Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

During that day and the soul-racking, foot-blistering days that followed, I gained a fairly clear idea of what I might hope for in a boarding house for the small sum which I was prepared to spend. The cheaper places were, of course, the least attractive; the halls seemed dingier, the odor of dreary, bygone dinners more pervasive in them; the servants were more slatternly, the landladies themselves more rusty, dusty and depressing. There were innumerable parlors furnished in upholstery that made up in accumulated dust and aroma for what it had lost in freshness of color during the years of its service; there were folding beds of every sort; there were lace curtains, and there were pier glasses between the long front windows. Then, somewhere up on the top floor, there was a hall bedroom without a closet, without heat; but “the last lady” – marvelously adaptable female! – had always found the hooks under the cambric curtain on the door an ample refuge for her gowns, and as for the temperature, she had been compelled to keep her window open during most of the winter before, so intense was the heat from the hall. She had moved, apparently, in search of a harder spiritual discipline than she could obtain among such comfortable surroundings. Certainly there was no other reason for her leaving.

Sometimes, departing from the lists furnished me, I stumbled upon wonderful places where “cozy corners” greatly prevailed, and where the landladies wore trailing negligées of soiled pink or blue instead of the tight-fitting black uniform of the other houses. Whenever such a meeting inadvertently occurred, the gorgeous landlady and I were always as eager as civility would permit to see the last of each other.

Then there were other places – airy, clean and bright, with parlors guiltless of any suggestion of the folding bed, with graceful furnishings, efficient servants, cheerful landladies. But these were always either “full” – I don’t wonder – or what they had left was far beyond my humble means.

I wandered through the unhomelike splendors of the woman’s hotel, by and by. Here at least there would be no question of boarding house parlor etiquette – there were successions of charming, big, airy, handsomely fitted-out parlors; there were tea rooms, there were libraries and writing rooms. The bedrooms themselves – simple, sunny, clean – were charming, with their chintz-frilled cots and their substantially made wooden pieces. Here I could live, by a pretty rigid system of economy, for nine dollars a week – four for my tiny bedroom, five for my breakfasts and dinners. I would have to share the sparkling white and nickel bathroom with only two others.

I was not one of those haughty souls who revolted at the rule forbidding masculine callers above the parlor floors; in the first place, I had not been long enough in New York to know that young women ever did receive callers save in drawing rooms of some description, and in the second, I didn’t expect any callers for a long time. Once Robert Matthews saw me safely settled, I knew that his neighborly kindness would dwindle; and he was my only possible visitor at present. No, one might be very comfortable at the woman’s hotel, I was sure – if one could overcome a prejudice against being one of a mass. I had been long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a number.

However, though I had made up my mind to the boarding house, I did not come to it. And that was because of the unwelcome other occupant of the room at the Margaret Louisa. She had proved to be a wholesome, graceful, rather tall woman of thirty-three or so. She had none of my rustic air of sullen doubt when she met strangers. She was polite, uninquisitive, even uninterested. Her attitude was the perfection of civil indifference; she would have been an ideal woman to occupy the opposite section on a transcontinental train, or the other berth in a transatlantic stateroom, for she was perfectly considerate, unfamiliar and impersonal. She told me that she had just come from a summer abroad – she was a teacher of some handicraft in a trade school for girls – and that she was staying at the Margaret Louisa until “the doctor was through redecorating the house.”

“Of course everyone makes fun of the Maggie Lou,” she said, “but I find it an admirable refuge. It is in the center of the town; it’s clean, cheap and respectable; it charges a fair price for the accommodations it offers, so that there’s no taint of philanthropy about it – though sometimes the managers seem to forget that. One doesn’t come here for society. Once one knows its little red-tape rules, and how to keep them from interfering with one’s personal liberty, it’s a very comfortable place.”

It developed that a woman physician of Miss Putnam’s acquaintance had a small house on West Eleventh Street, the upper floors of which she let to women lodgers.

“Of course she knows us all,” said Miss Putnam. “It’s really very convenient. There aren’t more than six of us; we are absolutely independent, without being brutally isolated. Dr. Lyons serves us all with breakfast in our rooms, and leaves us to solve the luncheon-dinner problem for ourselves. It’s a charming, old-fashioned house, and she has furnished it in character.”

I sighed bitterly. Dr. Lyons’ six lodgers paid her five dollars and a half a week for their rooms and their simple breakfasts – as little as I should have to pay at the huge caravansary which I was even then considering – and they had a home! I could have wept over the inequalities of life.

