“Supposing I said it meant a whole lot to me,” began Mr. Preble.
“What’s come over you?” his wife demanded. “It’s cold down there and there is absolutely nothing to do.”
“We could pick up pieces of coal,” said Mr. Preble. “We might get up some kind of a game with pieces of coal.”
“I don’t want to,” said his wife. “Anyway, I’m reading.”
“Listen,” said Mr. Preble, rising and walking up and down. “Why won’t you come down in the cellar? You can read down there, as far as that goes.”
“There isn’t a good enough light down there,” she said, “and anyway, I’m not going to go down in the cellar. You may as well make up your mind to that.”
“Gee whiz!” said Mr. Preble, kicking at the edge of a rug. “Other people’s wives go down in the cellar. Why is it you never want to do anything? I come home worn out from the office and you won’t even go down in the cellar with me. God knows it isn’t very far—it isn’t as if I was asking you to go to the movies or some place.”
“I don’t want to go!” shouted Mrs. Preble. Mr. Preble sat down on the edge of a davenport.
“All right, all right,” he said. He picked up the newspaper again. “I wish you’d let me tell you more about it. It’s—kind of a surprise.”
“Will you quit harping on that subject?” asked Mrs. Preble.
“Listen,” said Mr. Preble, leaping to his feet. “I might as well tell you the truth instead of beating around the bush. I want to get rid of you so I can marry my stenographer. Is there anything especially wrong about that? People do it every day. Love is something you can’t control——”
“We’ve been all over that,” said Mrs. Preble. “I’m not going to go all over that again.”
“I just wanted you to know how things are,” said Mr. Preble. “But you have to take everything so literally. Good Lord, do you suppose I really wanted to go down in the cellar and make up some silly game with pieces of coal?”
“I never believed that for a minute,” said Mrs. Preble. “I knew all along you wanted to get me down there and bury me.”
“You can say that now—after I told you,” said Mr. Preble. “But it would never have occurred to you if I hadn’t.”
“You didn’t tell me; I got it out of you,” said Mrs. Preble. “Anyway, I’m always two steps ahead of what you’re thinking.”
“You’re never within a mile of what I’m thinking,” said Mr. Preble.
“Is that so? I knew you wanted to bury me the minute you set foot in this house tonight.” Mrs. Preble held him with a glare.
“Now that’s just plain damn exaggeration,” said Mr. Preble, considerably annoyed. “You knew nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, I never thought of it till just a few minutes ago.”
“It was in the back of your mind,” said Mrs. Preble. “I suppose this filing woman put you up to it.”
“You needn’t get sarcastic,” said Mr. Preble. “I have plenty of people to file without having her file. She doesn’t know anything about this. She isn’t in on it. I was going to tell her you had gone to visit some friends and fell over a cliff. She wants me to get a divorce.”
“That’s a laugh,” said Mrs. Preble. “That’s a laugh. You may bury me, but you’ll never get a divorce.”
“She knows that! I told her that,” said Mr. Preble. “I mean—I told her I’d never get a divorce.”
“Oh, you probably told her about burying me, too,” said Mrs. Preble.
“That’s not true,” said Mr. Preble, with dignity. “That’s between you and me. I was never going to tell a soul.”
“You’d blab it to the whole world; don’t tell me,” said Mrs. Preble. “I know you.” Mr. Preble puffed at his cigar.
“I wish you were buried now and it was all over with,” he said.
“Don’t you suppose you would get caught, you crazy thing?” she said. “They always get caught. Why don’t you go to bed? You’re just getting yourself all worked up over nothing.”
“I’m not going to bed,” said Mr. Preble. “I’m going to bury you in the cellar. I’ve got my mind made up to it. I don’t know how I could make it any plainer.”
“Listen,” cried Mrs. Preble, throwing her book down, “will you be satisfied and shut up if I go down in the cellar? Can I have a little peace if I go down in the cellar? Will you let me alone then?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Preble. “But you spoil it by taking that attitude.”
“Sure, sure, I always spoil everything. I stop reading right in the middle of a chapter. I’ll never know how the story comes out—but that’s nothing to you.”
“Did I make you start reading the book?” asked Mr. Preble. He opened the cellar door. “Here, you go first.”
