Laughing Last by Jane Abbott (fun to read .TXT) 📖

When Tillie Higgins saw Joe the baker’s cart pass her house she ran to her gate.

“He must be going to Eph Calkins or to Achsy Green’s. Now I wonder—” Joe rarely penetrated Sunset Lane with his goods; Tillie Higgins and old Mrs. Calkins did their own baking and Achsa Green’s pies were legend.

Old Mrs. Calkins, too, had seen the baker’s rickety cart approaching through the deep sand. At once she “happened” to be out tying up her yellow rambler.

“Got a letter for Achsy Green,” the baker called to her, leaning out of his cart.

“You don’t say! Not bad news, I hope?”

“Dunno. It’s a letter. Thought I’d bring it to her. Gettap, General. Pretty nice weather we’re havin’. Dry, though.”

“Tell Achsy I’ll drop over soon’s my bakin’s done.”

Tillie Higgins’ shadow fell across the yellow roses. Tillie was a little breathless; she had hurried over to catch what the baker was saying.

“A letter? For Achsy Green? You don’t say. Not bad news I hope,” she echoed.

“Joe dunno. Cal’late that’s why he came all this way with it. He’ll find out what’s in that letter if he can. Then the hul town’ll know. I told him to tell Achsy I’d drop over soon’s my pies are out of the oven. Better set down a spell and go along with me.”

But Tillie Higgins, with regret in her voice, explained that she had bread in her own oven. “If it’s news send Martie over with it. Hope it’s nothing bothersome. Achsy Green has ’nough as ’tis.”

This Sunset Lane was the farthest byway of the northernmost habitation of Cape Cod. Only a ridge of sandy dunes at its back door kept it from tumbling into the blue Atlantic. Provincetown folk called it “up p’int way” and “t’other end.” The more fanciful name had been given to it by a young Portuguese who had essayed to convert that corner of Provincetown into a summer colony. He had only succeeded, after long effort, in selling the Carpenter house nearest Commercial Street, then had abandoned his enterprise to open a combination garage and one-arm lunch room on Commercial Street.

Sunset Lane led nowhere, unless one counted the dunes; it was only wide enough for a cart to pass between the hedging rows of crowding wild flowers and the guardian willows; it was deep in sand. The rising tide of commercialism that was destroying the eighteenth-century dignity of the little town turned before it reached it. Few went there unless on definite purpose bound, excepting the artists who came singly and in groups to paint an old gray gable against an overtowering hill of sand or a scrap of blue sky between crumbling chimney pots and peaked roofs or old Mrs. Calkins’ hollyhocks that flanked the narrow byway like gaudy soldiers. Some sketched Jeremiah Higgins’ octagonal house, more of an oddity than a thing of grace yet ornamented with hand-wrought cornices and dignified by a figurehead from the prow of a ship long since split into driftwood; others went on to the end of the lane to catch upon their canvases the grace of Achsa’s Green’s old gray-shingled cottage with its low roof and white pilastered doorway.

With the changing years Achsa Green had become as quaint as her surroundings. Bent, and small, her face seared to the brown of a withered leaf from the hot suns and biting winds, her hands knotted with labor, her sparse hair twisted into a knob at the exact center of the back of her head, she was not lovely to look upon, yet from her eyes gleamed a spirit that knew no wear of age, that took its knocks upstanding, that suffered when others suffered but that spread a healing philosophy of God’s wisdom. For Achsa’s acceptance of God’s wisdom faltered only when she thought of Lavender.

Lavender was her brother Asabel’s only child. His mother had died a week after his birth, his father five months before. Achsa had taken the babe into her arms and had promised to “do” for him. And she had, with a fierce yearning, a compassion that hurt to her very soul. For Lavender was not like other children; his poor little body was sadly crippled. Achsa had at first refused to believe but that he might “grow straight,” then as the years convinced her that this could never be she consecrated herself to the single task of keeping him fed and clothed and happy and “out o’ mischief.” She clung staunchly to the hope that, if she prayed hard enough by night and believed by day that her boy was “straight,” sometime Lavender would be straight and all their little world—the Cape—would know.

There was nothing unusual in Dugald Allan of Rahway, N. J., finding Sunset Lane, for he was a fledgling artist and came there like other artists, but certainly a destiny that was kind toward old Achsa had something to do in the skirmish that ensued between Poker, Allan’s brindle bull-pup, and Nip and Tuck, Achsa Green’s two black cats. Tuck, caught sunning herself in the middle of the lane, had recognized a foe in Poker and had defended her stronghold; Poker, resenting her exclusiveness, had offered battle. Nip, never far from his sister, had promptly thrown himself into the fray. There had resulted a whirl of sand like a miniature cyclone from which young Allan rescued Poker just in time to save his brindle hide. Nip, unvanquished, had retreated to the very doorway that Allan had come to paint; Tuck fled to the shelter of a bed of tall sweet william.

