By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 24, 1932.
“Jimmie,” I said to the artist, “we go around having goofy adventures. But we never do anybody good. We ought to do good. We ought to perform some deed of kindness.”
“The next issue is the Christmas issue,” said Jim Frise. “Couldn’t we think up some kindly thing to do and write about that?”
I bet you,” I said, “there isn’t a house in this city, no, not a house in this country, maybe in all the world, these days, that is not in need of some kindly act. Rich house, poor house.”
“We could go,” said Jim, “to any house in any street and we could knock on the door and say to the person that comes to the door, ‘Mister, is there anything we can do for you?’ And there would be something, some trouble, some need.”
“Let’s do that,” I cried.
“I like the country better,” said Jim. “We have all our adventures in the city. Let’s go down to the Union station to-day at noon. Let’s just walk down into the station and see what train is leaving next. We’ll get on that train without buying tickets.”
“This is good,” said I.
“And when the conductor comes along,” went on Jimmie, “we will ask him what stations he’s got. And he will name the stations. And the one we like the sound of best, that isn’t too far away from Toronto, we’ll buy tickets for.”
“Swell,” said I.
“Then we’ll get off at that station and hire a cutter1,” said Jim. “I haven’t had a cutter ride for fifteen years. And in the cutter we will drive out into the country. And then we’ll call at a farmhouse, any old farmhouse. And we will go up to the door and ask them if there is anything we can do for them.”
“It’ll fill in an afternoon,” said I.
So we went down to the Union station and in the big waiting-room there was only one gate open. It was the train for Aston, Palmerston, Durham, leaving in three minutes.
We rushed up to the gate and told the gateman we would get our tickets on board as we had very important business and daren’t miss the train.
We got into the smoking end of a car and when the conductor came along we asked him what stations he had about thirty or forty miles out.
He recited them, Georgetown, Moorefield, Alma, Ethel, Maryvale, Elmwood, and the one we liked the best was Maryvale.
“Maryvale!” said Jimmie. “That’s the place.”
We took singles to Maryvale and settled down to a nice debate on Mr. Bennett2 and the tariff with the other ten gentlemen in the smoking compartment.
“Maryvale,” droned the brakeman, just about the time we had solved the problems of Canada. And Jim and I were the only customers for a little station, three brick houses, seven frame houses, one store, one gas pump and a church, which was Maryvale, with not a living soul in sight, nestling in the snow of a gray and pleasant afternoon.
The station agent told us we could rent a cutter and a young man to drive it for us at the frame house next to the store.
“Eddie is his name,” said the agent.
“Anything We Can Do For You?”
Through the snow we walked to the store, while the three brick houses, the seven frame houses and the church looked politely at us, with never a human soul in sight, but soft smoke coming from all the chimneys.
Eddie was a silent young man in a ragged coon coat, who quickly hitched up a tall brown horse to an old cutter.
“Where do you wish to go?” asked Eddie.
“Out this road a piece,” said Jimmie, pointing to a snowy road that led over a hill between snake fences and cedar trees. We piled in beside Eddie, under horsey blankets, and away we went, with a jerk and a jolt, while the sleigh-bells jangled and we had all the white wide world to ourselves.
Eddie leaned out the driving side, silently.
“How far should we go?” I asked Jim.
“Let’s go a couple of miles before we start looking,” replied Jim. “Isn’t this swell?”
It was swell. We saw farmhouses and clustered barns in the valleys. Black and white collies ran out at us. Going between two walls of cedar trees we saw a rabbit skip across the road. Jangle, jangle went the sleigh-bells in the quiet and the clean air went right down into us.
Up a slow hill the horse plodded and the sleigh jerked and slewed. Out on a lonely hilltop we came. We approached a gray brick farmhouse with scalloped wooden trimmings on its gables and along its eaves.
Its buildings were burdened with snow. There were no tracks into its lane. Its doors were closed. Its blinds down. No animals stood steaming in its barnyards.
“Who lives there?” asked Jim, suddenly.
“Robinsons,” said Eddie.
“Robertson or Robinson?” asked Jim.
“I don’t know, everybody calls it Robinson,” said Eddie.
“Turn in here,” said Jim.
No windows moved as we jangled up the lane. No doors opened as we pulled up in the door yard.
“Wait for us,” said Jim to Eddie. And we stepped out into the snow.
We rapped on the back door. After a long moment the door opened.
An elderly man looked out at us, in his shirt-sleeves. He was in his sock feet and he held a newspaper in his hand. His face was lined, tired, and a film of silver stubble covered his chin and cheeks.
“Mr. Robinson?” asked Jim.
“Yes.”
“Could we speak to you a minute?”
The old man opened the door wider and let us pass into his kitchen. It smelled of sour milk. Of warmth, of sweetness and age and comfort.
