I take A country house:
This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost
her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city,
took a furnished house for the summer out of town,
and found herself involved in one of those mysterious
crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies
happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had
been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had
had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets
lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered
with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by
to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring
hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town,
where the mail comes three times a day, and the water
supply does not depend on a tank on the roof.
And then—the madness seized me. When
I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside,
I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I
show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences.
I have turned very gray—Liddy reminded
me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little
bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery,
instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be reminded
of unpleasant things and I snapped her off.
“No,” I said sharply, “I’m
not going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch,
either.”
Liddy’s nerves are gone, she says, since that
awful summer, but she has enough left, goodness knows!
And when she begins to go around with a lump in her
throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return
to Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance
of cheerfulness,—from which you may judge
that the summer there was anything but a success.
The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete—one
of them mentioned me but once, and then only as the
tenant at the time the thing happened—that
I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson,
the detective, said himself he could never have done
without me, although he gave me little enough credit,
in print.
I shall have to go back several years—thirteen,
to be exact—to start my story. At
that time my brother died, leaving me his two children.
Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven.
All the responsibilities of maternity were thrust
upon me suddenly; to perfect the profession of motherhood
requires precisely as many years as the child has
lived, like the man who started to carry the calf
and ended by walking along with the bull on his shoulders.
However, I did the best I could. When Gertrude
got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey asked for
a scarf-pin and put on long trousers—and
a wonderful help that was to the darning.—I
sent them away to good schools. After that, my
responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months
every summer in which to replenish their wardrobes,
look over their lists of acquaintances, and generally
to take my foster-motherhood out of its nine months’
retirement in camphor.
