Those Times and These
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For a silent minute – a minute which seemed a year – those below stared upward, with starting eyes and lumps in their throats. Then, all together, they swallowed their several throat lumps and united in an exultant joyous yell, which made that other yell they had uttered a little before seem by comparison puny and cheap. Through the smoke which bulged from the balcony window and out upon the balcony itself popped the agile black figure. Bracing itself, it hauled across the window ledge a bulky inert form. It wrestled its helpless burden over and eased it down the flat, tiny railed-in perch just as a fire ladder, manned by many eager hands, came straightening up from below, with Captain Bud Gorman of Station No. 1 climbing it, two rounds at a jump, before it had ceased to waver in the air.
Volunteers swarmed up the ladder behind Bud Gorman, forming a living chain from the earth to the balcony. First they passed down the judge, breathing and whole but unconscious, with his nightshirt torn off his back and his bare right arm still clenched round a picture of some sort in a heavy gilt frame. His grip on it did not relax until they had carried him well back from the burning house, and for the second time that night had stretched him out upon the grass.
The judge being safe, the men on the ladder made room for Jeff Poindexter to descend under his own motive power, all of them cheering mightily. Just as Jeff reached solid ground the stoppage in the hose unstopped itself of its own accord and from the brazen gullet of the nozzle there sprang up, like a silver sword, a straight, hard stream of water which lanced into the heart of the fire, turning its exultant song from a crackle to a croon and then to a resentful hiss.
In that same instant Sergeant Bagby found himself, for the first time since he escaped from the kindly tyranny of a black mammy – nearly sixty years before – in close and ardent embrace with a member of the African race.
“Jeff,” clarioned the sergeant, hugging the blistered rescuer yet closer to him and beating him on the back with hearty thumps – “Jeff, God bless your black hide, how did you come to think of it?”
“Well, suh, Mr. Bagby,” wheezed Jeff, “hit wuz lak dis: I didn’t wake up w’en she fust started. I got so much on my mind to do daytimes ‘at I sleeps mighty sound w’en I does sleep. Presen’ly, tho’, I did wake up, an’ I got my pants on, an’ I come runnin’ acrost de lot frum de stable, an’ I got heah jes’ in time to hear ‘em all yellin’ out dat de jedge is done went back into de house. I sees there ain’t no chanc’t of goin’ in after him de way he’s done went, but jes’ about that time I remembers dat air little po’ch up yonder on de front of de house w’ich it seem lak ever’body else had done furgot all ‘bout hit bein’ there a-tall. So I runs round to de back right quick, an’ I dim’ up de lattice-work by de kitchen, an’ I comes out along over de roof, an’ I drap down on de little po’ch, an’ after that, I reckin, you seen de rest of it fur you’self, suh – all but whut happen after I gits inside dat window.”
“What did happen?” From the ring of men who hedged in the sergeant and Jeff five or six asked the same question at once. Before an all-white audience Jeff visibly expanded himself.
“W’y, nothin’ a-tall happen,” he said, “‘ceptin’ that I found de ole boss-man right where I figgered I’d find him – in his own room at de foot of his baid. He’d done fell down dere on de flo’, right after he grabbed dat air picture offen de wall. Yas, suh, that’s perzack-ly where I finds him!”
“But, Jeff, how could you breathe up there?” Still in the sergeant’s cordial grasp, Jeff made direct answer:
“Gen’l’mens, I didn’t! Fur de time bein’ I jes’ natchelly abandoned breathin’!”
Again that night Judge Priest had a dream – only this time the dream lacked continuity and sequence and was but a jumble of things – and he emerged from it with his thoughts all in confusion. In his first drowsy moment of consciousness he had a sensation of having taken a long journey along a dark rough road. For a little he lay wondering where he was, piecing together his impressions and trying to bridge the intervening gaps.
Then the light got better and he made out the anxious face of Doctor Lake looking down at him and, just over Doctor Lake’s shoulder, the face of Sergeant Bagby. He opened his mouth then and spoke.
“Well, there’s one thing certain shore,” said the judge: “this ain’t heaven! Because ef ‘twas, there wouldn’t be a chance of you and Jimmy Bagby bein’ here with me.”
