up the collar of his
light raincoat and turned back to hurry to the Hotel Brain-ard, where
he lived. Going in the opposite direction a woman pedestrian, under an
umbrella, met him; she was heading right into the slanting sheets of
rain. In a sidelong glance he recognised the profile of the passer,
and instantly he had faced about and was alongside of her, lifting his
soaked hat.
“How d'you do, Miss Van Nicht?” he was saying. “I'm afraid you'll make
poor headway against this rainstorm. Won't you let me see you safely
home?”
It was the younger Miss Van Nicht. Her greeting of him and her smile
made him feel that for the moment at least he would not be altogether
an unwelcome companion. As he fell in beside her, catching step with her
and taking the umbrella out of her hands, he noted with a small throb of
pity that her cheap dark skirt was dripping and that the shoes she wore
must be insufficient protection, with their thin soles and their worn
uppers, against wet weather. He noted sundry other things about her:
Seen by daylight she was pretty--undeniably pretty. The dampness had
twisted little curls in her primly bestowed hair, and the exertion of
her struggle against the storm had put a becoming flush in her cheeks.
“I was out on an errand for my sister,” she said. “I thought I could
get home between showers, but this one caught me. And my umbrella--I'm
afraid it is leaky.”
Undeniably it was. Already the palm of Olcott's hand was sopping where
water, seeping through open seams along the rusted ribs, had run down
the handle. Each new gust, drumming upon the decrepit cloth, threatened
to make a total wreck of what was already but little better than the
venerable ruin of an umbrella.
“You must permit me to see you home then,” he said. He glanced up and
down, hoping to see a cab or a taxi. But there was no hireable vehicle
in sight and the street cars did not run through this street. “I'm
afraid, though, that we'll have to go afoot.”
“And I'm afraid that I am taking you out of your way,” she said. “You
were going in the opposite direction, weren't you, when you met me?”
“I wasn't going anywhere in particular,” he lied gallantly; “personally
I rather like to take a walk when it's raining.”
For a bit after this neither of them spoke, for the wind all at once
blew with nearly the intensity of a small hurricane, buffeting thick
rain spray into their faces and spattering it up about their feet. She
seemed so small--so defenceless almost, bending forward to brace herself
against its rude impetuosity. He was mighty glad it was his hand which
clasped her arm, guiding and helping her along; mighty glad it was he
who held the leaky old umbrella in front of her and with it fended off
some part of the rain from her. They had travelled a block or two so, in
company, when the summer storm broke off even more abruptly than it had
started. There was an especially violent spatter of especially large
drops, and then the wind gave one farewell wrench at the umbrella and
was gone, tearing on its way.
In another half minute the setting sun was doing its best to shine out
through a welter of shredding black clouds. There were wide patches
of blue in the sky when they turned into Putnam Street and came within
sight of the Van Nicht elm, rising as a great, green balloon at the head
of it. By now they were chatting upon the basis--almost--of a seasoned
acquaintanceship. Olcott found himself talking about his work. When a
young man tells a young woman about his work, and is himself interested
as he tells it, it is quite frequently a sign that he is beginning to be
interested in something besides his work, whether he realises it yet or
not. And in Miss Van Nicht he was pleased to discern what he took to be
a sympathetic understanding, as well as a happy aptness and alertness in
the framing of her replies. It hardly seemed possible that this was the
second time they had exchanged words. Rather it was as though they had
known each other for a considerable period; so he told himself.
But as, side by side, they turned in at the rickety gate of the
ancestral dooryard and came under the shadow of the ancestral tree,
her manner, her attitude, her voice, all about her seemed to undergo
a change. Her pace quickened for these last few steps, and she cast a
furtive, almost an apprehensive glance toward the hooded windows of the
house.
“I'm afraid I am late--my sister and my brother will be worrying about
me,” she said a little nervously. “And I am sorry to have put you to all
this trouble on my account.”
“Trouble, Miss Van Nicht? Why, it was--”
“I shan't ask you in,” she said, breaking in on him. “I know you
will want to be getting back to the hotel and putting on dry clothes.
Good-by, Mr. Olcott, and thank you very much.”
And with that she had left him, and she was hurrying up the porch steps,
and she was gone, without a backward look to where he stood, puzzled and
decidedly taken aback, in the middle of the seamed flags of the walk.
