“But,” I said, “that’s away out in the suburbs, is it not, a mile or so beyond the car tracks?”

  “Something like that,” answered Mr. Butt.

  “And it’s going on for ten o’clock and it’s starting to rain—”

  “Pooh, pooh,” said Mr. Butt, cheerfully, adjusting his galoshes. “I never mind the rain — does one good. As to their house. I’ve not been there yet but I can easily find it. I’ve a very simple system for finding a house at night by merely knocking at the doors in the neighborhood till I get it.”

  “Isn’t it rather late to go there?” I protested.

  “My dear fellow,” said Mr. Butt warmly, “I don’t mind that a bit. The way I look at it is, here are these two young people, only married a few weeks, just moving into their new house, everything probably upside down, no one there but themselves, no one to cheer them up” — he was wriggling into his raincoat as he spoke and working himself into a frenzy of benevolence— “good gracious, I only learned at dinner time that they had come to town, or I’d have been out there days ago — days ago—”

  And with that Mr. Butt went bursting forth into the rain, his face shining with good will under the street lamps.

  The next day I saw him again at the club at lunch time.

  “Well,” I asked, “did you find the Joneses?”

  “I did,” said Mr. Butt, “and, by George, I was glad that I’d gone — quite a lot of trouble to find the house (though I didn’t mind that; I expected it) — had to knock at twenty houses at least to get it — very dark and wet out there — no street lights yet — however I simply pounded at the doors until someone showed a light — at every house I called out the same things, ‘Do you know where the Everleigh-Joneses live?’ They didn’t. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘go back to bed. Don’t bother to come down.’

  “But I got to the right spot at last. I found the house all dark. Jones put his head out of an upper window. ‘Hullo,’ I called out; ‘it’s Butt.’ ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said, ‘we’ve gone to bed.’ ‘My dear boy,’ I called back, ‘don’t apologize at all. Throw me down the key and I’ll wait while you dress. I don’t mind a bit.’

  “Just think of it,” continued Mr. Butt, “those two poor souls going to bed at half past ten, through sheer dullness! By George, I was glad I’d come. ‘Now then,’ I said to myself, ‘let’s cheer them up a little, let’s make things a little brighter here.’

  “Well, down they came and we sat there on furniture cases and things and had a chat. Mrs. Jones wanted to make me some coffee. ‘My dear girl,’ I said (I knew them both when they were children) ‘I absolutely refuse. Let me make it.’ They protested. I insisted. I went at it — kitchen all upset — had to open at least twenty tins to get the coffee. However, I made it at last. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘drink it.’ They said they had some an hour or so ago. ‘Nonsense,’ I said, ‘drink it.’ Well, we sat and chatted away till midnight. They were dull at first and I had to do all the talking. But I set myself to it. I can talk, you know, when I try. Presently about midnight they seemed to brighten up a little. Jones looked at his watch. ‘By Jove,’ he said, in an animated way, ‘it’s after midnight.’ I think he was pleased at the way the evening was going; after that we chatted away more comfortably. Every little while Jones would say, ‘By Jove, it’s half past twelve,’ or ‘it’s one o’clock,’ and so on.

  “I took care, of course, not to stay too late. But when I left them I promised that I’d come back to-day to help straighten things up. They protested, but I insisted.”

  That same day Mr. Butt went out to the suburbs and put the Joneses’ furniture to rights.

  “I worked all afternoon,” he told me afterwards— “hard at it with my coat off — got the pictures up first — they’d been trying to put them up by themselves in the morning. I had to take down every one of them — not a single one right. ‘Down they come,’ I said, and went at it with a will.”

  A few days later Mr. Butt gave me a further report. “Yes,” he said, “the furniture is all unpacked and straightened out but I don’t like it. There’s a lot of it I don’t quite like. I half feel like advising Jones to sell it and get some more. But I don’t want to do that till I’m quite certain about it.”

  After that Mr. Butt seemed much occupied and I didn’t see him at the club for some time.

