MATTIE “CHARLES T. SMITH”
The old mansion stood back from the road along the bay in a field of
high, burnt grass. Drooping dahlias and faded old-fashioned pinks and
poppies bordered the half-obscured flagstones which led to a fan-topped
door. It was so long since the house had been painted that it had
the appearance of having turned white with age, or something more,
some terror that had struck it overnight. Wooden blinds, blanched
by the salt wind to a dull peacock-blue, hung disjointedly from the
great square-paned windows. A low roof sloped forward to the eaves of
the first story, its austere expanse interrupted by a pointed gable
above the kitchen. Beneath the dormer-window was a second closed and
shuttered door.
At some period, already lost in obscurity, a wing had been thrust back
into the neglected garden behind the house, and over its gray shingles
stood the five pine-trees which we had seen from the sand-dunes. Old
Captain Jeremiah Hawes had planted them for a wind-break, and during a
century they had raised their gaunt necks, waiting to be guillotined by
the winter storms. Faithfully trying to protect their trust from the
ravages of wind-driven spray and stinging sand, they extended their
tattered arms in sighing protest above the worn old house.
We went wonderingly up the flagging and knocked at the small door of
the “porch.” There was no answer. We knocked again, staring, as is the
way of strangers, to each side of us and endeavoring to peer through
the green shutter. We had to jerk ourselves back and look quickly
upward when the dormer-window over our heads went rattling up and an
old woman craned her neck out.
“That’s Mattie,” whispered Ruth, “Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’!”
Gray wisps of hair framed a face thin and brown as a stalk of seaweed,
with sharp eyes, like those of a hungry cat, above a narrow mouth.
The creature did not ask us what we wanted; she knew. Her perception
was clairvoyant. Long experience in dealing with house-hunters made
her understand what we had come for without the formality of any
explanation. We brushed straight past the first half of what would
ordinarily have been the procedure of conversation, and I came to the
gist of what was uppermost in my mind and Mattie’s.
“Why won’t you let any one in?” I asked, bluntly.
Ruth looked at me in some surprise.
Mattie put up a long thin arm to keep the window from falling on her
shoulders. “I dunno as I need to say,” she answered me, directly.
“What?” said Ruth. My friend, being complacent-minded, had not followed
the argument so fast.
But Mattie did not repeat herself. She and I understood each other.
She kept on gazing straight at me in that piercing way which I knew
instinctively had driven many a purchaser from her inscrutable doorway.
“Will you let me in if I get a permit from the agent?” I insisted.
“That depends,” replied Mattie.
Her lean body withdrew from the frame of the upper gable, her eyes
still holding mine, until her face gradually disappeared into the
gloom of the room behind her. The last thing I saw were two veined
hands gradually lowering the sash, and the last sound was a little
click as it shut.
Ruth, having brought me to see the house, was murmuring words of
apologetic responsibility. But I did not feel daunted.
“I think I will take it, anyway,” I said, “just for the view.”
From the doorstep of the House of the Five Pines we faced the bay
across the road, where many little fishing-boats were anchored,
and white sails, rounding the lighthouse-point, made a home-coming
procession into Star Harbor. Remembering Mattie “Charles T. Smith” at
her upper window, I wondered if she, too, saw the picture as I did and
loved it the same way. But Mattie would have seen far more--not only
what lay before us, but the ships that “used to be” and the wharf of
old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, the piles of which were left on the beach
now, like teeth of some buried sea-monster protruding from the sand.
She would have counted the drying-frames hung with salt cod in pungent
rows upon the bank of the shore lot, and she would have seen the burly
fishermen themselves, who used to tramp back from the flats to the “Big
House” for their breakfast. She had been a part of that former life
which was gone, and now, like an old hull on the flats, she was waiting
for that last great storm that was to sweep her out to sea. Sympathy
for her made me almost wish to abandon my own project before it was
begun, and yet it seemed to me that her life was almost over and that
the House of the Five Pines needed the youth that we could bring it as
much as we needed the shelter it could offer us. I brushed aside the
thought of Mattie as if it were a cobweb that clung to my face in the
woods.
