task under conditions such as these, especially to a young couple
prematurely saddled with parental cares, and equipped with only twenty
days of experience in the matrimonial state. They discussed the
situation for hours on end. Mrs. Wick wept, and Mr. Wick contributed
more profanity than is generally used by a green husband. They even
asked the Irish nurse if she could not suggest some suitable place, and
they stated the whole situation to her very clearly and carefully. She
thought a while, and then suggested Ballymahon, County Longford,
Ireland. However, indirectly, she assisted them to solve the problem.
Mr. Wick told her to go to Jericho; and Mrs. Wick suddenly brightened up
and said:
“Why, that’s so, Winkelman!”
Mr. Wick stared in horror at his wife. Was the sweet young thing going
crazy under the strain? But no; Mrs. Wick was looking as bright as a
rose after an April shower, and she grew brighter and brighter as she
stood thinking in silence, nodding her pretty head affirmatively,
pursing her lips, and checking off the various stages of her thought
with her finger tip on her cheek. Finally she said:
“And you could use the little room for a dressing room. Yes, dear, I’m
quite certain it will do beautifully.”
After a while Mr. Wick convinced his wife that he was not a
mind-reader, and then he got some information. Of course she did not
stay convinced--no woman ever did. All women think that the mechanism of
their thought is visible like a model in a glass case.
Mrs. Wick had forgotten that she herself owned a country house. This was
more excusable than it seems on the face of it, for she had never seen
the house, nor had she ever expected to see it. In fact, it was hardly
to be called a house; it was only a sort of bungalow or pavilion which
had once belonged to a club of sportsmen, and which her father had taken
for a bad debt. It was situated in the village of Jericho, of which she
knew nothing more than that her father had said that it was a good place
for trout, and was accessible by several different railroads. Concerning
the house itself she was better informed. She had had to copy the plans
of its interior on many occasions when her guardian had made futile
efforts to sell or to rent it. She also knew that the place was fully
furnished, and that an old woman lived in it as care-taker, rent free,
and liable to be dispossessed at any moment.
The nurse was told that they would go to Jericho with her. She only
asked would the baby take her bottle now or wait till she got there?
* * * * *
Jericho Junction is one of those lonely and forsaken little
stopping-places on the outskirts of the great woods that are the
sportsman’s paradise, with a dreary, brown-painted, pine box, just big
enough for the ticket agent, the baggage master, the telegraph operator,
the flagman, the local postmaster, and the casual or possible intending
passenger. As this makes two persons in all, the structure is not large.
[Illustration]
The casual passenger and the full corps of local railway officials were
both present at Jericho Junction when the 6:30 P. M. train loomed out of
the dreary, raw May twilight, and drew up in front of the little box.
Now, these two occupants of the tiny station were neighbors but not
friends. Farmer Byam Beebe lived “a piece back in the country, over
t’wards Ellenville South Farms.” Mr. John D. Wilkins, station agent,
telegraph operator, and all the rest of the functionaries of Jericho
Junction, dwelt in his little box, midway between Ellenville South Farms
and the nearest important town, Bunker’s Mills, a considerable
manufacturing settlement. A houseless stretch of ten miles separated the
neighbors; but not even ten miles had stood between them and a grudge
of many years’ duration. Beebe hated Wilkins, and Wilkins hated Beebe.
Never mind why. They were close neighbors for that region; and that more
close neighbors do not kill each other testifies every day to the broad
spread of Christian charity.
[Illustration]
Mr. Beebe so hated Mr. Wilkins that he made it a regular practice to
stop at the station after his day’s work was done, to wait for this
particular train. Silent and unfriendly, he would loaf in the station
for an hour and a half, and the station master dared not put him out,
for he was possibly an intending passenger on the train as far as the
next flag-station, which was a railroad crossing a mile and a quarter
further on. Mr. Beebe never bought a ticket from Mr. Wilkins, on the
occasions when he did ride. He paid his way on the cars, five cents,
plus ten cents rebate-check, and this rebate-check he redeemed at Mr.
Wilkins’s office the next day. Furthermore, he made a point of going out
just before the train arrived, and waiting on the other side of it to
get in, so that Mr. Wilkins could not tell whether he boarded the train
or walked off through the thick woods that crowded down to the very edge
of the line.
