They changed from steamer to railroad; about eleven in the morning they
stepped out at West Skipsit, Cape Cod. Uncle Joe Tubbs and Mrs. Tubbs
were driving up, in a country buggy. Father and Mother filled their
nostrils with the smell of the salt marshes, their ears with the long
murmur of the mile-distant surf, their eyes with the shine of the great
dunes and the demure peace of a New England white cottage standing among
firs and apple-trees--scent and sound and sight of their freedom.
"Father, we're here!" Mother whispered, her eyes wet. Then, "Oh, do be
careful of that box. There's a hat there that's going to make Matilda
Tubbs catch her death from envy!"
To the Tubbses, though they were cynical with a hoary wisdom in regard
to New-Yorkers and summerites and boarders in general, the annual coming
of the Applebys was welcome as cider and buttered toast--yes, they even
gave Father and Mother the best chamber, with the four-poster bed and
the mirror bordered with Florida shells, at a much reduced rate. They
burrowed into their grim old hearts as Uncle Joe Tubbs grubbed into the
mud for clams, and brought out treasures of shy affection.
As soon as they reached the Tubbs farm-house the two women went off
together to the kitchen, while the men sneaked toward the inlet. Mother
didn't show her new hat as yet; that was in reserve to tantalize Mrs.
Tubbs with the waiting. Besides, for a day or two the women couldn't
take down the bars and say what they thought. But the men immediately
pounded each other on the back and called each other "Seth" and "Joe,"
and, keeping behind banks lest they be seen by young uns, they
shamefacedly paddled barefoot--two old men with bare feet and silvery
shanks, chuckling and catching crabs, in a salt inlet among rolling
hillocks covered with sedge-grass that lisped in the breeze. The grass
hollows were filled with quiet and the sound of hovering flies. Beyond
was a hill shiny with laurel.
They dug for Little-Neck clams in the mud by the Pond, they discussed
the cranberry bog and the war and the daily catch of the traps; they
interrupted their sage discourse to whoop at a mackerel gull that
flapped above them; they prowled along the inlet to the Outside, and
like officials they viewed a passing pogie-boat. Uncle Joe Tubbs ought
to have been washing dishes, and he knew it, but the coming of the
Applebys annually gave him the excuse for a complete loaf. Besides, he
was sure that by now Mother Appleby would be in apron and gingham,
helping the protesting yet willing Mrs. Tubbs.
The greatest philosophical theory in the world is that "people are
people." The Applebys, who had mellowed among streets and shops, were
very much like the Tubbses of Cape Cod. Father was, in his unquenchable
fondness for Mother, like Romeo, like golden Aucassin. But also in his
sly fondness for loafing on a sunny grass-bank, smoking a vile pipe and
arguing that the war couldn't last more than six months, he was very
much like Uncle Joe Tubbs. As for Mother, she gossiped about the ancient
feud between the West Skipsit Universalists and Methodists, and she said
"wa'n't" exactly like Mrs. Tubbs.
There were other boarders at the Tubbses', and before them at supper
both of the old couples maintained the gravity with which, vainly, Age
always endeavors to impress Youth. Uncle Joe was crotchety, and Mrs.
Tubbs was brisk about the butter, and the Applebys were tremendously
dignified and washed and brushed, and not averse to being known as
superior star boarders from that superior city, New York, personages to
whom the opera and the horse-show were perfectly familiar. Father
dismissed a small, amateurish war debate by letting it be known that in
his business--nature of business not stated--he was accustomed to meet
the diplomatic representatives of the very choicest nations, and to give
them advice. Which, indeed, he did--regarding shoes. For Pilkings & Son
had a rather elite clientele for Sixth Avenue, and Father had with his
own hands made glad the feet of the Swedish consul and the Bolivian
trade agent.