“Brrr,” said Mrs. Preble, starting down the steps. “It’s cold down here! You would think of this, at this time of year! Any other husband would have buried his wife in the summer.”
“You can’t arrange those things just whenever you want to,” said Mr. Preble. “I didn’t fall in love with this girl till late fall.”
“Anybody else would have fallen in love with her long before that. She’s been around for years. Why is it you always let other men get in ahead of you? Mercy, but it’s dirty down here! What have you got there?”
“I was going to hit you over the head with this shovel,” said Mr. Preble.
“You were, huh?” said Mrs. Preble. “Well, get that out of your mind. Do you want to leave a great big clue right here in the middle of everything where the first detective that comes snooping around will find it? Go out in the street and find some piece of iron or something—something that doesn’t belong to you.”
“Oh, all right,” said Mr. Preble. “But there won’t be any piece of iron in the street. Women always expect to pick up a piece of iron anywhere.”
“If you look in the right place you’ll find it,” said Mrs. Preble. “And don’t be gone long. Don’t you dare stop in at the cigarstore. I’m not going to stand down here in this cold cellar all night and freeze.”
“All right,” said Mr. Preble. “I’ll hurry.”
“And shut that door behind you!” she screamed after him. “Where were you born—in a barn?”
A Portrait of Aunt Ida
MY MOTHER’S Aunt Ida Clemmens died the other day out West. She was ninety-one years old. I remember her clearly, although I haven’t thought about her in a long time and never saw her after I was twenty. I remember how dearly she loved catastrophes, especially those of a national or international importance. The sinking of the Titanic was perhaps the most important tragedy of the years in which I knew her. She never saw in such things, as her older sisters, Emma and Clara, did, the vengeance of a Deity outraged by Man’s lust for speed and gaiety; she looked for the causes deep down in the dark heart of the corporate interests. You could never make her believe that the Titanic hit an iceberg. Whoever heard of such a thing! It was simply a flimsy prevarication devised to cover up the real cause. The real cause she could not, or would not, make plain, but somewhere in its black core was a monstrous secret of treachery and corrupt goings-on—men were like that. She came later on to doubt the courage of the brave gentlemen on the sinking ship who at the last waved goodbye smilingly and smoked cigarettes. It was her growing conviction that most of them had to be shot by the ship’s officers in order to prevent them from crowding into the lifeboats ahead of the older and less attractive women passengers. Eminence and wealth in men Aunt Ida persistently attributed to deceit, trickery, and impiety. I think the only famous person she ever trusted in her time was President McKinley.
The disappearance of Judge Crater, the Hall-Mills murder, the Starr Faithfull case, and similar mysteries must have made Aunt Ida’s last years happy. She loved the unsolvable and the unsolved. Mysteries that were never cleared up were brought about, in her opinion, by the workings of some strange force in the world which we do not thoroughly understand and which God does not intend that we
ever shall understand. An invisible power, a power akin to electricity and radio (both of which she must have regarded as somehow or other blasphemous), but never to be isolated or channelled. Out of this power came murder, disappearances, and supernatural phenomena. All persons connected in any way whatever with celebrated cases were tainted in Aunt Ida’s sight—and that went for prosecuting attorneys, too (always “tricky” men). But she would, I’m sure, rather have had a look at Willie Stevens than at President Roosevelt, at Jafsie than at the King of England, just as she would rather have gone through the old Wendel house than the White House.
Surgical operations and post-mortems were among Aunt Ida’s special interests, although she did not believe that any operation was ever necessary and she was convinced that postmortems were conducted to cover up something rather than to find something out. It was her conviction that doctors were in the habit of trying to obfuscate or distort the true facts about illness and death. She believed that many of her friends and relatives had been laid away without the real causes of their deaths being entered on the “city books.” She was fond of telling a long and involved story about the death of one of her first cousins, a married woman who had passed away at twenty-five. Aunt Ida for thirty years contended that there was something “behind it.” She believed that a certain physician, a gentleman of the highest reputation, would some day “tell the truth about Ruth,” perhaps on his deathbed. When he died (without confessing, of course), she said after reading the account in the newspaper that she had dreamed of him a few nights before. It seemed that he had called to her and wanted to tell her something but couldn’t.
