Chapter 19

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_ CHAPTER XIX

Which Treats of Quahaugs in General

Asaph Tidditt helped me to begin this long chronicle of a quahaug's pilgrimage. Perhaps it is fitting that Asaph should end it. He dropped in for a call the other afternoon and, as I had finished my day's "stunt" at the desk, I assisted in entertaining him. Frances was in the sitting-room also and Hephzy joined us soon afterward. Mr. Tidditt had stopped at the post-office on his way down and he had the Boston morning paper in his hand. Of course he was filled to the brim with war news. We discuss little else in Bayport now; even the new baby at the parsonage has to play second fiddle.

"My godfreys!" exclaimed Asaph, as soon as he sat down in the rocking chair and put his cap on the floor beneath it. "My godfreys, but they're havin' awful times over across, now ain't they. Killin' and fightin' and battlin' and slaughterin'! It don't seem human to me somehow."

"It is human, I'm afraid," I said, with a sigh. "Altogether too human. We're a poor lot, we, humans, after all. We pride ourselves on our civilization, but after all, it takes very little to send us back to savagery."

"That's so," said Asaph, with conviction. "That's true about everybody but us folks in the United States. We are awful fortunate, we are. We ain't savages. We was born in a free country, and we've been brought up right, I declare! I beg your pardon, Mrs. Knowles; I forgot you wasn't born in Bayport."

Frances smiled. "No apology is needed, Mr. Tidditt," she said. "I confess to having been born a--savage."

"But you're all right now," said Asaph, hastily, trying to cover his slip. "You're all right now. You're just as American as the rest of us. Kent, suppose this war in Europe is goin' to hurt your trade any? It's goin' to hurt a good many folks's. They tell me groceries and such like is goin' way up. Lucky we've got fish and clams to depend on. Clams and quahaugs'll keep us from starvin' for a spell. Oh," with a chuckle, "speakin' of quahaugs reminds me. Did you know they used to call your husband a quahaug, Mrs. Knowles? That's what they used to call him round here--'The Quahaug.' They called him that 'count of his keepin' inside his shell all the time and not mixin' with folks, not toadyin' up to the summer crowd and all. I always respected him for it. _I_ don't toady to nobody neither."

Hephzy had come in by this time and now she took a part in the conversation.

"They don't call him 'The Quahaug' any more," she declared, indignantly. "He's been out of his shell more and seen more than most of the folks in this town."

"I know it; I know it. And he's kept goin' ever since. Runnin' to New York, he and you," with a nod toward Frances, "and travelin' to Washin'ton and Niagary Falls and all. Wonder to me how he does as much writin' as he does. That last book of yours is sellin' first-rate, they tell me, Kent."

He referred to the novel I began in Mayberry. I have rewritten and finished it since, and it has had a surprising sale. The critics seem to think I have achieved my first genuine success.

"What are you writin' now?" asked Asaph. "More of them yarns about pirates and such? Land sakes! when I go by this house nights and see a light in your library window there, Kent, and know you're pluggin' along amongst all them adventures, I wonder how you can stand it. 'Twould give me the shivers. Godfreys! the last time I read one of them yarns--that about the 'Black Brig' 'twas--I hardly dast to go to bed. And I DIDN'T dast to put out the light. I see a pirate in every corner, grittin' his teeth. Writin' another of that kind, are you?"

"No," I said; "this one is quite different. You will have no trouble in sleeping over this one, Ase."

"That's a comfort. Got a little Bayport in it? Seems to me you ought to put a little Bayport in, for a change."

I smiled. "There is a little in this," I answered. "A little at the beginning, and, perhaps, at the end."

"You don't say! You ain't got me in it, have you? I'd--I'd look kind of funny in a book, wouldn't I?"

I laughed, but I did not answer.

"Not that I ain't seen things in my life," went on Asaph, hopefully. "A man can't be town clerk in a live town like this and not see things. But I hope you won't put any more foreigners in. This we're readin' now," rapping the newspaper with his knuckles, "gives us all we want to know about foreigners. Just savages, they be, as you say, and nothin' more. I pity 'em."

I laughed again.

"Asaph," said I, "what would you say if I told you that the English and French--yes, and the Germans, too, though I haven't seen them at home as I have the others--were no more savages than we are?"

"I'd say you was crazy," was the prompt answer.

"Well, I'm not. And you're not very complimentary. You're forgetting again. You forget that I married one of those savages."

Asaph was taken aback, but he recovered promptly, as he had before.

"She ain't any savage," he announced. "Her mother was born right here in Bayport. And she knows, just as I do, that Bayport's the best place in the world; don't you, Mrs. Knowles?"

"Yes," said Frances, "I am sure of it, Mr. Tidditt."

So Asaph went away triumphantly happy. After he had gone I apologized for him.

"He's a fair sample," I said. "He is a quahaug, although he doesn't know it. He is a certain type, an exaggerated type, of American."

Frances smiled. "He's not much worse than I used to be," she said. "I used to call America an uncivilized country, you remember. I suppose I--and Mr. Heathcroft--were exaggerated types of a certain kind of English. We were English quahaugs, weren't we?"

Hephzy nodded. "We're all quahaugs," she declared. "Most of us, anyhow. That's the trouble with all the folks of all the nations; they stay in their shells and they don't try to know and understand their neighbors. Kent, you used to be a quahaug--a different kind of one--but that kind, too. I was a quahaug afore I lived in Mayberry. That's who makes wars like this dreadful one--quahaugs. We know better now--you and Frances and I. We've found out that, down underneath, there's precious little difference. Humans are humans."

She paused and then, as a final summing up, added:

"I guess that's it: American or German or French or anything--nice folks are nice folks anywhere."

[THE END]
Joseph Crosby Lincoln's Novel: Kent Knowles: Quahaug

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