KENT KNOWLES: QUAHAUG
By Joseph C. Lincoln
1914
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Which is not a chapter at all
II. Which repeats, for the most part, what Jim Campbell said to me and
what I said to him
III. Which, although it is largely family history, should not be skipped
by the reader
IV. In which Hephzy and I and the Plutonia sail together
V. In which we view, and even mingle slightly with, the upper classes
VI. In which we are received at Bancroft's Hotel and I receive a letter
VII. In which a dream becomes a reality
VIII. In which the pilgrims become tenants
IX. In which we make the acquaintance of Mayberry and a portion of
Burgleston Bogs
X. In which I break all previous resolutions and make a new one
XI. In which complications become more complicated
XII. In which the truth is told at last
XIII. In which Hephzy and I agree to live for each other
XIV. In which I play golf and cross the channel
XV. In which I learn that all abbeys are not churches
XVI. In which I take my turn at playing the invalid
XVII. In which I, as well as Mr. Solomon Cripps, am surprised
XVIII. In which the pilgrimage ends where it began
XIX. Which treats of quahaugs in general
KENT KNOWLES: QUAHAUG
CHAPTER I
Which is Not a Chapter at All
It was Asaph Tidditt who told me how to begin this history. Perhaps I
should be very much obliged to Asaph; perhaps I shouldn't. He has gotten
me out of a difficulty--or into one; I am far from certain which.
Ordinarily--I am speaking now of the writing of swashbuckling
romances, which is, or was, my trade--I swear I never have called it
a profession--the beginning of a story is the least of the troubles
connected with its manufacture. Given a character or two and a
situation, the beginning of one of those romances is, or was, pretty
likely to be something like this:
“It was a black night. Heavy clouds had obscured the setting sun and
now, as the clock in the great stone tower boomed twelve, the darkness
was pitchy.”
That is a good safe beginning. Midnight, a stone tower, a booming clock,
and darkness make an appeal to the imagination. On a night like that
almost anything may happen. A reader of one of my romances--and
readers there must be, for the things did, and still do, sell to some
extent--might be fairly certain that something WOULD happen before the
end of the second page. After that the somethings continued to happen as
fast as I could invent them.
But this story was different. The weather or the time had nothing to do
with its beginning. There were no solitary horsemen or strange wayfarers
on lonely roads, no unexpected knocks at the doors of taverns, no
cloaked personages landing from boats rowed by black-browed seamen with
red handkerchiefs knotted about their heads and knives in their
belts. The hero was not addressed as “My Lord”; he was not “Sir
Somebody-or-other” in disguise. He was not young and handsome; there was
not even “a certain something in his manner and bearing which hinted of
an eventful past.” Indeed there was not. For, if this particular yarn or
history or chronicle which I had made up my mind to write, and which I
am writing now, had or has a hero, I am he. And I am Hosea Kent Knowles,
of Bayport, Massachusetts, the latter the village in which I was born
and in which I have lived most of the time since I was twenty-seven
years old. Nobody calls me “My Lord.” Hephzy has always called me
“Hosy”--a name which I despise--and the others, most of them, “Kent” to
my face and “The Quahaug” behind my back, a quahaug being a very common
form of clam which is supposed to lead a solitary existence and to
keep its shell tightly shut. If anything in my manner had hinted at a
mysterious past no one in Bayport would have taken the hint. Bayporters
know my past and that of my ancestors only too well.
As for being young and handsome--well, I was thirty-eight years old last
March. Which is quite enough on THAT subject.
But I had determined to write the story, so I sat down to begin it. And
immediately I got into difficulties. How should I begin? I might begin
at any one of a dozen places--with Hephzy's receiving the Raymond and
Whitcomb circular; with our arrival in London; with Jim Campbell's visit
to me here in Bayport; with the curious way in which the letter reached
us, after crossing the ocean twice. Any one of these might serve as a
beginning--but which? I made I don't know how many attempts, but not
one was satisfactory. I, who had begun I am ashamed to tell you how many
stories--yes, and had finished them and seen them in print as well--was
stumped at the very beginning of this one. Like Sim Phinney I had
worked at my job “a long spell” and “cal'lated” I knew it, but here
was something I didn't know. As Sim said, when he faced his problem, “I
couldn't seem to get steerage way on her.”
