the elders of the tribe of summer visitors nearly all professed to have “discovered” harpledon. the only one of the number who never, to my knowledge, put forth this claim was waldo cranch; and he had lived there longer than any of us.
the one person in the village who could remember his coming to harpledon, and opening and repairing the old cranch house (for his family had been india merchants when harpledon was a thriving sea-port) — the only person who went back far enough to antedate waldo cranch was an aunt of mine, old miss lucilla selwick, who lived in the selwick house, itself a stout relic of india merchant days, and who had been sitting at the same window, watching the main street of harpledon, for seventy years and more to my knowledge. but unfortunately the long range of aunt lucilla’s memory often made it hit rather wide of the mark. she remembered heaps and heaps of far-off things; but she almost always remembered them wrongly. for instance, she used to say: “poor polly everitt! how well i remember her, coming up from the beach one day screaming, and saying she’d seen her husband drowning before her eyes” — whereas every one knew that mrs. everitt was on a picnic when her husband was drowned at the other end of the world, and that no ghostly premonition of her loss had reached her. and whenever aunt lucilla mentioned mr. cranch’s coming to live at harpledon she used to say: “dear me, i can see him now, driving by on that rainy afternoon in denny brine’s old carry-all, with a great pile of bags and bundles, and on top of them a black and white hobby-horse with a real mane — the very handsomest hobby-horse i ever saw.” no persuasion could induce her to dissociate the image of this prodigious toy from her first sight of waldo cranch, most incurable of bachelors, and least concerned with the amusing of other people’s children, even those of his best friends. in this case, to be sure, her power of evocation had a certain success. some one told cranch — mrs. durant i think it must have been — and i can still hear his hearty laugh.
“what could it have been that she saw?” mrs. durant questioned; and he responded gaily: “why not simply the symbol of my numerous tastes?” which — as cranch painted and gardened and made music (even composed it) — seemed so happy an explanation that for long afterward the cranch house was known to us as hobby–horse hall.
it will be seen that aunt lucilla’s reminiscences, though they sometimes provoked a passing amusement, were neither accurate nor illuminating. naturally, nobody paid much attention to them, and we had to content ourselves with regarding waldo cranch, hale and hearty and social as he still was, as an institution already venerable when the rest of us had first apprehended harpledon. we knew, of course, the chief points in the family history: that the cranches had been prosperous merchants for three centuries, and had intermarried with other prosperous families; that one of them, serving his business apprenticeship at malaga in colonial days, had brought back a spanish bride, to the bewilderment of harpledon; and that waldo cranch himself had spent a studious and wandering youth in europe. his spanish great-grandmother’s portrait still hung in the old house; and it was a long-standing joke at harpledon that the young cranch who went to malaga, where he presumably had his pick of spanish beauties, should have chosen so dour a specimen. the lady was a forbidding character on the canvas: very short and thickset, with a huge wig of black ringlets, a long harsh nose, and one shoulder perceptibly above the other. it was characteristic of aunt lucilla selwick that in mentioning this swart virago she always took the tone of elegy. “ah, poor thing, they say she never forgot the sunshine and orange blossoms, and pined off early, when her queer son calvert was hardly out of petticoats. a strange man calvert cranch was; but he married euphemia waldo of wood’s hole, the beauty, and had two sons, one exactly like euphemia, the other made in his own image. and they do say that one was so afraid of his own face that he went back to spain and died a monk — if you’ll believe it,” she always concluded with a puritan shudder.
this was all we knew of waldo cranch’s past; and he had been so long a part of harpledon that our curiosity seldom ranged beyond his coming there. he was our local ancestor; but it was a mark of his studied cordiality and his native tact that he never made us feel his priority. it was never he who embittered us with allusions to the picturesqueness of the old light-house before it was rebuilt, or the paintability of the vanished water-mill; he carried his distinction so far as to take harpledon itself for granted, carelessly, almost condescendingly — as if there had been rows and rows of them strung along the atlantic coast.
yet the cranch house was really something to brag about. architects and photographers had come in pursuit of it long before the diffused quaintness of harpledon made it the prey of the magazine illustrator. the cranch house was not quaint; it owed little to the happy irregularities of later additions, and needed no such help. foursquare and stern, built of a dark mountain granite (though all the other old houses in the place were of brick or wood), it stood at the far end of the green, where the elms were densest and the village street faded away between blueberry pastures and oakwoods.
