Chapter V

Of course it was all Althea. But for her it would never have happened. One must, however, be just, and taking the bitter with the sweet concede that had Asaph Holmes never ventured upon matrimonial seas he would have missed immeasurable depths of happiness. Indeed, he himself granted that after having once been blessed with such a wife he looked back on the empty years that preceded his marriage and marvelled how he had even contrived to get on without this peerless woman.

It was not yet a year since the wedding, and in that brief interval Althea had become a prop he could not well have lived without. How capable she was! What a caretaker!

Before her advent he had often been wont, when engrossed in horticultural pursuits or the allurements of a Websterian oration, to become oblivious to the milk bottles, the ice card, or the pan beneath the refrigerator. Now these nagging duties along with a score of others like them Althea had taken into her keeping. She never suffered lapses of memory; never even tied strings round her finger to help her to remember details. Responsibility came so easily to her one felt she could carry in her head ten times the number of things she did, and still not be conscious of having anything on her mind.

Care, on the other hand, nettled her husband. When in addition to weeding and transplanting he had the milk bottles, the ice card and the refrigerator to remember, he veered as close to irritation as his phlegmatic temperament ever approached. This Althea speedily sensed, and after her arrival it took her not more than twenty-four hours to shift from his shoulders to her own all the harassing routine of the household.

She did not, however, make the transfer to the blowing of trumpets. That was the delightful part of it. So quietly was the exchange accomplished that Asaph could not have told the moment when the burden slipped from him. All he was conscious of was his wife’s voice announcing with a finality not to be questioned:

“I will attend to the ice-chest and the other things in future, dear.”

And yet for all her amazing executive ability Althea was very modest. She did not perch herself on a pedestal and from its elevation look down with superiority on her less capable helpmate. In fact it is doubtful whether the idea that she was superior ever occurred to her. She was a proud woman, to whom the bare notion of being linked with an inferior husband would have been unendurable. No, she certainly did not hold Asaph to be lower down the evolutionary ladder than herself. Instead, she evidently considered he maintained the intellectual balance of their union by making up in information with regard to Saturn’s rings, the campaigns of Napoleon, and Webster’s reply to Haine what he lacked in knowledge concerning the catch on the back door or the leak in the shed roof. She was immensely proud of his learning. Not every woman in Belleport was married to a man who could tell offhand the name of the hero who first glimpsed the Pacific. To be sure, Balboa and his discoveries offered no remedy for the door that continually blew open, nor were they of assistance in tarring over the shed roof. Nevertheless as a background they lent dignity to these commonplace phenomena.

When, therefore, such a pillar as Althea casually declared on an afternoon in late May: “I’ve had a letter from Sister Sarah, Asaph, an’ she sounds to be in such a sea of trouble that I’ve decided to go up to Abington an’ straighten her out,” what wonder the blow was more overwhelming than the fall of Sebastopol or the destruction of the Spanish Armada?

Asaph cringed before it in consternation.

Not that Abington was far away. In actual miles it was no great distance off. But it might as well have been at the other end of the world if Althea were to betake herself hither. As Mercutio remarked of his death wound, _it would serve_.

Deep in his heart Asaph cursed Sarah Tyler. She was constantly foundering into calamities that all but submerged her, and then appealing to Althea to rescue her from them. He did not for the moment appreciate that he himself committed dozens of similar offenses, and if he had he would doubtless have offered the excuse that a husband’s privileges were very different from those of a sister. If he chose to amble into seas of tribulation and then shout to Althea for help he had a perfect right to do so; but Sarah Tyler should keep her troubles to herself.

Possibly had the hapless Sarah been born with a relative less capable she would have pursued this very policy; but to be linked with Althea by ties of blood and aware of her ability was fatal. Why endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when succor so potential was within reach? In every crisis of her life Althea had been her guiding star. Why shift pilots at this late hour? Therefore, if the children had the mumps (and they had a faculty for catching everything within catching distance); if Jabez was out of work; if her taffeta silk had to be made over, Sarah sat down and graphically described on paper the nature of her dilemma; then having gummed her trials up in a pale blue envelope and hurried them into the mail box she sat serenely down to await the magic solution which experience had taught her would surely follow.

