“I don’t think we’d better begin trying to establish alibis,” remarked Muriel, very gently, “for we might get into terrible scrapes. Why, if Mr. Stevens hadn’t been so splendid about everything and wasn’t just the kindest man in the world, he could make it very ugly for me.”
“I shudder to think of what he might do to me,” said Wilton, glancing guardedly at his neighbor.
“The main thing,” said Talbot—“the main thing is that Mr. Stevens has done for us all what nobody else could ever have done. He’s made us see how foolish it is to quarrel about mere baubles. He’s settled all our troubles for us, and for my part I’ll say his solution is entirely satisfactory.”
“Quite right,” ejaculated Wilton. “If I ever have any delicate business negotiations that are beyond my powers I’m going to engage Mr. Stevens to handle them.”
“My business’s hens an’ eggs,” said The Hopper modestly; “an’ we’re doin’ purty well.”
When they rose to go (a move that evoked strident protests from Billie, who was enjoying himself hugely with Humpy) they were all in the jolliest humor.
“We must be neighborly,” said Muriel, shaking hands with Mary, who was at the point of tears so great was her emotion at the success of The Hopper’s party. “And we’re going to buy all our chickens and eggs from you. We never have any luck raising our own.”
Whereupon The Hopper imperturbably pressed upon each of the visitors a neat card stating his name (his latest and let us hope his last!) with the proper rural route designation of Happy Hill Farm.
The Hopper carried Billie out to his Grandfather Wilton’s car, while Humpy walked beside him bearing the gifts from the Happy Hill Farm Christmas tree. From the door Mary watched them depart amid a chorus of merry Christmases, out of which Billie’s little pipe rang cheerily.
When The Hopper and Humpy returned to the house, they abandoned the parlor for the greater coziness of the kitchen and there took account of the events of the momentous twenty-four hours.
“Them’s what I call nice folks,” said Humpy. “They jes’ put us on an’ wore us like we wuz a pair o’ ole slippers.”
“They wuzn’t uppish—not to speak of,” Mary agreed. “I guess that girl’s got more gumption than any of ’em. She’s got ’em straightened up now and I guess she’ll take care they don’t cut up no more monkey-shines about that Chinese stuff. Her husban’ seemed sort o’ gentle like.”
“Artists is that way,” volunteered The Hopper, as though from deep experience of art and life. “I jes’ been thinkin’ that knowin’ folks like that an’ findin’ ’em humin, makin’ mistakes like th’ rest of us, kind o’ makes ut seem easier fer us all t’ play th’ game straight. Ut’s goin’ to be th’ white card fer me—jes’ chickens an’ eggs, an’ here’s hopin’ the bulls don’t ever find out we’re settled here.”
Humpy, having gone into the parlor to tend the fire, returned with two envelopes he had found on the mantel. There was a check for a thousand dollars in each, one from Wilton, the other from Talbot, with “Merry Christmas” written across the visiting-cards of those gentlemen. The Hopper permitted Mary and Humpy to examine them and then laid them on the kitchen table, while he deliberated. His meditations were so prolonged that they grew nervous.
“I reckon they could spare ut, after all ye done fer ’em, Hop,” remarked Humpy.
“They’s millionaires, an’ money ain’t nothin’ to ’em,” said The Hopper.
“We can buy a motor-truck,” suggested Mary, “to haul our stuff to town; an’ mebbe we can build a new shed to keep ut in.”
The Hopper set the catsup bottle on the checks and rubbed his cheek, squinting at the ceiling in the manner of one who means to be careful of his speech.
“They’s things wot is an’ things wot ain’t,” he began. “We ain’t none o’ us ever got nowheres bein’ crooked. I been figurin’ that I still got about twenty thousan’ o’ that bunch o’ green I pulled out o’ that express car, planted in places where ’taint doin’ nobody no good. I guess ef I do ut careful I kin send ut back to the company, a little at a time, an’ they’d never know where ut come from.”
Mary wept; Humpy stared, his mouth open, his one eye rolling queerly.
“I guess we kin put a little chunk away every year,” The Hopper went on. “We’d be comfortabler doin’ ut. We could square up ef we lived long enough, which we don’t need t’ worry about, that bein’ the Lord’s business. You an’ me’s cracked a good many safes, Hump, but we never made no money at ut, takin’ out th’ time we done.”
“He’s got religion; that’s wot he’s got!” moaned Humpy, as though this marked the ultimate tragedy of The Hopper’s life.
“Mebbe ut’s religion an’ mebbe ut’s jes’ sense,” pursued The Hopper, unshaken by Humpy’s charge. “They wuz a chaplin in th’ Minnesoty pen as used t’ say ef we’re all square with our own selves ut’s goin’ to be all right with God. I guess I got a good deal o’ squarin’ t’ do, but I’m goin’ t’ begin ut. An’ all these things happenin’ along o’ Chris’mus, an’ little Shaver an’ his ma bein’ so friendly like, an’ her gittin’ me t’ help straighten out them ole gents, an’ doin’ all I done an’ not gettin’ pinched seems more ’n jes’ luck; it’s providential’s wot ut is!”
