The Nice People

“They certainly are nice people,” I said to my wife, using the common phrase with a twinge of guilt, “and I bet their three children are better brought up than most of—”

“Two children,” corrected my wife.

“Three, he told me.”

“My dear, she said there were two.”

“He said three.”

“You’ve simply forgotten. I’m sure she told me they had only two—a boy and a girl.”

“Well, I didn’t go into details.”

“No, dear, and you couldn’t have understood him. Two children.”

“All right,” I said, but I didn’t think it was all right. As a nearsighted man learns by necessity to recognize people at a distance when their faces are unclear, so a man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen carefully and report accurately. My memory is bad, but I hadn’t had time to forget that Mr. Brewster Brede had told me that afternoon that he had three children, currently in the care of his mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Brede took their summer vacation.

“Two children,” repeated my wife. “And they are staying with his aunt Jenny.”

“He told me with his mother-in-law,” I put in. My wife looked at me with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they are told about children, but any man knows the difference between an aunt and a mother-in-law.

“But don’t you think they’re nice people?” asked my wife.

“Oh, certainly,” I replied.

“Only they seem to be a little mixed up about their children.”

“That isn’t a nice thing to say,” returned my wife. I couldn’t deny it.

The next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated themselves across from us at the breakfast table, beaming and smiling in their natural, pleasant, well-bred way, I knew with certainty that they were “nice” people.

He was a fine-looking fellow in his neat tennis flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old, with a Frenchy pointed beard. She was “nice” in all her pretty clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness that outlasts most others—the prettiness that lies in a rounded figure, a dusky skin, plump rosy cheeks, white teeth, and black eyes. She might have been twenty-five; you guessed that she was prettier than she had been at twenty, and that she would be prettier still at forty.

And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy at Mr. Jacobus’s summer boarding-house on top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted the precious days of idleness in the company gathered around the Jacobus table. What joy of human companionship could be had from Mrs. Tabb and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton, Pennsylvania; from Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, a hard-headed bookkeeper and his prim and censorious wife; or from old Major Halkit, a retired businessman who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote to every new stock company for circulars and tried to convince everyone who would listen to invest? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful mirrors of mean and barren minds, and decided to leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs.

Jacobus’s biscuits, light as Aurora’s clouds, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the scent of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone our departure one more day. Then we wandered out to take our morning look at what we called “our view,” and it seemed as if Tabb and Hoogencamp and Halkit and the Biggleses could not drive us away in a year.

I wasn’t surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the Bredes to walk with us to “our view.” The Hoogencamp-Biggle-Tabb-Halkit crowd never stirred from Jacobus’s veranda, but we both felt that the Bredes wouldn’t profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly across the fields, passed through the little belt of woods, and as I heard Mrs. Brede’s little cry of startled pleasure, I motioned to Brede to look up.

“By Jove!” he cried. “Heavenly!”

We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue, lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. It was silent to us, standing in the silence of a high place—silent with a Sunday stillness that made us listen, without thinking, for the sound of bells coming up from the spires that rose above the treetops—the treetops that lay as far beneath us as the light clouds were above us, dropping great shadows on our heads and faint specks of shade on the broad sweep of land at the mountain’s foot.

“And so that is your view?” asked Mrs. Brede after a moment. “You are very generous to make it ours too.”

Then we lay down on the grass; and Brede began to talk in a gentle voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a canoe in his earlier days, he said, and knew every river and creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks and pointed out where the Passaic and Hackensack flowed, invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but combings of the green waves below. Yet, on the other side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages—a little world of country life lying unseen under our eyes.

“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said. “There is such a thing as getting so far above our fellow men that we see only one side of them.”

Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter and gossip of Tabb and Hoogencamp, or the Major’s lectures on his endless circulars! My wife and I exchanged glances.

“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn,” Mr. Brede began.

“Why, dear,” interrupted his wife, “I didn’t know you ever went up the Matterhorn.”

“It—it was five years ago,” said Mr. Brede hastily. “I—I didn’t tell you—when I was on the other side, you know—it was rather dangerous—well, as I was saying—it looked—oh, it didn’t look at all like this.”

A cloud floated overhead, casting its great shadow over the field where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain’s brow and reappeared far below, a rapidly shrinking blot flying eastward over the golden green. My wife and I exchanged glances once more.

Somehow, the shadow seemed to linger over us all. As we walked home, the Bredes went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I walked together.

“Should you think,” she asked me, “that a man would climb the Matterhorn the very first year he was married?”

“I don’t know, my dear,” I answered evasively. “This isn’t the first year I’ve been married, not by a good many, and I wouldn’t climb it for a farm.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

I did.