Asaph had come to dread the appearance of those blue envelopes. Had he dared, he would have burned them unopened as fast as they arrived. Not possessing this measure of courage he habitually delivered them to his wife with the edged interrogation:

“Well, what’s up with the Tylers now?”

For it was safe to assume something was up. When affairs went prosperously Sarah never wrote at all.

This time a heavier thunderbolt than usual assailed her. Teddie had had a bad fall and his mother must take him to Boston for an X-ray examination. Could Althea come in the meantime and keep house for the family? There was no one else she dared leave the children with. Surely in such an emergency she could be spared, especially as she would not be long away.

Asaph grunted ungraciously. How ready some people were to settle everybody else’s affairs for them! Nevertheless he was a tender-hearted man and of all the Tyler brood Teddie was his favorite. The present catastrophe certainly justified Althea’s being summoned, and under ordinary conditions he would have urged her to go and do what she could. But just now the conditions were not ordinary. Althea herself must realize that. Was it not she who was responsible for them?

Vividly Asaph called to mind the fatal evening when the adventure of the Green Dolphin had first been presented to him. He and his wife had been sitting together in the March twilight, he absorbed in the Bunker Hill oration and she silent over her knitting. The click of her needles and the faraway sobbing of the surf were the only sounds in the room, and he had thought how delightful the stillness was. Often through the winter they had sat thus, and his serenity had been so profound it had not occurred to him that Althea was not finding their wordless companionship as satisfying as did he.

Then suddenly, without warning of any sort, she had burst out:

“I wish to goodness, Asaph, this house stood on the main road!”

Startled not alone by the words, but by an unusual quality in her voice, her husband crashed down from the heights amid which he was soaring.

“W--hat?” stammered he.

“I say,” repeated Althea, “that I wish to mercy we lived on the main road; then there’d be some passin’.”

“It wouldn’t be so quiet,” objected the man uncomprehendingly.

“I don’t want it so quiet,” was the sharp answer. “It’s all very well for you to have it still, readin’ as you do day in an’ day out. But I’d like somethin’ goin on--like to see folks an’ talk to ’em.”

Aghast, Asaph stared.

“Why, Althea, I never dreamed but you were contented enough.”

“I am contented,” returned his wife. “Nevertheless, that doesn’t prevent me from wantin’ to get a look at my kind once in a while, does it? A woman enjoys a bit of gossip an’ an occasional peep at what the rest of the world is doin’.”

“My soul an’ body!” was all her spouse contrived to ejaculate.

“It ain’t no crime as I see,” went on Althea, gaining eloquence now that the subject was fairly launched. “We ain’t all made alike. You could sit in one spot an’ read that talk of Daniel Webster’s till the chair dropped to pieces under you; but I’m different. I like sociability, meetin’ people an’ hearin’ what they have to say. I can put up with a certain amount of quiet; but when it nears spring I begin to long for some sound besides the boomin’ of the sea.”

“My soul!” reiterated Asaph under his breath.

“Now if we were on the main road there’d be folks goin’ by from April till October--Enoch Morton in his fish cart, the butcher, an’ Ephraim Wise with the mail.”

“Humph!”

“They’d be better’n nothin’,” asserted Althea, instantly on the defensive. “Besides, there’d be the summer people--streams of ’em in their automobiles.”

“Precious little good they’d do you, shootin’ by as if the devil was at their heels,” sniffed the man with sarcasm.

“They’d do me good if I was on the main road,” was the significant response.

“I don’t see how.”

“I’d open a tea-room. Other women do it an’ make money hand over fist.”

“But you ain’t in want of money, are you?” inquired her husband, concern evident in his face. “I thought--”

“No, Asaph,” answered Althea more gently. “No, I don’t lack anything. You’ve been very generous an’ given me whatever I needed ever since we were married. ’Tain’t that. It’s just that I’d like the fun of havin’ folks comin’ an’ goin’ here same’s they do over at Mattie Bearse’s Yaller Fish. Why, there’s days when Mattie has much as a dozen or fifteen people at the house drinkin’ tea an’ laughin’, talkin’, an’ havin’ a good time. It’s most like livin’ in a hotel.”

