Flood Tide

Willie Spence was a trial. Not that his personality rasped society at large. On the contrary his neighbors cherished toward the little old man, with his short-sighted blue eyes and his appealing smile, an affection peculiarly tender; and if they sometimes were wont to observe that although Willie possessed some common sense he was blessed with uncommon little of it, the observation was facetiously uttered and was offered with no malicious intent.

In fact had one scoured Wilton from end to end it would have been difficult to unearth a single individual who bore enmity toward the owner of the silver-gray cottage on the Harbor Road. It was impossible to talk ten seconds with Willie Spence and not be won by his kindliness, his optimism, his sympathy, and his honesty. Willie probably could not have dissembled had he tried, and fortunately his life was of so simple and transparent a trend that little lay hidden beneath its crystalline exterior. What he was he was. When baffled by phenomena he would scratch his thin locks and with a smile of endearing candor frankly admit, "I dunno." When, on the other hand, he knew himself to be master of a debated fact, no power under heaven could shake the tenacity with which he clung to his beliefs. There was never any compromise with truth on Willie's part. A thing was so or it was not.

This reputation for veracity, linked as it was with an ingenuous good will toward all mankind, had earned for Willie Spence such universal esteem and tenderness that whenever the stooping figure with its ruddy cheeks, soft white hair, and gentle smile made its appearance on the sandy roads of the hamlet, it was hailed on all sides with the loving and indulgent greetings of the inhabitants of the village.

Even Celestina Morton, who kept house for him and who might well have lost patience at his defiance of domestic routine, worshipped the very soil his foot touched. There was, of course, no denying that Willie's disregard for the meal hour had become what she termed "chronical" and severely taxed her forbearance; or that since she was a creature of human limitations she did at times protest when the chowder stood forgotten in the tureen until it was of Arctic temperature; nor had she ever acquired the grace of spirit to amiably view freshly baked popovers shrivel neglected into nothingness. Try as she would to curb her tongue, under such circumstances, she occasionally would burst out:

"I do wish, Willie Spence, you'd quit your dreamin' an' come to dinner."

For answer Willie would rise hastily and stand arrested, a bit of string in one hand and the hammer in the other, and peering reproachfully over the top of his steel-bowed spectacles would reply:

"Law, Tiny! You wouldn't begretch me my dreams, would you? They're about all I've got. If it warn't fur the things I dream I wouldn't have nothin'."

The wistfulness in the sensitive face would instantly transform Celestina's irritation into sympathy and cause her to respond:

"Nonsense, Willie! What are you talkin' about? Ain't you got more friends than anybody in this town? Nobody's poor so long as he has good friends."

"Oh, 'taint bein' poor I mind," laughed Willie, now quite himself again. "It's knowin' nothin' an' bein' nothin' that discourages me. If I'd only had the chance to learn somethin' when I was a youngster I wouldn't have to be goin' it blind now like I do. There's times, Celestina," added the man solemnly, "when I really believe I've got stuff inside me that's worth while if only I knew what to do with it."

"Pshaw! Ain't you usin' what's inside you all the time to help the folks of this town out of their troubles? I'd like to know how they'd get along if it warn't fur you. Ain't you doctorin' an' fixin' up things for the whole of Cape Cod from one end to the other, day in and day out? I call that amountin' to somethin' in the world if you don't."

Willie paused thoughtfully.

"I do do quite a batch of tinkerin', that's true," admitted he, brightening, "an' I'm right down glad to do it, too. Don't think I ain't. Still, I can't help knowin' there's better ways to go at it than blunderin' along as I have to, an' sometimes I can't help wishin' I knew what the right way is. There must be folks that know how to do in half the time what I do by makeshift an' fussin'. Sometimes it seems a pity there never was anybody to steer me into findin' out the kind of things I've always wanted to know."

Celestina began to rock nervously.

Being of New England fiber, and classing as morbid all forms of introspection, she always so dreaded to have the conversation drift into a reflective channel that whenever she found Willie indulging in reveries she was wont to rout him out of them, tartly reproaching herself for having even indirectly been the cause of stirrin' him up.