Whereupon, for no apparent reason on earth that Judge Priest could fathom, Doctor Lake, with a huskily affectionate intonation, called him by many profane and improper names; and Sergeant Bagby, wiping his eyes with one hand, made his other hand up into a fist and shook it in Judge Priest’s face, meanwhile emotionally denouncing him as several qualified varieties of an old idiot.
Under this treatment the fogginess quit Judge Priest’s brain, and he became aware of the presence of a considerable number of persons about him, including the two Edward Tilghmans – Senior and Junior – and the two Tilghman girls; and Jeff Poindexter, wearing about half as many garments as Jeff customarily wore, and with a slightly blistered appearance as to his face and shoulders; and Mr. Ulysses Rice, with a badly skinned nose and badly drenched shoulders; and divers others of his acquaintances. Indeed, he was quite surrounded by neighbours and friends. Also by degrees it became apparent to him that he was stretched upon a strange bed in a strange room – at least he did not recall ever having been in this room before – and that he had a bandage across the baldest part of his head, and that he felt tired all over his body.
“Well, I got out, didn’t I?” he inquired after a minute or two.
“Got out – thunder!” vociferated the sergeant with what the judge regarded as a most unnecessary violence of voice and manner. “Ef this here black boy of yourn hadn’t a-risked his own life, climbin’ down over the roof and goin’ in through a front window and draggin’ you out of that fire – the same ez ef you was a sack of shorts – you’d a-been a goner, shore. Ain’t you ‘shamed of yourself, scarin’ everybody half to death that-a-way?”
“Oh, it was Jeff, was it?” said the old judge, disregarding Sergeant Bagby’s indignant interrogation. He looked steadfastly at his grinning servitor and, when he spoke again, there was a different intonation in his voice.
“Much obliged to you, Jeff.” That was all he said. It was the way he said it.
“You is more’n welcome, thanky, suh,” answered Jeff; “it warn’t scursely no trouble a-tall, suh – ‘cep’in’ dem ole shingles on dat roof suttin’y wuz warm to de te’ch.”
“Did – did Jeff succeed in savin’ anything else besides me?” The judge put the question as though half fearing what the answer might be.
“Ef you mean this – why, here ‘tis, safe and sound,” said Sergeant Bagby, and he moved aside so that Judge Priest might see, leaning against the footboard of the bed, a certain crayon portrait. “The glass ain’t cracked even and the frame ain’t dented. You three come out of there practically together – Jeff a-hang-in’ onto you and you a-hangin’ onto your picture. So if that’s whut you went chargin’ back in there fur, I hope you’re satisfied!”
“I’m satisfied,” said the judge softly. Then after a bit he cleared his throat and ventured another query:
“That old house of mine – I s’pose she’s all burnt up by now?”
“Don’t you ever believe it,” said the sergeant. “That there house of yourn ‘pears to be purty nigh ez contrary and set in its ways ez whut you are. It won’t burn up, no matter how good a chance you give it. Jest about the time Jeff here drug you out on that little balcony outside your window, the water works begun to work, and after that they had her under control in less’n no time. She must be about out by now.”
“Your bathroom’s a total loss and the extension on that side is pretty badly scorched up, but the rest of the place, excusing damage by the water and the smoke, is hardly damaged,” added the younger Tilghman. “You’ll be able to move back in, inside of a month, judge.”
“And in the meantime you’re going to stay right here, Judge Priest, and make my house your home,” announced Mr. Tilghman, Senior. “It’s mighty plain, but such as it is you’re welcome to it, judge. We’ll do our level best to make you comfortable. Only I’m afraid you’ll miss the things you’ve been used to having round you.”
“Oh, I reckin not,” said Judge Priest. His glance travelled slowly from the crayon portrait at the foot of the bed to Jeff Poindexter’s chocolate-coloured face and back again to the portrait. “I’ve got mighty near everything I need to make me happy.”
“What I meant was that maybe you’d be kind of lonesome away from your own house,” Mr. Tilghman said.
“No, I don’t believe so,” answered the old man, smiling a little. “You see, I taken the cure for lonesomeness to-night. You mout call it the smoke cure.”
