Short Sixes

But Miss Euphrosyne did not seem to be offended – only thoughtful.

“Can you call here to-morrow at this time, Mr. Cutter?” she inquired.

***

Miss Euphrosyne blushed faintly when Dick presented himself to hear judgement pronounced.

“I suppose you will think it strange,” she said, “but if your plan is feasible, I should wish to carry it out. Frankly, I do want to see the girls married. Clelia and Lydia and I are past the time when women think about such things – but Clytie – and the rest. And, you know, I can remember how Papa and Mama lived together, and sometimes it seems cruelly hard that those dear girls should lose all that happiness – I’m sure it’s the best happiness in the world. And it can never be, here. Now, if I could get occupation – you know that I’m teaching school, I suppose – and if the rest of the girls could keep up their work for the New York people – why – don’t you know, if I didn’t tell – if I put it on business grounds, you know – I think they would feel that it was best, after all, to leave Tusculum…”

Her voice was choked when she recommenced.

“It seems awful for me to talk to you in this cold-blooded way about such a thing; but – what can we do, Mr. Cutter? You don’t know how poor we are. There’s nothing for my little Clytie to do but to be a dressmaker – and you know what that means, in Tusculum. Oh, do you think I could teach school out in Star – Star – Starbuckle?”

Miss Euphrosyne was crying.

Dick’s census of possible pupils in the neighborhood of Starbuck satisfied Miss Euphrosyne. It troubled Dick’s conscience a bit, as he walked back to the hotel. “But they’ll all be married off before she finds it out, so I guess it’s all right,” he reflected.

***

The next week Dick went to New York. This was in pursuance of an idea which he had confided to Winfield, on the eve of his forth-setting.

“Why,” Winfield had said to him, “you are clean left out of this deal, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am,” said Dick. “How am I going to marry a poor girl on a hundred dollars a month?”

“I might set you up for yourself – ” began his employer.

“Hold on!” broke in Dick Cutter, with emphasis. “You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d ever been hungry yourself. I ’most starved that last time I tried for myself; and I’d starve next trip, sure. You’ve been a good friend to me, Jack Winfield. Don’t you make a damn fool of yourself and spoil it all.”

“But,” he added, after a pause, “I have a little racket of my own. There’s a widow in New York who smiled on yours affectionately once, ere she wed Mammon. I’m going just to see if she feels inclined to divide the late lamented’s pile with a blonde husband.”

So, the business at Tusculum being determined, and preparations for the hegira well under way, Dick went to look after his own speculation.

He reached New York on Tuesday morning, and called on the lady of his hopes that afternoon. She was out. He wrote to her in the evening, asking when he might see her. On Thursday her wedding-cards came to his hotel by special messenger. He cursed his luck, and went cheerfully about attending to a commission which Miss Euphrosyne, after much urging, had given him, trembling at her own audacity. The size of it had somewhat staggered him. She asked him to take an order to a certain large dry-goods house for nine traveling ulsters, (ladies’, medium weight, measurements enclosed,) for which he was to select the materials.

“Men have so much taste,” said Miss Euphrosyne. “Papa always knew when we were well dressed.”

Dick had to wait while another customer was served. He stared at her in humble admiration. It was a British actress, recently imported.

***

When Mr. Richard Cutter sat on the platform of Tusculum station and saw his nine charges approach, ready for the long trip to the Far West, it struck him that the pinky-dun ulsters with the six-inch-square checks of pale red and blue did not look, on these nine virgins, as they looked on the British actress. It struck him, moreover, that the nine “fore-and-aft,” or “deer-stalker” caps which he had thrown in as Friendship’s Offering only served to more accentuate a costume already accentuated.

But it was too late for retreat. The Baileys had burned their bridges behind them. The old house was sold. Their lot was cast in Montana. He had his misgivings; but he handed them gallantly into the train – it was not a vestibule express, for economy forbade – and they began their journey.

He had an uneasy feeling that they were noticed; that the nine ladies in the ulsters of one pattern – and of the pattern of his choosing – were attracting more attention than any ladies not thus uniformed would have attracted; but he was not seriously disturbed until a loquacious countryman sat down beside him.