  “How about the Everleigh-Joneses?” I asked. “Are they comfortable in their new house?”

  Mr. Butt shook his head. “It won’t do,” he said. “I was afraid of it from the first. I’m moving Jones in nearer to town. I’ve been out all morning looking for an apartment; when I get the right one I shall move him. I like an apartment far better than a house.”

  So the Joneses in due course of time were moved. After that Mr. Butt was very busy selecting a piano, and advising them on wall paper and woodwork.

  They were hardly settled in their new home when fresh trouble came to them.

  “Have you heard about Everleigh-Jones?” said Mr. Butt one day with an anxious face.

  “No,” I answered.

  “He’s ill — some sort of fever — poor chap — been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me — just like their grit — meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.”

  From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness.

  “I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap — he was very bad yesterday for a while — mind wandered — quite delirious — I could hear him from the next room — seemed to think some one was hunting him— ‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say.

  “I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned. Mrs. Jones begged me to leave him. ‘You look quite used up,’ she said. ‘Go out into the open air.’ ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said, ‘what does it matter about me?’ ”

  Eventually, thanks no doubt to Mr. Butt’s assiduous care, Everleigh-Jones got well.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Butt to me a few weeks later, “Jones is all right again now, but his illness has been a long hard pull. I haven’t had an evening to myself since it began. But I’m paid, sir, now, more than paid for anything I’ve done — the gratitude of those two people — it’s unbelievable — you ought to see it. Why do you know that dear little woman is so worried for fear that my strength has been overtaxed that she wants me to take a complete rest and go on a long trip somewhere — suggested first that I should go south. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said laughing, ‘that’s the one place I will not go. Heat is the one thing I can’t stand.’ She wasn’t nonplussed for a moment. ‘Then go north,’ she said. ‘Go up to Canada, or better still go to Labrador’ — and in a minute that kind little woman was hunting up railway maps to see how far north I could get by rail. ‘After that,’ she said, ‘you can go on snow-shoes.’ She’s found that there’s a steamer to Ungava every spring and she wants me to run up there on one steamer and come back on the next.”

  “It must be very gratifying,” I said.

  “Oh, it is, it is,” said Mr. Butt warmly. “It’s well worth anything I do. It more than repays me. I’m alone in the world and my friends are all I have. I can’t tell you how it goes to my heart when I think of all my friends, here in the club and in the town, always glad to see me, always protesting against my little kindnesses and yet never quite satisfied about anything unless they can get my advice and hear what I have to say.

  “Take Jones for instance,” he continued. “Do you know, really now as a fact, — the hall porter assures me of it, — every time Everleigh-Jones enters the club here the first thing he does is to sing out, ‘Is Mr. Butt in the club?’ It warms me to think of it.” Mr. Butt paused, one would have said there were tears in his eyes. But if so the kindly beam of his spectacles shone through them like the sun through April rain. He left me and passed into the cloak room.

  He had just left the hall when a stranger entered, a narrow, meek man with a hunted face. He came in with a furtive step and looked about him apprehensively.

  “Is Mr. Butt in the club?” he whispered to the hall porter.

  “Yes, sir, he’s just gone into the cloak room, sir, shall I—”

  But the man had turned and made a dive for the front door and had vanished.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “That’s a new member, sir, Mr. Everleigh-Jones,” said the hall porter.

  Cast Up by the Sea. A Sea Coast Melodrama (As Thrown up for 30 cents) — Period, 1880

  EVERYBODY WHO HAS reached or passed middle age looks back with affection to that splendid old melodrama Cast Up by the Sea. Perhaps it wasn’t called exactly that. It may have been named Called Back from the Dead, or Broken Up by the Wind, or Buried Alive in the Snow, or anything of the sort. In fact I believe it was played under about forty different names in fifty different forms. But it was always the same good old melodrama of the New England Coast, with the farmhouse and the yellow fields running down to the sea, and the lighthouse right at the end of the farm with the rocks and the sea beyond, looking for trouble.