“Take me to the trustee, or whoever controls the place,” I begged my
friend; “let’s see what can be done!”
“Now?” asked Ruth.
We had turned reluctantly through the hedge into the road.
“Why not?” I answered. “I’m going back to New York to-morrow.”
“You can’t do things so quickly around here.”
She must have noticed my disappointment, for she added, “There are no
telephones or street-cars, and whenever you go to see people, the
first three times you call they always happen to be out.”
“Don’t be lazy,” I urged, so full of my own enthusiasm that I had no
mercy on plump and pretty Ruth. “How far is it to this man’s office?”
“Office? He doesn’t have any office. His house is at the other end of
town.”
_Clang-kilang! Clang-kilang!_
The clamor of bell-ringing finished our argument.
Down the boardwalk, to meet us, hobbled a strange figure. Supporting
a great copper bell, which he swung with a short stroke of his stumpy
right arm, was a stodgy man dressed in a tight, faded, sailor’s suit,
a straw hat on his bald head, fringed with red hair, and a florid face
that at present was all open mouth and teeth and tongue. He was the
town crier.
In front of the deserted House of the Five Pines he stopped and,
holding a printed dodger high in the air, read off it, in stentorian
tones, “Hi Yi, Gu Jay, Be Boom Bee Boy!”
“Whatever in the world is he trying to say?” I gasped.
“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Nobody ever knows. You can’t understand
him.”
“But what does he do that for?”
“Why,” smiled Ruth, “that’s the way we get the news around. If there is
a meeting in the town hall, you give the town crier a dollar, and he
goes up and down the boardwalk and rings his bell.”
“But if no one can understand him?”
“Oh, they ask each other afterward. The man who sends the crier out
always knows. He tells some one, who tells the next, so that often
the news travels faster than the crier does and you know what it is
beforehand.”
“It’s well you do!”
“Yes,” Ruth agreed, “because for the most part he gives out the notices
in front of a vacant lot. And if you ask him to repeat, he is furious
with you. I’ll show you. O Dave,” she called after him, “what is the
news?”
The town crier turned upon the sweet-mannered city woman like an angry
child on his partner in a game of croquet who has not obeyed the rules.
He clanged down his bell insolently, and kept on clanging it up and
down as he turned on his heel and strode away.
Ruth laughed. “You see!” she said.
“I see.”
“He is the last town crier in America. We are very proud of him!”
“I should think you would be,” I replied. It seemed to me that I
understood why the race had become extinct. I would have traded him for
a telephone.
We walked slowly down the village street. To the right of us the
fishermen’s cottages, behind their white picket-fences and green,
well-tended squares of lawn, made patches of paint as gay as the quilts
that hung airing on their clothes-lines. They looked as if each one
had been done over with what was left in the bottom of the can after
their owners had finished painting their boats. On the side of the
street toward the bay freshly tarred nets were spread to dry upon
low bushes, dories were dragged up and turned over, and straggling
wharves, with their long line of storm-bent buildings, stretched their
necks out into the flats. We passed a great, ugly cold-storage house,
which had superseded the private industry of the old days, the company
which owned it controlling all of the seines in the bay, for whom the
fishermen rose at four to pull up the nets which had once been theirs.
“You can’t buy fresh fish in Star Harbor now,” Ruth was saying; “it all
goes to Boston on ice and comes back again on the train.”