Later I wept in very truth. Robert had sent me a note inviting me to a glee-club concert. I had accepted the invitation. Then I had rubbed my aching body with witch hazel – it’s no small athletic feat to climb to the top of twenty-seven New York houses in one day – and I had lain down to rest. A little before seven I bethought me of clothes. The black silk which mother had made for me, with its pretty chemisette and cuffs of real Val and Indian mull, and my black net hat with white roses, lay in the trunk in the trunk room. I made up my mind to swallow a hasty dinner, invade the cellar and carry my poor little finery upstairs after dinner, so as to be ready for Bob at eight. At seven-fifteen, having eaten all that I could in the banging, crowded, steaming dining room, I approached the office and made known my wish to go to the trunk room.

“Trunk room closes at seven,” snapped the waitress of destiny.

Nor could any tale of my needs, any indignation concerning the high-handed retention of my property, move her from that statement. I went to my room and wept with rage. Bob impressed me nowadays as a stylish youth. How would he like taking me to a musicale in a short black skirt, a reefer and that dumpy turban?

Upon my fit of pettishness in came Miss Putnam. She was politely absorbed in her own chiffonier for a while. Then she turned to me with a comical air of balancing the fear of intrusiveness against a friendly desire to help.

“Is it – can I do anything for you?” she asked finally.

“You can tell that wretched martinet downstairs what I think of her, if you have sufficient command of language,” I rejoined, wiping my eyes furiously. Then I told her my tale of woe. She laughed. Then she hesitated and blushed.

“I’m just home from Paris, as I told you,” she said. “I’m not going out tonight. And I knew the Margaret Louisa well enough to unpack for an emergency. We’re about of a height – would you think me desperately impertinent if – if – ”

And she actually offered to lend me some clothes. And I – I, Ellen Berwick, of Agonquitt, where all borrowing is regarded as criminally unthrifty, and where the borrowing of finery would seem degenerately frivolous as well – I went to that musicale at the Waldorf in an absolute confection of heavy black lace over white silk, and a hat all white tulle and roses and jet! Robert whistled rudely as he saw me.

“Is this the way they do things in Agonquitt now?” he asked.

And from something I overheard him saying to a lovely young matron-patroness in a peach-colored crêpe, I gathered that he had somewhat apologetically prepared her to be kind to a nice little rustic from his old home. Thus clothes, as adornments and not merely coverings, made their first distinct appeal to me; it was the voice of New York, if I had only known it.

I blessed Theresa Putnam that evening, but how much more did I bless her when toward the end of the fortnight she burst into our joint abode with something less than her usual calm of manner, and cried:

“Clorinda Dorset isn’t coming back to the Medical School this year. Do you want to meet Dr. Lyons? For if you do, and you like her and she likes you – ”

I did not let her finish.

“Do you mean that there’s a chance for me in the Eleventh Street house?” I demanded. I had been to seven boarding houses in furthest Harlem that day and had heard seven boarding house keepers declare that the time from One Hundred and Eighteenth Street to Wall was twenty minutes!

By the next morning my trunk had been rescued from the cave of the trunks, and stood, unstrapped and unlocked, in my sloping-roofed, attic room in the old-fashioned house of Dr. Lyons. The sunlight poured in through two dormer windows. There were dimity curtains at them. There was a blue-and-white, hit-or-miss rag rug on the floor. There was a fireplace; there were old-fashioned chairs that might have come out of an Agonquitt attic; there was a plain table, with blotters on it and bookshelves above; there was a cot covered with an old homespun blue-and-white cover. There were potted geraniums and primroses on the wide window shelves. I sat down and fairly rocked in my delight.

“An attic!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I didn’t believe there was one in all New York. And a rag carpet – ”

But the language of jubilation failed.

Well, my fortnight of grace was ended. I was housed, by a kindly miracle and no skill of my own, comfortably, charmingly, not expensively. I was a lucky young woman!

I polished my boots to the highest pitch of brilliancy, I set my stock on at the most accurate angle, and I proceeded to Mr. George Hennen’s office to gladden his heart with the information that I had arrived.

He received me with some embarrassment – a good-looking, slender, boyish man with an inattentive manner.

“I had meant to write,” he murmured. “Really, it has been unpardonable. But I didn’t know until last week, and – it is really unpardonable.”

A cold chill gripped me. Was I not to have the position, after all? I sat very rigid, my fingers frozen in their stiff calfskin gloves.

