only really human thing this lady ever did, so far as I could discover,
was to put some of this magic remedy on her hair that restores the
natural colour if the natural colour happened to be what this remedy
restores it to. Any way, she now wanted to know if I thought it was right
for Aunt Mollie to continue to reside there in that house between now and
the time when they would be lawful man and wife. I said no; I didn't
think it was right. I thought it was a monstrous infamy and an affront
to public morals; but mebbe we better resolve to ignore it and plow a
straight furrow, without stopping to pull weeds. She sadly said she
supposed I was right.
"So Uncle Henry hitched up his fat white horse to the buggy, and him and
Aunt Mollie drove round the country for three days, inviting folks to
their wedding. Aunt Mollie had the time of her life. It seemed as if
there wasn't no way whatever to get a sense of shame into that brazen old
hussy. And when this job was done she got busy with her trousseau, which
consisted of a bridge gown in blue organdie, and a pair of high white
shoes. She didn't know what a bridge gown was for, but she liked the
looks of one in a pattern book and sent down to Red Gap for Miss
Gunslaugh to bring up the stuff and make it. And she'd always had this
secret yearning for a pair of high white shoes; so they come up, too.
"Furthermore, Aunt Mollie had read the city paper for years and knew
about wedding breakfasts; so she was bound to have one of those. It
looked like a good time was going to be had by all present except the
lady who started it. Mrs. Julia was more malignantly scandalized by these
festal preparations than she had been by the original crime; but she had
to go through with it now.
"The date had been set and we was within three days of it when Aunt
Mollie postponed it three days more because Dave Pickens couldn't be
there until this later day. Mrs. Julia made a violent protest, because
she had made her plans to leave for larger fields of crime; but Aunt
Mollie was stubborn. She said Dave Pickens was one of the oldest
neighbours and she wouldn't have a wedding he couldn't attend; and
besides, marriage was a serious step and she wasn't going to be hurried
into it.
"So Mrs. Julia went to a lot of trouble about her ticket and
reservations, and stayed over. She was game enough not to run out
before Uncle Henry had made Aunt Mollie a lady. I was a good deal
puzzled about this postponement. Dave Pickens was nothing to postpone
anything for. There never was any date that he couldn't be anywhere--at
least, unless he had gone to work after losing his fiddle, which was
highly ridiculous.
"The date held this time. We get word the wedding is to be held in the
evening and that everyone must stay there overnight. This was surprising,
but simple after Aunt Mollie explained it. The guests, of course, had
to stay over for the wedding breakfast. Aunt Mollie had figured it all
out. A breakfast is something you eat in the morning, about six-thirty or
seven; so a wedding breakfast must be held the morning after the wedding.
You couldn't fool Aunt Mollie on social niceties.
"Anyway, there we all was at the wedding; Uncle Henry in his black suit
and his shiny new teeth, and Aunt Mollie in her bridge gown and white
shoes, and this young minister that wore a puzzled look from start
to finish. I guess he never did know what kind of a game he was helping
out in. But he got through with the ceremony. There proved to be not
a soul present knowing any reason why this pair shouldn't be joined
together in holy wedlock, though Mrs. Julia looked more severe than usual
at this part of the ceremony. Uncle Henry and Aunt Mollie was firm in
their responses and promised to cling to each other till death did them
part. They really sounded as if they meant it.
"Mrs. Julia looked highly noble and sweet when all was over, like she had
rescued an erring sister from the depths. You could see she felt that the
world would indeed be a better place if she could only give a little
more time to it.
"We stood round and talked some after the ceremony; but not for long.
Aunt Mollie wound the clock and set the mouse-trap, and hustled us all
off to bed so we could be up bright and early for the wedding breakfast.
You'd think she'd been handling these affairs in metropolitan society for
years. The women slept on beds and sofas, and different places, and the
men slept out in the barn and in a tent Uncle Henry had put up or took
their blanket rolls and bunked under a tree.