Thus it happened that as the train arrived on the evening of the first
of May, Mr. Beebe, being on the farther side of the track from the
railroad station, saw an Irish nurse blunder helplessly off the platform
in front of him, holding a six months’ old baby in her arms, and stand
staring straight before her in evident bewilderment. Mr. Beebe accosted
her in all kindness:
“Your folks got off the other side, I guess. This here ain’t the right
side for nobody, only me.” Then he prodded the baby with a large and
horny finger. “How old will that young ’un be?” he inquired.
“Six months, sorr,” replied the nurse; “gahn on seven.”
“Is that so?” said Mr. Beebe, with polite affectation of interest.
“Folks been long married?”
“Wan month, sorr,” replied the nurse.
“_Which?_” inquired Mr. Beebe.
“Wan month, sorr,” replied the nurse.
* * * * *
On the other side of the train of cars, station agent John D. Wilkins
saw an old-fashioned carryall drive up, conducted by an elderly woman of
austere demeanor. She was dressed in black alpaca, and her look was
stern and severe, and, necessarily, highly respectable. He saw a young
man and a young woman descend from the train, and saw the young man hand
the young woman into the carryall behind the elderly lady. Then, as the
young man turned as though to look for some one following him, he heard
the young woman say:
[Illustration]
“Winkelman, dear, I don’t care _what_ her age is, you _must_ spank your
aunt!”
* * * * *
When Mr. John D. Wilkins heard what he heard, he forgot the rules of the
railroad company, according to which he should have remained on the
platform until the train had left. He knew that just at 6:30 his
particular crony, Mr. Hiram Stalls, telegraph operator at Bunker’s
Mills, and news-gatherer for the Bunker’s Mills _Daily Eagle_, went off
duty in his telegraphic capacity, and became an unalloyed journalist. He
caught Mr. Stalls in the act of saying goodnight, and he talked to him
over the wire in dot and dash thus:
“That you, Hi? Meet me at the station when the 7:21 gets in. I’ve got a
news item for you that will make the _Eagle_ scream this trip, sure.”
If Mr. Wilkins had not been so zealous in breaking his employer’s rules
in the interest of personal journalism, he would have heard the young
man thus enjoined to inflict humiliating punishment upon a parent’s
sister, respond to this cruel counsel in these words:
“It will only make her cry more;--why, where the deuce is the brat,
anyway?”
[Illustration]
Moreover, he would have seen Mr. Beebe pilot an Irish nurse and a
bundled-up baby around the rear of the train, and then jump on the
platform as the cars started, with all the vigor and energy which the
possession of a real mean story about a fellow human being can impart to
the most aged and stiffened limbs. But he didn’t. What would become of
the gossip business if those engaged in it stopped to find things out?
* * * * *
When Cæsar expressed a preference for being the first man in a village,
over a second-fiddle job in Rome, he probably never reflected how much
it would rile him if he should happen to find out that there was just
as big a man in the next village who didn’t know Cæsar from a
cheese-cake; yet that is the poor limitation of local bigness. Great is
Mr. Way in Wayback, and great is Mr. Hay in Hayville; but what is Mr.
Way in Hayville, and what is Mr. Hay in Wayback? Two nothings, two
casual strangers, with no credit, with no say-no, two mere chunks of
humanity whose value to the community is strictly proportionate to the
size of their greenback wads, and the laxity or tenacity of their
several grips thereon.
At nine o’clock that night two local Cæsars, in two towns but a score of
miles from each other, donned the ermine of power, waved the sceptre of
authority, and told their pale-faced but devoted followers that
“SOMETHING had got to be done about IT.”
The “IT,” of course, was an “OUTRAGE”--it always is when something has
got to be done about it, and the something generally means just about
nothing.
In the front parlor of his large mansard-roof residence, Mr. Bodger--Mr.
Theophilus Scranton Bodger, prominent manufacturer, pillar of the
Church, candidate for the mayoralty, and general all around magnate and
muldoon of Bunker’s Mills, sat amid surroundings of much elegance, black
walnut, gilt, plush and hand-painted tidies, and slapping a broad palm
with a burly fist, told Mr. Stalls, Mr. Wilkins and Mrs. Bodger that
something had got to be done about it.
