FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES
BY
AVERY GAUL
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
THE CENTURY CO.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
To
MARY FENOLLOSA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 3
II MATTIE “CHARLES T. SMITH” 24
III THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL 41
IV THE BOYCOTT 51
V “THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY” 65
VI LOBSTER-POTS 76
VII THE FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 89
VIII A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE 103
IX THE SECOND NIGHT 118
X THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 134
XI THE THIRD NIGHT 149
XII THE LITTLE COFFIN 162
XIII THE SÉANCE OF HORNS 178
XIV THE FOURTH NIGHT 191
XV BEACH-PLUMS 207
XVI THE FIFTH NIGHT 225
XVII DAWN 231
XVIII THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE 247
XIX I HIDE THE GHOST 260
XX JEZEBEL 273
FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES
A sea of yellow sand rose, wave on wave, around us. High hills,
carved by the bitter salt winds into tawny breakers, reared towering
heads, peak upon peak. Like combers that never burst into spray,
their static curves remained suspended above us, their tops bent back
upon the leeward side, menacing, but never engulfing, the deep pools
of purple shadows that lay beneath them. The sand was mauve in the
hollows, and black upon white were the cupped dunes hung over their
own heights. They were like water that did not move, or mountains with
no vegetation. They did not support as much life upon their surface
as that which crawls upon the floor of the ocean. They were naked and
unashamed as the day when they were tossed up out of the bed of the
sea. Only tufts of sharp green grass clung to some of the slopes, their
silhouettes flattened out before them like the pin-feathers of a young
bird, inadequate and scant, accentuating the barrenness of the saffron
sand.
Centuries ago some gigantic upheaval of Neptune had forced this long
ridge out of the shielding water, to lie prone in the sight of the sun,
like a prehistoric sea-monster forever drying its hide. More isolated
than an island, the head of the cape, with the town in its jaws, fought
the encroaching sea, which thundered upon it in constant endeavor to
separate it from the tail, extending a hundred miles to the mainland.
From the height on which we stood, the line of ocean far away was dark
blue, following in a frothy scallop the indentations of the coast. The
sound of the surf came to us like a repeated threat. It could bend
the cape, but never break it, twist and turn it, change the currents
and the sand-bars, and toss back upon its shore the wreckage of such
vessels as men essayed to sail in, but the sand-dunes continued to bask
blandly. Sometimes they shifted, but so silently and gradually that
they seemed not so much to move as to vanish. To-day there would be a
dune in the way of our path to the sea, so steep as to make a barrier,
impossible to scale. To-morrow the force of the wind upon its surface,
and the strength of the far-away tide which continually seeped its
roots, would have leveled it. The very footsteps one followed, trying
to trace a track across the waste, would have melted away.
On this desert each traveler must be his own guide and climb to some
eminence which topped all others, to get his bearings from the strip
of deep blue that marked the ocean’s rim. Nor could he say to himself,
securely, “Here is east,” although he looked out on the Atlantic. Land
played a trick upon the wayfarer who trusted it, and turned its back
upon the sea, and curled up like a snail, so that the inside of the
cape, where the town lay behind us in its green verdure, faced south,
and the outside sea, where the sun set, curved west and north. The
glory of light in the afternoon struck first upon the hills and was
reflected back from the sheltered bay to the little fishing-village.
The path from the woods, by which you entered the dunes, lost itself
to sight under the foliage of the scrub-oak trees, and unless you
had tied a white rag to the last branch, marking the point where you
climbed up out of the forest, you would never find it again. There were
many foot-paths through the thicket which separated the hamlet on the
inside of the horn from the immense dry sea-bed, but none of them were
visible, once you had left them. By day you must mark the entrance to
the desert of your own footsteps, by night it was useless to look for
them.
