Flood Tide

Willie Spence was a trial. Not that his personality rasped society at large. On the contrary his neighbors cherished toward the little old man, with his short-sighted blue eyes and his appealing smile, an affection peculiarly tender; and if they sometimes were wont to observe that although Willie possessed some common sense he was blessed with uncommon little of it, the observation was facetiously uttered and was offered with no malicious intent.

In fact had one scoured Wilton from end to end it would have been difficult to unearth a single individual who bore enmity toward the owner of the silver-gray cottage on the Harbor Road. It was impossible to talk ten seconds with Willie Spence and not be won by his kindliness, his optimism, his sympathy, and his honesty. Willie probably could not have dissembled had he tried, and fortunately his life was of so simple and transparent a trend that little lay hidden beneath its crystalline exterior. What he was he was. When baffled by phenomena he would scratch his thin locks and with a smile of endearing candor frankly admit, "I dunno." When, on the other hand, he knew himself to be master of a debated fact, no power under heaven could shake the tenacity with which he clung to his beliefs. There was never any compromise with truth on Willie's part. A thing was so or it was not.

This reputation for veracity, linked as it was with an ingenuous good will toward all mankind, had earned for Willie Spence such universal esteem and tenderness that whenever the stooping figure with its ruddy cheeks, soft white hair, and gentle smile made its appearance on the sandy roads of the hamlet, it was hailed on all sides with the loving and indulgent greetings of the inhabitants of the village.

Even Celestina Morton, who kept house for him and who might well have lost patience at his defiance of domestic routine, worshipped the very soil his foot touched. There was, of course, no denying that Willie's disregard for the meal hour had become what she termed "chronical" and severely taxed her forbearance; or that since she was a creature of human limitations she did at times protest when the chowder stood forgotten in the tureen until it was of Arctic temperature; nor had she ever acquired the grace of spirit to amiably view freshly baked popovers shrivel neglected into nothingness. Try as she would to curb her tongue, under such circumstances, she occasionally would burst out:

"I do wish, Willie Spence, you'd quit your dreamin' an' come to dinner."

For answer Willie would rise hastily and stand arrested, a bit of string in one hand and the hammer in the other, and peering reproachfully over the top of his steel-bowed spectacles would reply:

"Law, Tiny! You wouldn't begretch me my dreams, would you? They're about all I've got. If it warn't fur the things I dream I wouldn't have nothin'."

The wistfulness in the sensitive face would instantly transform Celestina's irritation into sympathy and cause her to respond:

"Nonsense, Willie! What are you talkin' about? Ain't you got more friends than anybody in this town? Nobody's poor so long as he has good friends."

"Oh, 'taint bein' poor I mind," laughed Willie, now quite himself again. "It's knowin' nothin' an' bein' nothin' that discourages me. If I'd only had the chance to learn somethin' when I was a youngster I wouldn't have to be goin' it blind now like I do. There's times, Celestina," added the man solemnly, "when I really believe I've got stuff inside me that's worth while if only I knew what to do with it."

"Pshaw! Ain't you usin' what's inside you all the time to help the folks of this town out of their troubles? I'd like to know how they'd get along if it warn't fur you. Ain't you doctorin' an' fixin' up things for the whole of Cape Cod from one end to the other, day in and day out? I call that amountin' to somethin' in the world if you don't."

Willie paused thoughtfully.

"I do do quite a batch of tinkerin', that's true," admitted he, brightening, "an' I'm right down glad to do it, too. Don't think I ain't. Still, I can't help knowin' there's better ways to go at it than blunderin' along as I have to, an' sometimes I can't help wishin' I knew what the right way is. There must be folks that know how to do in half the time what I do by makeshift an' fussin'. Sometimes it seems a pity there never was anybody to steer me into findin' out the kind of things I've always wanted to know."

Celestina began to rock nervously.

Being of New England fiber, and classing as morbid all forms of introspection, she always so dreaded to have the conversation drift into a reflective channel that whenever she found Willie indulging in reveries she was wont to rout him out of them, tartly reproaching herself for having even indirectly been the cause of stirrin' him up.

"Next time I'll set the chowder back on the stove an' say nothin'," she would vow inwardly. "I'd much better have waited 'til his dream was over an' done with. S'pose I am put out a bit--'twon't hurt me. If I don't care enough for Willie to do somethin' for him once in a while, good as he's always been to me, I'd oughter be ashamed of myself."

Hence it is easily seen that neither to Wilton in general nor to Celestina in particular was Willie Spence a trial.

