Читать книгу Mary's Neck - Booth Tarkington - Страница 4

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YOU see the Masseys have always had a great name for being home-bodies. Maybe it’s been a mistake, I don’t know; but anyway for three generations—ever since pioneer days—we’ve stuck pretty close around Logansville and done mighty little travelling. For my own part, Logansville’s always been good enough for me and I never did see much use in getting very far away from home. Not that I couldn’t afford it, because I’ve done as well in business as any man could ask—my father owned the gas-plant and I’ve still got it, and I’m president of the Logansville Light and Power Company besides—but two or three trips a year to Chicago on business and to other large cities, maybe, to look over Plants like ours, have usually been enough to satisfy me in the way of gadding about, so to speak. Of course I don’t mean that my family and I practically haven’t ever been out of Logansville. Both the girls went East to school, and they and Mrs. Massey have been to New York pretty often—I’ve had to go there myself sometimes—and they’ve been to Atlantic City and Florida. One or two summers we’ve spent a month or so at a hotel up on Lake Michigan; but it’s a fact I never did see the ocean until we came here to Mary’s Neck this summer, and to tell the truth I didn’t have any particular anxiety to see it. Mrs. Massey and Enid and Clarissa had just about all they could do, I expect, to persuade me that my duty required me to come and look at it.

They’d read about this place in a newspaper article by a summer correspondent, a lady-writer that was pretty enthusiastic about the quaint old Down East fishing village, full of quaint old interesting characters and quaint old interesting furniture and fashionable summer people and storm-bound rocks and sun-washed beaches and all this and that; and so last winter nothing would do but Mrs. Massey should write to a real estate agent in Boston and rent a cottage here for the summer. That article hit her and the girls right between the eyes; they’d read books about just such places, and they’d already pestered me into remodelling our old house to make it Colonial or something—all out of place in Logansville, I told ’em, but they had their way, and they got their way about landing the family here in Mary’s Neck for this summer, too.

They were so excited and so anxious to see the quaint old Down East characters and buy some of the quaint old furniture that they couldn’t even wait for warm weather and hustled me up here with ’em right in April—yes, sir, outside of a taxicab ride in the rain across some of Boston, my first experience of old New England was spang in the middle of a snowstorm. “Stern and rockbound coast”, I should say so! Mrs. Massey and the girls stood out on the front piazza, shivering and taking on about what a grand view it was, while I took the keys the Boston agent had given us and opened the front door and went inside to see what chance there was to get warm. There didn’t seem to be much hope. The fireplaces were all empty, so I went out to the kitchen, and, happening to think, I turned a faucet of the sink and nothing came out. Then I opened the kitchen door and there was a man in rubber boots and these yellow slickers they call oilskins sitting on the back steps.

“Howdy-do,” I said. “I expect you’re probably Zebias Flick, the man Mr. Avery in Boston told us was the caretaker here and would have everything nice and ready for us.”

He didn’t move, or even turn his head; he just sat there on the steps with his back toward me.

“Here!” I said. “Aren’t you this Zebias Flick?”

Well, it didn’t seem to register with him; he didn’t pay any attention at all; he didn’t budge—just sat there like a stone man, and I couldn’t see even his profile because his head was all covered with one of these sou’wester hats that had snow on it. Mrs. Massey and the girls had been delighted in Boston when Mr. Avery told us the caretaker’s name was Zebias Flick; they said it was “too perfect”, that name! But as I stood there in the doorway looking at him, it began to come over me that if this was Zebias I wasn’t taking a great liking to him at first sight.

“Listen!” I said. “Are you snowbound or are you Zebias Flick?”

At that, he stretched out one of his legs, then he stretched out the other one, then he put ’em both under him again and hoisted himself up. He didn’t turn all the way toward me, just part way; but I could see that he had a weazened sort of face with kind of a scattered mustache, and his mouth was moving around underneath it because he was chewing a splinter. But he didn’t say anything; he just gave sort of a cough. That is, it was more like a muffled bark—as if he was afraid if he let himself out in a good hearty cough he might commit himself to something.

“Well, that’s a comfort,” I told him. “Anyhow you can cough a little! Listen, are you Zebias Flick?”

“Well—” he said, “yes.” He took his time to say it, too, and the way he said it struck me as if what he really wanted to say, and would have said if he hadn’t got caught in a jam, was, “Yes and no.”