This must have been the place, I thought, where Dorothy Bradford was
lost. Brave as the Pilgrim Fathers were, they had not loitered here
after dark to look for William’s young wife! They had conscientiously
attended to their laundry work, on that first November day when the
_Mayflower_ landed, and, having finished their domestic duties, waited
no longer for any scatterbrain of the party who had been foolish enough
to venture from the fold, but weighed anchor without finding her and
put off for Plymouth Rock!
As I looked about me at the profound grandeur of space, it seemed to
me that I understood why Dorothy had not hurried back to the boat. She
had embarked upon the _Mayflower_, a bride, strange to the ways of
men and of marriage, and for sixty-three days the stern-faced Puritans
had been her only companions and the rolling sea her entire horizon.
Her quarters must have become a prison to her before the voyage was
over. When at last this finger of land, reaching into the Atlantic, had
beckoned to the mariners, her heart must have sung like a caged canary,
even as mine responded when first I saw the cape. Did she linger
with the other virtuous housewives at the first spring, to wash her
husband’s dirty linen? Not she! I liked to think that in glad escape
she ran from all those stuff gowns and starched kerchiefs, through the
woods, chasing the scarlet-winged blackbirds on and on, picking the
wintergreen berries and ravenously eating them, gathering her arms
full of bright autumn leaves, feeding her hungry eyes on the vivid
color of growing things and her starved soul, at last, upon the dunes.
It was not the Indians who prevented Dorothy Bradford from returning
to the ship; it was her own heart. If Indians saw her, they must have
fallen on their red knees in the sand and worshiped her for a sprite
of limitless space, running past them with gay branches clasped to her
gray dress and a wreath of waxy bayberries on her fair young head.
It was her wayward feet that forbade her from following further the
fortunes of the Pilgrims. No doubt, from some high point on the dunes
she watched them sail away, and laughed, taking off her shoes upon the
sand and dancing, fleeing further. That is what I would have done.
That is what I wanted to do now. Something starving in my heart found
food here; a hardness that had been growing within me for two years
dissolved, as my mind relaxed, and the troubles that had driven me here
appeared insignificant. The tired spirit of hope that had been driven
deeper and deeper down beneath the weight of disillusion began to
bubble up. There might be a way of regaining the nice balance of life,
after all, if one could weigh it every afternoon upon the sand-dunes!
Ruth and I were sitting on a pyramid, where we had brought a picnic
lunch, and were watching her children play in the hollows.
“Do people get lost here nowadays?” I asked her.
“The natives never come here,” she answered; “at least, not for fun.
They only follow the wagon-track to the coast-guard station on ‘the
outside,’ and that is about all the summer people do. It is three miles
across the soft sand to the sea, and most people get discouraged and
turn back before they reach the further shore. But enough children
and strangers have been lost here in recent years to scare away the
others! The townspeople say the dunes are haunted, and that at night
strange shapes flit across the sand, spirits of those who have never
been found. They will not come near the white fields at moonlight, when
they are wrapped in mystery. The landmarks are not permanent. Every
storm changes them, just as it changes the shoals on ‘the outside.’ The
sailors are more afraid of this neck of land than any one else. Do you
see how far distant the big steamers keep?” She pointed out to me a
thin line of smoke on the horizon. “Hundreds of ships have run aground
off here in less than that many years. There are lighthouses at every
point now, but the bed of the sea moves constantly. That is why they
call this coast the ‘Graveyard of the Cape.’”
“Have there been any wrecks since you have lived here?”
Ruth’s eyes darkened. “A year ago a fleet of fishing-vessels were
caught in a sudden tempest and half of them were lost. Eleven men were
drowned, all from this town! Star Harbor raises her sons upon the sandy
flats of the bay at her doorway, and when they grow old enough they
sail away from her, and she knows that one day, sooner or later, they
will fail to return. In the meantime the mothers do not bring their
boys out here on the dunes to play, as we do our children from the
cities. It is too much like dancing on their own graves! They try to
forget the dunes are here, and walk up and down the front street of the
village.”
“I do not want to forget them,” said I. “They mean something to me,
Ruth, something that I have needed for a long time.”