"Next time I'll set the chowder back on the stove an' say nothin'," she would vow inwardly. "I'd much better have waited 'til his dream was over an' done with. S'pose I am put out a bit-'twon't hurt me. If I don't care enough for Willie to do somethin' for him once in a while, good as he's always been to me, I'd oughter be ashamed of myself."

Hence it is easily seen that neither to Wilton in general nor to Celestina in particular was Willie Spence a trial.

No, it was to himself that Willie was the torment. "I plague myself 'most to death, Tiny," he would not infrequently confess when the two sat together at dusk in the little room that looked out on the reach of blue sea. "It's gettin' all these idees that drives me distracted. 'Tain't that I go huntin' 'em; they come to me, hittin' me broadside like as if they'd been shot out of a gun. There's times," ambled on the quiet voice, "when they'll wake me out of a sound sleep an' give me no peace 'til I've got up and 'tended to 'em. That notion of hitchin' a string to the slide in the stove door so'st you could open the draught without stirrin' out of your chair-that took me in the night. There warn't no waitin' 'til mornin'! Long ago I learned that. Once the idee has a-holt of me there's nothin' to do but haul myself out of bed, even if it's midnight an' colder'n the devil, an' try out that notion."

"The plan was a good one; it's saved lots of steps," put in Celestina.

"It had to be done, Tiny," Willie answered simply. "That's all there was to it. Good or bad, I had to carry it to a finish if I didn't sleep another wink that night."

The assertion was true; Celestina could vouch for that. After ten years of residence in the gray cottage she had become too completely inured to hearing the muffled sound of saw and hammer during the wee small hours of the night to question the verity of the statement. Therefore she was quite ready to agree that there was no peace for Willie, or herself either, until the particular burst of genius that assailed him had been transformed from a mirage of the imagination to the more tangible form of tacks and strings.

For strings played a very vital part in Willie Spence's inspirational world. Indeed, when Celestina had first come to the weathered cottage on the bluff to keep house for the lonely little bachelor and had discovered that cottage to be one gigantic spider's web, her initial impression was that strings played far too important a part in the household. What a labyrinthine entanglement the dwelling was! Had a mammoth silkworm woven his airy filaments within its interior, the effect could scarcely have been more grotesque.

Strings stretched from the back door, across the kitchen and through the hallway, and disappeared up the stairs into Willie's bedroom, where one pull of a cord lifted the iron latch to admit Oliver Goldsmith, the Maltese cat, whenever he rattled for entrance. There was a string that hoisted and lowered the coal hod from the cellar through a square hole in the kitchen floor, thereby saving one the fatigue of tugging it up the stairs.

"A coal hod is such an infernal tote to tote!" Willie would explain to his listeners.

Then there was a string which in like manner swung the wood box into place. Other strings opened and closed the kitchen windows, unfastened the front gate, rang a bell in Celestina's room, and whisked Willie's slippers forth from their hiding place beneath the stairs; not to mention myriad red, blue, green, yellow, and purple strings that had their goals in the ice chest, the pump, the letter box, and the storm door, and in connection with which objects they silently performed mystic benefactions.

Probably, however, the most significant string of all was that of stout twine that reached from Willie's shop to the home of Janoah Eldridge, two fields beyond, just at the junction of the Belleport and Harbor roads. This string not only linked the two cottages but sustained upon its taut line a small wooden box that could be pulled back and forth at will and convey from one abode to the other not only written communications but also such diminutive articles as pipes, tobacco, spectacles, balls of string, boxes of tacks, and even tools of moderate weight. By means of this primitive special delivery service Jan Eldridge could be summoned posthaste whenever an especially luminous inspiration flashed upon Willie's intellect and could assist in helping to make the dream a reality.