"Then ho! for the merry wedding breakfast at six-thirty A.M.! The wedding
breakfast consisted of ham and eggs and champagne. Yes, sir; don't think
Aunt Mollie had overlooked the fashionable drink. Hadn't she been reading
all her life about champagne being served at wedding breakfasts? So there
it was in a new wash boiler, buried in cracked ice. And while the women
was serving the ham and eggs and hot biscuits at the long table built out
in the side yard, Uncle Henry exploded several bottles of this wine and
passed it to one and all, and a toast was drunk to the legal bride and
groom; after which eating was indulged in heartily.
"It was a merry feast, even without the lobster salad, which Aunt Mollie
apologized for not having. She said she knew lobster salad went with a
wedding breakfast, the same as champagne; but the canned lobster she had
ordered hadn't come, so we'd have to make out with the home-cured ham and
some pork sausage that now come along. Nobody seemed downhearted about
the missing lobster salad. Uncle Henry passed up and down the table
filling cups and glasses, and Aunt Mollie, in her wedding finery, kept
the food coming with some buckwheat cakes at the finish.
"It was a very satisfactory wedding breakfast, if any one should ever
make inquiries of you. By the time Uncle Henry had the ends out of half
the champagne bottles I guess everyone there was glad he had decided
to drag Aunt Mollie back from the primrose path.
"It all passed off beautifully, except for one tragedy. Oh, yes; there's
always something to mar these affairs. But this hellish incident didn't
come till the very last. After the guests had pretty well et themselves
to a standstill, Dave Pickens got up and come back with a fiddle, and
stood at the end of the grape arbour and played a piece.
"'Someone must have supplied that wretch with another fiddle!' says Mrs.
Julia, who was kind of cross, anyway, having been bedded down on a short
sofa and not liking champagne for breakfast--and, therefore, not liking
to see others drink it.
"'Oh, he's probably borrowed one for your celebration,' I says.
"Dave played a couple more lively pieces; and pretty soon, when we got up
from the table, he come over to Mrs. Julia and me.
"'It's a peach of a fiddle,' says Dave. 'It says in the catalogue it's a
genuine Cremonika--looks like a Cremona and plays just as good. I bet
it's the best fiddle in the world to be had for twelve dollars!'
"'What's that?' says Mrs. Julia, erecting herself like an alarmed
rattlesnake.
"'Sure! It's a genuine twelve-dollar one,' says Dave proudly. 'My old
one, that you so kindly raffled off, cost only five. I always wanted a
better one, but I never had the money to spare till you come along. It's
awful hard to save up money round here.'
"'Do you mean to tell me--' says Mrs. Julia. She was so mad she couldn't
get any farther. Dave thought she was merely enthusiastic about his new
fiddle.
"'Sure! Only twelve dollars for this beauty,' he says, fondling the
instrument. 'We got down the mail-order catalogue the minute you left
that money with us, and had a postal order on the way to Chicago that
very night. I must say, lady, you brought a great pleasure into our
life.'
"'What about your poor wife?' snaps Mrs. Julia.
"His poor wife comes up just then and looks affectionately at Dave and
the new fiddle.
"'He spent that money for another fiddle!' says Mrs. Julia to her in low
tones of horror.
"'Sure! What did you think he was going to do with it?' says Mrs. Dave.
'I must say we had two mighty dull weeks while Dave was waiting for this
new one. He just mopes round the house when he ain't got anything
to play on. But this is a lot better than the old fiddle; it was worth
waiting for. Did you thank the lady, Dave?'
"Mrs. Julia was now plumb speechless and kind of weak. And on top of
these blows up comes Aunt Mollie the new-wed, and beams fondly on her.
"'There!' says she. 'Ain't that a fine new fiddle that Dave bought with
his twelve dollars? And wasn't it worth postponing my wedding for, so we
could have some music?'
"'What's that?' says Mrs. Julia again. 'Why did you postpone it?'
"'Because the fiddle didn't get here till last night,' says Aunt Mollie,
'and I wasn't going to have a wedding without music. It wouldn't seem
right. And don't you think, yourself, it's a lot better fiddle than
Dave's old one?'
"So this poor Mrs. Julia woman was now stricken for fair, thinking of all
the trouble she'd been to about her tickets, and all to see this new
fiddle.
