FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES





FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES
BY
AVERY GAUL .« ^;
\

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922


PZ
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5011)3
Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.

PBINTID IS U, J.4.


To
MARY FENOLLOSA





CONTENTS
CHAPTER »A(J»
I The House of the Five Pines ... 3
II Mattie Charles T. Smith .... 24
III The Winkle-man and the Will . . 41
IV The Boycott 51
V "The Shoals op Yesterday" ... 65
VI Lobster-Pots ....,..-76
VII The First Night at Fiyi Pines . . 89
VIII A Message from Mattib ..... 103
IX The Second Night ....... 118
X The Cat or the Captain . . . .184
XI The Third Night 149
XII The Little Coffin 162
XIII The Seance of Horns 178
XIV The Fourth Night 191
XV Beach-Plums 207
XVI The Fifth Night 225
XVII Dawn 231
XVIII The Disappearance of Mrs. Dove . . 247
XIX I Hide the Ghost 260
XX Jezebel . . . ,.i m m » .* 278


FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES





FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES
ASEA of yellow sand rose, wave on wave,
around us. High hills, carved by the
bitter salt winds into tawny breakers, reared
towering heads, peak upon peak. Like
combers that never burst into spray, their
static curves remained suspended above us,
their tops bent back upon the leeward side,
menacing, but never engulfing, the deep pools
of purple shadows that lay beneath them.
The sand was mauve in the hollows, and black
upon white were the cupped dunes hung over
their own heights. They were like water that
did not move, or mountains with no vegeta-
tion. They did not support as much life upon
their surface as that which crawls upon the
floor of the ocean. They were naked and un-
ashamed as the day when they were tossed up
3


A FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
out of the bed of the sea. Only tufts of sharp
green grass clung to some of the slopes, their
silhouettes flattened out before them like the
pin-feathers of a young bird, inadequate and
scant, accentuating the barrenness of the saf-
fron sand.
Centuries ago some gigantic upheaval of
Neptune had forced this long ridge out of the
shielding water, to he prone in the sight of the
sun, like a prehistoric sea-monster forever dry-
ing its hide. More isolated than an island,
the head of the cape, with the town in its jaws,
fought the encroaching sea, which thundered
upon it in constant endeavor to separate it
from the tail, extending a hundred miles to the
mainland. From the height on which we
stood, the line of ocean far away was dark
blue, following in a frothy scallop the inden-
tations of the coast. The sound of the surf
came to us like a repeated threat. It could
bend the cape, but never break it, twist and
turn it, change the currents and the sand-bars,
and toss back upon its shore the wreckage of
such vessels as men essayed to sail in, but
the sand-dunes continued to bask blandly.
Sometimes they shifted, but so silently and
gradually that they seemed not so much to


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 7
men and of marriage, and for sixty-three
days the stern-faced Puritans had been her
only companions and the rolling sea her
entire horizon. Her quarters must have be-
come a prison to her before the voyage was
over. When at last this finger of land, reach-
ing into the Atlantic, had beckoned to the
mariners, her heart must have sung like a
caged canary, even as mine responded when
first I saw the cape. Did she linger with the
other virtuous housewives at the first spring,
to wash her husband's dirty linen? Not she!
I liked to think that in glad escape she ran
from all those stuff gowns and starched ker-
chiefs, through the woods, chasing the scarlet-
winged blackbirds on and on, picking the win-
tergreen berries and ravenously eating them,
gathering her arms full of bright autumn
leaves, feeding her hungry eyes on the vivid
color of growing things and her starved soul,
at last, upon the dunes. It was not the In-
dians who prevented Dorothy Bradford from
returning to the ship; it was her own heart.
If Indians saw her, they must have fallen on
their red knees in the sand and worshiped her
for a sprite of limitless space, running past
them with gay branches clasped to her gray


10 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
of fishing-vessels were caught in a sudden tem-
pest and half of them were lost. Eleven men
were drowned, all from this town! Star Har-
bor raises her sons upon the sandy flats of the
bay at her doorway, and when they grow old
enough they sail away from her, and she
knows that one day, sooner or later, they will
fail to return. In the meantime the mothers
do not bring their boys out here on the dunes to
play, as we do our children from the cities.
It is too much like dancing on their own
graves! They try to forget the dunes are
here, and walk up and down -the front street
of the village."
"I do not want to forget them," said I.
"They mean something to me, Ruth, some-
thing that I have needed for a long time."
Ruth smiled at me fondly, without replying.
We had known each other for a long time.
"It is like the touch of a hand on the heart,"
I tried to explain, "or like a song heard out-
side a window in the dark—or a flaming em-
broidery on a stucco wall."
The sun shone down upon the tawny sand,
illuminating the dunes with so blinding a radi-
ance that description was futile. The effect
of so much heat and light was soothing and


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 11
restful, and at the same time stimulating.
The body drank up enough electricity,
through contact with the sand, to renew its
youth and send the worn years reeling back-
ward. The children were shouting and slid-
ing down the inside of a crater below us,
transposing their winter sports to the summer-
time, 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.
It is absurd, in the face of this vast emptiness,
to wear clothes at all!"
"So many people feel that way," said Ruth,
dryly.
But I refused to be rebuffed.
"We need it, Ruth," I cried. "We, who
are cooped up in cities, are starving for this
very thing—space and sunlight, air and


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 18
Ruth laughed.
I thought that probably she would point out
to me how impractical I was. But she did
not. She seemed to be weighing the matter,
taking me more seriously than I took myself.
Ruth had a penetrating quality of sympathy
with another's trouble that made of it an
immediate problem for her to solve and for
the sufferer to relinquish. I had come up
here a week ago, for no other reason than that
life had reached the stage with me where I
had to run away from the confusion of my
own menage. I needed another line of vision,
another angle from which to approach it, and
I considered it worth taking the long dull
journey up the cape to get my friend's point
of view. All that quiet August afternoon,
while we had watched her children playing on
the sand-dunes, we had been talking over life
and our place in it as only two women can
who had known each other since childhood
and have managed to keep friends, although
both of them are married. Our conversation
had been mostly about New York, from which
I was escaping, and that offshoot of society
which has its roots among actors and produc-
ers and its branches in the motion-picture


14. FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
studios. Ruth was far removed from this
forcing frame, spending her winters, more
happily, in Charleston, and her summers on
Cape Cod, so that I thought I could get from
her the calm point of view and the fresh focus
that I needed.
"Well, if you want to live here and get back
to nature by way of the sand-dunes, by all
means do so," she was saying dispassionately;
"that would be saner than running on all fours
and standing on your head in the city. But
don't pitch a tent out here! It has been dem-
onstrated that hurricanes have an antipathy
for canvas. Buy a house in town, and at least
have shingles over your head and running
water in the kitchen. Even the birds refuse
to drink from the rank pools in this desert.
There is alkali on the surface and quicksands
along the edges of the ponds. I '11 show you
a house in Star Harbor that has been waiting
for years for some one like you to come along
and take a chance on moving into it."
She stood up and, giving a long "Woo-
ooh!" through her hands to the turbulent
young ones, led me back over the dunes to
the green edge of the woods.
"There," she said, pointing over the tree-


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 15
tops to the town that nestled at the edge of the
encircled bay, "do you see five pine-trees stand-
ing up higher than all the others? That is the
place."
I saw below me a mass of scrubby oaks and
stunted pines, which wore out to a thin edge
on the shore where the fishing-village huddled.
The bright white paint of the cottages, with
the sun at their backs, picked them out
distinctly from the blue bay beyond them, and
one house, larger than any of the others, thrust
its sloping roof into prominence beside a row
of pines.
"That!" I exclaimed. "But how large it
is—for only my husband and myself! We
would rattle around in it. We haven't
enough furniture!"
I was alarmed at the expansive turn of
Ruth's imagination. Even if you have put
yourself in the power of a friend's advice, or
perhaps just because of that, you are not
ready to admit that she, with one slash of
unprejudiced judgment, has cut the knot
which you have been patiently trying to
untangle.
"Furniture!" scoffed Ruth. "If that is all
that is worrying you— There is more fur-


16 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
niture in that house than any other house on
Cape Cod. That is a captain's place, old
Captain Jeremiah Hawes, and he brought
home fine mahogany from wherever he
dropped anchor. In his day they sailed to
England for their Chippendale and to China
for a set of dishes."
"What good would that do me?"
"You don't seem to understand," Ruth
explained patiently; "it all goes together.
There is hardly a house sold in Star Harbor
but what the furniture is included in the deal.
You get whatever the house contains, when
you buy it."
We were retracing the path through the
woods by which we had entered the dunes
earlier in the day. The children ran before
us, playing wood-tag from tree to tree,
exploring "fairy circles," and stopping from
time to time to let us catch up with them,
when they would drop completely out of
sight among the blueberry bushes. These
grew so thick at our feet that you could pull
the berries off by the handful and munch them
as you strolled along.
"Tell me more about the house," I begged.


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 17
My mouth was full of blueberries, but my
mind was full of plans.
"It was built over a hundred years ago, by
ships' carpenters who came down here all the
way from Boston. They don't know how to
do that kind of cabinet-work any more. The
soil in the yard was hauled here by the wagon-
load from ten miles down the cape to make the
garden—no sea sand left there to sprout burrs!
The Old Captain knew what he wanted and
where to get it. He made what was, in those
days, a fortune. He was master of a fleet of
fishing-vessels, and used to make yearly
voyages to the banks of Newfoundland for
cod and to Iceland for sperm-oil whales. A
pair of his big iron testing-kettles are still
down in his wharf-shed, and the house is full
of valuable maps and charts. Not that any
one has ever seen them."
"Why not? How long has it been vacant?"
"It has never been vacant at all! That's
the trouble. After old Captain Hawes and
his wife died, their son, whom every one calls
the 'New Captain,' lived on there in the house
for years, along with the same woman who had
always been a servant to his mother. He died


18 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
after we came here, five years ago, under
peculiar circumstances, but she still lives on,
behind closed shutters."
"Is the house for sale?"
"It's been for sale ever since the New
Captain died, but the old woman who lives in
it won't let any one inside the door to look
at it."
"I'd take it without seeing it, if it's all you
say it is," I answered. "Why don't they put
the old woman out?"
Ruth shrugged, as one who would suggest
that no outsider could hope to understand how
business was managed on the cape.
"Let's go and see it on our way home,"
I suggested.
"All right; we can send the children on."
They were scampering through the brush
ahead of us, chasing limp-winged yellow
butterflies and spilling their'precious garnered
blueberries as they ran. Their bare legs,
covered with sand from the dunes and
scratched by the briers of the woods, stood the
strain of the long walk better than ours, in
their flimsy stockings and hot rubber-soled
shoes. I wanted to sit on a log in the shady
woods and rest, but no one else seemed tired


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 19
and the thought of the old house lured me on to
hurry to its doorstep.
It needed only that difficulty of getting
possession to make me sure that this was the
very house for which I had been waiting all my
life. I knew, too, that the romance of the
situation would be the deciding point in any
opposition that I might well expect to meet
from my husband, who was still in New York.
Jasper was a fiction-writer, at present aspir-
ing to be a playwright, and it was true that he
needed for his work an atmosphere that he
could people with the phantoms of his own
mind, rather than the disturbing congestion of
the apartment where we now lived. In set-
ting out to follow Ruth's advice and buy a
house on Cape Cod, I felt that I was doing
my best not only for myself and the sort of
family life that I felt would naturally follow,
but for my husband and his exacting career.
I realized that it would be for both of us a
solution of the philosophy of living. Jasper
had reached that stage in the beginning of
success when it seemed to his friends that he
was working too hard and playing too hard,
squandering his talents upon Carthaginian
gods who would only burn him up in the end.


20 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
I had been following Ruth in silence, for
the way through the wood was hard, but now
we came into the outskirts of the fishing-village
and, crossing the single railroad track that ran
the length of the cape, struck the easy tread
of the boardwalks, There were only two
streets in Star Harbor, front and back, and,
sending the children on to Ruth's house by the
back way, their pockets oozing with blue-
berries, we emerged to the front street and
faced the bay, just as the Pond-Lily Man was
passing.
He was returning from his day's work,
peddling pond-lilies up and down the cape on
his bicycle, a great basket of them dripping
from his arm now, their luscious white heads
closed, although not wilted; and he offered
them all to Ruth hopefully, to get rid of
them.
"Pond-lilies," he repeated automatically, as
he saw us coming into sight. "Pond-lilies.
Five cents a bunch!"
He was a thin little man with a tired face,
apologetic, but stubborn about his trade, sell-
ing his flowers with a mildness and a persistence
that was deceptive.
Ruth bought them all, only asking if he


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 21
would, as a favor, carry them up to her cottage.
"As a favor," he replied; "this time!"
"Pond-lilies! Pond-lilies!" he called again,
as he started off, seeming to forget that we
had purchased the entire stock.
"Poor thing," said Ruth; "that cry is a habit
with him. He must do it in his sleep. He
used to be a parson of some sort, but his
'health failed him' and that's the way he sup-
ports his family. They say his children all
get out in a flat-bottomed boat on Pink Pond,
down the cape, and pick them for him every
morning before it is light."
"They work hard up here," said I, feeling
rather inadequate to the occasion, which was
so tremendously local.
"They do," replied Ruth, with her usual
sympathy and few words.
We paused to rest a moment by the bay.
The water sparkled happily, with none of
the menace that shrouded the deep blue of the
ocean which we had left on "the outside"
beyond the dunes. Here were merry little
whitecaps, as innocent as the children who
played upon the flats, and before us the
fishing-boats, riding at anchor, had no more
flavor of adventure than so many rocking-


22 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
horses. The sunlight, mirrored from the
bright waves, shone upon houses at the water's
edge with a glow that turned the glass of the
windows into flame and burnished the brass
knockers on the doors. The white paint glis-
tened as if it had been varnished that very
afternoon, and the green blinds and the red
roses climbing on the cottages were raised in
tone to the height of the color of ornaments on
a Christmas-tree. The whole village had the
aspect of a gaily painted toy. The dust of the
road was rose-tinted. The leaves of the trees
looked as if they had been scrubbed and
polished, and the sails of the vessels on the bay
were as white as the clouds that skipped across
the bright blue sky.
. It was the contrast between this radiant
shimmer of sea and cloud, this flicker of sun-
shine and dazzle of window-pane, this green
of the short trimmed grass and crimson of the
flowers, that caused my amazement when I
first saw the house that was to be mine. I
was bewildered by its drab melancholy, and I
would have turned away, had not an inner
courage urged me on. For it seemed to me,
that August afternoon, that I had come to
a crossroads in my married life, and it was in


THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES 23
the mood of a weary traveler approaching a
wayside shrine that I turned through the
hedge at last and beheld the House of the
Five Pines.


