"The old home! You who sit in your luxurious apartments, attended by your liveried servants, eating the costly dishes that bring you dyspepsia and kindred evils, what would you give to go back once more to the simple, cleanly living of the old house in the country? The old home, where the nights were cool and refreshing, the sleep deep and sound; where the huckleberry pies that mother fashioned were swimming in fragrant juice, where the sh.e.l.ls of the clams for the chowder were snow white and the chowder itself a triumph; where there were no voices but those of the wind and sea; no--"
"Don"t!" busts out Jonadab. "Don"t! I can"t stand it!"
He was mopping his eyes with his red bandanner. I was consider"ble shook up myself. The dear land knows we was more used to huckleberry pies and clam chowder than we was to liveried servants and costly dishes, but there was something in the way that feller read off that slush that just worked the pump handle. A hog would have cried; I know _I_ couldn"t help it. As for Peter T. Brown, he fairly crowed.
"It gets you!" he says. "I knew it would. And it"ll get a heap of others, too. Well, we can"t send "em back to the old home, but we can trot the old home to them, or a mighty good imitation of it. Here it is; right here!"
And he waves his hand up toward Aunt Sophrony"s cast-off palace.
Cap"n Jonadab set up straight and sputtered like a firecracker. A man hates to be fooled.
"Old home!" he snorts. "Old county jail, you mean!"
And then that Brown feller took his feet down off the rail, hitched his chair right in front of Jonadab and me and commenced to talk. And HOW he did talk! Say, he could talk a Hyannis fisherman into a missionary.
I wish I could remember all he said; "twould make a book as big as a dictionary, but "twould be worth the trouble of writing it down. "Fore he got through he talked a thousand dollars out of Cap"n Jonadab, and it takes a pretty hefty lecture to squeeze a quarter out of HIM. To make a long yarn short, this was his plan:
He proposed to turn Aunt Sophrony"s wind plantation into a hotel for summer boarders. And it wan"t going to be any worn-out, regulation kind of a summer hotel neither.
"Confound it, man!" he says, "they"re sick of hot and cold water, elevators, bell wires with a n.i.g.g.e.r on the end, and all that. There"s a raft of old codgers that call themselves "self-made men"--meanin"
that the Creator won"t own "em, and they take the responsibility themselves--that are always wishing they could go somewheres like the shacks where they lived when they were kids. They"re always talking about it, and wishing they could go to the old home and rest. Rest! Why, say, there"s as much rest to this place as there is sand, and there"s enough of that to scour all the knives in creation."
"But "twill cost so like the d.i.c.kens to furnish it," I says.
"Furnish it!" says he. "Why, that"s just it! It won"t cost nothing to furnish it--nothing to speak of. I went through the house day before yesterday--crawled in the kitchen window--oh! it"s all right, you can count the spoons--and there"s eight of those bedrooms furnished just right, corded bedsteads, painted bureaus with gla.s.s k.n.o.bs, "G.o.d Bless Our Home" and Uncle Jeremiah"s coffin plate on the wall, rag mats on the floor, and all the rest. All she needs is a little more of the same stuff, that I can buy "round here for next to nothing--I used to buy for an auction room--and a little paint and fixings, and there she is. All I want from you folks is a little money--I"ll chuck in two hundred and fifty myself--and you two can be proprietors and treasurers if you want to. But active manager and publicity man--that"s yours cheerily, Peter Theodosius Brown!" And he slapped his plaid vest.
Well, he talked all the forenoon and all the way to Orham on the train and most of that night. And when he heaved anchor, Jonadab had agreed to put up a thousand and I was in for five hundred and Peter contributed two hundred and fifty and experience and nerve. And the "Old Home House"
was off the ways.
And by the first of May "twas open and ready for business, too. You never see such a driver as that feller Brown was. He had a new wide piazza built all "round the main buildings, painted everything up fine, hired the three best women cooks in Wellmouth--and there"s some good cooks on Cape Cod, too--and a half dozen chamber girls and waiters.
