The elders of the tribe of summer visitors nearly all professed1 to have “discovered” Harpledon. The only one of the number who never, to my knowledge, put forth2 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 antedate3 Waldo Cranch was an aunt of mine, old Miss Lucilla Selwick, who lived in the Selwick house, itself a stout4 relic5 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 persuasion6 could induce her to dissociate the image of this prodigious7 toy from her first sight of Waldo Cranch, most incurable8 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 evocation9 had a certain success. Some one told Cranch — Mrs. Durant I think it must have been — and I can still hear his hearty10 laugh.
“What could it have been that she saw?” Mrs. Durant questioned; and he responded gaily11: “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 afterward12 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 illuminating13. 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 apprehended14 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 apprenticeship15 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 dour16 a specimen17. The lady was a forbidding character on the canvas: very short and thickset, with a huge wig18 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 virago19 she always took the tone of elegy20. “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 monk21 — if you’ll believe it,” she always concluded with a Puritan shudder22.
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 tact23 that he never made us feel his priority. It was never he who embittered24 us with allusions25 to the picturesqueness26 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 brag27 about. Architects and photographers had come in pursuit of it long before the diffused28 quaintness29 of Harpledon made it the prey31 of the magazine illustrator. The Cranch house was not quaint30; it owed little to the happy irregularities of later additions, and needed no such help. Foursquare and stern, built of a dark mountain granite32 (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 densest33 and the village street faded away between blueberry pastures and oakwoods.
A door with a white classical portico34 was the only eighteenth century addition. The house kept untouched its heavy slate35 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 housekeeper36 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 kindly37 tone: “After all, I suppose I ought to be pleased.”
If anyone could have soothed38 his annoyance39, and even made it appear unreasonable40, it was Mrs. Durant. The fact that it was to her he had betrayed his impatience41 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 trifling42 incident to remind me of his real aloofness43. 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 colonists44, 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 conjectures45, of which the two themselves could hardly have been unaware46, did not seem to trouble the even tenor47 of their friendship. They continued to meet as often as before, and Mrs. Durant continued to be the channel for transmitting any request or inquiry48 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 gallantly49, 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 isolation50.
“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 sociable51 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 seclude52 him in their jealous hold. He was always eager to show his sketches53, to read aloud his occasional articles in the lesser54 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 accomplishments55. 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.
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professed
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| 公开声称的，伪称的，已立誓信教的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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antedate
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| vt.填早...的日期，早干，先干 | |
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relic
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| n.神圣的遗物，遗迹，纪念物 | |
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persuasion
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| n.劝说；说服；持有某种信仰的宗派 | |
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prodigious
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| adj.惊人的，奇妙的；异常的；巨大的；庞大的 | |
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incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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9
evocation
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| n. 引起，唤起 n. <古> 召唤，招魂 | |
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hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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gaily
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| adv.欢乐地，高兴地 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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illuminating
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| a.富于启发性的，有助阐明的 | |
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apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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apprenticeship
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| n.学徒身份；学徒期 | |
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dour
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| adj.冷酷的，严厉的；（岩石）嶙峋的；顽强不屈 | |
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specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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wig
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| n.假发 | |
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virago
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| n.悍妇 | |
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elegy
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| n.哀歌，挽歌 | |
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monk
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| n.和尚，僧侣，修道士 | |
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shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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tact
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| n.机敏，圆滑，得体 | |
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embittered
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| v.使怨恨，激怒( embitter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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allusions
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| 暗指，间接提到( allusion的名词复数 ) | |
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picturesqueness
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brag
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| v./n.吹牛，自夸；adj.第一流的 | |
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diffused
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| 散布的，普及的，扩散的 | |
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quaintness
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| n.离奇有趣，古怪的事物 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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granite
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| adj.花岗岩，花岗石 | |
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densest
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| 密集的( dense的最高级 )； 密度大的； 愚笨的； （信息量大得）难理解的 | |
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portico
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| n.柱廊，门廊 | |
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slate
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| n.板岩，石板，石片，石板色，候选人名单；adj.暗蓝灰色的，含板岩的；vt.用石板覆盖，痛打，提名，预订 | |
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housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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soothed
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| v.安慰( soothe的过去式和过去分词 )；抚慰；使舒服；减轻痛苦 | |
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annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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43
aloofness
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| 超然态度 | |
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44
colonists
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| n.殖民地开拓者，移民，殖民地居民( colonist的名词复数 ) | |
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conjectures
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| 推测，猜想( conjecture的名词复数 ) | |
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unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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tenor
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| n.男高音（歌手），次中音（乐器），要旨，大意 | |
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inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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gallantly
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| adv. 漂亮地，勇敢地，献殷勤地 | |
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50
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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sociable
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| adj.好交际的，友好的，合群的 | |
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52
seclude
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| vi.使隔离，使孤立，使隐退 | |
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53
sketches
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| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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accomplishments
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| n.造诣；完成( accomplishment的名词复数 )；技能；成绩；成就 | |
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