When we reached the boarding-house, Mr. Jacobus took me aside.

“You know,” he began, “my wife, she used to live in New York.”

I didn’t know, but I said “Yes.”

“She says the numbers on the streets run criss-cross-like. Thirty-four’s on one side of the street and thirty-five on t’other. How’s that?”

“That is the invariable rule, I believe.”

“Then—I say—these new folks that you and your wife seem so mighty taken up with—d’ye know anything about ’em?”

“I know nothing about the character of your boarders, Mr. Jacobus,” I replied, feeling some irritation. “If I choose to associate with any of them—”

“Jess so—jess so!” broke in Jacobus. “I haven’t nothing to say against your sociability. But do ye know them?”

“Why, certainly not,” I replied.

“Well—that was all I was askin’ ye. Ye see, when he come here to take the rooms—you wasn’t here then—he told my wife that he lived at number thirty-four in his street. And yesterday she told her that they lived at number thirty-five. He said he lived in an apartment-house. Now there can’t be no apartment-house on two sides of the same street, can there?”

“What street was it?” I asked wearily.

“Hundred and twenty-first street.”

“Maybe,” I replied, still more wearily, “that’s Harlem. Nobody knows what people will do in Harlem.”

I went up to my wife’s room.

“Don’t you think it’s queer?” she asked.

“I think I’ll have a talk with that young man tonight,” I said, “and see if he can give some account of himself.”

“But, my dear,” my wife said gravely, “she doesn’t know whether they’ve had the measles or not.”

“Why, Great Scott!” I exclaimed. “They must have had them when they were children.”

“Please don’t be stupid,” said my wife. “I meant their children.”

After dinner that night—or rather, after supper, for dinner was at midday at Jacobus’s—I walked down the long veranda to ask Brede, who was placidly smoking at the other end, to accompany me on a twilight stroll. Halfway down I met Major Halkit.

“That friend of yours,” he said, indicating the unconscious figure at the far end of the house, “seems to be a queer sort of a Dick. He told me that he was out of business, and just looking round for a chance to invest his capital. And I’ve been telling him what an everlasting big show he had to take stock in the Capitoline Trust Company—starts next month—four million capital—I told you all about it. ‘Oh, well,’ he says, ‘let’s wait and think about it.’ ‘Wait!’ says I, ‘the Capitoline Trust Company won’t wait for you, my boy. This is letting you in on the ground floor,’ says I, ‘and it’s now or never.’ ‘Oh, let it wait,’ says he. I don’t know what’s gotten into the man.”

“I don’t know how well he knows his own business, Major,” I said as I headed for Brede’s end of the veranda. But I was troubled nonetheless. The Major could not have influenced the sale of a single share in the Capitoline Company. But that stock was a great investment; a rare chance for a purchaser with a few thousand dollars. Perhaps it was no more remarkable that Brede should not invest than that I should not—and yet, it seemed to add one more to the other suspicious circumstances.

When I went upstairs that evening, I found my wife putting her hair to bed—I don’t know how better to describe an operation familiar to every married man. I waited until the last tress was coiled up, and then I spoke.

“I’ve talked with Brede,” I said, “and I didn’t have to interrogate him. He seemed to feel that some sort of explanation was expected, and he was very open. You were right about the children—that is, I must have misunderstood him. There are only two. But the Matterhorn episode was simple enough. He didn’t realize how dangerous it was until he was too far into it to back out; and he didn’t tell her, because—he’d left her here, you see, and under the circumstances—”

“Left her here!” cried my wife. “I’ve been sitting with her all afternoon, sewing, and she told me that he left her at Geneva, and came back and took her to Basel, and the baby was born there—now I’m sure, dear, because I asked her.”

“Perhaps I was mistaken when I thought he said she was on this side of the water,” I suggested with bitter, biting irony.

“You poor dear, did I abuse you?” said my wife. “But, do you know, Mrs. Tabb said that she didn’t know how many lumps of sugar he took in his coffee. Now that seems queer, doesn’t it?”

It did. It was a small thing. But it looked queer. Very queer.

The next morning, it was clear that war had been declared against the Bredes. They came down to breakfast somewhat late, and, as soon as they arrived, the Biggleses scooped up the last remnants on their plates and made a stately exit from the dining room. Then Miss Hoogencamp arose and departed, leaving a whole fish-ball on her plate. As Atalanta might have dropped an apple behind her to slow her pursuer, so Miss Hoogencamp left that fish-ball behind her, as a barrier between her maiden self and contamination.

We had finished our breakfast before the Bredes appeared. We talked it over and agreed that we were glad we had not been forced to take sides on such insufficient evidence.

