Which Treats of Quahaugs in General
Asaph Tidditt helped me to begin this long chronicle of a quahaug's
pilgrimage. Perhaps it is fitting that Asaph should end it. He dropped
in for a call the other afternoon and, as I had finished my day's
“stunt” at the desk, I assisted in entertaining him. Frances was in the
sitting-room also and Hephzy joined us soon afterward. Mr. Tidditt had
stopped at the post-office on his way down and he had the Boston morning
paper in his hand. Of course he was filled to the brim with war news. We
discuss little else in Bayport now; even the new baby at the parsonage
has to play second fiddle.
“My godfreys!” exclaimed Asaph, as soon as he sat down in the rocking
chair and put his cap on the floor beneath it. “My godfreys, but they're
havin' awful times over across, now ain't they. Killin' and fightin' and
battlin' and slaughterin'! It don't seem human to me somehow.”
“It is human, I'm afraid,” I said, with a sigh. “Altogether too human.
We're a poor lot, we, humans, after all. We pride ourselves on our
civilization, but after all, it takes very little to send us back to
savagery.”
“That's so,” said Asaph, with conviction. “That's true about everybody
but us folks in the United States. We are awful fortunate, we are. We
ain't savages. We was born in a free country, and we've been brought up
right, I declare! I beg your pardon, Mrs. Knowles; I forgot you wasn't
born in Bayport.”
Frances smiled. “No apology is needed, Mr. Tidditt,” she said. “I
confess to having been born a--savage.”
“But you're all right now,” said Asaph, hastily, trying to cover his
slip. “You're all right now. You're just as American as the rest of us.
Kent, suppose this war in Europe is goin' to hurt your trade any? It's
goin' to hurt a good many folks's. They tell me groceries and such like
is goin' way up. Lucky we've got fish and clams to depend on. Clams
and quahaugs'll keep us from starvin' for a spell. Oh,” with a chuckle,
“speakin' of quahaugs reminds me. Did you know they used to call your
husband a quahaug, Mrs. Knowles? That's what they used to call him round
here--'The Quahaug.' They called him that 'count of his keepin' inside
his shell all the time and not mixin' with folks, not toadyin' up to the
summer crowd and all. I always respected him for it. _I_ don't toady to
nobody neither.”
Hephzy had come in by this time and now she took a part in the
conversation.
“They don't call him 'The Quahaug' any more,” she declared, indignantly.
“He's been out of his shell more and seen more than most of the folks in
this town.”
“I know it; I know it. And he's kept goin' ever since. Runnin' to
New York, he and you,” with a nod toward Frances, “and travelin' to
Washin'ton and Niagary Falls and all. Wonder to me how he does as much
writin' as he does. That last book of yours is sellin' first-rate, they
tell me, Kent.”
He referred to the novel I began in Mayberry. I have rewritten and
finished it since, and it has had a surprising sale. The critics seem to
think I have achieved my first genuine success.
“What are you writin' now?” asked Asaph. “More of them yarns about
pirates and such? Land sakes! when I go by this house nights and see a
light in your library window there, Kent, and know you're pluggin' along
amongst all them adventures, I wonder how you can stand it. 'Twould give
me the shivers. Godfreys! the last time I read one of them yarns--that
about the 'Black Brig' 'twas--I hardly dast to go to bed. And I DIDN'T
dast to put out the light. I see a pirate in every corner, grittin' his
teeth. Writin' another of that kind, are you?”
“No,” I said; “this one is quite different. You will have no trouble in
sleeping over this one, Ase.”
“That's a comfort. Got a little Bayport in it? Seems to me you ought to
put a little Bayport in, for a change.”
I smiled. “There is a little in this,” I answered. “A little at the
beginning, and, perhaps, at the end.”
“You don't say! You ain't got me in it, have you? I'd--I'd look kind of
funny in a book, wouldn't I?”
I laughed, but I did not answer.
“Not that I ain't seen things in my life,” went on Asaph, hopefully. “A
man can't be town clerk in a live town like this and not see things. But
I hope you won't put any more foreigners in. This we're readin' now,”
rapping the newspaper with his knuckles, “gives us all we want to know
about foreigners. Just savages, they be, as you say, and nothin' more. I
pity 'em.”
I laughed again.
“Asaph,” said I, “what would you say if I told you that the English and
French--yes, and the Germans, too, though I haven't seen them at home as
I have the others--were no more savages than we are?”
“I'd say you was crazy,” was the prompt answer.
“Well, I'm not. And you're not very complimentary. You're forgetting
again. You forget that I married one of those savages.”
Asaph was taken aback, but he recovered promptly, as he had before.
“She ain't any savage,” he announced. “Her mother was born right here in
Bayport. And she knows, just as I do, that Bayport's the best place in
the world; don't you, Mrs. Knowles?”
“Yes,” said Frances, “I am sure of it, Mr. Tidditt.”
So Asaph went away triumphantly happy. After he had gone I apologized
for him.
“He's a fair sample,” I said. “He is a quahaug, although he doesn't know
it. He is a certain type, an exaggerated type, of American.”
Frances smiled. “He's not much worse than I used to be,” she said. “I
used to call America an uncivilized country, you remember. I suppose
I--and Mr. Heathcroft--were exaggerated types of a certain kind of
English. We were English quahaugs, weren't we?”
Hephzy nodded. “We're all quahaugs,” she declared. “Most of us, anyhow.
That's the trouble with all the folks of all the nations; they stay in
their shells and they don't try to know and understand their neighbors.
Kent, you used to be a quahaug--a different kind of one--but that kind,
too. I was a quahaug afore I lived in Mayberry. That's who makes wars
like this dreadful one--quahaugs. We know better now--you and Frances
and I. We've found out that, down underneath, there's precious little
difference. Humans are humans.”
She paused and then, as a final summing up, added:
“I guess that's it: American or German or French or anything--nice folks
are nice folks anywhere.”
THE END