"She went weakly into the house and lay down, with a headache, till I was
ready to leave the gay throng. And the next day she left us to our fate.
Still, she'd done us good. Dave has a new fiddle and Aunt Mollie has her
high white shoes. So now you know all about it."
We neared the Arrowhead gate. Presently its bell would peal a sweet
message to those who laboured. Ma Pettengill turned in her saddle to scan
the western horizon.
"A red sun has water in his eye," said she. "Well, a good soak won't hurt
us."
And a moment later:
"Curious thing about reformers: They don't seem to get a lot of pleasure
out of their labours unless the ones they reform resist and suffer, and
show a proper sense of their degradation. I bet a lot of reformers would
quit to-morrow if they knew their work wasn't going to bother people
any."
VI
THE PORCH WREN
So it befell, in a shining and memorable interlude that there was
talk of the oldest living boy scout, who was said to have rats in his
wainscoting; of the oldest living débutante, who was also a porch wren;
and of the body snatcher. Little of the talk was mine; a query now and
again. It was Ma Pettengill's talk, and I put it here for what it may be
worth, hoping I may close-knit and harmonize its themes, so diverse
as that of the wardrobe trunk, the age of the earth, what every woman
thinks she knows, and the Upper Silurian trilobites.
It might be well to start with the concrete, and baby's picture seems
to be an acceptable springboard from which to dive into the recital. It
came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John
Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion
in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all
snapshots--a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully
swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk
through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent
faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was
a weakish white blob.
I need not say that there must be millions of these pathetic revealments
burdening our mails day by day. I myself must have looked coldly upon
over a thousand.
"Well, what of it?" I demanded shortly.
"I bet you can't guess what's in that bundle!" said my hostess in a large
playful manner.
I said what I could see of it looked like a half portion of plain boiled
cauliflower, but that in all probability the object was an infant, a
human infant--or, to use a common expression, a baby. Whereupon the lady
drew herself up and remarked in the clipped accent of a parrot:
"No, sir; it's a carboniferous trilobite of the Upper Silurian."
This, indeed, piqued me. It made a difference. I said was it possible?
Mrs. Pettengill said it was worse than possible; it was inevitable. She
seemed about to rest there; so I accused her of ill-natured jesting and
took up the previous day's issue of the Red Gap _Recorder_, meaning to
appear bored. It worked.
"Well, if Professor Oswald Pennypacker don't call his infant that, you
can bet your new trout rod he calls it something just as good. Mebbe I
better read what the proud mother says."
"It would be the kind thing before you spread evil reports," I murmured
in a tone of gentle rebuke.
So the woman polished her nose glasses and read a double sheet of
long up-and-down calligraphy--that is, she read until she exploded
in triumphant retort:
"Ha! There now! Don't I know a thing or two? Listen: 'Oswald is so
enraptured with the mite; you would never guess what he calls it--"My
little flower with bones and a voice!"' Now! Don't tell me I didn't have
Oswald's number. I knew he wouldn't be satisfied to call it a baby; he'd
be bound to name it something animal, vegetable, or mineral. Ain't it the
truth? 'Little flower with bones and a voice!' What do you know about
that? That's a scientist trying to be poetic.
"And here--get this: She says that one hour after the thing was born the
happy father was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could hold
its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey. She says he was acutely
distressed when these authorities deprived him of the custody of his
child. Wouldn't that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour old could
chin itself! Quite all you would wish to know about Oswald."
I hastily said no; it was not nearly all I wanted to know about Oswald.
I wanted to know much more. Almost any one would. The lady once more
studied the hairy face with its bone-rimmed glasses.
"Shucks!" said she. "He don't look near as proud in this as he does in
that one he sent me himself--here, where is that thing?"
From the far end of the big table she brought under the lamp a basket
of Indian weave and excavated from its trove of playing cards, tobacco
sacks, cigarette papers, letters, and odd photographs another snapshot
of Oswald. It was a far different scene. Here Oswald stood erect beside
the mounted skeleton of some prehistoric giant reptile that dwarfed yet
left him somehow in kingly triumph.