“Runnin’ a lady base-ball nine, be ye?” he inquired. “I seen one, wunst, down to Ne’ York. They can’t play ball not to speak of; but it’s kinder fun lookin’ at ’em. Couldn’t ye interdooce me to the pitcher?”

Mr. Cutter made a dignified reply, and withdrew to the smoking-car. There a fat and affable stranger tapped him on the back and talked in his ear from the seat behind.

“It don’t pay, young man,” he said. “I’ve handled ’em. Female minstrels sounds first rate; but they don’t give the show that catches the people. You’ve gotter have reel talent kinder mixed in with them if you want to draw.”

“Them ladies in your comp’ny, where do they show?” inquired the Conductor, as he examined the ten tickets that Dick presented.

“What do you mean?” asked the irritated pioneer.

“If they show in Cleveland, I’d like to go, first rate,” the Conductor explained.

“Those ladies,” Dick thundered, at the end of his patience, “are not actresses!”

“Hmf! What be they then?” asked the Conductor.

***

They had arrived at Buffalo. They had gone to the Niagara Hotel, and had been told that there were no rooms for them; and to the Tifft House, where there were no rooms; and to the Genesee, where every room was occupied. Finally they had found quarters in a very queer hotel, where the clerk, as he dealt out the keys, said:

“One for Lily, and one for Daisy and one for Rosie – here, Boss, sort out the flower-bed yourself,” as he handed over the bunch.

Dick was taking a drink in the dingy bar-room, and trying to forget the queer looks that had been cast at his innocent caravan all the day, when the solitary hall-boy brought a message summoning him to Miss Euphrosyne’s room. He went, with his moral tail between his mental legs.

“Mr. Cutter,” said Miss Euphrosyne, firmly, “we have made a mistake.”

“It looks that way,” replied Dick, feebly; “but may be it’s only the – the ulsters.”

“No,” said Miss Euphrosyne. “The ulsters are a part of it; but the whole thing is wrong, Mr. Cutter; and I see it all now. I didn’t realize what it meant. But my eyes have been opened. Nine young unmarried women can not go West with a young man – if you had heard what people were saying all around us in the cars – you don’t know. We’ve got to give up the idea. Oh, but it was awful!”

Miss Euphrosyne, trembling, hid her face in her hands. Her tears trickled out through her thin fingers.

“And the old house is sold! What shall we do? Where shall we go?” she cried, forgetting Dick utterly, lost and helpless.

Dick was stalking up and down the room.

“It would be all right,” he demanded, “if there was a married woman to lead the gang, and if – if – if we caught on to something new in the ulster line?”

“It might be different,” Miss Euphrosyne admitted, with a sob. Speaking came hard to her. She was tired: well nigh worn out.

“THEN,” said Dick, with tremendous emphasis, “what’s the matter with my marrying one of you?”

“Why, Mr. Cutter!” Miss Euphrosyne cried, “I had no idea that you – you – ever – thought of – is it Clytie?”

“No,” said Mr. Cutter, “it isn’t Clytie.”

“Is it – is it – ” Miss Euphrosyne’s eyes lit up with hope long since extinguished, “is it Aurora?”

“No!”

Dick Cutter could have been heard three rooms off.

“No!” he said, with all his lungs. “It ain’t Clytie, nor it ain’t Aurora, nor it ain’t Flora, nor Melpomene nor Cybele nor Alveolar Aureole nor none of ’em. It’s YOU– Y-O-U! I want to marry you, and what’s more, I’m going to!”

“Oh! oh! oh! oh!” said poor Miss Euphrosyne, and hid her face in her hands. She had never thought to be happy, and now she was happy for one moment. That seemed quite enough for her modest soul. And yet more was to come.

For once in his life, Dick Cutter seized the right moment to do the right thing. One hour later, Miss Euphrosyne Bailey was Mrs. Richard Cutter. She did not know quite how it happened. Clytie told her she had been bullied into it. But oh! such sweet bullying!