For it was always through Willie's plastic imagination that these creative visions flitted. In all his seventy years Jan had been beset by only one outburst of genius and that had pertained to whisking an extra blanket over himself when he was cold at night. How much pleasanter to lie placidly between the sheets and have the blanket miraculously appear without the chill and discomfort of arising to fetch it, he argued! But alas! the magic spell had failed to work. Instead the strings had wrenched the corners from the age-worn covering, thereby arousing Mrs. Eldridge's ire. Moreover, although Jan had not confessed it at the time, the blanket while in process of locomotion had for some unfathomable reason dragged in its wake all the other bedclothes, freeing them from their moorings and submerging his head in a smothering weight of disorganized sheets and counterpanes only to leave his poor shivering body a prey to the unfriendly elements. An attack of lumbago that rendered him helpless from January until March followed and had decided Jan that inventors were born, not made. Thereafter he had been content to abandon the realm of research to his comrade and allow Willie to furnish the inspiration for further creative ventures. Nevertheless his retirement from the spheres of discovery did not prevent him from zealously assisting in the mechanical details that rendered Willie's schemes material. Jan not only possessed a far more practical type of mind than did his friend but he was also a more skilful workman and therefore in the carrying out of any plan his aid was indispensable. He was, moreover, content to be the lesser power, looking up to Willie's ability with admiration and asserting with unfeigned sincerity to every one he met that Willie Spence had not only been born with the injun but he had the newity to go with it.

"Why," Jan would often declare with spirit, "in my opinion Willie has every whit as much call to write X, Y, Z, an' all them other letters after his name as any of those fellers that graduate from colleges! He's a wonder, Willie Spence is-a walkin' wonder! Some day he's goin' to make his mark, too, an' cause the folks in this town to set up an' take notice. See if he don't."

Willie's neighbors had long since tired of waiting for the glorious moment of his fame to arrive; and although they had too genuine a regard for the little old inventor to state publicly what they really thought of the strings, the nails, the spools, the wires, and the pulleys, in private they did not hesitate to denounce derisively the scientist's contrivances and assert that some fine day the house on the bluff would come to dire disaster.

"Somebody's goin' to get hung or strangled on one of them contraptions Willie's rigged up," Captain Phineas Taylor prophesied impressively to Zenas Henry as the two men sat smoking in the lee of the wood pile. "You watch out an' see if they don't."

Indeed there was no denying that Celestina was continually catching hairpins, hooks, and buttons in the strings; or that some such dilemma as had been predicted had actually occurred, for one day while alone in the house a pin fastening the back of her print gown had become inextricably entangled in the maze amid which she moved, and fearing Willie's wrath if she should sunder her fetters she had been forced to stand captive and helplessly witness a newly made sponge cake burn to a crisp in the oven. She had hoped the ignominious episode would not reach the outside world; but as Wilton was possessed of a miraculous power for finding out things the story filtered through the community, affording the village a laugh and the opportunity to affirm with ominous shakings of the head that it was only because the Lord looked out for fools and little children that a worse evil had not long ago befallen the Spence household.

Willie accepted the banter in good part. Born with a forgiving, noncombative disposition he seldom took offence and although Janoah Eldridge, who knew him better perhaps than anyone else on earth did, acclaimed that this tranquil exterior concealed, as did Tim Linkinwater's, unsuspected depths of ferocity, Wilton had yet to encounter its lionlike fury. Instead the mild little inventor, with his spools and his pulleys, his bits of wire and his measureless reaches of string, pursued his peaceful though tortuous way, and if his abode became transformed into a magnified cobweb only himself and Celestina were inconvenienced thereby.

To Celestina inconvenience was second nature since from the moment of her birth it had been her lot in life. Arriving in the world prematurely she had found nothing prepared for her coming and had been forced to put up with such makeshifts for comfort as could be hurriedly scrambled together. From that day until the present instant the same fate had shadowed her path; perhaps it was in her stars. Her parents had been of dilatory habits and by the time a crib with the necessary pillows and bedding had been secured, and she had drawn a few peaceful breaths therein a new baby had arrived and she had been ousted from her resting place and compelled to surrender it to the more recent comer. Ever since she had been shunted from pillar to post, sleeping on cots, on couches, in folding beds and in hammocks, and keeping her meager possessions in paste-board boxes tucked away beneath tables and bureaus. Poised on the ragged edge of domesticity she continued throughout her girlhood to look forward with hope to an eventual state of permanence. When she was eighteen, however, her mother died and in the task of bringing up six brothers and sisters younger than herself all considerations for her personal ease were forgotten. Ten years passed and her father was no more; than gradually, one after another, the family she had so patiently reared took wing, leaving Celestina a lonely spinster of fifty, homeless and practically penniless.