CHAPTER VI. THE FAMILY TREE
THE family tree of the Van Nicht family was not the sort of family tree you think I mean, although they had one of that variety too. This was a real tree. It was an elm – the biggest elm and the broadest and the most majestic elm in the entire state, and in the times of its leafage cast the densest shade of any elm to be found anywhere, probably. For more than one hundred years the Van Nicht family had lived in its shadow. That was the principal trouble with them – they did live in the shadow. I’ll come to that later.
Every consequential visitor to Schuylerville was taken to see the Van Nicht elm. It was a necessary detail of his tour about town. Either before or after he had viewed the new ten-story skyscraper of the Seaboard National Bank, and the site for the projected Civic Centre, and the monument to Schuyler County’s defenders of the Union – 1861-’65 – with a dropsical bronze figure of a booted and whiskered infantryman on top of the tall column, and the Henrietta Wing Memorial Library, and the rest of it, they took him and they showed him the Van Nicht elm. So doing, it was incumbent upon them to escort him through a street which was beginning to wear that vacillating, uncertain look any street wears while trying to make up its mind whether to keep on being a quiet residential byway in an old-fashioned town or to turn itself into an important thoroughfare of a thriving industrial centre. You know the kind of street I aim to picture – with here an impudent young garage showing its shining morning face of red brick in a side yard where there used to be an orchard, and there a new apartment building which has shouldered its way into a line of ancient dwellings and is driving its cast-iron cornices, like rude elbows, into the clapboarded short ribs of its neighbours upon either side.
At the far, upper end of that street, upon the poll of a gentle eminence, uplifted the Van Nicht elm. It was for sundry months of the year a splendid vast umbrella, green in the spring and summer and yellow in the fall; and in the winter presented itself against the sky line as a great skeleton shape, without a blemish upon it, except for a scar in the bark close down to the earth to show where once there might have been a fissure in its mighty bole. No grass, or at least mighty little grass, grew within the circle of its brandishing limbs. It was as though the roots of the tree sucked up all the nourishment that the soil might hold, leaving none for the humble grass to thrive upon.
It was in the winter that the house, which stood almost directly under the tree, was most clearly revealed as a square, ugly domicile of grey stone, a story and a half in height, lidded over by a hip roof of weathered shingles; with a deeply recessed front door, like a pursed and proper mouth, and, above it, a row of queer little longitudinal windows, half hidden below the overhang of the gables and suggesting so many slitted eyes peering out from beneath a lowering brow. You saw, too, the mould that had formed in streaky splotches upon the stonework of the walls and the green rime of age and dampness that had overspread the curled shingles and the peeling paint, turning to minute scales upon the woodwork of the window casings and the door frames. Also you saw one great crooked bough which stretched across the roof like a menacing black arm, forever threatening to descend and crush its rafters in. This was in winter; in summertime the leaves almost completely hid the house, so that one who halted outside the decrepit fence, with its snaggled and broken panels, must needs stoop low to perceive its outlines at all.
The carriage or the automobile bearing the prominent guest and the chairman of the local reception committee would halt at the end of the street.
“That,” the chairman would say, pointing up grade, “is the Van Nicht elm. Possibly you’ve heard about it? Round here we call it the Van Nicht family tree. It is said to be the largest elm in this part of the country. In fact, I doubt whether there are any larger than this one, even up in New England. And that’s the famous old Van Nicht homestead there, just back of it.
“Its got a history. When Colonel Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht came here right after the Revolutionary War – he was a colonel in the Revolution, you know – he built the house, placing it just behind the tree. The tree must’ve grown considerably since then, but the house yonder hasn’t changed but mighty little all these years. It’s the oldest building in Schuyler County. As a matter of fact, the town, with this house for a starter, sort of grew up down here on the flat lands below. The old colonel raised a family here and died here. So did his son and his grandson. They were rich people once – the richest people in the county at one time.
“Why all the land from here clear down to Ossibaw Street – that’s six blocks south – used to be included in the Van Nicht estate. It was a farm then, of course, and by all accounts a fine one. But each generation sold off some of the original grant, until all that’s left now is that house, with the tree and about an acre of ground more or less. And I guess it’s pretty well covered with mortgages.”
