“But, dear sir, where is the story?” Usually it is a “Sir,” and this time it was Felmer Prince. “Look Around You!”
I mocked: “I defy you to find anything more stirring than old Sam Peters, driving a moth-eaten mule to the mill.”
“And you and I,” supplemented Felmer. “The human heart—”
But I retreated behind the gate and barred it upon the “human heart,” retorting that if the organ disturbed me as it did some people I should confine my conversation to “Yes” and “No.”
“You are sufficiently expert in the use of the negative,” said Felmer, switching at a dead brier, and I proceeded: “As for ‘looking within,’ when Martha and I reach the homicidal point I take a walk.”
“How many subscriptions have you gotten for that confounded thing, Enid?” he asked, abruptly. I temporized.
“One can live on very little after the habit is formed.”
Felmer shook the gate fiercely. “I wish that you would listen to reason!”
“I do, to my own. I’m thinking of selling—”
“Not the place!” he broke in. I asked him, as a man and a neighbor, if he thought that any sane tenant would invest in a left-over colonial, with roof leaking, paint off, shutters hanging; populated by generations of bats, and with a frog pond beside which Poe’s Raven was a pæan of joy?
“Except beauty,” he added. I clung to the gate’s bars, my brow upon my hands, and pain shaking my heart.
“And I’m a fool about it!” I said, miserably. “Every mossy old flagstone, and the very wizardry of its black woods against the sky, means me. It is psychic with inherited memories.”
“Miss E-enid! Are your shoes dry?” screamed Martha from the back door.
“The ivory Buddha and the Mercury, at the Collectors’ International Exposition opened up in town. Now is my chance.” He nodded.
I reminded him that the vice president was Cary Penwick, a cousin of my own, the fear and fascination of childhood’s idolatry. Prince said rather gloomily that he had never heard me mention this cousin, which was not surprising; the last time I saw Cary Penwick he was a wild boy of fourteen, with hair in his eves and a brain full of adventurous mischief. I was an imaginative child of eight years, and memory’s tenderest association with Cary was a mutual and unappeased hunger.
“We roasted corn at the field’s edge and climbed the roof to steal bricks out of the chimney, to build the oven.” I marched on, with Cary borne banner-like before, to relate how the poor boy’s father had been the family skeleton, grandma’s black sheep son, smirched with disgrace, who died in Paris. Finally, Cary’s mother’s family had sent him off to school, from which he consistently ran away, and we never saw him again. He had vowed that one day he would return— At Prince’s laugh, I ended haughtily: “To get even with me for kicking him, when he carried me dripping from the frog pond. I remember that he slapped me. Now, the papers call him a famous collector, and I am sure Cary will help me dispose of the things to advantage.”