Chapter 5

The first twin, seeing his brother's back turned, dug into his pockets and, having brought out with an air of modest pride a fish-line, a morsel of gingerbread, a bit of resin, human tooth, part of a human bone, a kitten's skull, a chewed piece of gum, and an incredibly besmirched Sunday-school card, extracted from these omens a large rusty screw, which he proffered to his grandmother, muttering, "For your Everything Jar." With a sudden shame at having been seen sympathizing with the interests of a woman, this twin then seized his hat and fled whooping down the road to school, followed by his brother, who, holding between his vision and the sun a small bit of crimson glass, exulted in the contemplation of a deep red universe.

Mrs. Pawket, bundling the dinner-dishes into a pan and pouring hot water from the teakettle over them, sighed. Mr. Pawket, having again retired to the Turkey-red-covered chair, watched his wife somewhat dazedly; he was still thinking of the contents of "Willum's" letter.

"Comin' home by a cir-cus-to-us route," he soliloquized ... "and devil-elopements. I suppose he knows what he's doin', but it all sounds kindy resky to me. Did you get it that A. Malfi was his wife's maiden name? Don't it sound sorter like a actress to you? One of them sassy, tricky furriners, I'll bet. 'N' a vanilla--what call has Willum got to build a vanilla, his age? A mansion, now--I could onderstand how the boy would hanker for a mansion--he always had big feelin's, Willum had--but a vanilla! Say, you ever seen one of them there contraptions?"

Mrs. Pawket, washing the dishes, hung up the soap-shaker and cast her eyes upward as in an effort of memory. She reached for a dish-towel, replying, somewhat evasively, "Where my mother come from they had 'em a-plenty; there was one on every street."

Her husband regarded her with deep respect. "Ye don't say?"

Mrs. Pawket squeezed out the dishmop with a thoughtful air; she cast a hasty, authoritative glance at the range, banging the door shut with a decision that made Mr. Pawket jump as she snapped:

"Just the same, this here ain't no place for a vanilla. A vanilla around these parts would be the same as if you was to wear your Sunday silk hat out a-plowin'. They hain't got good judgment, them two hain't."

The old farmer regarded his wife with serious attention. Lighting his pipe, he lay back in the Turkey-red chair, puffing in silence. At last he laid the pipe down and, laboriously pulling off his boots, hummed an air which had for its sole motif the undynamic suggestion:

"By and by By and by By and by. By and by. By and by."

At last the thumping of stocking feet ceased with the drone of the drowsy voice; a bit of sunlight filtering first through the tulip-trees, then through the little low kitchen window, let it be seen that Mr. Pawket had lapsed into slumber. His wife looked at him with an expressionless face. Wringing her hands out of the dish-water, she carried the pan to the door; with contemptuous words of warning to some chickens near by, she flung the contents on the grass. Going further into the door-yard she dragged up some bleached clothing and stuffed it into a clothes-basket. Choking the range full of coal, wrenching into place a refractory coal-scuttle, she turned the damper in the stove-pipe and set the stove-plates slightly a-tilt. Then she seized the tin wash-basin, and, setting up a small mirror against the window, loosened her hair and dragged her face and head through a severe toilet whose original youthful motive of comeliness had been lost in habitual effort of tidiness. This done, Mrs. Pawket donned a clean white apron and draped around her neck a knitted orange tie which she pinned with a scarlet coral breast-pin.

Having thus dressed for the afternoon and for the feared, desired, but seldom experienced visitation called "company," Mrs. Pawket took from her pocket the screw her grandson had bestowed upon her. Suddenly, with the expression of one who in the interests of art performs dangerous acrobatic feats, she dragged a chair in front of a cupboard. Climbing, with many expressions of insecurity, on this chair, Mrs. Pawket reached a bony hand into the cupboard, groping on the top shelf for an object which her fingers approached tremulously. This object with considerable care Mrs. Pawket brought down to earth and set upon the kitchen table. It was a short, stumpy bowl or jar, upon which curious protuberances of all kinds clustered. The protuberances encircled the jar in something like the way fungus circles a tree hole, in strange and various patterns.