This, in substance, was what the guide would tell the distinguished stranger. This, in substance, was what was told to young Olcott on the day after he arrived in Schuylerville to take over the editorial management of the Schuylerville News-Ledger. Mayor T. J. McGlynn was showing him the principal points of interest – so the mayor had put it, when he called that morning with his own car at the Hotel Brain-ard, where Olcott was stopping, and invited the young man to go for a tour of inspection of the city, as a sort of introductory and preparatory course in local education prior to his assuming his new duties.
While the worthy mayor was uttering his descriptive remarks Olcott bent his head and squinted past the thick shield of limbs and leaves. He saw that the door of the house, which was closed, somehow had the look of about always being closed, and that most of the windows were barred with thick shutters.
“Appears rather deserted, doesn’t it?” said the newcomer, striving to show a proper appreciation of the courtesy that was being visited upon him. “There isn’t any one living there at present, is there?”
“Sure there is,” said Mayor McGlynn. “Old Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th, who’s the present head of the family, and his two old-maid sisters, Miss Rachael and Miss Harriet – they all live there together. Miss Rachael is considerably older than Miss Harriet, but they’re both regular old maids – guess they always will be. The brother never married, either – couldn’t find anybody good enough to share the name, I suppose. Anyhow he’s never married. And besides I guess it keeps him pretty busy living up to the job of being the head of the oldest family in this end of the state. That’s about all he ever has done.”
“Then he isn’t in any regular business or any profession?”
“Business!” Mayor McGlynn snorted. “I should say not! All any one of the Van Nichts has ever done since anybody can remember was just to keep on being a Van Nicht and upholding the traditions and the honours of the Van Nichts – and this one is like all his breed. The poorer he gets the more pompous and the more important acting he gets – that’s the funny part of it.”
“Apparently not a very lucrative calling, judging by the general aspect of the ancestral manor,” said Olcott, who was beginning now to be interested. “How do they manage to live?”
“Lord knows,” said the mayor. “How do the sparrows manage to live? I guess there’re times when they need a load of coal and a market basket full of victuals to help tide ‘em over a hard spell, but naturally nobody would dare to offer to help them. They’re proud as Lucifer themselves, and the town is kind of proud of ‘em. They’re institutions with us, as you might say.”
McGlynn, who, as Olcott was to learn later, was a product of new industrial and new political conditions in the community, spoke with the half-begrudged admiration which the self-made so often have for the ancestor-made.
“We ain’t got so very many of the real aristocrats in this section any more, what with all this new blood pouring in since our boom started up; and even if they are as poor as Job’s turkey, these Van Nichts still count for a good deal round here. Money ain’t everything anyway, is it?.. Well, Mr. Olcott, if you’ve seen enough here, we’ll turn round and go see something else.” He addressed his chauffeur: “Jim, suppose you take us by the new hosiery mills next. I want Mr. Olcott to see one of the most prosperous manufacturing plants in the state. Employs nine hundred hands, Mr. Olcott, and hasn’t been in operation but a little more than three years. That’s the way this town is humping itself. You didn’t make any mistake, coming here.”
As the car swung about, Olcott gave the Van Nicht place a backward scrutiny over his shoulder and was impressed by its appearance into saying this:
“It strikes me as having a mighty unhealthy air about it. I’d say offhand it was a first-rate breeding spot for malaria and rheumatism. I wonder why they don’t trim up that big old tree and give the sunshine and the light a chance to get in under it.”
“For heaven’s sake and your own, don’t you suggest that to the old boy when you meet him,” said McGlynn with a grin. “He’d as soon think of cutting off his own leg as to touch a leaf on the family tree. It’s sacred to him. It represents all the glory of his breed and he venerates it, the same as some people venerate an altar in a church.”
“Then you think I will be likely to meet him? I’d like to – from what you tell me, he must be rather a unique personality.”