Ruth smiled at me fondly, without replying. We had known each other for
a long time.
“It is like the touch of a hand on the heart,” I tried to explain, “or
like a song heard outside a window in the dark--or a flaming embroidery
on a stucco wall.”
The sun shone down upon the tawny sand, illuminating the dunes with
so blinding a radiance that description was futile. The effect of so
much heat and light was soothing and restful, and at the same time
stimulating. The body drank up enough electricity, through contact with
the sand, to renew its youth and send the worn years reeling backward.
The children were shouting and sliding down the inside of a crater
below us, transposing their winter sports to the summertime, climbing
up the opposite slope, only to shoot down again on the seats of their
rompers, laughing and crawling up, and repeating the game, in ecstasy
of abandonment.
“I would like to do that, too,” said I.
Ruth smiled. “You would get sand in your sneakers.”
“Sneakers!” I scoffed.
“And wear holes in your silk stockings.”
“Silk stockings! No one should wear stockings out here. They should run
barefoot before the wind, and leap from peak to peak. It is absurd, in
the face of this vast emptiness, to wear clothes at all!”
“So many people feel that way,” said Ruth, dryly.
But I refused to be rebuffed.
“We need it, Ruth,” I cried. “We, who are cooped up in cities, are
starving for this very thing--space and sunlight, air and warmth. Not
the suffocating heat of the area-ways, but the glow that glances off
the sun-kissed sand. Our eyes are blind with gray pavements and white
asphalt, stone and cement, nothing but colors as hard as the substance
we tread on. We hunger for blue and for purple, for the sea and the
seacoast shadows, for green that is brighter than burnt sod, and for
living red and yellow. The craving for earth under our feet is still
natural to us. It is what has made possible the barefoot cult of the
people who choose to get up in the morning and run around in the dew,
and the ‘back to all fours’ cult of those who put their hands down
on the floor and prance like a trained bear. And the ‘stand on your
head’ cult, who pick out a cushion which best suits their psychic
soul and balance themselves with their feet in the air for hours at
a time. Perhaps it is true that it is stimulating to the brain. But
Ruth, joking aside, there must be a fundamental reason for all of
this ‘simple life’ movement--the elemental need for relaxation, which
is what this sort of exercise gives to the worn human machine. I am
going to give up my apartment in New York and pitch a tent on the
sand-dunes!”
Ruth laughed.
I thought that probably she would point out to me how impractical I
was. But she did not. She seemed to be weighing the matter, taking me
more seriously than I took myself. Ruth had a penetrating quality of
sympathy with another’s trouble that made of it an immediate problem
for her to solve and for the sufferer to relinquish. I had come up here
a week ago, for no other reason than that life had reached the stage
with me where I had to run away from the confusion of my own ménage.
I needed another line of vision, another angle from which to approach
it, and I considered it worth taking the long dull journey up the cape
to get my friend’s point of view. All that quiet August afternoon,
while we had watched her children playing on the sand-dunes, we had
been talking over life and our place in it as only two women can who
had known each other since childhood and have managed to keep friends,
although both of them are married. Our conversation had been mostly
about New York, from which I was escaping, and that offshoot of society
which has its roots among actors and producers and its branches in the
motion-picture studios. Ruth was far removed from this forcing frame,
spending her winters, more happily, in Charleston, and her summers on
Cape Cod, so that I thought I could get from her the calm point of view
and the fresh focus that I needed.
“Well, if you want to live here and get back to nature by way of the
sand-dunes, by all means do so,” she was saying dispassionately; “that
would be saner than running on all fours and standing on your head in
the city. But don’t pitch a tent out here! It has been demonstrated
that hurricanes have an antipathy for canvas. Buy a house in town, and
at least have shingles over your head and running water in the kitchen.
Even the birds refuse to drink from the rank pools in this desert.
There is alkali on the surface and quicksands along the edges of the
ponds. I’ll show you a house in Star Harbor that has been waiting for
years for some one like you to come along and take a chance on moving
into it.”
