BEACH-PLUMS
Did you ever wake up looking at the inside of a boat?
My impulse to sit up came to an abrupt finish with a stunning blow on
the head, where the seat struck me across the eyes. I lay blinking at
it. The roof of the interior rounded over me securely, resting upon the
beach on one gunwale and on the other side leaving a tipped-up opening
under which I had crawled. Through this slit I could see waves curling
up at the water’s edge and was glad that whoever owned the dory had
pulled it well beyond the rising. Had it stood where the tide reached
it I would have been under it just the same.
I was wondering how I had come there and why, when two mammoth feet
crunched across the sand toward me. Before I had time to slide out of
my retreat, great hands turned the dory over and I was gazing into the
face of a fisherman. He held a pair of bleached oars under one arm and
from his hairy fist dripped a punctured bait-bucket.
“Gosh!” was all he said.
He set down his pail, dropped his oars, and, wiping his hands across
his mouth, sized me up with unmixed disapproval in which there was no
particle of respect.
I tried to twist my damp hair out of my face, but the pins had fallen
from it and were lost, and my dress, drenched with sea salt, clung to
me like the shriveled skin of a dead fish. I staggered to my feet, not
knowing how to explain myself.
But by this time the fisherman had his own line of attack well in hand.
“Where’s your partner?” he asked rudely.
“My--?”
“You don’t sleep down here on the beach alone, do you?”
The hot blood rushed to my colorless face, and for the first time that
dreadful foggy morning I felt warm. Who or what did the creature think
I was?
“You do not understand!”
He was pushing the dory across the beach with great sweeping pulls
along one side. “Oh,” he grunted, between jerks, “I--think--I--do!”
The evil imagination of these people was too much for me to cope with.
I could neither forestall nor refute it. I stood wretchedly watching
him, without trying to say a word in my defense.
Prow in the water, he turned back accusingly. “You been here before,”
he sneered; “night after night.”
“I haven’t!”
“I seen the marks in the sand!” His brute eyes leered at me. “What’s
your name?”
“I live in the House of the Five Pines,” I answered, with all the
dignity that five hours’ sleep on a wet beach could put into my limp
manner. “I’m the woman who bought it.”
With one foot in the dory, he looked me up and down.
“I thought as much!”
He pushed out into the bay.
I was sorry then that I had told him who I was. I ought to have
answered, “Maud Smith,” or something. I was only adding to the
ill-repute that surrounded that luckless dwelling and any one who
set his foot within it. Last night insinuations had been made about
my having asked the judge to stay with me; this morning a vile
construction had been placed upon my sleeping on the beach. For
innocence and charity and sweet faith in each other, let me commend the
country mind! It is as willing to wallow in scandal as a pig in mud.
After the fisherman’s appraisal I dared not face any one without going
back to the house and cleaning up. Ghost or no, some sort of toilet
would have to be made before I was ready to face the world. I felt
shaken and degraded, and as willing as any one else to believe the
worst about myself. Perhaps my traveling clothes would restore my
self-respect.
I was leaving.
* * * * *
The green-shuttered door of the kitchen was open, as I had left it
last night, and, turning up the broken flagging, the house seemed so
beseechingly friendly that I was half-ashamed of my mood of hatred.
I was even willing to believe that the trouble was with me, instead
of with the house. It was not its fault that hateful mysteries had
attached themselves to it with the grafting on of the captain’s wing.
Probably the old house resented the secret room and the apparitions as
much as I did, for in its youth it had been highly respected, holding
its head above all the other houses on the cape. I felt the same sort
of pity for it that I had for myself after my recent experience on the
beach.
“We’re both old ruins,” I said to the House of the Five Pines. “We
ought to stick together.”
Everything within was just as I had left it, the door of the closet
downstairs locked and the one upstairs nailed. I felt like a deserter
all the time I packed my trunk. With tears in my eyes and a heavy pain
in my heart, I went out of the front door, which Jasper and I had
opened so hopefully, and closed it after me.
On the flagging was the boy from the telegraph-office, snapping a
yellow envelope at the tall grass as he loitered along.
“Is that for me?” I ripped it open before I paused to sign.
Don’t give up house. Am returning Saturday morning. Wait.
JASPER.
And this was Friday! Our trains would pass each other.
Well, if I were out of my mind, as I more than half-suspected, one
night more or less would not make any difference. A sanatorium was very
much like a jail. I put my hat and bag inside the door and wandered off
to think it over. This might be my last day of freedom.
I had no impulse to call on the judge. He could not help me solve
anything, because his point of view was too much like mine. Moreover, I
was still angry with him in an unreasonable way because he had failed
me last night. Why hadn’t he arrived quietly, as he had promised,
instead of getting into a scrape which necessitated explanations to the
whole town? He had no right to break his arm!
I took the back street and followed it to the edge of the village, and
there, in front of Mrs. Dove’s cottage, met her coming out of the white
picket-gate with a tin pail on her arm. She smiled as if the world were
just as usual and I one of her best friends. I was so surprised and
grateful to meet some one who still considered me a normal human being
that I could have kissed her.