a door with a white classical portico was the only eighteenth century addition. the house kept untouched its heavy slate roof, its low windows, its sober cornice and plain interior panelling — even the old box garden at the back, and the pagoda-roofed summer house, could not have been much later than the house. i have said that the latter owed little to later additions; yet some people thought the wing on the garden side was of more recent construction. if it was, its architect had respected the dimensions and detail of the original house, simply giving the wing one less story, and covering it with a lower-pitched roof. the learned thought that the kitchen and offices, and perhaps the slaves’ quarters, had originally been in this wing; they based their argument on the fact of there being no windows, but only blind arches, on the side toward the garden, waldo cranch said he didn’t know; he had found the wing just as it was now, with a big empty room on the ground floor, that he used for storing things, and a few low-studded bedchambers above. the house was so big that he didn’t need any of these rooms, and had never bothered about them. once, i remember, i thought him a little short with a fashionable boston architect who had insisted on mrs. durant’s bringing him to see the house, and who wanted to examine the windows on the farther, the invisible, side of the wing.
“certainly,” cranch had agreed. “but you see those windows look on the kitchen-court and the drying-ground. my old housekeeper and the faithful retainers generally sit there in the afternoons in hot weather, when their work is done, and they’ve been with me so long that i respect their habits. at some other hour, if you’ll come again — . you’re going back to boston tomorrow? so sorry! yes, of course, you can photograph the front as much as you like. it’s used to it.” and he showed out mrs. durant and her protege.
when he came back a frown still lingered on his handsome brows. “i’m getting sick of having this poor old house lionized. no one bothered about it or me when i first came back to live here,” he said. but a moment later he added, in his usual kindly tone: “after all, i suppose i ought to be pleased.”
if anyone could have soothed his annoyance, and even made it appear unreasonable, it was mrs. durant. the fact that it was to her he had betrayed his impatience struck us all, and caused me to remark, for the first time, that she was the only person at harpledon who was not afraid of him. yes; we all were, though he came and went among us with such a show of good-fellowship that it took this trifling incident to remind me of his real aloofness. not one of us but would have felt a slight chill at his tone to the boston architect; but then i doubt if any of us but mrs. durant would have dared to bring a stranger to the house.
mrs. durant was a widow who combined gray hair with a still-youthful face at a time when this happy union was less generally fashionable than now. she had come to harpledon among the earliest summer colonists, and had soon struck up a friendship with waldo cranch. at first harpledon was sure they would marry; then it became sure they wouldn’t; for a number of years now it had wondered why they hadn’t. these conjectures, of which the two themselves could hardly have been unaware, did not seem to trouble the even tenor of their friendship. they continued to meet as often as before, and mrs. durant continued to be the channel for transmitting any request or inquiry that the rest of us hesitated to put to cranch. “we know he won’t refuse you,” i once said to her; and i recall the half-lift of her dark brows above a pinched little smile. “perhaps,” i thought, “he has refused her — once.” if so, she had taken her failure gallantly, and cranch appeared to find an undiminished pleasure in her company. indeed, as the years went on their friendship grew closer; one would have said he was dependent on her if one could have pictured cranch as dependent on anybody. but whenever i tried to do this i was driven back to the fundamental fact of his isolation.
“he could get on well enough without any of us,” i thought to myself, wondering if this remoteness were inherited from the homesick spanish ancestress. yet i have seldom known a more superficially sociable man than cranch. he had many talents, none of which perhaps went as far as he had once confidently hoped; but at least he used them as links with his kind instead of letting them seclude him in their jealous hold. he was always eager to show his sketches, to read aloud his occasional articles in the lesser literary reviews, and above all to play his new compositions to the musically-minded among us; or rather, since “eager” is hardly the term to apply to his calm balanced manner, i should say that he was affably ready to show off his accomplishments. but then he may have regarded doing so as one of the social obligations: i had felt from the first that, whatever cranch did, he was always living up to some self-imposed and complicated standard. even his way of taking off his hat struck me as the result of more thought than most people give to the act; his very absence of flourish lent it an odd importance.