This, uttered in a challenging tone, evoked a sob from Humpy, who announced that he “felt like” he was going to die.
“It’s th’ Chris’mus time, I reckon,” said Mary, watching The Hopper deposit the two checks in the clock. “It’s the only decent Chris’mus I ever knowed!”
BEASLEY’S CHRISTMAS PARTY, by Booth Tarkington
TO JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
I.
The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o’clock in the morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first night’s work on the Wainwright Morning Despatch.
I had already marked that house as the finest (to my taste) in Wainwright, though hitherto, on my excursions to this metropolis, the state capital, I was not without a certain native jealousy that Spencerville, the county-seat where I lived, had nothing so good. Now, however, I approached its purlieus with a pleasure in it quite unalloyed, for I was at last myself a resident (albeit of only one day’s standing) of Wainwright, and the house—though I had not even an idea who lived there—part of my possessions as a citizen. Moreover, I might enjoy the warmer pride of a next-door-neighbor, for Mrs. Apperthwaite’s, where I had taken a room, was just beyond.
This was the quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it, and the “fashionable residence section” had overleaped this “forgotten backwater,” leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none, as a town grows to be a city—the look of still being a neighborhood. This friendliness of appearance was largely the emanation of the homely and beautiful house which so greatly pleased my fancy.
It might be difficult to say why I thought it the “finest” house in Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain, set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a fair spread of flat lawn. But it gave back a great deal for your glance, just as some people do. It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in it. Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people living there, who would welcome you merrily.
It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and a grandmother; where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would return from no matter what distances; a house wher
e big turkeys would be on the table often; where one called “the hired man” (and named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his knees on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful—and that is about as near as I can come to my reason for thinking it the finest house in Wainwright.
The moon hung kindly above its level roof in the silence of that October morning, as I checked my gait to loiter along the picket fence; but suddenly the house showed a light of its own. The spurt of a match took my eye to one of the upper windows, then a steadier glow of orange told me that a lamp was lighted. The window was opened, and a man looked out and whistled loudly.
I stopped, thinking that he meant to attract my attention; that something might be wrong; that perhaps some one was needed to go for a doctor. My mistake was immediately evident, however; I stood in the shadow of the trees bordering the sidewalk, and the man at the window had not seen me.
“Boy! Boy!” he called, softly. “Where are you, Simpledoria?”
He leaned from the window, looking downward. “Why, there you are!” he exclaimed, and turned to address some invisible person within the room. “He’s right there, underneath the window. I’ll bring him up.” He leaned out again. “Wait there, Simpledoria!” he called. “I’ll be down in a jiffy and let you in.”
Puzzled, I stared at the vacant lawn before me. The clear moonlight revealed it brightly, and it was empty of any living presence; there were no bushes nor shrubberies—nor even shadows—that could have been mistaken for a boy, if “Simpledoria” was a boy. There was no dog in sight; there was no cat; there was nothing beneath the window except thick, close-cropped grass.
A light shone in the hallway behind the broad front doors; one of these was opened, and revealed in silhouette the tall, thin figure of a man in a long, old-fashioned dressing-gown.
“Simpledoria,” he said, addressing the night air with considerable severity, “I don’t know what to make of you. You might have caught your death of cold, roving out at such an hour. But there,” he continued, more indulgently; “wipe your feet on the mat and come in. You’re safe now!”
He closed the door, and I heard him call to some one upstairs, as he rearranged the fastenings:
“Simpledoria is all right—only a little chilled. I’ll bring him up to your fire.”
I went on my way in a condition of astonishment that engendered, almost, a doubt of my eyes; for if my sight was unimpaired and myself not subject to optical or mental delusion, neither boy nor dog nor bird nor cat, nor any other object of this visible world, had entered that opened door. Was my “finest” house, then, a place of call for wandering ghosts, who came home to roost at four in the morning?
It was only a step to Mrs. Apperthwaite’s; I let myself in with the key that good lady had given me, stole up to my room, went to my window, and stared across the yard at the house next door. The front window in the second story, I decided, necessarily belonged to that room in which the lamp had been lighted; but all was dark there now. I went to bed, and dreamed that I was out at sea in a fog, having embarked on a transparent vessel whose preposterous name, inscribed upon glass life-belts, depending here and there from an invisible rail, was Simpledoria.
II.
Mrs. Apperthwaite’s was a commodious old house, the greater part of it of about the same age, I judged, as its neighbor; but the late Mr. Apperthwaite had caught the Mansard fever of the late Seventies, and the building-disease, once fastened upon him, had never known a convalescence, but, rather, a series of relapses, the tokens of which, in the nature of a cupola and a couple of frame turrets, were terrifyingly apparent. These romantic misplacements seemed to me not inharmonious with the library, a cheerful and pleasantly shabby apartment down-stairs, where I found (over a substratum of history, encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an early edition of Cooper’s works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay, Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac: Clarissa, Lalla Rookh, The Alhambra, Beulah, Uarda, Lucile, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben-Hur, Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were novels about those delicately tangled emotions experienced by the supreme few; and stories of adventurous royalty; tales of “clean-limbed young American manhood;” and some thin volumes of rather precious verse.