***

“No,” said Mr. Richard Cutter one morning in September of the next year, to Mr. Jack Winfield and his wife, (Miss Aurora Bailey that was,) “I can’t stop a minute. We’re too busy up at the ranch. The Wife has just bought out Wilkinson; and I’ve got to round up all his stock. I’ll see you next month, at Clytie’s wedding. Queer, she should have gone off the last, ain’t it? Euphrosyne and I are going down to Butte City Monday, to buy her a present. Know anybody who wants to pay six per cent. for a thousand?”

THE NICE PEOPLE

“They certainly are nice people,” I assented to my wife’s observation, using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that it was any thing but “nice” English, “and I’ll bet that their three children are better brought up than most of – “

“Two children,” corrected my wife.

“Three, he told me.”

“My dear, she said there were two.”

“He said three.”

“You’ve simply forgotten. I’m sure she told me they had only two – a boy and a girl.”

“Well, I didn’t enter into particulars.”

“No, dear, and you couldn’t have understood him. Two children.”

“All right,” I said; but I did not think it was all right. As a near-sighted man learns by enforced observation to recognize persons at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so the man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen carefully and report accurately. My memory is bad; but I had not had time to forget that Mr. Brewster Brede had told me that afternoon that he had three children, at present left in the care of his mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Brede took their Summer vacation.

“Two children,” repeated my wife; “and they are staying with his aunt Jenny.”

“He told me with his mother-in-law,” I put in. My wife looked at me with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they are told about children; but any man knows the difference between an aunt and a mother-in-law.

“But don’t you think they’re nice people?” asked my wife.

“Oh, certainly,” I replied. “Only they seem to be a little mixed up about their children.”

“That isn’t a nice thing to say,” returned my wife.

I could not deny it.

***

And yet, the next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated themselves opposite us at table, beaming and smiling in their natural, pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew, to a social certainty, that they were “nice” people. He was a fine-looking fellow in his neat tennis-flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old, with a Frenchy pointed beard. She was “nice” in all her pretty clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness which outwears most other types – the prettiness that lies in a rounded figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white teeth and black eyes. She might have been twenty-five; you guessed that she was prettier than she was at twenty, and that she would be prettier still at forty.

And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr. Jacobus’s Summer boarding-house on top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted the precious days of idleness with the company gathered around the Jacobus board. What joy of human companionship was to be had out of Mrs. Tabb and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton, Pa. – out of Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, an indurated head-bookkeeper and his prim and censorious wife – out of old Major Halkit, a retired business man, who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus’s biscuit, light as Aurora’s cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wandered out to take our morning glance at what we called “our view;” and it seemed to us as if Tabb and Hoogencamp and Halkit and the Biggleses could not drive us away in a year.

I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the Bredes to walk with us to “our view.” The Hoogencamp-Biggle-Tabb-Halkit contingent never stirred off Jacobus’s verandah; but we both felt that the Bredes would not profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly across the fields, passed through the little belt of woods, and as I heard Mrs. Brede’s little cry of startled rapture, I motioned to Brede to look up.

“By Jove!” he cried, “heavenly!”

We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. For silent it was to us, standing in the silence of a high place – silent with a Sunday stillness that made us listen, without taking thought, for the sound of bells coming up from the spires that rose above the tree-tops – the tree-tops that lay as far beneath us as the light clouds were above us that dropped great shadows upon our heads and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep of land at the mountain’s foot.

“And so that is your view?” asked Mrs. Brede, after a moment; “you are very generous to make it ours, too.”

Then we lay down on the grass, and Brede began to talk, in a gentle voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a canoe, in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks, and pointed out to us where the Passaic and the Hackensack flowed, invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but combings of the green waves upon which we looked down. And yet, on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages – a little world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.

“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said: “there is such a thing as getting so far above our fellow-men that we see only one side of them.”

Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter and gossip of the Tabb and the Hoogencamp – than the Major’s dissertations upon his everlasting circulars! My wife and I exchanged glances.

“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn,” Mr. Brede began.

