Aliens. William McFee
intervals.
It was our custom, as we sat on our verandah during these afternoons, to watch the gradual appearance of familiar figures upon this path. We knew that a few moments after the whistle of the five-twenty had sounded at the grade-crossing down in the valley, certain neighbours who commuted to New York would infallibly rise into view on this path. There was Eckhardt, who lived at five hundred and nine, and spent the day on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. There was Williams, immaculate of costume, who designed automobile bodies and had an office on Broadway. There was Wederslen, the art-critic of the New York Daily News, a man whom all three of us held in peculiar abhorrence because he persisted in ignoring Mac's etchings. There was Arber, rather short of stature and rather long of lip, an Irishman who, miraculous to state, admired Burns. There was Confield, an Indianian from Logansport, who had been to Europe on a vacation tour (No. 67 Series C., Inclusive Fare $450) and invariably carried a grip plastered with hotel labels to prove it. We had met these men at tennis and at the Field Club, and in our English way esteemed them. They would come up, head-first, so to speak, out of the valley, revealing themselves step by step until they reached the street, when they would acknowledge our salutations by a lift of the hat and a wave of the evening paper, and pass on to their homes. They generally came, too, in the order in which I have given them. Eckhardt was always first, for he did not smoke, and the smoking-cars on the Erie Road were generally behind. And Confield, of course, was likely to be last, for he had his bag.
It was so on the day of which I speak. The deep bay of the locomotive came up on the still autumn air, and a cloud of dazzling white vapour rose like a balloon above the trees and drifted slowly into thin curls and feathers against the blue sky. It was, even in this trifling detail, a homelike landscape, for Bill had told us how, from the square hall window of High Wigborough, you could see the white puffs of invisible trains on the lonely little loopline from Wivenhoe to Brightlingsea.
A few moments, and one by one, and in the case of Wederslen and Williams arm-in-arm, our neighbours hove into view out of the valley, saluted and passed. We noted the unusually friendly attitude of the two. What was Williams up to? we wondered. We knew that Williams, the ignoble designer of tonneaux, laboured under the delusion that he could paint. Of course he could not paint—we were all agreed upon that—but he had shown us various compositions done during vacation time—blood-red boulders and glass-green seas. Was it possible that he was convincing Wederslen that he could paint? We shuddered for Art as we thought of it. Their wives were not friendly, though, so Bill asserted. We placed our hopes for Art on that.
For some moments after they were gone, and Confield with his bag had passed from view down the forest path, we tried to contemplate with stoical indifference the prospect of seeing Williams hailed by the servile and blandiloquent Wederslen as a genius. Had he not said of Hooker that "he was likely, at no distant date, to be seen in all the collections of note? His rare skill with the burin, his delicate feeling for nature——" and so on. Of course we all esteemed Hooker and were glad to see him make good; but really, as Bill remarked, "A man who said Hooker had a feeling for nature would say anything." It was like speaking of Antony Van Dyck's feeling for nature. Hooker's Dutch gardens and Italian ornamental waters, his cypresses like black spearheads, his eighteenth-century precisians with their flowered waistcoats and high insteps, were as far from nature as they could conveniently get. So much for Wederslen. We might have pursued the subject indefinitely had not our attention been drawn abruptly to the path.
He came uncertainly, this new figure, pausing when he was only half revealed, as though in doubt of his direction. He wore a Derby hat, and we saw over his arm a rubber mackintosh. Making up an obviously unsettled mind, he abjured the path and struck straight across towards us, with the evident intention of inquiring the way.
There are many conceits by which men may assert their individuality in dress, even in these days of stereotyped cut. They may adhere by habit or desire to the uniform of their class, they may preserve their anonymity even to a cuff-link, yet in some occult way we are apprised of their personal fancy; we see a last-remaining vestige of that high courage that made their ancestors clothe themselves in original and astonishing vestments. And it is this fortuitous difference, this tiny leak, one might say, of their personality, that stamps them finally as belonging to an immense mediocrity. It is this subtle and microscopic change, a sixteenth of an inch in the height of a collar, a line in the pattern of a scarf, a hair's breadth in the disposition of a crease, that the psychologists of the market-place call distinction, and labour industriously to supply.
But the man who now crossed the street and stood before us bore neither in his apparel nor in his lineaments a single detail by which he could be remembered. In everything, from his black medium-toed boots to his Derby hat of untarnished respectability, from his recently-shaven chin to his steady grey-blue eyes, he betrayed not the slightest caprice which would enable an observer to distinguish him from a particular type. It was as though he had been conscious of all this and had even sought to avoid the most trivial peculiarities. In height, in feature, in dress, he was so ordinary that he became extraordinary. His intention to be unnoticed was so obvious that it predicated, in my own mind at least, a character and possibly an occupation out of the common run.
"Can you tell me," he began in a voice that gave no hint of emotion, "can you tell me if this is Van Diemen's Avenue?"
"Yes," we said all together, studying him the while. "Yes, this is Van Diemen's Avenue."
"Thanks," he replied, and withdrew his foot from our bottom step.
It seemed as though he was about to depart and leave us guessing, when he spoke again.
"Perhaps you know the house I want," he said. "Carville's the name. I," he added as if in an afterthought, "am Mr. Carville." And he looked at us gravely, apparently unaware of the turmoil of curiosity which he had aroused.
Some one—I think it was Mac—pointed to the next house.
"That's it," we managed to say.
For a moment his eyes rested upon it casually.
"Thanks," he said again, and then, "Much obliged." He stepped back to the sidewalk and walked along to the house. None of us can recall exactly what happened when he approached his door, for we were all looking away across the valley, hastily rearranging our chaotic impressions. It is to be presumed that he knocked and was admitted. When we glanced round a few moments later he was gone.
"Great Scott!" murmured Mac, and looked at us in the growing dusk. Bill rose to get dinner.
Throughout the meal we refrained from any comment. Now that he had materialized, there was no reason, in the nature of things, why we should bother our heads any more about him. In the most natural way he had appeared and innocently demolished the photo-play romances we had constructed about him. It was a warning to us to avoid nonsense, in future, when discussing our neighbours. Miss Fraenkel had fared no better. Evidently he was not "held" for something with which his wife had "got away." We were all ridiculously wrong and ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And so we were; avoiding mention of him, and devoting our attention to the fish, for it was Friday, and we kept it religiously.
But as I drank my coffee and listened to that exquisitely mournful barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffmann, the whole episode took on a different aspect. I perceived, as Schopenhauer had perceived a hundred years before me, that our first judgment upon a man or principle is probably the most correct. I saw that I had been carried away by logic and numbers and had discounted my first impression. From the angle at which I now regarded Mr. Carville I could see that, after all, his case presented certain details which we could not as yet account for. Unfamiliar as I was with the life of the sea, I felt instinctively that men who had their business in great waters would bear upon their persons indications of their calling, some sign which would catch one's imagination and assist one to visualize their collective existence. But Mr. Carville had nothing. I passed in mental review the details of his appearance, his blue serge suit, his dark green tie, his greying moustache, clipped short in a fashion that might be American, English, French or German. His voice had been quiet and deferential, but by no means genteel; nor had it any hint of the roystering joviality of a sailor. More than anything else his gait, in its sedate unobtrusiveness,