Mrs. Pawket, the light deepening in her eyes, took from her apron pocket the screw; holding it very daintily in one work-worn hand, with the other she dove into further recesses and produced, wrapped in an oily bit of newspaper, a large lump of putty.

Now a solemn ritual began. Breaking off a bit of the putty, Mrs. Pawket welded it on the jar near the other protuberances; while the putty was soft she fixed in it the screw, arranging that implement by a method best calculated to display its screw characteristics. Then Mrs. Pawket's eyes grew darker, a flush came into her wrinkled cheeks; she wrung the moisture from her brow in a sort of agony of creative pleasure. As one who performs an action sacred in its heightened detachment and mechanical efficiency, she rummaged with desperate insistence on another and higher shelf of the cupboard, this time bringing forth a very small vial of gilt varnish and an equally small paint-brush with which to apply it. Mrs. Pawket then observed that her hand was shaking and chid herself severely:

"Look at me! Soon as I see how pritty this here Everything Jar is gettin' to be, I go and get excited. If I'm goosefleshed now, what'll I be when the Everything is finished?"

But the Everything Jar was a long way from finished and the unsatisfied ache of the creative artist made heavy Mrs. Pawket's breast. She surveyed the ceramic, half-erupt with a medley of buttons, screws, safety-pins, hooks, knobs, all covered with their transforming gilt, and tried to imagine how it would seem to have it completed. Then the ultimate anxiety beset her--when completed, should the Everything be bestowed upon the minister's family or--this a recent and daring inspiration--should it be conferred upon Willum's wife, the mistress of the proposed vanilla? Mrs. Pawket was fairly tortured by uncertainty. She shook the sleeping Mr. Pawket by the shoulder.

"Say, look at the Everything. I just now put on that last screw. Ain't it handsome?"

As he blinked at the fantastic jar gleaming with golden excrescences, a deep sense of beauty thrilled Mr. Pawket.

"Hey, Maw," he chuckled. "That's the best yet. My! ain't it pritty? It beats that lamp-shade ye made out er the tinfoil. Now the question is, who ye goin' to give it to?"

"It's fer the vanilla," returned Mrs. Pawket, calmly.

Mr. Pawket put up his hand and wrung out his ear; he thought he could not have heard aright; such aplomb, such dashing assurance as was his wife's! His gray beard vibrated with curiosity.

"For the vanilla," the artist repeated, firmly. "I take it Willum's wife won't be too proud to accept a notion or two fer her parlor. 'Tain't likely that she, being so long in a furrin country, has had much chance to go through the stores and pick out bric-a-brac. I don't know but what she would be thankful for an ornament or so."

"Ornaments?" Mr. Pawket dwelt reverently upon the word. "Ornaments? I dunno but what you got it right, though I wouldn't never have thought of it myself." He leaned over the table the better to gloat upon the golden jar. "Well," he summed up--"well, wimmen do beat all for mind-readin'. First she sets up house-keepin', it's _ornaments_ she's goin' to hanker fer--something fer the center-table most likely; and here you, who she 'ain't never see, stands all ready with an Everything fer her!"

A few days after the excitement produced by Willum's letter the architect arrived. He was a tall, old-young man with the preoccupied air of having reduced all human existence to exact diagrams. He was, however, strangely intoxicated by the quiet and beauty of his country surroundings. On the evening of his arrival he installed himself happily in the spare room of the Pawkets' farm-house, acting, as Mrs. Pawket marveled, as "if he hadn't never lived up in them classy city beehives."

Mr. Badgely, however, seemed to the farmer and his wife unnaturally ecstatic over the ordinary manifestations of the physical universe. He would stand for hours looking off over soft sunrise country; he would hang over the bars by the cow-sheds, staring down the red road or gazing pensively up at the ancient outlines of the Pawkets' homestead. When the old farmer went up to him with knockkneed, rheumatic tread, inquiring, "Well, how goes it?" the architect would reply:

"Oh, heavenly! Such depth! Such substance! Such integrity!"

When Mr. Pawket, fearing such brain lesions as he could not diagnose, saw that these epithets were directed toward his own home in its tulip-tree setting, he would range himself alongside of the architect, eye his residence critically, and expectorate as he avowed:

"It wants roofing. Come vacation I'm goin' ter put the twins to scrapin' them pesky mossback shingles; then I may go with the tide and buy me a fancy tin roof."