“What is it, Mr. Hennen?” I asked. “Please tell me quickly.”

“Oh, of course it can be arranged. I had meant to ask you to defer coming until the first of December. Miss O’Dowd’s wedding has been postponed until Christmas. But – ”

Returning waves of warmth lapped me. After all, I was not to go penniless and positionless back to Agonquitt.

“Oh, is that all?” I cried, in relief. “I think I can put in the two months to excellent advantage, Mr. Hennen.”

“Do you, really?” He brightened. “Are you – er – prepared – er – ”

“Oh, quite,” I said, stiffly, though the emergency fund on my chest no longer seemed the oppressive weight it once had.

“If not – ” he floundered, evidently groping with some idea for my relief.

I felt the color tingle in my cheeks. My mother’s hatred of “Letitia Bland’s” favors seemed to stiffen my neck.

“Oh, but I am,” I declared. Then the door opened simultaneously with a rap. From the Axminster and rosewood splendors of the outer office a man entered – tall, broad, lithe. His eyes, even in that first flash of them upon me, I knew to be gay, and his smooth-shaven lips had lines of laughter about them. He glanced at me with a momentary pause in his entrance.

“Beg pardon, George. Ferritt said you were alone.”

“It’s all right. Don’t go, Archie. I want you to meet Miss Berwick. Miss Berwick, Mr. Charter – the other member of the firm. Miss Berwick’s going to take Miss O’Dowd’s place, you remember, Archie?”

“Very much more than that, I think,” said Mr. Charter, smiling. And though there was something in the cool appraisal of his manner, in the implied familiar compliment and criticism of his words, which made me flush with displeasure, yet when I met his mirthful, amused regard, I could not but smile in answer.

There was a little more talk, and I went out, leaving my address with Mr. Hennen. There was an agreeable sense of buoyancy and exhilaration in the air. I could not fix my mind upon the gloomy fact that I was to be without employment and without salary for two months; I was only very sure that I should like the work in the office of Hennen & Charter, when I was admitted to it. Meantime, I had a hazy recollection of all sorts of tempting advertisements which I had seen in the papers, asking for the services of just such able-bodied, well-educated young women as myself. To be an adventurer in industry for two months might be amusing; it might be profitable. And at the end of it there was the office of Hennen & Charter glowing like a comfortable beacon for me.

It was fortunate for my peace of mind that I could not forecast the future, and had no premonition of my initial experience as a laboring person. I was profoundly convinced of my ability to “take care of myself”; I had a high respect for my own judgment. Had anyone suggested to me that my arrogant self-confidence would nearly land me in court and almost cover me with notoriety, I should have dismissed the suggestion with a laugh.

THE TWO RAPTURES

TWO raptures are there; one is of the spring;Life leaps down all her sources and is gladWith gladness that enfolds each humblest thing.Furrows teem fragrant, trees with buds go mad;Music and color and a sunbright gleeTurn sullen earth into sweet Arcady.The autumn’s rapture is a soberer wight,But deep in tender dreams and rich in rareDesigns, and mellow harmonies of light.The hills lie steeped in memories most fair,The forests blaze with visions, and the year,Two-minded, mingles elegies of dearthWith hopeful hymns of yet triumphant birth,When May returns, when Spring again is here.Richard Burton.

THE MARE AND THE MOTOR

BY JOSEPH C. LINCOLN

IN order to understand this story there are a few points of information concerning “Lonesome Huckleberries” with which you ought to be acquainted. First, his nationality: Captain Jonadab Wixon used to say that Lonesome was “a little of everything, like a picked-up dinner; principally Eyetalian and Portygee, I cal’late, with a streak of Gay Head Injun.” Second, his name: To quote from the captain again, “His reel name’s long enough to touch bottom in the ship channel at high tide, so folks nater’lly got to callin’ him ‘Huckleberries,’ ’cause he peddles them kind of fruit in summer. Then he mopes round so, with nary a smile on his face, that it seemed jest right to tack on the ‘Lonesome.’ So ‘Lonesome Huckleberries’ he’s been for the past ten year.” Add to these items the fact that he lived in a patchwork shanty on the end of a sandspit six miles from Wellmouth Port, that he was deaf and dumb, that he drove a liver-colored, balky mare that no one but himself and his daughter “Becky” could handle, that he had a fondness for bad rum, and a wicked temper that had twice landed him in the village lockup, and you have a fair idea of the personality of Lonesome Huckleberries. And, oh, yes! his decoy ducks. He was a great gunner alongshore, and owned a flock of live decoys for which he had refused bids as high as fifteen dollars each. There, now I think you are in position to appreciate the yarn that Mr. Barzilla Wingate told me as we sat in the “Lovers’ Nest,” the summerhouse on the bluff by the Old Home House, and watched the Greased Lightning, Peter Brown’s smart little motor launch, swinging at her moorings below.

