Читать книгу Mary's Neck - Booth Tarkington - Страница 5

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WELL, of course they’d found out by this time that we’d come to Mary’s Neck pretty early in the season—a good deal before the season was due to get ready to commence, in fact. “It isn’t like Atlantic City,” Mrs. Massey said, “or those other places where people go practically at any time. Joanna Gillwife has cooked several summers for families in other places along the shore and she tells me none of the cottagers to speak of will be here before June and most of ’em won’t be along until a couple of months from now, and the hotels won’t open till then, either. I thought Mr. Avery did seem rather surprised about our wanting to come in April and I s’pose we really were rushing things a little.”

But of course Clarissa and Enid both said they’d known all about that. Anybody that knew anything understood that the season at places like Mary’s Neck didn’t begin until along in June, at least, they said, and they told me the kind of people that had cottages at Mary’s Neck were probably mostly resting themselves at home in the eastern cities for a while after being in Florida and other southern resorts for some of the winter. The fact that they wouldn’t be here for quite a while yet was a great advantage for us, Enid and Clarissa said, because when the season opened everything would be in such a sociable rush they wouldn’t have time for anything, and now, the way things were, we’d have a long, peaceable period to get acquainted with the neighborhood in and find the quaint old characters and do some antiquing. What if we did have a few snowstorms, they asked, and they said they wished they had even more time before the pow-wowing and ruckus of the sociable season opened.

Enid is the artistic one, and for the last year or so she’s had artistic theories I don’t understand at all, and she gets sensitive about ’em, too; but she claims she isn’t bigoted against the old in art because she’s just as much interested in antiques as her mother and sister are. Sometimes she gets me nervous about both art and antiques; she has a way of looking as if she knew secrets about both that I couldn’t ever hope to learn, and now and then if I ask questions in such matters she has a cold, hurt look that’s right upsetting for a parent to endure. Clarissa and Mrs. Massey, too, can do a little in that line when it comes to antiques, and, during those first days of ours at Mary’s Neck, the three of them were pretty often frosty with me, besides being expensive. They weren’t having the same kind of oppressive time I was, not a bit of it. They were just revelling, as they said, in the delicious old quaintness of Mary’s Neck and everything else up and down that strip of coast. They had magazines and read books about all such matters—getting themselves posted up on whatever was old enough to be worth anything—and already they’d gone fairly wild antiquing, as they called it. Our car and the chauffeur had got here from Logansville, and they went out antiquing all over Mary’s Neck and up and down the coast and through the country and to inland towns as much as sixty or seventy miles away, almost every day; and what they brought home with ’em—my soul!

Of course, they’d had the fever a good while back before we ever thought of coming to Mary’s Neck, and they’d bought a few terrible-looking things on their trips away from Logansville; but I hadn’t got myself accustomed to the idea at all. The way I was brought-up, my father and mother, like everybody else in our part of the country, always used to feel a little set up and superior whenever we could afford to buy something new. The principal idea people had about the pleasure of being well off was getting rid of old things and buying new ones; and that’s always seemed to me the natural way of human nature, because it’s the way of progress. Even the ancient orientals must have had that idea or else why was everybody so anxious to trade old lamps for new in the Arabian Nights story of Aladdin? I can’t seem to keep myself from feeling that there’s something upside-down about all this antiquing; but Enid and Clarissa and their mother fairly hoot at me when I air such notions, and they tell me I’m a barbarian and then start in to try and educate me some more. It’s pretty uphill work for them, I guess.

They came home late one afternoon when we’d been here about ten days, and the car was so full that about all you could see of the three of them was their heads sticking out above the packages; and when the chauffeur and I had helped to carry all that truck into the house I couldn’t make myself heard, there was so much going on in the way of exclamations. Enid and Clarissa just danced around the dining-room table where they had their plunder laid out, and kept shouting: “Look at this! Look at that!” till I was pretty nearly dazed.

“We’re going to re-furnish this whole cottage with antiques,” they told me. “Just look at the treasures we’ve found!”

Well, I looked at them; and all I saw seemed to me to be the worst kind of second-hand truck I’d ever laid my eyes on. A good deal of it was pewter, and if there’s anything on earth I despise—we used to be ashamed to have any of it in the house when I was a boy—it’s pewter! Then there was a good deal of that cheap old kind of glass we used to use in Logansville before we could afford cut-glass; there were rusty iron candle-sticks with snuffers; there were some ratty old stable-lanterns, and heaven knows what all! The worst thing in the lot, I thought—even worse than a glass hen sitting on glass eggs in a glass basket—was a great big china dog. He was lying down on kind of an oval plate, and too sizable for a mantelpiece ornament—he was kind of spanielish; but you couldn’t tell what kind of a dog he was, unless being a china dog made him some kind of a dog. He had four awful-looking yellowish spots on him; but for the rest of him he was glistening bald all over, and the expression on what was intended to be his face honestly made me sort of sick. As a matter of fact, this dog was one of those things you don’t want to look at but you can’t help doing it. I’d look at him a while; then I’d walk away and try to forget about him; then I’d have to come back to see if he really did look as horrible as I thought he did, and then I’d just stand staring at him and swallowing.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” Enid asked me.