"There now!" observed the lady. "Don't he look a heap more egregious by
that mess of bones than he does by his own flesh and blood? Talk about
pride!"
And I saw that it was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face,
proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a proprietary
caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be
forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born.
If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father
of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed
somewhere.
"That's where the man's heart really lies," said his stern critic,
"even if he does drivel about his little flower with bones and a voice!
Probably by now he's wishing the voice had been left out of his little
flower." Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the print of the
mounted skeleton.
"That there," she glibly rattled off, "is the organic remains of a
three-toed woolly bronsolumphicus of the carboniferous limestone, or
Upper Silurian trilobite period. I believe I have the name correct.
It was dug up out of a dry lake in Wyoming that years ago got to be
mere loblolly, so that this unfortunate critter bogged down in it. The
poor thing passed on about six million or four hundred million years
ago--somewhere along there. Oswald and his new father-in-law dug it
from its quiet resting place in the old cemetery. Such is their
thrilling work in life.
"This father-in-law is just an old body snatcher that snoops round
robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum
at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest.
He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out
in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He
don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like
a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the skeleton of
something as big as a freight car, that perished far in the dead past,
and he's as tickled as a kid shooting at little sister with his new air
gun.
"Bones in his weakness--and periods of geology. He likes period bones
the way some folks like period furniture; and rocks and geography and
Lower Triassics, and so forth. He knows how old the earth is within a
few hundred million years; how the scantling and joists for it was put
together, and all the different kinds of teeth that wild animals have.
He's a scientist. Oswald is a scientist. I was a scientist myself two
summers ago when they was up here.
"By the time they left I could talk a lot of attractive words. I could
speak whole sentences so good that I could hardly understand myself. Of
course after they left I didn't keep up my science. I let myself get
rusty in it. I probably don't know so much more about it now than you
would. Oh, perhaps a little more. It would all come back to me if I took
it up again."
So I said that I had nothing to do for an hour or so, and if she would
not try to be scientific, but talk in her own homely words, I might
consent to listen; in this event she might tell the whole thing, omitting
nothing, however trifling it might seem to her, because she was no proper
judge of values. I said it was true I might be overtaken by sleep, since
my day had been a hard one, reaching clear to the trout pool under the
big falls and involving the transportation back to seventeen rainbow
trout weighing well over seventeen pounds, more or less, though feeling
much like more. And what about Oswald and the primeval ooze, and so
forth. And would it be important if true? The lady said--well, yes, and
no; but, however--
He's Professor Marwich up at the university--this confirmed old coroner
I'm telling you about. Has a train of capital letters streaming along
after he's all through with his name. I don't know what they mean--doctor
of dental surgery, I guess, or zoology or fractions or geography, or
whatever has to do with rocks and animals and vertebraes. He ain't a bad
old scout out of business hours. He pirooted round here one autumn about
a dozen years ago and always threatened to come back and hold some more
of these here inquests on the long departed; but I heard nothing until
two summers ago. He wrote that he wanted to come up to do field work.
That's the innocent name he calls his foul trade by. And he wanted to
bring his assistant, Professor Pennypacker; and could I put them up?
I said if they would wait till haying was over I could and would. He
answered they would wait till my hay was garnered--that's the pretty word
he used--and could he also bring his mouthless chit with him? I didn't
quite make him. He writes a hand that would never get by in a business
college. I thought it might be something tame he carried in a cage, and
would stay quiet all day while he was out pursuing his repulsive
practices. It didn't sound troublesome.
I never made a worse guess. It was his daughter he talked about that
way. She was all right enough, though astounding when you had expected
something highly zoological and mouthless instead of motherless. She was
a tall roan girl with the fashionable streamline body, devoted to the
ukulele and ladies' wearing apparel. But not so young as that sounds. Her
general manner of conduct was infantile enough, but she had tired eyes
and a million little lines coming round 'em, and if you got her in a
strong light you saw she was old enough to have a serious aim in life.
