The Count And The Manager
The way we got into the hotel business in the first place come
around like this: Me and Cap'n Jonadab went down to Wellmouth Port
one day 'long in March to look at some property he'd had left him.
Jonadab's Aunt Sophrony had moved kind of sudden from that village
to Beulah Land--they're a good ways apart, too--and Cap'n Jonadab
had come in for the old farm, he being the only near relative.
When you go to Wellmouth Port you get off the cars at Wellmouth
Center and then take Labe Bearse's barge and ride four miles; and
then, if the horse don't take a notion to lay down in the road and
go to sleep, or a wheel don't come off or some other surprise party
ain't sprung on you, you come to a place where there's a Baptist
chapel that needs painting, and a little two-for-a-cent store that
needs trade, and two or three houses that need building over, and
any Lord's quantity of scrub pines and beach grass and sand. Then
you take Labe's word for it that you've got to Wellmouth Port and
get out of the barge and try to remember you're a church member.
Well, Aunt Sophrony's house was a mile or more from the place where
the barge stopped, and Jonadab and me, we hoofed it up there. We
bought some cheese and crackers and canned things at the store,
'cause we expected to stay overnight in the house, and knew there
wasn't no other way of getting provender.
We got there after a spell and set down on the big piazza with our
souls full of gratitude and our boots full of sand. Great, big,
old-fashioned house with fourteen big bedrooms in it, big barn,
sheds, and one thing or 'nother, and perched right on top of a hill
with five or six acres of ground 'round it. And how the March wind
did whoop in off the sea and howl and screech lonesomeness through
the pine trees! You take it in the middle of the night, with the
shutters rattling and the old joists a-creaking and Jonadab snoring
like a chap sawing hollow logs, and if it wan't joy then my name
ain't Barzilla Wingate. I don't wonder Aunt Sophrony died. I'd
have died 'long afore she did if I knew I was checked plumb through
to perdition. There'd be some company where I was going, anyhow.
The next morning after ballasting up with the truck we'd bought at
the store--the feller 'most keeled over when he found we was going
to pay cash for it--we went out on the piazza again, and looked at
the breakers and the pine trees and the sand, and held our hats on
with both hands.
"Jonadab," says I, "what'll you take for your heirloom?"
"Well," he says, "Barzilla, the way I feel now, I think I'd take a
return ticket to Orham and be afraid of being took up for swindling
at that."
Neither of us says nothing more for a spell, and, first thing you
know, we heard a carriage rattling somewhere up the road. I was
shipwrecked once and spent two days in a boat looking for a sail.
When I heard that rattling I felt just the way I done when I
sighted the ship that picked us up.
"Judas!" says Jonadab, "there's somebody COMING!"
We jumped out of our chairs and put for the corner of the house.
There WAS somebody coming--a feller in a buggy, and he hitched his
horse to the front fence and come whistling up the walk.
He was a tall chap, with a smooth face, kind of sharp and knowing,
and with a stiff hat set just a little on one side. His clothes
was new and about a week ahead of up-to-date, his shoes shined till
they lit up the lower half of his legs, and his pants was creased
so's you could mow with 'em. Cool and slick! Say! in the middle
of that deadliness and compared to Jonadab and me, he looked like a
bird of Paradise in a coop of moulting pullets.
"Cap'n Wixon?" he says to me, sticking out a gloved flipper.
"Not guilty," says I. "There's the skipper. My name's Wingate."
"Glad to have the pleasure, Mr. Wingate," he says. "Cap'n Wixon,
yours truly."
We shook hands, and he took each of us by the arm and piloted us
back to the piazza, like a tug with a couple of coal barges. He
pulled up a chair, crossed his legs on the rail, reached into the
for'ard hatch of his coat and brought out a cigar case.
"Smoke up," he says. We done it--I holding my hat to shut off the
wind, while Jonadab used up two cards of matches getting the first
light. When we got the cigars to going finally, the feller says:
"My name's Brown--Peter T. Brown. I read about your falling heir
to this estate, Cap'n Wixon, in a New Bedford paper. I happened to
be in New Bedford then, representing the John B. Wilkins
Unparalleled All Star Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ten Nights in a Bar-
room Company. It isn't my reg'lar line, the show bus'ness, but it
produced the necessary 'ham and' every day and the excelsior sleep
inviter every night, so--but never mind that. Soon as I read the
paper I came right down to look at the property. Having rubbered,
back I go to Orham to see you. Your handsome and talented daughter
says you are over here. That'll be about all--here I am. Now,
then, listen to this."
