XXX
“I HAVE here a small pitcher with blue and yellow flowers. How much am I offered? Fifty. Who’ll make it seventy-five? Seventy-five, who’ll make it a dollar? A dollar: who’ll make it a dollar and a quarter? A dollar and a quarter I have: who’ll make it a dollar-fifty? Anybody make it a dollar-fifty? Any bids? Sold to the lady in the brown hat for a dollar and a quarter.”
It is the very perfection of a summer’s day, and on a side street of the seacoast town and on the lawn of an old white house, a whole miscellany of household goods stands in the open air under two venerable elms. There are old benches covered with kitchen china and table china, a parlor organ, chairs of all kinds, some arranged in rows, boxes of old books, pictures stacked dustily, their backs to the observer, wooden bowls and egg beaters, and spool beds and horsehide trunks.
Auctions are a part of our adventure of the summer. We all go to them when they are held nearby, especially if we knew the family whose things are being auctioned off. We buy agricultural tools and implements at farm auctions, and at town auctions are liable to bid for what takes our fancy. Because we are an old, a conservative, and a thrifty people, and shipbuilders and seafarers withal, there is no telling here what an auction may bring to light. I have seen a small cottage on the coast produce a superbly carved ceremonial comb from the old Bight of Benin, and as for grandfathers’ clocks, they used to take them home in hayracks, carefully laid flat on a cushion of new hay.
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The weather being so fine, and the auction so well advertised, a sizable number of townspeople and summer people have gathered in the driveway and on the lawn. There is also a figure I have never known to be absent from any auction anywhere—somebody’s black and tan hound-dog seated not on his sitdown, but on the small of his back and trying perseveringly to scratch the bottom of his chin.
People are coming, people are going, small boys are moving about, the usual antique dealers are turning plates over, and buyers are carrying various purchases off to their parked cars. Going about in the throng, our summer people enliven the entire scene with modern color and gaiety. “How much am I offered?” “No, Mam, I wouldn’t say it was an antique.” “Don’t know what you’d call this—” Pause, and an answer from many ladies replying antiphonally, “It’s a tea-tray.” A spirited battle takes place over a “Boston rocker” painted black and gold with an oriental bird in golden scrollwork on the headboard.
In terms of town and village history, I know well what I am seeing. It is not only the last of some old household which is being scattered to the wolves, but the lares and penates of America’s early nineteenth century. This “omnium gatherum” of furniture is our 1840’s and 1850’s with the usual few—and bad—additions from the 1870’s plus something of the flowery-bowery world of the bouncing early 1900’s. Browsing among the pictures, I find that old-time favorite, “A Yard of Kittens,” and behind it a particularly good late eighteenth-century portrait-engraving of President George Washington seated in his Presidential chair.
“I think you’ll like what he’s putting up now,” says Elizabeth quickly. “Let’s go closer.”
“I now show you,” begins the auctioneer, and not only do I like what he holds up to view but I feel that it would take a charge of bears to separate me from it. It is a painting, a “genuine oil painting,” about twenty inches square and framed in a gay but not too gaudy gilt frame of the late eighties or the nineties.
Now pictures are my weakness, and this is a prize. Done by some rustic and inspired amateur about fifty or sixty years ago, it depicts in fine, bold color a scene full of dramatic action and bravura, the departure of a horsedrawn fire engine from the engine house. The back of the picture is the engine house archway full of golden light, and the foreground is the engine itself pouring out a long tress of wonderful smoke while two gigantic dapple-grey horses plunge forward in an artistic moment of outstretched necks and lashing hoofs. They are neither real horses nor rocking horses, but a combination of the two such as only a genius could achieve. A fireman in blue with handlebar moustaches leans forward to drive, and a second figure leans out from the fire box.
“Sold to Mr. Beston for three dollars and fifty cents!”
We have hung it in the winter kitchen beside the fireplace, and the horses have been promptly christened “Major” and “Prince.”
FARM DIARY
The early summer festival of bird song is now a thing of the past, and though we hear birds during the day, it is usually only a casual cheeping and twittering that we catch. Every once in a while, of course, we are still favored with an unexpected song. / Buyers from the lumber companies are visiting the farm country, purchasing what timber they can locate, and farmers who have scrub timber on the backroads have many of them made a deal. / Haying season in full swing, leaving dangling wisps of hay on the bushes beside the farm roads, and fields of dry, golden stubble which a first rain will color through with green. / Squash bugs under control, but some of these modern chemical replacements and strengthenings of the still scarce Rotenone can do things to one’s hide when they mix in with sweat. / Good swimming in the pond, a wonderful treat at the end of a hot day. / Just at twilight, on an evening of sea fog and wailing wind, discover a large porcupine in a poplar sapling, swaying to and fro in the chill, melancholy gusts. / Elizabeth says that a kind of bright pine-green seems to be the favorite color of the new cars on Route 1.
* * *
The other day, while looking at an album of good modern photographs of ancient Greek portrayals of the old classical life, many of them entirely “realistic,” I found myself wondering what the quality was in these ancient faces which is absent from ours. The modern face is a tired one, but it was not the absence of fatigue which interested me in these countenances of the past. They too must have known their times of weariness. What was it? Assurance? Acceptance? A sense of roots in an objective world?
I give no answer to my own question. Of one thing, however, I am sure: these people did not ask too much. Perhaps asking too much is an error more dangerous than we realize, a thing of strong poison to the human soul. Our world would do well for awhile to muse upon the serenity and happiness possible within our human and earthly limitations.