Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 451
“Guess you’ve often took note of it, yourself, Zebias,” Mr. Sweetmus was saying. “I mean how animals and childern and women always like to make over me. Take these two daughters o’ Mrs. Massish and Mr. Massish, too. You see them two talkin’ to me yestiddy aftanoon? Guess you did. Know what they was sayin’ to me? Well, I’ll tell you: said right out they’d b’en thinkin’ ‘bout my ‘pearance. I told ’em that jest seein’ me in my gaddnin clo’es, they couldn’t tell; but some Sunday I’d walk up this way in the golf suit Mr. Carmichael’s wife didn’t like him in last year so she gave it to me, and they could jedge for theirselves. So they says no they liked to look out o’ the window sometimes, and sometimes when they was out on the premises they liked to look down towards the gaddin, maybe, and they’d ‘joy theirselves better if I was fixed up all the time. Says they’d like to see me in good, nice overalls, the kind that fasten up over the shoulders. Come right out with it and said they thought I’d look nice in long, blue overalls. See? Funny, but that’s the way it’s always b’en.”
“They ain’t the only ones,” I heard Zebias Flick telling him. “Yestiddy I see three four fine handsome womenfolks — automobile tourists they was, top-notch high-heelers — and they was lookin’ over the hedge at you while you was at work; but you never took note of ’em. Ast me who in the world you was, and I told ’em. ‘My!’ they says. Heard ’em say it two three times. ‘My!’ they kep’ sayin’. ‘My!’ ”
“Did they so? Well, it’s funny,” Mr. Sweetmus told him.
“That wun’t all,” Zebias went on. “Heard ’em sayin’ they wondered where you c’d a-come from. Heard ’em say it right out. Same as sayin’ they’d liked to know where you lived, so they c’d make your ‘quaintance. I never told ’em though; thought I’d said enough.”
“Well, they wouldn’t ‘a’ b’en no harm in your tellin’ ’em,” I heard Mr. Sweetmus say. “Guess they’ll be by again, though, likely. Funny how it keeps on always the same way. Why do you think it is, Zebias?”
“Must be somethin’ ‘bout you,” Zebias told him. “Somethin’ that ‘tracts ’em.”
“Must be,” Mr. Sweetmus agreed, and there was a short silence as if he were doing some hard thinking. “One reason that might help to ‘count fer it,” he said, after that, “why, it’s likely because I never put on no airs with ’em. Always easy and natural-like. They might be other reasons; but that’s one of ’em anyways. Naturalness always come natural to me, as you might want to put it. In other words, I’m always jest myself with ’em, same as I am with you or with somebody’s dog or if I was anywuz else. You take note o’ me, Zebias, when I’m with animals or childern or women, and you’ll see. I’m behavin’ jest as natural’s if I was speakin’ man-to-man. Yessuh, that’s part o’ the reason they make over me the way they do. ‘Counts fer part of it anyways.”
CHAPTER VI
MR. SWEETMUS WAS certainly right about his being natural with animals at any rate, as we discovered an evening or two later. We were just finishing dinner, and for a time I thought a skunk must have got right into the very room with us, though the carpenters had put in a temporary partition. I never before had such a powerful experience with that odor, and it drove us out of the room in a hurry; but conditions weren’t better in any other part of the house, upstairs or down. Everybody had to get outdoors and stay there for quite a while, and it was difficult inside the house even after bedtime; I never did know a smell to be so thoroughly distributed throughout a building. Well, the next morning I went out to see how the garden was getting on, and of course Mr. Sweetmus stopped work as soon as he saw me and began to walk toward me, talking about which direction the breeze was coming from, and so on; but as he got nearer I began taking steps backward, so he stopped.