CHAPTER II
MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH"
THE old mansion stood back from the
road along the bay in a field of high,
burnt grass. Drooping dahlias and faded
old-fashioned pinks and poppies bordered the
half-obscured flagstones which led to a fan-
topped door. It was so long since the house
had been painted that it had the appearance
of having turned white with age, or something
more, some terror that had struck it overnight.
Wooden blinds, blanched by the salt wind to
a dull peacock-blue, hung disjointedly from
the great square-paned windows. A low roof
sloped forward to the eaves of the first story,
its austere expanse interrupted by a pointed
gable above the kitchen. Beneath the dor-
mer-window was a second closed and shuttered
door.
At some period, already lost in obscurity, a
wing had been thrust back into the neglected
garden behind the house, and over its gray
24


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 25
shingles stood the five pine-trees which we had
seen from the sand-dunes. Old Captain Jer-
emiah Hawes had planted them for a wind-
break, and during a century they had raised
their gaunt necks, waiting to be guillotined
by the winter storms. Faithfully trying to
protect their trust from the ravages of wind-
driven spray and stinging sand, they extended
their tattered arms in sighing protest above
the worn old house.
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 creature did not ask us what we
wanted; she knew. Her perception was clair-
voyant. Long experience in dealing with


26 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
house-hunters made her understand what we
had come for without the formality of any ex-
planation. We brushed straight past the first
half of what would ordinarily have been the
procedure of conversation, and I came to the
gist of what was uppermost in my mind and
Mattie's.
"Why won't you let any one in?" I asked,
bluntly.
Ruth looked at me in some surprise.
Mattie put up a long thin arm to keep the
window from falling on her shoulders. "I
dunno as I need to say," she answered me,
directly.
"What?" said Ruth. My friend, being
complacent-minded, had not followed the
argument so fast.
But Mattie did not repeat herself. She and
I understood each other. She kept on gazing
straight at me in that piercing way which I
knew instinctively had driven many a pur-
chaser from her inscrutable doorway.
"Will you let me in if I get a permit from
the agent?" I insisted.
"That depends," replied Mattie.
Her lean body withdrew from the frame of
the upper gable, her eyes still holding mine,


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 27
until her face gradually disappeared into the
gloom of the room behind her. The last thing
I saw were two veined hands gradually low-
ering the sash, and the last sound was a little
click as it shut.
Ruth, having brought me to see the house,
was murmuring words of apologetic respon-
sibility. But I did not feel daunted.
"I think I will take it, anyway," I said,
"just for the view."
From the doorstep of the House of the Five
Pines we faced the bay across the road, where
many little fishing-boats were anchored, and
white sails, rounding the light-house point,
made a home-coming procession into Star
Harbor. Remembering Mattie "Charles T.
Smith" at her upper window, I wondered if
she, too, saw the picture as I did and loved it
the same way. 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 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
the burly fishermen themselves, who used to
tramp back from the flats to the "Big House"
for their breakfast. She had been a part of
that former life which was gone, and now, like
an old hull on the flats, she was waiting for
that last great storm that was to sweep her
out to sea. Sympathy for her made me al-
most wish to abandon my own project before
it was begun, and yet it seemed to me that her
life was almost over and that the House of the
Five Pines needed the youth that we could
bring it as much as we needed the shelter it
could offer us. I brushed aside the thought
of Mattie as if it were a cobweb that clung to
my face in the woods.
"Take me to the trustee, or whoever controls
the place," I begged my friend; "let's see what
can be done!"
"Now?" asked Ruth.
We had turned reluctantly through the
hedge into the road.
"Why not?" I answered. "I'm going back
to New York to-morrow."
"You can't do things so quickly around
here."
She must have noticed my disappointment,
for she added, "There are no telephones or


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 29
street-cars, and whenever you go to see people,
the first three times you call they always hap-
pen to be out."
"Don't be lazy," I urged, so full of my own
enthusiasm that I had no mercy on plump and
pretty Ruth. "How far is it to this man's
office?"
"Office? He does n't have any office. His
house is at the other end of town."
Clang-Mlang! Clang-Mlang!
The clamor of bell-ringing finished our ar-
gument.
Down the boardwalk, to meet us, hobbled
a strange figure. Supporting a great copper
bell, which he swung with a short stroke of his
stumpy right arm, was a stodgy man dressed
in a tight, faded, sailor's suit, a straw hat on
his bald head, fringed with red hair, and a
florid face that at present was all open mouth
and teeth and tongue. He was the town crier.
In front of the deserted House of the Five
Pines he stopped and, holding a printed
dodger high in the air, read off it, in stentor-
ian tones, "Hi Yi, Gu Jay, Be Boom Bee
Boy!"
"Whatever in the world is he trying to say?"
I gasped.


30 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"I don't know," said Ruth. "Nobody ever
knows. You can't understand him."
"But what does he do that for?"
"Why," smiled Ruth, "that's the way we
get the news around. If there is a meeting in
the town hall, you give the town crier a dollar,
and he goes up and down the boardwalk and
rings his belL"
"But if no one can understand him?"
"Oh, they ask each other afterward. The
man who sends the crier out always knows.
He tells some one, who tells the next, so that
often the news travels faster than the crier
does and you know what it is beforehand."
"It's well you do!"
"Yes," Ruth agreed, "because for the most
part he gives out the notices in front of a
vacant lot. And if you ask him to repeat, he
is furious with you. I '11 show you. O
Dave," she called after him, "what is the
news?"
The town crier turned upon the sweet-
mannered city woman like an angry child on
his partner in a game of croquet who has not
obeyed the rules. He clanged down his bell
insolently, and kept on clanging it up and
down as he turned on his heel and strode away.


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 31
Ruth laughed. "You see!" she said.
"I see."
"He is the last town crier in America. We
are very proud of him!"
"I should think you would be," I replied.
It seemed to me that I understood why the
race had become extinct. I would have traded
him for a telephone.
We walked slowly down the village street.
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 strag-
gling wharves, with their long line of storm-
bent buildings, stretched their necks out into
the flats. We passed a great, ugly cold-
storage house, which had superseded the pri-
vate industry of the old days, the company
which owned it controlling all of the seines in
the bay, for whom the fishermen rose at four


82 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
to pull up the nets which had once been theirs.
"You can't buy fresh fish in Star Harbor
now," Ruth was saying; "it all goes to Boston
on ice and comes back again on the train."
Down the steep roadways beside the wharves
one caught sight of tall-masted schooners, an-
chored to unload, and the dead herring thrown
from the packing-houses to the beach, rotting
in the stale tide-water, made an unwholesome
stench. In front of the fish-houses swarthy
Portuguese sat drowsing in the sun. Their
day's work had begun with the trip to the
seines at dawn and had ended with their big
breakfast at noon. Their children swarmed
about them in the streets, quarreling over ice-
cream cones, which they shared, lick for lick,
with their dogs. On the corner near the gov-
ernment wharf we had to turn into the road to
avoid a crowd of noisy middies who were
taking up all the sidewalk, laughing like
schoolboys at recess, enjoying their two hours'
leave from the big destroyer anchored in the
harbor. They had no contact with the town
except through mild flirtation with the girls,
and no festivity while on shore greater than
eating pop-corn on the curb, but they seemed
to feel satisfied that they were "seeing the


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 83
world" and were quite hilarious about it.
They were as much a part of the port as the
Portuguese sailors, and more vital to it than
the stray artists whom we had seen, absorbed
each in his own canvas, which he had pitched
in some picturesque—and cool—spot along the
water-front.
Passing through a neighborhood where the
little shops filled their fly-specked windows
with shell souvenirs for visitors, we turned up
an alleyway and entered the yard of a house
built squarely behind the row of front store
buildings. In this neighborhood they did not
mind because they had no view of the sea.
They were tired of looking at it and were more
than glad to be shut off from its sharp wind
in the winter.
Judge Bell was sitting on the open porch
that ran around three sides of his pink house
like the deck of a ship. He was perfectly con-
tent with the location.
"We have come to see you," I began, "about
buying the House of the Five Pines."
The judge marked the book he was reading
and laid it down, looking at us mildly, without
surprise.
"I '11 do all I can for you," he replied, with


34. FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
what seemed to me undue emphasis on the
"can." "Won't you come up and set down?
We might talk it over, anyway."
"Talk it over!" I repeated impatiently,
rocking violently in one of his big chairs.
"How much is it, and how soon can I get it?"
I felt Ruth and the judge exchanging
glances over my head.
"It ain't quite so simple as that," he said
quietly, weighing me, as all these Cape Cod
people do, with unveiled, appraising eyes.
"Two thousand dollars is all I'm asking for
it now, as trustee—"
"I thought it was three 1" Ruth could not
help exclaiming. "I was told you were hold-
ing it for three."
"I'm holding it,"—his big leathery face
broke into the lines of a smile—"for Mattie
'Charles T. Smith' to move out. That's all
I'm holding it for. I could 'a sold it five
times a year in the last five years, if it had n't
been for her. And it's gettin' a name now.
I'd be glad to be rid of it." He passed his
heavy hand over his face speculatively, and
held his lower jaw down as he weighed me
once more. "I'd be real glad to get shet with
the whole deal!"


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 35
"I '11 take it," said I.
Even Ruth looked startled. She remem-
bered what I did not, in my sudden enthusi-
asm; that I had yet to get my husband's con-
sent to living here—and the money. But it
seemed so ridiculously cheap that I was al-
ready in that cold real-estate sweat which
breaks out on the novice in his first venture
for fear that some one else, between night and
morning or while he goes for his lunch,
will get the treasure that he has set his heart
on.
"How soon can you get Mattie 'Charles T.
Smith' out?" I asked nervously.
The judge's lower jaw went up with a snap.
"I don't know," he said, tapping the arms
of his chair with his hammerhead fingers, "as
I can ever get her out."
"You mean as long as she lives?"
"As long as she lives, certainly—and after
that, maybe never."
He got up and spit over the porch-rail.
As he did so I picked up the book that
he had knocked to the floor—"Brewster's
Natural Magic," edited in London in 1838.
It was full of diagrams of necromancy and
open at a chapter on phantom ships. I


36 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
showed the title to Ruth surreptitiously. She
nodded.
"They are all that way up here," she said.
But the shrewd old judge had heard her.
"I '11 let you read that book," he said, "if
you can understand it."
"I'd like to," I answered, to cover my em-
barrassment. "But I do understand you.
You mean that her influence would remain."
"I mean more than that."
I would have liked nothing better than to
have started the judge talking on "natural
magic," but just for this one afternoon it
seemed as if we ought to keep to real estate.
If I lived here, I could come back and talk to
him again on psychic subjects.
"You think, then, that Mattie has some
claim on the place?"
"No legal claim, no. But there is claims
and claims. The claims on parents that chil-
dren have, and the claims on children that par-
ents have. And the claims of them that are
not the true children of their parents, but
adopted. Maybe not legally; but morally,
yes. If people take children and bring them
up, like Captain Jeremiah Hawes done, that
makes them have some obligation toward


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 37
them, doesn't it? And then there are the
claims that married people have on each other,
and the people that ain't married, and I
sometimes think that the people that ain't
legally married have more claim on each other
than people who are, just on account of that.
It puts it up to the individual. And if the
individual fails, it is more of a moral break-
down than if the law fails. For the law is
only responsible to man, but man, he is
responsible to God. Do you follow me?"
"All the way," I said.
The judge got up and spit over the rail of
the porch again.
"As I was say in', Mattie ain't got no legal
claim to the House of the Five Pines, and I
could put her out in a minute if I was a mind
to. I expect I could have done it five years
ago, when the New Captain died, only
it seemed the town would have to take care of
her all the rest of her natural days. We've
saved five years' board on her at the poor-
farm now, and it looks as if she might live
quite a while longer. Plenty of 'em get to be
a hundred around here, and she ain't over
seventy; not any older than I am, likely. At
least, she didn't used to be when she was


38 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
young!" He sighed, as if suddenly feeling the
weight of his days. "And the town, as a town,
don't hanker after the responsibility of taking
on Mattie 'Charles T. Smith.'"
"Why do they call her that?" interrupted
Ruth. "Is that her name?"
"That's as good a name as any for a person
who ain't got one of her own. Charles T.
Smith was the vessel old Captain Hawes was
sailin' in, the time he picked her up out of the
sea."
"Picked her up out of the sea!" we both ex-
claimed.
"Didn't you ever hear about that?" he
asked. "Well it's so common known around
here there's no need in my concealing it from
you.
"Captain Hawes was up on the Grand
Banks fishing, along in the fifties, and had all
his small boats out from the ship when a
hurricane struck him. The sea was standing
right up on its legs. Just as he was trying to
get back his men, and letting all the cod go to
do it, too, there he see a big sloop right on top
of him, almost riding over him, on the crest of
a wave as high as that dune back there. High
and solid like that, and yellow. But instead


MATTIE "CHARLES T. SMITH" 39
of comuV over on him, like he fully expected
an' was praying against, the vessel slipped
back. By the time he rode the crest, there
she was diving stern down into the bottom of
the trough. And she never come up again.
The only thing that come up was this here
Mattie. Sebastian Sikes, he was out in a
small boat still, and he leaned over and
grabbed her up, a little girl, tied to a life-
preserver. The captain was for letting her go
adrift again when he come ashore, but Mis'
Hawes wouldn't let him. She said as long
as Mattie was the only thing he salvaged out
of the whole voyage, the Lord He meant they
should keep her.
"The child couldn't even speak the lan-
guage at first. They thought it must be
Portuguese she was jabberin', but the sailors
they said no, they would n't claim it neither.
So they come to think afterward it might have
been French, her being picked up there off
Newfoundland, and all them French sailors
coming out that way from Quebec. But by
the time somebody had thought of that, she had
forgot how to speak it, anyway. She was only
about five. The missis had her baptized
'Matilda,' after a black slave her father had


40 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
brought home to Maine when she was a girl
herself, up to Wiscasset. But 'Mattie' it
came to be, and 'Charles T. Smith,' after
the ship that saved her."
"And didn't he leave her anything in his
will, after all that?"
"Neither Jeremiah Hawes nor his wife left
any will," replied Judge Bell. "The only
will there is is the one the New Captain made.
It's up to Caleb Snow's place."
"Can I see it?"
"You can if he ain't out winkling." The
judge picked up his "Natural Magic" as if he
hoped that we were going.
"What's 'winkling'?" I whispered to Ruth,
as we turned away.
"Oh, nothing important—something the
children do out on the flats, gathering little
shell-fish they use for bait."
"He '11 be in if the tide ain't out," the judge
called after us.


CHAPTER III
THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL
WE found the man who gathers winkles
sitting ort the floor of the sail-loft.
Caleb Snow combined the resources of real es-
tate with the independence of a fisherman,
and sent his daughter to the State normal-
school on the proceeds. When one can go out
on the flats at low tide and pick up a living
with a pronged stick, why worry about rents?
Judge Bell, himself too busy attending seances
to give the matter his best thought, had per-
suaded Caleb Snow to handle the House of
the Five Pines. We wondered if the Winkle-
Man would take any interest in either it or us.
"Judge Bell told us that we might ask you
to show us the will of the late Captain
Hawes," I began.
"You mean the New Captain."
Caleb went on with the deft mending of the
great tarred net, in the center of which he was
bent like some old spider. He was a little
41


42 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
man, and he made us feel even taller than we
were as he peered up at us in the dusk of the
low-beamed room, shadowed by the hanging
sails and paraphernalia of ships which ob-
scured the lights from the dusty windows.
"It's up in the loft," he said wiping his
greasy hands on the seat of his overalls.
"Can't we go up there?"
"Can ye?" he answered. He walked slowly
over to a steep ladder that led up into a black
hole and began to mount. Near the top he
turned around and called down to us:
"I ain't a-goin' to bring it below, not for
no one!"
I started after him.
"Isn't there any light up there?" asked
Ruth cravenly, from the bottom rung.
For answer he swung open a pair of double
doors, and the glory of the afternoon sunshine
streamed in upon us. Gold and bronze the
water fell in the long lines of the incoming tide.
Deep blue shadows pooled the mirrored
surface beneath the boats that were anchored
along the shore. The radiance of the bay
filled the dark corners of the sail-loft like a
blessing.
Caleb Snow bent over an old safe under


44 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"It is my wish that Mattie 'Charles T.
Smith' sit in the room with my body for a week
after I die, thereby fulfilling a last solemn
trust."
"Why did he say that?" I gasped.
Caleb Snow was sitting in the upper door-
way, with his legs hanging out, whittling at
a piece of wood.
"Well, you see, he died once before and
come to life again, and this time he did n't
want to disappoint nobody."
"What?"
"He simply stretched out dead one day, like
he had heart-failure, and after Mattie had got
the old crape out of the chest and tacked it on
the door, arid the undertaker was there going
about his business, the New Captain come to
again. It was the coffin turned the trick.
He would n't let 'em put him into it. He had
an awful hate towards coffins after that. Said
coffin-makers was a low form of life. He
took up some foreign religion and read books
to prove it by. Claimed undertakers would
be caterpillars in their next life, crawling on
their bellies and never coming out of their own
cocoons. I bet he don't stay in his, neither!"


THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL 45
"Nonsense," said I; "those things don't
happen twice."
"If things happen once that hadn't ought
to happen at all, they got a right to happen
twice," said Caleb doggedly, "or three or four
times, for that matter 1"
"But he was cataleptic."
"Call him anything you like." Caleb went
on whittling. "All I know is, he was so scairt
he would be buried alive, he made Mattie
promise she would watch him for a week."
"And did she do it?"
"Yep. It was two years after the first
time that he died the second time, and they had
it all planned out. She sat there in the back
room, with the shutters closed, and never took
her eyes off him. Folks would go in and out
and offer her a cup of tea once in a while,
but she let on as how she didn't know
them. She never was a hand to speak to any
one before that, and after that she never has
spoke to any one at all. If you ask her any-
thing, like I'm obliged to, strictly business,
she looks as if she did n't have it on her mind
what you was talking about. Nor on any-
thing else, for that matter. It turned her."


46 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"I should think it would!" said Ruth and
I together.
"Yep," Caleb continued, "he was dead all
right when they took him out. Leastwise, as
dead as he will ever get. I didn't see him;
nobody went to the funeral except Judge Bell,
but he O. K.'d it. An' if Mattie decided he
was beyond recall, why he was; that settles it.
For if he had been only half way, like the other
time, she would 'a' fetched him back herself."
He gave us a look profoundly mysterious.
"You think, then, that Mattie has the power
to raise people from the dead?"
"Well, I would n't go so far as to have it
said I say so," he evaded. "Not humans,
maybe, but cats! I've seen her take a dead
cat up off the beach in her apron, drowned or
starved, no difference to her, and the next day
there it would be, lapping up milk on the door-
step." He paused a minute to let us weigh
this, and then he added, "An' cats ain't the
only things that has nine lives."
Ruth and I stared blankly at him and at
each other, and back to the faded ink-written
pages of the New Captain's will.
"Did Mattie ever show this—power—in any
other way?"


THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL 47
"I don't know," replied Caleb testily. "I
don't know her at all. Nobody does. She
don't go around where folks are."
"Did n't she ever attend church?"
"Not her! She's got a system of her own.
Her and the New Captain got it up together.
The Old Captain and his wife was regular
members, but down to the public library Mis'
Katy says the New Captain used to ask for
books that a Christian would 'a' been ashamed
to be seen carrying up the street under his
arm."
"Occultism, probably."
"The judge can tell you. He understands
them things."
"Is he a spiritualist?"
"Not precisely, but leanin'. Goes to the
First Baptist on Sunday mornings, and all
over the cape week-days, to parlor meetings.
It was the New Captain started him off, too.
The judge, he thinks if he keeps after it, he '11
get a message from him, and he's real worried,
waitin'. But Mattie—she goes around in the
yard, even, talking out loud to the cap'n, as if
he was right there, diggin' in the garden."
"Lots of people talk to themselves."
"To themselves, yes! I know they do. But


48 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
Turtle's boy—he takes the groceries, and he's
the only one that will go in there now—he says
sometimes it's more than he can stand. He
jest puts the stuff down on the step and runs
away. She gets that cross-eyed girl next door
to go on errands for her. All that family
is—" he tapped his head significantly, "and
don't know the difference."
"You mean that Mattie is crazy?" I asked
indignantly. "She's no more crazy than you
or me."
Ruth smiled then at the look Caleb gave me.
It was as much as to say that he had suspected
I was right along, and that now I had
admitted it.
"She only appears to us to act," my friend
defended me, "as anyone might who had
always lived in one place and felt she had a
right to stay there. Especially, because she
is out of contact with life and does not know
any longer how to take it up. There is noth-
ing weak-minded in the course she is pursu-
ing."
"No mind at all," Caleb contradicted her.
But there was something important that
I wanted to find out.


THE WINKLE-MAN AND THE WILL 49
"Why," I asked, "did n't the New Captain
leave Mattie anything in his will?"
Caleb cocked one eye at the thing that he
was whittling.
"He was past the place."
"You mean that there was a time when he
would have left her his money?"
"There was a time when he would have
married her—only his mother wouldn't let
him."
Somehow the idea of the rugged Captain
Hawes, a sailor in his youth and a terrifying
figure in his old age, a recluse around whom
strange tales had been woven by his towns-
people, did not seem like a man who could have
been prevented by his mother from marrying
an orphan girl.
"You can laugh," Caleb scolded us; "you
never saw her!"
"Old Jeremiah Hawes' wife?"
"Her!" Caleb jabbed with his jack-knife
as he spoke, as if he wished that it was the old
lady he had under his blade.
"But I don't see why the New Captain
could not have married Mattie after his mother
died. They must have lived a long time to-


50 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
gether in the House of the Five Pines after
that."
"Forty years is all. Same reason that he
didn't leave her nothin'. He was past the
place where he wanted to."
Caleb had finished what he was whittling
now, and, as if he knew that Ruth carried all
such things home to her children, he handed it
to her with an apologetic smile. It was the
hull of a little fishing-boat, with two masts and
a rudder all in place.
We thanked him and backed out down the
ladder.
Looking at the toy in the sunlight, Ruth
exclaimed. The name of that fatal ship which
had brought the little half-drowned French
child to the sterile land of her adoption had
been carved by the Winkle-Man upon this
tiny model—Charles T. Smith.
"It must have looked just like that!" I cried.
"It's like Caleb," said Ruth, with her slow,
fond smile.


52 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"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
buynt."
"Well, you '11 probably never move in," was
his reply. "I would n'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, hardly any," he corrected; "just a
little now and then to oblige a friend, when
I ain't busy."
Ruth had warned me of this. The inde-
pendent 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 you are busy?"
"Oh—boats."


THE BOYCOTT
"Would n'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 cut-
ting 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^duli 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. After


54 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
she had listened to my story and hung up
the stockings, she took the clothes-pins out of
her mouth long enough to answer.
"You '11 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 did n't hire none
of them to work on the wing he built."
"But that was years ago!"
"Fifty, maybe. :The Jiouse 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 around


THE BOYCOTT
55
here. 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 a


56 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
family 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
the White 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 Cap-
tain. They was young people then, and just
the age. She would n't let him have a penny
of the Old Captain's fortune. I suppose it
was because she would n't give him any cash to


THE BOYCOTT
57
do 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 anyone, 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 did n't have trains clear down the
cape in those times. So what did the New
Captain do but drive all the way down to Bos-
ton 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 tight


58 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
shut 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 whim-
pering-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 my


THE BOYCOTT
59
clean 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 spirit-
ual. 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 spirit-
ual 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 psycho-
logical 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 ex-
ternal 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 him


THE BOYCOTT
61
neath the 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 specu-
lation, 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 the


62 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
kitchen 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 I What do you want it for
anyway? The judge and me have give up
wondering what summer people wants any-
thing 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


THE BOYCOTT
63
'em, like a revivalist prayin' over a sinner,
until you would think the blessed old rat-trap
tms something!"
"The House of the Five Pines is n'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 '11 take the house
if I possibly can. You put your mind on get-
ting Mattie moved out of it, and I '11 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 after-
noon train, but I knew that in her kind heart


CHAPTER V
"the shoals of yesterday"
AFTER I had been back in New York for
a month I had about decided that Mrs.
Dove was right.
Jasper had greeted my idea about buying
the house with enthusiasm, but, when it came
to details, with a stubborn refusal to face the
facts and sign a check. To my entreaties
that he go down and look at it, or write to
Judge Bell about it, or arrange to move there
soon, I was constantly met with, "Wait till
after the play."
We lived in four rooms in the old arcade
near Columbus Circle which we had originally
chosen because artists lived there, and at that
time I had thought of myself as an artist. I
did, in truth, have some flair for it, and a little
education, which had been laboriously acquired
at the School of Design associated with the
Carnegie Technical Schools. Two years of
65


66 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
marriage had seen the dwindling away of my
aspirations by attrition. The one room that
we had which possessed a window facing north,
which by any stretch of good-will might have
been called a studio, had been given up for
our common sleeping-room, and Jasper, be-
cause of the constant necessity of his profes-
sion to keep late hours, was never out of bed
until long after the sun had slid around to the
court. I bore fate no grudge because of this.
It was quite true, as he often pointed out to me,
that I could paint out of doors or in some one
else's studio, but the day that I felt free to
do this never came. When, after two years
of married life, our finances still necessitated
the curtailment of every extravagance, paints
and canvas seemed one of the most plausible
things to do without. It was only when
prompted by the exhibition of some woman
painter, who had evidently managed these
things better, my husband would ask me why
I did not paint any more, that I suffered mo-
mentarily. For the rest of the time his own
work seemed to me much more important.
This was the night at last that my husband's
play was to go on, the plot of which he had


"THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY" 67
developed from a mystery that I had sug-
gested one morning a year ago, when I used
to wake up so happily, full of ideas. I did
not rise as exuberantly now. I hated to get
up at all. Our studio was crowded with
things and with people that we did not want
from morning until night, and from night
until morning again. It had become my chief
duty to sort out all the component parts of our
menage, producing just the influences that
would further the work of my husband and
suppressing all others. To-day I had been
answering questions constantly on the tele-
phone, from complaints about the box-office,
with which I had nothing at all to do, to re-
proaches from the ingenue because she could
not find the author. It seemed to me, think-
ing it over while pressing out the dress I was
going to wear, that Myrtle was spending alto-
gether too much time looking for my husband.
Just because he wrote the play and she was
acting in it was no reason that I could see why
she should lunch with him every day. I some-
times wished that all of these young girls who
thought it was part of their education to flirt
with him could have the pleasure of getting


68 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
him his breakfast every day, as I did, and of
waiting up for him for a thousand and one
nights.
I did not reproach Jasper; I loved him too
much for that. When one is jealous it is the
contortions of a member of his own sex, of
whom he is suspicious, not the dear one upon
whom he is dependent for happiness. A
woman will drop her best friend to save her
husband, without letting him know she has
done so.
I blamed the city in which we worked for
most of the confusion. Had we lived in some
other place, it would have been in a saner way.
And Jasper could have lived anywhere he
chose; he carried his earning capacity in his
imagination. 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 arch-
itectural relation to each other, whispers
followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue
loafed on the stairs. We had outgrown un-
conventional (which is the same as inconven-
ient) housekeeping. Jasper was getting
bored and I was becoming querulous before


"THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY" 69
our married life had been given any opportu-
nity to expand. Dogs were not allowed in our
arcade; children would have been a scandal.
Thinking of the big rooms in that cool,
quiet house on the cape during the hot month
of September, I could not help longing to be
there, and I had written several times to the
judge. 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 say-
ing to myself, when I heard my husband com-
ing down the hall, and my heart forgot fore-
bodings. 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 fore-
head and gray eyes wide open in happy excite-
ment. He looked straight into life, eager to
understand it, and never seemed to know when
it came back at him, hitting him in the face.
He had that fortunate quality of making peo-
ple take him seriously, even his jokes. In a
world eager to give him what he wanted, I


70 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
was proud that he still chose me, and prayed
that he might continue.
He was pathetically glad to get some hot
tea, assuring me that the play was rotten, that
the manager was a pig, and that none of the
actors knew their business. He had been with
them all day.
"Jasper," I said, after I had given him all
the telephone messages, to which he paid no
heed at all, "have you any idea of taking that
house on Cape Cod this fall?"
Jasper went on looking through his papers
as if he had not heard me.
"Where is that correction I made last night
for Myrtle?" he asked.
"I'm sure I don't know."
"Well, what—" he began impatiently, and
then, turning on me, he read in my face, I
suppose, how much the House of the Five
Pines had come to mean to me.
"Now, see here," he finished more kindly, "I
can't think about houses to-day; you know I
can't. Ask me to-morrow."
"All right, dear; I'll ask you to-morrow.
Have you got my seat for to-night?"
"Seat?"
"Yes, a ticket to get in with. I suppose


"THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY" 71
I '11 have to have a pass of some sort, won't I?
I don't want to stand up behind the stage."
"Why, I'm sorry; I never thought of it.
I '11 run up to the theater before I come back
and get you something."
"You won't have time; you 're going out for
dinner, are n't you?"
"I was."
"Well, go ahead. I '11 see about the ticket
somehow. Don't bother."
I smiled a little ruefully after he had gone.
Why did I think I had to have any more child
than just him? I had always supposed that
when a man's play was produced his wife had
a box and all her friends gathered around her
with congratulations, and that the wives of the
actors were all arrayed, family style, to see
them come on. But it did not develop that
way among the members of "the profession" as
I knew them. The wives were mostly staying
at home with the children, or lived outside the
city and could n't afford to come in, or frankly
had another engagement. They were "not
expected."
It was raining when I crowded my way into
the foyer and begged a seat for "The Shoals
of Yesterday" from the man at the window.


72 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
He gave me the best he had, without any com-
ment, and I took off my rubbers and laid down
my umbrella in the balcony. From this point
I was as interested as if I did not know every
line that was to be said—almost every gesture.
After the first act I relaxed and enjoyed it.
The play went of its own volition, develop-
ing an amazing independent vitality which
withstood the surprising shocks administered
to it by the actors. I smiled benignly when
the audience sat tense, and wept when I saw
them burst into laughter.
Jasper's hurried hand-pressure, when he
found me, and his whispered "Is everything
all right out here,, dear?" made me feel that I,
too, had some part in it, outside of its original
conception, which of course everyone had for-
gotten. As a watcher of the first performance,
alert to catch any criticism that might be use-
ful, I sat up all night with the play that I had
tended from infancy. When the curtain went
up upon "The Shoals of Yesterday," it was a
manuscript from our apartment; when the
asbestos went down, it was upon a Broadway
success.
I found my way back to the dressing-rooms


"THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY" 73
and met Jasper coming along with a crowd of
actors, Myrtle crowding close. She wore an
orange-feathered toque, which set off her light
hair like a flame, and a sealskin wrap, drawn
tight around her slim, lightly clothed body.
She was one of those competent blond girls
who know not only how to make their own
clothes but how to get some one to buy them,
so that they will not have to, and how to wear
them after they get them. It is vanity which
forces them into bizarre conquests. I could
not tell whether her absorption of Jasper's
time had in it elements that would ever come
to hurt me, or whether she was simply using
him to further her own advancement. Prob-
ably she did not know herself.
"Is n't he a bright little boy?" She petted
him and hung upon his neck. "We 're going
to take him out and buy him a supper, so we
are; him's hungry."
I knew perfectly well that it would be Jas-
per who would pay for the supper, but at that
moment I could not bear any one ill-will. I
even recognized that, for Myrtle, this was
generosity. It would have been more like her
to have spoken of the play in terms of herself.


74 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"It went awfully well," I said to him over
their heads. I thought he would be waiting
for some word from me.
But he did not reply. He was laughing
and talking with the whole group. In that
intimate moment he was not aware of me in
the way that I was of him. Something inside
me withdrew, so that I saw myself standing
there, waiting. I became embarrassed.
"Shall I go on home?" I asked.
Jasper looked relieved.
"I'll be right along," he assured me.
I went out with my umbrella and tried to
call a taxi. But there were not enough; there
never are when it rains, and a single woman
has no chance at all. Men were running up
the street a block and jumping into them and
driving down to the awning with the door
half-open looking for their girls or their wives
along the sidewalk. I wished that some one
was looking for me. A hand closed over mine
where I held the handle of the umbrella and a
pleasant voice said:
"Can I take you home?"
I looked up into the eyes of a bald-headed
man I had never seen before, who was smiling
at me as if he had known me something more


"THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY/' 75
than all my life. I jerked away and hurried
down the street. After that I somehow did
not dare even to take a car; I walked home;
in fact, I ran. And all the way I kept think-
ing: "Why doesn't Jasper take any better
care of me? Why does n't he care what hap-
pens to me? That's it; he doesn't care."
It is a dangerous thing to pity oneself when
one's husband is out with another woman.
"All I can have to eat is what is left over in
the ice-box," I said, raising the lid and holding
the lettuce in one hand while I felt around in
the dark for the bottle of milk. But there
was no milk. And I had to laugh at myself
then or cry, and so I laughed, a very little, and
went to bed.
When Jasper came in it was so late that I
pretended that I did not hear him.


CHAPTER VI
LOBSTEE-POTS
GETTING up and out of the apartment
before my husband was awake, I bought
all the morning papers at the nearest kiosk
and carried them back to my breakfast-table.
At least I would know first, for my wakeful-
ness, what the edict of the critics was. I hated
to read what I knew in my heart to be their
immature and sometimes even silly opinions,
but such is the power of the press over the
theaters that I could not wait for my coffee to
boil before I unfolded the first sheet. These
sophisticated young writers, many of whom I
knew and whose opinions I respected less on
that account, wielded the power of life or
death over their subjects, the playwrights, who
struggled in the arena of life for their ap-
proval and were never safe from their august
"thumbs down." Sometimes I thought the
older men, who should have known better,
were the most irresponsible. Bored out of all
76


LOBSTER-POTS
TT
possibility of forming any constructive opinion
of a first night, they waited only to see that
every actor came on as advertised, and then
scuttled back to their typewriters to pound off
something, anything that would leave them
free for half an hour's game in the back of the
newspaper office before going home. What
had they done to us and to our play, to the
cross-section of life which we had labored over
all summer?
They were better than I had expected—
probably because it was in September and the
dramatic critics were not yet jaded. Possibly,
fresh from the mountains, with the sunburn
not yet worn off, they had actually been to see
the play and had had a good time meeting one
another in the lobby and comparing mileage.
At any rate, their remarks were universally
good-natured, if not profound, and their in-
tentions beyond cavil. They had one criticism
in common—they did not like our ingenue,
and I could not blame them any for that.
Will Turnball, on the "Gazette," said that
Myrtle Manners had done all she could to
ruin it, but fortunately the play did not de-
pend upon her for its success. He was not
aware that it was the playwright who was


78 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
himself dependent upon her, who put her in-
terests above any one else's in the cast. I
remembered that Turnball knew the girl, and
wondered if he had said that deliberately and
perhaps on my account. One never knows
where an obscure sense of chivalry is going to
crop out in a modern knight. We were old
friends. He had read "The Shoals of Yes-
terday" beforehand, one happy day in the
middle of last summer, when we were all down
at 'Sconset together over a Sunday. And, at
the time, he had objected to Myrtle Manners
taking that part. He had said she was a
trouble-maker, but Jasper, having only re-
cently secured his contract with Burton, who
was going to produce the play, did not feel
like stepping in and dictating the cast. I had
stupidly sustained him. And now Turnball,
knowing that what he said could not fail to
make Myrtle angry, had nevertheless gone
out of his way to say it. I smiled at the re-
action I knew would follow, and picked up
the next paper.
I was surprised to find that the man on the
"Tribune" agreed with him. I did not know
this critic at all. And the "Globe" said:
"'The Shoals of Yesterday,' the new play