She stood up and, giving a long “Woo-ooh!” through her hands to the
turbulent young ones, led me back over the dunes to the green edge of
the woods.
“There,” she said, pointing over the tree-tops to the town that
nestled at the edge of the encircled bay, “do you see five pine-trees
standing up higher than all the others? That is the place.”
I saw below me a mass of scrubby oaks and stunted pines, which wore
out to a thin edge on the shore where the fishing-village huddled. The
bright white paint of the cottages, with the sun at their backs, picked
them out distinctly from the blue bay beyond them, and one house,
larger than any of the others, thrust its sloping roof into prominence
beside a row of pines.
“That!” I exclaimed. “But how large it is--for only my husband and
myself! We would rattle around in it. We haven’t enough furniture!”
I was alarmed at the expansive turn of Ruth’s imagination. Even if you
have put yourself in the power of a friend’s advice, or perhaps just
because of that, you are not ready to admit that she, with one slash of
unprejudiced judgment, has cut the knot which you have been patiently
trying to untangle.
“Furniture!” scoffed Ruth. “If that is all that is worrying you--There
is more furniture in that house than any other house on Cape Cod. That
is a captain’s place, old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, and he brought home
fine mahogany from wherever he dropped anchor. In his day they sailed
to England for their Chippendale and to China for a set of dishes.”
“What good would that do me?”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Ruth explained patiently; “it all goes
together. There is hardly a house sold in Star Harbor but what the
furniture is included in the deal. You get whatever the house contains,
when you buy it.”
We were retracing the path through the woods by which we had entered
the dunes earlier in the day. The children ran before us, playing
wood-tag from tree to tree, exploring “fairy circles,” and stopping
from time to time to let us catch up with them, when they would drop
completely out of sight among the blueberry-bushes. These grew so thick
at our feet that you could pull the berries off by the handful and
munch them as you strolled along.
“Tell me more about the house,” I begged. My mouth was full of
blueberries, but my mind was full of plans.
“It was built over a hundred years ago, by ships’ carpenters who came
down here all the way from Boston. They don’t know how to do that kind
of cabinet-work any more. The soil in the yard was hauled here by the
wagon-load from ten miles down the cape to make the garden--no sea sand
left there to sprout burrs! The Old Captain knew what he wanted and
where to get it. He made what was, in those days, a fortune. He was
master of a fleet of fishing-vessels, and used to make yearly voyages
to the banks of Newfoundland for cod and to Iceland for sperm-oil
whales. A pair of his big iron testing-kettles are still down in his
wharf-shed, and the house is full of valuable maps and charts. Not that
any one has ever seen them.”
“Why not? How long has it been vacant?”
“It has never been vacant at all! That’s the trouble. After old Captain
Hawes and his wife died, their son, whom every one calls the ‘New
Captain,’ lived on there in the house for years, along with the same
woman who had always been a servant to his mother. He died after we
came here, five years ago, under peculiar circumstances, but she still
lives on, behind closed shutters.”
“Is the house for sale?”
“It’s been for sale ever since the New Captain died, but the old woman
who lives in it won’t let any one inside the door to look at it.”
“I’d take it without seeing it, if it’s all you say it is,” I answered.
“Why don’t they put the old woman out?”
Ruth shrugged, as one who would suggest that no outsider could hope to
understand how business was managed on the cape.
“Let’s go and see it on our way home,” I suggested.
“All right; we can send the children on.”
They were scampering through the brush ahead of us, chasing limp-winged
yellow butterflies and spilling their precious garnered blueberries
as they ran. Their bare legs, covered with sand from the dunes and
scratched by the briers of the woods, stood the strain of the long walk
better than ours, in their flimsy stockings and hot rubber-soled shoes.
I wanted to sit on a log in the shady woods and rest, but no one else
seemed tired and the thought of the old house lured me on to hurry to
its doorstep.