  Before the cinematograph had addled the human brain and the radio broadcast had disintegrated the human mind, you could go and see Cast Up by the Sea any Saturday afternoon in any great American City for thirty cents; you got a thrill from it that lasted twenty years. For thirty cents you had an orchestra chair on the ground floor where you could sit and eat peanuts and study the program till the play began. After it had begun you couldn’t eat any more; you were too excited.

  The first thing everybody used to do in studying the program was to see how many years elapsed between the acts; because in those days everybody used to find it wiser to go out between the acts — for air. And the more years that elapsed and the more acts there were, the more air they could get. Some of the plays used to have ten acts and the people got out nine times. Nowadays this is all changed. People talk now of the unity of the drama, and in some of the plays to-day there is a deliberate announcement on the program that reads “Between Acts II and III the curtain will be merely lowered and raised again.” We wouldn’t have stood for that in 1880. We needed our two years between the acts. We had a use for it.

  As I say, it was necessary to study the program. Nobody had yet invented that system of marking the characters “in the order of their appearance.” You had to try and learn up the whole lot before the play began. You couldn’t really. But you began conscientiously enough. Hiram Haycroft, a farmer; Martha, his wife; Hope, their daughter; Phœbe, a girl help; Zeke, a hired man, — Rube also a hired man, — and by that time you had just forgotten the farmer’s own name and looked back for it when just then —

  Up went the curtain with a long stately roll, two men at the side hoisting it, and there you were looking at the farmstead by the sea.

  Notice how quick and easy and attractive that old fashioned beginning was. One minute you were eating peanuts and studying the program and the next minute the play had begun. There was none of that agonizing stuff that precedes the moving pictures of to-day: No “Authorized by the Board of Census of the State of New York.” The world, even New York State, was so good in 1880 that it had never heard of a censor. Nor was there any announcement of something else altogether heralded as “A Great Big Compelling Life Drama — Next Week.”

  If the moving picture people could have been in control (forty years before their time) they would have announced the farm and lighthouse play with a written panegyric on what they were going to show— “a gripping heart-drama in which the foam of the sea and the eerie of the spindrift carry to the heart a tale of true love battled by the wind next Thursday.”

  But if they had worked that stuff on an audience of 1880 it would have gone out and taken another drink, and never come back until next Thursday.

  So the play began at once. There was the farmhouse, or at least the porch and door, at the right hand side of the stage, all bathed in sunlight (yellow gas) and the grass plot and the road in the centre, and the yellow wheat (quite a little bunch of it) at the left, and the fields reaching back till they hit the painted curtain with the lighthouse and the rocks and the sea.

  Everybody who looked at that painted curtain and saw that lighthouse knew it wasn’t there for nothing. There’d be something doing from that all right, and when they looked back at the program and saw that Act IV was marked In the Lighthouse Tower — Midnight, they got the kind of a thrill that you can never get by a mere announcement that there is going to be a “gripping heart-drama next Tu., Thurs., and Sat.”

  Surely enough there would be something doing with that lighthouse. Either the heroine thrown off it, or the hero thrown over it — anyway something good.

  But for the moment all is peace and sunlight, on the seashore farm. There is no one on the stage but two men on the left, evidently Zeke and Rube, the hired men. They’ve got scythes and they are cutting the little patch of wheat over at the edge of the stage. Just imagine it, real wheat, they’re actually cutting it! Upon my word those stage effects of 1880 were simply wonderful. I do wish that “Doug” Fairbanks and those fellows who work so hard to give us thrills could realize what we used to get in 1880 by seeing Zeke and Rube cutting real wheat on the left hand side of the stage.

  Then they speak. You can’t really hear what they say — but it sounds like this:

  Zeke says, “I swan b’gosh heck b’gosh gum yak! yak!”

  And Rube answers: “Heck gosh b’gum, yes, yak! yak!”

  And they both laugh.

