Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

At the outer door, which she held ajar for his passage, she spoke, and instantly he was moved by a certain wistfulness in her tones.

“It was a pleasure to have you come to see us, Mr. Olcott,” she said, and he thought she meant it too. “We see so few visitors, living here as we do. Sometimes I think it might be better for us if we kept more in touch with people who live in the outside world and know something of it.”

“Thank you, Miss Van Nicht,” said Olcott, warming. “I'm afraid, though, I made a rather unfortunate suggestion about the tree. Really, I'm very sorry.”

Her face took on a gravity; almost a condemning expression came into it. And when she answered him it was in a different voice.

“A stranger could not understand how we regard the Van Nicht elm,” she said. “No stranger could understand! Good night, Mr. Olcott.”

At the last she had made him feel that he was a stranger. And she had not shaken hands with him either, nor had she asked him to call again.

He made his way out, through the black magic of the tree's midnight gloom, into the pure white chemistry of the moonlight; and having reached the open, he looked back. Except for that faint luminous blotch, like smeared phosphorus, showing through the blackness from beyond the giant tree, nothing testified that a habitation of living beings might be tucked away in that drear hiding place. He shrugged his shoulders as though to shake a load off them and, as he swung down the silvered street in the flawless night, his thoughts thawed out. He decided that assuredly two of the Van Nichts must go into the book which some day, when time served, he meant to write.

They belonged in a book—those two poor, pale, sapless creatures, enduring a grinding poverty for the sake of a vain idolatry; those joint inheritors of a worthless and burdensome fetish, deliberately preferring the shadow of a mouldy past for the substance of the present day. Why, the thing smacked of the Oriental. It wasn't fit and sane for white people—this Mongolian ancestor-worship which shut the door and drew the blind to every healthy and vigorous impulse and every beneficent impulse. Going along alone, Olcott worked himself into quite a brisk little fury of impatience and disgust.

He had it right—they belonged in a book, those two older Van Nichts, not in real life. And into a book they should go—into his book. But the younger girl, now. It was a pitiable life she must lead, hived up there in that musty old house under that terrific big tree with those two grim and touchy hermits. On her account he resented it. He tried to picture her in some more favourable setting. He succeeded fairly well too. Possibly, though, that was because Olcott had the gift of a brisk imagination. At times, during the days which followed, the vision of Harriet Van Nicht, translated out of her present decayed environment, persisted in his thoughts. He wondered why it did persist.

Nearly a month went by, during which he saw no member of that weird household. One day he encountered upon the street the brother and went up to him and, rather against the latter's inclination, engaged him in small talk. It didn't take long to prove that Mr. Van Nicht had very little small talk in stock; also that his one-time air of distant and punctilious regard for the newspaper man had entirely vanished. Mr. Van Nicht was courteous enough, with an aloof and stand-away courteousness, but he was not cordial. Presently Olcott found himself speaking, from a rather defensive attitude, of his own ancestry. He came of good New England stock—a circumstance which he rarely mentioned in company, but which now, rather to his own surprise, he found himself expounding at some length. Afterward he told himself that he had been merely casting about for a subject which might prove congenial to Mr. Van Nicht and had, by chance, hit on that one.