I must say at the beginning that it was all my fault. Jerry says
that it was just as much his, but it wasn't, because I'm the oldest
and I ought to have known better. To begin with, Father had to go to
New York to give a talk at the American Architects' League, or
something, and Mother decided to go with him. At the last minute
Aunt Ailsa got a weekend invitation from somebody she hadn't seen
for ages and went away, too, which left us alone with Katy and Lena.
Katy has been with us next to forever and took care of Jerry and
Greg when they were Infant Babes, so that Mother never imagined, of
course, that anything could happen in two days. It wasn't Katy's
fault either.
The first day was foggy, and the garden dripped, so we went down to
call on Captain Moss, who lives near the ferry-landing. Besides
having boats for hire, he sells such things as fishing-tackle and
very strong-smelling rope, and sometimes salt herring on a stick.
The things he sells are all mixed up with parts of his own boats and
pieces of canvas and rope-ends, and curly shavings that skitter
across the floor when the wind blows in from the harbor. There is a
window at one end of his shop-place that goes all the way to the
floor, like a doorway, and it is always open. His shop is half on
the ferry-wharf so that the window hangs right over the water, very
high above it. It is quite a dizzyish place, but wonderful to look
out at. Far away you see boats coming in, and Wecanicut all flat and
gray, and then right below is nice sloshy green water with old boxes
and straws floating by, and sometimes horrid orange-peels that
picnic people throw in.
That afternoon Captain Moss was mending the stern of one of his
boats, and when we asked him what he was fitting on, he said:
"Rudder-gudgeons."
He grunted it out so funnily that it sounded just like some queer
old flounder trying to talk, and we thought he was joking. But he
wasn't at all. Sometimes he is very nice and tells us the longest
yarns about when he shipped on a whaler, but this time he was busy
and the rudder-gudgeons didn't behave right, I think, so he let us
do all the talking. We told him a good deal about the bottle, and
also something about the city under the sea. He said he shouldn't
wonder at it, for there was powerful curious things under the sea.
He also said he supposed now we'd be wanting to hire the _Jolly
Nancy_ "fer to find submarine cities, sence he wouldn't let us have
her to go a-stavin' in her bottom on them rocks off Wecanicut."
We decided that he really didn't want to be bothered, so we went
away presently. To soothe him, Jerry bought some of the dry herring
things and carried them home in a pasteboard box that said "1/2 doz.
galvanized line cleats. Extra quality" on the lid. Lena cooked the
herrings for supper, but I don't think she could have done it right,
because they were quite horrid.
The second day was the perfectly gorgeous kind that makes you want
to go off to seek your fortune or dance on top of a high hill or do
anything rather than stay at home, however nice your own garden may
be. We agreed about this at breakfast, and I said:
"Let's go to Wecanicut."
We'd never gone to Wecanicut alone, but I couldn't see any reason
why we shouldn't. Captain Lewis, on the ferry, always watches over
every one on board with a fatherly sort of eye, and Wecanicut itself
is a perfectly safe, mild place, without any quicksands or tigers or
anything that Mother would object to.
"I tell you what," Jerry said, "let's make it a real adventure and
take some costumes along. We never had any proper ones there
before."
I thought this was a rather good idea, and after breakfast we went
up to select things that wouldn't be too bothersome to carry, from
the Property Basket.
"Is it to be pirates or smugglers or what?" Greg asked, poking in
the corner where he keeps his own special rigs.
"Explorers, my fine fellow," Jerry said, "exploring after a
submerged city."
"Oh!" Greg said, evidently changing his ideas.
Jerry and I went down to ask Katy to make us some lunch.
"Just food; nothing careful," Jerry explained.
"What are ye goin' to do with it?" Katy asked.
Jerry was all ready to say, "Eat it, of course," but I saw what Katy
meant and said:
"We're going out; it's such a nice day. We thought we'd take our
lunch with us to save Lena trouble."
"Don't get streelin' off too far," Katy said, "Where are ye goin'?"
"Oh, down by the shore," I said, which was not quite the whole
truth, because of course it was not our shore, but the shore of
Wecanicut I meant. Yes, _all_ of it was my fault.
Just as we were putting the lunch into the kit-bag Greg came
staggering downstairs, trailing along the weirdest lot of stuff he'd
collected.
"What on earth is all that?" Jerry asked him. "Drop it and get your
hat."
"It's--my costume," Greg explained, out of breath from having
dragged all the things down from the attic.
"Glory!" Jerry said, "You don't suppose you're going to lug all that
rubbish on to the ferry, do you? Not while _I'm_ with you, my boy."
"You couldn't begin to put on half of it, Gregs," I said. "Let's
weed it out a little."
"And look sharp about it," Jerry said, jingling the money for the
ferry in his pocket.
Greg finally took a Turkish fez thing, and a black-and-orange sash,
and a white brocade waistcoat that Father once had for a masque ball
ages ago. We hadn't time to tell him that it was no sort of outfit
for an explorer, so we bundled the things up with our own and
stuffed them all into the kit-bag on top of the lunch.
Luke Street has a turn in it just beyond our house, so neither Katy
nor Lena could have seen which way we went; anyhow, I think they
were both in the back kitchen, which looks out on the clothes-yard.
I thought perhaps we should have told Katy where we were going after
all, but Jerry said:
"Fiddlesticks, Chris; we're not babies. I suppose you'd like Katy to
take us in a perambulator."