He went under his hatches again, rousted out a sheet of paper,
unfolded it and read something like this--I know it by heart:
"The great sea leaps and splashes before you as it leaped and
splashed in the old boyhood days. The sea wind sings to you as it
sang of old. The old dreams come back to you, the dreams you
dreamed as you slumbered upon the cornhusk mattress in the clean,
sweet little chamber of the old home. Forgotten are the cares of
business, the scramble for money, the ruthless hunt for fame. Here
are perfect rest and perfect peace.
"Now what place would you say I was describing?" says the feller.
"Heaven," says Jonadab, looking up, reverent like.
You never see a body more disgusted than Brown.
"Get out!" he snaps. "Do I look like the advance agent of Glory?
Listen to this one."
He unfurls another sheet of paper, and goes off on a tack about
like this:
"The old home! You who sit in your luxurious apartments, attended
by your liveried servants, eating the costly dishes that bring you
dyspepsia and kindred evils, what would you give to go back once
more to the simple, cleanly living of the old house in the country?
The old home, where the nights were cool and refreshing, the sleep
deep and sound; where the huckleberry pies that mother fashioned
were swimming in fragrant juice, where the shells of the clams for
the chowder were snow white and the chowder itself a triumph; where
there were no voices but those of the wind and sea; no--"
"Don't!" busts out Jonadab. "Don't! I can't stand it!"
He was mopping his eyes with his red bandanner. I was consider'ble
shook up myself. The dear land knows we was more used to
huckleberry pies and clam chowder than we was to liveried servants
and costly dishes, but there was something in the way that feller
read off that slush that just worked the pump handle. A hog would
have cried; I know _I_ couldn't help it. As for Peter T. Brown, he
fairly crowed.
"It gets you!" he says. "I knew it would. And it'll get a heap of
others, too. Well, we can't send 'em back to the old home, but we
can trot the old home to them, or a mighty good imitation of it.
Here it is; right here!"
And he waves his hand up toward Aunt Sophrony's cast-off palace.
Cap'n Jonadab set up straight and sputtered like a firecracker.
A man hates to be fooled.
"Old home!" he snorts. "Old county jail, you mean!"
And then that Brown feller took his feet down off the rail, hitched
his chair right in front of Jonadab and me and commenced to talk.
And HOW he did talk! Say, he could talk a Hyannis fisherman into a
missionary. I wish I could remember all he said; 'twould make a
book as big as a dictionary, but 'twould be worth the trouble of
writing it down. 'Fore he got through he talked a thousand dollars
out of Cap'n Jonadab, and it takes a pretty hefty lecture to
squeeze a quarter out of HIM. To make a long yarn short, this was
his plan:
He proposed to turn Aunt Sophrony's wind plantation into a hotel
for summer boarders. And it wan't going to be any worn-out,
regulation kind of a summer hotel neither.
"Confound it, man!" he says, "they're sick of hot and cold water,
elevators, bell wires with a nigger on the end, and all that.
There's a raft of old codgers that call themselves 'self-made
men'--meanin' that the Creator won't own 'em, and they take the
responsibility themselves--that are always wishing they could go
somewheres like the shacks where they lived when they were kids.
They're always talking about it, and wishing they could go to the
old home and rest. Rest! Why, say, there's as much rest to this
place as there is sand, and there's enough of that to scour all the
knives in creation."
"But 'twill cost so like the dickens to furnish it," I says.
"Furnish it!" says he. "Why, that's just it! It won't cost
nothing to furnish it--nothing to speak of. I went through the
house day before yesterday--crawled in the kitchen window--oh! it's
all right, you can count the spoons--and there's eight of those
bedrooms furnished just right, corded bedsteads, painted bureaus
with glass knobs, 'God Bless Our Home' and Uncle Jeremiah's coffin
plate on the wall, rag mats on the floor, and all the rest. All
she needs is a little more of the same stuff, that I can buy 'round
here for next to nothing--I used to buy for an auction room--and a
little paint and fixings, and there she is. All I want from you
folks is a little money--I'll chuck in two hundred and fifty
myself--and you two can be proprietors and treasurers if you want
to. But active manager and publicity man--that's yours cheerily,
Peter Theodosius Brown!" And he slapped his plaid vest.
Well, he talked all the forenoon and all the way to Orham on the
train and most of that night. And when he heaved anchor, Jonadab
had agreed to put up a thousand and I was in for five hundred and
Peter contributed two hundred and fifty and experience and nerve.
And the "Old Home House" was off the ways.
And by the first of May 'twas open and ready for business, too.