Aunt Ida believed that she was terribly psychic. She had warnings, premonitions, and “feelings.” They were invariably intimations of approaching misfortune, sickness, or death. She never had a premonition that everything was going to be all right. It was always that Grace So-and-So was not going to marry the man she was engaged to, or that Mr. Hollowell, who was down in South America on business, would never return, or that old Mrs. Hutchins would not last out the year (she missed on old Mrs. Hutchins for twenty-two years but finally made it). Most all of Aunt Ida’s forewarnings of financial ruin and marital tragedy came in the daytime while she was marketing or sitting hulling peas; most all of her intimations of death appeared to her in dreams. Dreams of Ohio women of Aunt Ida’s generation were never Freudian; they were purely prophetic. They dealt with black hearses and white hearses rolling soundlessly along through the night, and with coffins being carried out of houses, and with tombstones bearing names and dates, and with tall, faceless women in black veils and gloves. Most of Aunt Ida’s dreams foretold the fate of women, for what happened to women was of much greater importance to Aunt Ida than what happened to men. Men usually “brought things on themselves”; women, on the other hand, were usually the victims of dark and devious goings-on of a more or less supernatural nature.
Birth was, in some ways, as dark a matter to Aunt Ida as death. She felt that most babies, no matter what you said or anybody else said, were “not wanted.” She believed that the children of famous people, brilliant people, and of first, second, or third cousins would be idiotic. If a child died young, she laid it to the child’s parentage, no matter what the immediate cause of death might have been. “There is something in that family,” Aunt Ida used to say, in her best funeral voice. This something was a vague, ominous thing, both far off and close at hand, misty and ready to spring, compounded of nobody could guess exactly what. One of Aunt Ida’s favorite predictions was “They’ll never raise that baby, you mark my words.” The fact that they usually did never shook her confidence in her “feelings.” If she was right once in twenty times, it proved that she knew what she was talking about. In foretelling the sex of unborn children, she was right about half the time.
Life after death was a source of speculation, worry, and exhilaration to Aunt Ida. She firmly believed that people could “come back” and she could tell you of many a house that was haunted (barrels of apples rolled down the attic steps of one of them, I remember, but it was never clear why they did). Aunt Ida put no faith in mediums or séances. The dead preferred to come back to the houses where they had lived and to go stalking through the rooms and down the halls. I think Aunt Ida always thought of them as coming back in the flesh, fully clothed, for she always spoke of them as “the dead,” never as ghosts. The reason they came back was that they had left something unsaid or undone that must be corrected. Although a descendant of staunch orthodox Methodists, some of them ministers, Aunt Ida in her later years dabbled a little in various religions, superstitions, and even cults. She found astrology, New Thought, and the theory of reincarnation comforting. The people who are bowed down in this life, she grew to believe, will have another chance.
Aunt Ida was confident that the world was going to be destroyed almost any day. When Hailey’s comet appeared in 1910, she expected to read in the papers every time she picked them up the news that Paris had gone up in flames and that New York City had slid into the ocean. Those two cities, being horrible dens of vice, were bound to go first; the smaller towns would be destroyed in a more leisurely fashion with some respectable and dignified ending for the pious and the kindly people.
Two of Aunt Ida’s favorite expressions were “I never heard of such a thing” and “If I never get up from this chair. . . .” She told all stories of death, misfortune, grief, corruption, and disaster with vehemence and exaggeration. She was hampered in narration by her inability to think of names, particularly simple names, such as Joe, Earl, Ned, Harry, Louise, Ruth, Bert. Somebody usually had to prompt her with the name of the third cousin, or whomever, that she was trying to think of, but she was unerring in her ability to remember difficult names the rest of us had long forgotten. “He used to work in the old Schirtzberger & Wallenheim saddle store in Naughton Street,” she would say. “What was his name?” It would turn out that his name was Frank Butler.
