II

The elders of the tribe of summer visitors nearly all professed to have

“discovered” Harpledon. The only one of the number who never, to my

knowledge, put forth this claim was Waldo Cranch; and he had lived there

longer than any of us.

The one person in the village who could remember his coming to

Harpledon, and opening and repairing the old Cranch house (for his

family had been India merchants when Harpledon was a thriving

sea-port)—the only person who went back far enough to antedate Waldo

Cranch was an aunt of mine, old Miss Lucilla Selwick, who lived in the

Selwick house, itself a stout relic of India merchant days, and who had

been sitting at the same window, watching the main street of Harpledon,

for seventy years and more to my knowledge. But unfortunately the long

range of Aunt Lucilla’s memory often made it hit rather wide of the

mark. She remembered heaps and heaps of far-off things; but she almost

always remembered them wrongly. For instance, she used to say: “Poor

Polly Everitt! How well I remember her, coming up from the beach one day

screaming, and saying she’d seen her husband drowning before her

eyes”—whereas every one knew that Mrs. Everitt was on a picnic when her

husband was drowned at the other end of the world, and that no ghostly

premonition of her loss had reached her. And whenever Aunt Lucilla

mentioned Mr. Cranch’s coming to live at Harpledon she used to say:

“Dear me, I can see him now, driving by on that rainy afternoon in Denny

Brine’s old carry-all, with a great pile of bags and bundles, and on top

of them a black and white hobby-horse with a real mane—the very

handsomest hobby-horse I ever saw.” No persuasion could induce her to

dissociate the image of this prodigious toy from her first sight of

Waldo Cranch, most incurable of bachelors, and least concerned with the

amusing of other people’s children, even those of his best friends. In

this case, to be sure, her power of evocation had a certain success.

Some one told Cranch—Mrs. Durant I think it must have been—and I can

still hear his hearty laugh.

“What could it have been that she saw?” Mrs. Durant questioned; and he

responded gaily: “Why not simply the symbol of my numerous tastes?”

Which—as Cranch painted and gardened and made music (even composed

it)—seemed so happy an explanation that for long afterward the Cranch

house was known to us as Hobby-Horse Hall.

It will be seen that Aunt Lucilla’s reminiscences, though they sometimes

provoked a passing amusement, were neither accurate nor illuminating.

Naturally, nobody paid much attention to them, and we had to content

ourselves with regarding Waldo Cranch, hale and hearty and social as he

still was, as an Institution already venerable when the rest of us had

first apprehended Harpledon. We knew, of course, the chief points in the

family history: that the Cranches had been prosperous merchants for

three centuries, and had intermarried with other prosperous families;

that one of them, serving his business apprenticeship at Malaga in

colonial days, had brought back a Spanish bride, to the bewilderment of

Harpledon; and that Waldo Cranch himself had spent a studious and

wandering youth in Europe. His Spanish great-grandmother’s portrait

still hung in the old house; and it was a long-standing joke at

Harpledon that the young Cranch who went to Malaga, where he presumably

had his pick of Spanish beauties, should have chosen so dour a specimen.

The lady was a forbidding character on the canvas: very short and

thickset, with a huge wig of black ringlets, a long harsh nose, and one

shoulder perceptibly above the other. It was characteristic of Aunt

Lucilla Selwick that in mentioning this swart virago she always took the

tone of elegy. “Ah, poor thing, they say she never forgot the sunshine

and orange blossoms, and pined off early, when her queer son Calvert was

hardly out of petticoats. A strange man Calvert Cranch was; but he

married Euphemia Waldo of Wood’s Hole, the beauty, and had two sons, one

exactly like Euphemia, the other made in his own image. And they do say

that one was so afraid of his own face that he went back to Spain and

died a monk—if you’ll believe it,” she always concluded with a Puritan

shudder.

This was all we knew of Waldo Cranch’s past; and he had been so long a

part of Harpledon that our curiosity seldom ranged beyond his coming

there. He was our local ancestor; but it was a mark of his studied

cordiality and his native tact that he never made us feel his priority.

It was never he who embittered us with allusions to the picturesqueness

of the old light-house before it was rebuilt, or the paintability of the

vanished water-mill; he carried his distinction so far as to take

Harpledon itself for granted, carelessly, almost condescendingly—as if

there had been rows and rows of them strung along the Atlantic coast.

Yet the Cranch house was really something to brag about. Architects and

photographers had come in pursuit of it long before the diffused

quaintness of Harpledon made it the prey of the magazine illustrator.

