“They certainly are nice people,” I assented to my wife’s
observation, using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that
it was anything but “nice” English, “and I’ll bet that their three
children are better brought up than most of——”
“_Two_ children,” corrected my wife.
“Three, he told me.”
“My dear, she said there were _two_.”
“He said three.”
“You’ve simply forgotten. I’m _sure_ she told me they had only
two—a boy and a girl.”
“Well, I didn’t enter into particulars.”
“No, dear, and you couldn’t have understood him. Two children.”
“All right,” I said; but I did not think it was all right. As a
nearsighted man learns by enforced observation to recognize persons
at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so
the man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen
carefully and report accurately. My memory is bad; but I had
not had time to forget that Mr. Brewster Brede had told me that
afternoon that he had three children, at present left in the care
of his mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Brede took their summer
vacation.
“Two children,” repeated my wife; “and they are staying with his
aunt Jenny.”
“He told me with his mother-in-law,” I put in. My wife looked at me
with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they
are told about children; but any man knows the difference between
an aunt and a mother-in-law.
“But don’t you think they’re nice people?” asked my wife.
“Oh, certainly,” I replied. “Only they seem to be a little mixed up
about their children.”
“That isn’t a nice thing to say,” returned my wife. I could not
deny it.
* * * * *
And yet, the next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated
themselves opposite us at table, beaming and smiling in their
natural, pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew, to a social
certainty, that they were “nice” people. He was a fine-looking
fellow in his neat tennis-flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or
thirty years old, with a Frenchy pointed beard. She was “nice” in
all her pretty clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type
of prettiness which outwears most other types—the prettiness that
lies in a rounded figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white
teeth and black eyes. She might have been twenty-five; you guessed
that she was prettier than she was at twenty, and that she would be
prettier still at forty.
And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr.
Jacobus’s summer boarding-house on top of Orange Mountain. For a
week we had come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we
wasted the precious days of idleness with the company gathered
around the Jacobus board. What joy of human companionship was to
be had out of Mrs. Tabb and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged
gossips from Scranton, Pa.—out of Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, an indurated
head-bookkeeper and his prim and censorious wife—out of old Major
Halkit, a retired business man, who, having once sold a few shares
on commission, wrote for circulars of every stock company that was
started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen
to him? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful indices
of mean and barren minds, and decided that we would leave that
morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus’s biscuit, light as Aurora’s
cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late
azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone
our departure one more day. And then we wandered out to take our
morning glance at what we called “our view”; and it seemed to us as
if Tabb and Hoogencamp and Halkit and the Biggleses could not drive
us away in a year.
I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife
invited the Bredes to walk with us to “our view.” The
Hoogencamp-Biggle-Tabb-Halkit contingent never stirred off
Jacobus’s veranda; but we both felt that the Bredes would not
profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly across the fields,
passed through the little belt of woods and, as I heard Mrs.
Brede’s little cry of startled rapture, I motioned to Brede to look
up.
“By Jove!” he cried, “heavenly!”
We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles
of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale
blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns
and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and
hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and
mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. For silent it
was to us, standing in the silence of a high place—silent with a
Sunday stillness that made us listen, without taking thought, for
the sound of bells coming up from the spires that rose above the
tree-tops—the tree-tops that lay as far beneath us as the light
clouds were above us that dropped great shadows upon our heads
and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep of land at the
mountain’s foot.
“And so that is _your_ view?” asked Mrs. Brede, after a moment;
“you are very generous to make it ours, too.”
Then we lay down on the grass, and Brede began to talk, in a gentle
voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a
canoe, in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and
creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks,
and pointed out to us where the Passaic and the Hackensack flowed,
invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were
but combings of the green waves upon which we looked down. And yet,
on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of
villages—a little world of country life, lying unseen under our
eyes.
“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said; “there is such a
thing as getting so far above our fellow men that we see only one
side of them.”
Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter
and gossip of the Tabb and the Hoogencamp—than the Major’s
dissertations upon his everlasting circulars! My wife and I
exchanged glances.
“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn” Mr. Brede began.
“Why, dear,” interrupted his wife, “I didn’t know you ever went up
the Matterhorn.”
“It—it was five years ago,” said Mr. Brede, hurriedly. “I—I didn’t
tell you—when I was on the other side, you know—it was rather
dangerous—well, as I was saying—it looked—oh, it didn’t look at all
like this.”
A cloud floated overhead, throwing its great shadow over the field
where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain’s brow and
reappeared far below, a rapidly decreasing blot, flying eastward
over the golden green. My wife and I exchanged glances once more.
Somehow, the shadow lingered over us all. As we went home, the
Bredes went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I
walked together.
“_Should you think_,” she asked me, “that a man would climb the
Matterhorn the very first year he was married?”
“I don’t know, my dear,” I answered, evasively; “this isn’t the
first year I have been married, not by a good many, and I wouldn’t
climb it—for a farm.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.