Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

Too American-1

Too American––––––––

Is it a real English cottage?” we asked the agent suspiciously, “or is it one that has been hastily aged to rent to Americans?”

It was the real thing: he vouched for it. It was right in the middle of England. The children could walk for miles in any direction without falling off the edge of England and getting wet.

“See here!” I said. “How many blocks from Scotland is it?”

“Blocks from Scotland?” He didn't understand.

“Yes,” I said, “blocks from Scotland.” I explained. My wife and I had been trying to get a real English accent. That was one of the things we had come to England for. We wanted to take it back with us and use it in Brooklyn, and we didn't want to get too near Scotland and get any Scottish dialect mixed up with it. It seemed that the cottage was quite a piece from Scotland. There was a castle not far away—the fifteenth castle on the right side as you go into England. When there wasn't any wind you didn't get a raw sea breeze or hear the ocean vessels whistle.

“Is it overgrown with ivy,” asked Marian, my wife.

Yes, it was ivy-covered. You could scarcely see it for ivy—ivy that was pulling the wall down, ivy as deep-rooted as the hereditary idea.

“Are the drains bad?” I asked.

They were. There would be no trouble on that score. What plumbing there was, was leaky. The roof leaked.

There was neither gas nor electricity, nor hot and cold water, nor anything else.

“I suppose the place is rather damp?” I said to the agent. “Is it chilly most of the time? Are the flues defective? Are the floors uneven? Is the place thoroughly uncomfortable and unsanitary and unhabitable in every particular?”

Yes, it had all these advantages. I was about to sign the lease when my wife plucked me by the sleeve in her impulsive American way. “Is there a bathroom?” she asked.

“My dear Mrs. Minever,” said the agent with dignity, “there is not. I can assure you that there are no conveniences of any kind. It is a real English cottage.”

I took the place. It was evening of the third day after we took possession that I discovered that we had been taken in. All the other Americans in that part of England were sitting out in front of their cottages trying to look as if they were accustomed to them, and we—my wife and Uncle Bainbridge and I—were sitting in front of ours trying to act as English as we knew how, when a voice hailed me.

“You are Americans, aren't you, sir?” said the voice.

The voice was anyhow; so we shamefacedly confessed.

“I thought you looked like it,” said the voice, and its owner came wavering toward us through the twilight.

“What makes you think we look like it?” I said, a trifle annoyed; for it had been my delusion that we had got ourselves to looking quite English—English enough, at least, so that no one could tell us in the faint light.

“Our clothes don't fit us, do they?” asked my wife nervously.

“They can't fit us,” said I; “they were made in London.”

I spoke rather sharply, I suppose. And as I was speaking, a most astonishing thing happened—the person I had been speaking to suddenly disappeared. He was, and then he was not! I sprang up, and I could tell from my wife's exclamation that she was startled, too. As for Uncle Bainbridge, he seldom gives way to emotion not directly connected with his meals or his money.

“Here, you!” I called out loudly, looking about me.

The figure came waveringly into view again.

“Where did you go to?” I demanded. “What do you mean by acting like that? Who are you, anyhow?”

“Please, sir,” said the wavery person, “don't speak so crosslike. It always makes me vanish. I can't help it, sir.”

He continued timidly:

“I heard a new American family had moved here and I dropped by to ask you, sir, do you need a ghost?”

“A ghost! Are you——”

“Yes, sir,” with a deprecating smile. “Only an American ghost; but one who would appreciate a situation all the more, sir, for that reason. I don't mind telling you that there's a feeling against us American ghosts here in England, and I've been out of a place for some time. Maybe you have noticed a similar feeling toward Americans? I'm sure, sir, you must have noticed a discrimination, and——”

“Don't say 'sir' all the time,” I told him.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he rejoined: “but it's a habit. I've tried very hard to fit myself to English ways and it's got to be second nature, sir. My voice I can't change; but my class—I was a barber in America, sir—my class I have learned. And,” he repeated rather vacantly, “I just dropped by to see if you wanted a ghost. Being fellow Americans, you know, I thought——” His voice trailed off into humble silence, and he stood twisting a shadowy hat round and round in his fingers.

“See here!” I said. “Should we have a ghost?”

“Beg pardon, sir, but how much rent do you pay?” I told him.

He answered politely but with decision, “Then, sir, in all fairness, you are entitled to a ghost with the place. It gives a certain tone, sir.”

“Why weren't we given one, then?” I asked

“Well——” he said, and paused. If a ghost can blush with embarrassment, he blushed. “You see,” he went on, making it as easy for me as he could, “English ghosts mostly object to haunting Americans, just as American ghosts find it difficult to get places in English houses and cottages. You see, sir, we are——”

He halted lamely, and then finished, “We're so American somehow, sir.”

“But we've been cheated!” I said.

“Yes, sir,” said the American ghost, “regularly had” He said it in quite an English manner, and I complimented him on his achievement. He smiled with a child's delight.

“Would I do?” he urged again, with a kind of timid insistence.

My sympathies were with him. “You don't mind children?” I said. “We have two.”

“No,” he replied; “leastways, if they aren't very rough, I am not much frightened of them.”