The Cranch house was not quaint; it owed little to the happy

irregularities of later additions, and needed no such help. Foursquare

and stern, built of a dark mountain granite (though all the other old

houses in the place were of brick or wood), it stood at the far end of

the green, where the elms were densest and the village street faded away

between blueberry pastures and oakwoods. A door with a white classical

portico was the only eighteenth century addition. The house kept

untouched its heavy slate roof, its low windows, its sober cornice and

plain interior panelling—even the old box garden at the back, and the

pagoda-roofed summer house, could not have been much later than the

house. I have said that the latter owed little to later additions; yet

some people thought the wing on the garden side was of more recent

construction. If it was, its architect had respected the dimensions and

detail of the original house, simply giving the wing one less story, and

covering it with a lower-pitched roof. The learned thought that the

kitchen and offices, and perhaps the slaves’ quarters, had originally

been in this wing; they based their argument on the fact of there being

no windows, but only blind arches, on the side toward the garden Waldo

Cranch said he didn’t know; he had found the wing just as it was now,

with a big empty room on the ground floor, that he used for storing

things, and a few low-studded bedchambers above. The house was so big

that he didn’t need any of these rooms, and had never bothered about

them. Once, I remember, I thought him a little short with a fashionable

Boston architect who had insisted on Mrs. Durant’s bringing him to see

the house, and who wanted to examine the windows on the farther, the

invisible, side of the wing.

“Certainly,” Cranch had agreed. “But you see those windows look on the

kitchen-court and the drying-ground. My old housekeeper and the faithful

retainers generally sit there in the afternoons in hot weather, when

their work is done, and they’ve been with me so long that I respect

their habits. At some other hour, if you’ll come again—. You’re going

back to Boston tomorrow? So sorry! Yes, of course, you can photograph

the front as much as you like. It’s used to it.” And he showed out Mrs.

Durant and her protégé.

When he came back a frown still lingered on his handsome brows. “I’m

getting sick of having this poor old house lionized. No one bothered

about it or me when I first came back to live here,” he said. But a

moment later he added, in his usual kindly tone: “After all, I suppose I

ought to be pleased.”

If anyone could have soothed his annoyance, and even made it appear

unreasonable, it was Mrs. Durant. The fact that it was to her he had

betrayed his impatience struck us all, and caused me to remark, for the

first time, that she was the only person at Harpledon who was not afraid

of him. Yes; we all were, though he came and went among us with such a

show of good-fellowship that it took this trifling incident to remind me

of his real aloofness. Not one of us but would have felt a slight chill

at his tone to the Boston architect; but then I doubt if any of us but

Mrs. Durant would have dared to bring a stranger to the house.

Mrs. Durant was a widow who combined gray hair with a still-youthful

face at a time when this happy union was less generally fashionable than

now. She had come to Harpledon among the earliest summer colonists, and

had soon struck up a friendship with Waldo Cranch. At first Harpledon

was sure they would marry; then it became sure they wouldn’t; for a

number of years now it had wondered why they hadn’t. These conjectures,

of which the two themselves could hardly have been unaware, did not seem

to trouble the even tenor of their friendship. They continued to meet as

often as before, and Mrs. Durant continued to be the channel for

transmitting any request or inquiry that the rest of us hesitated to put

to Cranch. “We know he won’t refuse you,” I once said to her; and I

recall the half-lift of her dark brows above a pinched little smile.

“Perhaps,” I thought, “he _has_ refused her—once.” If so, she had taken

her failure gallantly, and Cranch appeared to find an undiminished

pleasure in her company. Indeed, as the years went on their friendship

grew closer; one would have said he was dependent on her if one could

have pictured Cranch as dependent on anybody. But whenever I tried to do

this I was driven back to the fundamental fact of his isolation.

“He could get on well enough without any of us,” I thought to myself,

wondering if this remoteness were inherited from the homesick Spanish

ancestress. Yet I have seldom known a more superficially sociable man

than Cranch. He had many talents, none of which perhaps went as far as

he had once confidently hoped; but at least he used them as links with

his kind instead of letting them seclude him in their jealous hold. He

was always eager to show his sketches, to read aloud his occasional

articles in the lesser literary reviews, and above all to play his new

compositions to the musically-minded among us; or rather, since “eager”

is hardly the term to apply to his calm balanced manner, I should say

that he was affably ready to show off his accomplishments. But then he

may have regarded doing so as one of the social obligations: I had felt

from the first that, whatever Cranch did, he was always living up to

some self-imposed and complicated standard. Even his way of taking off

his hat struck me as the result of more thought than most people give to

the act; his very absence of flourish lent it an odd importance.