DAWN
Four by the clock.
Four by the clock. And yet not day;
But the great world rolls and wheels away,
With its cities on land and its ships at sea,
Into the dawn that is to be.
Only the lamp in the anchored bark
Sends its glimmer across the dark,
And the heavy breathing of the sea
Is the only sound that comes to me.
_Longfellow._
At dawn I leaned over and blew out the kitchen-lamp.
All night we had sat there shivering, with the wick burning down on the
table between us, not daring to go upstairs again nor even to move.
There had not been another sound, unless it was the well-nigh inaudible
drip of the beach-plum jelly where it hung in a cheese-cloth bag above
a yellow bowl.
Mrs. Dove was asleep now, her poor tired head upon her bare arms on
the table. In the growing light I saw a shawl upon a hook, which all
night had looked to me like a person hanging there, and I took it down
and laid it around her shoulders. Outside the fog still shrouded the
bay, so that nothing was visible. The faint outlines of houses along
the shore grew momentarily more solid. The lights of early risers
began to appear in the windows. Star Harbor had slept right through
the tragedy of the House of the Five Pines as it had been sleeping for
almost fifty years.
Determined to be ready to leave as soon as my husband returned, I
went back up the kitchen companionway to Mattie’s room to dress. The
bed-clothes were tossed wildly over the foot, where Mrs. Dove had
thrown them when she had dived for the candle and made her hurried
exit, but the rest of the room was as I had left it. I pulled the
bureau away from the little door and tried it. It was still nailed
tight. When I came down again Mrs. Dove was bending over the fire in
the range.
“Get me a few kindlings, will you, dearie?” were the first words she
said.
Without answering, I got them. Then she looked up and saw I had my hat
on.
“Why, wherever in the world are you going?” she asked.
“Home.”
“Don’t you do a thing,” she admonished, “until you have something to
eat.”
“How about yourself?” I tried to muster a smile.
“What, me? I’m all right. Don’t worry about me.”
She looked all right. She had found a skirt somewhere and tucked the
shawl into the belt of it, and put a mob-cap on over her curlers and
gone to housekeeping. How could she be so methodical after all that had
happened? I sat down meekly in a tall-backed rocking-chair beside the
red-clothed table, too weak to resist her ordered comfort, and before I
could check myself I had fallen asleep.
The hands of the banjo-clock on the wall were at ten when I sat up.
Mrs. Dove was pouring hot jelly into a row of glasses.
“It turned out fine,” she said. “Do you want a taste?”
I put my finger tentatively into the sticky saucer and suddenly woke
up, realizing that here was something delicious that I had never
tried before and that doubtless life still held many new sensations
if one had wit enough to enjoy them. But I had not. Housekeeping,
jelly-making, were nothing to me this morning. I had only one impulse,
one thought, one purpose--to leave.
The black cat came miawing around for her breakfast. It seemed strange
to me that after I had put her out in the storm that night she should
keep coming back.
“Which of your nine lives are you living, kitty?” I asked, endeavoring
to give her a caress which she avoided. The cat had never admitted that
I lived in her house.
“It might have been her you heard,” said Mrs. Dove, pouring out a
saucer of milk.
“If it was, she and Mattie are the same thing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Dove sharply.
But I was too worn out to explain.
“I don’t know anything about such things,” said Mrs. Dove impatiently,
“and don’t you go thinking that you do, either. All I know is that
if you had put the cat down cellar, you could be sure it wasn’t her
prowling around.”
“Cellar? Why, there is no cellar.”
“Isn’t there?” asked Mrs. Dove. “Where did you think you was going to
put the jelly?”
“I hadn’t thought.”
The captain’s wing had so much space beneath it that, were it not for
the rubbish stored there, a cow could have walked under the floor
without grazing her horns. The rest of the house stood on open brick
piles.
“Don’t put away the beach-plum jelly at all,” I said. “I’ll take it
back to New York with me.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure till I saw my husband.”
Mrs. Dove belonged to a different generation.
“It’s time to meet him now,” I replied. “Will you be here when I come
back? We sha’n’t stay any longer than we have to, but I know he will
want to see things for himself. I’d like my husband to know you, Mrs.
Dove; you’ve been so kind!”
Mrs. Dove blushed. “I’ll just finish up here,” she answered. “I ain’t
in any hurry.”
She stood in the doorway, smiling comfortably, as I walked off. She
looked like part of the house as she lingered there, motherly and
pleasant, more congenial to it than Mattie had ever been or I would
ever have become.