So then I asked him why in the name of conscience there wasn’t any heat in the house, and he loosened up enough to answer that there might be some wood in the cellar.

“The water isn’t turned on, either,” I told him, and I asked him if the current was on for the lights and the electric range in the kitchen.

“Dun’t know as ’tis,” he said.

“Well, how do we get our water and light?”

This question seemed to strike him as one that opened up a field of thought entirely new to him, and I had to repeat it twice. Then he came back at me with the snappy suggestion: “Telephone mebbe.”

“All right, where’s the telephone?”

“Dun’t know as it’s been connected.”

“Listen!” I said. “Mr. Avery told me you were supposed to be the caretaker here, and the people that rent this cottage are more or less expected to employ you during the summer as kind of a hired man. Do you think if I made a settlement with you right now at a reasonable figure you could take up your duties and get some fires going in the house and the water connected and the lights on and kind of brighten things up generally? What about it?”

“Well,” he said, and he turned more away from me, “I dun’t know as I cal’lated on being around here this season. Had a mind to lobster some down Kitter’s Cove way.”

“Listen!” I said. “How much do you want?”

“Well—” he said, and he stopped chewing his splinter for so long that the end of it that stuck out beyond his mustache got snow on it.

I began making offers to him, raising them pretty fast because I’d only brought a light overcoat and I was pretty shivery. Finally, when I thought I’d gone about as far over the limit for a hired man as even an Eastern summer resort could expect, he began chewing his splinter again, at least enough to wobble the snow off of it; and pretty soon after that he seemed to make up his mind to come into the house and start in to be fairly busy, so I concluded that the terms were satisfactory. Then, the next day, the cook and a couple of housemaids Mrs. Massey had hired in Boston came up, and, feeling that we were beginning to get settled a little, I went out to take a look around and see where I was going to find somebody to talk to.

Of course Mrs. Massey and Clarissa and Enid are just as pleasant a family as a body could wish for; but they incline a good deal to topics that don’t appeal to me so terribly and that pretty often are ’way out of a practical man’s field of thought, and over my head, maybe. And besides that, a man always has a kind of powerful need to talk to other men quite a little, instead of just to women, no matter how nice those women are. Out our way in the Middle West everybody knows how easily talking goes on between man and man, so to speak; nobody’s ever afraid to talk to anybody else, and of course in Logansville everybody knows everybody else and there’s quite a power of talking goes on all the time. Well, I always supposed it was just the same all over the country, and that a man could hardly go anywhere where it wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world to start up a conversation—but when I thought that I’d never been to Mary’s Neck in New England.

I went into the grocery store in the village and bought some supplies right liberally. There were several men in there; one or two, I could tell from their clothes, were fishermen, and they kind of seemed to smell like it, and two or three were in overalls. “Well, gentlemen,” I said, “I hope we’ll have some better weather before long.” I said this because that’s always a good way to start a conversation, and besides, I’d already heard some of the inhabitants of Mary’s Neck calling out things about the weather to one another as they passed on the road. The very day we arrived I heard one of the villagers shout across the street to another in the midst of the snowstorm, “Snowin’!” and the other called back, “Yes, ’tis!” So I thought this might be an agreeable way to begin. But nobody paid any attention; nobody even looked at me, and I felt a little embarrassed.

“Well, most likely,” I said, trying to make myself feel more comfortable, “I guess most likely it’s liable to clear up pretty soon.”

They just stood there, mostly with their hands in their pockets, and looked out toward the village street; so I waited to see if they weren’t going to have a little politeness, maybe. After a while, one of ’em began to move his lower jaw, which I’ve learned since is a sort of preliminary sign a citizen of these parts makes to indicate that if you stand around and wait long enough he’s liable to say something. When this one got the motion worked up to where he was ready, he spoke to a fisherman standing near him. “Cap’,” he said, “you hear about old man Lingle’s mistake?”

“No,” the one he called “Cap’ ” told him. “Ain’t.”

