The Green Dolphin
For it was safe to assume something was up. When affairs went
prosperously Sarah never wrote at all.
This time a heavier thunderbolt than usual assailed her. Teddie had
had a bad fall and his mother must take him to Boston for an X-ray
examination. Could Althea come in the meantime and keep house for the
family? There was no one else she dared leave the children with. Surely
in such an emergency she could be spared, especially as she would not
be long away.
Asaph grunted ungraciously. How ready some people were to settle
everybody else’s affairs for them! Nevertheless he was a tender-hearted
man and of all the Tyler brood Teddie was his favorite. The present
catastrophe certainly justified Althea’s being summoned, and under
ordinary conditions he would have urged her to go and do what she
could. But just now the conditions were not ordinary. Althea herself
must realize that. Was it not she who was responsible for them?
Vividly Asaph called to mind the fatal evening when the adventure of
the Green Dolphin had first been presented to him. He and his wife had
been sitting together in the March twilight, he absorbed in the Bunker
Hill oration and she silent over her knitting. The click of her needles
and the faraway sobbing of the surf were the only sounds in the room,
and he had thought how delightful the stillness was. Often through
the winter they had sat thus, and his serenity had been so profound
it had not occurred to him that Althea was not finding their wordless
companionship as satisfying as did he.
Then suddenly, without warning of any sort, she had burst out:
“I wish to goodness, Asaph, this house stood on the main road!”
Startled not alone by the words, but by an unusual quality in her
voice, her husband crashed down from the heights amid which he was
soaring.
“W--hat?” stammered he.
“I say,” repeated Althea, “that I wish to mercy we lived on the main
road; then there’d be some passin’.”
“It wouldn’t be so quiet,” objected the man uncomprehendingly.
“I don’t want it so quiet,” was the sharp answer. “It’s all very well
for you to have it still, readin’ as you do day in an’ day out. But I’d
like somethin’ goin on--like to see folks an’ talk to ’em.”
Aghast, Asaph stared.
“Why, Althea, I never dreamed but you were contented enough.”
“I am contented,” returned his wife. “Nevertheless, that doesn’t
prevent me from wantin’ to get a look at my kind once in a while, does
it? A woman enjoys a bit of gossip an’ an occasional peep at what the
rest of the world is doin’.”
“My soul an’ body!” was all her spouse contrived to ejaculate.
“It ain’t no crime as I see,” went on Althea, gaining eloquence now
that the subject was fairly launched. “We ain’t all made alike. You
could sit in one spot an’ read that talk of Daniel Webster’s till
the chair dropped to pieces under you; but I’m different. I like
sociability, meetin’ people an’ hearin’ what they have to say. I can
put up with a certain amount of quiet; but when it nears spring I begin
to long for some sound besides the boomin’ of the sea.”
“My soul!” reiterated Asaph under his breath.
“Now if we were on the main road there’d be folks goin’ by from April
till October--Enoch Morton in his fish cart, the butcher, an’ Ephraim
Wise with the mail.”
“Humph!”
“They’d be better’n nothin’,” asserted Althea, instantly on the
defensive. “Besides, there’d be the summer people--streams of ’em in
their automobiles.”
“Precious little good they’d do you, shootin’ by as if the devil was at
their heels,” sniffed the man with sarcasm.
“They’d do me good if I was on the main road,” was the significant
response.
“I don’t see how.”
“I’d open a tea-room. Other women do it an’ make money hand over fist.”
“But you ain’t in want of money, are you?” inquired her husband,
concern evident in his face. “I thought--”
“No, Asaph,” answered Althea more gently. “No, I don’t lack anything.
You’ve been very generous an’ given me whatever I needed ever since we
were married. ’Tain’t that. It’s just that I’d like the fun of havin’
folks comin’ an’ goin’ here same’s they do over at Mattie Bearse’s
Yaller Fish. Why, there’s days when Mattie has much as a dozen or
fifteen people at the house drinkin’ tea an’ laughin’, talkin’, an’
havin’ a good time. It’s most like livin’ in a hotel.”
Without intending to, Asaph shuddered.
“Mattie has opened up every room in the house; an’ she’s usin’ her pink
lustre china as well as her gold banded set. An’ what do you think? The
first day she had the lustre out some lady from the city wanted to buy
it right off the table--offered fifty dollars for it an’ would hardly
take no for an answer. Of course Mattie didn’t sell it. She told me
she was afraid the woman warn’t right in her head to set such a price
on that old stuff. Moreover, Mattie warn’t anxious to part with it,
it havin’ belonged to her Great-aunt Experience Howland. Still, it
was gratifyin’ to have outsiders take a fancy to it. It gave Mattie
somethin’ to talk of for days.”
“An’ you’d like to have a parcel of strangers come here an’ try to buy
the dishes you were eatin’ off of?”
Althea laughed good-humoredly, showing her strong white teeth.
“Yes, I would,” admitted she without a blush. “It would amuse me same’s
readin’ Daniel Webster amuses you. This ain’t the first time I’ve
thought of it. All winter I’ve been kinder drawin’ plans in my head as
to how I could manage. It’s been most entertainin’. While you were busy
with that long history of the Civil War, I’ve been doin’ it.”
Asaph opened his mouth; then uttering only a faint gasp closed it again.