At the same moment, in the Sunday School room of the Baptist Church in
Ellenville South Farms, Mr. Manfred Lusk Hackfeather, theological
student, Sunday School superintendent, social leader and idol of the
ladies in Ellenville South Farms, told six fluttering feminine things,
who gazed at him in affectionate awe, that something had got to be done
about it.
[Illustration]
Mr. Bodger’s business was making socks. Mr. Hackfeather may have been
wearing a pair of socks of Mr. Bodger’s make at that very instant, yet
had he never heard of Bodger; nor did Mr. Bodger know that any part of
his growing business was built up on the money of a man named
Hackfeather.
* * * * *
To say that a party of Brooklyn people, conducted in an old-fashioned
carryall, by an elderly woman of austere demeanor, entered the deep pine
wood in a chilled twilight of early Spring certainly ought to convey an
impression of gloom. And certainly gloom of the deepest enshrouded the
beginning of that ride. Diligent inquiry elicited from the elderly woman
that she was, as the Wicks supposed, Miss Hipsy, the care-taker; that
she had received their telegram, or she wouldn’t have been there nohow;
that she had had a contrack with the late owner of the premises; that
she had lived up to it, whatever other people hed or hedn’t done; that
what she had done she would do, and that if she was not satisfactory to
other parties, or if other parties was not satisfactory to her, which
was most likely to be the case, she was willin’, as far as she was
concerned, to take herself off just as soon as she could; that she
thanked Providence she had folks in Ellenville she could go to, as
respectable as some, that she could go to and no obligations to nobody,
and that she was not aware that her contrack called for no general
conversation.
Now this extremely discouraging way and manner of Miss Hipsy’s was
entirely general and impersonal, like dampness or a close smell in a
long unused house. Congenitally sub-acid, a failure to accomplish any
sort of an early or late love affair had completely soured her, and many
years of solitude had put a gray-green coating of mildew over her moral
nature. But the Wicks did not know this, and, remembering their peculiar
position, it made them feel extremely uncomfortable.
But the moon came out in the soft Spring sky, and the mists of the
evening rolled away, and a great silvery radiance wrapped the
cathedral-like spires and pinnacles of the broad spreading pine forest,
and, after awhile, the rough corduroy road grew smoother, and the baby
stopped crying and went to sleep, and they were all, except Miss Hipsy,
beginning to nod off just a little when the wheels crunched on a
driveway of white pebbles, and they looked up to see a spacious low
building standing out black against the sky, except where a half a dozen
brightly lit windows winked at them like friendly eyes.
This was the bungalow, and here they found a sportsman’s supper of cold
meat and ale awaiting them. Miss Hipsy told them, by way of leaving no
doubt of the unfriendliness of her intentions, that this refection was
provided for in the contract. So, also, must have been the deliciously
soft beds in which they were presently all fast asleep, even to the
baby. And when a traveling baby will sleep, anybody else can.
[Illustration]
In the morning the elder Wicks opened their eyes on a world of
wonderment and bewilderment. They found themselves living in a
well-appointed and commodious club-house, on the banks of a broad and
beautiful lake, across which other similar structures with pretty, low,
peaked roofs looked at them in neighborly fashion from the other side.
Mrs. Wick said that it was too nice for anything.
There was nothing mysterious about the surprise which the Wicks had
found awaiting them. Sportsmen have a habit of referring to their
possessions in a depreciatory way. They call a comfortable club-house a
“box” or a “bungalow” or a “shack,” and they make nothing of calling a
costly hotel a “camp.” Indeed, they seem to try to impart a factitious
flavor of profanity by christening such structures, whenever they can,
“Middle Dam Camp” or “Upper Dam Camp.” And since Mrs. Wick’s father’s
club had died out, the further side of Jericho Pond had become a
fashionable resort, maintaining two or three Winter and Summer
Sanitariums.
Thanks to the contract, they made an excellent breakfast, and their
praises of the fare mollified Miss Hipsy to some slight extent. Then
they remembered the baby, and after some search they found the Irish
nurse walking it up and down on a broad sunny terrace at the back of the
house. Below stretched an old-fashioned garden, full of homely, pleasant
flowers and simples just beginning to show their buds to the tempting
month of May.