This cruel lack of responsibility on the part of her relatives resulted less from a want of affection than from a supreme misunderstanding of their older sister. So completely had Celestina learned to efface her personality and her inclinations that they reasoned she was utterly without preferences; that she lacked the homing instinct; and was quite as happy in one place as in another. Having thus washed their hands of her they proceeded to sell the Morton homestead and each one pocket his share of the proceeds. Very scanty this inheritance was, so scanty that it compelled Celestina to begin a rotation around the village, where in return for shelter she filled in domestic gaps of various kinds. She helped here, she helped there; she took care of babies, nursed the sick, comforted the aged. On she moved from house to house, no enduring foundation ever remaining beneath her feet. No sooner would she strike her roots down into a congenial soil than she would be forced to pluck them up again and find new earth to which to cling.

She might have married a dozen times during her youth had not her conscience deterred her from deserting her father and the children left to her care. In fact one persistent swain who refused to take "No" for an answer had begged Celestina to wait and pray over the matter.

"I never trouble the Lord with things I can settle myself," replied she firmly. "I can't go marryin' an' that's all there is to it."

Other offers had been declined with the same characteristic firmness until now the golden season of mating-time was past, and although she was still a pretty little woman the stamp of spinsterhood was unalterably fixed upon her.

Wilton, in the meantime, had long ago lost sight of the uncomplaining self-sacrifice it had previously lauded and explained Celestina Morton's unwedded state by declaring that she was too "easy goin'" to make anybody a good wife. This criticism came, perhaps, more loudly from the female faction of the town than from the male. However that may be, the stigma, merited or unmerited, had become so firmly branded upon Celestina that it could not be effaced. She may to some extent have brought it upon herself, for certain it was that she never kicked against the pricks or tried to shape her circumstances more in accordance with her liking. Undoubtedly had she accepted her lot less meekly she might have commanded a greater measure of attention and sympathy; still, if she had not been of a more or less plastic nature and surrendered herself patiently to her destiny it is a question whether she would have survived at all.

It was this mutability, this power to detach herself from her environment and view it with the stoical indifference of a spectator that caused Wilton with its harsh New England standards, to characterize Celestina as "easy goin'." In fact, this popularly termed "flaw" in her make-up was what had acted as an open sesame to every door at which she knocked and had kept a roof above her head. She had been just sixty years of age when Willie Spence's sister had died and left him alone in the wee cottage on the Harbor Road, and all Wilton had begun to speculate as to what was to become of him. Willie was as dependent as an infant; the village gossips who knew everything knew that. From childhood he had been looked after,-first by his mother, then by his aunt, and lastly by his sister; and when death had removed in succession all three of these props, leaving the little old man at last face to face with life, his startled blue eyes had grown large with terror. What was to become of him now? Not only did Willie himself helplessly raise the interrogation but so did all Wilton.

Of course he could go and board with the Eldridges but that would mean renting or selling the silver-gray cottage where he had dwelt since birth and would be a tragic severing of all ties with the past; moreover, and a fact more potent than all the rest, it would mean dismantling the house of the web that for years he had spun, the symbols of dreams that had been his chief delight. Should he go to the Eldridges there could be no more inventing, for Jan's wife was a hard, practical woman who had scant sympathy with Willie's "idees." Nevertheless one redeeming consideration must not be lost sight of-she was a famous cook, a very famous cook; and poor Willie, although he cared little what he ate, was incapable of concocting any food at all. But the strings, the strings! No, to go to live with Jan and Mrs. Eldridge was not to be thought of.

It was just at this psychological juncture, when Willie was choosing 'twixt flesh and spirit, that he saw Celestina Morton standing like a vision in the sunshine that spangled his doorway. She said she knew how lonely he must be and therefore she had come to make a friendly call and tidy up the house or mend for him anything that needed mending. With this simple introduction she had taken off her hat and coat, donned an ample blue-and-white pinafore, and set to work. Fascinated Willie watched her deft movements. Now and then she smiled at him but she did not speak and neither did he; nor, he noticed, did she disturb his strings or comment on their inconvenience. When twilight came and the hour for her departure drew near Willie stationed himself before the peg from which dangled her shabby wraps and stubbornly refused to have her hat and cloak removed from the nail. There, figuratively speaking, they had hung ever since, the inventor reasoning that life without this paragon of capability was a wretched and profitless adventure.