LOBSTER-POTS
79
by Jasper Curdy, well-known short-story
writer, opened last night at the Lyric with
great success. . . . When so many girls are
out of work this fall, why hire Myrtle Man-
ners?"
I finished my breakfast with the feeling that
I had been revenged.
Jasper had not chosen her, I came to his
defense. The manager picked her out, Bur-
ton himself, for no better reason than that her
father played baseball with him on the high-
school team back in Plainfield, New Jersey,
and she had come to him with a letter and a
sob-story and a pair of blue eyes. She was
ambitious, she had told him, and she wanted to
work hard. Well, she understood herself; she
was all of ambitious, but who was to do the
hard work was more doubtful. She was
never up at the hour of the day when most of
the hard work is done. To do Jasper justice,
he had not seen the girl until the first rehearsal,
although she had hardly been out of his sight
since. Discontented with the part as it was
originally written, Myrtle had insisted on
changes in it until the whole fabric of the play
was endangered. The part of ingenue was
not originally important, but her insistence,


80 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
and Jasper's willingness to please her, had
altered it until it threatened the lead. There-
fore it had come about that Gaya Jones, who
was creating the difficult part of a society
crook, was herself becoming restless. There
was no need of antagonizing Gaya. She had
started out at the beginning of the rehearsals
with all the good-will in the world, and worked
up her character with her usual dependable
artistry. If she had her fines cut and Myrtle
Manners had hers made increasingly impor-
tant, there was going to be grave trouble. I
had looked for Gaya in vain in the crowd who
were going out for supper last night. Prob-
ably, like myself, she had gone home alone.
I wished her better luck in her ice-box than I
had found in mine.
Now that the play had been launched I
wondered if these two women, upon whose
acting it depended, would become reconciled
to each other.
The telephone interrupted my foreboding
with a new fear.
"O Mrs. Curdy? Myrtle talking. Have
you seen the papers? Is Jasper up? Isn't
he? Why, he went home awfully early. He
always does, doesn't he? Broke up the


LOBSTER-POTS
81
party; so sorry you couldn't go along! I
suppose you've read what the papers say
about me? I got up to find out; might as
well go back to bed again! Some of them
were grand, but the 'Tribune'— Wait till
Jasper reads what that awful man said in the
'Tribune.' And the 'Gazette'! I don't be-
lieve they sent anyone over at all! That
must have been written at the desk by the
office-boy! The 'Globe' was grouchy, too,
but I know why that was; that Jones who
writes their stuff is married, you know, and
he's sore at me. Last night, when we were all
having supper, it was this way—"
I put my hand over the receiver so that I
would not have to listen to her story about the
supper. I knew perfectly well that dramatic
critics were not loitering around restaurants
after plays; they had to get their reviews
written before twelve o'clock.
"No, Jasper is n't up yet," I replied, taking
my hand away just in time to hear her insis-
tent question. "All right."
But the sunshine had been taken out of the
room for me, as if a blind had been drawn.
Was this what we had been working for—
this? Failure might have drawn us together,


82 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
might have made us need each other more—
or did I not mean that it would have made my
husband need me just a little? But now he
was forever a part of a production—as long as
"The Shoals of Yesterday" should live, its
slave and its nurse. Nor did I want it to die
precisely, nor quarrel with my bread and
butter, but, like many another, wanted success
without the price of success, and fame without
the penalty. If, after the production, Jasper
had to spend all of his time mollifying this
girl, if he had to get right up out of bed to
answer her demands, what had he gained? I
was so tired of the whole circle of my life!
Tired of plays and of writers, of actors and
of stages, of newspapers and of telephones.
The list ran on in my mind like a stanza of
Walt Whitman. I could think of just as
many nouns as he could, and of all of them I
was tired. The thought of leaving New York
altogether was to my mind like a fresh breeze
on a sultry noon. There was nothing more to
detain Jasper. Why not go?
I looked about the room where I was sitting
with eyes suddenly grown cold to it. There
was a hinge loose on the gate-legged table that
had once been our pride, so that a wing would


LOBSTER-POTS
88
go down if one kicked it. The leather cushion
on the big davenport in the windows was worn
white. The curtains were half-dirty and stuck
to the screen. The silver needed cleaning.
The painted chairs, which furnished that in-
timate "arty" touch, were like a woman who
has slept in her rouge without washing her
face and needed touching up. The living-
room was too near. I wanted rooms where to
leave one was not to look back into it contin-
ually, rooms from which there was some es-
cape, that did not merge into one another.
Particularly desirable to me at that moment
was a separate kitchen, incorrigibly isolated.
I felt that I would not care if it were in the
basement or in another building, if only I did
not have to see the grapefruit rinds on the
kitchen sink while I was eating my egg.
That house on the cape! Two thousand
dollars! The price of a car, and Jasper had
said he was going to get a car—to take Myrtle
out in, probably. I decided right then that
if he bought a car, instead of a house, I would
never ride in it. (But I knew that I lied,
even as I did so.) It seemed to me that our
life here was ended. More real was the
House of the Five Pines, the sand-dunes and


84* FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
the sea, the little road and the vessels in the
harbor. They were enduring; they had been
there before us and would indifferently outlast
our brief sojourn, if we lived with them the
rest of our lives. They were the sum of the
hopes of simple men and the fabric of their
dreams. I could hear the voices of the children
who would run around in that great yard, if it
were ever mine, and smell the hollyhocks that
again would bloom in orderly rows against the
freshly painted house.
I took the mail in from the janitor—a letter
from Star Harbor.
Dear Madam:
Mattie "Charles T. Smith" was drowned yester-
day while taking up her lobster-pots. I know that you
will feel sorry for her demise, but Providence has now
made clear the way for you to have the house you
wanted. Please advise, as I would like to close the
deal.
Yours truly,
John Bell.
I sat quite still, with the letter trembling in
my hand.
Mattie had gone back to the sea, back to
that ancient mother of hers out of whose arms
she had been taken.


LOBSTER-POTS
85
I knew the place where the lobster-pots
were put out. A long row from Mattie's
wharf, over in one shallow pool of the bay
behind the stone breakwater, where children
played on the flats at low tide and the horse-
shoe-crabs held carnival. No cottages were
near this spot, no fishermen's houses stood
up on the bank, for deep-pooled marshes _
stretched behind it and to one side and beyond
the breakwater was nothing but sand and mos-
quitoes. 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 shout-
ing distance of the place where Mattie must
have been drowned. I could see it all as it
must have been. 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 floun-


86 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
dered; a cry that no one heard on those desolate
flats; a boat left rocking, half-full of water;
and an old withered body, found when the
tide went out, caught fast in the lobster-pots.
Mattie "Charles T. Smith"! Cast upon the
mercy of these hard fisher-folk and in the end
snatched back by the sea, which always
claims its own! At least, and I was glad for
it, she had been spared the ignominy of being
turned out of her home by me or any of my
kind. The manner of her going was like the
way of her living—an accident of fate, a
silence, and a mystery.
Jasper startled me, coming into the room
in his bath-robe, asking for coffee. "Oh,
let's see the papers."
I had forgotten the papers. I pushed them
all toward him and went out to make fresh
toast.
The letter lay there. I did not know
whether to show it to him or not. For the
first time in our married life I was afraid.
I wanted so passionately to have him go away
with me, to have a place in which to be to-
gether alone, a home, and yet at the same
time I knew that he would have to choose it for
himself or the project would be futile. I
hated to be refused, and I would not force a


LOBSTER-POTS
87
decision. Had he risen on this morning of his
great success thinking only of that little actress
and what it would mean to her, or had he, after
all, created this thing for our own future—for
me?
"You 're burning it!" called Jasper.
I hurried in with the toast.
"What are you crying for?"
"I'm not."
"You 're up too early. Nerves. You
ought to take more rest."
I watched him miserably while he ate and
looked through all the newspapers.
"That's fine," he said. "That settles that!
The old boys certainly Were nice to me!—
Better than I deserve! Looks as if we were
going to have money in the bank!"
Then he picked up the letter.
"Read it," I whispered. But I could not
bear to see him, and I got up and would have
run away. He caught me in the doorway and,
his arms around me, kissed away my fears.
"I'm glad the old woman's drowned!"
he cried.
"Oh no, don't say that!"
"Aren't you?"
"But don't put it that way!"


88 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"What way? What's the difference what
way we put it, so long as she's out of it and
we can get the house f"
"Shall we get it?"
"Do you want it?"
I broke down then and wept upon his
shoulder.
"Don't cry," he kept saying, "don't cry.
All you need is sleep. We '11 go up there and
get rested. That's the best news this morn-
ing. Why didn't you tell me right away?"
"I did n't know whether you'd be inter-
ested."
Jasper laughed, and, through my tears, I
laughed, too.
"Don't get any funny ideas in your head,"
he said. "You know very well that—"
It was too hard to say. I spared him.
"What I need is not sleep, Jasper," I
whispered; "it's just—you."
He looked at me quickly, with his chin
thrown up, and did not smile. Then he
gathered me close to him, as if he had not seen
me for a long, long time.
"If that is all you want," he said; "if that
is all you want!"
And that was all I wanted.


CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES
IT was only a matter of two weeks before
we rounded up our affairs in New York,
packed the furniture that had sufficed us in the
studio in the arcade, and took the long ride
down the cape on the afternoon train from
Boston. It was early October, and traffic was
all going the other way. Hardly a passenger
was left on the sooty little local when, after
dark, it panted in exhausted and threw us out
with the mail-bags, covered with sand and
dust.
In August when I had been at Star Harbor
many people had met the train, summer board-
ers and jeering natives had made of this an
evening's diversion; but now only the baggage-
master was on duty. The ticket-office was
closed, and the conductor picked up a lantern
and walked away up the dark road. No one
jumped to take our bags or to force upon us
a ride in either a station-barge or a jitney,
89


FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 91
"I don't know," replied Alf, without look-
ing at us. Then he got up slowly, as if
annoyed at the interruption, and tiptoed out
from behind his barricade.
"Don't breath on them," he warned us, and
went out through a swinging door.
The room we were in was big and clean, with
hanging oil-lamps, a new linoleum, and shin-
ing brass spittoons. We shook the cinders off
our coats carefully, so as not to blow away
any of the postage-stamps, and sank down in
two chairs. I had expected Jasper to say
something caustic, but his writer's sense had
begun to reassert itself and he was sniffing the
air like a hound. I saw that I had been right
in bringing him up here.
"Supper's all over," said Alf, "and the
girls is gone home, but you can have some
clams and some coffee, if that will help you
out any."
We couldn't drink the coffee, but the
steamed clams and a big loaf of Portuguese
bread as full of holes as a Swiss cheese were
devoured before we spoke another word. By
that time our host had put away his stamp
collection and had joined us in the empty


92 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
dining-room. He showed symptoms of a
hesitant curiosity as to whether we were ex-
pecting to stay all night.
"We are going up to the House of the Five
Pines," I informed him. "We 're the people
who bought it."
"Are you?" His relief at our not wanting
a bed at his "Sailor's Rest" was mingled with
skepticism. "To-night?"
I was very firm about to-night. Jasper
did not say anything. I think he would have
preferred to stay where he was, but did not
like to say so. As the two men were silent,
and rather sententiously smoked their pipes,
I continued, "I want to sleep under my own
roof."
"If you can sleep!" said Alf.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's none of my business, but if I
was just picking out a place to get a good
night's rest, it would n't be the House of
the Five Pines.":
"You think there is something wrong with
it?"
"I know gosh-darn well there is! Pardon
me. Wrong as rain. Of course I'm just
telling you this out of friendliness."


FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 93
"You haven't told us anything yet," re-
minded Jasper.
"I ain't got anything much to tell."
"Then we might as well be going."
This was only a bluff, and I thought that
Jasper had misjudged his man. I was ex-
asperated because, without any pretense of
being able to understand anybody, I knew that
I could have had the whole story out of him.
"Ghosts are everywhere," I remarked ex-
pansively. "We have them where we came
from. I'm used to them."
"I suppose you 're used to people dying
two or three times and coming to life again,
ain't you?"
"Why? Do you think the old captain is
still alive?"
"The 'New Captain'!" he contradicted me;
it seems as if I never could learn this title.
"Well, if it ain't him, who is it that's sliding
right through the house, vanishing into a
blank wall that has no doors? People that's
been abroad at midnight has seen some one
turning in off the back street, cutting across
the lawn, but never coming out on the front."
"Who's seen him doing that?"
"Brown's boy. Not that I say he seen him;


94 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
but I say he says he seen him! Of course I
know that all them Browns ain't reliable; too
much fish eating, it makes them that way!"
"Does it?" asked Jasper, all interest.
Alf would not answer him, but went on
directing his conversation to me. "Put 'em
back on meat and they come around all right.
The 'town home' over on the back street is
full of crazy people the only thing that's the
matter with is too much herring. Scientifi-
cally speaking, it overkeys up the brain."
Having explained, he relapsed into silence,
allowing us to sift the evidence.
"But did this Brown boy see a ghost while
Mattie was alive?"
"I don't know as he did, but if he did he
wouldn't have been likely to circulate it
around. He ain't so foolish as all that!"
"Poor Mattie! Every one was afraid of
her."
"Not of her exactly, but if you was to say
of her power, I'd partly agree. Suppose,
as happened, a boy was to come out from
swimming under her wharf, by mistake—Lord
knows he would n't 'a' come up there on pur-
pose—and she was to look at him through a
knot-hole in the floor—just look, mind you,


FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 05
and not say a word—and he was to go home
and die of a chill, what would you think?"
"I'd think he caught cold in his bathing-
suit."
"Bathing-suit!" Alf scorned the word, as
if the probability that the boy did not have
one on refuted my suggestion.
"But," I insisted, "she was drowned, in the
end, naturally enough, like anybody else."
"Was she?"
"Why not?"
"Well, would any one else that was raised
around here and could row a boat out to the
light-house-point and swim two miles back,
as easy as you could walk across the street,
upset in ten feet of water and get drowned,
if they didn't want to?"
"You think Mattie 'Charles T. Smith'
drowned herself?" I exclaimed in horror.
The thought, freighted with terrible respon-
sibility, was too dreadful to accept.
"She was going to get turned out of her
house, wasn't she? And she wasn't on
speaking terms with a town that she would
have to accept the crust of charity from.
There's some as says she was crazy, and that
was why she fell out of her boat, but me, I


96 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
claim it was the most sensible thing she ever
done."
The subject had become so depressing that
I was more than ready to discontinue it.
Jasper was restlessly picking up our bags.
"Let's go," said he. "How about the key?"
"We '11 have to go to Judge Bell and get
it," I was beginning, but Alf interrupted me.
"Oh, it ain't locked! Don't worry, nobody
would steal anything out of that house; they
wouldn't go near it." He wished us good-
night in a tone that suggested that it was
nothing to him if we chose to be murdered in
our beds, but kindly insisted on lending us
matches and candles and a can of kerosene.
We went happily up the boardwalk, arm
in arm, and in five minutes turned into our
own yard and opened the front door.
Jasper threw his electric flash on the white
paneling of a narrow hall, with stairs running
up between the walls. As he did so, some-
thing rushed past us through the entry and
out into the dark.
I shrank back against the wall and pointed
after it. A starving "miau" came floating
back. It was a cat that had been shut up


FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 97
in the House of the Five Pines ever since
Mattie's death.
We laughed, remembering how, in his will,
the New Captain had desired to found a
home for stray animals, but we were both
a little shaken. We lit all the lamps that
we could find and, with the aid of their bright
circle, looked into the shadows to discover
what we could about the house that we had
purchased without entering. Never having
been inside the door, it would have been a
just rebuke to our ignorance if we had been
badly disappointed. But fate had been cap-
riciously kind. The bargain was better than
we had dared to dream.
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,


98 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
Some of the rooms were in the sort of dis-
order that comes through disuse, but the kit-
chen looked as if Mattie had lived there, and
gave us an uncomfortable sense of intruding.
Nothing remained of her now in the house
where she had spent so many years but her
feeling that she ought to continue there, and
that permeated the place like a live presence,
a protest in every room. She seemed ;not
only at war with us, but in a surer and more
subtle way fighting against some other pres-
ence, also unseen, but strongly felt. It made
us aware that we had allied ourselves with her
enemy and that the captain gloated over our
arrival. I could not pretend to understand
this antagonism, because I knew that they
were held to have been lovers, but I felt that it
was antecedent to his death and to his will—
to be, in fact, the cause of that cryptic docu-
ment. I began to fear that the peace which
we had come so far to find was not waiting
us. We would have to introduce that note
ourselves into the symphony of the House
of the Five Pines.
Jasper was thinking of architecture.
"Have you noticed," he asked, "that none
of the rooms are in their right places?"


FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 99
I saw what he meant. The kitchen was to
the right of the hall, in the part of the house
called the "porch," and behind it had been
built the "captain's wing," which was simply
a large living-room, one story high, hardly
pretentious enough to have caused so much
jealousy. To the left of the hall, the front
room was a bedroom, the same room, doubt-
less, from which the bedridden "Old Mis'
Hawes" used to shout at passers-by on the
street. Behind the bedroom was the dining-
room, evidently seldom used, for it had no
access to the kitchen except through the front
hall. Upstairs the rooms in the main part
of the house were divided as if a child had laid
them out with blocks, each one leading into
the next. To the right of the stairs was the
room over the kitchen, with its dormer-window
facing the sea, the very window from which
Mattie had leaned on the only occasion that
I had ever seen her. This room was habitable,
and here we decided to spend the night.
"Nothing can keep me awake," yawned
Jasper, and we both thought of Alf's pes-
simism when we had left him at the Sailor's
Rest.
I was sorry that what my husband said


100 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
would undoubtedly be true. I have always
found that in the more elusive moments of life
the male partner escapes much responsibility
and untold anxiety by simply being asleep.
We stood at the dormer-window and looked
out on the dark bay, where the little boats,
at anchor, were rocking so gently and so un-
aware, until we had won a measure of that
quiet which we had been searching for, and
then we said a thankful and a wishful prayer
for our new life in this house before we blew
out the candle. We thought that it was the
most intimate spot that any one had ever
chosen for a home and that this was the first
of many evenings that we would stand there
in the window together, looking out to star-
rise on the sea.
As a matter of fact, we never stood there
together again.
Jasper was so exhausted that he went to
sleep without turning over, but I was too
tired to shut my eyes. I stared into the dark-
ness until it became vivid, and when the cold
October moonlight checkered the walls, through
the small-paned windows, the little room was
alive again.
There were five doors. The walls had


FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES 101
been painted a dark blue, and each of these
doors shot out into significance like the white
marble slabs of a tomb. None of them
would stay shut. Their iron latches clicked
with every stray gust of the night, and
first one and then another would swing
gently open. I gave up trying to close
them and let them bang as they would. 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 chim-
ney-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 be-
tween them a third topped the kitchen-stairs,
which pitched down steeply, like a ship's com-
panionway. The wooden bed, with high
painted headboard decorated with a medallion
of carnations, stood against the back wall,
facing the dormer-window. The bureau and
the wash-stand matched its faded blue, and
the chair-backs held gold spread-eagles, half
obliterated. In one corner was an old sea-
chest with rope handles. I got up out of bed
to see what was in it. There was nothing.
All of the stories of the sea that I had ever


102 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
heard came drifting back to me, borne in up-
on the waves of moonlight. Things half
heard and never understood became more
true than reality. A clock far away struck
a long hour.
I was looking at the five white doors and
the bright window and thinking that the wall
at the head of the bed was the only blank wall
in the room, when I felt as if I were being
pushed. Or as if the headboard were gradu-
ally bending. Certainly, the bed was coming
down on me!
I sat up quickly and watched. The high
wooden headboard bulged. As I looked it
sprang back into place again. This was re-
peated.
I tried to call out.
The headboard bowed once more. I sprang
up and pushed it back with my bare hands
and beat upon it.
"Jasper!"
My throat was paralyzed with terror and
made no sound.


CHAPTER VIII
A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE
WITH my frantic demonstration of hu-
man antagonism, the pressure on the
headboard was removed. Whatever had
caused it ceased its malign exertion. The
menace had withdrawn.
In the morning I woke up numb and cold
at the foot of the bed, where I must have
crawled for safety, although I could remember
nothing about it.
Jasper said it was the best night's sleep
he ever had had.
I tried to tell him what had happened.
"What I had dreamed," he called it, and I
could not make him take the matter seriously.
He had awakened refreshed and full of enthu-
siasm, only complaining that there was no
shower and seriously considering taking a
plunge into the ocean, until I had to give up my
megrims to enter into an argument about the
chances there were for and against pneumonia
103


104 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
for one who was not accustomed to swimming
in October. I persuaded him to go around
and examine the furniture while I found some-
thing to eat, and while I was trying to accom-
plish this I realized ruefully that I had
succeeded too well in sparing my husband the
psychic reaction that I had been subjected to
during the night. He had not been prepared
for it, and my fright had no significance to
him. Consequently, I received no sympathy.
This was what I had wanted, to guard against
our both falling prey to hallucinations, but I
had not foreseen in how defenceless a position
it was going to place me. I determined that
if anything like the night's performance ever
happened again, I would explain to Jasper
every detail that had led up to the phenomenon
and let him solve it as he would. Two heads
would be immeasurably better than one, if we
had to smoke out the ghost. I would sooner
have found rats in that house, as the Winkle-
Man had suggested, than a bending wall.
Jasper had discovered a Chippendale chair
in the old lady's bedroom, and a three-cornered
cupboard in the room behind it, full of
Canton china, and he would speak of nothing
else.


106 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
But finally our appetites could withstand the
zest of the salt air no longer.
We laid out the breakfast on the clean red
cloth of the kitchen-table, under the window
next the shuttered door, and were babbling
like happy children when our celebration was
cut short by the arrival of a boy on a bicycle.
He knocked timidly at the porch door, and
held out a telegram at arm's length.
"I 've got to go back to New York," said
Jasper, reading it; "they want me for the
play."
"But you can't!" I cried; "we've just
come!"
"I know." Jasper was absently folding the
paper up into a tiny yellow square, without
looking at me.
"They told you they were all through with
you."
"I know it."
"Who signed the telegram?"
"Why,—Tyrrell Burton." He handed it
to me.
Trouble again. Have fired M. M. Must change
part or Gaya walks out on us. For God's sake come
and help me.
Tyrrell.


A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE
107
Tyrrell Burton was the manager. It was
all perfectly evident; it might even have been
foreseen. Myrtle Manners and Gaya Jones
had jumped at each other's throat the second
Jasper had left the city, and Tyrrell was try-
ing to keep the better of the two. He knew
that Myrtle's part must be rewritten—it had
become so top-heavy in her favor—and a new
actress would want to start fresh, with the role
more as it was first written. I was ashamed.
My first thought had been that Myrtle had
telegraphed for Jasper and that he was folding
up the telegram so that I could not see it. I
hoped he had not read my thoughts.
"Well?" he asked, impatiently'.
In reaction, the tears had sprung into my
eyes, and I stood there on the doorstep of our
house and the threshold of our new life that
was to be lived in it, crying. I had not yet
had a chance to drink a cup of coffee and I had
been up for hours.
Why is it that, no matter how bravely we
face the future, how we seemingly have for-
gotten and, by every effort of the will and
mind, have forgiven, still the thing we dread
lies smoldering deep within us, a subdued but
never an extinguished fire, ready at the first


108 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
suspicion to leap into devouring flame? I had
failed myself and my own faith more than
Jasper.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He did not more than half understand me.
He had not been thinking of me and my re-
lationship to him; his mind had been racing to
the problem of what in the world to do next
with "The Shoals of Yesterday."
"Well, if that is the way you feel about it,"
he began, "I won't go."
"You must."
The boy, tired of listening, swung his leg
over the bicycle.
"Any answer?"
"Yes, wait. There is only one train,
Jasper. Take it. Write out an answer for
the boy. I '11 get you started."
There it was. I had to force Jasper to
answer this urgent summons, had to pack his
bag and hurry him off and appear glad to see
him go, when all the time I was furious with
the fate that took him and the power there
was in material circumstances to keep us
separated. Once in a year or so comes a glad
day to each of us when he can control destiny,
when the thing that he has set his heart on


110 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
door in a second wall, from which one would
draw the conclusion that it must open on
an attic-chamber. I tried it, but the latch
would not lift up; it was fastened on the inside.
I listened. There was no sound within.
But suddenly there swept over me the remem-
brance of the night before. As vividly as
if it were again occurring, I felt the pressure
that had been thrown against my headboard,
and I knew that it had been directed by some
force struggling to get out of this room into
mine. Overcome by horror, but with feet so
fascinated by an uncanny attraction that they
almost refused to carry me away, I crept out
of the cubbyhole and fled down the stairs, out
into the sunlight.
My first thought was of Ruth. If Ruth
were only here! But in the six weeks that I
had been in New York she had packed her
trunks and gone. There was no use in asking
sympathy of the Winkle-Man, or Alf, or any
of those townsmen who had so generously,
and so thoroughly, insisted on warning me
not to move in. My troubles were most
peculiarly my own. And Jasper had gone.
The thought of Jasper and the cold Oc-
tober sunshine revived my courage. Jasper


A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE 111
would have laughed. I could see the way
he would have opened the door and made
copy of it for future use in fiction. It would
mean a great deal to him, the little doorway
under the eaves; he would be glad we had it.
To his observation that none of the rooms
were in their right places, he could now add
the fact that there was one room which did
not belong to the house at all. It would be
depriving him of a pleasure for me to have
the first delight of opening the door and dis-
covering what lay beyond. I would save it
until he came back—a day or two, at most—
and we would lift up the latch together.
I walked around to the back of the house
and looked up. Now I could see clearly how
the roof of the captain's wing had been built.
It was quite high enough to admit of a loft
beneath the ridge-pole and was lighted by
a skylight. I noticed, too, while I was in the
yard, the accumulation of cast-off lumber that
filled the "under." Everything that had been
thrown out in the last fifty years had been
left here, instead of being taken to the "town
dump" on the sand-dunes. There were rung-
less chairs and stepless ladders, oil-stoves and
a spinning-wheel, two rowboats and half a


112 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
r
dozen mattresses. I determined to have them
removed that day. There might be no cellar
and no attic to the House of the Five Pines,
but that was no reason why the family refuse
should lie out in plain sight under the house.
A high two-wheeled cart was going down
the back street, and in my innocence I thought
that this would be just the thing to secure for
hauling away the rubbish.
I do not know to this day what those blue
wagons are used for. 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, ami-
ably plodding back and forth.
I called out to the driver:
"Yoo-hoo! Wait a minute!"
He looked at me, but kept on driving past.


A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE 113
"Yoo-hoo!"
Even if he were one of the Portuguese, he
could not have misunderstood the meaning of
that call; the children of every continent have
hailed each other by that syllable since before
speech was invented.
But my stoical friend never hesitated. In
fact, as I started to run after him, he picked
up his whip and, standing up in the sand-
wagon, laid such a blow on the horse's back
that he jumped up and down without making
any headway. I could hear the fellow swear-
ing at him, urging him by all the saints to
hurry. He must have thought that I was the
reincarnation of Mattie, or was warned by
his guiding angel to have no traffic with any
woman queer enough to live in the House of
the Five Pines.
In the village I had no better luck. People
were too used to a display of skeletons in their
own yards to take any interest in mine or,
having disposed of theirs, felt no further civic
responsibility. Money could not hire any
native of the cape to crawl under the house
and drag out that heavy stuff. They only
worked "for a friend" or out of curiosity,
which I failed to arouse. By noon I began to


114. FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
think of Mrs. Dove's ominous prediction that
I never would get any one to help me at the
House of the Five Pines, and saw that this
was going to resolve itself into another little
job for Jasper on his return. I had promised
to have everything in order for him, but if
my settling was going to be limited to what
I could do with my own hands, the agreement
was nil. It is difficult enough anywhere to be-
gin housekeeping after a move. One always
finds he has the trunks, but not the keys, and
a dozen eggs, without any frying-pan; but
an efficiency expert would have quailed at my
undertaking. I had to arrange not only my
own belongings, when by the grace of the bag-
gagemen's strike and the cape train they
should have arrived, but the offscourings of a
family which had tenanted an eight-room
house for generations. New Englanders
never throw away anything! This I had to
do without any means of locomotion except
my own legs, carrying everything from a
tack-hammer to a can of beans, cooking with-
out any gas, washing without any hot water,
and, for candle-power, using wax instead of
electricity.
I stopped at the Sailor's Rest for lunch,


A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE 115
remembering to shut the door quietly so as
not to disturb the stamps. As I came in, Alf
was saying,
"Nicaragua, four, six, and eight—pink—
eighty-four." It sounded like the echo of a
football game.
"Did you sleep well?" he asked.
"Fine," I lied.
"Go right in to dinner." He waved his
hand. "It's better than what you got here
last night—beef!"
I hoped he had n't ordered it on my account.
"Alf," said I, interrupting him between the
Chile greens and yellows, "Is there any attic
to that house of mine?"
"Nope," he replied, "they ain't. They
never was. They don't have 'em around here."
That was what I wanted to find out. The
room over the captain's wing had never been
heard of by the townspeople.
"They don't build the roofs that high," he
explained, anxious to defend the architecture
of the cape from ignorant criticism, "on ac-
count of the wind. It would rip 'em right
off, take a big tempest."
"What do they do with their old furniture,
then?"


A MESSAGE FROM MATTIE 117
TO THE NEW MISSUS.
That might be me.
I opened it, and, on a piece of ruled pad-
paper, read:
I would a been here yet if it had n't a been for you.
It did not take any signature to make
me know that this cryptic message was left
by Mattie.
Alf was right; I had enough to worry about
with what was in the house.


THE SECOND NIGHT 119
that she had tended the terrible "Mis' Hawes,"
after she had grown out of being the bare-
foot girl whom the boy had chased through the
drying-frames. There was no cod spread out
to the salt winds now. The whole industry had
vanished as completely as the owners of it.
and, to take the place of these persons in-
digenous to the sea, was only myself, a stranger
sleeping in their beds, one who could only
guess out their histories and who knew noth-
ing of their thwarted ambitions and their
dreams.
Tell me your dreams! . . . But your dream is you.
We are our dreams—and the dream is all!
What had Mattie's reveries been during all
those twilights when she must have stood at this
same window with the New Captain and, after
him, alone? However dreary, they could not
have included the possibility of being driven
forth. It had been left for me, in my pre-
sumptuous selfishness, to add that cataclysm.
Now I was the one to be alone here. Was
it to be the lot of some woman always to be
left at this window at sunset, to face the grow-
ing shadows in solitude? Would it be that
way with me, too?


120 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
Some Puritanical instinct in me, deeper-
rooted than the casual conscience of the Mid-
dle West where I had been born, tracing back
to forefathers whose stern necessities of doc-
trine were related to this atmosphere, made me
wonder if the justice which ought to be meted
out to me, the murderer of Mattie, would be
that, for some reason still obscure, my husband
would never return and fate would force me
to change places with the woman whose house
I had usurped and leave me stranded there.
I checked myself. This was no mood with
which to meet the night. That life had
stripped Mattie at last even of her dwelling,
leaving her body as bereft as her soul, was no
precedent for me to follow, or I would end, as
she had, in the bottom of the bay. I was
grateful to her that she had not chosen the
house for her act of renunciation. If her
revenge upon me had taken the form of hang-
ing herself, so that I would have unexpect-
edly come upon her body, swinging from the
kitchen-rafters, in the dark—I put that
thought away, too, and tried to occupy myself.
The sunset, flaming through the windows
that faced the west, now made a red light every-
where that touched into form the tall book-


THE SECOND NIGHT 121
case where I had found the message from
Mattie, burnished the gold in a Chinese cab-
inet brought back by some seafarer, and fell
softly upon the ivory mantel at the end of
the room. I made a fire with driftwood which
lay piled in a rough box, had my tea in front
of it, and then began again on the
books. There was no likelihood that more
notes would tumble out of them, unless it
should be a will, or maybe an old tintype
or a valentine. I shook each volume care-
fully.
There are people who can straighten up a
library or turn a vacuum-cleaner on a book-
case in a hurry, but to me it is a labor that
time forgets. There is always a clipping to
be cut from a stale newspaper, or a review
that has not been read before, or old acquaint-
ances among long-closed volumes that lure
one on, page by page. It takes me hours
to go over a five-foot bookshelf with a dust-
rag. And to-night was no exception. Par-
ticularly fascinating were the books of the New
Captain on esoteric philosophy. There was
no getting away from them; here was the
"foreign religion" he and Mattie had embraced
and the "books to prove it by."


