Читать книгу Mary's Neck - Booth Tarkington - Страница 6

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AFTER I’d stood around looking on a while, the old man seemed to notice me; then he took a big brass key out of his pocket and opened up the front door with it—it seems they’re great people around here to keep everything locked up, even when they’re right on the premises.

The girls followed him and the old lady into the front parlor; but Mrs. Massey gave me a pinch on the arm and kept me in the little front hall.

“Just look at that!” she whispered. “Just look at that staircase!”

Well, I looked at it, and it was certainly as mean a little staircase as I ever saw in my life. It came almost right down to the front door, and it was steep and narrow and twisted enough for a monkey, and had a miserable old strip of faded carpet running up it.

“Yes,” I said. “Terrible.” Because of course I thought that was why she wanted me to look at it.

“It’s gorgeous!” she told me. “Look at the spiral of that mahogany rail! Maybe they’d sell that darling old stair-carpet with it.”

I looked at her. “With it?” I asked her. “You mean you want to buy their staircase? Buy their staircase?”

“We’ll have to talk to ’em about that,” she whispered. “Look at that low boy!”

“Where?” I said, because I wanted to see one. I’d been hearing a lot of talk about low boys and high boys, and of course I understood by this time that some sort of furniture was implied. “Where’s any low boy?”

She pointed to an ornery little table with some drawers underneath the top of it. “It’s got cubbyhole legs and duck feet,” she said. Anyhow she said something like that; I’m pretty sure it was duck feet. “Now come in and see the high boy,” she said.

So we went into the parlor and I looked at the high boy but didn’t think much of it. Then old Mr. and Mrs. Cheever took us all over the house. To me, the whole place seemed to be just a plain farmhouse full of kind of homely old-fashioned things with nothing in it I’d ever care to buy or feel I had to see around me; but I never heard anything like the way Mrs. Massey and the girls carried on together in whispers. Every minute or so one of ’em would come and grab me by the arm and whisper to me, too, sort of fiercely, “Carved knees!” they’d say, or “Will you look at those snake feet!” or something like that. Most of the time I was walking with old Cheever; but he never said a word except when we got to the kitchen where there was a flint-lock musket hanging over the miserable old fireplace among a lot of out-of-date cooking utensils, and I asked him how old it was.

“Seventeen-thirty-six, B. C.,” he said, and I never heard a hoarser voice. “Either Seventeen-thirty-six, B. C. or Seventeen-thirty-seven, B. C.”

“B. C.?” I asked him. “B. C.?”

“No,” he said, “A. D.” That’s everything he said all the time we were in there, so I could see that Mrs. Massey and the girls were right about his being a pretty quaint old New England character.

In one corner of the kitchen there was a contraption that Enid went just crazy over. It didn’t amount to anything. I could have made one like it, myself, out of old pine boards if I’d wanted to, which I certainly didn’t; but she dragged me over to it and made me look at some figures that had been scratched near the base of it with a nail or something.

“Look at that!” she whispered. “Seventeen-fifty-nine! A pine corner-cupboard dated Seventeen-fifty-nine with a scallop-shell impediment and chock full of absolutely priceless pewter. I’ll simply die if they refuse to sell it!”

“What were you thinking of offering ’em for it?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she whispered to me. “It’s worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars without the pewter, and I’ve simply got to have that pewter, too. Mother and Clarissa and I have made up our minds that we simply cannot live unless we get this corner-cupboard with the pewter, and the high boy and the low boy, and the three four-poster beds and that wonderful duck-foot dining-room table, and the Chippingale chair and the harp-backed chair and the set of blue china and the old silver tea-set and ladle and the staircase and——”

“Hold on,” I said, and I wiped my forehead. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? These old Cheevers intend to go on living here, don’t they? How on earth could you expect ’em to do it with the staircase ripped out—and all these other——”

“Never mind,” she told me. “They’re used to living in the simplest way. Come on.” So we went back to the parlor where the others already were, and Mrs. Massey was talking to the old couple about the high boy.

“Of course I know it’s a delicate matter,” she said, “to press you to name a price for a thing that’s associated in your minds with former members of your family. But of course, since you feel you could bring yourselves to part with it——” She was being so polite about it that she just stopped there and waited for them to speak; but she had to wait so long that finally it got embarrassing. “Well,” she said, “if you could just bring yourselves to name a price——” And she laughed a little, as if she were apologizing.