After breakfast, it was the custom of the male half of the Jacobus household to go around the corner of the building and smoke their pipes and cigars where they wouldn’t annoy the ladies. We sat under a trellis covered with a grapevine that had borne no grapes in living memory. This vine, however, bore leaves, and these, on that pleasant summer morning, shielded from us two people who were having an earnest conversation in the straggling, half-dead flower garden at the side of the house.

“I don’t want to enter into no man’s privacy,” we heard Mr. Jacobus say, “but I do want to know who it may be that I have in my house. Now what I ask of you, and I don’t want you to take it personal, is—have you got your marriage license with you?”

“No,” we heard Mr. Brede reply. “Have you yours?”

I think it was a chance shot, but it hit home. The Major (he was a widower), Mr. Biggle, and I looked at each other; and Mr. Jacobus, on the other side of the grape trellis, looked at—I don’t know what—and was as silent as we were.

Where is your marriage license, married reader? Do you know? Four men, not including Mr. Brede, stood or sat on one side or the other of that trellis, and not one of them knew where his marriage license was. Each of us had had one—the Major had had three. But where were they? Where is yours? Tucked in your best man’s pocket, deposited in his desk, or washed to pulp in his white waistcoat (if white waistcoats are in fashion), washed out of existence—can you tell where it is? Can you—unless you are one of those odd people who frame that document and hang it on the drawing-room wall?

Mr. Brede’s voice broke the awful stillness that seemed like five minutes but was probably thirty seconds.

“Mr. Jacobus, will you make out my bill at once, and let me pay it? I shall leave by the six o’clock train. And will you also send the wagon for my trunks?”

“I haven’t said I wanted you to leave—” began Mr. Jacobus, but Brede cut him short.

“Bring me your bill.”

“But,” protested Jacobus, “if you aren’t—”

“Bring me your bill!” said Mr. Brede.

My wife and I went out for our morning walk. But when we looked at “our view,” it seemed as if we could only see those invisible villages that Brede had told us about—that other side of the ridges and rises that we never glimpse from lofty hills or from the heights of human self-esteem. We meant to stay out until the Bredes had gone, but we returned just in time to see Pete, Jacobus’s handyman, the blacker of boots and brusher of coats, loading the Bredes’ trunks onto the Jacobus wagon.

And as we stepped onto the veranda, down came Mrs. Brede, leaning on Mr. Brede’s arm as if she were ill, and it was clear that she had been crying. There were heavy dark rings around her pretty black eyes.

My wife took a step toward her.

“Look at that dress, dear,” she whispered, “she never thought anything like this was going to happen when she put that on.”

It was a pretty, delicate, dainty dress, a graceful narrow-striped affair. Her hat was trimmed with the same narrow-striped silk, maroon and white, and in her hand she held a parasol that matched her dress.

“She’s worn a new dress twice a day,” my wife said, “but that’s the prettiest yet. Oh, somehow—I’m awfully sorry they’re going!”

But they were indeed leaving. They moved toward the steps. Mrs. Brede looked toward my wife, and my wife moved toward Mrs. Brede. But the ostracized woman, as if feeling the deep humiliation of her position, turned sharply away and opened her parasol to shield her eyes from the sun.

A shower of rice—a half-pound shower of rice—fell down over her pretty hat and dress, scattering in a circle on the floor and outlining her skirt, lying there in a broad, uneven band, bright in the morning sun.

Then Mrs. Brede was in my wife’s arms, sobbing as if her heart would break.

“Oh, you poor, dear, silly children!” my wife cried while Mrs. Brede sobbed on her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“W-W-W-We didn’t want to be t-t-taken for a b-b-b-bridal couple,” sobbed Mrs. Brede, “and we d-d-didn’t dream what awful lies we’d have to tell, and all the aw-awful mixed-up-ness of it. Oh, dear, dear, dear!”

“Pete!” commanded Mr. Jacobus. “Put back them trunks. These folks stay as long as they want to. Mr. Brede”—he held out a large, hard hand—“I ought to have known better,” he said. And my last doubt of Mr. Brede vanished as he shook that grimy hand in a manly way.

The two women walked off toward “our view,” each with an arm around the other’s waist, touched by a sudden sisterhood of sympathy.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Brede, addressing Jacobus, Biggle, the Major, and me, “there is a hostelry down the street where they sell honest New Jersey beer. I recognize the obligations of the situation.”

We five men filed down the street. The two women went toward the pleasant slope where the sunlight gilded the brow of the great hill. On Mr. Jacobus’s veranda lay a spattered circle of shining grains of rice. Two of Mr. Jacobus’s pigeons flew down and picked up the shining grains, making grateful noises deep in their throats.