You never see such a driver as that feller Brown was. He had a new
wide piazza built all 'round the main buildings, painted everything
up fine, hired the three best women cooks in Wellmouth--and there's
some good cooks on Cape Cod, too--and a half dozen chamber girls
and waiters. He had some trouble getting corded beds and old
bureaus for the empty rooms, but he got 'em finally. He bought the
last bed of Beriah Burgess, up at East Harniss, and had quite a
dicker getting it.
"He thought he ought to get five dollars for it," says Brown,
telling Jonadab and me about it. "Said he hated to part with it
because his grandmother died in it. I told him I couldn't see any
good reason why I should pay more for a bed just because it had
killed his grandmother, so we split up and called it three dollars.
'Twas too much money, but we had to have it."
And the advertisements! They was sent everywheres. Lots of 'em
was what Peter called "reading notices," and them he mostly got for
nothing, for he could talk an editor foolish same as he could
anybody else. By the middle of April most of our money was gone,
but every room in the house was let and we had applications coming
by the pailful.
And the folks that come had money, too--they had to have to pay
Brown's rates. I always felt like a robber or a Standard Oil
director every time I looked at the books. The most of 'em was
rich folks--self-made men, just like Peter prophesied--and they
brought their wives and daughters and slept on cornhusks and eat
chowder and said 'twas great and just like old times. And they got
the rest we advertised; we didn't cheat 'em on REST. By ten
o'clock pretty nigh all hands was abed, and 'twas so still all you
could hear was the breakers or the wind, or p'raps a groan coming
from a window where some boarder had turned over in his sleep and a
corncob in the mattress had raked him crossways.
There was one old chap that we'll call Dillaway--Ebenezer Dillaway.
That wan't his name; his real one's too well known to tell. He
runs the "Dillaway Combination Stores" that are all over the
country. In them stores you can buy anything and buy it cheap--
cheapness is Ebenezer's stronghold and job lots is his sheet
anchor. He'll sell you a mowing machine and the grass seed to grow
the hay to cut with it. He'll sell you a suit of clothes for two
dollars and a quarter, and for ten cents more he'll sell you glue
enough to stick it together again after you've worn it out in the
rain. He'll sell you anything, and he's got cash enough to sink a
ship.
He come to the "Old Home House" with his daughter, and he took to
the place right away. Said 'twas for all the world like where he
used to live when he was a boy. He liked the grub and he liked the
cornhusks and he liked Brown. Brown had a way of stealing a thing
and yet paying enough for it to square the law--that hit Ebenezer
where he lived.
His daughter liked Brown, too, and 'twas easy enough to see that
Brown liked her. She was a mighty pretty girl, the kind Peter
called a "queen," and the active manager took to her like a cat to
a fish. They was together more'n half the time, gitting up sailing
parties, or playing croquet, or setting up on the "Lover's Nest,"
which was a kind of slab summer-house Brown had rigged up on the
bluff where Aunt Sophrony's pig-pens used to be in the old days.
Me and Jonadab see how things was going, and we'd look at one
another and wink and shake our heads when the pair'd go by
together. But all that was afore the count come aboard.
We got our first letter from the count about the third of June.
The writing was all over the plate like a biled dinner, and the
English looked like it had been shook up in a bag, but it was
signed with a nine fathom, toggle-jinted name that would give a
pollparrot the lockjaw, and had the word "Count" on the bow of it.
You never see a feller happier than Peter T. Brown.
"Can he have rooms?" says Peter. "CAN he? Well, I should rise to
elocute! He can have the best there is if yours truly has to bunk
in the coop with the gladsome Plymouth Rock. That's what! He says
he's a count and he'll be advertised as a count from this place to
where rolls the Oregon."
And he was, too. The papers was full of how Count What's-his-Name
was hanging out at the "Old Home House," and we got more letters
from rich old women and pork-pickling money bags than you could
shake a stick at. If you want to catch the free and equal nabob of
a glorious republic, bait up with a little nobility and you'll have
your salt wet in no time. We had to rig up rooms in the carriage
house, and me and Jonadab slept in the haymow.
The count himself hove in sight on June fifteenth. He was a
little, smoked Italian man with a pair of legs that would have been
carried away in a gale, and a black mustache with waxed ends that
you'd think would punch holes in the pillow case. His talk was
like his writing, only worse, but from the time his big trunk with
the foreign labels was carried upstairs, he was skipper and all
hands of the "Old Home House."
And the funny part of it was that old man Dillaway was as much gone
on him as the rest. For a self-made American article he was the
worst gone on this machine-made importation that ever you see. I
s'pose when you've got more money than you can spend for straight
goods you nat'rally go in for buying curiosities; I can't see no
other reason.