“Dear! Dear!” cried Achsa Green in the open doorway. “Oh, my cats—”

“Nobody hurt. I’m sorry,” laughed young Allan. “I mean—Poker’s sorry. I don’t understand his rudeness. He never fights anyone smaller than himself. I’ve brought him up to a high sporting code. He must have misunderstood your cat’s attitude. He apologizes, humbly.”

Assured that her pets were unharmed the little old woman in the doorway had laughed gleefully. “Tuck’s sort o’ suspicious o’ strange folks, but I cal’late she didn’t take a good look at you! She must a looked at your dog first!”

“I thank you for the compliment. You see, we came quite peaceably to paint your doorway. You’re Miss Green, aren’t you? I’m sure that’s the door they told me about. And if your defiant animal will stand like that long enough for me to sketch it—I’d consider myself in luck—”

“I cal’late he will—if your dog’s ’round. Nip ain’t ’fraid of nothin’ ’slong as his own door’s at his back. Don’t know as anyone’s wanted to draw his picture before. He’ll be all set up for sure!”

Whipping out his pad Dugald Allan, with rapid strokes, had sketched the door and the cat—and Achsa Green. Later the picture he painted from the sketch hung in a Paris exhibition. When he showed the drawing to Achsa Green she had beamed with pleasure. “Why, that’s as like Nip as though it war a twin.” Nip, scenting the friendly atmosphere, had relaxed, stretched, yawned, waved a plumy tail toward poor Poker, watching fearfully from behind his master, and had stalked, disdainful, over to the sweet william to reassure the more timid Tuck.

Of course Achsa Green had wanted to show the “picture” to Lavender and Dugald Allan, eager to see the inside of the old house, had followed her into the low-ceilinged kitchen. And that had been ten years ago and each succeeding spring since had brought Dugald Allan back to Sunset Lane.

Achsa Green knew him only as “a nice appearin’ boy—not so much on looks,” with a kindly manner toward Lavender and an appreciation of the merits of Nip and Tuck. And inasmuch as Nip and Tuck made friendly advances to Poker and Lavender would do things for Dugald Allan that he would not do for anyone else, she finally consented to “let” her gable room to the young stranger and to board him as well. In settling the matter of board young Allan had had to deal with a pride as hard as the granite of the breakwall he could glimpse from the one window of his room; it had been only after he convinced Aunt Achsa that he could never feel like “one of the folks” until he contributed something to the upkeep of the family, that he had persuaded her to accept the sum of money which he considered barely repaid her trouble but which Aunt Achsa deemed a fortune.

Wisely young Allan paid the “board money” at the bank. He had come to know Aunt Achsa’s failings, how sometimes she stowed her scant earnings away and forgot its hiding place; how at other times she gave them to someone needier than herself. Many a one of her generation had told him that she was without “sense” where business was concerned. It was everyone’s wonder how she’d managed to feed two mouths, not counting the cats, with Lavender not earning so much as his salt. And gradually, as the summers passed, Allan took upon his shoulders other responsibilities; planning safe pastimes for Lavender; marketing, after which the kitchen cupboards groaned with food; persuading Aunt Achsa to let her rugs go and putter in her flowers while the summer lasted.

With the Cape standards of wealth it would not have made any difference to Achsa Green, anyway, or to anyone else, if they had known that the “nice-appearin’ boy” in the old flannels was the only son of Roderick Allan, President of the Allan Iron Works of Newark, New Jersey. Not half so much difference as the old flannels made to Dugald’s mother. The inclination on the part of their boy to be “queer,” for under that head they put all his predilections that differed from their ambitions—distressed his parents very much. The boy had “everything” and he didn’t care a rap about “anything”; they looked upon his spells of dreamy preoccupation as “loafing.” His father had an executive office in the iron works waiting for him when he finished college, a job at which any red-blooded young fellow would jump, and Dugald talked of painting. His mother had grieved that he would take no part in the social whirl that made up her existence, that he laughed at the creed of her “set,” scouted the class commandments by which she lived. When he expressed the intention of going on a tramp over Cape Cod she had encouraged the whim. She had believed that the discomforts of such an expedition would cure him of his “notions.” She had motored to Provincetown two summers before and she thought it a forlorn place; the hotels were impossible, the streets dusty and crowded, everything smelled fishy and one was always elbowing great foreign creatures in dirty oilskins and rubber boots.

Like many a mother she had been too busy living down to her rapidly accruing wealth to know the man her boy had grown to be. All her upbringing notwithstanding he was a simple soul with a sympathetic understanding of his fellow mortals; a quiet humor and a keen perception of beauty that abhorred the false or superficial, a brain that stifled in crowded places. He much preferred knocking elbows with men of homely labor to the crowded and law-breaking parties he came to Cape Cod to escape; he found among the fisherfolk, the old gray wharves, the sandy dunes, everlastingly swept with the clean breath of the Atlantic, a peace of mind and an inspiration he had never known elsewhere. The longing in his heart to paint that had been scarcely more than an urge, took definite and splendid shape. Someone else had the executive job in his father’s manufacturing plant.

That he grew to know that Aunt Achsa needed him and looked