Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

“I feel warranted in the assumption that you will not find it necessary to alter or curtail my statements in any particular. I have had some previous experience in literary endeavours. In all modesty I may say that I am no novice. A signed article from my pen, entitled The Influence of the Holland—Dutch Strain Upon American Public Life, From Peter Stuyvesant to Theodore Roosevelt, was published some years since in the New York Evening Post, afterward becoming the subject of editorial comment in the Springfield Republican, the Hartford Courant and the Boston Transcript. At present I am engaged in a brief history of one of our earlier presidents, the Honourable Martin Van Buren. I have the honour to bid you a very good day, sir.”

Olcott ran the story in his next Sunday issue but one. It stretched the full length of two columns and invaded a third. It was tiresome and long-winded. It was as prosy as prosy could be. To make room for it a smartly done special on the commercial awakening of Schuyler County was crowded out. Olcott's judgment told him he did a sinful thing, but he ran it. He went further than that. Into the editorial page he slipped a paragraph directing attention to “Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht's timely and interesting article, appearing elsewhere in this number.”

He had his reward, though, in the comments of sundry ones of his local subscribers. From these comments, made to him by letter and by word of mouth, he sensed something of the attitude of the community toward the Van Nicht family. As he figured, this sentiment was a compound of several things. It appeared to embody a gentle intolerance for the shell of social exclusiveness in which the present bearers of the name had walled themselves up, together with a sympathy for their poverty and their self-imposed state of lonely and neglected aloofness, and still further down, underlying these emotions and tincturing them, an understanding and an admiration for the importance of this old family as an old family—an admiration which was genuine and avowed on the part of some, and just as genuine but more or less reluctantly bestowed on the part of others. It was as Mayor McGlynn had informed Olcott on their first meeting. The Van Nichts were not so much individuals, having a share in the life of this thriving, striving, overgrown town, as they were historical fixtures and traditional assets. Collectively, they constituted something to be proud of and sorry for.

Soon, too, he had further reward. One afternoon a small and grimy boy invaded his room, without knocking, and laid a note upon his desk.

“Old guy downstairs, with long hair and a gimpy leg, handed me this yere and gimme fi' cents to fetch it up here to you,” stated the messenger.

The note was from Mr. Van Nicht, as a glance at the superscription told Olcott before he opened the envelope. In formal terms Olcott was thanked for giving the writer's offering such prominence in the pages of his valuable paper and was invited, formally, to call upon the undersigned at his place of residence, in order that undersigned might more fully express to Mr. Olcott his sincere appreciation.

On the whole, Olcott was glad of the opportunity to view the inside of that gloomy old house under the big tree out at the end of Putnam Street. He wanted to see more of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, and to see something of the other two dwellers beneath that ancient roof. Olcott had dreams of some day writing a novel; some day when he had the time. Most newspaper men do have such dreams; or else it is a play they are going to write. Meanwhile, pending the coming of that day, he was storing up material for it in his mind. Assuredly the bleached-out, pale, old recluse in the black stock would make copy. Probably his sisters would be types also, and they might make copy too. Olcott answered the note, accepting the invitation for that same evening.

It was a night of crystal-clear moonlight, and Olcott walked up Putnam Street through an alchemistic radiance which was like a path for a Puck to dance along. But the shimmering aisle broke off short, when he had turned in at the broken gate and had come to the edge of the shade of the Van Nicht elm. Under there the shadow lay so thick and dense that, as he groped through it to the small entry porch, finding the way by the feel of his feet upon the irregular, flagged walk, he had the conviction that he might reach out with his hands and gather up folds of the darkness in his arms, like ells of black velvet. The faint glow which came through a curtained front window of the unseen house was like a phosphorescent smear, plastered against a formless background, and only served to make the adjacent darkness darker still. If the moonlight yonder was a fit place for the fairies to trip it, this particular spot, he thought, must be reserved for ghosts to stalk in.

Fumbling with his hands, he searched out the heavy door knocker. Its resounding thump against its heel plate, as he dropped it back in place, made him jump. At once the door opened. Centred in the oblong of dulled light which came from an oil lamp burning upon a table, behind and within, appeared the slender, warped figure of Mr. Cecilius Jacob Van Nicht, 4th. With much ceremony the head of the house bowed the guest in past the portals.

Almost the first object to catch Olcott's eye, as he stepped in, was a portrait which, with its heavy frame, filled up a considerable portion of the wall space across the back breadth of the square hallway into which he had entered. Excepting for this picture and the table with the oil lamp upon it and a tall hat-tree, the hall was quite bare.