“Guess I still smell of it. Some people dun’t stummick it so well,” he said, and smiled kind of superiorly. “Take me, fer instance, and I ain’t never b’en troubled by it because I’ve got kind of a natural way with me, and what’s natural with animals and childern and women dun’t never trouble me none, and you take that little animal and nothin’ ain’t more natural than fer it to make anythin’ that distu’bs it p’take of its smell. Course I know, though, that summer families in p’tic’lar dun’t stummick it easy, and that’s what I was thinkin’ ‘bout last night when I see one a-settin’ here in your ya’d. I says to myself, ‘Mrs. Massish and Mr. Massish, too, and their two daughters, besides,’ I says to myself, ‘they wouldn’t like this,’ I says to — —”
I interrupted him. “You did? It was you — —”
“Jest like I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Massish. Zebias laid off yestiddy aftanoon and Mrs. Massish showed me a cellar window that she says was the new fresh air intake the carpenters had finished to carry nice, good outside air all through the house. Told me to close that window jest before I went home, because it looked like the evenin’ was goin’ to git chilly; but I fergot all ‘bout it until I was home finishin’ supper. So I come all the way back to ‘tend to it, and when I got here it was bright nice moonlight and they was a young skunk a-settin’ right there on the grass not two feet in front o’ that fresh air intake. They’re friendly little animals if you’re natural with ’em — I’ve had one to follow me as much as a quarter of a mile after dark, walkin’ ‘longside o’ me, nice and pet-like — and they wun’t do nothin’ or even budge if you ‘proach ’em right, in a natural kind of a way. Course I knowed you wouldn’t want one pra’tic’ly in your fresh air intake, so when I come up to him I give him kind of a kick — —”
“You did!” I said. “You did!”
“Sploded right in my face a’most,” Mr. Sweetmus informed me. “Never did git it stronger. Awdinarily, ‘s I says, I ain’t sensitive to it; but kickin’ him like I done it come on me kind o’ like a knife in the nostrils — more’n I’d looked fer, you might say. Disagreeable. By the time I’d got back home, though, course it wun’t anythin’ a man with a good deal o’ naturalness would object to. He went on ‘bout his bizness after I give him that kick; didn’t hurt him none. Course I shet that window ‘cause she’d told me to; but if it had b’en mine I wouldn’t ‘a’ done it, ‘cause after what’d happened ’twould ‘a’ b’en better to let the house air out some. Bein’s it was her window and not mine, and she knowed what she wanted, I didn’t see no choice but to take and shet it. Looks to me jest the same way as ’tis ‘bout that gaddin. I got a love o’ flowers jest the same’s I got a love of animals and childern and women; but the way I like flowers is to see ’em growin’ natural-like — wild flowers you hear some people callin’ ’em. You’ve heard that spression used, yourself, Mr. Massish, I guess; but my own ‘pinion is that it ain’t no matter whether you call ’em wild flowers or jest natural flowers or whatever you might take a mind to say ‘bout ’em, the point is they’re handsome to look at and no trouble to anybody. What I mean by that, they ain’t no trouble if you let ’em alone and dun’t take no trouble ‘bout ’em. Course it’s her gaddin, though, and she’s ‘sposed to know what she wants; but if ’twas mine — —”
I excused myself here and got away, though of course he kept on talking as long as I was in sight; Mrs. Massey’s method didn’t work so far as I was concerned, and my only way of stopping him was to get where he couldn’t see me — I had to keep out of the yard entirely during Mr. Sweetmus’s working hours or there wouldn’t be any garden.
Inside the house there was such a hammering and sawing and ripping and tearing going on that you couldn’t read, much less think; I don’t care to spend my whole time motoring and I expect I’ve made it clear enough that I didn’t have anybody outside the family to talk to — at least not with any great pleasure to myself. Well, you see, I had to do something with my time and that’s how it happened that I bought the motor-boat. One summer when we were up on Lake Michigan I’d been out in hired motor-boats enough to understand that I don’t get seasick in a boat so long as it keeps going ahead; qualms begin to come over me only when it stops and goes to flopping about in one location, and when that can be avoided I enjoy motor-boating first rate. So one day when the carpenters were pretty noisy at our new cottage I was down on a wharf at the harborside and saw a fine-looking boat, all nicely painted and varnished, with the brass work polished, and about thirty-eight feet long, I judged. It had a nice mahogany cabin forward, a small bridge-deck with comfortable seats for the operator and one other person; there was an ample cockpit with four or five wicker chairs in it, and there was a little rowboat or dinghy swung up on davits — altogether a pretty good appearing sort of a motor-boat. So I asked a man that was standing there whose boat it was.
