Harriet A. Gaul

“ 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 rain fell heavily on the low roof, blanketing the skylight and making the loft so dark that for a few seconds I could not see.
A sound came from a far corner. High-strung with terror, I thought it was some witless creature who had been concealed up here for many years, waiting for death to unburden it from a life that could never grow old.
It moved—and I saw it was the cat.
Again I could have killed it, but instead I sank down on the floor and began to laugh and cry.
“Come here, Cat! I won’t hurt you. We’re all mad together.” ”

“ And immediately the masculine tones changed to the light fluttering voice that had been hers. “Five pines, five pines, five pines,” it repeated rapidly, like a telephone-operator.
“Mattie,” I demanded, no longer surprised at my own voice, “what is in that secret room?”
“Huh?” interrupted the sailor, grasping my hand harder.
[189] I felt that every one in the circle was straining for the answer. The phrase “secret room” had won instant coöperation. We bent forward in abysmal darkness, listening through the silence, till even the sand blown down on the roof grated on our raw nerves. ”

“ 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 [28] the burly fishermen themselves, who used to tramp back from the flats to the “Big House” for their breakfast. ”

“ They had rattled for a hundred years; why not one night more? On the inside of the room two doors marked either side of a blind white chimney-shelf, one of them opening into the upper hall and the other into a small hall bedroom. On the outer wall opposite, two small doors opened into closets under the eaves, and between them a third topped the kitchen-stairs, which pitched down steeply, like a ship’s companionway. The wooden bed, with high painted headboard decorated with a medallion of carnations, stood against the back wall, facing the dormer-window. ”

“ Each room was large and high, with white woodwork and panels beneath the square-paned windows, and the furniture was of the period of the house, a hundred years old, much of it mahogany. We would have to wait until morning to justify an impression of it. The household belongings were all just as Mattie had left them—curtains and rugs, dishes and kitchen-utensils, even food. I knew that I would never eat any of the food. ”

“ The ones that I have seen have always been empty, with an insolent driver in a flannel shirt staring at the people he passes like an emperor in a Roman chariot. I would like to ride in one some time; it would be a restoring experience to get that superior attitude toward pedestrians. A chauffeur in a Rolls-Royce in a traffic jam does not achieve such aplomb. There is a superstition on Cape Cod that these carts are built for the sand roads over the dunes, but the only vehicles that I have ever met on those desolate tracks are the buggies of the life-saving crew, amiably plodding back and forth. ”

“ An early morning; fiery clouds veiling the rising sun, turning the whole bay to heliotrope and silver; fishing-vessels at anchor, their crews still asleep; sea-gulls flapping up lazily to roost again on pile tops, each one a gargoyle in the morning mist; and a little old woman rowing a heavy boat to her traps, standing to tug at the slippery line. An extra pull that drew her over the edge; a stagger to recover her balance as she floundered; [86] a cry that no one heard on those desolate flats; a boat left rocking, half-full of water ”

“ I could distinguish the furniture in the loft now. I saw a wash-bowl on a little stand, and put it under the loose-paned glass in the roof beneath which a pool was spreading. There was a low bureau in the room and a short turned bed, painted green, with a quilt thrown over one end, two little hand-made chairs, and one of those solid wooden rocking-horses, awesomely brave in the dusk. An open sea-chest held picture-books and paints and bent lead soldiers, and strewn upon the floor were quahaug-shells and a string of buoys. ”

“ However, as always, it halted in its race, pawed upon the stone breakwater, and I knew that by morning it would have slunk out again, and that children would be wading where waves had been, and Caleb Snow would be picking up winkles. Living was like that; the tide of our passions turns. The New Captain had built this double room for the great storm that had swept through his life, bearing [158] away the barricades of his traditions; but its force was spent now, and the skeleton laid as bare as a fish-bone on the sandy flats where strangers walked. ”

“ But enough children and strangers have been lost here in recent years to scare away the others! The townspeople say the dunes are haunted, and that at night strange shapes flit across the sand, spirits of those who have never been found. They will not come near the white fields at moonlight, when they are wrapped in mystery. The landmarks are not permanent. Every storm changes them, just as it changes the shoals on ‘the outside.’ The sailors are more afraid of this neck of land than any one else. ”

“ 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 [215] 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 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. ”