Without intending to, Asaph shuddered.

“Mattie has opened up every room in the house; an’ she’s usin’ her pink lustre china as well as her gold banded set. An’ what do you think? The first day she had the lustre out some lady from the city wanted to buy it right off the table--offered fifty dollars for it an’ would hardly take no for an answer. Of course Mattie didn’t sell it. She told me she was afraid the woman warn’t right in her head to set such a price on that old stuff. Moreover, Mattie warn’t anxious to part with it, it havin’ belonged to her Great-aunt Experience Howland. Still, it was gratifyin’ to have outsiders take a fancy to it. It gave Mattie somethin’ to talk of for days.”

“An’ you’d like to have a parcel of strangers come here an’ try to buy the dishes you were eatin’ off of?”

Althea laughed good-humoredly, showing her strong white teeth.

“Yes, I would,” admitted she without a blush. “It would amuse me same’s readin’ Daniel Webster amuses you. This ain’t the first time I’ve thought of it. All winter I’ve been kinder drawin’ plans in my head as to how I could manage. It’s been most entertainin’. While you were busy with that long history of the Civil War, I’ve been doin’ it.”

Asaph opened his mouth; then uttering only a faint gasp closed it again.

It was incredible that anyone presenting the peaceful appearance Althea had displayed should in the meantime have been engaged in so monstrous a mental mutiny. While in imagination he was marching through the South with Sheridan, he had not thought to question what she was doing. Had he speculated at all on her pursuits he would have rated her as being intent on fashioning socks to ward off the winter’s cold. And all the time her mind had been on teacups, gossips, and silliness! He could scarcely credit her with such frivolity.

“Yes,” continued his wife, shamelessly, “I planned it all out just how we could arrange tables on the screened-in porch, the sittin’-room an’ the dinin’ room. There’d be space enough to do things real tasty.”

As with rapidity she sketched her plans Asaph became wordless before the magnitude of her conception. The screened-in porch--his favorite refuge on a July day! And the sitting room where he always took his afternoon nap! Of course the possibility of these quiet corners being infested by unending tea parties was preposterous, but the thought nevertheless disquieted him.

Meanwhile, mistaking the trend of his silence Althea hastened on:

“There’s quite a few broken chairs in the shed that you could fix up an’ paint--old ladder-backed things that came from Provincetown along with my other stuff. Mattie says folks like ’em an’ they’d save buyin’ more. I’ve figgered that for a hundred dollars, or a hundred an’ fifty at most, we could get all that would be necessary to make a start.”

Spellbound the man listened.

Why, she actually spoke as if the enterprise were a practical scheme and as if she meant to drag him into it with her! The absurdity of it!

“You know I’ve never touched a penny of the money that belonged to Mother,” she went on, “though you’ve urged me times without number to spend it for somethin’ I’d really take pleasure in doin’. Up to the minute I’ve never found the thing I wanted to use it for. But now I’ve decided I’d like to lay out part of it startin’ the Green Dolphin.”

“The--the--what?”

“The Green Dolphin,” repeated Althea, impatient at his stupidity. “A tea-room has to have a name, you know. They all do. Mattie’s is the Yaller Fish an’ the one over at Sawyer’s Falls is the Blue Whale.”

“An’ darn silly names they are,” retorted Asaph, his scientific mind offended by the inaccuracy of the terms and his irritation accumulating. “There ain’t any such thing as a blue whale.”

“That’s just it!” agreed the undaunted Althea. “Of course there ain’t. But that’s no hinderance. Folks like queer names. The queerer they are the better. They attract attention.”

“An’ you think a Green Dolphin would catch people’s eyes?”

“Yes, I do,” nodded his wife with spirit. “The very sound of one would set me wonderin’; wouldn’t it you? We’d have to do more, though, than just call the place that. We’d have to have a carved dolphin over the door an’ mebbe one in the front yard.”