Mr. Robinson shut the door, laid down his newspaper and stood while we stood.
“Well?” said he.
“Mr. Robinson,” said I, “is there anything we can do for you?”
He looked at us steadily. He looked at me and then he looked at Jim.
“How do you mean?” he asked, uncertainly.
“We’re from Toronto,” I explained. “We came out here to ask you if there was any thing we could do for you?”
There Was Something After All
He stared heavily at us.
“Do you know my brother in Toronto? Have you come from him?”
“No, we don’t know your brother and we don’t know you. We are just two men from Toronto, who decided to come out somewhere in the country and drive out to some house and ask if there was anything we could do.”
The old man did not ask us to sit down. He continued to stare at us, with long pauses between his words.
“Has that boy in the cutter been talking to you?” he demanded.
“Eddie?” said Jim. “No, we never saw Eddie before and we just picked him up at the village to take us for a drive. He hasn’t said ten words to us.”
“You don’t know my brother in Toronto? You never heard of me? And you come out here to see if you can help me? You must be crazy men.”
“No,” said Jim. “You see it’s nearly Christmas, and we thought we ought to be doing something for somebody.”
“I should think you would find plenty to do in the city,” said Mr. Robinson.
“Sure,” said Jim. “Every house in the city could find something to do. But we thought it would be a good idea to just go out anywhere in the country and drive along until we came to some place and then drop in, kind of, and ask if there was anything we could do. It was just an idea. We had an idea that everybody in the world needs somebody to do something for them. I guess we were wrong.”
“I guess you were,” said the old man. “Well, if you don’t mind, I was reading the paper.”
And he walked over to the kitchen door. and opened it. Jim and I walked out.
“Good-day, Mr. Robinson.”
“Good-day.”
We got outside.
“Well,” said Jim.
The kitchen door opened.
“Just a minute, gentlemen,” said the old man. He nodded his head for us to come back.
“Come back in for just a moment,” said Mr. Robinson.
We walked back and he shut the door, slowly, while he bent his head in thought.
“You aren’t police, are you?” asked Mr. Robinson.
“No, indeed,” said I. “Far from it.”
Mr. Robinson stood very still before us, watching us steadily.
“Do you know my daughter?” he asked, in a strange voice.
“No, sir,” we replied.
After looking at us until his old eyes began to waver in a curious fashion he said: “Please sit down, gentlemen.”
There were rocking-chairs in this kitchen, with heavy wool afghans on the backs.
“My wife,” said Mr. Robinson, sitting on the edge of his chair and leaning on the kitchen table, “is asleep upstairs. Would you mind if we talk low? My daughter,” and he tapped with his curved, coarse, old hand on the table pathetically, looking at it as he talked, “my daughter has been away for four months. She went to my brother’s in Toronto, because I sent her away. She was in trouble.”
“Help Us To Find Her”
Jimmie and I heard the clock ticking on the shelf, and we both looked at it. It was easier to look there than at the old man, beating his curved, calloused, old hand on the table.
“So she went to my brother’s, but she did not stay there. She has not been there for six weeks. They don’t know where she is. Nobody knows where she is. I thought maybe you had come about her?”
“No,” said Jim. One of us had to say something.
“My wife,” said Mr. Robinson, “isn’t well. This has been very hard on her. She just sits around. We don’t go to church any more. We don’t go to the village. We just sit here, you see.”
“Do you want your daughter back?” I asked.
“I sent her away and I think I was right,” said the old man. “It was the proper thing to do. My wife is not well. She sits all day staring before her, and while I ordered her not to write I know she has got no answers now for six weeks. My daughter has left my brother’s. We don’t know where she is.”
“There is a poem, Mr. Robinson,” I said. “It goes-
‘If I were damned of body and soul
I know whose love would make me whole,
Mother o’ mine!’
“And it’s a strange thing, Mr. Robinson, they never write any poems like that about fathers.”
“Please,” suddenly burst out the old man, putting his two heavy hands over his face, “please help us to find her! Just to find her!”
Jimmie and I got up very hastily and put our hands on the old man while Jim made faces at me for quoting poetry.
“We’ll find her,” we both said, and the other door creaked and in walked the loveliest old lady you ever beheld in your life, a little, narrow, old lady with a gray dress and the bent shoulders they get on the farms. Her eyes were wide and terrified, when she saw two strange men standing over her husband at the table.
“We’ll find her!” said Jimmie loudly, nodding at the dear old lady with a crooked smile and patting Mr. Robinson violently on the back.
Mr. Robinson had to stand up, so as to provide some place for the old lady to rest her head. We stood over toward the door, while the old lady trembled against the chest of the old man, who mumbled things down into her white hair and pawed her with his rough old hands.