Up to the end, they tell me, Aunt Ida could read without her glasses, and none of the commoner frailties of senility affected her. She had no persecution complex, no lapses of memory, no trailing off into the past, no unfounded bitternesses—unless you could call her violent hatred of cigarettes unfounded bitterness, and I don’t think it was, because she actually knew stories of young men and even young women who had become paralyzed to the point of losing the use of both legs through smoking cigarettes. She tended to her begonias and wrote out a check for the rent the day she took to her bed for the last time. It irked her not to be up and about, and she accused the doctor the family brought in of not knowing his business. There was marketing to do, and friends to call on, and work to get through with. When friends and relatives began calling on her, she was annoyed. Making out that she was really sick! Old Mrs. Kurtz, who is seventy-two, visited her on the last day, and when she left, Aunt Ida looked after her pityingly. “Poor Cora,” she said, “she’s failin’, ain’t she?”
The Luck of Jad Peters
AUNT EMMA PETERS, at eighty-three—the year she died—still kept in her unused front parlor, on the table with Jad Peters’s collection of lucky souvenirs, a large rough fragment of rock weighing perhaps twenty pounds. The rock stood in the centre of a curious array of odds and ends: a piece of tent canvas, a chip of pine wood, a yellowed telegram, some old newspaper clippings, the cork from a bottle, a bill from a surgeon. Aunt Emma never talked about the strange collection except once, during her last days, when somebody asked her if she wouldn’t feel better if the rock were thrown away. “Let it stay where Lisbeth put it,” she said. All that I know about the souvenirs I have got from other members of the family. A few of them didn’t think it was “decent” that the rock should have been part of the collection, but Aunt Lisbeth, Emma’s sister, had insisted that it should be. In fact, it was Aunt Lisbeth Banks who hired a man to lug it to the house and put it on the table with the rest of the things. “It’s as much God’s doing as that other clutter-trap,” she would say. And she would rock
back and forth in her rocking chair with a grim look. “You can’t taunt the Lord,” she would add. She was a very religious woman. I used to see her now and again at funerals, tall, gaunt, grim, but I never talked to her if I could help it. She liked funerals and she liked to look at corpses, and that made me afraid of her.
Just back of the souvenir table at Aunt Emma’s, on the wall, hung a heavy-framed, full-length photograph of Aunt Emma’s husband, Jad Peters. It showed him wearing a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase. When I was a little boy in the early nineteen-hundreds and was taken to Aunt Emma’s house near Sugar Grove, Ohio, I used to wonder about that photograph (I didn’t wonder about the rock and the other objects, because they weren’t put there till much later). It seemed so funny for anyone to be photographed in a hat and overcoat and carrying a suitcase, and even funnier to have the photograph enlarged to almost life size and put inside so elaborate a frame. When we children would sneak into the front parlor to look at the picture, Aunt Emma would hurry us out again. When we asked her about the picture, she would say, “Never you mind.” But when I grew up, I learned the story of the big photograph and of how Jad Peters came to be known as Lucky Jad. As a matter of fact, it was Jad who began calling himself that; once when he ran for a county office (and lost) he had “Lucky Jad Peters” printed on his campaign cards. Nobody else took the name up except in a scoffing way.
It seems that back in 1888, when Jad Peters was about thirty-five, he had a pretty good business of some kind or other which caused him to travel around quite a lot. One week he went to New York with the intention of going on to Newport, later, by ship. Something turned up back home, however, and one of his employees sent him a telegram reading “Don’t go to Newport. Urgent you return here.” Jad’s story was that he was on the ship, ready to sail, when the telegram was delivered; it had been sent to his hotel, he said, a few minutes after he had checked out, and an obliging clerk had hustled the messenger boy on down to the dock. That was Jad’s story. Most people believed, when they heard the story, that Jad had got the wire at his hotel, probably hours before the ship sailed, for he was a great one at adorning a tale. At any rate, whether or not he rushed off the ship just before the gangplank was hauled up, it sailed without him and some eight or nine hours out of the harbor sank in a storm with the loss of everybody on board. That’s why he had the photograph taken and enlarged: it showed him just as he was when he got off the ship, he said. And that is how he came to start his collection of lucky souvenirs. For a few years he kept the telegram, and newspaper clippings of the ship disaster, tucked away in the family Bible, but one day he got them out and put them on the parlor table under a big glass bell.