CHAPTER IVTHE BOYCOTT

CHAPTER IVTHE BOYCOTT

“I ’M going home to-day,” I announced to Ruth after breakfast the next morning, “to secure Jasper’s consent to buying the House of the Five Pines. I’ll go round on the back street now, while you are busy, and get my washing from Mrs. Dove, so that I can pack it.”

As I passed the big old house it looked so innocent that I scoffed at the stories that it had gathered to itself, as a ship gathers barnacles. “All I need to do is to have it painted,” I thought, “and I will have the finest place on the cape. I’ll see how much it will cost to have a few things done.”

I turned into Turtle’s store, and after a search found the proprietor out in the back room making himself an ice-cream cone. I asked him if he knew any one whom I could get to paint a house.

“What house?” he parried, as if it made all the difference in the world.

“The House of the Five Pines.”

“What do you want to paint that for?”

I tried to keep my temper. “I’m going to buy it.”

“Well, you’ll probably never move in,” was his reply. “I wouldn’t waste no paint on it.”

As I turned out of his hostile door I bumped into a man coming in with open pails of white lead in each hand.

“Can you give me an estimate on a house—the House of the Five Pines?”

He looked from me to Mr. Turtle. “Why, I don’t do no painting,” he replied.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the evidence he had forgotten he was carrying.

“Well,hardlyany,” he corrected; “just a little now and then to oblige a friend, when I ain’t busy.”

Ruth had warned me of this. The independent son of the Puritan Fathers on Cape Cod will only work as a favor, and out of kindness charges you more than if he were drawing union wages.

“What do you do when youarebusy?”

“Oh,—boats.”

“Wouldn’t you have time in the fall?”

“In the fall I won’t be here,” he answered, with a relieved sigh.

Mr. Turtle gave a guffaw, but when I looked at him sharply he was methodically cutting a piece of cheese. “Will you have a sample?” he asked me, holding a sliver out to me on the end of a knife.

I slammed the screen-door.

As soon as I arrived in the hospitable back-yard of Mrs. Dove, I asked her what was wrong with them, or with me, that they should rebuff me so. Stout and red-faced with exertion, she was laboriously washing on a bench under the trees and kept on splashing the suds. Being the only laundry in town, she could not waste time on explanations. Mrs. Dove contracted to do the summer people’s clothing by the dozen, and, counting almost everything that was given her as not rightfully within that dozen, supplied herself with sufficient funds to hibernate for the winter. During the dull season she prepared for the next year’s trade by making rag-rugs and mats with button-eyed cats, the patterns for which had traditionally been brought back from Newfoundland by the sailors. Aftershe had listened to my story and hung up the stockings, she took the clothes-pins out of her mouth long enough to answer.

“You’ll have a hard time all right, getting any one to go near the place. They’re all against it.”

“But why?”

“Well, it has a bad name around here.”

That was what the judge had said. That was the reason he was willing to sell it cheap.

“Do you mean it is haunted?”

Mrs. Dove held a child’s rompers up to the sunlight, soaped a spot on the seat, and rubbed hard again.

“Well, not ghosts, precisely, but there’s always been strange goings-on there, things a person could not understand and that never has been explained. All the men is down on it, because the New Captain didn’t hire none of them to work on the wing he built.”

“But that was years ago!”

“Fifty, maybe. The house was put up in the first place by ships’ carpenters from Boston, and there’s some is still jealous of that. Still, when the New Captain added to it, seems as if he might have hired folks aroundhere. Instead of that he was so stingy that he built it all himself, him and Mattie. He had her working around there just like a man. Pretty near killed her carrying lumber. I’d ’a’ seen myself hammerin’ and climbing up and down ladders for any of them Haweses!”

“Did she really do that?”

“She did anything he said. Anything at all! From the time that he used to chase her barefooted in and out of the drying-frames on the shore lot where the cod was spread, she just worshiped him. And what good did it do her? Mis’ Hawes was so set against her that she made her life a torment, trying to keep her busy and away from him.”