He had some trouble getting corded beds and old bureaus for the empty rooms, but he got "em finally. He bought the last bed of Beriah Burgess, up at East Harniss, and had quite a d.i.c.ker getting it.
"He thought he ought to get five dollars for it," says Brown, telling Jonadab and me about it. "Said he hated to part with it because his grandmother died in it. I told him I couldn"t see any good reason why I should pay more for a bed just because it had killed his grandmother, so we split up and called it three dollars. "Twas too much money, but we had to have it."
And the advertis.e.m.e.nts! They was sent everywheres. Lots of "em was what Peter called "reading notices," and them he mostly got for nothing, for he could talk an editor foolish same as he could anybody else. By the middle of April most of our money was gone, but every room in the house was let and we had applications coming by the pailful.
And the folks that come had money, too--they had to have to pay Brown"s rates. I always felt like a robber or a Standard Oil director every time I looked at the books. The most of "em was rich folks--self-made men, just like Peter prophesied--and they brought their wives and daughters and slept on cornhusks and eat chowder and said "twas great and just like old times. And they got the rest we advertised; we didn"t cheat "em on REST. By ten o"clock pretty nigh all hands was abed, and "twas so still all you could hear was the breakers or the wind, or p"raps a groan coming from a window where some boarder had turned over in his sleep and a corncob in the mattress had raked him crossways.
There was one old chap that we"ll call Dillaway--Ebenezer Dillaway.
That wan"t his name; his real one"s too well known to tell. He runs the "Dillaway Combination Stores" that are all over the country. In them stores you can buy anything and buy it cheap--cheapness is Ebenezer"s stronghold and job lots is his sheet anchor. He"ll sell you a mowing machine and the gra.s.s seed to grow the hay to cut with it. He"ll sell you a suit of clothes for two dollars and a quarter, and for ten cents more he"ll sell you glue enough to stick it together again after you"ve worn it out in the rain. He"ll sell you anything, and he"s got cash enough to sink a ship.
He come to the "Old Home House" with his daughter, and he took to the place right away. Said "twas for all the world like where he used to live when he was a boy. He liked the grub and he liked the cornhusks and he liked Brown. Brown had a way of stealing a thing and yet paying enough for it to square the law--that hit Ebenezer where he lived.
His daughter liked Brown, too, and "twas easy enough to see that Brown liked her. She was a mighty pretty girl, the kind Peter called a "queen," and the active manager took to her like a cat to a fish.
They was together more"n half the time, gitting up sailing parties, or playing croquet, or setting up on the "Lover"s Nest," which was a kind of slab summer-house Brown had rigged up on the bluff where Aunt Sophrony"s pig-pens used to be in the old days.
Me and Jonadab see how things was going, and we"d look at one another and wink and shake our heads when the pair"d go by together. But all that was afore the count come aboard.
We got our first letter from the count about the third of June. The writing was all over the plate like a biled dinner, and the English looked like it had been shook up in a bag, but it was signed with a nine fathom, toggle-jinted name that would give a pollparrot the lockjaw, and had the word "Count" on the bow of it.
You never see a feller happier than Peter T. Brown.
"Can he have rooms?" says Peter. "CAN he? Well, I should rise to elocute! He can have the best there is if yours truly has to bunk in the coop with the gladsome Plymouth Rock. That"s what! He says he"s a count and he"ll be advertised as a count from this place to where rolls the Oregon."
And he was, too. The papers was full of how Count What"s-his-Name was hanging out at the "Old Home House," and we got more letters from rich old women and pork-pickling money bags than you could shake a stick at.
If you want to catch the free and equal nabob of a glorious republic, bait up with a little n.o.bility and you"ll have your salt wet in no time.
We had to rig up rooms in the carriage house, and me and Jonadab slept in the haymow.