Anyway, from the minute the count come over the side it was "Good-
by, Peter." The foreigner was first oar with the old man and
general consort for the daughter. Whenever there was a sailing
trip on or a spell of roosting in the Lover's Nest, Ebenezer would
see that the count looked out for the "queen," while Brown stayed
on the piazza and talked bargains with papa. It worried Peter--
you could see that. He'd set in the barn with Jonadab and me,
thinking, thinking, and all at once he'd bust out:
"Bless that Dago's heart! I haven't chummed in with the degenerate
aristocracy much in my time, but somewhere or other I've seen that
chap before. Now where--where--where?"
For the first two weeks the count paid his board like a major; then
he let it slide. Jonadab and me was a little worried, but he was
advertising us like fun, his photographs--snap shots by Peter--was
getting into the papers, so we judged he was a good investment.
But Peter got bluer and bluer.
One night we was in the setting room--me and Jonadab and the count
and Ebenezer. The "queen" and the rest of the boarders was abed.
The count was spinning a pigeon English yarn of how he'd fought a
duel with rapiers. When he'd finished, old Dillaway pounded his
knee and sung out:
"That's bus'ness! That's the way to fix 'em! No lawsuits, no
argument, no delays. Just take 'em out and punch holes in 'em.
Did you hear that, Brown?"
"Yes, I heard it," says Peter, kind of absent-minded like.
"Fighting with razors, wan't it?"
Now there wan't nothing to that--'twas just some of Brown's
sarcastic spite getting the best of him--but I give you my word
that the count turned yellow under his brown skin, kind of like mud
rising from the bottom of a pond.
"What-a you say?" he says, bending for'ards.
"Mr. Brown was mistaken, that's all," says Dillaway; "he meant
rapiers."
"But why-a razors--why-a razors?" says the count.
Now I was watching Brown's face, and all at once I see it light up
like you'd turned a searchlight on it. He settled back in his
chair and fetched a long breath as if he was satisfied. Then he
grinned and begged pardon and talked a blue streak for the rest of
the evening.
Next day he was the happiest thing in sight, and when Miss Dillaway
and the count went Lover's Nesting he didn't seem to care a bit.
All of a sudden he told Jonadab and me that he was going up to
Boston that evening on bus'ness and wouldn't be back for a day or
so. He wouldn't tell what the bus'ness was, either, but just
whistled and laughed and sung, "Good-by, Susannah; don't you grieve
for me," till train time.
He was back again three nights afterward, and he come right out to
the barn without going nigh the house. He had another feller with
him, a kind of shabby dressed Italian man with curly hair.
"Fellers," he says to me and Jonadab, "this is my friend, Mr.
Macaroni; he's going to engineer the barber shop for a while."
Well, we'd just let our other barber go, so we didn't think
anything of this, but when he said that his friend Spaghetti was
going to stay in the barn for a day or so, and that we needn't
mention that he was there, we thought that was funny.
But Peter done a lot of funny things the next day. One of 'em was
to set a feller painting a side of the house by the count's window,
that didn't need painting at all. And when the feller quit for the
night, Brown told him to leave the ladder where 'twas.
That evening the same crowd was together in the setting room.
Peter was as lively as a cricket, talking, talking, all the time.
By and by he says:
"Oh, say, I want you to see the new barber. He can shave anything
from a note to a porkypine. Come in here, Chianti!" he says,
opening the door and calling out. "I want you."
And in come the new Italian man, smiling and bowing and looking
"meek and lowly, sick and sore," as the song says.
Well, we laughed at Brown's talk and asked the Italian all kinds of
fool questions and nobody noticed that the count wan't saying
nothing. Pretty soon he gets up and says he guesses he'll go to
his room, 'cause he feels sort of sick.
And I tell you he looked sick. He was yellower than he was the
other night, and he walked like he hadn't got his sea legs on.
Old Dillaway was terrible sorry and kept asking if there wan't
something he could do, but the count put him off and went out.
"Now that's too bad!" says Brown. "Spaghetti, you needn't wait any
longer."
So the other Italian went out, too.
And then Peter T. Brown turned loose and talked the way he done
when me and Jonadab first met him. He just spread himself. He
told of this bargain that he'd made and that sharp trade he had
turned, while we set there and listened and laughed like a parsel
of fools. And every time that Ebenezer'd get up to go to bed,
Peter'd trot out a new yarn and he'd have to stop to listen to
that. And it got to be eleven o'clock and then twelve and then
one.