Down the steep roadways beside the wharves one caught sight of
tall-masted schooners, anchored to unload, and the dead herring thrown
from the packing-houses to the beach, rotting in the stale tidewater,
made an unwholesome stench. In front of the fish-houses swarthy
Portuguese sat drowsing in the sun. Their day’s work had begun with the
trip to the seines at dawn and had ended with their big breakfast at
noon. Their children swarmed about them in the streets, quarreling over
ice-cream cones, which they shared, lick for lick, with their dogs. On
the corner near the government wharf we had to turn into the road to
avoid a crowd of noisy middies who were taking up all the sidewalk,
laughing like schoolboys at recess, enjoying their two hours’ leave
from the big destroyer anchored in the harbor. They had no contact
with the town except through mild flirtation with the girls, and no
festivity while on shore greater than eating pop-corn on the curb, but
they seemed to feel satisfied that they were “seeing the world” and
were quite hilarious about it. They were as much a part of the port as
the Portuguese sailors, and more vital to it than the stray artists
whom we had seen, absorbed each in his own canvas, which he had pitched
in some picturesque--and cool--spot along the water-front.
Passing through a neighborhood where the little shops filled their
fly-specked windows with shell souvenirs for visitors, we turned up
an alleyway and entered the yard of a house built squarely behind the
row of front store buildings. In this neighborhood they did not mind
because they had no view of the sea. They were tired of looking at
it and were more than glad to be shut off from its sharp wind in the
winter.
Judge Bell was sitting on the open porch that ran around three sides of
his pink house like the deck of a ship. He was perfectly content with
the location.
“We have come to see you,” I began, “about buying the House of the Five
Pines.”
The judge marked the book he was reading and laid it down, looking at
us mildly, without surprise.
“I’ll do all I can for you,” he replied, with what seemed to me undue
emphasis on the “can.” “Won’t you come up and set down? We might talk
it over, anyway.”
“Talk it over!” I repeated impatiently, rocking violently in one of his
big chairs. “How much is it, and how soon can I get it?”
I felt Ruth and the judge exchanging glances over my head.
“It ain’t quite so simple as that,” he said quietly, weighing me, as
all these Cape Cod people do, with unveiled, appraising eyes. “Two
thousand dollars is all I’m asking for it now, as trustee--”
“I thought it was three!” Ruth could not help exclaiming. “I was told
you were holding it for three.”
“I’m holding it,”--his big leathery face broke into the lines of a
smile--“for Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ to move out. That’s all I’m
holding it for. I could ’a’ sold it five times a year in the last
five years, if it hadn’t been for her. And it’s gettin’ a name now.
I’d be glad to be rid of it.” He passed his heavy hand over his face
speculatively, and held his lower jaw down as he weighed me once more.
“I’d be real glad to get shet with the whole deal!”
“I’ll take it,” said I.
Even Ruth looked startled. She remembered what I did not, in my sudden
enthusiasm; that I had yet to get my husband’s consent to living
here--and the money. But it seemed so ridiculously cheap that I was
already in that cold real-estate sweat which breaks out on the novice
in his first venture for fear that some one else, between night and
morning or while he goes for his lunch, will get the treasure that he
has set his heart on.
“How soon can you get Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ out?” I asked nervously.
The judge’s lower jaw went up with a snap.
“I don’t know,” he said, tapping the arms of his chair with his
hammerhead fingers, “as I can ever get her out.”
“You mean as long as she lives?”
“As long as she lives, certainly--and after that, maybe never.”
He got up and spit over the porch-rail.
As he did so I picked up the book that he had knocked to the
floor--“Brewster’s Natural Magic,” edited in London in 1838. It was
full of diagrams of necromancy and open at a chapter on phantom ships.
I showed the title to Ruth surreptitiously. She nodded.
“They are all that way up here,” she said.
But the shrewd old judge had heard her.
“I’ll let you read that book,” he said, “if you can understand it.”
“I’d like to,” I answered, to cover my embarrassment. “But I do
understand you. You mean that her influence would remain.”
“I mean more than that.”
I would have liked nothing better than to have started the judge
talking on “natural magic,” but just for this one afternoon it seemed
as if we ought to keep to real estate. If I lived here, I could come
back and talk to him again on psychic subjects.
“You think, then, that Mattie has some claim on the place?”