He was a quiet, likeable-looking man, middle-aged, in a blue suit and a blue yachting-cap, and I was surprised when he answered, “It might as well be yours, Mr. Massey, because it’s for sale at a bargain and a good boat, too.”
Then I remembered having seen him before and that his name was Captain Turner. He seemed to be another man that was willing to speak freely, but more to the point, you might say, than Mr. Sweetmus did. So we had a conversation and he told me the boat belonged to a summer family he’d run it for the year before; but they’d gone to Europe and left him the job of selling it and getting himself the position of captain on it again, if he could. Well, the long and short of it is, I bought that boat the next day, with Captain Turner to run it for me, and of course Mrs. Massey and Enid and Clarissa got right excited. The way they talked about it and the plans they made, you wouldn’t have thought I was going to have much to do with the Wanda — that was the boat’s name — she was just going to be used for them to give parties on when “they” got here. Mrs. Massey’s enthusiasm was the quickest to drop; she isn’t a good sailor, and her first excursion on the Wanda was a poor experience for her. The girls’ excitement tapered off pretty quickly, too, especially as the Wanda only made about fifteen miles an hour, and within a week if I asked them to go out with me they usually looked absent-minded and began to make excuses.
Of course I enjoyed having them along with me; but I got to liking the Wanda just as well when they weren’t. She had a good engine in her that Captain Turner kept in fine condition, so my stomach didn’t become unsettled by our having to stop for repairs, and I learned how to manage the wheel and the controls, myself. I got a good deal of pleasure out of running the boat, and some out of talking to Captain Turner, though his mind was strictly limited to marine interests and I never did get much response out of him to what you might call Logansville topics. We’d usually go out to sea pretty soon after lunch and not come back into the harbor until along about five o’clock, and one afternoon we got back a little later than usual and were just tying up when I noticed Mr. Sweetmus standing on the wharf that we used, looking down at us with his customarily affable expression. “See you b’en moty-boatin’, Mr. Massish,” he said. “Jest on my way home and thought I might ‘s well stop to find out how you ‘joy yourself. Ain’t never b’en on the ocean myself nor into it, neither. B’en to the bathin’-beach, though, couple times when I was younger to look at other people goin’ into it. Overdo it, they do — leastways that’s my ‘pinion. Gittin’ the whole human body into water, it ain’t natural ‘cept fer them fishes. Disagreeable.”
“You don’t mean to say you can’t swim?” I asked him.
“Me?” He looked surprised. “Never see no use of it. Ain’t never b’en in a boat, neither, ‘cept two three times in my life. Nice-lookin’ chairs you got there, though. Wouldn’t mind settin’ in one myself some Sunday aftanoon when you’re goin’ out, if so be you’d be willin’ I sh’d ‘company you. Ain’t got nothin’ p’tic’lar to do next Sunday aftanoon, if so be you’d be pleased to have me.”
Of course there wasn’t anything to do but to tell him he could come, though I certainly didn’t enjoy the prospect, because I knew he’d talk the whole time, and the more I listened to him the more confusing I found him. I mean to say that his whole character perplexed me; he was the only man I ever saw who would walk up to a skunk and kick it, and the fact that he would kick one right in front of a person’s fresh air intake and then casually tell the person about it, without the slightest appearance of realizing he’d done that person a wrong or of what the person would be thinking of him — well, I’m not much of a psychologist, I suppose, and Ananias Prinsh Sweetmus was a little too much for me.
When I got home, that afternoon, after telling him he could go out on the Wanda with me the next Sunday, I found one of my family had other boating plans for the same date, and I thought it better not to mention my engagement with Mr. Sweetmus. It was Clarissa who had the plans, and her mother and sister were almost as excited as she was, because after all these weeks from the middle of April well into May of being ‘way up here, left alone among and by the original inhabitants, we were going to have a visitor from the outside world. Clarissa’s a nice, bright, sensible girl, always with plenty of boys seeming interested in her, and now and then she appears to get a little excited about one or another of them. This time it was a boy named Paul Bicksit whom the rest of the family hadn’t ever seen; but she’d met him at a college dance somewhere in our part of the country and had talked quite a little about him in a conscious kind of a way, so I judged she was rather more upset over him than she usually got. This young Bicksit was in the Harvard Law School down at Cambridge, Mass., by now, and he’d called her on long distance, I gathered, and was going to spend Sunday with us at Mary’s Neck, so she’d decided she wanted the Wanda for the afternoon.