A man from South Bromfield started to cap the pose, as low persons
always do in these boarding-houses, but Father changed the subject, in a
slightly peppery manner. Father could be playful with Mother, but, like
all men who are worth anything, he could be as Olympian as a king or a
woman author or a box-office manager when he was afflicted by young men
who chewed gum and were chatty. He put his gold-bowed eye-glasses on the
end of his nose and looked over them so wealthily that the summerites
were awed and shyly ate their apple-sauce to the last dreg.
Twelve o'clock dinner at the Tubbses' was a very respectable meal, with
roasts and vegetables to which you could devote some skill and energy.
But supper was more like an after-thought, a sort of afternoon tea
without the wrist-watch conversation. It was soon over, the dishes soon
washed, and by seven o'clock the Applebys and Tubbses gathered in the
sacred parlor, where ordinary summerites were not welcome, where the
family crayon-enlargements hung above the green plush settee from
Boston, which was flanked by the teak table which Uncle Joe's Uncle Ira
had brought from China, and the whale's vertebrae without which no
high-caste Cape Cod household is virtuous. With joy and verbal
fireworks, with highly insulting comments on one another's play, began
the annual series of cribbage games--a world's series, a Davis cup
tournament. Doffing his usual tobacco-chewing, collarless, jocose
manner, Uncle Joe reverently took from the what-not the ancestral
cribbage-board, carved from a solid walrus-tooth. They stood about
exclaiming over it, then fell to. "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair
is six!" rang out, triumphantly. Finally (as happened every year on the
occasion of their first game), when the men had magnificently won, Mrs.
Tubbs surprised them with refreshments--they would have been jolly well
surprised if she hadn't surprised them--and Father played recent New
York musical comedy songs on his new mouth-organ, stopping to explain
the point of each, whereupon Mother shook her head and said, warningly,
"Now, Father, you be careful what you say. Honestly, I don't know what
the world is coming to, Mrs. Tubbs, the way men carry on nowadays." But
she wasn't very earnest about it because she was gigglingly aware that
Uncle Joe was stealing Mrs. Tubbs's share of the doughnuts.
They were all as hysterical as a girls' school during this annual
celebration. But Father peeped out of the parlor window and saw the lush
moonlight on marsh and field. To Mother, with an awed quiet, "Sarah,
it's moonlight, like it used to be--" The Tubbses seemed to understand
that the sweethearts wanted to be alone, and they made excuses to be off
to bed. On the porch, wrapped in comforters and coats against the
seaside chill, Father and Mother cuddled together. They said
little--everything was said for them by the moonlight, silvery on the
marshes, wistful silver among the dunes, while the surf was lulled and
the whole spacious night seemed reverent with love. His hand cradled
hers as the hand of a child would close round a lily leaf.
Halcyon days of sitting in rocking-chairs under the beech-trees on
locust-zizzing afternoons, of hunting for shells on the back-side shore
of the Cape, of fishing for whiting from the landing on the bay side, of
musing among the many-colored grasses of the uplands. They would have
gone ambling along such dreamland roads to the end of their vacation had
it not been for the motor-car of Uncle Joe's son-in-law.
That car changed their entire life. Among the hills of peace there was
waiting for them an adventure.
Uncle Joe's son-in-law lived in a portable bungalow a mile away. He
rotated crops. He peddled fish with a motor-car. In five minutes he
could detach from the back of his car the box in which he carried the
fish, clap on a rather rickety tonneau, and be ready to compete in
stylish pleasures with the largest limousine from Newport or Brookline.
Father and Mother went wheezing about the country with him. Father had
always felt that he had the makings of a motorist, because of the
distinct pleasure he had felt in motor-bus rides on New York Sundays,
and he tactfully encouraged the son-in-law in the touring mania. So it
was really Father's fault that they found the tea-room.
The six of them, the Applebys, the Tubbses, and son-in-law and daughter,
somewhat cramped as to space and dusty as to garments, had motored to
Cotagansuit. Before them, out across the road, hung the sign: Ye Tea
Shoppe.
"Say, by Jiminy! let's go into that Tea Shoppy and have some eats," said
Father. "My treat."
"Nope, it's mine," said the Tubbses' son-in-law, hypocritically.