He was nearly at the gate when he discovered that he had failed to
return her umbrella to her; so he went back and knocked at the door. It
was the elder sister who answered. She opened the door a scant foot.
“How do you do, sir?” she said austerely.
“I forgot to give your sister her umbrella,” explained Olcott.
“So I perceive,” she replied, speaking through the slit with a kind of
sharp impatience, and she took it from him. “'Thank you! We are most
grateful to you for your thoughtfulness.”
She waited then, as if for him to speak, providing he had anything to
say--her posture and her expression meanwhile most forcibly interpreting
the attitude in which he must understand that he stood here. It
was plain enough to be sensed. She resented--they all resented--his
reappearance in any rôle at the threshold of their home. She was
profoundly out of temper with him and all that might pertain and
appertain to him. So naturally there was nothing for him to say except
“Good evening,” and he said it.
“Good evening,” she said, and as he bowed and backed away she closed the
door.
Outside the fence he halted and looked about him, then he looked back
over the gapped and broken palings. Everywhere else the little world of
Putnam Street had a washed, cleansed aspect; everywhere else nearly the
sun slid its flattened rays along the refreshed and moistened sod and
touched the wayside weeds with pure gold; but none of its beams slanted
over the side hill and found a way beneath the interlaced, widespread
bulk of the family tree. He saw how forlornly the lower boughs, under
their load of rain water, drooped almost to the earth, and how the naked
soil round about the vast trunk of it was guttered with muddy, yellow
furrows where little torrents had coursed down the slope, and how
poisonously vivid was the mould upon the trunk. The triangular scar in
its lower bark showed as a livid greenish patch. Still farther back in
the shadow the outlines of the old grey house half emerged, revealing
dimly a space of streaked walls and the sodden, warped shingles upon one
outjut-ting gable of the peaked roof.
“It's not an honest elm,” thought Olcott to himself in a little
impotent rage. “It's a cursed devil tree, a upas tree, overshadowing
and blighting everything pleasant and wholesome that might grow near
it. Bats and owls and snails belong back there--not human beings. There
ought to be a vigilance committee formed to chop it down and blast its
roots out of the ground with dynamite. Oh, damn!”
In his pocket he had a letter from the presiding deity of the
organisation that owned the string of papers of which the paper he
edited was a part. In that letter he was invited to consider the
proposition of surrendering his present berth with the Schuylerville
_News-Ledger_ and going off to Europe, as special war correspondent for
the syndicate. He had been considering the project for two days now.
All of a sudden he made up his mind to accept. While the heat of his
petulance and disappointment was still upon him, he went that same
evening and wired his acceptance to headquarters. Two days later, with
his credentials in his pocket and a weight of sullen resentment against
certain animate and inanimate objects in his heart, he was aboard a
train out of Schuylerville, bound for New York, and thereafter, by
steamer, for foreign parts.
He was away, concerned with trenches, gas bombs, field hospitals and
the quotable opinions of sundry high and mighty men of war-craft and
statecraft, for upwards of a year. It was a most remarkably busy year,
and the job in hand claimed jealous sovereignty of his eyes, his legs
and his brain, while it lasted.
He came back, having delivered the goods to the satisfaction of his
employers, to find himself promoted to a general supervision of the
editorial direction of the papers in his syndicate, with a thumping good
salary and a roving commission. He willed it that the first week of his
incumbency in his new duties should carry him to Schuylerville. In his
old office, which looked much the same as it had looked when he occupied
it, he found young Morgan, his former assistant, also looking much
the same, barring that now Morgan was in full charge and giving orders
instead of taking them. Authority nearly always works a change in a man;
it had in this case.
“Say, Olcott,” said Morgan after the talk between them had ebbed and
flowed along a little while, “you remember that old geezer, Van Nicht,
don't you? You know, the old boy who wrote the long piece about his
family, and you ran it?”
“Certainly I do,” said Olcott. “Why--what of him?”
Instead of answering him directly, Morgan put another question:
“And of course you remember the old Van Nicht house, under that big,
whopping elm tree, out at the end of Putnam Street, where he used to
live with those two freakish sisters of his?”
“Where he used to live? Doesn't he--don't they--live there now?”
