CHAPTER XVIIDAWN
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 barkSends its glimmer across the dark,And the heavy breathing of the seaIs the only sound that comes to me.Longfellow.
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 barkSends its glimmer across the dark,And the heavy breathing of the seaIs the only sound that comes to me.Longfellow.
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.
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 barkSends its glimmer across the dark,And the heavy breathing of the seaIs the only sound that comes to me.
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.
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 tiredhead 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 stickysaucer 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 felthis 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 reallythought 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.”
“Mywhat?” 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 anyother, 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 unconditionallyand 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 Iamsorry, and that Iwon’tstay. You take a look at the house yourself.”
He took one long look inside the kitchendoor 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.