The Red Book Magazine/Volume 9/Number 6/Elvira's Boys

IKE and I found that they had always been called “Elvira's boys” in Seriph Four Corners ever since, at sixteen, Elvira came home from boarding-school to take the reins of household government out of their hands and bring order out of what had been an amiable, amateur, domestic chaos. There were four of them all told, and they were about all that one girl could handle. First, there was her handsome father: elderly at thirty-seven, the best behaved of them all, for he was only absent minded, dreamy, and heedless. Her Grandfather Edmunds, perfectly unwrinkled and merely iron-gray at sixty, was a fairly decent lad, well trained and obedient. But her great-grand-uncles, Tom and Dick—mere infants of eighty-four—were as mischievous a pair of twins as a great-grand-niece was ever cursed with.

Elvira herself was as different from all the men of the family as you can possibly imagine. She was long and thin and silent, with parted hair, prim mouth, a copper-plate profile and appalling spectacles—the whole outfit, in fact, of the typical New England old maid. But the strangest thing about her was that, in a family like that, she had no more sense of humor than a fly. The rest of them were a shriek from dawn to dewy eve. They simply could not do anything that was natural, normal, obvious, or expected. They lived, in short, in that perilous debatable ground between hypo-sulphitism and actual insanity. And the things that happened in that house in a week would fill a book.

Her father was just a plain, bats-in-the-belfry dreamer. It lent a kind of excitement, when calling at the Edmunds place, to find he had lately transferred his interest in “soul-vibration” and “compound concentric curves” to chemistry. He had a laboratory leading right out of the living room, and he was always shutting himself in there to make experiments. Dynamite was his lay, at the time we made his acquaintance. I listened to talk that summer about “actual vacuum,” “feathered radius,” and “detonation,” until I thought I would explode, and in that household I did'nt [sic] know but what I would literally some day.

Grandfather Edmunds didn't bother her especially. He'd have tantrums sometimes and, in these peevish spells, he was likely to disappear, apparently right off the face of the globe, for a week or more. But his avocations were all harmless. His particular hobby was saving pennies. He loved a penny as if it was made out of priceless Crown Darby—can you understand it—nasty, dirty, smelly little things. He'd swap a bright nickel for three pennies any time. Of course all the children in Seriph Four Corners soon got on to that, and there was a constant procession of them calling on him—he was a source of regular income to many of them. And he actually had a trunk full of pennies, in his room—he showed it to me once.

No, Grandpa Edmunds wasn't such a trial but her great-grand-uncles. Well, if anybody ever went away from Seriph Four Corners, the first thing he said when he got off the train, on his return, was, “What have the Edmunds twins been up to lately?” And they had always been up to something—that was one tip on the village gossip that you could everlastingly depend upon to come out straight.

You see, they were the ones that had the money, and they took up with every kind of mechanical invention that came out, from safety razors—through all kinds of serve-while-you-wait phonographs, graphophones, and æolians—to automobiles. The auto had held them for quite a while but Elvira—poor, impracticable dear—was in mortal terror for fear they'd buy a flying-machine. They were always being brought home from places black and blue and sometimes all battered in. But there was no killing them—the least thing anybody expected was a fatality of any kind—they just seemed to lead a charmed life.

One summer, for instance, they had electric-fans put in the house, and one day Elvira came into the library just as Dick was stumping Tom to engage in a fistic encounter with a fan that had just gone into action. You can fancy the life that girl led—they said at the apothecary shop that she bought arnica by the hogshead, absorbent cotton by the bale, and court-plaster by the acre. And it is true that Mike and I never called there once that whole summer long that one of them wasn't hauled up for repairs.

In the middle of the summer it looked as if things might be a little easier for Elvira, for a distant relative in New Hampshire offered to come and help with the work for her board and keep. We all felt awfully glad for, with a nice, brisk, New England widow about—everybody said—Elvira would expand and irradiate snd come at last into her belated girlhood. Mike said he wanted to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the first natural smile bloomed in Elvira's set features. Well, it didn't bloom—far from it.

Mrs. Humphreys turned out to be the most gray-colored, fatuous, futile, heavily-wadded sack of humanity that we ever saw. Her figure had never known a stay on its development—it just bubbled, rippled, cascaded. She had the shape of a jelly-roll and the energy of a bran-mash And she had one of those flabby, plaintive voices—in short, she was a damp widow—just one more burden for poor Elvira.