In justifying his sudden decision to Janoah Eldridge, Willie had merely explained that he had hired Celestina because she was so comfortable to have around, a recommendation at which Wilton would have jeered but which, perhaps, in the eyes of the Lord was quite as praiseworthy as that which her more hidebound but less accommodating sisters could have boasted. For disorder and confusion never kept Celestina awake nights or prevented her from partaking of three hearty meals a day as it would have Abbie Brewster or Deborah Howland. So long as things were clean, their being an inch or two, or even a foot, out of plumb did not worry the new inmate of the gray house an iota. And when Willie was balked in an "idee" that had "kitched him," and left half-a-dozen strings and wires swinging in mid-air for weeks together, Celestina would patiently duck her head as she passed beneath them and offer no protest more emphatic than to remark:

"Them strings hangin' down over the sink snare me every time I wash a dish. Ain't you calculatin' ever to take 'em down, Willie?"

The reply vouchsafed would be as mild as the suggestion:

"I reckon they ain't there for eternity, Tiny," the inventor would respond. "Like as not both you an' me will live to see 'em out of the way."

That was all the satisfaction Celestina would get from her feeble complaints; it was all she ever got. Yet in spite of the exasperating response she adored Willie who had been to her the soul of kindliness and courtesy ever since she had come to the bluff to live. He might forget to come to his meals,-forget, in fact, whether he had eaten them or not; he might venture forth into the village with one gray sock and one blue one; or when part way to the post-office become lost in reverie and return home again without ever reaching his destination. Such incidents had happened and were likely to happen again. Nevertheless, notwithstanding his absentmindedness, he was never too much absorbed to maintain toward Celestina an old-fashioned deference very appealing to one accustomed to being ignored and slighted.

The impulse, it was quite obvious, was prompted less by conventionality than by a knightliness of heart, and Celestina, who had never before been the recipient of such courtesies, found herself inexpressibly touched by the trifling attentions. Often she speculated as to whether this mental attitude toward all womanhood was one Willie himself had evolved or whether it was the result of standards instilled into his sensitive consciousness by the women who had been his companions through life,-his mother, his aunt, his sister. Whichever the case there was no question that the old man's bearing toward her placed her on a pinnacle where gossip was silenced, and transformed her humble ministrations from those of a hireling into acts of graciousness and beauty.

Moreover to live in the same house with such an optimist was no ordinary experience. Well Celestina remembered the day when at dinner the little old man had choked violently, turning purple in the face in his fight for breath. She had rushed to his side, terror-stricken, but between his spasms of coughing the inventor had gasped out:

"Why make so much fuss over what's gone down the wrong way, Tiny? Think-of-the-things-I've-swallered-all-these-years-that have-gone down-right!"

The observation was characteristic of Willie's creed of life. He never emphasized the exceptions but always the big, fine, elemental good in everything.

Even the name by which he went had been bestowed on him by the community as a term of endearment. There were, to be sure, other men in the hamlet whose names had passed into diminutives. There was, for example, Seth Crocker, whose wife explained that she called him Sethie "for short." But Sethie's name was never pronounced with the same affectionate drawl that Willie's was.

No, Willie had his peculiar niche in Wilton and a very sacred niche it was.

What marvel, therefore, that Celestina reverenced the very earth which he trod and cheerfully put up with the strings, the wires, the spools, the tacks, and the pulleys; that she shifted the meals about to suit his convenience; and that when she was awakened at midnight by a rhythmic hammering which portended that the inventor had once again "got kitched with a new idee" she smiled indulgently in the darkness and instead of cursing the echoes that disturbed her slumber whispered to herself Jan Eldridge's oft-repeated prediction that the day would come when Willie Spence would astonish the scoffers of Wilton and would make his mark.