“Them Todds,” observed Barzilla, “had got on my nerves. ’Twas Peter’s ad that brought ’em down here. You see, ’twas ’long toward the end of the season at the Old Home House, and Brown had been advertisin’ in the New York and Boston papers to ‘bag the leftovers,’ as he called it. Besides the reg’lar hogwash about the ‘breath of old ocean’ and the ‘simple, cleanly livin’ of the bygone days we dream about,’ there was some new froth concernin’ huntin’ and fishin’. You’d think the wild geese roosted on the flagpole nights, and the bluefish clogged up the bay so’s you could walk on their back fins without wettin’ your feet – that is, if you wore rubbers and trod light.

“‘There!’ says Peter T., wavin’ the advertisement and crowin’ gladsome; ‘they’ll take to that like your temp’rance aunt to brandy coughdrops. We’ll have to put up barbed wire to keep ’em off.’

“‘Humph!’ grunts Cap’n Jonadab. ‘Anybody but a born fool’ll know there ain’t any shootin’ down here this time of year.’

“Peter looked at him sorrowful. ‘Pop,’ says he, ‘did you ever hear that Solomon answered a summer hotel ad? This ain’t a Chautauqua, this is the Old Home House, and its motto is: “There’s a new sucker born every minute, and there’s twenty-four hours in a day.” You set back and count the clock ticks.’

“Well, that’s ’bout all we had to do. We got boarders enough from that ridic’lous advertisement to fill every spare room we had, includin’ Jonadab’s and mine. Me and the cap’n had to bunk in the barn loft; but there was some satisfaction in that – it give us an excuse to git away from the ‘sports’ in the smokin’ room.

“The Todds was part of the haul. He was a little, dried-up man, single, and a minister. Nigh’s I could find out, he’d given up preachin’ by the request of the doctor and his last congregation. He had a notion that he was a mighty hunter afore the Lord, like Nimrod in the Bible, and he’d come to the Old Home to bag a few gross of geese and ducks.

“His sister was an old maid, and slim, neither of which failin’s was from ch’ice, I cal’late. She wore eyeglasses and a veil to ‘preserve her complexion,’ and her idee seemed to be that native Cape Codders lived in trees and et cocoanuts. She called ’em barbarians, utter barbarians.’ Whenever she piped ‘James!’ her brother had to drop everything and report on deck. She was skipper of the Todd craft.

“Well, them Todds was what Peter T. called ‘the limit, and a chip or two over.’ The other would-be gunners and fishermen were satisfied to slam shot after sandpeeps, or hook a stray sculpin or a hake. But t’wa’n’t so with brother James Todd and sister Clarissa. ‘Ducks’ it was in the advertisin’, and nothin’ but ducks they wanted. Clarissa, she commenced to hint middlin’ p’inted concernin’ fraud.

“Fin’lly we lost patience, and Peter T., he said they’d got to be quieted somehow, or he’d do some shootin’ on his own hook; said too much Toddy was givin’ him the ‘D.T.’s.’ Then I suggested takin’ ’em down the beach somewheres on the chance of seein’ a stray coot or loon or somethin’ —anything that could be shot at. Jonadab and Peter agreed ’twas a good plan, and we matched to see who’d be guide. And I got stuck, of course; my luck again.

“So the next mornin’ we started, me and the Reverend James and Clarissa, in the Greased Lightnin’. Fust part of the trip that Todd man done nothin’ but ask questions about the launch; I had to show him how to start it and steer it, and the land knows what all. Clarissa set around doin’ the heavy contemptuous and turnin’ up her nose at creation gin’rally. It must have its drawbacks, this roostin’ so fur above the common flock; seems to me I’d be thinkin’ all the time of the bump that was due me if I got shoved off the perch.