“There is no use,” I thought, “in putting a foreign waif or a city
woman in a Cape Cod house. It simply refuses to assimilate them. It was
a grand adventure--but it is over!”
The Winkle-Man was mending his nets in the sail-loft when I passed. He
came to the doorway and called to me.
“Say, how about them vines and shrubs you asked me to get for you? Do
you want ’em to-day? It’s time to get ’em in before frost.”
“I’m leaving,” I confessed. “I’m giving up the house.”
Caleb Snow nodded understandingly.
“I been hearing things,” he suggested.
“What have you heard?”
“Well, that you was sleeping down on the beach the other night.”
So it was all over town!
“What else?”
“And that the judge broke his arm.”
“Well, what of that?”
“‘What of that?’” repeated Caleb. “That’s what I says to ’em: ‘What of
it?’”
They all must have been discussing me.
“I says,” Caleb continued, anxious to inform me of his defense in my
behalf, “that I didn’t blame you none.” He held out his hand gravely.
“You show your good sense by leaving.”
“And will you say good-by to the judge for me?” I asked. I felt all
choked up.
“Sure! Say, come back next summer and visit that lady friend of yours;
that’s the way to do it--visit! I never could see what anybody wanted
to buy one of them old houses for.”
A long whistle sounded.
“That’s your train,” said the Winkle-Man. “Oh, no hurry! It lets off
steam five miles down the cape.”
I began to run, and passed other people doing the same thing. Half a
dozen of us turned simultaneously at the crossing and arrived out of
breath on the platform. There was so little to do in Star Harbor that
it was easy to miss the only excitement. One got entirely out of the
habit of keeping engagements.
There were two Fords drawn up, an old white horse and phaëton, the
station-barge, and a two-wheeled wagon. A short-sleeved boy in one
of the jitneys kept honking his horn, trying to hasten trade. The
baggage-master importantly pushed his truck alongside the track, and
some loafers, who had been sitting on their heels against the station,
stood up. A sea-captain spit out his plug of tobacco and wiped off his
face with a red handkerchief. We were all ready.
With a great grinding of brakes and shouting of orders the cape train
rounded the curve and drew up at the end of the line. The engineer
leaned out of the cab and began a conversation where he had left off
yesterday with one of the yardmen. The mail and a bundle of newspapers
were thrown out and snatched away. A clinking of milk-cans sounded
from the baggage-car. Jasper was swinging off the last platform, and I
rushed toward him, suddenly and unexpectedly dissolved in tears.
He looked so different from any one whom I had seen in five days
that he seemed a magnificent stranger. He waved his hat, dropped his
luggage, and ran to meet me. When I felt his rough, tweed coat against
my face, I could hardly look up into his eyes. It was too much to
believe that this was my husband.
“Jasper,” I said, “I nearly died while you were gone.”
“So did I,” said Jasper, keeping his arm around me and gathering up
suit-cases with the other hand. “Horrible in the city! I don’t see why
people live there.”
He looked fagged, and I realized that he had been working hard and fast
to get back here the sooner. He had never understood that I was not
going to stay.
“I brought the typewriter.” He pointed out a square black box. “All
ready to go to work again. I suppose you’ve got things fixed?”
“No,” I answered helplessly. “Things aren’t ready at all.” Hating to
disillusion him, yet knowing I must get rid of my burden somehow, I
threw down three more words. “Not even lunch!”
“Not even lunch?”
The full significance of a disastrous domestic breakdown finally
overwhelmed him. “What do you mean, my darling? What is the matter up
there at the House of the Five Pines?”
So I told him, sitting down on the empty truck on the sunny platform
after the crowd had scattered, for I thought he might as well know
before going any further. There was no need in carrying suit-cases and
typewriters up the street, only to lug them back. The afternoon train
would leave at three, and I intended to take it.
Jasper listened in silence, giving me close attention and now and then
a little pat on the arm or a sympathetic squeeze. Toward the end, as I
came to the part about the séance and the aura and the fourth and fifth
nights, I could see that he wanted to interrupt me and was barely able
to restrain himself till I had finished. Then he jumped off the truck,
laughed, and said,
“Now I’ll tell you what is the matter with you.”
And because I looked so doubtful and pathetic, I suppose, he hastened
to add, “Oh, it’s nothing much, but it all works out so easily; it
doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to understand it!”
“What is it, then?”
“Self-hypnotism! No, don’t be angry!”--for I had turned away in
disgust; I had really thought he might elucidate the mystery. “It is
a pure case of materialization from the subconscious mind, drawing an
image of the subconscious across the threshold of consciousness and
reproducing it in sound, or motion, or color, or some other tangible
form. It is the same thing that the spiritualists take for evidence
of the return of the dead, but it is actually only the return, or the
recall, of dead thoughts.”