Mr. Badgely would sweep him with an unseeing look. He would stretch five very long fingers toward the facade of the farm-house, muttering, "Of course not the dormers; they obtrude, I think, and the note is pseudo-foreign. We should try to evolve something absolutely American, don't you think? But the pilasters, the door paneling, positively Doric in their clean sobriety! The eastern development, now; there may have been reason for the extreme slant toward the east--it orients well, but with a certain shock...."

"Shock? I guess yes," Mr. Pawket would reply. "'Twuz struck by lightnin', tore down considerable." Then Mr. Pawket would remember that Willum had asked him to be all the help he could to the architect, so he would cast his eyes up to the sun as one who dovetails multitudinous engagements, remarking: "What say we go down to Cedar Plains now? Fool around a little. Kindy block the thing all out, as it were."

Once Mr. Pawket had added, "Ef we can't do nothin' else, you can tell me ef you want any of them trees left a-standin'."

The dreaming architect had turned on him like one under sudden electric compulsion; he shook himself into unbelievable alertness.

"The--er--trees? Left standing?"

Mr. Pawket smiled indulgently. He scratched a match on the seat of his overalls and lighted his pipe, answering between puffs: "I guess you 'm new to the business, ain't ye? Don't ye know, boy, the fust thing ye do when ye set out to build a house is to lay all the trees low? Some does it with dunnamite; some does it with mules and swearin'--anything to root out the pesky things."

An extraordinary look of terror had swept the architect's face.

"Nervous," noted Mr. Pawket, "nervous! Maw'll have to feed him up with buttermilk and put drops into his coffee. Them city people is always nagged into nerves." The old man continued in fatherly fashion:

"Now, you wantin' to make all clear for anything as sizable as a vanilla, fust thing we do is to 'scratch off the trees.' I can git you plenty fellers handy with ax and saw, but when it comes to them cussed roots, why, then, you 'm goin' to want dunnamite."

The architect bowed his head thoughtfully. As the two took the little bronzed path leading to the natural park-land dark with tapering cedars, he gave a puzzled look at the old farmer. At last he seemed struck by an idea and said, slowly:

"Do you know, Mr. Pawket, we architects are often a little vague; we need so much to--er--confer--and--er--ahem!--consult. Now, really, I should be so interested. Just what are your personal preferences with regard to the construction of an Italian villa?"

Mr. Pawket was for the moment slightly dazed. He surmised that the question placed him somewhat at a disadvantage; yet, somehow, it seemed to him that he knew a good deal about Italian villas. Gathering together certain impressions derived from the conversation of the twins, from a picture seen on a calendar, from the one lurid film of his experience, and from certain opulent descriptions of the building of the Tabernacle, it seemed to him that he knew a little something about occult species of architecture. He not immodestly presented his ideas.

"I take it"--squashing ruminatively through puddles--"I take it that the vanilla idee is kinder intricate, ain't it?--somethin' fancy and grand like a castle? Two or three cupolos, er course, and all run around with stoops and balconies; marble staircases inside." Mr. Pawket added this carelessly as one used to the larger handling of details. "High sideboards set out in silver in the dinin'-room--a reel handsome phonnygraft into the front room and statoos on the gateposts."

The architect receiving this preliminary sketch with such silent respect, Mr. Pawket gained courage and resumed:

"Wall-papers I ain't so sure about." The old farmer took out a large clasp-knife and, paring his thumb-nail, continued, somewhat loftily: "I presume that is as the lady of the house commands. Some favors blue, but there's a many as is great hands for red. I see a house once had dead animals, stuffed codfish, and shot ducks all over the wall-paper into the dinin'-room; 'twuz reel tony! As fer the yard--well, I mistrust that Willum, bein' sociable and always interested into the open air, would want circular seats around whatever trees was left standin'. Ye could paint 'em red, white, and blue, ye know. And he'd like a pond, maybe, with a white swan shovin' back and forth."

