Soon after we moved to the country we became eligible to join the
Westchester County Despair Association, on account of an artesian
well--or, to be exact, on account of three artesian wells, complicated
with several springs.
I spoke some pages back of the Westchester County Despair Association,
which was founded by George Creel and which has a large membership in
our immediate section. As I stated then, any city-bred man who turns
amateur farmer and moves into our neighborhood, and who in developing
his country place has a streak of hard labor, is eligible to join this
organization. And sooner or later--but as a general thing sooner--all
the urbanites who settle up our way do join. Some day we shall be strong
enough to club in and elect our own county officers on a ticket pledged
to run a macadam highway past the estate of each member.
Our main claim to qualification was based upon the water question; and
yet at the outset it appeared to us that lack of water would be the very
least of our troubles. When we took title to our abandoned farm, and
for the first time explored the bramble-grown valley leading up from
the proposed site of our house to the woodland, we several times had to
wade, and once or twice thought we should have to swim. Why, we actually
congratulated ourselves upon having acquired riparian rights without
paying for them.
This was in the springtime; and the springs along the haunches of the
hills upon either side of the little ravine were speaking in burbly
murmuring voices, like overflowing mouths, as they spilled forth their
accumulated store of the melted snows of the winter before; and the
April rainstorms had made a pond of every low place in the county.
In our ignorance we assumed that, since there was now plenty of water of
Nature's furnishing, there always would be plenty of water forthcoming
from the same prodigal source--more water than we could possibly ever
need unless we opened up a fresh-water bathing beach in the lower meadow
of our place. So we dug out and stoned up the uppermost spring, which
seemed to have the most generous vein of them all, and put in pipes. The
lay of the land and the laws of gravity did the rest, bringing the flow
downgrade in a gurgling comforting stream, which poured day and night
without cessation.
This detail having been attended to, we turned our attention to other
things. Goodness knows there were plenty of things requiring attention.
I figured at that period of our pioneering work that if we got into the
Despair Association at all it would follow as the result of my being
indicted for more or less justifiable manslaughter in having destroyed
an elderly gentleman of the vicinity, whom upon the occasion of our
first meeting I rechristened as Old Major Gloom, and of whom we still
speak behind his back by that same name.
The major lived a short distance from us, within easy walking distance,
and he speedily proved that he was an easy walker. I shall not forget
the first day he came to call. He ambled up a trail that the previous
tenants, through a chronic delusion, had insisted upon calling a road;
and he found me up to my gills in the midst of the preliminary job
of trying to decide where we should make a start at clearing out the
jungle, which once upon a time, probably back in the Stone Age, as
nearly as we might judge from its present condition, had been the house
garden.
We had been camping on the place only a few days. We climbed over,
through and under mystic mazes of household belongings to get our meals,
or to get to our beds, or to get anywhere, and altogether were existing
in a state of disorder that might be likened to the condition the
Germans created with such thoroughgoing and painstaking efficiency when
falling back from an occupied French community.
I trust we are not lacking in hospitality; but, for the moment, we were
in no mood to receive visitors. However, upon first judgment the old
major's appearance was such as to disarm hostility and re-arouse the
slumbering instincts of cordiality. He was of a benevolent aspect, with
fine white whiskers and an engaging manner. If you can imagine one of
the Minor Prophets, who had stepped right out of the Old Testament,
stopping en route at a ready-made clothing store, you will have a very
fair mental picture of the major as he looked when he approached me,
with hand outstretched, and in warm tones bade me welcome to Upper
Westchester. He fooled me; he would have fooled anybody unless possibly
it were an expert criminologist, trained at discerning depravity when
masked behind a pleasing exterior.
When he spoke I placed him with regard to his antecedents, for I
had been on the spot long enough to recognize the breed to which he
belonged. There is a type of native-born citizen of this part of New
York State who comes of an undiluted New England strain, being the
descendant of pioneering Yankees who settled along the lower Hudson
Valley after the Revolution and immediately started in to trade the
original Dutch settlers out of their lands and their eyeteeth.
The subsequent generations of this transplanted stock have preserved
some of the customs and many of the idioms of their stern and rock-bound
forebears; at the same time they have acquired most of the linguistic
eccentricities of the New York cockney. Except that they dwell in
proximity to it, they have nothing in common with the great city that
is only thirty or forty miles away as the motorist flies. Generally they
profess a contempt for New York and all its works. They may not visit it
once a year; but, all the same, its influence has crept up through the
hills to tincture their mode of speech with queer distinctive modes of
pronunciation.
The result is a composite dialectic system not to be found anywhere else
except in this little strip of upland country and in certain isolated
communities over on Long Island, along the outer edge of the zone of
metropolitan life and excitement. For instance, a member of this race of
beings will call a raspberry a “rosbry”; and he will call a bluebird a
“blubbud,” thereby displaying the inherited vernacular of the Down East
country. He will say “oily” when he means early, and “early” when
he means oily, and occasionally he will even say “yous” for
you--peculiarities which in other environment serve unmistakably to mark
the born-and-bred Manhattanite.