There was one good came of her coming—Elvira's father took to reading the poems he composed, when he wasn't busy exploding himself, to her instead of to Elvira, who had as much feeling for poetry as Tom or Dick had for the fourth dimension. That must have been a relief for, though I never heard but one of Mr. Edmunds' poems, it took a whole hour and all the patience I had to see it through. You see, he wrote chemical poetry—odes to unknown, undiscovered gases and the eighteen-carat Golden Age they were going to bring about. He wrote out all the gases in chemical formulæ and Mike said he'd give up half his practice to see one published in “The Chemist's Fireside Exploder” verbatim from the manuscript. Well, just as we had all given Elvira up as a poor, pathetic, New England Andromeda, hopelessly imprisoned among a gang of sulphites, who should come on to the scene but Simeon Fullerton.

Simeon was the son of the minister in Melcher—a town about thirty miles away—and he came to Seriph Four Corner for a summer's rest. If you ever saw a man and a woman who were exact counterparts—Elvira Edmunds and Simeon Fullerton were those two. Just the same Rocky Mountain slope forehead—all knobby under parted hair—the same prominent eyes, thin nose, and a jaw like the arm of fate. And as for their mental affinity—well, the life-force made those two from the same mould and then broke it. It was a case of love at first sight, all right—can't you just see how Elvira must have longed for somebody like her—and a hurricane wooing—that is if you know what I mean. Of course you must remember that this happened in a prim New England town-and so you've got to reduce those words to their lowest terms. What I mean to say is that he started to woo right off the moment the revolver sounded, and got busy at once about the state of Elvira's soul. Soul! I should have thought it would have been exploded out of her long before this. But it really went swift for New England. He called at night twice a week and every afternoon they went out for a long walk, on which they took a bird-book and a pair of opera glasses.

Well, you never saw a wooing conducted under such difficulties. Elvira's father was no especial trouble—that is he didn't plague her intentionally—the only thing he did was to hand Simeon a stick of dynamite to hold one day. Simeon got quite gay with it, tossing it up and catching it for a few minutes before Mr. Edmunds came out of his state of congenial trance to tell him, mildly, that it was dynamite. Simeon turned green and then, in a manner that savored less of grace than careful precision, dropped it on a sofa cushion. Then he fell to the floor in silent prayer. It was after that that they took to conducting their wooing outdoors.

Grandpa Edmunds didn't bother her at all—he seemed really happy and contented, nowadays, and hadn't got peevish fora month. And Simeon won his heart by having his father send him all the pennies they took up on the contribution plate Sundays—oh! hundreds of them. But the twins simply made Elvira's and Simeon's life one long nightmare.

They played real Peck's-bad-boy tricks—cut the hammock-strings half through so that Simeon came sprawling over into fat Mrs. Humphreys' lap one day, just as she was drinking a scalding cup of tea. They put fly-paper round in the hall so that one night, when they came home late—the whole family had to get up and peel the nasty stuff off them. They peppered the front room so heavily with cayenne that Simeon had to go out of the courting business at a quarter past eight while poor Elvira simply sneezed her head off all night long. As for alarm clocks, Simeon couldn't be in the house a minute before one went off—once one “detonated” in his pocket on his way home. They invited Elvira and Simeon to go autoing with them constantly and one day they accepted. I wish you could have seen what they looked like when they came home—but, after all, they'd only run over a dog, two hens, and empty baby carriage.

But Simeon was just as nice and patient about it as it was possible for a man to be—that proved that he really was in love with Elvira, didn't it? I don't think he ever reached that point of magnanimity that he thought it was funny—but then it was impossible for him to think anything was funny—from Jonah to Lawson. I never saw him smile—he was just as blind on his humor side as Elvira, and nobody had ever heard Elvira laugh at anything. Of course Elvira liked him,as I have already intimated, because he presented such a contrast to that awful family of hers—he was exactly the kind of a bromide that she was.