I saw that Mrs. Cheever was going to say something because her under jaw was beginning to move a little; so afterwhile, when she got herself ready like that, she said, “It’s got clor and boiled feet.”

It seemed to me that Mrs. Massey was surprised that the old lady knew so much about her high boy’s feet. “Oh—has it?” she said. “I’d hardly noticed that.” But here, it struck me, that she was trying to be diplomatic, because she went on, “Of course it’s nice; but so far as rarity is concerned it isn’t very——”

“It’s got clor and boiled feet,” the old lady broke in, “and it’s got the original brasses and cubbyhole legs and a broken impediment.”

It seemed to me from the way she said this that she was fixing to drive quite a bargain; but Enid began talking to me in a low voice—we were standing over by the doorway—and she told me the old lady didn’t know anything at all about the high boy. “Those points are just some she picked up from hearing us talk about it,” Enid said. “We ought to’ve been more cautious, I guess; we made altogether too much fuss over the high boy the first time we came. I think mother ought to’ve begun with the chandelier.”

“My goodness!” I said. “You don’t expect to buy the chandelier right out of these people’s ceiling, do you?” It surprised me, too, that anybody’d want a chandelier like that; it was a little old glass one with candles.

“Sh!” Enid told me. “It’s waterproof; but they don’t know it.” Then she stepped forward and kind of took charge, as it were. “We might as well begin by telling Mr. and Mrs. Cheever exactly what we’re interested in, I think. Now, in this room, there’s the high boy and the chandelier and the two samplers and the wing chair——”

“And the secretary,” Clarissa put in. “Don’t forget the secretary and the andirons and the——”

“Wait a minute,” I said; because I thought we’d be there a pretty long time if things weren’t put on a more businesslike basis, so to speak. “Why don’t one of you just sit down here and write out a list of all the things you want in the whole house, in case Mr. and Mrs. Cheever are willing to sell ’em to you; then they could take your list and look it over and write down whatever price they decide on opposite the articles. Wouldn’t that be the best way to get somewhere?”

Mr. and Mrs. Cheever didn’t say anything; but my family fell in with the plan, and Clarissa sat down at the secretary and wrote out the list, with her mother and Enid bending over her and putting in whatever she happened to forget. When they had it finished, I looked at it, and it made me feel pretty embarrassed—though of course I realized the old couple could buy new household goods to begin their life over again with.

I handed the list to Mrs. Cheever. “Here,” I said, and I could feel myself getting red, I felt so apologetic. “You and your husband just write down the prices you think would be right. Of course I don’t know how much you’ll feel willing to part with——”

“That seckatary’s got the original brasses on it, too,” she said.

“Has it?” I asked her. “Well, if you and Mr. Cheever will just sit down here and work through the list, my family and I will step out in the yard and wait while you two do the figuring.”

So that’s what we did. Mrs. Massey and the girls and I went outdoors, and I never did see three women in a greater state of unsuppressed excitement. Enid and Clarissa were so exhilarated they just grabbed each other and began to dance on the brick walk; but Mrs. Massey stopped them for fear the old couple would look out of the window and see them. Then Clarissa got to standing in a kind of trance, staring at the front door and I noticed her and went up to her. “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“I wish we’d put that in,” she said, in a dreamy sort of way.

“Put what in?”

“The front door.”

I just walked away from her. I strolled around the house and noticed a shed in the back yard, and went in. There were quite a number of wonderful old things in there—mostly broken, though—and with its face against the wall there was one fine old piece that I turned over and looked at; but when I went back to the front yard I didn’t say anything about it. The quaint old couple had just come out of the house, and Mrs. Massey and both girls couldn’t restrain themselves—they made a dash for that list and fairly snatched it out of Mrs. Cheever’s hand. Then they put their three heads together over it, and ten feet away I could hear ’em breathing.

Mr. Cheever was carrying a red-painted cylinder with a bottom to it and a rope handle. “Here,” he said to me. “This is an ancient Revolutionary fire-bucket. I cal’late to make it a present to ye in case ye buy the hull list.”

Well, of course that would have made anybody understand there was something wrong, and the way my family were standing as they looked over the list seemed to have quite a little significance, too. None of them moved a muscle. They just stood and stared; but I could hear them breathing louder. So I went over to them and took the paper out of Mrs. Massey’s hand, and she didn’t resist any or hardly move her fingers as it slid out of them. Just one glance showed me that the Cheevers were certainly willing to sell because they had written a price after every article on the list, and then they had added the whole thing up and set down the total at the bottom.