I said he was. “You haven’t got it in mind to take him back to Logansville, have you?” I asked her.

At that, all three of ’em went for me. This dog, it seemed, was the finest thing they’d found in all their ransackings of the country around Mary’s Neck; it was old Chippingale ware or old Cheswood or something—I never could get the antiquing lingo straight. Anyhow, it was a great find and they’d got it at a tremendous bargain; but that seemed to be true of everything they bought. They were always talking of the “finds” they made; and they seemed to consider themselves pretty remarkable discoverers. It didn’t matter if something they bought was sitting right out in the show-window of an antique store, they always said they “found” it, and pretty often they were sure the antique dealer hadn’t understood the value of the things they bought, or maybe had got confused and put the wrong price-mark on something that was worth at least three times what they’d paid for it.

What they “found” was mostly the kind of extinct ornamental efforts I’ve just been talking about, though they’d also brought home a few old chairs with rush-seats, a couple of farmerish-looking tables and a ghastly sort of thing with mushmelon sized knobs on it that Clarissa told me was a “beautiful old Colonial wig-stand”, and I hate to think what she paid for it—she could have bought a gas-driven lawnmower with the same money. What they wanted most, of course, was furniture; but Mrs. Massey said that “really good things” and “fine, rare old pieces” in that line were scarce; the antique stores seemed to have been pretty well combed over for Colonial furniture.

“What I wish,” she told me, “is that I knew some way to get inside of a few of these delicious old houses in this neighborhood. There’s where the best old pieces are—if there were any way in the world to get at them! Some of these families have been living in the same house for generations, and the place is just full of the most wonderful old concealed treasures. The girls and I have done everything we could to get a look at them; we’ve used every bit of tact we possess; but these people up here in New England are so queer! We haven’t got inside a single old house.”

“No,” I said, “I should think maybe you mightn’t have. That seems fairly plausible to me.”

“But we’re going to keep on trying,” Clarissa put in. “It makes my mouth water to think what must be inside some of these houses, and we’re not going to rest until we see for ourselves. We’ll make it before long; you just wait!”

But they had to go on waiting quite a little while longer; then one day they didn’t get home till so late that dinner had been ready half an hour before they drove up and came bouncing out of the car. They were just wild, though they hadn’t bought anything and didn’t have any packages with ’em at all. They’d got into one of the delicious old houses at last, and the three of ’em tried to tell me all about it at the same time, and they were so excited it took me quite a while to make out what had happened. We were half through dinner before I could get the girls to let their mother have the floor to herself and tell me.

“There was never anything so absolutely perfect in the world!” she said. “I never dreamed they would let us in, and at first they weren’t going to; but Enid looked so pretty and so pleading the dear old man simply couldn’t resist her!”

“What dear old man?” I asked. “What dear old man?”

“The old man at this wonderful old house,” she told me. “He’s simply the sweetest old thing I ever——”

“And don’t forget his darling old wife,” Clarissa broke in. “They were simply the dearest, quaintest, sweetest old couple in the world! The most perfect old New England characters!”

“Absolutely!” Enid had to have her say. “You could see right away they were absolutely characters. They were the most perfectly quaint——”

“Yes,” Mrs. Massey said, “they certainly were! And even after they let us into the front parlor, and we saw how wonderful it was, I was just sure they weren’t going to consent to our seeing the rest of the house. I think if Clarissa hadn’t developed such a crush on the old lady they never would have done it. You never saw such a place in your life—absolutely a treasure house!”

“Why, it’s absolutely a museum!” Enid told me. “There’s hardly a thing in it that isn’t a museum piece, father. And all that priceless, wonderful stuff has been there for generations and generations in the old couple’s family! That’s the most wonderful thing about it all—they haven’t the remotest idea of what it’s worth themselves; so that if we ever get around the dear old things enough to persuade them to sell us such treasures, why, the bargains we could make would just take your breath!”

“Didn’t you offer to buy anything?” I asked her.

“Offer to buy their family heirlooms? No, we certainly didn’t! We knew too much for that; they’d have been insulted. That isn’t the way to handle these people; you’d never get anywhere if you spoke of buying anything the very first day you got into the house. You have to lead up to it gradually; but after you once get them into the mood to sell——”

“Yes,” Clarissa said, “that’s when you begin to get the bargains. Why, Moses Brazinga told me, himself, about a woman that picked up a Hayes-and-Wheeler butterdish for two dollars at a farmhouse, and he offered her a hundred and twenty-five dollars for it and could have sold it to a New York collector for three hundred; but she knew what she’d got, and she wouldn’t sell it. She was from Chicago, he told me.”