The major at once betrayed himself as such a person. He introduced
himself, adding that as a neighbor he had felt it incumbent to call.
I removed a couple of the family portraits and a collection of Indian
relics and a few kitchen utensils, and one thing and another, from the
seat of a chair, and begged him to sit down and make himself at home,
which he did. He accepted a cigar, which I fished out of a humidor
temporarily tucked away beneath a roll of carpet; and we spoke of the
weather, to which he gave a qualified and cautious indorsement. Then,
without further delay, he hitched his chair over and laid a paternal
hand upon my arm.
“I hear you've got Blank, the lawyer, searching out the title to your
propputty here.”
“Yes,” I said; “Mr. Blank took the matter in hand for us. Fine man,
isn't he?”
“Well, some people think so,” he said with an emphasis of profound
significance.
“Doesn't everybody think so?” I inquired. “Listen,” he said; “my motto
is, Live and let live. And, anyhow, I'm the last man in the world to go
round prejudicing a newcomer against an old resident. Now I've just met
you and, on the other hand, I've known Blank all my life; in fact, we're
sort of related by marriage--a relative of his married a relative of
my wife's. So, of course, I've got nothing to say to you on that
score except this--and I'm going to say it to you now in the strictest
confidence--if I was doing business with Blank I'd be mighty, mighty
careful, young man.”
“You astonish me,” I said. “Mr. So-and-So”--naming a prominent business
man of the county seat--“recommended his firm to me.”
“Oh, So-and-So, eh? I wonder what the understanding between those two
is? Probably they've hatched up something.”
“Why, isn't So-and-So above suspicion?” I asked. “I wouldn't say he was
and I wouldn't say he wasn't. But, just between you and me, I'd think
twice about taking any advice he gave me. They tell me you've let the
contract for some work to Dash & Space?”
“Yes; I gave them one small job.”
“Too bad!”
“What's too bad?”
“You'll be finding out for yourself before you're done; so I won't say
anything more on that subject neither. I could tell you a good deal
about those fellows if I was a-mind to; but I never believed in
repeating anything behind a man's back I wouldn't say to his face. Live
and let live!--that's my motto. Anyhow, if you've already signed up with
Dash & Space it's too late for you to be backing out--but keep your eyes
open, young man; keep your eyes wide open. Who's your architect going to
be?”
I told him. He repeated the name in rather a disappointed fashion.
“Never heard of him,” he admitted; “but I take it he's like the run of
his kind of people. I never yet saw the architect that I'd trust as far
as I could sling him by the coat-tails. Say, ain't that Bink's delivery
wagon standing over yonder in front of your stable?”
“I think so. We've been buying some things from Bink.”
“You've opened up a regular account with him, then?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I wouldn't reflect on Bink's honesty for any amount of money in
the world. Of my own knowledge I don't know anything against him one way
or the other. Of course, from time to time I've heard a lot of things
that other people said about him; but that's only hearsay evidence, and
I make it a rule not to repeat gossip about anybody. Still”--he lingered
over the word--“still, if it was me instead of you, I'd go over his
bills very carefully--that's all!
“I don't blame any fellow for trying to get along in his business; and
I guess the competition is so keen in the retail merchandising line
that oncet in a while a man just naturally has to skin his customers a
little. But that's no argument why he should try to take the entire hide
off of 'em. They tell me Bink's bookkeeper is a regular wizard when it
comes to making up an account, 'specially for a stranger.” He took
a puff or two at his cigar, meantime squinting across our weed-grown
fields. “Don't I see 'Lonzo Begee chopping dead trees down there
alongside the road?”
“Yes; I believe that's his name. He only came to work for us this
morning. Seems to be a hustler.”
“Does he, now? Well, ain't it a curious circumstance how many fellers
starting in at a new job just naturally work their heads off and wind
up at the end of the second week loafing? Strikes me that's particularly
the case with the farm laborers round here. Now you take 'Lonzo Begee's
case. He never worked for me--I'm mighty careful about who I hire,
lemme tell you!--but it always struck me as a strange thing that 'Lonzo
changes jobs so often. I make it a point to keep an eye on what's
happening in this neighborhood; and seems like every time I run acrost
him he's working in a different place for a different party.
“And yet you never can tell--he might turn out to be a satisfactory hand
for you. Stranger things have happened. And besides, what suits one
man don't suit another. I believe in letting a man find out about these
things for himself. The bitterer the experience and the more it costs
him, the more likely he is to remember the lesson and profit by it.
Don't you think so yourself?”