She told me once that Simeon had never done a wrong or a foolish thing in his life. I believed it. She had never known what to expect from the boys, but she could always prophesy to a hair's breadth just what Simeon would say and how he would say it. I was inclined to laugh about it until she caught me off my guard once and got me to come and spend a day with her. After that I could see just how good Simeon looked to her. For when the twins weren't egging Dick's parrot to a little mill with Tom's rooster, they were feeding the æolian with Elvira's dress patterns to see what it would play. (Tom winked at me and said he expected a polonaise.) Oh, I understood then. Can you imagine how good the cyclone-cellar looks when the cyclone turns loose? Anyway, the wooing went on apace. In two months the engagement was out and in three they were married. Elvira was going to live in Melcher with Simeon's parents who were just dying to have “young company” in the house, while Mrs. Humphreys kept house for the boys.

The wedding was a home-wedding. It was the first thing that had been held in the house since Elvira's mother died. I don't know how everybody else felt but I quaked in my slippers. In the first place, Elvira's father kept looking towards the laboratory with a sort of puzzled, harassed look on his face, as if he were trying to remember whether he'd taken the dynamite out of the oven or not? Grandpa Edmunds kept chinking a handful of pennies that one of the children had slipped into his hand on arrival. And Tom and Dick—such lovely-looking old dears they were in their dress-up clothes—faces red as Baldwin apples coming out from under a shock of tousled silver hair that simply would stay tousled no matter what they did to it—and they had been known to try glue.

But they had such a look of potential mischief that I knew they had it in for Elvira. Of course they'd bought barrels of rice and tons of confetti—anybody would have forseen [sic] that—but who would have thought of fire-crackers, torpedoes, sky-rockets, fire-balloons—all going off and up and down in deafening confusion as soon as Elvira came down the stairs in her mission-furniture, going-away clothes? When the carriage drove up for them it was found that a flag pole just strung up and down with flags had been rigged on the top of it, bearing a lighted transparency. Simeon and Elvira drove three miles to the station in that thing—the twins, behind and in front and all over the road, in the automobile, tooting horns something scandalous.

I guess she didn't find it hard to forgive them—that was the strangest thing about Elvira, a part of her lack of sense of humor—she never seemed to hold up anything they did against them. Her attitude was exactly that of a keeper of a madhouse towards the inmates. And then, besides, they'd all been pretty nice to her in the matter of wedding presents—all money—it amounted to the pretty sum of fifteen hundred dollars, Elvira told Mike and me. She said that she and Simeon had decided to put it in the bank and not touch it until they just had to. You see there was no reason why they should buy furniture or anything, as they were going to live with Simeon's parents

Well, later, Elvira told Mike and me all about the month that followed and how everything that did happen came to happen. For the first week or two she had the loveliest time that a woman could possibly have. She said that the peace and quiet and order of that household was something heavenly—she just reveled in it, poor dear, bathed in it, breathed it, and drank it down. Mrs. Fullerton was a wonderful housekeeper. There was a place for everything and everything so inevitably in it that you got into the way of not using things, it caused such a disturbance. Then the days of the week were laid out like a Cook's excursion—there was a time for everything as well as a place. Life went like clockwork there and the machinery was all oiled.

Elvira said that it wasn't until about the third week that she began to miss something, and then she didn't know what the matter was and “doctored” on the sly. Then she found that she needed in her system something more than pills—something that she couldn't ever get in that house. She was simply deadly homesick for some noise and disorder. When she realized that the well-ordered calm and decency of that pious household got on her nerves to such an extent that it seemed sometimes when she went to bed as if she must open the window and yell out into the night. There never was an unexpected or unaccountable sound in that place, and as for worrying over anybody's welfare, it would have been inviting calamity. The plain truth of it was that Elvira was smothered in bromidism—just dying for one breath of the sulphitic atmosphere in which she'd been raised. She was too ashamed to tell Simeon anything about it, and as for his father and mother, she'd have suffered martyrdom before she'd put them next.

Well, one day after she'd been married three or four weeks, Simeon decided to go to Boston for a few days to attend a remarkable book-sale. No sooner had he got out of the house than it popped into Elvira's head that this would be a good time for her to make a flying visit home. She flew up to her room and dressed like a whirlwind—she was so afraid Simeon's mother would come back before she got off—wrote a note explaining her absence and dashed out of the house. She could only get a train, at that hour, that took her as far as Seriph Center, where the annual county fair was being held. But she knew she could get a carriage or a barge or something, easy enough, from there to Seriph Four Corners.