“Why, dear,” interrupted his wife; “I didn’t know you ever went up the Matterhorn.”

“It – it was five years ago,” said Mr. Brede, hurriedly. “I – I didn’t tell you – when I was on the other side, you know – it was rather dangerous – well, as I was saying – it looked – oh, it didn’t look at all like this.”

A cloud floated overhead, throwing its great shadow over the field where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain’s brow and reappeared far below, a rapidly decreasing blot, flying eastward over the golden green. My wife and I exchanged glances once more.

Somehow, the shadow lingered over us all. As we went home, the Bredes went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I walked together.

“Should you think,” she asked me, “that a man would climb the Matterhorn the very first year he was married?”

“I don’t know, my dear,” I answered, evasively; “this isn’t the first year I have been married, not by a good many, and I wouldn’t climb it – for a farm.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

I did.

***

When we reached the boarding-house, Mr. Jacobus took me aside.

“You know,” he began his discourse, “my wife, she used to live in N’ York!”

I didn’t know; but I said “Yes.”

“She says the numbers on the streets runs criss-cross like. Thirty-four’s on one side o’ the street an’ thirty-five on t’ other. How’s that?”

“That is the invariable rule, I believe.”

“Then – I say – these here new folk that you ’n’ your wife seem so mighty taken up with – d’ ye know any thing about ’em?”

“I know nothing about the character of your boarders, Mr. Jacobus,” I replied, conscious of some irritability. “If I choose to associate with any of them – “

“Jess so – jess so!” broke in Jacobus. “I hain’t nothin’ to say ag’inst yer sosherbil’ty. But do ye know them?”

“Why, certainly not,” I replied.

“Well – that was all I wuz askin’ ye. Ye see, when he come here to take the rooms – you wasn’t here then – he told my wife that he lived at number thirty-four in his street. An’ yistiddy she told her that they lived at number thirty-five. He said he lived in an apartment-house. Now there can’t be no apartment-house on two sides of the same street, kin they?”

“What street was it?” I inquired, wearily.

“Hunderd ’n’ twenty-first street.”

“May be,” I replied, still more wearily. “That’s Harlem. Nobody knows what people will do in Harlem.”

I went up to my wife’s room.

“Don’t you think it’s queer?” she asked me.

“I think I’ll have a talk with that young man to-night,” I said, “and see if he can give some account of himself.”

“But, my dear,” my wife said, gravely, “she doesn’t know whether they’ve had the measles or not.”

“Why, Great Scott!” I exclaimed, “they must have had them when they were children.”

“Please don’t be stupid,” said my wife. “I meant their children.”

***

After dinner that night – or rather, after supper, for we had dinner in the middle of the day at Jacobus’s – I walked down the long verandah to ask Brede, who was placidly smoking at the other end, to accompany me on a twilight stroll. Half way down I met Major Halkit.

“That friend of yours,” he said, indicating the unconscious figure at the further end of the house, “seems to be a queer sort of a Dick. He told me that he was out of business, and just looking round for a chance to invest his capital. And I’ve been telling him what an everlasting big show he had to take stock in the Capitoline Trust Company – starts next month – four million capital – I told you all about it. ‘Oh, well,’ he says, ‘let’s wait and think about it.’ ‘Wait!’ says I, ‘the Capitoline Trust Company won’t wait for you, my boy. This is letting you in on the ground floor,’ says I ‘and it’s now or never.’ ‘Oh, let it wait,’ says he. I don’t know what’s in-to the man.”

“I don’t know how well he knows his own business, Major,” I said as I started again for Brede’s end of the verandah. But I was troubled none the less. The Major could not have influenced the sale of one share of stock in the Capitoline Company. But that stock was a great investment; a rare chance for a purchaser with a few thousand dollars. Perhaps it was no more remarkable that Brede should not invest than that I should not – and yet, it seemed to add one circumstance more to the other suspicious circumstances.

***

When I went upstairs that evening, I found my wife putting her hair to bed – I don’t know how I can better describe an operation familiar to every married man. I waited until the last tress was coiled up, and then I spoke.