I told him I thought so; and presently he took his departure, after
remarking that we had purchased a place with a good many possibilities
in it; though, from what he had heard, we probably paid too much for it,
and he only hoped we didn't waste too much money in developing. He
left me filled with so many doubts and so many misgivings that I felt
congested. Within two days he was back, though, still actuated by the
neighborly spirit, to warn me against a few more persons with whom we
had already had dealings, or with whom we expected to have dealings, or
with whom conceivably we might some day have dealings.
And within a week after that he returned a third time to put me on
my guard against one or two more individuals who somehow had been
overlooked by him in his previous visits. Rarely did he come out in the
open and accuse anybody of anything. He was too crafty, too subtle for
that. The major was a regular sutler. But he certainly did understand
the art of planting the poison. Give him time enough, and he could
destroy a fellow's confidence in the entire human race.
He specialized in no single direction; his gifts were ample for all
emergencies. When he tired of making you distrustful of those about you,
or when temporarily he ran out of material, he knew the knack of making
you distrustful of your own judgment. For example, there was the
time, in the second month of our acquaintance I think it was, when
he meandered in to inspect the work of renovation that had just been
started on the stable. He spent perhaps ten minutes going over the
premises, now and then uttering low, disparaging, clucking sounds under
his breath. I followed him about fearsomely. I was distressed on account
of the disclosures that I felt would presently be forthcoming.
“Putting on a slate roof, eh?” he said when he was done with the
investigation. “Expect it to stay put?”
I admitted that such had been the calculation of the builder.
“Nothing like being one of these here optimists,” he commented dryly.
“But I want to tell you that it's the biggest mistake you ever made to
put a slate roof on those sloping gables without sticking in some metal
uprights to keep the snow from sliding off in a lump when the winter
thaws come.”
It had always seemed to me that snow had few enough pleasures as it was.
Though I had given the subject but little thought, it appeared to me
that if sliding off a roof gave the snow any satisfaction it would ill
become me or any one else to interfere. I ventured to say as much.
“I guess you don't get my meaning,” he explained. “When the snow starts
sliding, if there's enough of it, it's purty sure to take most of those
slates along with it. And then where'll you be, I want to know?”
“Is--is it too late to put up some anti-sliding thingumbobs now?” I
asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said comfortingly; “it's too late now unless you ripped
the whole job off and started all over again. I judge you'll just have
to let Nature take its course. I see you've got a chimney that don't
come over the ridge of the roof. Are you calculating that it'll draw?”
“I rather hoped it would--that was the intention, I believe.”
“Well, then, you're in for another disappointment there. But if I was
you I shouldn't fret myself about that, because it'll be some months yet
before you'll be building a fire in the fireplace, what with the warm
weather just coming on; and you can have the top of the chimney lifted
almost any time.... I don't want to alarm you needlessly; but it looks
to me like mighty faulty drainpipes the plumber's been putting in for
you. You'll have to snatch all that out before a great while and have
new pipes put in proper. Don't it beat all what sharpers plumbers are?
But then, they're no worse than other artisans, taking them by and
large. F'r instance, what could be a worse job than that plastering
in your bedroom, or those tin gutters up yonder at your eaves? The
plastering may stay up a while, but the first good hard storm ought
to bring the gutters down. I don't like your masonry work, either, if
you're asking me for my opinion; and I see the carpenters are slipping
in some mighty sorry-looking flooring on you.”
I am not exaggerating. I am repeating, as accurately as I can, a
conversation that really took place.
For a while the major was in a fair way to spoil the present century for
me. If the inhabitants of the countryside were in a conspiracy to strip
the pelfry off a fresh arrival and divide it among them as souvenirs, if
there was no honesty left anywhere in a corrupted world, what, then,
was the use of living? Why not commit suicide according to one of the
standard methods and have done with the struggle, trusting that the
undertaker would not be too much of a gouge and that the executors of
the estate would leave a trifle of it for the widow and the orphan?
But, after a spell, during which from the various firms, corporations
and persons who had been traduced by him we uniformly had considerate
and fair and scrupulously honorable treatment and service, we began to
disregard the major's danger signals and to steer right past them. He,
though, wearied not in well-doing. At every chance he dropped in, a
poison viper disguised as a philanthropist, to hang another red light on
the switch for us. It was inevitable that his ministrations should get
on our nerves. I began to have visions centering about justifiable acts
of homicide, always with the major for the chosen victim of my violence.
It was after having such a dream that I figured myself as getting into
George Creel's Despair Association by virtue of having to stand trial
over at White Plains for murder. As a matter of fact, I spared the
major; and at last accounts he was still going to and fro in the land,
planting slanders on all likely sites. I take it that there is one
counterpart for him among every so many human beings; but it is in the
country where every one has a chance to find out every one's business,
and where the excuses of being neighborly and friendly give him
opportunity for plying his trade that he is most in evidence.