It was just about quarter past one and we was laughing our heads
off at one of Brown's jokes, when out under the back window there
was a jingle and a thump and a kind of groaning and wiggling noise.
"What on earth is that?" says Dillaway.
"I shouldn't be surprised," says Peter, cool as a mack'rel on ice,
"if that was his royal highness, the count."
He took up the lamp and we all hurried outdoors and 'round the
corner. And there, sure enough, was the count, sprawling on the
ground with his leather satchel alongside of him, and his foot fast
in a big steel trap that was hitched by a chain to the lower round
of the ladder. He rared up on his hands when he see us and started
to say something about an outrage.
"Oh, that's all right, your majesty," says Brown. "Hi, Chianti,
come here a minute! Here's your old college chum, the count, been
and put his foot in it."
When the new barber showed up the count never made another move,
just wilted like a morning-glory after sunrise. But you never see
a worse upset man than Ebenezer Dillaway.
"But what does this mean?" says he, kind of wild like. "Why don't
you take that thing off his foot?"
"Oh," says Peter, "he's been elongating my pedal extremity for the
last month or so; I don't see why I should kick if he pulls his own
for a while. You see," he says, "it's this way:
"Ever since his grace condescended to lend the glory of his
countenance to this humble roof," he says, "it's stuck in my mind
that I'd seen the said countenance somewhere before. The other
night when our conversation was trifling with the razor subject and
the Grand Lama here"--that's the name he called the count--"was
throwing in details about his carving his friends, it flashed
across me where I'd seen it. About a couple of years ago I was
selling the guileless rural druggists contiguous to Scranton,
Pennsylvania, the tasty and happy combination called 'Dr. Bulger's
Electric Liver Cure,' the same being a sort of electric light for
shady livers, so to speak. I made my headquarters at Scranton,
and, while there, my hair was shortened and my chin smoothed in a
neat but gaudy barber shop, presided over by my friend Spaghetti
here, and my equally valued friend the count."
"So," says Peter, smiling and cool as ever, "when it all came back
to me, as the song says, I journeyed to Scranton accompanied by a
photograph of his lordship. I was lucky enough to find Macaroni in
the same old shop. He knew the count's classic profile at once.
It seems his majesty had hit up the lottery a short time previous
for a few hundred and had given up barbering. I suppose he'd read
in the papers that the imitation count line was stylish and
profitable and so he tried it on. It may be," says Brown, offhand,
"that he thought he might marry some rich girl. There's some fool
fathers, judging by the papers, that are willing to sell their
daughters for the proper kind of tag on a package like him."
Old man Dillaway kind of made a face, as if he'd ate something that
tasted bad, but he didn't speak.
"And so," says Peter, "Spaghetti and I came to the Old Home
together, he to shave for twelve per, and I to set traps, etcetera.
That's a good trap," he says, nodding, "I bought it in Boston. I
had the teeth filed down, but the man that sold it said 'twould
hold a horse. I left the ladder by his grace's window, thinking he
might find it handy after he'd seen his friend of other days,
particularly as the back door was locked.
"And now," goes on Brown, short and sharp, "let's talk business.
Count," he says, "you are set back on the books about sixty odd for
old home comforts. We'll cut off half of that and charge it to
advertising. You draw well, as the man said about the pipe. But
the other thirty you'll have to work out. You used to shave like a
bird. I'll give you twelve dollars a week to chip in with Macaroni
here and barber the boarders."
But Dillaway looked anxious.
"Look here, Brown," he says, "I wouldn't do that. I'll pay his
board bill and his traveling expenses if he clears out this minute.
It seems tough to set him shaving after he's been such a big gun
around here."
I could see right off that the arrangement suited Brown first rate
and was exactly what he'd been working for, but he pretended not to
care much for it.
"Oh! I don't know," he says. "I'd rather be a sterling barber
than a plated count. But anything to oblige you, Mr. Dillaway."
So the next day there was a nobleman missing at the "Old Home
House," and all we had to remember him by was a trunk full of
bricks. And Peter T. Brown and the "queen" was roosting in the
Lover's Nest; and the new Italian was busy in the barber shop. He
could shave, too. He shaved me without a pull, and my face ain't
no plush sofy, neither.
And before the season was over the engagement was announced. Old
Dillaway took it pretty well, considering. He liked Peter, and his
having no money to speak of didn't count, because Ebenezer had
enough for all hands. The old man said he'd been hoping for a son-
in-law sharp enough to run the "Consolidated Stores" after he was
gone, and it looked, he said, as if he'd found him.
-THE END-
Joseph Crosby Lincoln's short story: The Count And The Manager
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