“Yes, he’s all of that – unique, I mean. And you’re pretty sure to meet him before you’ve been in town many months. He seems to regard it as his duty to call on certain people, after they’ve been here a given length of time, and extend to them the freedom of the town that his illustrious great-granddaddy founded. If you’re specially lucky – or specially unlucky – he may even invite you to call on him, although that’s an honour that doesn’t come to very many, even among the older residents. The Van Nichts are mighty exclusive and it isn’t often that anybody sees what the inside of their house looks like – let alone a stranger… Say, Jim, after we’ve seen the hosiery mills, run us on out past the County Feeble-Minded and Insane Asylum. Mr. Olcott will enjoy that!”
Within a month’s time from this time, Mayor McGlynn’s prophecy was to come true. On a morning in the early part of the summer 01 Olcott sat behind his desk in his office adjoining the city room on the second floor of the News-Ledger building, when his office boy announced a gentleman calling to see Mr. Olcott personally.
“See who it is, will you, please, Morgan?” said Olcott to his assistant. Morgan had arrived less than a week before, having been sent on by the syndicate which owned a chain of papers, the News-Ledger included, to serve under the new managing editor. The syndicate had a cheery little way of shuffling the cards at frequent intervals and dealing out fresh executives for the six or eight dailies under its control and ownership.
“I’m busy as the dickens,” added Olcott as Morgan got up to obey; “so if it’s a pest that’s outside, give him the soft answer and steer him off!”
In a minute Morgan was back with a cryptic grin on his face.
“You’d better see him – he’s worth seeing, all right,” said Morgan.
“Who is it?” asked Olcott.
“It’s somebody right out of a book,” answered Morgan; “somebody giving the name of Something Something Van Nicht. I didn’t catch all the first name – I was too busy sizing up its proprietor. Says he must see you privately and in person. I gather from his manner that if you don’t see him this paper will never be quite the same again. And honestly, Olcott, he’s worth seeing.”
“I think I know who it is,” said Olcott, “and I’ll see him. Boy, show the gentleman in!”
“I’ll go myself,” said Morgan. “This is a thing that ought to be done in style.”
Olcott reared back in his chair, waiting. The door opened and Morgan’s voice was heard making formal and sonorous announcement: “Mr. Van Nicht.” And Olcott, looking over his desk top, saw, framed in the doorway, a figure at once picturesque and pitiable.
The first thing, almost, to catch his eye was a broad black stock collar – the first stock collar Olcott had ever seen worn by a man in daytime. Above it was a long, close-shaven, old face, with a bloodless and unwholesome pallor to it, framed in long, white hair, and surmounted by a broad-brimmed, tall-crowned soft hat which had once been black and now was gangrenous with age. Below it a pair of sloping shoulders merging into a thin, meagre body tightly cased in a rusty frock coat, and below the coat skirts in turn a pair of amazingly thin and rickety legs, ending in slender, well-polish-ed boots with high heels. In an instantaneous appraisal of the queer figure Olcott comprehended these details and, in that same flicker of time, noted that the triangle of limp linen showing in the V of the close-buttoned lapels had a fragile, yellowish look like old ivory, that all the outer garments were threadbare and shiny in the seams, and that the stock collar was decayed to a greenish tinge along its edges. Although the weather was warm, the stranger wore a pair of grey cotton gloves.
“Good morning,” said Olcott, mechanically putting a ceremonious and formal emphasis into the words and getting on his feet.
“Good morning, sir, to you,” returned the visitor in a voice of surprising volume, considering that it issued from so slight a frame. “You are Mr. Olcott?”
“Yes, that’s my name.” And Olcott took a step forward, extending his hand.
“Mine, sir, is Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th.” The speaker paused midway of the floor to remove one glove and to shift it and his cane to the left hand. Advancing, with a slight limp, he gave to Olcott a set of fingers that were dry and chilly and fleshless. Almost it was like clasping the articulated bones of a skeleton’s hand.
“I have come personally, sir, to pay my respects and, as one representing the – ah – the old régime of our people, to bid you welcome to our midst.”
“Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?”
“I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his posture with a stiff and stately investure.
Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a book – an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels.
“He wasn’t really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to posterity. But Charlotte Brontë endowed him with his conversation.” What Olcott said – aloud – was something fatuous and commonplace touching on the state of the weather.
“I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which, therefore, I assume you are responsible.”