It needed only that difficulty of getting possession to make me sure
that this was the very house for which I had been waiting all my life.
I knew, too, that the romance of the situation would be the deciding
point in any opposition that I might well expect to meet from my
husband, who was still in New York. Jasper was a fiction-writer, at
present aspiring to be a playwright, and it was true that he needed for
his work an atmosphere that he could people with the phantoms of his
own mind, rather than the disturbing congestion of the apartment where
we now lived. In setting out to follow Ruth’s advice and buy a house
on Cape Cod, I felt that I was doing my best not only for myself and
the sort of family life that I felt would naturally follow, but for my
husband and his exacting career. I realized that it would be for both
of us a solution of the philosophy of living. Jasper had reached that
stage in the beginning of success when it seemed to his friends that he
was working too hard and playing too hard, squandering his talents upon
Carthaginian gods who would only burn him up in the end.
I had been following Ruth in silence, for the way through the wood was
hard, but now we came into the outskirts of the fishing-village and,
crossing the single railroad track that ran the length of the cape,
struck the easy tread of the boardwalks. There were only two streets
in Star Harbor, front and back, and, sending the children on to Ruth’s
house by the back way, their pockets oozing with blueberries, we
emerged to the front street and faced the bay, just as the Pond-Lily
Man was passing.
He was returning from his day’s work, peddling pond-lilies up and down
the cape on his bicycle, a great basket of them dripping from his arm
now, their luscious white heads closed, although not wilted; and he
offered them all to Ruth hopefully, to get rid of them.
“Pond-lilies,” he repeated automatically, as he saw us coming into
sight. “Pond-lilies. Five cents a bunch!”
He was a thin little man with a tired face, apologetic, but stubborn
about his trade, selling his flowers with a mildness and a persistence
that was deceptive.
Ruth bought them all, only asking if he would, as a favor, carry them
up to her cottage.
“As a favor,” he replied; “this time!”
“Pond-lilies! Pond-lilies!” he called again, as he started off, seeming
to forget that we had purchased the entire stock.
“Poor thing,” said Ruth; “that cry is a habit with him. He must do it
in his sleep. He used to be a parson of some sort, but his ‘health
failed him’ and that’s the way he supports his family. They say his
children all get out in a flat-bottomed boat on Pink Pond, down the
cape, and pick them for him every morning before it is light.”
“They work hard up here,” said I, feeling rather inadequate to the
occasion, which was so tremendously local.
“They do,” replied Ruth, with her usual sympathy and few words.
We paused to rest a moment by the bay. The water sparkled happily,
with none of the menace that shrouded the deep blue of the ocean which
we had left on “the outside” beyond the dunes. Here were merry little
white-caps, as innocent as the children who played upon the flats, and
before us the fishing-boats, riding at anchor, had no more flavor of
adventure than so many rocking-horses. The sunlight, mirrored from
the bright waves, shone upon houses at the water’s edge with a glow
that turned the glass of the windows into flame and burnished the brass
knockers on the doors. The white paint glistened as if it had been
varnished that very afternoon, and the green blinds and the red roses
climbing on the cottages were raised in tone to the height of the color
of ornaments on a Christmas-tree. The whole village had the aspect of
a gaily painted toy. The dust of the road was rose-tinted. The leaves
of the trees looked as if they had been scrubbed and polished, and
the sails of the vessels on the bay were as white as the clouds that
skipped across the bright blue sky.
It was the contrast between this radiant shimmer of sea and cloud, this
flicker of sunshine and dazzle of window-pane, this green of the short
trimmed grass and crimson of the flowers, that caused my amazement when
I first saw the house that was to be mine. I was bewildered by its drab
melancholy, and I would have turned away, had not an inner courage
urged me on. For it seemed to me, that August afternoon, that I had
come to a crossroads in my married life, and it was in the mood of a
weary traveler approaching a wayside shrine that I turned through the
hedge at last and beheld the House of the Five Pines.