It was incredible that anyone presenting the peaceful appearance Althea
had displayed should in the meantime have been engaged in so monstrous
a mental mutiny. While in imagination he was marching through the South
with Sheridan, he had not thought to question what she was doing. Had
he speculated at all on her pursuits he would have rated her as being
intent on fashioning socks to ward off the winter’s cold. And all the
time her mind had been on teacups, gossips, and silliness! He could
scarcely credit her with such frivolity.
“Yes,” continued his wife, shamelessly, “I planned it all out just how
we could arrange tables on the screened-in porch, the sittin’-room an’
the dinin’ room. There’d be space enough to do things real tasty.”
As with rapidity she sketched her plans Asaph became wordless before
the magnitude of her conception. The screened-in porch--his favorite
refuge on a July day! And the sitting room where he always took his
afternoon nap! Of course the possibility of these quiet corners being
infested by unending tea parties was preposterous, but the thought
nevertheless disquieted him.
Meanwhile, mistaking the trend of his silence Althea hastened on:
“There’s quite a few broken chairs in the shed that you could fix up
an’ paint--old ladder-backed things that came from Provincetown along
with my other stuff. Mattie says folks like ’em an’ they’d save buyin’
more. I’ve figgered that for a hundred dollars, or a hundred an’ fifty
at most, we could get all that would be necessary to make a start.”
Spellbound the man listened.
Why, she actually spoke as if the enterprise were a practical scheme
and as if she meant to drag him into it with her! The absurdity of it!
“You know I’ve never touched a penny of the money that belonged to
Mother,” she went on, “though you’ve urged me times without number to
spend it for somethin’ I’d really take pleasure in doin’. Up to the
minute I’ve never found the thing I wanted to use it for. But now I’ve
decided I’d like to lay out part of it startin’ the Green Dolphin.”
“The--the--what?”
“The Green Dolphin,” repeated Althea, impatient at his stupidity. “A
tea-room has to have a name, you know. They all do. Mattie’s is the
Yaller Fish an’ the one over at Sawyer’s Falls is the Blue Whale.”
“An’ darn silly names they are,” retorted Asaph, his scientific
mind offended by the inaccuracy of the terms and his irritation
accumulating. “There ain’t any such thing as a blue whale.”
“That’s just it!” agreed the undaunted Althea. “Of course there ain’t.
But that’s no hinderance. Folks like queer names. The queerer they are
the better. They attract attention.”
“An’ you think a Green Dolphin would catch people’s eyes?”
“Yes, I do,” nodded his wife with spirit. “The very sound of one would
set me wonderin’; wouldn’t it you? We’d have to do more, though, than
just call the place that. We’d have to have a carved dolphin over the
door an’ mebbe one in the front yard.”
Of what avail were feeble protests before such a perfectly constructed
plot? As each new horror his wife’s fertile brain had conceived passed
before Asaph’s vision the blood froze in his veins. For behind the
fantasy lay the terrifying realization that this embryonic monster,
the Dolphin, would certainly be born. No power could prevent it. It
was already alive, the child of Althea’s imaginings, and her face was
alight with the joy of its coming. To strangle it before its birth
would break her heart.
“I don’t see--” began he helplessly.
“You don’t need to, dear,” came that reassuring voice that up to now
had meant comfort and consolation. “Just leave the whole thing to me.
You needn’t worry about any of it. I’ve thought out every detail an’
will tell you exactly what I want done. All you’ll have to do will be
to do it.”
And that was the way the Green Dolphin came into being!
Opposition was futile. As soon object to the sunrise which despite your
languor steadily crimsons the east; or the setting of the young moon
which for all your amorous pleading drops like a bow of silver into
the blackness of the night. Althea, alert and armed to vanquish every
difficulty, mowed to earth each obstacle as soon as it was presented.
The only mountain Asaph failed to put in her path was his personal
detestation of the whole undertaking; his hatred of tea-rooms in
general and this one in particular; his repugnance at having his peace
and privacy invaded--selfish reasons when his just mind came to analyze
them.
If he preferred solitude what was it after all but a matter of taste?
Althea apparently liked sociability and for months had been deprived of
it. Was it not fair that she should now have her fling?
As inch by inch he surrendered his ground the Green Dolphin took on
bodily form. Tables were purchased, and curbing inward rebellion he
painted them emerald as the caverns of the sea. He repaired decrepit
chairs and tinted them a like hue, after which Althea stencilled
dolphins on their backs. She stopped at nothing. The dolphin pattern
was all cut and ready, and as she flew to fetch it there seeped into
his consciousness the realization that for a long time she must have
been preparing these accessories against the great day when her dream
would be fulfilled. Had he vetoed the project his veto would have been
overruled. The Dolphin was to be and acquiescence to its existence was
merely an empty courtesy.
Hence preparations for the adventure went steadily onward.
“I don’t see how you’re goin’ to get folks to your tea drinkin’,” he
grumbled one day. “We’re so far off the highway nobody’ll know there’s
a tea-shop within miles.”
“Oh, yes, they will,” contradicted Althea cheerfully. “I’ve thought
that all out an’ prepared for it.”
Into the shed she bustled to return a moment later with a good-sized
wooden dolphin set on the top of a bar of steel. As she held the object
up to his astonished gaze she murmured modestly:
“It seemed to me I did a rather neat job.”
Words failed Asaph. Was there any contingency she had not foreseen?
“Say,” interrogated he, when at last he summoned breath to speak, “how