“Why wouldn’t she let him marry her?”

“How did you know about that? Oh, you seen Caleb Snow! People that talk all the time has to say something. I bet the judge didn’t mention it!”

“He said that Mattie was picked up out of the sea.”

“Oh, as for that!”

“And that Mrs. Hawes came from Maine.”

“Did he? Well, she did, then. And she always thought there was nothing good enough for her in Star Harbor. There was hardly afamily on Cape Cod that she would associate with. Her father was one of them old sea-captains, pirates, I call them, who took slaves up there in his own vessels, and she just naturally had it in her to make Mattie into a slave of her own. She would no more have let her son marry that orphan girl than if she was a nigger. I was a child then myself, and I used to hear her hollerin’ at Mattie. She was bedridden the last six years, and she used to lie by the window, downstairs in the front room, and call out to people passing in the street. Stone deaf, Mis’ Hawes was, and so as she could hear the sound of her own voice she used to shout loud enough to call the hands in off the ships in the harbor. Yes, ma’am, her lightest whisper could be heard all over the bay.”

“Did she live longer than her husband?”

“Oh, years and years! He went down with theWhite Wren—they got his body off the point. It was after that she had the stroke and was so mean to Mattie and the New Captain. They was young people then, and just the age. She wouldn’t let him have a penny of the Old Captain’s fortune. I suppose it was because she wouldn’t give him any cash todo it with that he had to build the new wing himself. She was dead set against it. But it served her right. Mattie got so wore out with it that she had to go to a hospital in Boston and get laid up for a while. Some say she fell off the roof, but I used to be right around there watchin’ them half the time and I never see her fall off any roof. And Mis’ Hawes, she had a miserable time of it while Mattie was gone. Once you get depending on any one, it’s them that is the masters.

“I don’t believe Mattie ever would ’a’ come back after that, she was so long away, only one day the New Captain hitched up his horse and went and fetched her. His mother simply couldn’t do without her another minute. It was winter and there was no ships plying. The harbor was ice from here way over to the lighthouse-point; I remember it. And we didn’t have trains clear down the cape in those times. So what did the New Captain do but drive all the way down to Boston and back in his square box-buggy. He was gone days and days. I saw them coming home that night, the horse’s coat all roughed up and sweaty and his breath steaming into the cold, like smoke, the side-curtains drawn tightshut and the lamps lit. I was bringing back our cow, and I drew to one side of the road to let them pass, and I could hear her whimpering-like inside. He must have thought a powerful sight of Mattie to have made that journey for her.”

“Were they happy after that?”

“Not that anybody knows of. There was old Mis’ Hawes so set against his marrying her that she would fly into a passion if she saw you was even so much as thinking of such a thing; and yet, what could she do about it? Or what did she even know about it, shut up in one room? Yes, ma’am, there’s been strange goings-on in that house, and there is still. That’s why the men they won’t go near it. When the New Captain wanted the roof shingled or the pipes mended from time to time, he had to do it himself.”

“Well, I’m not going to paint the house myself,” I said. “After I get in and have it all opened up, they will feel differently about it.” I held up my chin defiantly.

“That is, if you ever get in,” rejoined Mrs. Dove.

I walked on down the back street with myclean white skirts, that she had washed, over my arm, and thought things over.

To every house, as to every human being, is granted two sorts of life, physical and spiritual. These wear out. To renew the physical life, all that is needed is a few shingles and a can of white lead and a thorough overhauling of the drains. The regeneration of the spiritual is more complex, requiring a change of occupant. The deterioration of a family within the walls of a house leaves an aroma of decay that only the complete relinquishment of the last surviving occupant can dissipate. Even then, the new tenant, in order to be exempt from the influence of past psychological experiences, must be unaware of them. I was learning too much about the House of the Five Pines. I determined that I would inquire no further, but brush these revelations from my mind and make a clean beginning. I would go back to New York now, remembering the house only in its external aspect, impressing that alone upon my husband and forestalling his reaction to the side of the situation that lent itself to fiction, which was his profession, by not telling himall of these legends that I had recently unearthed. Jasper was more sensitive to such suggestions than myself, and I felt that if he knew what I did we should have no peace. To protect myself from exhaustive argument and speculation, it would be wiser to repeat nothing.