“Do you want to join me?” asked Mrs. Dove. “I’m going to pick
beach-plums. If you are going to be a regular householder up here, you
ought to learn where to find them.”
“What do you do with them after you get them?”
I was already suiting my step to hers.
“Jelly.”
“Will you put mine up for me?”
“Why, the idea! Anybody can do it. There’s no trick to beach-plums.”
“But I want you to come down to the house to-night, and we’ll do them
together.”
“Down to your house?” Mrs. Dove looked at me strangely.
“There’s a good range in the House of the Five Pines,” I hastened to
add, “and everything is convenient.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking.
“You can stay all night with me,” I hurried on, before she had the
courage to refuse, “and we can work all evening.”
Mrs. Dove was flustered, but at last had an excuse. “Why, I don’t know
whatever in the world Will would say!” she answered, “I ain’t used to
going out nights, unless it’s to nurse somebody--”
I took hold of both of her hands, much to her embarrassment. “Mrs.
Dove,” I said, “pretend you are nursing me. The truth is, I’m afraid to
stay alone. To-morrow my husband will return. I’ll promise you, this is
the very last night.”
She drew back like a shy girl. “If that’s the case, I guess Will will
leave me come over.”
I drew a breath of relief. That settled that. I began to enjoy the
scenery.
We had passed the last straggling house, and, following the pike down
the cape, had come to a high, wide part of it where the dunes were
covered with coarse grass and bordered little fresh-water lakes.
Leaving the main road for a path between the rushes, we came to a
height which commanded a view of the sea in all directions--before
us, to the left, where the backbone of the cape turned east to the
mainland, and behind us, where it rounded northwest toward the outside
lighthouse. Three miles of moors separated us from its deep blue, but
it looked almost as close as the bay on our immediate right. At our
feet was a fourth bit of water, Pink Pond, where lilies were cut
in the summer and ice in the winter, a bright blue sheet bordered
with tall brown cat-tails. Far away, on the outside sea, jetties of
suspended smoke marked the passing of an invisible ocean liner; near at
hand, in the bay, rocked the fishing-boats; and at the entrance to Star
Harbor a government cruiser was turning its gray nose northward.
I remembered my sailor, whom I had promised to meet at three o’clock
this afternoon, but even as I wished that I might in some way take
advantage of his eagerness to help me smoke burst out of the black
funnels and the cruiser glided past the point. The sailor would have to
pursue his investigations of the psychic in some other port.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Dove. “The beach-plums is further on.”
We found them growing on a hillside on stunted trees no larger than
bushes, as wild and untended as a patch of blackberries whose briers
were all around us and hindered our progress. They were a hard,
cherry-sized fruit all shades of ripening-red and purple, thick
upon each tree, but the trees were separated by clumps of sassafras
and the low brittle bayberry whose pale wax clusters are used for
candle-making. I tasted a beach-plum and found it juicy and tart, but
almost all pit.
“The green ones is good, too,” Mrs. Dove advised me. “They make it
jell.”
The day was as warm as Indian summer, now that the early fog had
melted, and the moist heat, oozing up from the humid ground, was
soothing to my tired body. The convolutions of my brain seemed to
uncoil and extend themselves into a flat surface, like a piece
of table-linen laid in the sun to bleach. I did not pick as many
beach-plums, perhaps, as Mrs. Dove, but I was more benefited by the
day’s work. I began to feel revived and almost normal.
“I brought lunch along,” announced my wonderful companion. She pulled
some paper-wrapped packages out of her capacious pockets, and we sat on
a rock and ate lobster-sandwiches and muffins spread with sweet butter
till I was ashamed. It seemed a long time since I had tasted anything
that I ate. I felt so grateful that I wanted to cry. Mrs. Dove sensed
my mood and my need, and kept right on mothering me.
“We’ll put the plums on as soon as we get back,” she said, “and have
some jam for supper, maybe, or to-morrow when your husband comes,
anyway. He’ll enjoy them; mine always does.”
It was hard to tell her that to-morrow I was going to leave, her plans
sounded so pleasant.
“That house is funny, Mrs. Dove,” I said; “I don’t know whether I will
live in it.”
“I thought you’d come to that!” she answered.
And another time, when we were picking plums, I tried again to explain
to her how things stood, because I felt that if she were going to be
any help to me she must know the truth about the House of the Five
Pines, in so far as that was possible.
“I know what you heard crying in the captain’s buggy, that night you
told me about when he brought Mattie home.”
And she said, “I’ve often wondered.”
“There’s a secret room in the loft of the captain’s wing; it’s a
child’s room.”
“You don’t say!”
“That’s why he wouldn’t ask any men to help him build it.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
She bore with me in that patient way which country women have
of greeting life, expecting nothing and counting extraordinary
circumstances as merely phases of the conditions they have always
known. Something like children, to whom all things are strange and
equally incredible.
“How many have you in that poke?” she changed the subject. And when I
held up the juice-stained bag to show her, “We’ll keep on till we get a
gallon.”