“Well, by and by Lonesome Huckleberries’ shanty hove in sight, and I was glad to see it, although I had to answer a million more questions about Lonesome and his history. When we struck the beach, Clarissa, she took her paint box and umbrella and moskeeter ’intment, and the rest of her cargo, and went off by herself to ‘sketch.’ She was great on ’sketchin’,’ and the way she’d use up good paint and spile nice clean paper was a sinful waste. Afore she went, she give me three fathom of sailin’ orders concernin’ takin’ care of ‘James.’ You’d think he was about four year old; made me feel like a hired nuss.

“Well, James and me went perusin’ up and down that beach in the blazin’ sun lookin’ for somethin’ to shoot. We went ’way beyond Lonesome’s shanty, but there wa’n’t nobody to home. Lonesome himself, it turned out afterward, was up to the village with his horse and wagon, and his daughter Becky was over in the woods on the mainland berryin’. Todd was a cheerful talker, but limited. His favorite remark was: ‘Oh, I say, my deah man.’ That’s what he kept callin’ me, ‘my deah man.’ Now, my name ain’t exactly a Claude de Montmorency for prettiness, but ‘Barzilla’ ’ll fetch me alongside a good deal quicker’n ‘my deah man,’ I’ll tell you that.

“We frogged it up and down all the forenoon, but didn’t git a shot at nothin’ but one stray ‘squawk’ that had come over from the Cedar Swamp. I told James ’twas a canvasback, and he blazed away at it, but missed it by three fathom, as might have been expected.

“Fin’lly my game leg – rheumatiz, you understand – begun to give out. So I flops down in the shade of a sand bank to rest, and the reverend goes pokin’ off by himself.

“I cal’late I must have fell asleep, for when I looked at my watch it was close to one o’clock, and time for us to be gittin’ back to the port. I got up and stretched and took an observation, but further’n Clarissa’s umbrella on the skyline, I didn’t see anything stirrin’. Brother James wa’n’t visible, but I jedged he was within hailin’ distance. You can’t see very fur on that point, there’s too many sand hills and hummocks.

“I started over toward the Greased Lightnin’. I’d gone a little ways, and was down in a gully between two big hummocks, when ‘Bang! bang!’ goes both barrels of a shotgun, and that Todd critter busts out hollerin’ like all possessed.

“‘Hooray!’ he squeals, in that squeaky voice of his. ‘Hooray! I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em!’

“Thinks I, ‘What in the nation does that lunatic cal’late he’s shot?’ And I left my own gun layin’ where ’twas and piled up over the edge of that sand bank like a cat over a fence. And then I see a sight.

“There was James, hoppin’ up and down in the beach grass, squealin’ like a Guinea hen with a sore throat, and wavin’ his gun with one wing – arm, I mean – and there in front of him, in the foam at the edge of the surf, was two ducks as dead as Nebuchadnezzar – two of Lonesome Huckleberries’ best decoy ducks – ducks he’d tamed and trained, and thought more of than anything else in this world – except rum, maybe – and the rest of the flock was diggin’ up the beach for home as if they’d been telegraphed for, and squawkin’ ‘Fire!’ and ‘Bloody murder!’

“Well, my mind was in a kind of various state, as you might say, for a minute. ’Course, I’d known about Lonesome’s ownin’ them decoys – told Todd about ’em, too – but I hadn’t seen ’em nowhere alongshore, and I sort of cal’lated they was locked up in Lonesome’s hen house, that bein’ his usual way when he went to town. I s’pose likely they’d been feedin’ among the beach grass somewheres out of sight, but I don’t know for sartin to this day. And I didn’t stop to reason it out then, neither. As Scriptur’ or George Washin’ton or somebody says, ‘’twas a condition, not a theory,’ I was afoul of.

“‘I’ve got ’em!’ hollers Todd, grinnin’ till I thought he’d swaller his own ears. ‘I shot ’em all myself!’

“‘You everlastin’ – ’ I begun, but I didn’t git any further. There was a rattlin’ noise behind me, and I turned, to see Lonesome Huckleberries himself, settin’ on the seat of his old truck wagon and glarin’ over the hammer head of that balky mare of his straight at brother Todd and the dead decoys.

“For a minute there was a kind of tableau, like them they have at church fairs – all four of us, includin’ the mare, keepin’ still, like we was frozen. But ’twas only for a minute. Then it turned into the liveliest movin’ picture that ever I see. Lonesome couldn’t swear – bein’ a dummy – but if ever a man got profane with his eyes, he did right then. Next thing I knew he tossed both hands into the air, clawed two handfuls out of the atmosphere, reached down into the cart, grabbed a pitchfork and piled out of that wagon and after Todd. There was murder comin’ and I could see it.