122 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
There was nothing modern. One great
tome was Madame Blavatsky's "Isis Un-
veiled," Eastern theosophy set forth in defiant
terms to a skeptical audience of 1785. Luck-
ily, I had read it before, or I should have
been reading it yet. I was already informed
as to the writings on the Temple of Karnac
that were identical with those on the walls
of a ruin in Yucatan, proving that the re-
ligious rites of Asia and America were the
same in the days before the Pyramids, when
Atlantis was a continent in the middle of
the ocean and the British Isles were under the
sea. I wished that the New Captain had heard
a certain lecture that I had recently heard
delivered by a savant, who claimed that the
secret of how to cut a canal from the Med-
iterranean to the Indian Ocean was well under-
stood by the Magi of the Orient and that it
was only due to international politics that it
had never been attempted. Because, forsooth,
it would incidentally cause the Sahara to be
partially inundated and to "bloom like a rose,"
but that the redistribution of the waters of the
world would engulf all of England. Poor
England! As if she, like myself, did not have
enough trouble with what was in her house,


THE SECOND NIGHT 123
without being swamped by what was under it!
However, this erudite lecturer had just been
released from a sanitarium, we learned after-
ward, and to it he was shortly returned, the
Mecca of most of those who follow worlds too
far.
Blavatsky's story of the ball of fire which
turned itself into a cat and frisked around
the room, before floating up the chimney, was
marked. It could have happened in this very
room. There was a white sheet of paper
pinned to the wall opposite me, with a round
black disk on it, that might have been the
when she wished to go into a trance. I felt
that if I looked at it long enough I might see
means by which Mattie aided concentration
a ball of fire turning into a cat. I wondered
what they would have thought of Hudson's
drummer, who, although locked up in a cell,
played upon his drum which was left behind in
his lodging-house to keep awake the enemies
who had thrown him into jail? Or of Conan
Doyle's poltergeists who threw pebbles at the
man seeking shelter in a bomb-cellar? But
they had manifestations of their own, no doubt,
and perhaps I should come across some record
of them, although they had worked out their


124 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
philosophy before the days when one could
simply seize a pencil and write upon a roll
of wall-paper facts dictated by one's "control."
Mattie and the New Captain had had no
opportunity to be influenced by the great
mass of post-war spiritualistic literature. The
fragments from which they formed their code
were bits of gold for which they had to wash
many cold streams of Calvinistic thought.
They must have gloated over each discovery
like misers. I could see them sitting here
in this room on a winter evening, the shutters
closed, the lean fire crackling, the two heads
bent beneath the oil lamp, exclaiming over
some nugget of wisdom which would cor-
roborate their own experiences. Those were
the times when "old Mis' Hawes" must have
called and bellowed and pounded on the floor
without getting Mattie to answer any summons
to the front bedroom on the other side of the
house.
Mattie and the New Captain may not have
known anything about photographing fairies,
or the S. P. R., or the S. P. C. A., for that
matter, but cats they knew. I had found the
saucers of seven of them in the kitchen and


THE SECOND NIGHT 125
strings on all the chairs, as if Mattie had some-
times tied them up. There was a book on the
shelves about a cat: "The World of Wonders,
or Divers Developments Showing the Thor-
ough Triumph of Animal Magnetism in New
England, Illustrated by the Power of Pre-
vision in Matilda Fox," published in Boston
in 1838. It was enlivened with pen-and-ink
drawings showing Mrs. Matilda Fox being
hypnotized by a feather, with the cat in her lap,
which, according to the text, licked her neck
until it sent her spirit soaring from her body
in aerial journeys to distant lands. As far
as I had time to read I could not ascertain
whether the author was in earnest or whether
he was trying to ridicule animal magnetism,
but I could not help wondering if the book had
not had some influence on the legacy in favor
of a home for cats, which had defrauded
Mattie. If any one could be put in a trance
by the manipulation of the tongue of a cat,
perhaps she had not been entirely altruistic
in her harboring of the creatures. Certainly,
the one who had rushed wildly out of the house
as we came in was glad to make its escape.
Where were the rest of the cats that belonged


126 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
to the saucers? Catching fish on the beach in
the moonlight, possibly, and hypnotizing sand-
pipers.
The books that told of cataleptic sleep
were all well worn. The New Captain lived
in the days when the subject of a wandering
mesmerist would allow himself to be stretched
out in a village drugstore window, remaining
inert between two chairs for days at a time,
while the curious glued their eyes to the glass
and tried to stay there long enough to see him
move or catch a confederate sneaking in to
feed him. But this sleep was only the imper-
fect imitation of the somnambulance which
the East Indians had practised for centuries.
Theirs was true life-in-death, when the heart
ceased to beat and the body grew cold, and
yet, to a disciple of the occult, there was a
way of reviving it. The theory of vampires
rose from this phenomenon, and that of
catalepsy, for if a tomb were opened and
the corpse found without decay it was easy
enough to ascribe the wilting of a child, in the
meantime, to the thirst of the absent spirit
for blood to satisfy its coffined body. More
persons would have lived for longer periods
if, instead of making sure of death by driv-


THE SECOND NIGHT 127
ing a stake through the possessed one's heart,
they had made sure of life by breathing into
his mouth and unwinding the tight shroud.
The ancient Orientals understood this. The
holy fakirs permitted themselves to be buried
and dug up again, to the glory of God, only
making sure beforehand that their bodies were
not interred in ground infested with white ants.
But the New Captain had the Puritan's
respect for life and death. He dreaded that
he would come to life again in an iron-bound
box, or he would not have despised undertakers
or written into the will which we had seen at the
Winkle-Man's the clause about Mattie spend-
ing a week beside his body. He must have
thought it was only due to her that he had been
called back before from the first of the seven
planes, and that his celestial passport was
spurious unless she signed it. Poor Mattie!
No one had sat beside her after her tired
spirit had freed itself.
I picked up another book.
French, this time. It was called "Les
Secrets du Petit Albert," and dealt with
necromancy of the eighteenth century. There
was also a French book on astrology, illus-
trated with crude drawings of the sacred


128 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
signs of the zodiac and diagrams of potent
numbers. Another one, "Le Dragon Rouge,
ou L'Art de Commander les Esprits Celestes,"
was not more than three by four inches, and
half an inch thick. Its brittle yellow pages
were bound in worn calfskin, and gave ex-
plicit directions how to conjure up the devil
and how to send him back to his own kingdom
when one had done with him. My scant
school French could barely master the archaic
forms, but I gave Mattie full credit for
being able to read all the volumes stored on
her top shelf. Her ancestry was traditionally
French, according to the judge's story, for
she had been picked up from a ship just off
Quebec, and the grooves of her mind would
run easily to the mother-tongue. A recluse
will master a foreign language for the mental
exercise it affords. Perhaps in some other
nook of the house I should find her French
grammar, but here, indeed, were books that
some one must have been able to read,—a
significant part of their highly specialized
library.
I began reading aloud from "Le Dragon
Rouge":
"Je te conjure, O Esprit! Deparoitre dans


THE SECOND NIGHT 129
la minute par la force du grand Adonay, par
Eloim, par Ariel, par Jehovam, par Agla,
Tagla, Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Arios,
Menbrot, Varios, Pithona, Magots, Silphae,
Cabost, Salamandre, Tabots, Gnomus Terrae,
Coelis, Godens, Aqua, Gingua, Janua, Etitua-
mus, Zariatnatmik, A. E. A. J. A. T. M. O.
A. A. M. V. P M. S. C. T. G. T. C. G.
A. J. E. Z."
["I conjure thee, O Spirit, to appear
instantly through the will of the great
Adonay"—etc.]
The little magic book then went on to say
that if this were repeated twice, Lucifer
would appear immediately. I thought per-
haps it would be just as well to discontinue
reading.
Had they actually attempted materializa-
tion up here in this very room in the old house
on the tip end of the cape? There was noth-
ing against it. If it were possible anywhere
to conjure up the shades of the dead, or the
devils themselves, this was as apt a place as
any—a hamlet at the tip of a barren cape
that extended into the ocean a hundred and
forty miles, a house separated from that hamlet
by its bad repute, as well as its location, a


THE SECOND NIGHT 131
friendship and sullen when they would not
appear.
"That was all right for him," she used to
say; "but after he left, the spirits that he
had called up to amuse him still hung
around. That they did, and I could never
get rid of them. Try as I would,—paint,
paper, or insect-powder,—every dark night
when I was alone one or the other of them
would brush up against me and stay just
where I could never quite see it until dawn."
It was a dark night and I was alone. I
sincerely hoped that whatever had been con-
jured up by Mattie would not brush past
me. At any rate, I had no mind to sleep
upstairs again in that little gabled room.
I did not argue with myself about the head-
board; it was too late at night for that. I
opened up a folding sofa in the room that
I was in, where the New Captain must have
slept many times, and lay down. The sound
of the full tide on the rising, answering the
questioning of the Five Pines trees, made a
lullaby.
It was with a shock and the feeling that I
had been asleep a long time that I woke up,
hearing some one coming down the stairs.


THE SECOND NIGHT 133
would come down again. The inside door
of the eaves-closet upstairs was locked. I had
left it the way I had found it, but the steps
seemed not to be within that secret room to-
night, but without, as if last night a presence
had been struggling to get through the closet
into my room and now was trying to get back.
Tortured, restless footsteps going up and down
the stairs, up and down, up and down.
Every time they reached the bottom and
tried the kitchen door, I swooned with terror.
When they rattled the latch and went back
up again I clutched my knees and did not
breathe till they returned.
At cockcrow they ceased of their own
volition, and, my will released, my body fell
exhausted.


CHAPTER X
THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN
HEN I awoke the sun was shining in
T T the windows on both sides of the study
where I had gone to bed, the neighbor's
chickens were clucking through my back yard,
and the boats on the bay were putting up their
sails. The past night seemed unreal.
The door at the foot of the kitchen
companionway was not only wide open, but
fastened back with a brick. I had forgotten
that. Then how could I have heard some one
trying the latch? And upstairs the little room
was just as I had left it, not a thing dis-
turbed. No one could have thrown himself
against the small eaves-closet door from this
side, because the bed was still in front of it,
and no one could have been shut in on the
other side and at the same time be pacing
up and down steps. I went into the upper
hall and looked at the big main stairs. Had

134


THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 135
any one been climbing them? But if any one
had, I should have hardly been able to hear
him, away off in the wing behind the kitchen.
Perhaps I could persuade the judge to come
to the house and practise going up and down
the flight of stairs, while I listened from the
study.
I had been reading too much last night
in the old vellum-bound books of occult
sciences. Without understanding the manner
of doing so, I had evidently hynotized myself
into the condition in which the thing that I
thought probable seemed to be true. I had
made up my mind that Mattie was a clair-
voyant and could materialize spirits and that
those spirits might still linger in the house;
thereupon I myself had materialized one,
unconsciously. The first night I had half-
expected to hear or see something uncanny,
and it had followed that I had. These
manifestations were due to the influence upon
me of what I had heard about the House of
the Five Pines, and to nothing else. Jasper
had not known all the harrowing stories that
were in circulation, and so he had not seen
the moving headboard. If he had been with
me on the second night he doubtless would


136 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
not have heard footsteps. It was all perfectly
simple when you understand psychology; that
was it, to keep a firm hold on yourself, not to
be carried away by imaginings.
And then I defended myself that any one
left alone in a big house like that would be
hearing things at night and that I was no
more weak-minded than the rest.
After breakfast I began again upon the
settling.
One of the features of the House of the
Five Pines was that everything in it was
included in the sale. Perhaps because there
were no heirs, or because Judge Bell, as the
trustee, was not grasping; perhaps, and most
probable of all, because the townspeople had
such a dread of it that they would take nothing
from it. The family linen still was packed
away in the big sea-chest—homespun sheets
and thin yellow blankets, pillow-cases with
crocheted lace. The family china remained in
the cupboard behind the front hall—firestone
pitchers and teapots, in pink and faded purple,
luster bowls, and white plates as heavy as dumb
bells, each with a gold leaf in the center; and
in a corner cupboard in the dining-room was
almost a full set of willow-ware, with all the


THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 137
lids unbroken on the little rice-cups. The big
mahogany bureaus, and there were at least two
in each room, four drawers below and three
little ones above, contained the clothing of two
generations of Haweses. This meant more in
the Old Captain's family than the usual sixty
years; it meant a hundred, for two more gen-
erations could easily have been born in the old
homestead if "Mis' Hawes" had not been
so set against the New Captain's marriage.
Her brass-handled high-boy held calico dresses
and muslin underwear, yellow and stiff with
starch, that Mattie had neither disposed of
nor used. Upstairs there was apparel that
must have dated back past the era of the New
ICaptain into that of his father, Jeremiah.
In Mattie's room was less than in the others.
She had found herself at the end of her life
with barely a change of linen.
In the study two doors at either side of
the finely carved mantel opened into closets.
One was filled with shelves on which were
papers and magazines that had been stored
for twenty years. The other was filled with
the out-of-door clothes of the New Captain—
a worn cardigan jacket, and a thick blue
coat with brass buttons, two felt hats, and a


138 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
yellow oilskin. A red shawl hung on a hook
at the end of the closet. I took it down to see
if there were moths in it, then dropped it
and backed away. The hook that I had lifted
the shawl from was an old iron latch. The
whole end of the closet was a wall-paper
covered door.
I was afraid. The flat sealed door might
open on the latch, or it might not. It might
be fastened on the other side. I could not
tell. But I did not want to know what was
on the other side. I did not want to stay
here any longer.
I fled out to the sunlight and around to
the back of the house. There was nothing
visible; I had known that all the time. The
wall-paper covered door inside must lead
either up or down. Down, there was nothing
but space beneath the house, the "under," filled
with rubbish. Up—?
I remembered the footsteps of the night
before and knew now why the kitchen door and
the little one in the upper room had looked
so unmolested. Those steps that I had heard
had been traveling not the kitchen companion-
way nor the main front stairway, but secret
stairs built in this wall behind the chimney,


THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 139
connecting with the room above. That was
where the restless spirit had been promenading,
just as it had been the first night, and that
was where it still must be.
I could not wait for Jasper to return from
New York to solve this mystery. Neither did
I dare to face it alone nor put it off longer.
I would go and get Judge Bell, and together
we would hurry back and find out who or
what was living in my house.
But the Judge was not at home. Dropping
down on his front porch I thought of what
Ruth had said to me last summer, that the
first three times you attempted to call on
any one that person was always out! Well,
I could wait. I was in no rush to return
to the House of the Five Pines. I could
stay here all day, if necessary.
At noon Judge Bell's Portuguese cook came
out and looked me over.
"The judge he won't be back," she volun-
teered.
"Why not?"
She only smirked without replying.
"Why not? Does n't he come for lunch?"
She stuck her second finger in the roof of
her mouth and looked away.


140 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"Not always, he don't. Not to-day, any-
how."
"Where is he?" I intended to follow him to
his lair, wherever it was, but Isabella seemed
to think I was prying.
"I ain't to say where he went," she answered,
twisting one bare foot over the other. "He
says if anybody asts me I don' know."
"And don't you?" I could not resist.
But she only stuck her finger further into
her mouth until I was afraid that she would
choke. I saw that I was tempting her to be
unfaithful to a trust, and dropped the matter.
The judge must have gone off down the cape
to a seance, leaving orders with Isabella to
uphold the majesty of the law.
My next stop was the Sailor's Rest.
I hoped to find Alf there. He would not
be so stanch an ally as the judge in this
emergency, because he believed in ghosts him-
self and could scarcely be convincing in his
reassurances. But he might be persuaded to
break open those doors for me, and I would
repay him by promising to look over all the
antique correspondence tucked away in the
pigeonholes of the desk for stamps. There
might well be some rare ones left at the House


142 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
closet behind the bed that I want to open,
and another one downstairs, in—" How
absurd! If it were only one door it might
not sound so preposterous.
I might begin: "My husband is in New
York, and I want you to come up to my
house and open a door of a secret room—"
No, that was worse yet. To a beginning like
that a man would only say, "Indeed?" and
walk off; or he might reply, "Thanks awfully!"
There was no use in accosting any one.
They all looked as if they would turn and
run. If only some summer people were here
—adventurous artists, or intrepid college boys,
or those Herculean chauffeurs that haunt the
soda-fountains while their grande dames take
a siesta! But there was no one.
Finally I remembered the Winkle-Man, and
hurried up there.
I was surprised to find outside that the wind
had turned, the sun had gone, and a storm was
coming up—a "hurricane," as they call it on
the cape. 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


THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 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 appear-
ing above that treacherous neck which lay be-
tween 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. Near shore the
sailors were stripping their canvas, letting out
their anchors, or tying up to the wharves.
There was a bustle and a stir in the harbor like
the confusion of a house whose occupants run
wildly into one another while they slam the
windows. I ought to go up to the House of
the Five Pines and shut mine.
The tide was far out. Beyond the half-mile
of yellow beach it beat a frothy, impatient tat-
too upon the water-line. When it came in it
would sweep up with a rush, covering the
green seaweed and the little rills with white-
capped waves, pounding far up against the
breakwaters, setting the ships rocking and
straining at their ropes, carrying away every-
thing that it could pry loose. Now it was
waiting, getting ready, lashing itself into a
fury of anticipation. There was a feeling of


144 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
suspense to the air itself, cold in an under-
stratum that came across the sea, hot above
where it hung over the torpid land. It seemed
as if you could feel the wind on your face, but
not a leaf stirred. People were hastening
into their homes, even as the boats were scur-
rying into the harbor. No one wanted to be
abroad when the storm struck.
The Winkle-Man's loft was deserted. I
saw him far out upon the flats, still picking up
his winkles with his pronged fork, hurrying to
get all he could before the tide covered them,
knowing with the accuracy of an alarm-clock
when that would be. Should I wait for him?
He might not come back, for he did not live
in this shack and where his home was I did not
know. I stood wondering what to do, when
suddenly down the street came a horse and
wagon, the boy beating the beast to make it go
even faster, although it was galloping up and
down in the shafts and the stones were rat-
tling out of the road. The dust flew into my
face when they flashed by. Then, as quickly,
the whole fantastic equipage stopped.
"Whoa!" yelled the boy. You could hear
him up and down the street.
He jumped over the back of the seat and


THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 145
threw something—a great box, as nearly as I
could make out—into the road, and then, turn-
ing the wagon on two wheels, came careening
back again, still beating the horse as he went
past me, standing up and lashing it with the
whip, cursing like a sailor, and vanishing in
his own cloud.
All this to get back before it rained?
I looked down the street to where the box
lay in the middle of the road, and then I saw
that he had dropped it in front of my house.
It was my box he had delivered, and his hurry
had not been entirely because of the storm.
I suppose I might expect to have all my pack-
ages dropped in the road by fleeing rogues
too craven to go near the dwelling.
Vexed with him for being such a fool, know-
ing I could not leave my belongings there in
the street through a hurricane that might de-
velop into a three days' storm, yet still having
no one to help me, I ran up the path as the
first drops came down on my head and, getting
an old wheelbarrow out of the yard, hoisted the
heavy thing into it and pushed it up to the
door. It was a box of books, packed in my
husband's sketchy manner, with openings be-
tween the boards on top through which news-


146 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
papers showed. Not the sort of covering to
withstand a northwest storm! And it was
very heavy. A bitter gust drove a flying hand-
ful of straw up the street and whirled it round
and round in the yard till it caught in the tops
of the pine-trees like a crow's-nest. They
bent and swayed and squeaked under the
high wind. A sheet of solid rain swept across
the bay like a curtain just as I succeeded
in shoving the box of books over the threshold
and shut the door behind me.
Something had come in with me. It eyed
me from under the stove. There was the
skinny cat that had bounded out of the house
with our arrival and had never been seen since!
Tired with my futile trip, overwrought with
the approaching storm, angry over my strug-
gles with the box, I leaped upon the creature
as if it was the cause of all my troubles.
"Get out! You can't stay here! I don't
want you! Scat!"
But the cat thought otherwise.
It leaped past my clutch, scampering
through the kitchen and on into the study
beyond. I followed fast. The room was
half-dark with the storm that beat around it;


THE CAT OR THE CAPTAIN 147
the rain made a cannonade upon the roof
and blinded the windows with a steady down-
pour. The whole house shook. The five
pine-trees outside bent beneath the onslaught
as if they would snap and crash down upon
me. I knew that the old shingles must be
leaking, but first of all I must get that cat,
I must put that horrible beast out!
As if it knew my thoughts it jumped upon
the mantel and raised its back at me. Its
eyes were green in its small head and its tail
waved high above it. It did not seem to be a
cat at all, but the reincarnation of some sinister
spirit, tantalizing and defiant, aloof, and at
the same time inexorable. I was so excited
that I picked up the poker and would have
struck it dead. But it dodged and leaped
away—into the coat-closet, and I after it. I
made a lunge with the poker, missed the cat,
and struck the latch of the forbidden door.
It flew open. The cat sprang—and disap-
peared. I followed. As I found myself
climbing steep steps hand over hand in a black
hole, I had time to think, like a drowning
man, that anyway I had the poker, and if
it was the captain hiding up there, he must


148 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINE
be an old man and I could knock him down.
I did not want to be locked in the house in
a hurricane with a black cat and God knows
what. I wanted to find out.
What I found was more of a shock than
what I was ready to meet.


CHAPTER XI
THE THIRD NIGHT
HIS was a child's room; there were
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 wit-
less creature who had been concealed up here
for many years, waiting for death to un-
burden 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."
But the cat mistrusted me. She slunk
away, and for a while watched me very care-
fully, until, deciding that I had lost interest in

149


150 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
her, she sat up and licked her tail. I won-
dered if this was her regular abode and if it
was she whom I had heard walking above me
at night, and, if so, how she managed an en-
trance when the doors were closed. Perhaps
she was feline by day and by night was psychic.
But she was not a confidential cat. Some-
thing fell coldly on my hand. I looked up.
The skylight was leaking.
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. The room appeared as if its owner
had just stepped out, and once more I took
a cautious look around, behind me and in all
the corners. Running my hand over the
quilt I found that the dust of years was thick
upon it. This attic had not been lived in


THE THIRD NIGHT
151
recently. Its disturbed face was only the
kind of confusion that is left after some one
has died whose belongings are too precious to
touch.
I opened one of the drawers of the cherry
bureau and discovered that it was full of the
clothes of a little boy, of a period so long ago
that I could not fathom the mystery of who
he might have been. Tears came to my eyes
as I unfolded the little ruffled shirts made by
hand out of faded anchor-printed calico, and
picked up the knitted stockings. This had
been a real child; there Were real holes in the
stockings.
My theory that it was the captain who was
living up here was exploded. Like a percus-
sion-cap under a railroad train it had gone
off when I blundered into the room. Noth-
ing remained of it now but a wan smile
and a sensation of relief. I only regretted
that I had not broken open both doors behind
my bed after the first night and rid my mind
of the obsession at once. I walked across
the room to the door at the far end and found
it was not locked after all, only that the rusty
latch was stuck. Forcing it up, I found my-


152 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
self, as I had expected, in the eaves closet,
where the little door ahead of me led into Mat-
tie's room. I would have to go down the other
way and move the bed in order to open it,
but I felt assured that no one had been before
me and escaped by retreating through here.
I peered up and down the black length of the
closet, whose floor was the adjacent edge of
the roof of the old part of the house. Ob-
viously no one was concealed. But from
the rain that filtered in and the shaking of the
attic beneath the storm, I felt that drafts
alone might have caused the bending of
the wall. Wind was sure to be playing tag
at midnight in this space between two parti-
tions, and a neurasthenic imagination could
supply the rest.
I only wished that I had all those miserable
hours back that I had wasted during the day,
wrestling with the mystery. The best theory
that I had evolved was that the New Captain
had not died at all, but that Mattie, watching
him during that legendary week, had man-
aged to raise him out of his cataleptic sleep,
and, although the townspeople thought he had
been buried, she had kept his life a secret for
the last five years. She could easily have


THE THIRD NIGHT 153
hidden him in this unknown room. That
would explain why she was so loath to show
the house to any one. It would also explain
why she refused to move out and why, in the
end, she committed suicide rather than do so.
Not daring to abandon him and have him
discovered by the next occupant, an event
which would end by their both being incarcer-
ated in the same poor-house, she had done away
with herself. The significance of this move
would have been that Mattie was no longer
dependent on the New Captain nor enchained
to him by the spirit, as she was always re-
ported to have been. Loving him, she would
never have deserted him. But thinking of
him in the role of a cataleptic old man, resus-
citated after his second death, it was plausible
to suppose that he would be so loathsome as
to have worn out all her emotions, even faith-
fulness. He must have been no more than a
crazy man, shut up in that loft, and love,
though as strong as Mattie's had been, can
not live forever on mere remembrance. So,
according to my solution, she had at last for-
saken him, after having provisioned him
beforehand, as for a siege. It had been only
the short length of a month after her drown-


THE THIRD NIGHT 155
idiosyncrasies of that room were her excuse
for not showing the house when the judge
had tried to sell it. A person who would
buy it as I had, without going inside the door,
was an exception. There were not many
whose need was so urgent; most house-shoppers
would have poked behind her bed and pried
into all the closets before the deal was closed.
Mattie had managed to keep this room hid-
den all her life. Alf, at the Sailor's Rest, had
told me squarely that there was no attic, and
he knew as much as any one else in the town
about the House of the Five Pines. Old Mis'
Hawes had died without knowing that after
Mattie had plumped up her pillows and thrust
the brass warming-pan into her bed, and
taken her candle and gone upstairs, she was
able to come down again and spend the even-
ing with the New Captain. I would keep the
secret, too, partly out of loyalty to Mattie,
who had bequeathed it to me, and partly
because it would be a lark to have it known
only to my dear one. I could hear Jasper's
exclamation of pleased surprise when, some
night after he had tucked me in, I appeared
again through his study-closet. It would
be a game for winter evenings.


156 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
I let myself down the steep steps behind the
chimney and, going through the study and the
kitchen, came up into Mattie's room. Shov-
ing the bed away from the little door in the
eaves closet, I opened it and walked straight
back into the attic chamber. That was the
way of it—a complete loop through the house!
Mattie's room was to be mine for no other
reason than its mysterious means of egress.
If I had any servants or any visiting relatives,
I would put them in the two big bedrooms
on the other side of the upper hall and turn
the hall bedroom into a bath-room. But if
I ever had any babies, if we ever had, I knew
where I would put them. There was a room
next mine waiting for some child to play with
the wall-eyed rocking-horse and sleep in the
little turned bed. Dormer-windows could be
cut on both sides and running water be
brought up, and such a nursery would bloom
beneath the old roof that the art magazines
would send up representatives to take pictures
of it. I could hardly restrain my impatience
to begin to make it ready, although as yet there
was no need for it. For the first time since
we moved into the house I was happy and
contented.


THE THIRD NIGHT 157
I was in the mood to write Jasper a long
and intimate letter, telling him of my hopes
for our life up here and how the House of the
Five Pines was all ready for us. Of my
hallucinations about the attic I said, "Nothing
was locked in the room but my own fears."
The tide had turned, and from my window
at the big desk in the lower room I watched
the lines of foaming spray licking up the
beach. There was no longer any horizon be-
tween sea and sky. All was one blur of mov-
ing gray water, picked out with breaking
white-caps and roaring as it fought to engulf
the land. I thought, as I often had be-
fore: suppose the tide does not pause at the
crest and retreat into the ocean, but keeps
on creeping up and over, over the bank and
over the road, over the hedge and over the
house. 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 Cap-
tain had built this double room for the great
storm that had swept through his life, bearing


158 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
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.
As I sat at the desk I smelled coffee cook-
ing. The impression was so strong that I
went into the kitchen and walked over to the
stove to shove back the coffee-pot that I
fancied had been left there since morning.
The fire must have caught on a smoldering
coal and the grounds were boiling up. But
the coffee-pot was not on the stove. I found
it still on the shelf, and the coffee was safe in
the can. The odor must have come from out-
of-doors.
I was too tired to figure the matter out, and
ended by making some for myself, and going
to bed. This was my third night at the
House of the Five Pines, and I retired peace-
fully, in confidence, without any disturbing
inhibitions. Everything had been solved.
I had shut the door in the secret stairs in
the study closet and fastened it with a piece of
wire. In Mattie's room I dropped down
on the bed where I had shoved it across the
floor that afternoon. Afterward I rose and
pushed the bureau in front of the little door.


THE THIRD NIGHT 159
I do not know what subconscious motive im-
pelled this, but a woman who is living alone
in a house with nine known rooms, none of
which !are in their right places, and three
stairs, front, back, and secret, ought to be
forgiven for locking up what she can.
Rain fell in wearied gusts; the worst was
over. The wind, still high, blew dense clouds
across the face of the moon and carried them on
again over the sea, so that the waste was mo-
mentarily illumined. Whenever the veils of
mist were torn aside the oval mirror in its
frame above my bureau reflected the moon-
light. I watched it for a long time on my
way to sleep.
At exactly twelve o'clock I found myself
sitting up in bed.
There was moonlight in the room, that fell
in quivering patches on the bed-quilt and
lightened up the dark walls, throwing into
relief all the five white doors. But there was
also another light, on the ceiling, that moved
steadily up and down. Forcing my hypno-
tized glance away from it, I turned to the
haunted door and the bureau that I had placed
in front of it, and saw with sickening under-
standing that the mirror above it was sway-


THE THIRD NIGHT 161
softly, picking a barefooted course across the
upper chamber toward the thin partitions
that separated its room from mine. I knew
that in a second more it would try one door
and then the other, and that the whole wall
would shake and give and the mirror I was
clutching would tip again and throw fantastic
lights. I heard it lift the latch.


CHAPTER XII
THE LITTLE COFFIN
IN the morning I was lying on the floor
where I had fainted, between the bureau
and the bed.
Was it going to turn out that I could not
live in the House of the Five Pines after all,
that I should never be at peace with it?
Would there be another manifestation the
next night, and another the night after, until
my mind was gone? I felt that it was going
now.
At midnight I could not help but think
that what I heard was caused by ghosts; by
day I refused to accept anything supernatural
and forced myself to a material explanation.
Did I, or did I not, lock the cat inside the
haunted room?
There was only one way to find out. I
unwired the door and climbed up again, and
found in the sunlight that there was nothing
more alive in the attic than the rocking-horse.
162


THE LITTLE COFFIN 163
Opening1 the eaves closet, a shaft of light
disclosed a hole in one end large enough to
admit a cat, granting that she could climb to
the roof by means of one of the pine-trees.
But cats do not prowl around in the rain.
Why had I been so certain that the New
Captain had not preceded me through the
eaves closet the day before? While I was
coming up the stairs he could have pushed
the little door wide enough open to crawl
out under the bed and put the bed back again.
He might do it another time, or half a dozen
times a day, until I put a nail into it, playing
hide-and-seek up one stairway and down the
other. He could have crept up the secret
stairs and been hiding in the attic at the very
time that I wired up the door at the foot.
This time I tried to make the fastening
more secure, but found that the flimsy
partition had warped with the wet weather;
and I ended by locking the outside door of the
coat-closet with a key that I managed to fit
to it after trying each one in the house. The
two doors of the eaves closet upstairs I nailed
securely from my side.
"Now get out if you can," I said aloud.
I felt like some one who steps up on the stage


166 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
at Star Harbor. While my host finished
washing his Ford, or whatever he was loiter-
ing over, I had full time to recognize the
oddity of my behavior. Judge Bell himself
was not so surprised to receive me as I was to
be there. And yet a canny sense of the value
of silence kept me from straightway break-
ing down and confessing the details of the
sleepless nights which had led up to my
demand. I felt, self-consciously, that, hav-
ing bought the House of the Five Pines in
spite of warnings, it had become so much my
house and my mystery that I had no right
to complain. If I confided in the judge,
he would not try to help me. He would take
my ghosts to his bosom as just so much
corroborative evidence of his own pet psychic
formulas. The time to explain was after I
had solved my problems.
So when my host finally appeared I only
said that I wanted to be sure the New Captain
was in his coffin, and the judge replied that
he could not blame me much for that.
"Are you sorry you bought the place?" he
asked, switching the late asters with his cane
as we crossed the downs.
"I'm sorry that we had to turn Mattie out."


THE LITTLE COFFIN 167
The message in the book I did not mention.
"Some one would have bought it," the
judge declared, speaking officially, and
then he added, as his own thought, "She
was done with life, anyway, long ago."
The cemetery lay on one side of a low
hill, behind the roof-tops of the town. The
gravestones were small, and sheep nibbled the
grass between them, so that as we approached
it looked like nothing more than a pasture
sprinkled with boulders.
A late, traveling circus had pitched its tents
at the foot of the slope, and we were silent as
we threaded our way through the rough-
looking professionals who were standing
around in the sun, trying to dry out after
last night's storm. Men were shaving, their
pocket-mirrors hung upon a tree; women were
combing their hair or sitting smoking, half-
dressed, in the open. A charred fire showed
where their breakfast had been cooked, and
the open flap of a tent exposed their sleeping-
quarters, with some of the ill-favored crew
still under the blankets.
The elephant, as large as a monument, had
been led down to the brook.
"We '11 have to hurry or we won't get back


168 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
in time for the parade." the judge said. "I
hear they are going to have a parade."
He was as pleased as a child, and stopped
and patted the elephant.
I could hear the caravan's laughter behind
us when we reached the old Hawes tomb.
From the edge of the graveyard the circus
band was tuning up. Grief was taking a
holiday.
The judge unlocked the gate of the iron
fence around the vault, and then he unlocked
the grating and we went down two steps into
the damp interior. The sunlight from the
open door behind us flooded the cellar-like
aperture, making its contents crudely visible.
The stone walls gave out no hint of horror.
Only an aroma of melancholy filled the rest-
ing-place of this strange family who had
once been a dynamic force in their corner of
the world and were now become a row of
rusty boxes.
I saw the coffin marked with the brass
plate of old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, and
the coffin of "Mis' Hawes," his wife, and,
on the lowest tier, that of the New Captain.
"Where is Mattie?" I asked.
The judge waved his hand ambiguously


170 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
lying in that room a week then, like he asked
to in his will. He was dead all right; you
did n't need to look at him."
"Was there a funeral service?"
"You bet there was. The Old Captain's
parson saw to that—Brother Jimps—gone
now, too. There was some talk against it.
The new minister he said he wouldn't 'a'
done it, but I knew enough not to ask him."
The judge chuckled over his grim recol-
lections.
"Yes, I saw the thing was all done proper
at the time; but I guess it would n't be going
outside of my rights any if I was to open
the coffin now and set your mind at rest."
"Please don't!"
"I brought a chisel—"
"Stop! No wonder she was queer."
"Who?"
"Mattie."
"Oh, yes, she was queer all right. But then,
she always was. You don't want me to open
it?"
It struck me that there was a great deal of
the inquisitive little boy left in the old judge,
but I did not have the courage to gratify him.