We said no more, and nothing was heard but the thud of the beach-plums
as the fruit fell into her pail. I was so drowsy I did not pick very
fast.
“I bet they hated each other,” Mrs. Dove said, unexpectedly.
I had been thinking about Mattie and the New Captain, too; I thought of
little else. But the intensity of her remark, coming as it did out of
nothing and cutting the still afternoon like a curse, surprised me.
“Nobody could keep it up,” she went on deliberately, giving me the sum
of her silent rumination, “a secret like that. Always guarding, always
watching, always afraid the other one would do something to give it
away! Between watching it and each other they must have been wore out.
Beats me how old Mis’ Hawes never got on to it. She must ’a’ been dead.”
“It died before she did; I saw the little coffin in the vault.”
“How did it die?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you go over to the cemetery for?”
“To see if the captain was in his coffin.”
“Was he?”
“Yes,--that is, the coffin was there; I didn’t open it.”
“I would ’a’!” said Mrs. Dove.
It struck me that she had put her finger on two weak parts of the
story. I was resting on the belief that I knew all there was to know
about the history of Mattie’s life, but it was true that I had not
looked inside any of the coffins, and it was equally true that I did
not know--yet--how the child met his death.
I was well enough informed in occultism by now to realize that this
spectral apparition had not put in its last appearance. It would keep
on coming, like Hamlet’s ghost, until its tragedy was explained. That
was what was keeping it near this plane, hovering about the scene of
its death till it had made itself understood. Not until the evil done
to it in life had been revenged could its spirit move on into the
higher astral regions and be at peace with the infinite. As long as I
did not know how the child had died, I might be sure of phantoms.
“Poor Mattie!” sighed Mrs. Dove.
“Her coffin wasn’t there,” said I.
“Of course not!”
“Where did they bury her?”
“They didn’t bury her.”
But before my horror had reached articulation she added,
absent-mindedly, “They never found her.”
I put my bag of beach-plums down and began to reconstruct my ideas.
What had been told me and what I had imagined were confused in my mind.
“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that they never found Mattie out there
on the flats, caught in the lobster-pots after the tide had gone out?”
“Law!” said Mrs. Dove, “She went out with it. They scarcely ever gets
’em back from behind the breakwater. The current is too strong.”
I wondered why the judge had not told me that. He must have been
thinking of something else when I asked him where Mattie was. I
remembered his wide gesture toward the bay, which I had misconstrued
into meaning that she had been buried in some place other than the
family vault. Evidently I was the only one who knew she had committed
suicide. I had never told any one of the note I had found in the
bookcase, and I was glad now that I had not. Her message was safe with
me. I resolved that I would have a tombstone erected for Mattie in that
part of the cemetery which is sacred to those who are lost at sea.
At four o’clock we walked back to Mrs. Dove’s house and gained her
husband’s consent to her staying all night with me. We asked Mr. Dove
if he wanted to come, too, but he scorned the idea. And Mrs. Dove did
not urge it, I noticed; she seemed to think that this was something we
had planned by ourselves and that no men-folks were wanted. She divided
the beach-plums scrupulously in half, in spite of my protest, and soon
had my share simmering upon the range. The House of the Five Pines
relaxed and became filled with good smells and homelike noises and made
a pretense of being all that a house should be.
Mrs. Dove ran from room to room, exclaiming with enthusiasm over what
she found, just as Jasper and I had done. She was so pleased with
everything that she restored my courage.
“You never in the world are going to give this up,” she said. “I won’t
let you.”
The secret stairs did not interest her half as much as the Canton china
and the patchwork quilts.
“I never knew Mis’ Hawes had that pattern,” she would say; or, “It’s a
wonder they never put that out on the line!” I could see that she was
going to relish telling the rest of the town what the House of the Five
Pines contained. She was stealing a march on them.
“Didn’t you ever come here?” I asked.
She was scandalized at the suggestion.
“Nobody did. Not since old Mother Hawes died, anyway. And before that
we just used to talk to her through the window. That was her room, that
nice one across the hall in front of the dining-room. Shall we sleep
there?”
I showed her Mattie’s little room upstairs.
“But this is the hired girl’s bedroom,” she objected. “With all them
grand rooms furnished with mahogany, I don’t see why you should pick
this one out for yourself.”
I confessed to her my attachment for the little room in the loft behind
it and my feeling that if I did decide to stay here, this was the very
part of the house I would want.
“You never can tell about people,” said Mrs. Dove.
She was more moved by the reason for my desire to stay in the old house
than she had been by any of the mysteries.
“I would never have thought it of you,” she kept saying. And when she
took the beach-plum jelly off the stove and hung it up in a bag to drip
overnight, she added: “It’s just as well you are learning how to make
this. They like lots of it. I know. I raised seven.”
We let the cat in and went to bed. As I settled down behind the portly
back of Mrs. Dove, I reassured myself with the thought that in the
morning Jasper would surely be here and that, no matter what might
happen, this would be my last night in the House of the Five Pines.
One never knows.