The Open Window: Tales of the Months

by Mabel Osgood Wright

Through the long nights the Magic Moon lights the little beasts to their hunting, but ice fingers lock the shallow pools before day dawn, and, in spite of alluring sunny noons, both man and beast seek shelter, one by the fireside, where the singing logs repeat the songs they once learned from the rain on the leaves in the forest, the other in ground hole, rock lair, or, if sociably inclined, in house chinks, and crannies. In this particular November, however, the village of Oaklands was undergoing a new and strange experience born of the sudden preference of a nimble, four-footed rodent for houses with warm cellars and well-stocked larders, over the more remote barns and granaries. In short, the north end of the village, and some of the outlying houses as well, were suffering from a raid of rats that would have competed in numbers with the army lured to cover by the Pied Piper.

All country dwellers expect to house a few of the wood folk in the hard season, whether they will or no. The bats hang themselves up in the attic behind the chimney, and the squirrels use a loose shingle as a storehouse door; the wood rats burrow under the stable floor, and the pretty, white-footed mouse with pelt and eyes like a deer will often venture to the hearth corner, and not only remain unharmed, but even make himself a welcome guest by his strange singing.

Rats, however,—the great relentless rats of city docks and sewers, that carry both destruction and disease in their march,—are a wholly different matter.

The plague had its beginning in what was considered a necessary improvement for the health of the village as well as its morals, the demolition of an old tavern that for a century had stood at the crossways opposite the railway station at the side of the road where, a few hundred rods higher up, was Martin Cortright’s cottage. The tavern, a relic of stage-coach days, and flanked by great barns and pastures of many acres that reached uphill quite to the Cortrights’ boundaries, had gradually fallen, until it became a road-house of the worst type, with its barns crumbling, filthy with the litter of years, and the land used for the rooting-ground of a breed of black swill-fed pigs. Its malodour had so offended the nose of public spirit as embodied in the Anglican Catholic, the Severely Protestant, Mrs. Jenks-Smith, Martin Cortright, and father, as health officer, that a public subscription had been secured, the place bought, the buildings, including the pig-pens, razed, and the land ploughed up to sweeten, preparatory to turning the plot into a sort of park to be a playground for the school children. All this had taken place in the early spring, and by fall every trace and odour of the nuisance that had existed was gone; but the Committee, when they had paid off all scores, had not reckoned with the rats that for generations had been housed upon the premises. During the summer, these rats evidently turned tramps, and, using the wide-chinked stone fences for runways, by which they travelled from farm to farm, lived in luxury, unobserved, though everywhere came complaint of the loss of young chickens and eggs, this being laid to cats, hawks, and weasels. But no sooner did Black Frost show himself than the winter homing instinct that comes upon man, as well as the lesser animals, seized the rats, and from all sides they began to travel back to their old haunts; these lacking, they sought the nearest shelter.

The Cortrights were away in early autumn, and late the first night after their return, Lavinia, candle in hand, going down the front stairs of her well-ordered and supposedly mouse-proof house, encountered a gray-whiskered rat coming up with so fixed a purpose, that even her shrieks and Martin’s coming only drove him to the hall below where, according to the testimony of Martin and Lavinia, he backed into a corner and put up a successful fight against Martin, armed with an umbrella, the wall paper receiving the whole of the damage. The maid, intrenched in the hall above, whispered a different version of the encounter, which was that the Master, being short-sighted, and lacking his glasses, had charged at the corner where the rat was not, much to the rat’s advantage.

Be this as it may, the postmaster, after having a ham cleaned to the bone and some valuable mail gnawed, tried traps in vain and resorted to poison, with the dire result that, in a week, after the stove fires were started, his family were obliged to go to his wife’s mother’s, while the movable part of the business took refuge in a corner of the Town House. Soon the one absorbing topic in Oaklands, that eclipsed even the town and presidential elections, both of which fell due that November, taking precedence of the local tax rate, new roads, tariff, tainted money, or trusts, was—“What shall we do with the rats?”

The Village Pharmacy, as the chief shop of the place is called, has many attributes of a department store and club-room as well, in the cold months. Here the men meet, who do not care to stay at home, or go to read in the library, foregather in the saloon, or play poker by a lantern in a corner of the windowless blacksmith’s shop. Among these, the rats came as a new subject, that was welcome, if its cause was not.

Better still, the Pharmacy coterie had a recent recruit and one that added not a little to the spice of its life, one Tom Scott, who owned a Queen Anne villa (no, it wasn’t a house or a cottage; if you know the modern English suburban home of this type, you will understand), together with all the proper outside ornaments, and ten acres of land halfway up the east road to the Bluffs. The place was close to what Evan, in the earlier and snobbish days of the Bluff Colony, used to call “the dead line,” because in the beginning there had been social war to the knife between the big landowners who lived above the line, and the small owners of the commuting tribe who lived below.

Mr. Scott had lived in Oaklands for eight years, during which time his two golden-haired daughters had turned from apple-cheeked schoolgirls to young women with the regular profiles and peculiar modulation of voice that tell of English origin. Their mother had the same features, voice, and colouring, but slimness had developed into the turtlesque figure of a staunch type of British matron in her early fifties, who has no American prototype. Fat women we have galore, but they usually carry their weight gaily, not ponderously, and seldom outlive their capability for wearing shirtwaists.

Mr. Scott was unmistakably English, tall, broad-shouldered, rosy, clean-shaven, and sixty, his closely cut, crisp gray hair showing no thinness at the crown and his deep-set eyes alert and keen to everything that went on about him, although he was not a man of many words and seldom entered into conversation of his own free will. In short, he was the type of the old country farmer, who, clad in cords and gaiters, spends half his time riding about his place on a deep-chested hunter, and is an ardent follower of the hounds when the chase does not interfere with market day. His speech, though usually correct, broadened with certain words; his s took the sound of z, and sometimes, when excited, he reversed his vowels.