Various Visitors

An Examination Into the Peculiarities of Certain Household Pests

R. PIERREPONT BASSETT

VISITORS are an affliction which may happen to almost any one. There are a few families, I know, which manage to keep themselves inviolate, immured, shut-up within themselves. But they are few indeed, and no one speaks well of them, referring to them as "those snifty Mortimers, who think they are too good for the rest of the world." Upon most of us visitors descend.

I speak thus gloomily because I have suffered. I know whereof I speak. Being no longer in the first flush of youth, my soul is seared and my sense of hospitality encrusted with that protective rind which the advancing years bestow. Since I have acquired a house and family of my own, with the attendant responsibilities, I no longer throw my hat in the air with a glad cry when I hear that Aunt Clara is coming. I figure Aunt Clara as a potential consumer of so much butter and so many eggs. I know that we shall have to have an extra pint of cream during her stay. This sounds inhospitable and mean. I want it to. I hate visitors. I loathe and despise them. There, I've said it.

All my life I have suffered in silence. It is a great relief to tell the truth. I had no idea it could be so pleasant.

Visitors are a habit acquired in early youth, when we do not know any better. Young people think it is great fun to visit about at each other's houses, where they can lie awake and talk all night and get hysterical over nothing and smuggle a cake of sweet chocolate into bed and get it all over the pillows. These little escapades extend during adolescence into weekend parties, and finally into real visits which take in both ends of the week. And before we know it, the dreadful habit is formed. As life goes on, these immature visitors harden into set patterns. They become types which are in the common experience of all. So that when I speak of Aunt Clara, as I have, and of Uncle Wallace and others, as I will, I do not wish to be taken as one who is slamming his individual relatives in the public prints. No, I am merely drawing a picture of the composite Aunt Claras of the world.

"Finishing" Aunt Clara

HAVING started with Aunt Clara, I suppose may as well finish her. My word, don't I wish I could! Aunt Clara is really one of the most ominous things that can fall across a man's threshold. She is the female relative of the wife, who annually comes out of her New England lair and "takes you in" in her broad sweep around the circle of her other victims. Aunt Clara's visit is as fixed and inexorable as taxday, and the pain is much more prolonged. When you were first married you thought it great fun to have Clara down for a week or two in the spring. You wanted her to see your house, and probably soon you had a son to show her, and so you invited her from year to year and wove your own fetters. She was useful at first, running things while the real head of the house was recuperating; but soon the visits came to have no particular meaning. They were just a habit. Early in the spring both you and your wife probably begin to sit around and dread Aunt Clara's visit. She has always come "in dogwood time", and you watch the tight little buds with an anxious eye as you go to your train every morning. If only the darn things wouldn't bloom, perhaps she wouldn't come. But they always do, and so does she. Some morning your wife heaves a great sigh over her coffee and groans, "I suppose I'll have to ask Clara for next week. She counts on it so." You smile bitterly. The word "week" is such a euphemism. It really means a month.

The Familial Invasion

DURING that month the house is completely out of joint. Sisters of adult age can no more live in the same establishment without friction than the two halves of a seidlitz powder can lie peacefully in the same glass of water. Details of house management come up for discussion, and whenever a thing is done your way Aunt Clara works in the remark that at Sister Edith's house it is done differently. All these little things tend to create an atmosphere in which the temperature steadily sinks to new low levels. Breakfast is a glacial repast, and you escape to your office with relief and wonder on your way home what new trouble has arisen during the day. The week stretches out to its accustomed three or four, the tension daily growing more acute. The blessed end is often hastened by the children who have by this time reached the age of reason, but not of tact. Trust them to blurt out the truth in some form or other. In one family of my acquaintance, the departure of the visitor was assisted by the sweet little daughter of the family, who looked up innocently and said with the candor of seven years, "Aunt Clara, I wish you were dead." Immediate packing was accomplished in a shower of tears, and Aunt Clara went on to the next port-of-call.

Among other hardy annuals, I have catalogued a type represented by a gentleman whom I shall call Uncle Wallace. He is not really a relative at all, but his old friendship with the family has established him in a position which seems to call for something more intimate than the mere title of "Mr." The particular Uncle Wallace who perches at intervals on my backbone is a spruce and sprightly old party who is nearing the eighties and is still going strong. We never know when to expect him, for he appears without warning. He telephones, usually from the station, and my wife lays down the instrument with a blank expression. It's Uncle Wallace.

The Self-Invited Guest

YOU see, we can't possibly turn the old boy down. He is far from home, and we are practically all he has left -in the world. It would be simply inhuman to fail him. With a groan I toddle out to the car and head to the rescue of Uncle Wallace. Full well do I know what the next few days will be. Uncle Wallace plays golf in strokes of one syllable. It will be my bounden duty to accompany him each morning to the club and engage in the eighteen holes which are his daily allowance.

A maddening feature of this entertainment is that, though Uncle Wallace never by any chance drives more than seventy-five yards, he is as straight as a die; and the moment I let up he begins beating me. On numerous occasions I have trailed back to the locker room, two or three down to the old party. Oh, the mortification of his joyous self-glorification! Nothing is more awful than this trait of self-praise in old age, a weakness which is protected by its very nature. We hear the conceit of youth often spoken of. It is a shadow compared with the conceit of age. When Uncle Wallace beats me, his howls of delight ring out in the length and breadth of the locker room. He must tell every one exactly how it was done. I have at times stood back of Uncle Wallace with a niblick in my hand and realized that, had he been a younger man, he would at that moment have been weltering in his gore.