"Not a word out of you!" sang out Father, gallantly. "Hey there,
chauffeur, stop this new car of mine at the Shoppy."
As the rusty car drew up Mrs. Tubbs and Mother looked rather agitatedly
at a group of young people, girls in smocks and men in white flannels,
who were making society noises before the brown barn which had been
turned into a tea-room. The two old women felt that they weren't quite
dressed for a party; they were shy of silken youth. Mrs. Tubbs's
daughter was conscious of the fact that her $1.98 wash-dress, shapeless
from many washings, was soiled in front. But Uncle Joe, the old
hardshell, was never abashed at anything. He shifted his tobacco quid
and "guessed he'd have to get some white pants like that young
red-headed fellow's."
Then Father again proved himself magnificent. Wasn't he a New-Yorker?
"No flossy tea-room and no bunch of young fellows in ice-cream
breeches--probably they were only clerks, anyway, if the truth was
known!--was going to scare your Uncle Dudley offn tea! Not that he cared
so much for tea itself; 'drather have a good cup of coffee, any time;
but he didn't want Joe Tubbs to think he wasn't used to fashionable
folks." So, with a manner of wearing goggles and gauntlets, he led the
women and the shambling son-in-law and the brazenly sloppy Uncle Joe
through the flowery youth and into the raftered room, with its new
fireplace and old William and Mary chairs, its highboy covered with
brassware, and its little tea-tables with slender handicraft vases each
containing one marigold. Father ignored all these elegances and
commanded a disdainful waitress with a frilly white apron, "Let's have a
couple of tables together here, eh?" He himself shifted chairs, and made
a joke, and started to select impressive food.
He was used to New York restaurants, and to quite expensive hotels, for
at least once a year, on his birthday, Mr. Pilkings took him to lunch at
the Waldorf. While he had apparently been devoting himself to arranging
the tables his cunning old brain had determined to order tea and French
pastry. Apparently the Tea Shoppe was neutral. There was no French
pastry on the bill, but, instead, such curious edibles as cinnamon
toast, cream cheese, walnut sandwiches, Martha Washington muffins. Nor
was the tea problem so easy as it had seemed. To Father there were only
two kinds of tea--the kind you got for a nickel at the Automat, and the
kind that Mother privately consumed. But here he had to choose
intelligently among orange pekoe, oolong, Ceylon, and English-breakfast
teas.
Father did a very brave thing, though he probably will never get the
Carnegie medal for it. Instead of timidly asking the lofty waitress's
advice, he boldly plunged in and ordered two kinds of sandwiches,
cinnamon toast, and, because he liked the name, orange pekoe. He rather
held his breath, but apparently the waitress took him quite seriously,
and some time in the course of the afternoon actually brought him what
he had asked for.
Ye Tea Shoppe was artistic. You could tell that by the fact that none of
the arts and crafts wares exposed for sale were in the least useful. And
it was too artistic, too far above the sordidness of commercialism, to
put any prices on the menu-cards. Consequently Father was worried about
his bill all the time he was encouraging his guests to forget their
uncomfortably decorative surroundings and talk like regular people. But
when he saw how skinny were the sandwiches and how reticent the cinnamon
toast he was cheered. He calculated that the whole bill couldn't, in
decency, be more than ninety cents for the six of them.
In the midst of his nicest flow of fancy about Mother's fear of mice,
the bill was laid decorously on its face beside him. Still talking, but
hesitating somewhat, he took a peep at the bill. It was for three
dollars and sixty cents.
He felt congealed, but he talked on. He slid a five-dollar bill from his
diminutive roll and gallantly paid up. His only comment when, in the
car, Mother secretly asked how much he had been overcharged, was the
reflection, "They certainly ought to make money out of those tea-rooms.
Their profit must be something like five hundred per cent. That strikes
me as a pretty good way to earn a living, old lady. You live in a nice
comfortable place in the country and don't have to do any work but slice
bread and stick in chicken or cream cheese, and make five hundred per
cent. Say--"