Of what avail were feeble protests before such a perfectly constructed plot? As each new horror his wife’s fertile brain had conceived passed before Asaph’s vision the blood froze in his veins. For behind the fantasy lay the terrifying realization that this embryonic monster, the Dolphin, would certainly be born. No power could prevent it. It was already alive, the child of Althea’s imaginings, and her face was alight with the joy of its coming. To strangle it before its birth would break her heart.

“I don’t see--” began he helplessly.

“You don’t need to, dear,” came that reassuring voice that up to now had meant comfort and consolation. “Just leave the whole thing to me. You needn’t worry about any of it. I’ve thought out every detail an’ will tell you exactly what I want done. All you’ll have to do will be to do it.”

And that was the way the Green Dolphin came into being!

Opposition was futile. As soon object to the sunrise which despite your languor steadily crimsons the east; or the setting of the young moon which for all your amorous pleading drops like a bow of silver into the blackness of the night. Althea, alert and armed to vanquish every difficulty, mowed to earth each obstacle as soon as it was presented. The only mountain Asaph failed to put in her path was his personal detestation of the whole undertaking; his hatred of tea-rooms in general and this one in particular; his repugnance at having his peace and privacy invaded--selfish reasons when his just mind came to analyze them.

If he preferred solitude what was it after all but a matter of taste? Althea apparently liked sociability and for months had been deprived of it. Was it not fair that she should now have her fling?

As inch by inch he surrendered his ground the Green Dolphin took on bodily form. Tables were purchased, and curbing inward rebellion he painted them emerald as the caverns of the sea. He repaired decrepit chairs and tinted them a like hue, after which Althea stencilled dolphins on their backs. She stopped at nothing. The dolphin pattern was all cut and ready, and as she flew to fetch it there seeped into his consciousness the realization that for a long time she must have been preparing these accessories against the great day when her dream would be fulfilled. Had he vetoed the project his veto would have been overruled. The Dolphin was to be and acquiescence to its existence was merely an empty courtesy.

Hence preparations for the adventure went steadily onward.

“I don’t see how you’re goin’ to get folks to your tea drinkin’,” he grumbled one day. “We’re so far off the highway nobody’ll know there’s a tea-shop within miles.”

“Oh, yes, they will,” contradicted Althea cheerfully. “I’ve thought that all out an’ prepared for it.”

Into the shed she bustled to return a moment later with a good-sized wooden dolphin set on the top of a bar of steel. As she held the object up to his astonished gaze she murmured modestly:

“It seemed to me I did a rather neat job.”

Words failed Asaph. Was there any contingency she had not foreseen?

“Say,” interrogated he, when at last he summoned breath to speak, “how long have you been gettin’ ready for this thing? An’ when under the sun did you make all this stuff?”

“Oh, off an’ on. When you were readin’ mostly. An’ sometimes when Lemmy Gill was here.”

The historian cursed Sherman, Sheridan, and Lemuel Gill along with them.

“We can put up this dolphin where the cross roads branch, over toward Wilton,” explained Althea. “I’ve printed out a notice to go with it, tellin’ just where our house is situated an’ the hours the tea-room will be open.”

She heard a faint groan but did not heed it.

“You won’t mind walkin’ over there an’ settin’ the sign in place, will you?” she coaxed. “It isn’t far.”

The assertion that it was a good mile to the Wilton fork if it was a step trembled on the victim’s tongue, and but for the grace of God would have fallen from it. But a power greater than himself helped him to nod acquiescence.

Althea beamed upon him.

“I knew you’d come to the rescue,” said she. “It’s twice the fun for us to run the Dolphin together.”

“I ain’t runnin’ much of it,” was the grim retort.

“You’re doin’ your full part,” comforted his spouse, mistaking irony for an apology. “Of course a man can’t do so much at a scheme of this sort as a woman--especially at the outset. Still, it’s nice to have you sympathetic an’ later on there’ll be more for you to do.”

The sobering effect of the latter clause prevented Asaph from refuting the commendation contained in the former. He would have proclaimed in no uncertain terms that when the Dolphin was once launched he intended to wash his hands of it had not Althea’s eyes shone so brightly.