The scene was so pleasant that Mr. and Mrs. Wick started out for a walk,
and the walk was so pleasant that they prolonged it,--prolonged it until
they reached the settlement on the other side of the lake, and the
people there were so pleasant that they staid to dinner at a club, and
did not get back till nearly supper-time.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
You will please observe that, so far as the members of the Wick family
are concerned, they stand as clear at this point as they did when we got
them down to bed-rock level, on the tenth of April, eighteen hundred and
tumty-tum. Their ways have been ways of pleasantness, and their paths
have been paths of peace. The two Wicks we are dealing with, like all
the other Wicks, have kept their engagements and filled their contract.
They have minded their own business and nobody else’s. They are, in
fact, all straight on the record.
But now we have to recount the fortunes of two social reformers, and it
is hard for a reformer to keep straight on the record. Whether they have
a genuine reform on their hands, like Martin Luther or the
Abolitionists, or whether they are like Mr. Harold Kettledrum Monocle,
of New York, who thinks that the Mayor of that city ought to be elected
by Harvard College, they are all likely to have what one might call a
mote-and-beam sort of time with their neighbors.
Thus did it happen with Mr. Bodger, of Bunker’s Mills, and with Mr.
Hackfeather, of Ellenville South Farms, who both found their way to
Jericho Pond that pleasant afternoon, the theological student a little
in advance of the business man. Mr. Hackfeather came to rebuke a
shocking case of impropriety in two so young; Mr. Bodger came to express
the sentiment of society at large toward a man who would inflict
corporal chastisement on a lady.
Terrible as with an army with banners, and consumed with the fire of
righteousness, Mr. Hackfeather bore down on the old-fashioned garden at
the back of the bungalow, in the full glory of the Spring afternoon. As
to his person, he was attired in a long, black diagonal frock-coat, worn
unbuttoned, and so well worn that its flaps waved in the wind with all
the easy grace of a linen duster. Trousers of the kind that chorus
together: “We are pants,” adorned his long, thin but heavily-kneed legs.
A shoestring necktie, a low cut waistcoat, and a whole-souled,
oh-be-joyful shirtfront added to this simple but harmonious effect, and
his last year’s hat had a mellow tone against the pale Springtime
greens. He tackled Miss Hipsy (who had so far relented from her
austerity as to take the baby while the nurse got dinner,) in that
old-fashioned garden; and the benign influences of budding nature had no
effect whatever upon his pious wrath. He pointed out the discrepancy in
the dates of the vital statistics of the Wick family, and he told Miss
Hipsy that she was
[Illustration]
the servant of sin, (who had been a respectable woman for forty-three
years, and if some as ought to know better said it was forty-seven there
was no truth in it,) that she was the slave of iniquity and abettor of
sin, (and if them she knowed of, one leastways, was alive to-day she
would not be insulted,) that the demon vice should not rear its hideous
head in that unpolluted community, (and she wasn’t rarin’ no heads, but
she could go to them she knowed of as could rare their heads as high as
him or any of his friends,) and that even if he, Mr. Hackfeather, had to
face all the minions of Satan, and all the retinue of the Scarlet Woman,
he would purify the stain or die in the attempt. Mr. Hackfeather’s
allusion to the Lady of Babylon probably was born of a mixed condition
of mind, and a desire to use forcible language. It did not seem clear to
him and it did not seem clear to Miss Hipsy, either. She said she was no
such a thing, and never expected to live to see the day she would be so
called, especially at her time of life. And, tearful and vociferous,
Miss Hipsy marched back to the bungalow, delivered over the baby to the
Irish nurse, packed her little old hair trunk with the round top,
dragged it down herself to the lakefront dock, and there sat on it in
stern grandeur until the afternoon boat came down the lake and took her
to Ellenville, presumably to the sheltering arms of them that she knowed
of.
Meanwhile, a thing she did not know of was happening on the other side
of the house in that same old-fashioned garden. Mr. Bodger, accompanied
by Mr. Stalls and Mr. Wilkins, had arrived from Bunker’s Mills to
interview the new arrival in the county, whose latitude in administering
corporal punishment had aroused the indignation of every humane heart
that had been made acquainted with the station master’s story. Mr.
Bodger saw the departure of the weeping woman of elderly aspect, he
heard her wails, and he saw their cause in a strange young man. This was
all the evidence that he wanted. Mr. Bodger made no inquiries into
identity or relationship. He weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, he
had three men behind him, and he fell upon Mr. Hackfeather as the
cyclone falls upon the chicken-coop.
