The Positive Negatives of New Englanders

THE telephone rang. I answered it.

‘I don’t suppose,’ said the familiar voice of a favorite friend, ‘that you could go to lunch with me, and the matinée.’

‘Why don’t you?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want me to?’

‘ Wh — wh-a-a-t?’ gasped the favorite friend’s familiar voice.

‘If you suppose,’ I said, in my most didactic tone, ‘that I cannot accept your invitation, why did you extend it?’

After a pause my friend burst into a peal of laughter, followed by ‘Because I am a New Englander, and don’t want to commit myself—to having really asked you, in case you said you could not go. Maybe it is a sort of selfdefense, and maybe it —’

I accepted and we went, but the matinée did not interest me nearly so much as did my recollections of other New Englanders and their negatives, or, if not positive negations, — if there can be such a thing, — at least noncommittalisms.

‘You can never get a definite answer out of a New Englander,’ one of General Stark’s descendants said to me, the first year I came to this delightful corner of our country.

We were driving home from her farm, the car laden with apples. We stopped at the home of her laundress; yard overflowing with children, but no sign of apple trees, or of any other crop.

‘I thought you might like a basket of apples,’ said the great-granddaughter of the General, as a worn little woman came to the gate. ‘Would you?’

‘Wa-al,’ drawled the woman, ‘ef I ’m to have any apples, I do-ant know but as na-ow’s as good a time as any ter have apples.’

The basket of apples was handed out, into a phalanx of uplifted arms, and as we drove off my hostess made that remark: ‘You can never get a definite answer out of a New Englander.’

That evening my sister-in-law said to me, ‘Let’s have a party. Go telephone so-and-so and so-and-so. That’s a dear.’

I did as I was bid, and each guest made answer in words to this effect: ‘Yes, I think I can come.’ ‘Will you let me know, definitely, when you know if you can?’ was my invariable query. ‘But I think I can.' That was all. Puzzled, I reported to my sister. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘is n’t that lovely?’ — and began at once to prepare her menu, counting guests. ‘You can’t prepare until you know definitely,’ I suggested. ‘Oh, they’ll all come,’ she tossed my suggestion aside. She did not even understand it.

Next — I wanted to make an appointment with my dentist. In his outer office I made known my desire to his attendant. She opened his engagement book, ran down the pages, paused, pencil poised above a blank space. ‘On Tuesday, at 2.30, I think he can see you,’and began to write my name. ‘Will you telephone me, when you are certain?’ I suggested. ‘Oh, I think 2.30 Tuesday is all right’; and, with no uncertainty, she inscribed my name in the fair white space.

Once, in the editorial offices of a Boston newspaper, I outlined a series of stories I wished to write.

’I think they will be very acceptable,’ said the austere editor.

That thought was permissible. I knew enough, even then, of editorial uncertainties to appreciate this. But when a letter came from that editor it baffled me.

‘It is possible,’ wrote the gentleman, ‘that we shall publish the first of these stories in the magazine section of our next issue, June 5. And I see no reason, now, why we should not be able to use one every Sunday — for a while, at least.’

Such a letter, to-day, would carry with it not a shadow of doubt. But in that early season of my residence in New England it brought naught but sorrow. ‘Why did n’t he return the stories, if he’s so uncertain about them, and let me try to place them elsewhere?’ I wailed to a near-by friend.

He stretched forth his hand. I gave him the letter. He read it and, with puzzled look, glanced from the written words to me. ‘What’s uncertain about that?’ he demanded. And he was right, for the stories appeared as the editor had implied they might, on Sunday, June the fifth, and on every other Sunday for a long, long while.

Recently another friend, and this time from my own New Orleans, was in town and we lunched together.

‘What will you have?’ he asked, consulting the menu.

‘Scrod, I think.’ I tried to tell him what scrod was.

‘All right. I’ll have it,’ said he. ‘Now — have you decided?’

‘I think I’ll have scrod,’ I answered quickly, and skipped from food to talk of home. The waiter came and, with pad and pencil, stood beside my friend.

‘Scrod for me,’ said he, ‘and salad, and — have you made up your mind yet,’ — his tone implied large tolerance of woman’s unstable mentality, — ‘what you want to eat?’

‘I told you — scrod.’ I was irritated at his stupidity. You see, I have lived five years in Boston.