Simeon, you see--He is Angeline Phinney's second cousin and lives in
the third house beyond the Holiness Bethel on the right-hand side of the
road--Simeon has “done carpentering” here in Bayport all his life. He
built practically every henhouse now gracing or disgracing the backyards
of our village. He is our “henhouse specialist,” so to speak. He has
even been known to boast of his skill. “Henhouses!” snorted Sim; “land
of love! I can build a henhouse with my eyes shut. Nowadays when another
one of them foolheads that's been readin' 'How to Make a Million Poultry
Raisin'' in the Farm Gazette comes to me and says 'Henhouse,' I say,
'Yes sir. Fifteen dollars if you pay me cash now and a hundred and
fifteen if you want to wait and pay me out of your egg profits. That's
all there is to it.'”
And yet, when Captain Darius Nickerson, who made the most of his money
selling fifty-foot lots of sand, beachgrass and ticks to summer
people for bungalow sites--when Captain Darius, grown purse-proud and
vainglorious, expressed a desire for a henhouse with a mansard roof and
a cupola, the latter embellishments to match those surmounting his own
dwelling, Simeon was set aback with his canvas flapping. At the end of
a week he had not driven a nail. “Godfrey's mighty!” he is reported to
have exclaimed. “I don't know whether to build the average cupola and
trust to a hen's fittin' it, or take an average hen and build a cupola
round her. Maybe I'll be all right after I get started, but it's where
to start that beats me.”
Where to start beat me, also, and it might be beating me yet, if I
hadn't dropped in at the post-office and heard Asaph Tidditt telling
a story to the group around the stove. After he had finished, and,
the mail being sorted, we were walking homeward together, I asked a
question.
“Asaph,” said I, “when you start to spin a yarn how do you begin?”
“Hey?” he exclaimed. “How do I begin? Why, I just heave to and go to
work and begin, that's all.”
“Yes, I know, but where do you begin?”
“At the beginnin', naturally. If you was cal'latin' to sail a boat race
you wouldn't commence at t'other end of the course, would you?”
“_I_ might; practical people wouldn't, I suppose. But--what IS the
beginning? Suppose there were a lot of beginnings and you didn't know
which to choose.”
“Oh, we-ll, in that case I'd just sort of--of edge around till I found
one that--that was a beginnin' of SOMETHIN' and I'd start there. You
understand, don't you? Take that yarn I was spinnin' just now--that one
about Josiah Dimick's great uncle's pig on his mother's side. I mean
his uncle on his mother's side, not the pig, of course. Now I hadn't no
intention of tellin' about that hog; hadn't thought of it for a thousand
year, as you might say. I just commenced to tell about Angie Phinney,
about how fast she could talk, and that reminded me of a parrot
that belonged to Sylvanus Cahoon's sister--Violet, the sister's name
was--loony name, too, if you ask ME, 'cause she was a plaguey sight
nigher bein' a sunflower than she was a violet--weighed two hundred and
ten and had a face on her as red as--”
“Just a minute, Ase. About that pig?”
“Oh, yes! Well, the pig reminded me of Violet's parrot and the parrot
reminded me of a Plymouth Rock rooster I had that used to roost in the
pigpen nights--wouldn't use the henhouse no more'n you nor I would--and
that, naturally, made me think of pigs, and pigs fetched Josiah's
uncle's pig to mind and there I was all ready to start on the yarn. It
pretty often works out that way. When you want to start a yarn and you
can't start--you've forgot it, or somethin'--just begin somewhere, get
goin' somehow. Edge around and keep edgin' around and pretty soon you'll
fetch up at the right place TO start. See, don't you, Kent?”
I saw--that is, I saw enough. I came home and this morning I began the
“edging around” process. I don't seem to have “fetched up” anywhere in
particular, but I shall keep on with the edging until I do. As Asaph
says, I must begin somewhere, so I shall begin with the Saturday morning
of last April when Jim Campbell, my publisher and my friend--which is
by no means such an unusual combination as many people think--sat on the
veranda of my boathouse overlooking Cape Cod Bay and discussed my past,
present and, more particularly, my future.