“No?” the first one said. “Old man Lingle was settin’ front his prop’ty at Pebble Cove when a little vessell come round the Point. She sprung a plank and went right down to the bottom with a young man aboard of her. He was makin’ a mite of a fuss; but he scarcely left a ripple, and it turned out to be old Mrs. Cadwalader’s son that keeps the fish store over t’ the Cove. After the funeral she come around, and it seemed like she wanted to take old man Lingle to task. ‘Mr. Lingle,’ she says, ‘why didn’t you rescue my son? There you stood right on the shore with your dory as handy as need be and my son hollering for help only a mite of a distance away in the water. Why didn’t you git in that dory and go out and haul him aboard?’ Ole man Lingle seemed to feel bad about it. ‘Why, Mrs. Cadwalader,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t ’a’ had such a thing happen for the world! If I’d ’a’ dreamed it was your son you know me better than to think I’d ever stood there jest lookin’ on like. Mrs. Cadwalader,’ he says, ‘you’ll have to excuse me; I thought it was one o’ them summer people.’ ”

Then, when he finished, nobody said anything and they all stood just the way they were before, without any expressions on their faces, staring out through the front windows of the store as if they didn’t have anything except that to do for the next day or so. It struck me as kind of chilling, so to speak, and I gave up trying to be sociable with that lot; but I didn’t do much better with any of the other inhabitants I ran across, though I made quite a number of attempts to strike up pleasant relations with them if such there were.

There was only one person showed any willingness to be friendly; but it didn’t turn out very well. He was an elderly-looking man with a right nice likeable kind of face, and he was sawing wood just outside of a big barn that stands close to an old stone fence on the back road; I was walking by there and I stopped and sat down on the fence and watched him for a while. By-and-by he quit sawing and wiped his forehead, and I spoke to him.

“Pretty good exercise, sawing wood,” I said; and he put his hand behind his ear and came up close to me.

“Wha’d you say? I’m hard o’ hearin’.”

So I got up and leaned close to his ear and said it again, louder, and he astonished me because he broke into a right amiable smile, the first thing of that kind I’d seen since I came to Mary’s Neck. Well, sir, it warmed me all up, and I thought to myself that here at last I’d found one fellow-being, as it were, that I could come and talk to, and I was lonesome enough to take the trouble of trying to make him hear me. He said he’d always enjoyed sawing wood; and we began to have a real nice conversation until I happened to ask him whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. He didn’t seem to understand me at first, so I shouted the question louder in his ear, and then, all at once, he reached out and grabbed my hat off my head and went into the barn with it. He stayed in there a minute; then he came out and walked up to the stone fence where I was and put my hat on my head again. He didn’t say anything while he was doing all this and it seemed so peculiar that I felt kind of embarrassed and didn’t say anything, either. Then he went over to his bucksaw and picked up a stick of wood and threw it at me. I dodged it; but he threw another one and was reaching down to get more, so I left.

On the way home I got to wondering why he’d taken my hat into the barn, so I took it off and looked at it. It was a new grey soft hat with a black band around it, and he had written DAMU on the front of the band in chalk. It struck me as a singular word; but I thought I saw what he meant, and when I got back to the cottage I told Zebias Flick about this old man and where he lived and what he’d done to my hat, and I asked Zebias if he knew him. It was warmer, and Zebias had found a blade of grass that he had in his mouth; afterwhile it began to move up and down where it came out between some of his mustache, and finally he said:

“Might be I might; might be I mightn’t.”

“Well, who is he?”

“I couldn’t say,” he told me. “I couldn’t say even if I was a mind to.”

“Look here,” I said, “that old man isn’t right in his head. I might have known that, myself, at the start, from the willingness he showed to talk to me; but naturally a person that begins to throw cordwood at you just because you ask him whether he’s a Republican or a Democrat—well, in a place as small as this, of course everybody would certainly know who he is. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never even heard of him?”

“I couldn’t state,” Zebias said. “I dun’t take no interest in politics.”

That’s all I could get out of him. But our cook, a woman named Joanna Gillwife, was originally from somewhere Down East, herself, and had made some acquaintances in the village, and the next evening she came into the living-room and told Mrs. Massey and me all about that old man. Of course, as anybody knew, he wasn’t right in his head; but he was strong and handy and perfectly gentle—except to strangers—so his family had always kept him in Mary’s Neck instead of sending him away, and he was Zebias Flick’s own cousin.

So that’s the way it was, you see. I was kind of thrown back completely, as it were, on the society of Mrs. Massey and the girls.