  These words probably have a meaning, but you don’t need it. The people are still moving into their seats and this is just the opening of the play. It’s a mere symbol. It stands for New England dialect, farm life, and honesty of character. Presently Rube gets articulate. He quits reaping and he says:

  “So Miss Hope’ll be coming back this morning.”

  “Yes, sir, that she will. A whole year now it’ll be that she’s been to boarding school.”

  And Rube says:

  “Yup, a whole yer come Gurdlemas.”

  Rube and Zeke have a calendar all their own.

  “She’ll be a growd up lady now all right.”

  “Yes, sir, and as purty as a pitcher, I’ll be bound, by heck.”

  They whet their scythes with a clang and out comes Martha, the farmer’s wife, and Phœbe, the help, from the porch on the right. With them comes a freckled boy, evidently the younger son of the farm family. This freckled boy is in all the melodramas. It is his business to get his ears boxed, mislay the will, lose the mortgage, forget to post the letters and otherwise mix up the plot.

  “Do you see the buggy yet, Rube? Can you see them coming yet, Zeke?”

  Zeke and Rube hop about making gestures of looking down the road, their hands up over their eyes.

  “Not yet, Missus, but they’ll be along right soon now.”

  “There they are,” calls Phœbe, “coming along down in the hollow.”

  There is great excitement at once. Martha cries, “Land’s sake, if it ain’t Hope all right,” and boxes the freckled boy’s ears. The others run to and fro saying, “Here they come!” so as to get the audience worked up with excitement, at the height of which there comes the actual clatter of the horse’s hoofs and the next moment a horse and buggy, a real horse and buggy, drive on to the stage. That clattering horse coming on to the stage was always one of the great effects in 1880, — a real horse with real harness and with added anxiety for fear that the horse would misbehave himself when he came on.

  The buggy stops with a lot of shouting of “Whoa there” — intended to keep the horse lively. If they didn’t shout at it this stage horse was apt to subside into a passive melancholy not suited for the drama.

  So here is the farmer sitting in the buggy in a suit of store clothes and a black slouch hat, and beside him is Hope, his daughter, just home from boarding school. How sweet and fresh she looks in her New England sun hat with the flowers on it. I don’t know what they did to the girls in the boarding schools in 1880 — some line of algebra perhaps — to make them look so fresh. There are none like them now.

  Hope leaps out in one spring and kisses her mother in one bound and she cries, “Well, Mother! Well, Phœbe! Why, Zeke! Why, Rube!” They all circulate and hop and dance about saying, “Well, Miss Hope, well, I never!” And all the while there’s the sunshine in the yellow fields and the red hollyhocks beside the porch, and light and happiness everywhere.

  You’d think, would you not, that that old homestead represented the high water mark of happiness? And so it does. But wait a bit. Before long they’ll start trouble enough. All the audience know in advance that that farm will be mortgaged and the farmer ruined and Hope driven from home, — oh, there’s lots of trouble coming. Trouble was the proper business of the melodrama. So presently they all get through their congratulations and Hope has embraced everybody, and the farmer’s wife has got off two jokes about the size of Boston and then the freckled boy wants to take Hope away to see the brindle cow, and they all fade away off the stage except the farmer and his wife.

  And right away the whole tone of the play changes, just like that.

  The farmer stands alone with his wife.

  And Martha comes over to him and puts her hand timidly on his shoulder. The joy has gone out of her face.

  “Hiram,” she says, “Lawyer Ellwood’s agent was here this morning.”

  The farmer fairly humps into his shoulders with anger.

  “Ay,” he snarls.

  “And, Hiram, Lawyer Ellwood wants his money.”

  “Ay! he wants his money, does he? Curse him!”

  The farmer’s fist is clenched and there’s a scowl on his face.

  “He says, Hiram, that it’s got to be paid to-morrow. Oh, Hiram, we can’t never pay it.”

  Martha puts her apron up to her face and sobs.

  The farmer turns and shakes his clenched fist at the scenery away off to the left.

  “Curse him!” he rages. “Ay, curse him. This three years he has thrown a blight across our life.”

 

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