“I’ve talked with Brede,” I said, “and I didn’t have to catechize him. He seemed to feel that some sort of explanation was looked for, and he was very out-spoken. You were right about the children – that is, I must have misunderstood him. There are only two. But the Matterhorn episode was simple enough. He didn’t realize how dangerous it was until he had got so far into it that he couldn’t back out; and he didn’t tell her, because he’d left her here, you see, and under the circumstances – “

“Left her here!” cried my wife. “I’ve been sitting with her the whole afternoon, sewing, and she told me that he left her at Geneva, and came back and took her to Basle, and the baby was born there – now I’m sure, dear, because I asked her.”

“Perhaps I was mistaken when I thought he said she was on this side of the water,” I suggested, with bitter, biting irony.

“You poor dear, did I abuse you?” said my wife. “But, do you know, Mrs. Tabb said that she didn’t know how many lumps of sugar he took in his coffee. Now that seems queer, doesn’t it.”

It did. It was a small thing. But it looked queer. Very queer.

***

The next morning, it was clear that war was declared against the Bredes. They came down to breakfast somewhat late, and, as soon as they arrived, the Biggleses swooped up the last fragments that remained on their plates, and made a stately march out of the dining-room. Then Miss Hoogencamp arose and departed, leaving a whole fish-ball on her plate. Even as Atalanta might have dropped an apple behind her to tempt her pursuer to check his speed, so Miss Hoogencamp left that fish-ball behind her, and between her maiden self and Contamination.

We had finished our breakfast, my wife and I, before the Bredes appeared. We talked it over, and agreed that we were glad that we had not been obliged to take sides upon such insufficient testimony.

After breakfast, it was the custom of the male half of the Jacobus household to go around the corner of the building and smoke their pipes and cigars where they would not annoy the ladies. We sat under a trellis covered with a grape-vine that had borne no grapes in the memory of man. This vine, however, bore leaves, and these, on that pleasant Summer morning, shielded from us two persons who were in earnest conversation in the straggling, half-dead flower-garden at the side of the house.

“I don’t want,” we heard Mr. Jacobus say, “to enter in no man’s pry-vacy; but I do want to know who it may be, like, that I hev in my house. Now what I ask of you, and I don’t want you to take it as in no ways personal, is – hev you your merridge-license with you?”

“No,” we heard the voice of Mr. Brede reply. “Have you yours?”

I think it was a chance shot; but it told all the same. The Major (he was a widower), and Mr. Biggle and I looked at each other; and Mr. Jacobus, on the other side of the grape-trellis, looked at – I don’t know what – and was as silent as we were.

Where is your marriage-license, married reader? Do you know? Four men, not including Mr. Brede, stood or sate on one side or the other of that grape-trellis, and not one of them knew where his marriage-license was. Each of us had had one – the Major had had three. But where were they? Where is yours? Tucked in your best-man’s pocket; deposited in his desk – or washed to a pulp in his white waistcoat (if white waistcoats be the fashion of the hour), washed out of existence – can you tell where it is? Can you – unless you are one of those people who frame that interesting document and hang it upon their drawing-room walls?

Mr. Brede’s voice arose, after an awful stillness of what seemed like five minutes, and was, probably, thirty seconds:

“Mr. Jacobus, will you make out your bill at once, and let me pay it? I shall leave by the six o’clock train. And will you also send the wagon for my trunks?”

“I hain’t said I wanted to hev ye leave – ” began Mr. Jacobus; but Brede cut him short.

“Bring me your bill.”

“But,” remonstrated Jacobus, “ef ye ain’t – “

“Bring me your bill!” said Mr. Brede.

***

My wife and I went out for our morning’s walk. But it seemed to us, when we looked at “our view,” as if we could only see those invisible villages of which Brede had told us – that other side of the ridges and rises of which we catch no glimpse from lofty hills or from the heights of human self-esteem. We meant to stay out until the Bredes had taken their departure; but we returned just in time to see Pete, the Jacobus darkey, the blacker of boots, the brusher of coats, the general handy-man of the house, loading the Brede trunks on the Jacobus wagon.