When she got out of the train she noticed a big crowd outside the grounds, very much engaged in watching the performances of a party going round on the roller-coaster. They'd just built the roller-coaster that year and Elvira had never seen one, so she stopped to watch it a moment. The car that was creating all the commotion had disappeared round a curve, but it came back again in a moment, and who should the occupants be but the Edmunds twins—of course you've guessed that. Elvira said it did her heart good to see the silvery heads of those two old sinners—although of course she was scared within an inch of her life. And well she might be, for Dick was standing up in the car, cracking a whip and Tom, who was nearly blind, was clinging to him like the proverbial drowning man to a straw.

I don't know what they did—Elvira doesn't know what they did—they don't know what they did—nobody knows what they did but they did something. Anyway, if you'll believe it, while Elvira stood there lamping, that car just flew off the coaster altogether. Get that picture? Then fancy yourself Elvira. Well, of course, it turned out they weren't killed—you simply can't kill them, even the law couldn't. And, with their usual luck, they landed on a heap of straw. But the car came down on top of them—knocked Tom senseless and opened Dick's scalp so generously that in about a moment he looked like a massacre. Well, of course, Elvira came to in an instant. She got to them through the crowd some way—Heaven only knows how—and took command of the situation at once. She revived Tom, who only said, as he opened his eyes, “Lucky you were here, Elvira,” in the most matter-of-fact voice. She always had been there—I suppose she always will be. She glued up the fissure in Dick's scalp with an ambidexterity that made the mere professional M.D. who evolved from the crowd, stand in useless, abject admiration. Then she got a carriage and started on the five-mile drive home.

The twins soon cheered up and told how it all happened. It seems that the roller-coaster stunt was all Tom's idea—a little joke that he had played on his brother, leading the poor half-blind thing to what he supposed was a permanent seat, and then enjoying his terror as they shot round through space. They were interrupted when they were nearly home by a long dull roar in the distance, but after a threefold, futile conjecture, they gave up trying to account for it and Elvira prodded the boys to an explicit account of their experiences since her wedding. Much of that narrative, I may add, is still classic in Seriph Four Corners

But the mysterious dull boom that they had just heard explained itself when they came in sight of the house and found the corner that had been her father's laboratory represented by a huge hole, the center of a circle of broken timber and glass and a few faint spirals of smoke. For a moment Elvira's heart stood still, but, before she could speak, the door opened and her father came limping down the path. His hair was burned and his mustache and eyebrows had disappeared utterly—he was torn, singed, black and blue, and bleeding—but he had his proper complement of limbs.

Well, Elvira got out and began hustling happily about in just her old way. In a jiffy she had water on to boil, medicine, plaster, absorbent cotton, arnica out in no time, and in less than half-an-hour, the three disabled creatures were sitting about on comfortable chairs, listening breathlessly to Mr. Edmunds' account of the explosion.

She had just started to get tea when a carriage drove up and Grandpa Edmunds and Mrs. Humphreys got out. Grandpa Edmunds looked sheepish and Mrs. Humphreys looked coquettish—that is about as coquettish as a bale of cotton. Well, the explanation of that juxtaposition was that they had just got married and had stopped to say good-by before going to Saugus, Mass., where Mrs. Humphreys had cousins, on their honeymoon. Nor was that the last.

In the morning—Mike and I had rushed over to see Elvira, interrupting them at breakfast—suddenly Simeon came walking in on them white as a ghost.

Elvira stood right up on her feet. “Simeon,” she said, “I can't go back with you to live in Melcher—I've got to stay here as long as I live and take care of these boys—I declare they're not fit to take care of themselves.”

“Elvira,” Simeon said, “you can live anywhere on God's foot-stool that you choose so long as you let me live with you. Elvira, I have come to ask your forgiveness—Elvira, I've got a confession to make. Elvira—I—I—Elvira, I took every cent of the fifteen hundred dollars we had in the bank and spent it all on an edition of the “Vinegar” Bible. He looked at her pleadingly.

And what do you think Elvira did? Why she ran straight into his arms and she burst into the longest, loudest, jolliest shriek of laughter I ever heard in my life.