The Road to Understanding

by Eleanor H. Porter

"Yes, yes, I know, dear, of course you can't make anything out of what I say. But listen. I'll begin at the beginning. It was like this: This morning he had only a few letters for me. Then, in that tired voice he uses most of the time, he said: 'I think perhaps now, we might as well begin on the cataloguing. Everything else is pretty well caught up.' I jumped up and down and clapped my hands, and—"

"You did what?" demanded her mother aghast.

Betty's nose wrinkled in a saucy little grimace.

"Oh, I mean inside of me. Outside I just said, 'Yes, sir,' or 'Very well, Mr. Denby,' or something prim and proper like that.

"Well, then he showed me huge drawers full of notes and clippings in a perfectly hopeless mass of confusion, and he unlocked one of the cabinets and took out the dearest little squat Buddha with diamond eyes, and showed me a number on the base. 'There, Miss Darling,' he began again in that tired voice of his, 'some of these notes and clippings are numbered in pencil to correspond with numbers like these on the curios; but many of them are not numbered at all. Unfortunately, many of the curios, too, lack numbers. All you can do, of course, is to sort out the papers by number, separating into a single pile all those that bear no number. I shall have to help you about those. You won't, of course, know where they go. I may have trouble myself to identify some of them. Later, after the preliminary work is done, each object will be entered on a card, together with a condensed tabulation of when and where I obtained it, its age, history—anything, in short, that we can find pertaining to it. The thing to do first, however, is to go through these drawers and sort out their contents by number."

"Having said this (still in that weary voice of his), he put back the little Buddha,—which my fingers were just tingling to get hold of,—waved his hand toward the drawers and papers, and marched out of the room. Then I set to work."

"But what did you do? How did you do it? What were those papers?"

"They were everything, mumsey: clippings from magazines and papers and sales catalogues of antiques, typewritten notes, and scrawls in long hand telling when and where and how Mr. Burke Denby or his father had found this or that thing. But what a mess they were in! And such a lot of them without the sign of a number!

"First, of course, I took a drawer and sorted the numbers into little piles on the big flat library table. Some of them had ten or a dozen, all one number. That work was very easy—only I did so want to read every last one of those notes and clippings! But of course I couldn't stop for that then. But I did read some of the unnumbered ones, and pretty quick I found one that I just knew referred to the little diamond-eyed Buddha Mr. Denby had taken out of the cabinet. I couldn't resist then. I just had to go and get it and find out. And I did—and it was; so I put them together on the library table.

"Then I noticed in the same cabinet a little old worn toby jug—a shepherd plaid—about the oldest and rarest there is, you know; and I knew I had three or four unnumbered notes on toby jugs—and, sure enough! three of them fitted this toby; and I put them together, with the jug on top, on the library table. Of course I was wild then to find some more. In the other cabinets that weren't unlocked, I could see, through the glass doors, a lot more things, and some of them, I was sure, fitted some of my unnumbered notes; but of course they didn't do me any good, as I couldn't get at them. One perfectly beautiful Oriental lacquered cabinet with diamond-paned doors was full of tablets, big and little, and I was crazy to get at those— I had a lot of notes about tablets. I did find in my cabinet, though, a little package of Chinese bank-notes, and I was sure I had something on those. And I had. I knew about them, anyway. I had seen some in London. These dated 'way back to the Tang dynasty—sixth century, you know—and were just as smooth! They're made of a kind of paper that crumples up like silk, but doesn't show creases. They had little rings printed on them of different sizes for different values, so that even the ignorant people couldn't be deceived, and—"