Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

His first look at her had told him she was of the same warp and texture as her brother; somewhat skimpier in the pattern, but identical in the fabric. Olcott decided though that there was this difference: If the brother had stepped out of Dickens, the sister had escaped from between the hasped lids of an old daguerreotype frame. Her plain frock of some harsh, dead-coloured stuff—her best frock, his intuition told him—the big cameo pin at her throat, the homely arrangement of her grey hair, her hands, wasted and withered-looking as they lay on her lap, even her voice, which was lugubriously subdued and flat—all these things helped out the illusion. Of the other sister, sitting two-thirds of the way across the wide room from him, he saw but little and he heard less. The poor light, and the distance and the deep chair in which she had sunk herself, combined to blot her out as a personality and to efface her from the picture. She scarcely uttered a word.

As Olcott had expected beforehand, the talk dealt, in the main, with the Van Nicht family, which is another way of saying that it went back of and behind, and far beyond, all that might be current and timely and pertinent to the hour. There was no substance to it, for it dealt with what had no substance. As he stayed on, making brave pretense of being interested, he was aware of an interrupting, vaguely irritating sound at his rear and partly to one side of him. Patently the sound was coming from without. It was like a sustained and steady scratching, and it had to do, he figured, with one of the window openings. He took a glance over his shoulder, but he couldn't make out the cause; the window was too heavily shrouded in faded, thick curtains of a sad, dark-green aspect. The thing got on his nerves, it persisted so. Finally he was moved to mention it.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, taking advantage of a pause, “but isn't somebody or something fumbling at the window outside?”

“It is a bough of the family elm,” explained Mr. Van Nicht. “One of the lower boughs has grown forward and downward, until it touches the side of the house. When stirred by the breeze it creates the sound which you hear.” Internally Olcott shivered. Now that the explanation had been vouchsafed the noise made him think of ghostly fingers tapping at the glass panes—as though the spirit of the tree craved admittance to the dismal circle of these human creatures who shared with it the tribal glory.

“Don't you find it very annoying?” he asked innocently. “I should think you would prune the limb back.” He halted then, realising that his tongue had slipped. There was a little silence, which became edged and iced with a sudden hostility.

“No human hand has ever touched the tree to denude it of any part of its majestic beauty,” stated Mr. Van Nicht with a frigid intonation. “Whilst any of this household survives to protect it, no human hand ever shall.”

From the elder sister came a murmur of assent.

The conversation had sagged and languished before; after this it sank to a still lower level and gradually froze to death. After possibly ten minutes more of the longest and bleakest minutes he ever recalled having weathered, Olcott, being mentally chilled through, got up and, making a show of expressing a counterfeit pleasure of having been accorded this opportunity of meeting those present, said really he must be going now.

In their places Miss Rachael Van Nicht and her brother rose, standing stiff as stalagmites, and he knew he was not forgiven. It was the younger sister who showed him out, preceding him silently, as he betook himself from the presence of the remaining two.

Close up, in the better light of the hall, Olcott for the first time perceived that Miss Harriet Van Nicht was not so very old. In fact, she was not old at all. He had assumed somehow that she must be sered and soured and elderly, or at least that she must be middle-aged. With this establishment he could not associate any guise of youth as belonging. But he perceived how wrong he had been. Miss Harriet Van Nicht most assuredly was not old. She could not be past thirty, perhaps she was not more than twenty-five or six. It was the plain and ugly gown she wore, a dun-coloured, sleazy, shabby gown, which had given her, when viewed from a distance, the aspect of age—that and the unbecoming way in which she wore her hair slicked back from her forehead and drawn up from round her ears. She had fine eyes, as now he saw, with a plaintive light in them, and finely arched brows and a delicate oval of a face; and she was small and dainty of figure. He could tell that, too, despite the fit of the ungraceful frock.