“Nope--tree's gone and so is the house.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“Gone out of existence--vamoosed. Here's what happened, and it's a
peach of a tale too: One night about six months ago there came up a hard
thunderstorm--lots of lightning and gobs of thunder, not to mention
rain and wind a plenty. In the midst of it a bolt hit the Van Nicht
elm--ker-flewie--and just naturally tore it into flinders. When I saw
it myself the next day it was converted from a landmark into the biggest
whisk broom in the world. The neighbours were saying that it rained
splinters round there for ten minutes after the bolt struck. I guess
they didn't exaggerate much at that, because--”
“Was the house struck too? Was anybody hurt?” Olcott cut in on him.
“No, the house escaped somehow--had a few shingles ripped off the roof,
and some of its windows smashed in by flying scraps; that was all. And
nobody about the place suffered anything worse than a stunning. But the
fright killed the older sister--Miss Rachael. Anyhow, that's what the
doctors think. She didn't have a mark on her, but she died in about an
hour, without ever speaking. I guess it was just as well, too, that she
did. If she had survived the first shock I judge the second one would
just about have finished her.”
“The second shock? You don't mean the lightning?”
“No, no!” Morgan hastened to explain.
“Lightning never plays a return date--never has need to, I take it. I
mean the shock of what happened after daylight next morning.
“That was the queerest part of the whole thing--that was what made a
really big story out of it. We ran two columns about it ourselves, and
the A. P. carried it for more than a column.
“After the storm had died down and it got light enough to see, some of
the neighbours were prowling round the place sizing up the damage. Right
in the heart of the stump of the elm, which was split wide open--the
stump, I mean--they found a funny-looking old copper box buried in
what must have been a rot-ted-out place at one time, maybe ninety or
a hundred years ago. But the hollow had grown up, and nobody ever had
suspected that the tree wasn't solid as iron all the way through, until
the lightning came along and just naturally reached a fiery finger down
through all that hardwood and probed the old box out of its cache and,
without so much as melting a hinge on it, heaved it up into sight, where
the first fellow that happened along afterward would be sure to see it.
Well, right off they thought of buried treasure, but being honest they
called old Van Nicht out of the house, and in his presence they opened
her up--the box I mean--and then, lo and behold, they found out that all
these years this town had been worshipping a false god!
“Yes, sir, the great and only original Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht was a
rank fake. He was as bogus as a lead nickel. There were papers in the
box to prove what nobody, and least of all his own flesh and blood,
ever suspected before. He wasn't a hero of the Revolution. He wasn't a
colonel under George Washington. He wasn't of Holland-Dutch stock. His
name wasn't even Van Nicht. His real name was Jake Nix--that's what it
was, Nix--and he was just a plain, everyday Hessian soldier--a mercenary
bought up, along with the other Hessians, and sent over here by King
George to fight against the cause of liberty, instead of for it.
“As near as we can figure it out, he changed his name after the war
ended, before he moved here to live, and then after he died--or anyhow
when he was an old man--his son, the second Cecilius Jacob, concocted
the fairy tale about his father's distinguished services and all the
rest of it. The son was the one, it seems, who capitalised the false
reputation of the old man. He lived on it, and all the Van Nichts who
came after him lived on it too--only they were innocent of practising
any deception on the community at large, and the second Van Nicht
wasn't. It certainly put the laugh on this town, not to mention the
local aristocracy, and the D. A. R.'s and the Colonial Dames and the
rest of the blue bloods generally, when the news spread that morning.
“Oh, there couldn't be any doubt about it! The proofs were all right
there and dozens of reliable witnesses saw them--letters and papers and
the record of old Nix's services in the British army. In fact there
was only one phase of the affair that has remained unexplained and
a mystery. I mean the presence of the papers in the tree. Nobody can
figure out why the son didn't destroy them, when he was creating such a
swell fiction character out of his revered parent. One theory is that
he didn't know of their existence at all--that the old man, for reasons
best known to himself, hid them there in that copper box and that then
the tree healed up over the hole and sealed the box in, with nobody but
him any the wiser, and nobody ever suspecting anything out of the way,
but just taking everything for granted. Why, it was exactly as if the
old Nix had come out of the grave after lying there for a century or
more, to produce the truth and shame his own offspring, and incidentally
scare one of his descendants plumb to death.”
“What a tragedy!” said Olcott. But his main thought when he said it was
not for the dead sister but for the living.