The road where I was walking led across the rear of the premises of the House of the Five Pines, which extended a block, from what was always called the “Front Street” to the “Back Street.” From here one had a view of the garden and the four-foot brick walls that held up the precious earth hauled from such a distance. The century’s growth of the five pine-trees had burst open the wall along one side, and their roots, extending into the next yard, had been ruthlessly chopped off. I hoped that these new neighbors would not extend their animosity to me. The land sloped gradually down from the house until it rose again in a wooded hill on the further side of Back Street. This incline had necessitated the placing of piles, topped with inverted tin pans, as they are in country corn-bins, to hold up the rear of the captain’s wing. The space thus formed beneaththe house, called the “under,” was filled with the rubbish of years. There were no doors at the back of the house, nor did this one-story addition have any entrance. There was a big chimney in the center of the end-wall and windows on either side. No barns or outbuildings fringed the road. The needs of seafaring folk demanded that they keep their properties in sheds upon their wharves.

At first there was no sign of Mattie, but as I lingered in Back Street, lost in speculation, a little old woman came around the side of the mysterious house. She was dragging two heavy oars behind her which she propped against a tree, and, setting down a wicker fish-basket beside them, lifted out a live green lobster.

She wore a yellow oilskin hat, with the brim bent down around her withered face, and a dirty sailor’s middy over a bedraggled skirt. Holding her freshly-caught lobster in a way that would have been precarious to most people, she talked to it like a pet, and as I continued to watch her, fascinated, she carried it tenderly away. I wondered if she would drop it into boiling water, which was its natural destiny, or take it into thekitchen and feed it a saucer of milk. She did not appear again, but realizing that from behind some shutter she might be observing me, I became self-conscious and moved on.

Judge Bell was leaning against the door of the Winkle-Man’s loft and greeted me like an old friend as I passed. I knew that he had strolled up there this morning to find out what had transpired after I left him the day before.

“Are you going to take the house?” he asked.

“I hope so. I’m going back home this afternoon and tell my husband about it.”

“Oh, ye’ve got a husband, have ye?” said Caleb, appearing with his winkle-fork in his hand.

“What would I want that big house for if I didn’t have any husband?”

“Give it up! What do you want it for anyway? The judge and me have give up wondering what summer people wants anything for, ain’t we, judge?”

Judge Bell would not answer; he was afraid Caleb was going to spoil the sale.

“They always pick out the worst ramshackle down-at-the-heels places that they can get for nothin’, and talks about the ‘possibilities’ of’em, like a revivalist prayin’ over a sinner, until you would think the blessed old rat-trap was something!”

“The House of the Five Pines isn’t a rat-trap,” said the judge, touchily.

“No, it ain’t,” grinned Caleb, shouldering his long fork and picking up his bait-bucket. “It’s a man-trap!”

He slouched off down the bank.

“Don’t you worry,” I reassured the judge, who was looking sour. “I’ll take the house if I possibly can. You put your mind on getting Mattie moved out of it, and I’ll write you.”

I told Ruth about my interviews when I reached the cottage. “You’ve found out more about that house in the last twenty-four hours,” she replied in her leisurely way, “than I’ve ever heard in the five years I’ve lived here. I only pray you will take it now. The town-people won’t like it if you don’t; you’ve got their hopes aroused.”

“I have my own aroused,” I replied. “I have more hope now for the future than I have had for the last six months.”

Ruth saw me off cheerfully on the afternoon train, but I knew that in her kind heartwere forebodings as to what might happen in my life before she could see me again. Her whole family would migrate soon now, and our winters would be spent in cities too far apart for us to help each other. If she could have known how much I was going to need her, she would never have left Star Harbor.

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