’Twas amid these romantic scenes that I awaited the sound of the lunch-bell (which for me was the announcement of breakfast), when I arose from my first night’s slumbers under Mrs. Apperthwaite’s roof; and I wondered if the books were a fair mirror of Miss Apperthwaite’s mind (I had been told that Mrs. Apperthwaite had a daughter). Mrs. Apperthwaite herself, in her youth, might have sat to an illustrator of Scott or Bulwer. Even now you could see she had come as near being romantically beautiful as was consistently proper for such a timid, gentle little gentlewoman as she was. Reduced, by her husband’s insolvency (coincident with his demise) to “keeping boarders,” she did it gracefully, as if the urgency thereto were only a spirit of quiet hospitality. It should be added in haste that she set an excellent table.
Moreover, the guests who gathered at her board were of a very attractive description, as I decided the instant my eye fell upon the lady who sat opposite me at lunch. I knew at once that she was Miss Apperthwaite, she “went so,” as they say, with her mother; nothing could have been more suitable. Mrs. Apperthwaite was the kind of woman whom you would expect to have a beautiful daughter, and Miss Apperthwaite more than fulfilled her mother’s promise.
I guessed her to be more than Juliet Capulet’s age, indeed, yet still between that and the perfect age of woman. She was of a larger, fuller, more striking type than Mrs. Apperthwaite, a bolder type, one might put it—though she might have been a great deal bolder than Mrs. Apperthwaite without being bold. Certainly she was handsome enough to make it difficult for a young fellow to keep from staring at her. She had an abundance of very soft, dark hair, worn almost severely, as if its profusion necessitated repression; and I am compelled to admit that her fine eyes expressed a distant contemplation—obviously of habit not of mood—so pronounced that one of her enemies (if she had any) might have described them as “dreamy.”
Only one other of my own sex was present at the lunch-table, a Mr. Dowden, an elderly lawyer and politician of whom I had heard, and to whom Mrs. Apperthwaite, coming in after the rest of us were seated, introduced me. She made the presentation general; and I had the experience of receiving a nod and a slow glance, in which there was a sort of dusky, estimating brilliance, from the beautiful lady opposite me.
It might have been better mannered for me to address myself to Mr. Dowden, or one of the very nice elderly women, who were my fellow-guests, than to open a conversation with Miss Apperthwaite; but I did not stop to think of that.
“You have a splendid old house next door to you here, Miss Apperthwaite,” I said. “It’s a privilege to find it in view from my window.”
There was a faint stir as of some consternation in the little company. The elderly ladies stopped talking abruptly and exchanged glances, though this was not of my observation at the moment, I think, but recurred to my consciousness later, when I had perceived my blunder.
“May I ask who lives there?” I pursued.
Miss Apperthwaite allowed her noticeable lashes to cover her eyes for an instant, then looked up again.
“A Mr. Beasley,” she said.
“Not the Honorable David Beasley!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” she returned, with a certain gravity which I afterward wished had checked me. “Do you know him?”
“Not in person,” I explained. “You see, I�
��ve written a good deal about him. I was with the Spencerville Journal until a few days ago, and even in the country we know who’s who in politics over the state. Beasley’s the man that went to Congress and never made a speech—never made even a motion to adjourn—but got everything his district wanted. There’s talk of him now for Governor.”
“Indeed?”
“And so it’s the Honorable David Beasley who lives in that splendid place. How curious that is!”
“Why?” asked Miss Apperthwaite.
“It seems too big for one man,” I answered; “and I’ve always had the impression Mr. Beasley was a bachelor.”
“Yes,” she said, rather slowly, “he is.”
“But of course he doesn’t live there all alone,” I supposed, aloud, “probably he has—”
“No. There’s no one else—except a couple of colored servants.”
“What a crime!” I exclaimed. “If there ever was a house meant for a large family, that one is. Can’t you almost hear it crying out for heaps and heaps of romping children? I should think—”
I was interrupted by a loud cough from Mr. Dowden, so abrupt and artificial that his intention to check the flow of my innocent prattle was embarrassingly obvious—even to me!
“Can you tell me,” he said, leaning forward and following up the interruption as hastily as possible, “what the farmers were getting for their wheat when you left Spencerville?”
“Ninety-four cents,” I answered, and felt my ears growing red with mortification. Too late, I remembered that the new-comer in a community should guard his tongue among the natives until he has unravelled the skein of their relationships, alliances, feuds, and private wars—a precept not unlike the classic injunction:
“Yes, my darling daughter. Hang your clothes on a hickory limb, But don’t go near the water.”
However, in my confusion I warmly regretted my failure to follow it, and resolved not to blunder again.
Mr. Dowden thanked me for the information for which he had no real desire, and, the elderly ladies again taking up (with all too evident relief) their various mild debates, he inquired if I played bridge. “But I forget,” he added. “Of course you’ll be at the Despatch office in the evenings, and can’t be here.” After which he immediately began to question me about my work, making his determination to give me no opportunity again to mention the Honorable David Beasley unnecessarily conspicuous, as I thought.
The Second Christmas Megapack Page 9
