The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

remember and glance back and wave their hands to her.

      Now they had disappeared, without a backward look.

      She continued gazing at the vacant road. It seemed to her that the children had taken everything with them.

      A gust of icy wind blew down sharply from the mountain, still snow-covered, and struck at her like a sword. She turned and went back shivering, into the empty house.

PART I

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CHAPTER III

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OLD MR. WELLES AND YOUNG MR. MARSH

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      An Hour in the Life of Mr. Ormsby Welles, aet. 67 March 15, 1920. 3:00 P.m.

      Having lifted the knocker and let it fall, the two men stood gazing with varying degrees of attention at the closed white-painted old door. The younger, the one with the round dark head and quick dark eyes, seemed extremely interested in the door, and examined it competently, its harmoniously disposed wide panels, the shapely fan-light over it, the small panes of greenish old glass on each side. "Beautiful old bits you get occasionally in these out-of-the-way holes," he remarked. But the older man was aware of nothing so concrete and material. He saw the door as he saw everything else that day, through a haze. Chiefly he was concerned as to what lay behind the door. … "My neighbors," he thought, "the first I ever had."

      The sun shone down through the bare, beautiful twigs of the leafless elms, in a still air, transparent and colorless.

      The handle of the door turned, the door opened. The older man was too astonished by what he saw to speak, but after an instant's pause the younger one asked if Mr. and Mrs. Crittenden were at home and could see callers. The lean, aged, leather-colored woman, with shiny opaque black eyes, opened the door wider and silently ushered them into the house.

      As long as she was in sight they preserved a prudent silence as profound as hers, but when she had left them seated, and disappeared, they turned to each other with lifted eyebrows. "Well, what was that, do you suppose?" exclaimed the Younger. He seemed extremely interested and amused. "I'm not so sure, Mr. Welles, about your being safe in never locking your doors at night, as they all tell you, up here. With that for a neighbor!"

      The older man had a friendly smile for the facetious intention of this. "I guess I won't have anything that'd be worth locking doors on," he said. He looked about him still smiling, his pleasant old eyes full of a fresh satisfaction in what he saw. The room was charming to his gaze, cheerful and homey. "I don't believe I'm going to have anything to complain of, with the folks that live in this house," he said, "any more than with any of the rest of it."

      The other nodded. "Yes, it's a very good room," he agreed. After a longer inspection, he added with a slight accent of surprise, "An oddly good room; stunning! Look at the color in those curtains and the walls, and the arrangement of those prints over that Chippendale sewing-table. I wonder if it's accidental. You wouldn't think you'd find anybody up here who could achieve it consciously."

      He got to his feet with a vigorous precision of movement which the other admired. "Well, he's grown to be considerable of a man," he thought to himself. "A pity his father couldn't have lived to see it, all that aliveness that had bothered them so much, down at last where he's got his grip on it. And enough of it, plenty of it, oceans of it, left so that he is still about forty times more alive than anybody else." He looked tolerantly with his tired elderly amusement at the other, stepping about, surveying the room and every object in it.

      The younger brought himself up short in front of a framed photograph. "Why, here's a château-fort I don't know!" he said with an abrupt accent. He added, with some vehemence, "I never even heard of it, I'm sure. And it's authentic, evidently."

      The older man sat perfectly still. He did not know what a shatto four was, nor had he the slightest desire to ask and bring the information down on him, given as the other would give it, pressingly, vividly, so that you had to listen whether you wanted to or not. Heaven knew he did not want to know about whatever it was, this time. Not about that, nor anything else. He only wanted to rest and have a little life before it was too late. It was already too late for any but the quietest sort. But that was no matter. He wouldn't have liked the other kind very well probably. He certainly had detested the sort of "life" he'd experienced in business. The quietest sort was what he had always wanted and never got. And now it really seemed as though he was going to have it. For all his fatigued pose in the old arm-chair, his heart beat faster at the idea. He hadn't got used to being free yet. He'd heard people say that when you were first married it was like that, you couldn't realize it. He'd heard one of the men at the office say that for a long time, every time he heard his bride's skirts rustle, he had to turn his head to make sure she was really there. Well, he would like now to get up and look out of that window and see if his garden was really there. His garden! He thought with a secret feeling, half pity and half shame, of those yellowed old seed catalogues which had come, varnished and brilliant and new, year after year, so long ago, which he'd looked at so hard and so long, in the evenings, and put away to get yellow and sallow like his face … and his hopes. It must be almost time to "make garden," he thought. He had heard them saying at the store that the sap was beginning to run in the maple-trees. He would have just time to get himself settled in his house … he felt an absurd young flush come up under his grizzled beard at this phrase … "his house," his own house, with bookshelves, and a garden. How he loved it all already! He sat very still, feeling those savagely lopped-off tendrils put out their curling fingers once more, this time unafraid. He sat there in the comfortable old arm-chair at rest as never before. He thought, "This is the way I'm going to feel right along, every day, all the time," and closed his eyes.

      He opened them again in a moment, moved subconsciously by the life-time habit of making sure what Vincent was up to. He smiled at the keen look of alert, prick-eared attention which the other was still giving to that room! Lord, how Vincent did love to get things all figured out! He probably had, by this time, an exact diagram of the owners of the house all drawn up in his mind and would probably spend the hour of their call, seeing if it fitted. Not that they would have any notion he was doing anything but talk a blue streak, or was thinking of anything but introducing an old friend.

      One thing he wanted in his garden was plenty of gladioli. Those poor, spindling, watery ones he had tried to grow in the window-box, he'd forget that failure in a whole big row all along the terrace, tall and strong, standing up straight in the country sunshine. What was the address of that man who made a specialty of gladioli? He ought to have noted it down. "Vincent," he asked, "do you remember the address of that Mr. Schwatzkummerer who grew nothing but gladioli?" Vincent was looking with an expression of extreme astonishment at the sheet of music on the piano. He started at the question, stared, recollected himself, laughed, and said, "Heavens, no, Mr. Welles!" and went back into his own world. There were lots of things, Mr. Welles reflected, that Vincent did not care about just as hard as he cared about others.

      In a moment the younger man came and sat down on the short, high-armed sofa. Mr. Welles thought he looked puzzled, a very unusual expression on that face. Maybe, after all, he hadn't got the owners of the house so well-plotted out as he thought he ought to. He himself, going on with his own concerns, remarked, "Well, the name must be in the Long Island telephone directory. When you go back you could look it up and send me word."

      "Whose name?" asked Vincent blankly.

      "Schwatzkummerer," said the other.

      "What!" cried Vincent incredulously, and then, "Oh yes," and then, "Sure, yes, I'll look it up. I'm going back Thursday on the night train. I won't