* * * * *
The consequences of these two meetings were so far-reaching, extending
to warrants of arrest, counter charges, civil suits and much civiler
compromises, that it was July before the ladies of the Bodger and
Hackfeather families picked up their threads of social intercourse,
which were knotted only at one point. To both of them it occurred on a
fine Summer’s day to call on the new comers at the old bungalow by way
of seeing whether the innocent causes of so much dire mischief knew
anything about the agitation they had caused.
[Illustration]
As the train from Bunker’s Mills met the boat from Ellenville, Mr.
Bodger’s wife and Mr. Hackfeather’s mother arrived at the same time,
and, sitting in the sunny reception room of the bungalow, glared at each
other in chilly and silent hostility, while poor, innocent little Mrs.
Wick, much troubled by their strange behavior, tried to talk to both of
them at once, and rattled away in her embarrassment until she had talked
a great deal more than she had meant to. She told them all the story of
Beatrice Brighton Wick, and the will, and the hurried flight to Jericho,
and at their surprise at finding Jericho Pond with its Summer and Winter
colony so delightful a place that they hardly felt as if they could
tear themselves away from it when the four years were up. And she told
them that both she and Mr. Wick had thought it might be quite awkward
for so newly married a couple to be traveling with a six month’s old
baby, and that baby Mr. Wick’s aunt.
[Illustration]
“But, do you know,” she said, “we must have been over-sensitive about
it, for we never had the first least little bit of trouble. Indeed, the
only mishap we had was the other way. The old woman who was in charge of
the place here left us suddenly the first day without a word of warning.
I couldn’t make out why she was dissatisfied, but my nurse, Nora, told
me that she thought that Miss Hipsy thought that the baby was too young.
Some people have such an objection to young babies, you know. However,
it didn’t the least bit matter, for Nora turned out to be a very good
cook, and I took the baby. I wanted to learn, you know.”
WHAT MRS. FORTESCUE DID.
Right in the rear of the First Congregational Church of ’Quawket, and
cornerwise across the street, the Old Ladies’ Home of Aquawket sits on
the topmost of a series of velvety green terraces. It is a quiet street;
the noisiest thing in it, or rather over it, is the bell in the church
steeple, and that is as deep toned and mellow as all church bells ought
to be and few church bells are. As to the Old Ladies’ Home, itself, it
looks like the veritable abode of peace. A great wistaria clambers over
its dull brown stucco walls. Beds of old-fashioned flowers nod and sway
in the chastened breezes on its two sunny sides, and thick clumps of
lilacs and syringas shield it to the north and east. Dainty little
dimity curtains flutter at the open windows all Summer long; and,
whether it comes from the immaculately neat chambers of the old ladies,
or from some of the old-fashioned flower beds, there is always, in warm
weather, a faint smell of lavender floating down upon the breeze to the
passer-by in the quiet street. You would never dream, to look at it,
that the mad, inhuman, pitiless strife and fury of an Old Ladies’ Home
raged ceaselessly, year after year, within those quiet walls.
[Illustration]
Now suppose that every wasp in a certain wasp’s nest had an individual
theology of its own, totally different from the theology of any other
wasp, and that each one personally conducted his theology in the real
earnest calvinistic spirit--you would call that wasp’s nest a pretty
warm, lively, interesting domicile, would you not? Well, it would be a
paradise of paralysis alongside of an Old Ladies’ Home. If you want to
get at the original compound tincture of envy, malice and all
uncharitableness, go to a nice, respectable Old Ladies’ Home with a list
of “Lady Patronesses” as long as your arm, and get the genuine article
in its most highly concentrated form.
There were eleven inmates of the ‘Old Ladies’ Home of Aquawket, besides
the matron, the nurse, the cook, and a couple of “chore-girls.” These
two last led a sort of life that came very near to qualifying them for
admission to the institution on a basis of premature old age. Of the
real old ladies in the home, every one of the eleven had a bitter and
undying grievance against at least one, and, possibly, against ten of
her companions, and the only thing that held the ten oldest of the band
together was the burning scorn and hatred which they all felt for the
youngest of the flock, Mrs. Williametta Fortescue, who signed what few
letters she wrote “Willie,” and had been known to the world as “Billy”
Fortescue when she sang in comic opera and wore pink tights.