I didn’t bother much with the individual items, though, as my eye ran down the paper, I noticed that they had marked the high boy eighteen-hundred and fifty-two dollars, and the waterproof chandelier twelve-hundred and sixty-nine dollars. The staircase was cheaper; they only wanted eleven hundred for that, and ninety-one dollars for the old strip of carpet on it. The total at the bottom of the second page interested me a good deal; it was eleven-thousand, eight-hundred and twenty-two dollars and sixty-five cents.

“Yes,” I said to Clarissa, “you could get the front door put in, I expect. I don’t believe they’d make any particular fuss about selling it.”

Well, we didn’t get the present of that Revolutionary red fire-bucket; the two New England characters were carrying it back into the house with ’em as we drove away, and Mrs. Massey and the girls were pretty quiet. They seemed kind of staggered, so I didn’t mention right then what I’d seen in the shed behind the house. I didn’t want to make my family feel any blanker until they’d got used to the shock they’d had. I just said, “I expect you used the right word about Mr. and Mrs. Cheever—I mean about their being a dear old couple.”

Probably I shouldn’t have gone even that far; I might have been wiser if I hadn’t said it, because the three of them stiffened up a little but didn’t look at me, and right away I could see they regarded me as occupying the position of an enemy, you might put it. When members of our opposite sex have been too confident about something and are feeling let-down about it, there’s hardly ever anything at all a man ought to take a chance of saying to them. I saw it was a mistake, so I kept quiet until we got home; then I took Mrs. Massey aside and asked her how many people she thought knew about her wanting to get inside one of those wonderful old houses in the neighborhood.

“Why, nobody,” she said in a cold way, staring at me. “We don’t know anybody.”

“Did this Moses Brazinga at Lodgeport tell you about the Cheever place?”

“Certainly not! We never talked to him about anything except what he had to sell right there in his shop.”

“Well, who did tell you about it?”

“I think it may have been Zebias Flick,” she said.

I went out in the kitchen where Zebias was sitting, talking to Joanna Gillwife. He had his woolen-stockinged feet in the oven of the electric stove; but mainly on account of habit, I expect, because the current was off.

“Listen!” I said to him. “Joanna here tells me that pretty nearly everybody in Mary’s Neck is kin to everybody else, especially yourself. Have you got some cousins named Cheever?”

“Cheever?” he said; then he ruminated a while and took a pin out of his mouth and looked at it. “Cheever,” he said to himself in a low voice, appearing to be puzzled.

“Yes, Cheever!” I said. “Cheever!”

“Well,” he asked me slowly, “where’bouts do they live? Do you mean the Philo Cheevers or the Cheevers at Sloan’s Point or the Cheevers around Nist Hill or some o’ the other Cheevers? I have hear,” he went on, “I have hear they was Cheevers ’way further on Down East. Mebbe it was them you had a mind to ’quire ’bout; but ef you was to ’peal to me I never see any of them Cheevers and I dun’t know as I’d want to. They might be kin to me, and they mightn’t. I couldn’t give you no inf’mation ’bout them Cheevers ’tall.”

“I don’t want any,” I told him. “I just want to know if you’ve got any relatives named Cheever anywhere.”

“Cheever,” he said, and he put his pin back in his mouth. “Cheever.” Then he took it out again and seemed to brighten up a little. “I can tell you where you can git some inf’mation ’bout the Cheevers. That’s from ole Miss Caroline Willingsworth; she lives back in the country quite a ways but it’d pay you to go up there ef you got a mind to hear ’bout the Cheevers. She’s got family albums and old dockments and——” Then he stopped himself with the air of a man who remembers something important, made a regretful sound with his tongue, and let his feet slide down from the oven to the floor. “No, I guess she ain’t, though. She passed away, come to think of it, some little time ago, and I don’t know as anybody’d be able to tell you what become of all her albums and dockments. They must be scattered far and wide, by this time, because she didn’t have anybody to leave ’em to, and mebbe the neighbors got ’em, or then mebbe they didn’t. I wasn’t there so I couldn’t tell you. Mebbe they had an auction——”

“Listen!” I said, and I guess I was getting kind of mad. “Listen! I simply asked you——”

But just then he put his pin back in his mouth again and began to roll it around with a sort of far-away expression on his face. I looked at him, and I knew it wasn’t any use in the world.