This was horrid of him, but he made up for everything later on.
Our Captain Lewis was not in the pilot-house of the _Wecanicut_.
Instead there was a strange captain, a scraggly, cross-looking
person, staring at a little book and not watching the people who
came on board, the way Captain Lewis does. Jerry and I sat on
campstools on the windy side, and Greg went to watch the
walking-beam, which he thinks will some day knock the top off its
house. It always stops and plunges down just when he thinks it
surely will forget and go smashing on up through the roof. He is
quite disappointed that it never does. It behaved perfectly properly
this time and paddled the old ferry-boat over to Wecanicut as usual.
We went up the hot little road that goes from the landing, and then
ran through a prickly, stony short-cut that leads among wild
rose-bushes and sweet fern to our part of the shore. There were tiny
little wavelets splashing over the rocks, and you couldn't think
which was bluer--the sea or the sky. The first thing we did was to
bury our bottle of root-beer in a pool up to its neck and mark the
place with two white stones. This is something we have learned by
experience, for nothing is nastier than warm root-beer. Then we put
on the costumes and capered about a little. I had a tight,
striped football jersey, and my gym bloomers, and a black,
villainous-looking felt hat; and Jerry had a ruffle pinned on the
front of his shirt, and a wide belt with the big tinfoil-covered
buckle that Mother made for us once, and a felt hat fastened up on
the sides so that it looked like a real three-cornered one. Greg had
arrayed himself in his things, and he did look too absurd, with more
than a foot of the brocade waistcoat dangling below the sash, the
end of which trailed on the ground behind.
It gave us a queer, wild feeling, being there without the grown-ups,
and we decided to tell them that as we'd proved we could do it, we
might go again. We never did tell them that, as it happens.
We all grew hungry so soon that we had lunch much earlier than the
grown-ups would have had it. The food Katy had fixed was wonderful,
though rather squashed on account of all the costumes being
on top of it in the kit-bag. While we ate we organized the
Submerged-City-Seeking-Expedition. Jerry was "Terry Loganshaw," in
charge of the party, and I was "Christopher Hole, shipmaster," and
Greg was "Baroo, the Madagascar cabin-boy," because we couldn't
think of what else he could be, with such clothes.
We tidied up all the picnic things so that there was nothing left,
and put the root-beer bottle into the kit-bag, because it was a good
one with a patent top. The kit-bag we took with us for duffle, and
we set off for the point. We went by the longest way we could think
of, to make it seem like a real expedition,--'cross country and back
again. Jerry led us through the scratchy, overgrown part of
Wecanicut, and we pretended that it was a long, weary _trek_ through
the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg
walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating
in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We
told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must
press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic
sweet-fern leaf and came running after us, tripping over his sash.
The _trekking_ took a long time, and when we reached the end of the
point we were quite exhausted and flung our weary frames down on the
tropic sand to rest. All at once Jerry clutched my arm and said:
"Look yonder, Hole! Does not yon strange form appear to you like the
topper-most minaret of a sunken tower?"
He was pointing at the Sea Monster, and it really did look much more
like a rough sort of dome than a monster's head. There was a lot of
haze in the air, which made it look bluish and mysterious instead of
rocky.
"It do indeed, sir," I said. "Could it be that city we be seeking?"
"Would that we had a boat!" said Greg, which might have been quite
proper if he'd been somebody else, instead of Baroo.
We'd been sprawling on the sand again for quite a while, when Jerry
suddenly jumped up and shouted:
"Glory! Look, Chris!" not at all like Terry Loganshaw.
I did look, and saw what he had seen. It was an empty boat, a sort
of dinghy, bobbing and butting along beside the rocks a little way
down the shore. We all ran helter-skelter, and Jerry pulled off his
shoes like a flash and waded out and pulled the boat in.
"It's one of those old tubs from around the ferry-landing," he said.
"It must have got adrift and come down with the tide. Oars in it and
all."
We stood there silently, Jerry in the water holding the boat, and we
were all thinking the same thing. It was Greg who said it first,
quite solemnly.
"We could go out to the Sea Monster."
Of course it was then that I ought to have said that we couldn't,
but Jerry pulled the boat up the beach and ran back to the end of
the point to see how high the waves were before I could say it. It
was too late to say it afterwards, because when we saw that there
was not even the faintest curl of white foam around the Sea Monster,
it did seem as though we could do it.
"It'll only take about five minutes to row out there," Jerry said,
"and then we'll have seen it at last. It couldn't be a better time.
Why, a newly hatched duckling could swim out there to-day."
It did look very near, and the water was calm and shiny, with just a
long, heaving roll now and then, as if something underneath were
humping its shoulders.
So I said, "All right; let's," and we climbed into the boat. Jerry
rows very well, and he pulled both the oars while I bailed with an
old tin can that I found under the stern thwart. The boat didn't
leak badly enough to worry about, but I thought it might be just as
well to keep it bailed. We talked in a very nautical way, though
Jerry kept forgetting he was Terry Loganshaw and mixing up "Treasure
Island" and Captain Moss. But I didn't feel so much like being Chris
Hole, anyway, even to please the boys, and I didn't say much.
The Sea Monster was much further away than you might suppose. When
there was ever so much smooth, swelling water between us and
Wecanicut, the Monster's head still seemed almost as far away as
before. Somehow the water looked very deep, although you couldn't
see down into it, and it humped itself under the boat.