Maybe “Hayes-and-Wheeler butterdish” wasn’t what Clarissa said, exactly—I never can get the straight of these things—but it was something like that, and Moses Brazinga is an antiquity dealer Mrs. Massey and the girls were always talking about. He has an antiquity store over at Lodgeport, a town about twenty miles from Mary’s Neck, and they’d bought some coal-oil lamps from him only the day before. (I thought these lamps would look out of place in the house of the president of the Logansville Light and Power Company; but the girls said that didn’t matter.) Anyhow, after Clarissa had told about the Hayes-and-Wheeler butterdish and Moses Brazinga and the Chicago lady, Mrs. Massey said that was just nothing to what happened to a picture collector she’d been reading about. He’d found some old paintings stored in a wood-shed up in the White Mountains and bought them for eight dollars and a half, and they turned out to be worth over seventy-five thousand. So then Enid broke out and told about things like that she’d heard of, and they all three began talking at once about old pieces of glass and iron and pewter and rags or rugs or something that people had “found” or “picked up”, and that turned out to be worth enough to buy a first class automobile. And they said it was going to be just this way about the delicious old house they’d been in that day and were raving over.

“Well, but look here!” I said. “Hold on a minute! I thought you were telling me what a sweet old couple they are that live in this house you’re talking so much about. If their furniture and bric-à-bric and all this and that are worth such a lot of money and they don’t know it, you ought to tell ’em, oughtn’t you? You wouldn’t want to persuade them to sell you something for four dollars that’s worth four hundred?”

I didn’t get very far with that. They all three began to educate me again in the methods proper to antiquing; and then Enid got the floor to herself.

“You see, father,” she told me, “these things that old couple own are only worth a certain amount to them, and that’s what we’d pay them; so they’d get the full value as far as they, themselves, are concerned. If they sold to a dealer, they’d hardly get anything at all and probably be terribly cheated. Besides, you see, we don’t propose to sell what we buy; we just want the things to keep, for our own pleasure in their beauty. We wouldn’t dream of selling them to make money!”

“I see,” I told her. “I’m glad you wouldn’t expect to. I won’t worry about it any more.”

Well, they talked about that old house and the things in it and the quaint old couple off and on till bedtime; they talked almost as much about the old couple as they did about the coming sociable season that’d begin when the cottagers got here. This was such a regular subject with them that by now the cottagers were usually referred to just as “they”. Probably more than a dozen times a day I’d hear Mrs. Massey and Clarissa and Enid saying something about what we ought to do “before they come” or “after they get here”, and once I even overheard a whisper when the three of ’em were in the next room—I couldn’t tell which of ’em said it: “Joanna Gillwife says nobody is practically anybody unless they own their own cottage; we ought to get him to buy this place before they come.”

That was kind of a disturbing whisper to me, and the evening I’m speaking of I preferred hearing them talk about the old couple. As a matter of fact, they got me kind of stirred up and curious to see these two old characters and where they lived, though of course I knew I wouldn’t understand a thing about their rare old house and furniture, even if I went there. The girls and their mother held off the next day and didn’t go near the place—they said it would be better policy—but they did go the afternoon after that and a couple of times more, and then they told me they thought the old couple were kind of coming round to the point where they’d be willing to sell a few things maybe. Mrs. Massey had almost come out in the open and talked price with them, so she was beginning to feel right encouraged.

“Why don’t you come with us to-morrow?” she asked me. “It would help you to learn what beautiful fine old things really are if you’d see them in their natural surroundings in that exquisite old house.”

I said no, at first, though the truth is I had kind of a hankering to go, and pretty soon I let them persuade me. They told me to be careful not to talk much, and I think they were a little nervous about my possibly saying something that might offend the quaint old couple; but the next afternoon we drove out there—it wasn’t far beyond the village—and stopped the car outside the white picket gate at the end of a brick walk that led up to the house. It was a nice-looking, white-painted farmhouse with green shutters; but it was so old-fashioned and plain that for my part I never would have made any great fuss over it. The old couple were sitting on a wooden bench out in the front yard, and when I got a good look at them I thought probably that if I hadn’t been told so much about how perfect they were I wouldn’t have made any particular fuss over them, either.

Their name was Cheever, Mrs. Massey said when she introduced me, and they were so much alike you could almost have taken him out of his own rusty black clothes and put him into hers without seeing much difference. They had grey hair and weazened faces and silver spectacles, and they didn’t look like people that ever gushed much. I guess maybe they were a right nice likeable old couple, if they wanted to be; but they hardly said a thing when Mrs. Massey and the girls began making a to-do over them. Most of the time when they were paid a compliment they’d just put a hand behind their ear and say, “Hey?” and then, if the compliment was repeated loud enough to hear, they’d scratch somewhere.

At least that’s the way they impressed me; but I was glad I’d come, because I’d never seen anything like them before.