“I guess,” I began, “that——” I was about to say that he would do, when my wife interrupted me.

“We do not want a ghost at all,” she said firmly.

“But, my dear——”

She raised her eyebrows at me, and I was silent. After looking from one to the other of us wistfully for a moment, the applicant turned and drifted away, vanishing dejectedly when he reached the gate.

“You heard what he said, Henry?” said my wife as he disappeared. “It is lucky that you have me by you! Do you want to saddle yourself with an American ghost? For my part, I will have an English ghost or none!”

I realized that Marian was right; but I felt sorry for the ghost.

“What did—the fellow—want?” roared Uncle Bain-bridge, who is deaf, and brings out his words two or three at a time.

“Wanted to know—if we wanted—a ghost!” I roared in reply.

“Goat? Goat? Huh-huh!” shouted Uncle Bain-bridge. “No, sir! Get 'em a pony—and a cart—little cart! That's the best—thing—for the kids!”

Uncle Bainbridge is, in fact, so deaf that he is never bothered by the noises he makes when he eats. As a rule when you speak to him he first says, “How?” Then he produces a kind of telephone arrangement. He plugs one end into his ear, and shoves a black rubber disk at you. You talk against the disk, and when he disagrees with you he pulls the plug out of his ear to stop your foolish chatter, and snorts contemptuously. Once my wife remarked to me that Uncle Bainbridge's hearing might be better if he would only cut those bunches of long gray hair out of his ears. They annoy every one except Uncle Bainbridge a great deal. But the plug was in, after all, and he heard her, and asked one of the children in a terrible voice to fetch him the tin box he keeps his will in.

Uncle Bainbridge is my uncle. My wife reminds me of that every now and then. And he is rather hard to live with. But Marian, in spite of his little idiosyncrasies, has always been generous enough to wish to protect him from designing females only too ready to marry him for his money. So she encourages him to make his home with us. If he married at all, she preferred that he should marry her cousin, Miss Sophia Calderwod. That was also Miss Sophia's preference.

We did get a ghost, however, and a real English ghost. The discovery was mine. I was sitting in the room we called the library one night, alone with my pipe, when I heard a couple of raps in, on, about, or behind a large bookcase that stood diagonally across one corner. It was several days after we had refused the American applicant, and I had been thinking of him more or less, and wondering what sort of existence he led. One half the world doesn't know how the other half lives. I suppose my reflections had disposed my mind to psychic receptivity; for when I heard raps I said at once:

“Are there any good spirits in the room?” It is a formula I remembered from the days when I had been greatly interested in psychic research.

Rap! rap! came the answer from behind the bookcase.

I made a tour of the room, and satisfied myself that it was not a flapping curtain, or anything like that.

“Do you have a message for me?” I asked.

The answer was in the affirmative.

“What is it?”

There was a confused and rapid jumble of raps. I repeated the question with the same result.

“Can you materialize?”

The ghost rapped no.

Then it occurred to me that probably this was a ghost of the sort that can communicate with the visible world only through replying to such questions as can be answered by yes or no. There are a great many of these ghosts. Indeed, my experience in psychic research has led me to the conclusion that they are in the majority.

“Were you sent down by the agent to take this place?” I asked.

“No!” It is impossible to convey in print the suggestion of hauteur and offended dignity and righteous anger that the ghost managed to get into that single rap. I have never felt more rebuked in my life; I have never been made to feel more American.

“Sir or madam,” I said, letting the regret I felt be apparent in my voice, “I beg your pardon. If you please, I should like to know whose ghost you are. I will repeat the alphabet. You may rap when you wish me to stop at a letter. In that way you can spell out your information. Is that satisfactory?”

It was.

“Who are you?”

Slowly, and with the assured raps of one whose social position is defined, fixed, and secure in whatever state of existence she may chance to find herself, the ghost spelled out, “Lady Agatha Pelham.”

I hope I am not snobbish. Indeed, I think I have proved over and over again that I am not, by frankly confessing that I am an American. But at the same time I could not repress a little exclamation of pleasure at the fact that we were haunted by the ghost of a member of the English aristocracy. You may say what you will, but there is a certain something—a manner—an air—I scarcely know how to describe it, but it is there; it exists. In England, one meets it so often—I hope you take me.

My gratification must have revealed itself in my manner. Lady Agatha rapped out, if anything with more haughtiness than she had previously employed—yes, even with a touch of defiance:

“I was at one time a governess.”

I gradually learned that while her own family was as good as the Pelham family, Lady Agatha's parents had been in very reduced circumstances, and she had had to become a governess. When Sir Arthur Pelham had married her, his people acted very nasty. He hadn't any money, and they had wanted him to marry some. He got to treating her very badly before he died. And during his lifetime, and after it, Lady Agatha had had a very sad life indeed. Still, you know, she was an aristocrat. She made one feel that as she told her story bit by bit. For all this came very gradually, as the result of many conversations, and not at once. We speedily agreed upon a code, very similar to the Morse telegraphic code, and we still further abbreviated this, until our conversations, after a couple of weeks, got to be as rapid as that of a couple of telegraph operators chatting over the wires. I intimated that it must be rather rough on her to be haunting Americans, and she said that she had once lived in our cottage and liked it.