* * *

At last came the day when vans of imported laborers arrived and began quick breaking of ground and laying of foundations on Cedar Plains. Parts of the superb heating system, the installing of which was the architect's special care, numerous white bath-tubs--these things were deposited before the eyes of the excited Mr. Pawket, who, in the absence of the owner of the proposed villa, felt that he must be very vigilant in overseeing. Every day the old man appeared at Cedar Plains, boots spattered, overalls greased and clayey, making his anxious comments to the architect, who received them thoughtfully, with the air of putting all suggestions into immediate execution.

So the building of the "vanilla" proceeded, but it proceeded under the stigma of an outraged countryside. The "show-place" confidently predicted seemed not to evolve; outside of insane expenditures for heating and bathing and the sanitary care of laundry and food, there were few evidences that the villa was to be magnificent. Development after development not only puzzled the neighboring farmers, but incensed them. Men driving by "Willum's vanilla" pointed it out, tongue in cheek, with derisive whip; their women folks, veiled and taciturn, leaned forward in curious wonder to condemn silently. Such complacent agriculturists as owned "ottermobiles" came from miles away to view the thing; they halted their machines by the roadside and went in parties up through the tapering cedars to where stood the slowly rising square white walls, which they stared at with patronizing guffaws. It was the fashion for the youth of Brook Center to spend Sunday afternoons down in Cedar Plains, where among the dark trees they found the rosy trail of arbutus; where strawberries hung in the rank green grass, and where, of autumn days, wandering over the sweet stubble, they confessed to each other those innocent melancholies of beings that have never known sorrow.

On the edge of the plains where the russet path met the highway was an old well. Here the brooding boys and girls were accustomed to bring their loves and quarrels; here they hoisted the bucket from its glittering black depths, poured water on tight bunches of anemone, fern, and Dutchman's breeches, took long, gasping country drinks, and played all the pranks youth plays when relaxed beside its subtle, laughing ally--water. As the Sunday sun went down the boys and girls discussed the strange phenomenon of the new house whose enigmatic walls gleamed through the fields of their once free rovings. They uttered dark hearsay: "Some says them two is crazy; that's why they been chased out er It'ly." The twins, playing stick-knife in the soft turf that edged the road, flatly contradicted this:

"They are not crazy, neither; they 'm as common sense as you are."

"Well, ef they ain't crazy, why they goin' to have stone floors? Why they got them big old stone jars that come yesterday? Why ain't they goin' to have no stair carpets? Why ain't they goin' to have no window-curtings?"

"They are, too, crazy, and they gone and built that old vanilla right on where we used to pick checkerberries, and he's goin' to put a outlandish Dago top right on this here well, the kind they have in It'ly where they all wear rags and eat lemon-skins."

"Nobody won't keep me from drinkin' out of this well when it's got a Dago top."

"Nobody won't never stop me from goin' on Cedar Plains if I've got a mind ter. I got as good a right as they got."

"I'd just as soon heave a rock right now at that there vanilla. I don't care for it. I ain't afraid of no tin-faced I-talian dudes."

At last came a letter announcing the proposed arrival of the villa furniture. The buckboard with the white horse halted again under the tulip-tree and this time Mr. Pawket with unwonted sense of haste intercepted the letter. The Rural, whose Rough Rider hat was now discarded for a black-velvet tam-o'-shanter adorned with a coquettish pink rose, rigidly resigned it to his eager grasp.

Mr. Pawket, for all his preoccupation, was not blind to the pink rose; he quickly got its sense and made the usual deduction.

"When does the weddin' take place?" he asked, facetiously.

The rigidity around the corners of the Rural's mouth did not lessen as she replied with the evasion Brook Center found piquant, "Next day after Never."

Having successfully warded off inquiry as to personal plans, the Rural returned to her rightful prerogatives of newsmonger, demanding:

"How's Mis' Pawket's Everything gittin' along? I got a couple shoe-buttons fer her. She'd better hurry up and finish it; I hear there is four more in town startin' Everything Jars. Seems there's a sort of rivalry of who's goin' to be the first to get a Everything into the vanilla."

A look of calamity shaded Mr. Pawket's face, but he accepted the two shoe-buttons with dignified reserve.