She did use massage cream and beauty lotions with a deep seriousness
you wouldn't suspect her of when she sat out in the hammock in the
moonlight and scratched this ukulele and acted the part of a mere porch
wren. That was really the girl's trade; all she'd ever learned. Mebbe
she had misspent her early youth, or mebbe she wasn't meant for anything
else--just a butterfly with some of the gold powder brushed off and the
wings a little mite crumpled.
Gee! How times have changed since I took my own hair out of a braid!
In them fond old days when a girl didn't seem attractive enough for
marriage she took up a career--school-teaching probably--and was looked
at sidewise by her family. It's different now. In this advanced day a
girl seems to start for the career first and take up marriage only when
all other avenues is closed. She's the one that is now regarded by her
brainy sisters as a failure. I consider it an evil state for the world
to be in--but no matter; I can't do anything about it from up here, with
haytime coming on.
Anyway, this Lydia girl had not been constructed for any career requiring
the serious use of the head; and yet so far she had failed in the other
one. She was on the way to being an outcast if she didn't pull something
desperate pretty soon. She was looking down on thirty, and I bet her
manner hadn't changed a bit since she was looking up to twenty.
Of course she'd learned things about her game. Living round a college she
must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating classes of young men.
Naturally she'd learned technique and feminine knavery. She was still
flirty enough. She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with
great pathos. And the party hadn't more than landed here when I saw that
at last she did have a serious aim in life.
It was this here assistant to her father, who was named Professor Oswald
Pennypacker; and he was a difficult aim in life, because he didn't need a
wife any more than the little dicky birds need wrist watches. You seen
his picture there. About thirty-five he was and had devoted all his years
to finding out the names of wild animals, which is said to be one of our
best sciences. He hadn't got round to women yet. A good snappy skeleton
of one might of entertained him if he could of dug it up himself and
called it a sedimentary limestone; but he had never trifled with one that
was still in commission and ornamented with flesh and clothes.
And fussy! I wish you could of seen that man's room after he had
carefully unpacked! A place for everything, and he had everything,
too--everything in the world. And if someone switched his soap over to
where his tooth paste belonged it upset his whole day. The Chink never
dared to go into his room after the first morning. Oswald even made his
own bed. Easy to call him an old maid, but I never saw any woman suffer
as much agony in her neatness.
His shoes had to be in a row, and his clothes and hats and caps had to
be in a row, and there was only one hook in the room his pyjamas could
lawfully hang on, and his talcum powder had to stand exactly between
the mosquito dope and the bay rum, which had to be flanked precisely by
his manicure tools and succeeded by something he put on his hair, which
was going the way of all flesh. If some marauder had entered his room in
the night and moved his compass over to where his fountain pen belonged
he would of woke up instantly and screamed.
And then his new wardrobe trunk! This was a great and holy joy that
had come into his bleak life; all new and shiny and complicated, with
a beautiful brass lock, one side for clothes on correct hangers and the
other side full of drawers and compartments and secret recesses, where
he could hide things from himself. It was like a furnished flat, that
trunk. And this was his first adventure out in the great cruel world
with it. He cherished it as a man had ought to cherish his bride.
He had me in to gaze upon it that first afternoon. You'd of thought he
was trying to sell it to me, the way he showed it off. It stood on end,
having a bulge like a watermelon in the top, so no vandal could stand
it up wrong; and it was wide open to show the two insides. He opened up
every room in it, so I could marvel at 'em. He fawned on that trunk. And
at the last he showed me a little brass hook he had screwed into the
side where the clothes hangers was. It was a very important hook. He hung
the keys of the trunk on it; two keys, strung on a cord, and the cord
neatly on the hook. This, he told me, was so the keys would never
get lost.
"I always have a dread I may lose those keys," says he. "That would be a
catastrophe indeed, would it not? So I plan to keep them on that hook;
then I shall always know where they are."
The crafty wretch! He could wake up in the night and put his hand on
those keys in the dark. Probably he often done so. I spoke a few simple
words of praise for his sagacity. And after this interesting lecture on
his trunk and its keys, and a good look at the accurate layout of his one
million belongings, I had his number. He was the oldest living boy scout.