The count himself hove in sight on June fifteenth. He was a little, smoked Italian man with a pair of legs that would have been carried away in a gale, and a black mustache with waxed ends that you"d think would punch holes in the pillow case. His talk was like his writing, only worse, but from the time his big trunk with the foreign labels was carried upstairs, he was skipper and all hands of the "Old Home House."
And the funny part of it was that old man Dillaway was as much gone on him as the rest. For a self-made American article he was the worst gone on this machine-made importation that ever you see. I s"pose when you"ve got more money than you can spend for straight goods you nat"rally go in for buying curiosities; I can"t see no other reason.
Anyway, from the minute the count come over the side it was "Good-by, Peter." The foreigner was first oar with the old man and general consort for the daughter. Whenever there was a sailing trip on or a spell of roosting in the Lover"s Nest, Ebenezer would see that the count looked out for the "queen," while Brown stayed on the piazza and talked bargains with papa. It worried Peter--you could see that. He"d set in the barn with Jonadab and me, thinking, thinking, and all at once he"d bust out:
"Bless that Dago"s heart! I haven"t chummed in with the degenerate aristocracy much in my time, but somewhere or other I"ve seen that chap before. Now where--where--where?"
For the first two weeks the count paid his board like a major; then he let it slide. Jonadab and me was a little worried, but he was advertising us like fun, his photographs--snap shots by Peter--was getting into the papers, so we judged he was a good investment. But Peter got bluer and bluer.
One night we was in the setting room--me and Jonadab and the count and Ebenezer. The "queen" and the rest of the boarders was abed.
The count was spinning a pigeon English yarn of how he"d fought a duel with rapiers. When he"d finished, old Dillaway pounded his knee and sung out:
"That"s bus"ness! That"s the way to fix "em! No lawsuits, no argument, no delays. Just take "em out and punch holes in "em. Did you hear that, Brown?"
"Yes, I heard it," says Peter, kind of absent-minded like. "Fighting with razors, wan"t it?"
Now there wan"t nothing to that--"twas just some of Brown"s sarcastic spite getting the best of him--but I give you my word that the count turned yellow under his brown skin, kind of like mud rising from the bottom of a pond.
"What-a you say?" he says, bending for"ards.
"Mr. Brown was mistaken, that"s all," says Dillaway; "he meant rapiers."
"But why-a razors--why-a razors?" says the count.
Now I was watching Brown"s face, and all at once I see it light up like you"d turned a searchlight on it. He settled back in his chair and fetched a long breath as if he was satisfied. Then he grinned and begged pardon and talked a blue streak for the rest of the evening.
Next day he was the happiest thing in sight, and when Miss Dillaway and the count went Lover"s Nesting he didn"t seem to care a bit. All of a sudden he told Jonadab and me that he was going up to Boston that evening on bus"ness and wouldn"t be back for a day or so. He wouldn"t tell what the bus"ness was, either, but just whistled and laughed and sung, "Good-by, Susannah; don"t you grieve for me," till train time.
He was back again three nights afterward, and he come right out to the barn without going nigh the house. He had another feller with him, a kind of shabby dressed Italian man with curly hair.
"Fellers," he says to me and Jonadab, "this is my friend, Mr. Macaroni; he"s going to engineer the barber shop for a while."
Well, we"d just let our other barber go, so we didn"t think anything of this, but when he said that his friend Spaghetti was going to stay in the barn for a day or so, and that we needn"t mention that he was there, we thought that was funny.
But Peter done a lot of funny things the next day. One of "em was to set a feller painting a side of the house by the count"s window, that didn"t need painting at all. And when the feller quit for the night, Brown told him to leave the ladder where "twas.
That evening the same crowd was together in the setting room. Peter was as lively as a cricket, talking, talking, all the time. By and by he says:
"Oh, say, I want you to see the new barber. He can shave anything from a note to a porkypine. Come in here, Chianti!" he says, opening the door and calling out. "I want you."