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘actually,’ if I were you,” I said.
“No, but wait. I have been listening to you for half an hour, and,
while it was very interesting, you must see, my dear--” Jasper looked
into my eyes so earnestly that I almost laughed, for I knew he thought
I was on the verge of insanity and I had a dreadful temptation to
convince him of it by giggling hysterically and not listening at all.
“You must see,” he repeated, “that these manifestations, these nightly
hallucinations, follow a regular sequence. First you fill yourself
up on the traditions of the house before you enter it. You do not
share them with any one, not even me, and the first night you are
subjected to a sort of dream about the headboard moving. I was here
that night, but I did not see it. Then you read a lot of stuff about
materialization, and when you try to go to sleep your disordered brain
conjures up footsteps.”
“My _what_?” I demanded.
Jasper did not bother to contradict his outrageous statement.
“The third night, after you had discovered the secret room, you
materialize the child who you have decided lived in it. The fourth
night, after you read about auras, you contrive one of your own in the
skylight. The fifth night you conjure up the scene of the murder which
was suggested to you by that fraud over there on the sand-dunes. By the
way, I’m going over there and have that place raided. He’s a fake. He
knew all about you. He’s the same colored man that came up on the train
with us last Monday.
“The only thing I’m not sure about is the cat. There is something
tremendously psychic about a cat. I haven’t gone into the science of
the occult very extensively, but I would not pretend to say that there
is nothing in it. The theory of reincarnation is just as plausible a
theory of what becomes of the spirit as any other, so far as I know.
Personally, I don’t believe or disbelieve anything.”
“I have heard you say so before,” I interrupted, “but you do believe
in the cat.” I was glad to point out to him that his logic was not
invulnerable. “There is not a soul living who is not superstitious
about something. Call it what you like. Say I am crazy and that the
cat is ‘actually’ the soul of a woman who is drowned. It is all the
same to me. But as the cat is left over from the régime of Mattie, her
soul must have been reincarnated before she died, which is spinning the
‘wheel of life’ a little fast, isn’t it?”
Jasper grinned.
“If we are going to walk back to the House of the Five Pines,” I
finished more amiably, “we had better start, or we shall miss the
afternoon train.”
We left the luggage, the new suit-case that Jasper had invested in and
the typewriter that he had carried for three hundred miles, and walked
off up the street. He told me then about his play that he had been
working over, and I tried to renew my interest in New York. Myrtle had
been dropped unconditionally and ignominiously, much to her chagrin.
She had attempted to get an interview with my husband for the purpose
of being reinstated by him over the expressed wishes of the manager,
but he had succeeded in avoiding her devices and had at last left the
city without seeing her at all. (“And I am dragging him back there!” I
said to myself.) Gaya Jones had persuaded Burton to try a young friend
of hers in the part of ingénue, and the two were doing such excellent
team-work that the play was swinging in triumph through its difficult
first six weeks and was billed to last all winter.
“I’m glad I’m through with it,” finished Jasper. “It’s funny how sick
you get of a thing, even a good thing, before you finish grinding it
out. I had no idea plays were so difficult. Writing them is all right,
but it’s a life job to get rid of them. I’m going to settle down here
and write a long novel. I’ve got it all worked out.” He began to tell
me the beginning. “It will take me all winter, and I’m not going back
to New York at all. I’m tired of that crowd. Quiet is what a person
needs. Christmas on the cape! How will that be?”
I stared at him mutely.
“What is the matter with you, my dear?” he asked. “You’ve told me
what is the matter with the house, but that’s nothing. If you think
anything is wrong with me--anything has happened,” he went on lamely,
“that would make any difference between us--why, you are wasting
your worries. Everything is just as I have told you, my darling, and
everything is all right. I want to be with you, and I am glad you found
this place. We can afford to live anywhere we please as long as ‘The
Shoals of Yesterday’ lasts. Why do you try and create obstacles?”
And I, who had been struggling for this very opportunity, who had
withstood the city and endured the country to this end, that we might
have a home together where we wanted it, was now the one to refuse what
I had longed for when it lay in the palm of my hand.
“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. I know I was the one
to bring you up here, and now I won’t stay. But all I can say is that
I _am_ sorry, and that I _won’t_ stay. You take a look at the house
yourself.”
He took one long look inside the kitchen door and stopped short. Then
with an exclamation of horror, he dove out of sight. By the time I
stood where he had been standing, no one was there.