“You said it,” affirmed Morgan. “That's exactly what it was--a tragedy,
with a good deal of serio-comedy relief to it. Only there wasn't
anything very comical about the figure the old man Van Nicht cut when he
came walking into this office here about half past ten o'clock that day,
with a ragged piece of crêpe tied round his old high hat. Olcott, you
never in your life saw a man as badly broken up as he was. All his
vanity, all his bumptiousness was gone--he was just a poor, old, shabby,
broken-spirited man. I'd already gotten a tip on the story and I'd sent
one of my boys out to find him and get his tale, but it seemed he'd told
the reporter he preferred to make a personal statement for publication.
And so here he was with his statement all carefully written out and
he asked me to print it, insisting that it ought to be given as wide
circulation as possible. I'll dig it up for you out of the files in a
minute and let you see it.
“Yes, sir, he'd sat down alongside his sister's dead body and written
it. He called it A Confession and an Apology, and I ran it that way,
just as he'd written it. It wasn't very long, but it was mighty pitiful,
when you took everything into consideration. He begged the pardon of
the public for unwittingly practicing a deceit upon it all through his
life--for living a lie, was the way he phrased it--and he signed it
'Jacob Nix, heretofore erroneously known as Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht,
4th.' That signature was what especially got me when I read it--it made
me feel that the old boy was literally stripping his soul naked before
the ridicule of this town and the ridicule of the whole country. A
pretty manly, straightforward thing, I called it, and I liked him better
for having done it than I ever had liked him before.
“Well, I told him I would run the card for him and I did run it, and
likewise I toned down the story we carried about the exposure too. I'm
fairly well calloused, I guess, but I didn't want to bruise the old
man and his sister any more than I could help doing. But, of course, I
didn't speak to him about that part of it. I did try, in a clumsy sort
of way, to express my sympathy for him. I guess I made a fairly sad hash
of it, though. There didn't seem to be any words to fit the situation.
Or, if there were, I couldn't think of them for the moment. I remember I
mumbled something about letting bygones be bygones and not taking it too
much to heart and all that sort of thing.
“He thanked me, and then, as he started to go, he stopped and asked
me whether by any chance I knew of any opening--any possible job for
a person of his age and limitations. I remember his words: 'It is high
time that I was casting about to find honourable employment, no matter
how humble. I have been trading with a spurious currency for too long.
I have spent my life in the imposition of a monumental deceit upon this
long-suffering community. I intend now, sir, to go to work to earn a
living with my own hands and upon my own merits. I wish to atone for the
rôle I have played.'
“It may have been imagination, but I thought there was a kind of faint
hopeful gleam in his eye as he looked at me and said this; and he seemed
to flinch a little bit when I broke the news to him that we didn't have
any vacancies on the staff at present. I sort of gathered that he rather
fancied he had literary gifts. Literary gifts? Can't you just see that
poor, forlorn old scout piking round soliciting want ads at twenty cents
a line or trying to cover petty assignments on the news end? I told him,
though, I'd be on the lookout for something for him, and he thanked me
mighty ceremoniously and limped out, leaving me all choked up. Two days
later, after the funeral, he telephoned in to ask me not to trouble
myself on his account, because he had already established a connection
with another concern which he hoped would turn out to be mutually
advantageous and personally lucrative; or words to that effect.
“So I did a little private investigating that evening and I found out
where the old chap had connected. You see I was interested. A live wire
named Garrison, who owned the state rights for selling the World's Great
Classics of Prose and Poetry on subscriptions, had landed here about
a week before. You know the kind of truck this fellow Garrison was
peddling? Forty large, hard, heavy volumes, five dollars down and a
dollar a month as long as you live; no blacksmith's fireside complete
without the full set; should be in every library; so much for the full
calf bindings; so much for the half leather; give your little ones a
chance to acquire an education at a trifling cost; come early and
avoid the rush of those seeking to take advantage of this unparalleled
opportunity; price positively due to advance at the end of a limited
period; see also our great clubbing offer in conjunction with Bunkem's
Illustrated Magazine--all that sort of guff.
“Well, Garrison had opened up headquarters here. He'd brought some of
his agents with him--experts at conning the simple peasantry and the
sturdy yeomanry into signing on the dotted line A and paying down the
first installment as a binder; but he needed some home talent to
fill out his crew, and he advertised with us for volunteers. Old Van
Nicht--Nix, I mean--had heard about it, and he had applied for a job as
canvasser, and Garrison had taken him on, not on salary, of course, but
agreeing to pay him a commission on all his sales. That was what I found
out that night.”