He finally set her down in the chair and we all three went outside. He gave us his daughter’s name, which doesn’t matter since the name Robinson is only an invented name anyway. We took down, like regular newspapermen, the brother’s address and all particulars as to age, weight, color of hair, eyes, how clothed. The sleigh-bells jangled expectantly. Eddie got out and spread the blankets for us, and with much silent handshaking and head-wagging and sniffly smiles and pats on the back we climbed into the cutter and drove in a queer silence, as deep as Eddie’s, back to Maryvale, which isn’t the name of the place at all.
There was a train at five-twenty-eight. We had only thirty minutes to walk up and down the frosty platform until it came, while Jim kept exclaiming, “Well, well, well,” and I continued to blow my nose.
We did not go into the smoking compartment. There were too many nosey strangers there. We sat on the green plush seats and put our heads close together and planned. It is not every day that men can make a joke like this.
“Everybody in the world,” said Jimmie, as we came into the lights of the city, “everybody, rich and poor, has something they would like to tell us. I bet you that old man would have sat there forever and let his wife die before he would soften his heart enough to take her in his arms.”
So I got out my hankie again.
The finding of Maryvale Robinson, if you like that for a name, was very simple to two great sleuths like Jim and me. By doing the wrong thing you always come out right. That is one of the best rules to follow.
The Mystery of Life
We called, straight from the station, at the brother’s house.
He looked like a derby hat edition of his old brother in the country.
“No,” he said, suspiciously and narrowly, through the barely opened door of his narrow little house in the mean little street to which people are glad to move from the white and silent country; “no, she was here, but she left. She just took her suitcase and walked out one night. My wife was very kind to her, too. Very kind. But she just packed her suitcase and waltzed off.”
“Did she have any friends in the city?” we asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Mr. Robinson’s brother.
So Jim and I went down the street. “She’d look for a job,” said Jim. “She had no money. So what employment agencies are open at night? We’ll get the car and make the rounds of the employment agencies.”
The first employment agency had no record of a Maryvale Robinson. The next two were closed. The next one was open and the hard, cold woman at the desk said she had no Maryvale Robinson, but she had lots of Robertsons and Robinsons, but none by the name of Maryvale.
“She was a young girl,” said Jim, “with lovely blue eyes and a sort of gold-colored hair.”
Which was pure imagination.
“And she had on a brown coat and a brown hat and was carrying a suitcase.”
“A black suitcase?” inquired the hard cold woman.
“Yes, a black suitcase,” said Jim, which was a lie, because we had not been told what kind of a suitcase it was. But Jim said afterwards that he had a hunch.
“I have a girl like that,” said the hard, cold woman, “but she gave another name. We have not got her a situation yet, but I loaned her ten dollars on account. I will give you her address and you can see if it is she.”
We took the address and started.
“If an old alligator like that would lend a girl with a false name ten dollars,” said Jim, “that will be the girl we are looking for. This is all part of the mystery of life.”
We called at a tall, dark house. We waited in a dim front hall. Down the stairs came a little, white scared girl, holding the bannister.
“Are you Maryvale Robinson?” we asked.
“Yes, that is, no,” said she, and the story is over.
All but the way we found there was no train, so we piled Maryvale and her suitcase in the car and drove down and got the old alligator at the employment agency to come with us, just for the adventure of it, for she was a friend of Maryvale’s
When we got to the village of Maryvale late in the night, amid the white snow and the cedar trees shadowy along the snake fences, the old alligator who was in the back seat with the little girl suggested that we stop and telephone out to the farm.
“No,” said Jim. “I have a better idea.”
So we got Eddie to hitch up the cutter and the four of us piled into it, with Maryvale’s suitcase, and we let Jimmie, the old farmer, do the driving.
And when the sleigh-bells came jangling, jangling over the hill to the high country where the gray brick house is with the scalloped trimmings on the gables, we saw, as Jimmie knew we should see, a light spring up, late as it was, in the windows of the lonely house.
And as we turned into the lane we saw the light come downstairs, and when the cutter turned and stopped in the door yard the kitchen door flew open and an old man came staggering blindly out of the dark, feeling with his arms, hungrily…
As we drove back to the village for the car, in the bitter midnight, Jim said, “I guess you see a lot of this sort of thing?”
“I have no use for girls of that sort,” replied the old alligator in her coldest voice.
“Neither have I,” said I.
But Jim held his hands very primly with the reins.
And the old alligator and I rested our hands very delicately on our laps.
For all our hands were blessed with tears.
Editor’s Notes:
- A cutter is are a type of sleigh. Generally, sleighs accommodated larger groups, while cutters were sufficient for two people. ↩︎
- R. B. Bennett was Prime Minister of Canada at the time. ↩︎
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