“No legal claim, no. But there is claims and claims. The claims on
parents that children have, and the claims on children that parents
have. And the claims of them that are not the true children of their
parents, but adopted. Maybe not legally; but morally, yes. If people
take children and bring them up, like Captain Jeremiah Hawes done,
that makes them have some obligation toward them, doesn’t it? And
then there are the claims that married people have on each other, and
the people that ain’t married, and I sometimes think that the people
that ain’t legally married have more claim on each other than people
who are, just on account of that. It puts it up to the individual.
And if the individual fails, it is more of a moral breakdown than if
the law fails. For the law is only responsible to man, but man, he is
responsible to God. Do you follow me?”
“All the way,” I said.
The judge got up and spit over the rail of the porch again.
“As I was sayin’, Mattie ain’t got no legal claim to the House of the
Five Pines, and I could put her out in a minute if I was a mind to. I
expect I could have done it five years ago, when the New Captain died,
only it seemed the town would have to take care of her all the rest of
her natural days. We’ve saved five years’ board on her at the poor-farm
now, and it looks as if she might live quite a while longer. Plenty of
’em get to be a hundred around here, and she ain’t over seventy; not
any older than I am, likely. At least, she didn’t used to be when she
was young!” He sighed, as if suddenly feeling the weight of his days.
“And the town, as a town, don’t hanker after the responsibility of
taking on Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith.’”
“Why do they call her that?” interrupted Ruth. “Is that her name?”
“That’s as good a name as any for a person who ain’t got one of her
own. _Charles T. Smith_ was the vessel old Captain Hawes was sailin’
in, the time he picked her up out of the sea.”
“Picked her up out of the sea!” we both exclaimed.
“Didn’t you ever hear about that?” he asked. “Well it’s so common known
around here there’s no need in my concealing it from you.
“Captain Hawes was up on the Grand Banks fishing, along in the fifties,
and had all his small boats out from the ship when a hurricane struck
him. The sea was standing right up on its legs. Just as he was trying
to get back his men, and letting all the cod go to do it, too, there
he see a big sloop right on top of him, almost riding over him, on the
crest of a wave as high as that dune back there. High and solid like
that, and yellow. But instead of comin’ over on him, like he fully
expected an’ was praying against, the vessel slipped back. By the time
he rode the crest, there she was diving stern down into the bottom
of the trough. And she never come up again. The only thing that come
up was this here Mattie. Sebastian Sikes, he was out in a small boat
still, and he leaned over and grabbed her up, a little girl, tied to a
life-preserver. The captain was for letting her go adrift again when
he come ashore, but Mis’ Hawes wouldn’t let him. She said as long as
Mattie was the only thing he salvaged out of the whole voyage, the Lord
He meant they should keep her.
“The child couldn’t even speak the language at first. They thought it
must be Portuguese she was jabberin’, but the sailors they said no,
they wouldn’t claim it neither. So they come to think afterward it
might have been French, her being picked up there off Newfoundland,
and all them French sailors coming out that way from Quebec. But by
the time somebody had thought of that, she had forgot how to speak it,
anyway. She was only about five. The missis had her baptized ‘Matilda,’
after a black slave her father had brought home to Maine when she
was a girl herself, up to Wiscasset. But ‘Mattie’ it came to be, and
‘Charles T. Smith,’ after the ship that saved her.”
“And didn’t he leave her anything in his will, after all that?”
“Neither Jeremiah Hawes nor his wife left any will,” replied Judge
Bell. “The only will there is is the one the New Captain made. It’s up
to Caleb Snow’s place.”
“Can I see it?”
“You can if he ain’t out winkling.” The judge picked up his “Natural
Magic” as if he hoped that we were going.
“What’s ‘winkling’?” I whispered to Ruth, as we turned away.
“Oh, nothing important--something the children do out on the flats,
gathering little shell-fish they use for bait.”
“He’ll be in if the tide ain’t out,” the judge called after us.