It is the same thing over again in the evening when we indulge in our hour of bridge or cribbage, at both of which pastimes the veteran is excellent. The stakes are infinitesimal, but he usually brings home the bacon, and the house resounds with his exultation. I retire to bed ruefully, for I know exactly what to expect the next morning, the moment we sit down to breakfast. The only way I can hasten Uncle Wallace's departure is by administering a series of crushing -defeats in every branch of sport in which we compete, and then crowing over them afterward on all occasions. The victories are not always easy to manage, but I do accomplish them from time to time. Even then, my position is ignoble and I feel like a villain as I go about boasting how I trimmed my venerable guest. It is the only way, however; and eventually, when his pride can stand no more humbling, he announces that he must move on to some other part of Long Island where, as he says, "they have a real golf course".

The Fuss-Budget

AMONG the yearly blights which descend on my domesticity, there is another form of guest with which I am sure many people are familiar. Irefer to thefussy or particular type which must have everything "just so". A pair of these birds make their temporary nest in my home every so often. To be exact, only one of them is fussy. They form a married couple, the husband being an old friend and classmate of mine. Of course, every husband knows that it is almost invariably the wife's relations and friends who are kept on the permanent visiting list. The husband's men friends are usually considered much too rowdy to be brought indoors, and their acquaintance is gradually discontinued. Jim, who is the husband of the fuss referred to above, is my one last stand in the matter of guests of my own selection. I cling to him on principle, as a sort of symbol that I am something in the house more than the provider. Consequently, I insist firmly that he and his wife shall visit us every summer.

Mrs. Jim is one of those mysterious women who are able to cast a mantle of dependence about them, so that sensitive souls feel that they must run and wait on their every-behest. Personally, I would see the lady starve before I would rout myself out of a Sunday morning to supervise the appointments of her breakfast tray. But women are not built that way, particularly when another woman is visiting visiting in the house. They want her to think that all the little fixings and doodahs are part of the regular regime.

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My friend, feels the artificiality of the situation as surely as we do, and tries to make up for his wife's listlessness by over-enthusiasm on his own part. In the evening, after the ladies have retired, he becomes confidential over his second Scotch and says he doesn't know how to explain Louise's manner, that she wasn't like that when they were married, that I remember perfectly well the family home in Racine and how simple it all was; and we part for the night in the hall above with a silent hand shake and a meaning look which says, "You understand, old man, and I can trust you to stick by me." Altogether it is quite a trying visit all around, and I think we are all glad when it is over. As I say, I only keep it up because I think it is good discipline, especially for my wife.

The Impossible Husband

A DOMESTIC team which must be familiar to all is the perfectly charming woman who has somehow picked up a most impossible husband. The Coopers, as we will call them, are in this class. Mabel Cooper is a dainty, charming little person whom every one loves at first sight. But Frank Cooper, ah, death and destruction! He is the most consummate bore who ever stepped on the face of the earth. There is nothing that Frank Cooper doesn't know more about than any one else in the room. At dinner, you don't have to give him the conversational floor; he grabs it, and I have never seen the man who could take it away from him.

Mabel is so desirable that we have them come to see us once in a while. We forget how awful Frank is. The memory of his atrocities fades away in some mysterious manner. Nature works that way. The sad things are blotted out. In general this is probably for the best; but in the case of the Coopers, it always lets us in for far more suffering than we had anticipated. A knowledge of our mistake breaks on us the moment we meet them at the station. Frank pulls out the bigtalk stop immediately and begins to tell us how he made the conductor find two seats together for them—he wasn't going to be brow-beaten, no, sir, not he; they were up against the wrong man, and if the Long Island Railroad thought they could get away with that, they had another guess. I settle back in my seat, and a feeling of dull pain mounts to the neighborhood of my neck and ears. Curse it, I should have known better; but it is too late now,and I am in for two or threedays of the most awful suffering man can know.

An unpleasant feature of these visits is the impression they always create on my personal friends. For weeks afterward I am greeted on the train with such salutations as, "Well, for the love of Mike, where did you find that Cooper person? How did she come to marry him?" etc. Just how Mabel can stand a steady diet of Frank is a question my wife and I have often discussed. She thinks Mabel got him at a rummage sale.

I might go on indefinitely and write of the gay young niece who comes down from Buffalo once a year and puts up with us when we are in town. We see very little of her, because she sleeps all day and stays out all night; but it is rather disturbing to be roused by a large section of the Princeton Glee Club, gathered around our piano at three in the morning, rehearsing a new song entitled, "The Bee's Knees."

But there; I have said enough, disclosing myself, perhaps, as a crabbed old curmudgeon with a rind like a rhinoceros, but at the same time ridding myself of so much spleen that I can now doubtless go forward with life's burdens, accepting every thing with a cheerful heart. Confession is good for the soul, and mine feels much better, thank you. Come on, you, Aunt Clara, and you, Uncle Wallace. Honestly, I feel that I should be glad to see you. I appreciate home so tremendously after you have gone!