Chadwick Caufield
Chadwick Caufield, the other member of our household, who was present
on the Desert Moon Ranch at the time of the first murder, came only
two years ago last October.
It was away past bedtime, after ten o’clock, but the radio was
brand-new then, and we were all sitting up, listening to a fine
program given by the Hoot Owls in Portland, Oregon, when the doorbell
rang. Sam answered it. Chad stepped in.
He was wearing white corduroy trousers, a long, yellow rubber
raincoat, and a straw hat tethered to its buttonhole with a string. He
was carrying a ukulele under his arm and a camera in his hand. He took
off his hat, displaying a head full of pretty yellow curls. He smiled,
displaying a sweet, gentle disposition. (If there is any better index
to character than the way a person smiles, I have never found it.)
“How do you do?” he said. “I have come to visit you.”
By the time Sam got his pipe picked up, John had got down the
forty-feet length of living-room and had Chad by both hands, and was
introducing him as the friend he had told us about, the friend he had
made at Mather’s Field, during the war.
The way of that was, John had saved his life for him down there, and
had never since been able to get out from under the responsibility of
it. John had found a job for him, after the armistice, and when Chad
lost it, John had loaned him money to start out in a vaudeville act.
He did fine with that for three years, and was making good money on
the Orpheum circuit, when he got into an automobile accident in Kansas
City and was laid up for months in the hospital there. He went back to
work sooner than he should have, and spent three months in an Oakland
hospital with influenza. John had wired money to him there, and had
asked him, again, to come for a visit to the Desert Moon. But, since
he had had a standing invitation for years, and since he had sent no
word that he was coming, John was as much surprised as any of us that
evening.
He had walked over, he explained, from Winnemucca, a distance of a
couple of hundred miles. He had had money to buy a ticket no further
than Winnemucca. He had had a job there, for a while, dish-washing—a
fine job he made of it, I’ll warrant—and had used his earnings to get
into a solo game, hoping to win enough money to pay for his ticket. He
had lost his money, his watch, his coat, vest, and shirt. The landlady
at Winnemucca, he said, wanted his trunk worse than he did; and,
anyway, he never argued with ladies. She had allowed him to take the
raincoat—a raincoat in this part of Nevada being about as much use to
anybody as a life preserver to a trout—and the funny straw hat—he had
worn both in his vaudeville act—and the ukulele. Who wouldn’t be glad
to let anyone who wanted to take a ukulele anywhere, take it? The
camera he had found on the road between Shoshone and Palisade. He had
named it, “Unconscious Sweetness,” and called it “Connie” for short,
and he was always plum daffy about it, taking expected and unexpected
pictures of all of us at all hours and in all places, and pasting them
in big albums with jokes and such written underneath.
It is hard to give a fair description of Chad. He was a little,
pindling fellow. Around Sam and John and Hubert Hand he looked about
as dainty and trifling as the garnish around the platter of the
Thanksgiving turkey. He seemed kind of like that, too; like the extra
bit of garnishing that makes life’s platter prettier and
nicer—absolutely useless, maybe, but never cluttery.
Until after he came, I had not realized how little real laughing any
of us had done. We had been happy enough, and content; but we had
never been much amused. He amused us. He made us laugh. He took the
mechanical player off the old grand piano, and played it as we had
never before heard it played. He spoke pieces and sang funny songs
until we held our sides with laughing. He was a ventriloquist, and a
mimic besides. He could imitate all of our voices to a T.
He had been with us about a week before any of us knew that. I was in
the kitchen, one day, when I heard someone come into the butler’s
pantry.
“Mary,” Sam’s voice called from there, “you are fired. Bounced. You
haven’t made a cake in two days, nor doughnuts in three. You are
getting too lazy and worthless for the Desert Moon——”
I tottered; but, just before I fainted clear away, here came that
grinning little ape, dancing and kicking his heels in an airy-fairy
dance, but still speaking in that gentle, drawling voice of Sam’s.
I laughed until I had to sit down and lean on the table. I begged him,
then, not to give it away for a few days; and the fun he and I had,
for the next week, would make a book in itself.
Martha adored him. He played with her by the hour. He made two dolls,
Mike and Pat, for her, and he would let them sit on her knees while he
made them talk for her. He had to treat her as he would treat a child,
of course; but he managed, what the rest of us did not always manage,
to treat her as if she were a good, sensible child, not too young to
be polite to. Chad had the nicest manners of any man I have ever
known.
At the end of November, when he began to talk about leaving, Sam
offered him a hundred and fifty a month to stay on. He said, like
Hubert Hand had said, “What for?”
“For living,” Sam said.
Chad laughed and shook his head.
“Double it, then,” Sam urged. “I wouldn’t have you leave the place,
and Martha, for three hundred a month; so why shouldn’t I pay it to
have you stay?”
Chad never would take any regular money from Sam. But he stayed on and
got what he needed, such as clothes, and razor blades and films for
Connie, and had them charged to Sam’s accounts. He called himself the
“Perpetual Guest—P. G.” for short, but some of the others said it
stood for “Pollyanna Gush” and called him “Polly” to twit him.
Pollyanna may not be literature, I don’t know; but a person of that
nature is most uncommonly pleasant to have around the house.
The only time I ever felt any differently about Chad was right after
Sam broke the news to the assembled household that we were to be
visited by a couple of lady twins from Switzerland. Chad began, then,
to practise a new song about “sleep, little baby,” and to permit the
most ear-splitting sounds to issue from the back of his throat. He
called it yodeling; and said that yodeling was Switzerland’s chief
export, and that he was practising up to make the ladies feel at home.
I declare, it nearly drove me out of my wits. A disturbing element,
they were, you see, from the very first.