“Why, certainly,” I told her. “Bring him along.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked serious. “I only thought that probably you’d be having something else to do that afternoon and wouldn’t want the boat — —”
“What else to do?” I asked her. “Suggest something.”
“Well — —” she said. “Something-or-other.”
I didn’t take the hint. It had already occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind having Mr. Sweetmus along so much if Clarissa and her young friend were there for him to converse with. Probably it was a little inconsiderate of me — maybe you might call it selfish — but anyhow I just said that I’d be on the bridge with Captain Turner, running the boat, and there was plenty of room in the cockpit, so she let it go at that. You could see it wasn’t exactly what she wanted; but she decided to make it do.
Young Bicksit turned up in a dusty little automobile Sunday morning right after breakfast, having started, he said, looking at Clarissa, a long, long time before sunrise. He was a tall, nice-looking boy not different from others so far as I could see, though Clarissa was all tensed up with self-consciousness and acting as if the rest of us didn’t belong to her. The two of them had the whole morning together, driving in his little car, so by the time they got back for lunch I couldn’t see how they’d have anything left to say to each other particularly and I didn’t feel selfish any more about their having a companion for the afternoon’s excursion on the Wanda.
When we got down to the wharf Mr. Sweetmus was there waiting for us, and Clarissa gave a start at the sight of him. “What on earth’s he doing here?” she whispered to me. “For heaven’s sake, don’t say anything that would give Paul the idea he’s our gardener!”
She was nervous; but I could see, in a way, why she didn’t want the young man to think Mr. Sweetmus was connected with us in any capacity. He was dressed in the clothes he’d mentioned a Mrs. Carmichael’s having given him because she didn’t like her husband in them, and I haven’t often seen anything more inappropriate-looking than Mr. Sweetmus with them on. You could see why Mrs. Carmichael hadn’t wanted her husband even to play golf in ’em, on account of their loudness, and Mr. Sweetmus hadn’t helped them any by wearing a little stiff summer-before-last’s straw hat that somebody must have given him, gladly. Clarissa tried to get us off in the boat without appearing to notice him, though of course he’d already begun to talk and she couldn’t have had much genuine hope that young Mr. Bicksit wouldn’t find out at least that Mr. Sweetmus knew us. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” she kept saying, pretending to laugh. “I’m simply mad to be out on the sea! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! I’m simply mad for a breath of salt air!” She kept right on talking as loudly as she could, trying to drown out what Mr. Sweetmus was saying.
The three of us were in the boat by this time and Captain Turner, anxious to please Clarissa, was casting off the lines that held us to the wharf. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Clarissa said. “I’m simply — —” But Mr. Sweetmus, talking all the time, himself, had already come down the steps from the wharf and landed himself with us in the cockpit.
“Nice good pleasant weather,” he said. “Nice good day fer a sail, though course that’s only my ‘pinion. Some people might say it was a nice good aftanoon to take a walk in, maybe, ‘count o’ their not havin’ the stummick they might be called on fer if they went sailin’. They might have their ‘pinions jest the same as I and you and the rest of us got ours.”
Clarissa looked sort of horrified. “Get him off the boat!” she whispered to me. “Do something!”
I thought it better just to make a gesture that showed her I couldn’t do anything, because we were already passing out of the harbor and getting into the ocean chop by then. It seemed to me just as well that she should surmise Mr. Sweetmus had invited himself along, which of course was really the case, so I made the gesture I speak of, and, as Clarissa looked as if she were going to faint, I just hurriedly introduced Mr. Sweetmus to Mr. Bicksit and went up on the bridge and took the wheel from Captain Turner, sitting with my back to the cockpit. I didn’t look round for quite a while; but I could hear Mr. Sweetmus talking — I think I’ve mentioned what kind of a voice he had — and I wondered whether or not Mr. Bicksit was taking him for a friend of the family, gardening not having been referred to.