“ In the kitchen doorway two men were standing, open-jawed. I did not even pause to see who they were, but dashed on into the captain’s room, and was in time to see the latch of the secret door raised stealthily, then dropped, then clicked again. Some one rattled and shook it, but it would not open.
I smiled grimly.
“It’s different, isn’t it,” I said, “when some one wires it up after you get in? You’re human, you are; you can’t get out of there any more than I could!”
“Who are you talking to?” asked the judge. It was he who had arrived with his arm in a sling, and Alf had followed him. ”

“ The red light came from the skylight—the skylight of my house—in the roof of the loft. The red light was shining from the little secret room.
Could it be a fire? No flames crackled up [206] through the rotten shingles.... Some one—? There had not been a sound to-night.
The red light made a glowing rectangle so bright that the roof was invisible. It had the effect of being suspended high in space, like a phantasmagoric banner of the witches. The outlines of four panes of glass made a black cross upon it.
“The attribute of the apparition.... The aura of youth is red,” said the savant. ”

“ Thus I knew that Mattie “Charles T. Smith” had once more refused to vacate, and unless we were coming up there immediately, the judge would not evict her before spring.
“We ought to decide something,” I was saying to myself, when I heard my husband coming down the hall, and my heart forgot forebodings. I hurried to hide the ironing-board, there still being a pretense between us that it was not necessary to do these things, and put on the tea-kettle.
Jasper was tall and angular, with wispy light hair always in disorder above a high forehead and gray eyes wide open in happy excitement. ”

“ A fisherman knocked into me, hurrying down to the beach to drag his dory up beyond the rising. Outside of the point, where the lighthouse stood, one could see a procession of ships coming in, a whole [143] line of them. I counted seven sweeping up the tip of the cape, like toys drawn by children along the nursery floor. They seemed to ride the sand rather than the sea, their sails appearing above that treacherous neck which lay between them and me. Their barometers must have registered this storm hours ago, for they were converging from all the far-off fishing-banks. The bay was black. ”

“ Nowhere are conditions so mad as in New York, so enticingly witless. In this arcade building, cut up in its old age into so-called living apartments, with rickety bridges connecting passages that had no architectural relation to each other, whispers followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue loafed on the stairs. We had outgrown unconventional (which is the same as inconvenient) housekeeping. Jasper was getting bored and I was becoming querulous before [69] our married life had been given any opportunity to expand. Dogs were not allowed in our arcade; children would have been a scandal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why would any one build a round cellar?”
“So the sand can’t wedge off the corners. You know,” Alf reminded me, “I told you they didn’t build cellars on the cape. Well, they don’t, not regular ones, but that’s the kind they do build. Round, like a well under the kitchen, to keep food cool.”
“Sure,” said the judge, seeing the doubt in my eyes. “All the good houses have them. I’ve got one myself.” ”

“ Some one, probably the judge, had white-washed his soul in spite of his preferences and given him a Christian burial. With Mattie things were different, in death even as in life. I did not dare to inquire any further for fear I would learn that they had taken her poor drowned body and thrown it under a heap of stones at a crossroads. Customs of the Old World and superstitions of the New lingered in this neck of New England where, not too many years ago, forlorn old women had been burned as witches. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ No one had been inside the door for so many years that it had no reputation for containing antiques, as had so many of the old houses of Star Harbor, and it had escaped the weeding out and selling off that leaves to most of them in this generation only the mid-Victorian walnut and the modern white iron bed. The House of the Five Pines still held its original Colonial furniture—great horse-hair sofas and mahogany chests of drawers, hand-made chairs and rope-strung beds, and chests full of homespun linen and intricately patched quilts. ”

“ The children were shouting and sliding down the inside of a crater below us, transposing their winter sports to the summertime, climbing up the opposite slope, only to shoot down again on the seats of their rompers, laughing and crawling up, and repeating the game, in ecstasy of abandonment.
“I would like to do that, too,” said I.
Ruth smiled. “You would get sand in your sneakers.”
“Sneakers!” I scoffed.
“And wear holes in your silk stockings.”
“Silk stockings! No one should wear stockings out here. They should run barefoot before the wind, and leap from peak to peak. ”

“ The breakwater itself was too lonely a walk for any one but lovers, who have the nocturnal habits of the cat, but who do not patrol distant beaches to see the sunrise. And no other person would ever have been in shouting distance of the place where Mattie must have been drowned. ”