"All she needs now is a harness buckle and a couple peanut-shells," he explained, nonchalantly. "I can get them fer her easy enough; the twins have been helping her some, one with a sinker and the other with a hook and eye. 'Tain't likely any one can git their jar in afore hern. I wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely--"there's been rumors as some one is tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white door-knobs to trim up the garden paths?"

The mail maiden smiled a contemptuous smile; her black eyes held like sediment the look of repudiation.

"Ah, door-knobs!"--scornfully. "What's the use Of givin' up your curios and souvenirs to folks like that? They don't know how to appreciate it! I got a better use for my door-knobs. They 'm peculiar, them two is; they don't know nothin'. You heard that about the bedrooms, I presume?"

Mr. Pawket, a worried look settling on his kind face, peered up at the Rural; he took off his sun-hat and fanned himself with it.

"The bedrooms?" he questioned, falteringly. "D' ye mean that comical cage-like where they goin' to sleep outdoors?"

The Rural smiled scornfully; she adjusted the pink rosebud with a haughty, gauntleted hand.

"I mean the walls," shortly. "Plaster walls. Yes, sir, that's what I mean and I know what I'm talkin' about--rough walls, plaster, like a cellar. I know what I'm talkin' about, for it's my intended has the job; he's 'most crazy about it, my intended is, it's gone all over the Center and every one laughin' and teasin' him about it.... She's wrote it herself in a letter with that same honey-bee onto the envelope. 'I want the bedroom walls to be rough plaster,' that's what she's went and wrote, 'of a pale yellow colorin' Mr. Badgely will choose. Please allow him to mix the color' (ain't it awful?) 'and put it on very rough' (she says). 'I want the grain especially coarse and rich' (she says). '_Coarse and rich_'!" The Rural lifted dramatic eyes, inquiring again, "Ain't that _terrible_?"

Mr. Pawket hesitated. An idea of loyalty possessed him; he made a feeble attempt at seeming to support the unknown lady's taste.

"Er course, as I look at vanillas--" he began, weakly.

But the Rural interrupted him with a vicious clip of her lean brown jaws. "Vanillas?" with scornful inflection. "_Vanillas?_" She lashed the white horse into a sprawling stagger as she snapped, "She don't know nothin' about vanillas!" and rattled confidently away, calling back, scornfully; "She don't know nothin'; she 'ain't never had no instruction; she don't reelize that there's such things as wall-papers. 'Coarse and rich,'" sneered the Rural. She peered back over her trim young shoulder, adding: "They say their furniture has come. Everybody is down to the junction, studyin' it. I'm glad it ain't mine."

It was true that the furniture had arrived. Braving the vicissitudes of sea routes; badly shipped by an Italian warehouse, and roughly handled at an American port, still the furniture had arrived. It had been dumped out of its crated cars at the little Brook Center station. To the lover of Flemish and Spanish carving, to the connoisseur of Genoese cabinets and Italian intarsia, to the student of time-fumed designs and forms, the coming of this furniture might well have been an event; for by a freak of destiny, on the little platform of an obscure country junction were assembled the hoardings of centuries of tradition, the adored heirlooms of a long line of ancestry. One huge case, half wrecked, showed the gleam of Florentine brasses; another, crated and roped, revealed faded Genoese brocades; slender broken legs and edges of carved flaps protruded from battered sheathings. To some minds all this might have spelled a certain sort of poetry; to the curious group assembled at the junction it spelled eccentricity and, what was worse, a fixed and immoral shabbiness of existence!

The junction agent pointed out a half-crated table standing by itself; it looked inconceivably old and was of a timber unknown to Brook Center. Its rickety four legs, wrapped separately, tapered off into carvings of opulent nymphs and the wild, laughing faces of dryads and fauns--these legs were observed by the curious groups at the junction to be badly worn and honeycombed with worm-holes.

"For the vanilla," it was whispered from one to another; the junction agent, hand over mouth, bowed himself backward in mirth. "They say it's all from her home, and this is the dinin'-room table. My! My! My! ain't it awful, all them old, ancient things?"

Mr. Pawket, affecting a connoisseurship unconsciously copied from the architect, bent over the table, examining it; with vague puzzlement he passed his hand over its cut and hacked surface--surface on which hundreds of monks of the time of Clement III had whetted their restless knives.