As I began to get better, I appreciated how much trouble I 'd given them all and tried to thank them; but Berri said,—
"Why, your illness has been a perfect god-send to me. I 've done more grinding lately between midnight and six in the morning than I ever thought would be possible. I 've caught up with almost everything." And Duggie stopped me with,—
"But if it had n't been Berri and I, it would have been someone else—which we're very glad it was n't."
Old Mrs. Chester is a jewel. I didn't pay much attention to her at first, but was just glad to know she was in the room. Later, however, when I began to want to get up and she devoted the whole of her marvellous art to keeping me amused, I appreciated her. She is wonderful. I was going to assert that she inspires the kind of affection one can't help feeling for a person who is all heart and no intelligence; but that, somehow, misses the mark. She has intelligence—lots of it—only it's different. And before my recovery was complete I began to wonder if it wasn't the only kind that is, after all, worth while. For it's the kind with which books and newspapers and "going a journey" and other mechanical aids have nothing to do. (Perhaps I should concede something to the influence of foreign travel, as there was a very memorable expedition "to Goshen in New York State" some time in the early sixties.) Mrs. Chester's intelligence gushes undefiled from the rock, and then flows along in a limpid, ungrammatical stream that soothes at first and then enslaves. Her gift for narrative of the detailed, photographic, New England variety positively out-Wilkins Mary, and I am to-day, perhaps, the greatest living male authority on what Berri calls la cronique scandaleuse of Cambridge. One of her studies in the life of the town forty years ago (it was a sort of epic trilogy that lasted all morning and afternoon and part of the evening with intermissions for luncheon and dinner) I mean to write some time for the Advocate. It all leads up to the New Year's Eve on which "old Mrs. Burlap passed away," but it includes several new and startling theories as to the real cause of the Civil War, an impartial account of the war itself, a magnificent tribute to the late General Butler, a description of Mrs. Chester's wedding,—the gifts and floral tributes displayed on that occasion together with a dreamy surmise as to their probable cost,—a brief history of religion from the point of view of one who is at times assailed by doubt,—but who doesn't make a practice of "rushin' around town tellin' folks who'd only be too glad to have it to say" (this last I assumed to be a thrust at Mis' Buckson),—a spirited word picture of the festivities that took place when Cambridge celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a city, and at the end a brilliant comparison between Cambridge and "Goshen in New York State." There was, I believe, some mention of the passing away of old Mrs. Burlap on New Year's Eve, but of this I am not sure.
One thing I discovered that rather astonished me in this part of the world (a locality that Berri in one of his themes called "a cold hot-bed of erudition"), and that is—Mrs. Chester doesn't know how to read. I never would have found it out but for an embarrassing little miscalculation on her part, in the method by which until then she had delightfully concealed the fact. More than once while I was sick, she sat by the lamp apparently enjoying the evening paper that Duggie subscribes to, and I had n't the slightest suspicion that she was probably holding it upside down, even when I would ask her what the news was and she would reply,—
"Oh, shaw—these papers! They 're every one of 'em alike. They don't seem to be any news to 'em. I don't see why you young gentlemen waste your good money a-buyin' 'em."
Often on the way upstairs she takes the letters that the postman leaves between the banisters in the little hall below, and manages to distribute them with more or less accuracy.
"I 've got somethin' for you, and it 's from your mother too, you naughty little man, you," is her usual way of handing me a communication from mamma. I did n't realise until the other day that, as mamma's letters always came in the same kind of gray-blue envelopes, it doesn't take a chirographic expert to tell whom they are from. Nor did I recall that, when Mrs. Chester appears with a whole handful of things, she invariably stops short in the middle of the room and artlessly exclaims,—
"Well, now, if that does n't beat all! Here I 've climbed up them steep stairs again and forgotten my specs. Who 's gettin' all these letters anyhow?"
A few mornings ago, however,—when they let me sit up for the first time,—Mrs. Chester appeared with two letters. One of them was unmistakably gray-blue, but the other was white and oblong and non-committal. She paused at the door as if about to examine the address, and then suddenly,—