No, it was to himself that Willie was the torment. "I plague myself 'most to death, Tiny," he would not infrequently confess when the two sat together at dusk in the little room that looked out on the reach of blue sea. "It's gettin' all these idees that drives me distracted. 'Tain't that I go huntin' 'em; they come to me, hittin' me broadside like as if they'd been shot out of a gun. There's times," ambled on the quiet voice, "when they'll wake me out of a sound sleep an' give me no peace 'til I've got up and 'tended to 'em. That notion of hitchin' a string to the slide in the stove door so'st you could open the draught without stirrin' out of your chair--that took me in the night. There warn't no waitin' 'til mornin'! Long ago I learned that. Once the idee has a-holt of me there's nothin' to do but haul myself out of bed, even if it's midnight an' colder'n the devil, an' try out that notion."

"The plan was a good one; it's saved lots of steps," put in Celestina.

"It had to be done, Tiny," Willie answered simply. "That's all there was to it. Good or bad, I had to carry it to a finish if I didn't sleep another wink that night."

The assertion was true; Celestina could vouch for that. After ten years of residence in the gray cottage she had become too completely inured to hearing the muffled sound of saw and hammer during the wee small hours of the night to question the verity of the statement. Therefore she was quite ready to agree that there was no peace for Willie, or herself either, until the particular burst of genius that assailed him had been transformed from a mirage of the imagination to the more tangible form of tacks and strings.

For strings played a very vital part in Willie Spence's inspirational world. Indeed, when Celestina had first come to the weathered cottage on the bluff to keep house for the lonely little bachelor and had discovered that cottage to be one gigantic spider's web, her initial impression was that strings played far too important a part in the household. What a labyrinthine entanglement the dwelling was! Had a mammoth silkworm woven his airy filaments within its interior, the effect could scarcely have been more grotesque.

Strings stretched from the back door, across the kitchen and through the hallway, and disappeared up the stairs into Willie's bedroom, where one pull of a cord lifted the iron latch to admit Oliver Goldsmith, the Maltese cat, whenever he rattled for entrance. There was a string that hoisted and lowered the coal hod from the cellar through a square hole in the kitchen floor, thereby saving one the fatigue of tugging it up the stairs.

"A coal hod is such an infernal tote to tote!" Willie would explain to his listeners.

Then there was a string which in like manner swung the wood box into place. Other strings opened and closed the kitchen windows, unfastened the front gate, rang a bell in Celestina's room, and whisked Willie's slippers forth from their hiding place beneath the stairs; not to mention myriad red, blue, green, yellow, and purple strings that had their goals in the ice chest, the pump, the letter box, and the storm door, and in connection with which objects they silently performed mystic benefactions.

Probably, however, the most significant string of all was that of stout twine that reached from Willie's shop to the home of Janoah Eldridge, two fields beyond, just at the junction of the Belleport and Harbor roads. This string not only linked the two cottages but sustained upon its taut line a small wooden box that could be pulled back and forth at will and convey from one abode to the other not only written communications but also such diminutive articles as pipes, tobacco, spectacles, balls of string, boxes of tacks, and even tools of moderate weight. By means of this primitive special delivery service Jan Eldridge could be summoned posthaste whenever an especially luminous inspiration flashed upon Willie's intellect and could assist in helping to make the dream a reality.

For it was always through Willie's plastic imagination that these creative visions flitted. In all his seventy years Jan had been beset by only one outburst of genius and that had pertained to whisking an extra blanket over himself when he was cold at night. How much pleasanter to lie placidly between the sheets and have the blanket miraculously appear without the chill and discomfort of arising to fetch it, he argued! But alas! the magic spell had failed to work. Instead the strings had wrenched the corners from the age-worn covering, thereby arousing Mrs. Eldridge's ire. Moreover, although Jan had not confessed it at the time, the blanket while in process of locomotion had for some unfathomable reason dragged in its wake all the other bedclothes, freeing them from their moorings and submerging his head in a smothering weight of disorganized sheets and counterpanes only to leave his poor shivering body a prey to the unfriendly elements. An attack of lumbago that rendered him helpless from January until March followed and had decided Jan that inventors were born, not made. Thereafter he had been content to abandon the realm of research to his comrade and allow Willie to furnish the inspiration for further creative ventures. Nevertheless his retirement from the spheres of discovery did not prevent him from zealously assisting in the mechanical details that rendered Willie's schemes material. Jan not only possessed a far more practical type of mind than did his friend but he was also a more skilful workman and therefore in the carrying out of any plan his aid was indispensable. He was, moreover, content to be the lesser power, looking up to Willie's ability with admiration and asserting with unfeigned sincerity to every one he met that Willie Spence had not only been born with the injun but he had the newity to go with it.