“I’ve set my heart on openin’ the place the first of June,” went on his wife. “I reckon we can manage to get things ready by that time.”

Sadly he agreed. Althea’s efficiency! Alas, how he had prided himself upon it and lived secure within its shadow; and now what a boomerang it was proving! With all his heart he wished she had been a helpless, clinging parasite instead of this mountain of ability. However, such wishes were futile now.

Meanwhile, as the tea-room materialized, wonder, admiration, and awe hypnotized mutiny into subjection. He finished the chairs, stencilling the last hateful dolphin upon them, and when his wife declared herself pushed for time he heard his voice volunteering to hang the chintz curtains. He had not meant to be beguiled into this concession and was surprised to discover he had been.

Later in the same somnambulistic mood he found himself at the Wilton cross roads, the wooden dolphin in one hand and in the other the invitation to all the world to come and drink tea on his veranda or in his sitting room. The indignity of it! What peace would there be for him henceforth, he mused. What possibility of quiet with his books?

If only Althea had not clung so tenaciously to the word we and the delusion that they were partners in the venture! Or if, even at this eleventh hour, he had the courage to rise up, repudiate the Dolphin and its attendant ignominies, and flee to Lemuel Gill’s! Lemmy would grant him a refuge. Lemmy always granted everybody everything. But alas! this avenue of escape disappeared like a mirage even as the thought of it came before his imagination, for to cast off the Dolphin would mean to cast off Althea as well, and to such an alternative he refused to subscribe.

Jealously as he resented the fact that her fate and that of the hated cetacean were irrevocably intertwined, there was no denying it. He loathed the very thought of the monster. Moreover, it really wasn’t a dolphin at all. Althea’s zoölogical knowledge had its limitations, and so, too, had her artistic prowess. What she had actually created was a mongrel habitant of the deep, a fictitious combination of sea-serpent and whale--interesting, perhaps; decorative--but in no way true to life.

Althea had always attacked science from this casual angle. It was the outstanding flaw in her. Zealously as he had tried to correct it and mold her mind into grooves of greater technical accuracy, he had failed. It seemed not to matter to her how far away Mars was, whether a mastodon was a mammal or an aquatic. She listened, to be sure, when the matter was discussed, but afterward she either forgot the information vouchsafed her or garbled it so heedlessly one regretted having imparted it.

Perhaps no defect a wife could have been born with would have been more patience-trying to a person of Asaph Holmes’s peculiar bent of mind than was this vice of Althea’s. Nevertheless, human nature has its idiosyncrasies, and we are what we are.

Althea had not many corners to be avoided, excused, and made light of.

Certainly loyalty to her own flesh and blood could scarcely be condemned as a blot on her character. And yet in the present instance this devotion took on the guise of a flagrant crime. At least the result of it appeared heinous, for to be left alone with a tea-shop on one’s hands--a tea-shop to which he had never whole-heartedly subscribed--was no small calamity to face, and that was the dilemma that now confronted Asaph Holmes.

“It’s too bad I have to go to Sister Sarah’s just when the Dolphin is booked to start,” apologized the promoter of the project. “Still, I’ve no choice in the matter. My relations, of course, come first. I guess you can manage somehow. It’s early in the season yet an’ most likely folks won’t have seen the sign.”

“You--you--don’t mean you’re intendin’ to open the shop same’s if you were at home?” quavered her astounded helpmate.

“What else can we do? The date is all announced.”

“’Tain’t much announced,” was the quick argument. “It’s only posted on the board at the cross roads an’ I can go over there double quick an’ take it down.”

“But it’s announced in other places besides,” returned Althea bending intently over her sewing.

“What places?”

“Now, Asaph, what use would it be to start a thing unless folks knew you’d done it? I stuck some notices in the papers.”

“Papers? The newspapers? Which ones?” demanded the man in a high-pitched voice.

“Oh, the Wilton _Trumpeter_; the Sawyer’s Falls _Clarion_; the Eastport _Signal_--quite a few of ’em. I can’t name ’em all now. I can get you the list.” List! There was a whole list of ’em? Good Lord!