Before Olcott's eyes rose a vision of a dried-up, bleak-eyed old man
limping from doorstep to doorstep, enduring the rebuffs of fretful
housewives and the insolence of annoyed householders--a failure, and a
hopeless, predestined failure at that.
“Too bad, wasn't it?” he said.
“What's too bad?” asked Morgan.
“About that poor old man turning book agent at his age, with his lack of
experience with the ways of the world.”
“Save your pity for somebody that needs it,” said Morgan, grinning.
“That old boy doesn't. Why, Olcott, he was a hit from the first minute.
This fellow Garrison was telling me about him only last week. All that
stately dignity, all that Sir Walter Raleigh courtesy stuff, all that
faculty for using the biggest possible words in stock, was worth money
to the old chap when he put it to use. It impressed the simple-minded
rustic and the merry villager. It got him a hearing where one of
these gabby young canvassers with a striped vest and a line of patter
memorised out of a book would be apt to fail. Why, he's the sensation
of the book-agent game in these parts. They sick him on to all the
difficult prospects out in the country, and he makes good nine times out
of ten. He's got four counties in his territory, with all expenses
paid, and last month his commissions--so Garrison told me--amounted to a
hundred and forty dollars, and this month he's liable to do even better.
What's more, according to Garrison, the old scout likes the work and
isn't ashamed of it. So what do you know about that?”
As Morgan paused, Olcott asked the question which from the first of this
recital had been shaping itself in the back part of his head: “The other
sister--what became of her?” He tried to put a casual tone into his
inquiry.
“You mean Miss Harriet? Well, say, in her case the transformation was
almost as great as it was in her brother's. She came right out of her
shell, too--in fact, she seemed downright glad of a chance to come out
of it and quit being a recluse. She let it be noised about that she was
in the market for any work that she could do, and a lot of people who
felt sorry for her, including Mayor McGlynn, who's a pretty good
chap, interested themselves in her behalf. Right off, the school board
appointed her a substitute teacher in one of the lower grammar grades at
the Hawthorne School, out here on West Frobisher Street. She didn't
lose any time in delivering the goods either. Say, there must have
been mighty good blood in that family, once it got a real chance to
circulate. The kiddies in her classes all liked her from the start, and
the other teachers and the principal liked her, too, and when the fall
term begins in October she goes on as a regular.
“On top of that, when she'd got a little colour in her cheeks and had
frizzed her hair out round her face, and when she'd used up her first
month's pay in buying herself some good black clothes, it dawned on the
town all of a sudden that she was a mighty good-looking, bright, sweet
little woman instead of a dowdy, sour old maid. They say she never had
a sweetheart before in her life--that no man ever had looked at her the
second time; at least that's the current gossip. Be that as it may, she
can't complain on that score any more, even if she is still in mourning
for her sister.”
“How do you know all this?” demanded Olcott suspiciously. “Are you
paying her attentions yourself?”
“Who, me? Lord, man, no! I'm merely an innocent bystander. You see, we
live at the same boarding house, take our meals at the same table in
fact, and I get a chance to see what's going on. She came there to
board--it's Mrs. Gale's house--as soon as she moved out of the historic
but mildewed homestead, which was about a month after the night of the
storm. The New Diamond Auto Company--that's a concern formed since you
left--bought the property and tore down the old house, after blasting
the stump of the family tree out of the ground with giant powder;
they're putting up their assembling plant on the site. After the
mortgage was satisfied and the back taxes had been paid up, there was
mighty little left for the two heirs; but about that time Miss Harriet
got her job of teaching and she came to Mrs. Gale's to live, and that's
where I first met her. Two or three spry young fellows round town are
calling on her in the evenings--nearly every night there's some fellow
in the parlour, all spruced up and highly perfumed, waiting to see
her--not to mention one or two of the unmarried men boarders.”
“Morgan,” said Olcott briskly, “do me a favour! Take me along with you
to dinner tonight at your boarding place, will you?”
“Tired of hotels, eh?” asked Morgan. “Well, Mrs. Gale has good home
cooking and I'd be glad to have you come.”
“That's it,” said Olcott; “I'm tired of hotel life.”
“You're on,” said Morgan.
“Yes,” said Olcott, “I am--but you're not on--at least not yet.” But
Morgan didn't hear that, because Olcott said it to himself.