THE LITTLE COFFIN 171
"Let's go," I answered. "I've seen every-
thing I need."
It was at this precise moment that I caught
sight of a small coffin. It did not lie in state
on the stone shelves on each side of the vault,
but was pushed back into a dark corner.
"What's that?" I asked sharply.
The old judge did not answer.
"Did the Old Captain have another child?
Did the New Captain have a brother—or a
sister?"
The judge stood in the open doorway, his
face turned toward the downs. I could
hardly hear his words when at length he
answered.
"That is his son."
Not understanding, I looked at him and
then at the little coffin; and then at him again.
"Whose?"
"The New Captain's. He never had any
brothers nor any sisters."
"But," I protested, "I did not know he had
a child."
"Nobody else knows it."
He drew me outside and locked up the
grating with his large, hand-made, iron key.


172 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
We walked away in silence. But it was
more than I could stand.
"Did he live in the house?" I asked, at last.
"I don't know anything about it," answered
the judge unhappily. "I was hoping you
wouldn't ask." There was upon his face an
oldness and discouragement with life that I
had never seen there before. "I was his best
friend, and his only friend at the end, and he
never told me anything about it. The day
we buried his mother, old Mis' Hawes, I saw
that little coffin in the vault, just like you
did, only there weren't so much dust on it
then. I was staring down at it, after the other
pallbearers had gone. The New Captain
seen me.
"'What are you looking at? Come on!'
said he. And I said, 'Who is that?' and he
said, 'That's my son; now you know who
it is.'
"That's all he ever said and all I ever asked
him, and I never mentioned it to any one since
then."
A great comprehension suddenly came to
me, and I was dazed with what was whirl-
ing through my mind. I would have acknowl-
edged the finding of the loft to him, except,


THE LITTLE COFFIN 173
from the way the judge had dealt with the
matter all these years, I realized that he pre-
ferred to be left in ignorance. What he had
never inquired into he did not want to know.
I did not attempt to intimate to him how much
the discovery of the little coffin meant to me.
It was one secret more added to the burden of
the House of the Five Pines, but one mystery
less.
After a while I asked, "How long ago was
that, judge?"
And he answered, "Mis' Hawes died in the
early eighties."
A whiff of vault-like air seemed to pass
over my heart. I was back once more in the
dark loft, with the rain beating down on the
roof. That was the period when boys wore
fluted calico shirts.
The judge and I walked slowly down the
slope between the headstones and the crosses.
On one grave was a carved stone lamb, and
a stray live one had lain down beside it.
Milk-bottles blossoming with petunias and
lard-pails filled with earth in which bloomed
yellow nasturtiums made a brave display.
Tall Lorraine crosses, with Portuguese names


174 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
carved in the weathered wood, were lettered in
red and gold. The wreaths were of beads,
such as they use in the Western Islands, from
which far lands the fishers had brought the
customs of their forefathers. Many little
mounds were enclosed with a low wooden
fence, marked with a headboard at one
end, as if an open-bottomed crib had been
set down on the grass. Here and there an
old musket stuck into the ground or a cheap
flag, faded since last Decoration Day, showed
that from this village, too, our country had
taken toll in the fighting of its wars. Some
of the soldiers' graves were dated 1777.
At one side of the hill, where the grass
dwindled away into the encroaching sand, was
a sort of potters' field, with unpainted pine
crosses of uniform size. Thinking that per-
haps it was a military section, I bent down
and read the names.
David Lester, Lost at sea, 1856. . . . Jo
Lippa, aged 19. Lost on the Veronica, off
the Great Banks, 1890. . . . Capt. Miles
Longsworth, 1790-1830. Drowned with six
of his crew on an Iceland Vovage. . . .
Samuel Polk, 1880-1915. Lost at Sea.
A group of them would bear the same dates,


THE LITTLE COFFIN 175
as if half a dozen had been drowned in the
same disaster.
"What does it mean?" I asked.
"They are all sailors," replied the judge,
gravely, "who were lost at sea. When their
bodies are not recovered, their families feel
better if they can give them a grave with the
others on the hill. Sometimes we have the
funeral, too, if many have gone down together.
Last year there was eleven on one vessel.''
I remembered what Ruth had told me about
wrecks and the "graveyard of the cape."
"But I would rather have my boy's cross
here," I vowed, "than there!"—with a gesture
back toward the Hawes's big vault. "Passers-
by at least may know what these sailors' names
are and that they once have lived."
The old judge bowed his head.
I put my hand in his rough hand and led
him on. "I'm sorry," I said.
He smiled at me a little in a far-off way,
as if it were some one else he were smiling
at. I could not bear to watch his face. The
peculiarities that his isolated life had culti-
vated did not separate us so much now. He
seemed pathetically human and, like all of us,
needing sympathy, struggling forlornly against


176 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
the obstacles that his own limitations had
created. It no longer seemed strange that
he was attempting divination and second sight,
trying to wrest the undiscoverable from the
mute unknown. After all, he might be the
only one of us whose philosophy was right.
Materialism fell away from me in that
sand-swept graveyard where only the gray
sheep moved among the symbols of the dead.
Objectivity lost its grip; the subjective was
the only reality. I recalled what the Hindus
believed: that this world was an unnecessary
torment, valuable only for the acquiring of
grace, which might as well be accomplished
by sitting upon a pillar; that the only truth
was the life of the spirit, which had begun
with the spinning of the Wheel and would
endure so long as it revolved. The ascetics
of all religions had preached nearly the same
thing, in terms understandable to their own
generation and their own race. The impulse
of the soul, confined in its body's prison, to
reach out to souls which had left theirs but
which still hovered near, was the only past-
time worth an adult's serious attention.
Out on the daisy-covered downs where the
rain-washed sunlight blinded one to the im-


THE LITTLE COFFIN 177
mediate vista, where the reluctant storm-
clouds overhead moved in white masses through
the brilliant sky and banked themselves upon
the ocean's rim, the strength of the judge's
spiritualism subdued my worldiness. In a
new meekness and dependence of will I did
not want to lose sight of him. And I had
no impulse whatever to return to the House
of the Five Pines.
As we came near the circus grounds the
line of skinny horses and the tarnished animal-
wagon, the weary clown and the dusty ele-
phant, were already winding their way to
the village. The judge began to hurry.
"What are you going to do this afternoon?"
I asked.
He looked as uncomfortable as his Isabella.
"Why, to tell the truth, I—I'm busy," he
stumbled.
"Judge, are you going to the circus?"
"No, I ain't."
"Well, whatever it is, I'm going to do it,
too."
"Do you mean that?" His eyes penetrated
mine as a seer who would probe the faith of
a novitiate. "All right. Be around to my
house at two-thirty. I '11 take you to a
seance."


CHAPTER XIII
THE SEANCE OF HORNS
IWO-THIRTY found me on the porch of
JL the judge's house again, picking up a
modern magazine of the occultists which lay
there on the table. This time, because I would
have liked to read it, the judge showed up on
the minute.
"You can take it home with you," he said,
noting my disappointment.
Was he glad of a proselyte, I wondered,
ffhe townspeople stared when we appeared
on the front street together, but then, they
always stared at me. I had not asked where
we were going—to one of the rickety store-
buildings on the water-front, I fancied, in
some back room over tidewater.
Instead, we turned off at the railroad track
and skirting the town dump, where, on a
briery height, the refuse of the entire popu-
lation was spread out to breed mosquitoes,
took a little path through the marshy woods at

178


THE SEANCE OF HORNS 179
the base of the sand-dunes, and followed it
two miles. Blueberry-bushes at our feet
grew green and high, rid of their prolific har-
vest. Wintergreen berries were turning red,
anticipating frost. The leaves of the sumac
were wine-colored, and the dark racemes hung
like tassels heavy with their glutinous ripened
seeds. Goldenrod and purple asters rioted
along the path, and tiger-lilies bordered the
black ponds. Scarlet-winged blackbirds flit-
ted through the low branches of the oaks, and
wild canaries dived from sight. Bayberry
and sassafras made the air sweet, and the
brown pine-cones crunched under foot. The
October sunshine, released after yesterday's
storm, danced between the interlacings of the
wild grape-vine, which covered the under-
growth with its mocking pattern.
The soil of the woods was shallow, and the
trees, sending their roots too quickly into
sterile sea sand, shriveled and died before
they had reached maturity, so that the forest
was half-new and half as dead as if it had
been burned. Growth here was quick and
almost tropical, a glad green and a fast sun-
set of color, and then stale brown stalks. The
dunes, bearing down upon the woods from


THE SEANCE OF HORNS 181
behind it. We slid down off the roof and
knocked at the front door. A colored man
opened it cautiously, bowed gravely, and let
us in. We found ourselves in a darkened
room with five other persons, who were quietly
waiting for us, sitting in a half-circle on the
bare floor.
A colored man on Cape Cod is as exotic
a growth as mistletoe. Where this one dark-
skinned man had come from I could not guess;
why he stayed was easier to imagine. His
power as the representative of another race
was as unquestioned as a white man's is in
an African jungle or a Chinese in Alaska.
He was not so old as to have lost the use of
his keenest faculties, nor so young as to under-
estimate them. He was small of stature, with
an intellectual face and quick-moving light-
palmed hands. He wore a white tight-fitting
jersey and high-turned corduroy trousers.
The great toes of his bare feet were separated,
like those of an ape. He seemed like a mix-
ture of a cave-man and the motion-picture
conception of a cave-man; as if, knowing the
value of his picturesqueness, he not so much
cultivated as accepted it. There were no
chairs or tables; the bunk was covered with


THE SEANCE OF HORNS 185
cause of the tightened grip on my hands of
the judge and of the sailor, that my body
was left behind. Something touched me on
the shoulder.
"Look out, there's the horn! Don't you
see it?" Some one whispered.
I strained my eyes above my head, but I
could see nothing.
"There it goes!" This was the judge's
excited comment.
Still I could see nothing. The medium
continued to sing.
"It's flying around the room,," breathed
the captain.
What did they mean was flying around the
room? It was most aggravating. Was it
supposed to be the horn that was flying around
the room?
"It's stopped in front of you, judge,"
whispered the sailor.
I felt the judge's hand tighten on mine.
"Is that you, Ebenezer?" he asked, quaver-
ingly.
And the voice, a throaty disguise of the
voice of the medium, answered: "This is
Ebenezer. What can I do for you? How
de do, how de do, folks!" It seemed to come


186 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
from all over the room at once, now above
my head, now across from me. "How de do,
how de do to-day 1"
"Fine," some one answered.
"Ebenezer, how about that money you
promised me?" the sailor began, trying to
force his personality upon the control. But
Ebenezer would have none of him. "This is
Mattie, this is Mattie," it was whispering.
What? I had not been listening accurately.
It had never crossed my mind that this farce
could be directed toward me.
"Ask it something," urged the judge in a
fierce whisper.
"You ask," I whispered back.
"Aw, who is Mattie?" the disappointed
sailor growled under his breath.
But the excitement of the quest had caught
me at last, and I was panting for the next
words from that strange, disembodied voice.
"This is Mattie," it repeated, fainter now.
"Does n't anybody want to speak to Mattie?"
"Where are you, Mattie?" demanded the
judge.
There was a dreadful silence.
"They never answer that," whispered the
ship-captain. "You'd better try something


THE SEANCE OF HORNS 187
else." Then, addressing the spirit of Mattie
directly, the captain asked: "Who do you
want to speak to? Can you tell?"
"To the woman," wailed the voice.
"To you," they all hissed at me.
"What do you want?" I besought it.
"You must leave."
"Leave where?"
"The house."
A murmur of opposition went around the
circle. Enmeshed in a bad dream as I was,
I was grateful to them for their loyalty. They
would not have me put out. And then an-
other meaning to these words made my flesh
creep. The judge at the same moment asked
the question that was trembling on my hps.
"What house?"
"The house of th-three—seven—"
"It's trying to say it," he assured me;
"they can't get numbers very well. Yes,
Mattie?"
But the control had been seized by another
spirit and, with a great pounding of the
trumpet on the floor, announced: "Is the
captain here? Is the captain here? I am
Jacques Davit who went down on the Dolly
B."


188 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
This was a great strong masculine spirit. I
had no hope of hearing from Mattie now.
The captain sat up stiffly and was swearing
under his breath. "Gosh willikins, I'm a son
of a— Jacques Davit! Hello, Jack!"
"Too bad," murmured the judge to me.
"Wait, we '11 get her again."
"I'm out o' luck all around!" said my horny-
handed colleague in deep disgust.
One of the Portuguese kept repeating:
"Do you see any change for me? Do you see
any change for me?"
I could not keep my raind on what the con-
trol was perpetrating in the name of Jacques.
Like the veriest devotee among them I wished
to get hold of Mattie again.
"Get Mattie back," I whispered to the
judge.
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.


THE SEANCE OF HORNS
189
I felt that every one in the circle was strain-
ing for the answer. The phrase "secret room"
had won instant cooperation. We bent for-
ward in abysmal darkness, listening through
the silence, till even the sand blown down on
the roof grated on our raw nerves. The pho-
nograph had stopped playing. Then one
word hung in the air like a floating feather:
"Murder!"
That was all. As if the circle had been cut
with a sharp knife, every one dropped hands
and pushed back from the others. Some one
rushed over to the door and unbolted it, and
the light struck in across the floor.
The horns lay in a disordered heap at the
foot of the medium, who was slowly running
his fingers through his kinky hair, as if coming
back to life. The men stood up and breathed
hard, without looking at one another.
"What was it she asked?" the Portuguese
was saying; but no one answered him. Nor
did they look at me. They made me feel
guilty, an accomplice to some dark deed they
did not understand. No more did I under-
stand it, I wanted to scream at them! The
judge was taking money out of his pocket,


190 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
and handed five one-dollar bills to the colored
man, who had revived enough by now to take
up a general collection.
"Good-by," said the sailor genially. "I
didn't find out nothin', but it was worth it,
anyway, to be in on that. Say, he's good,
ain't he?" He followed me to the door.
"Say," he whispered, "if anything, you know,
turns up, let me know, will you? I'd take
it as a favor. I'm off from three to five,
short leave. See you to-morrow, corner of
Long Wharf."
I smiled hysterically. These were strange
days for me. I had been at a seance, and
made a date with a sailor!


CHAPTER XIV
THE FOURTH NIGHT
JUDGE BELL and I climbed up the
shifting cliff of sand and paused at the
top, out of breath.
While we had been in the cabin holding the
seance, a fog had risen. The sun was hidden
behind a gray bank, barely causing a brighter
patch of mother-of-pearl in the western sky,
where feathery clouds were heaped high, one
upon the other, like the soft silken cushions
of the fairy princess's bed. Mist swept
around the top of the dunes and filled the
hollows. Lakes of fog spread themselves at
our feet, deceptively solidifying the craters
between the hills into opaque pools of silver.
Vapor eddied in slow masses backward and
forward, disclosing the dunes and hiding them
again at the will of the sluggish wind.
Outlines were dim; the blue of the ocean had
become invisible. Distances were so distorted
that it seemed as if in three strides one might
191


192 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
reach the outside shore, where the surf was
roaring.
The rain of yesterday had pounded every
track out of the wet dark sand, leaving it
imprinted with a wind-stamped water-mark.
The grass-topped pyramid where Ruth and I
had played with the children last summer
was dissolved. There was no formation in
all that desolate region which bore any resem-
blance to it. The dunes must have challenged
the sea to a wild race during the hurricane,
with a gale driving the bitter sand so swiftly
that whole hills were moved. The pounding
of the breakers was reminiscent of the orgy
they had indulged in during the storm, crash-
ing as clearly across the waste as if we were
listening where the foam fell. Our damp
clothes clung to us, and our faces became wet
and our lips tasted salt.
I turned to the silent judge, whose rugged
figure, buffeted by many tempests of the soul
as well as of the sea, stood staunchly beside
me in the dusk, a strong defense. His intro-
spective vision penetrated further than the
eye could follow.
"Who do you think was speaking to us,
back there in the hut?" I asked.


THE FOURTH NIGHT 193
"Why, Mattie," he answered in a surprised
tone.
"But I do not understand it."
Judge Bell smiled slowly, making no reply.
He did not expect me to understand.
We descended from the dripping dunes at
the place where the judge had left his hand-
kerchief tied to a tree-top to mark the path
that dipped into the thicket. The groaning
of a fog-horn at the coast-guard station
followed us, and the tidal breeze laid an icy
hand upon our backs.
The way home was traversed quickly, for
it was downhill most of the distance. When
we drew near the railroad tracks I caught
the judge by his coat.
"Judge," I said, "I was going to the
Sailor's Rest, because I can't stay in the
House of the Five Pines any longer, but if
you will come up and spend the night there,
too, I will go back. I had n't intended to tell
you, but—there are very strange manifesta-
tions in that old house, far more amazing
than what we saw this afternoon, and you
ought to know about them. You owe it to
yourself not to miss them; it is research work.


194 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
I '11 stay there once more if you will. Can
you come?"
The judge's face glowed like a scientist
about to resolve the atmosphere into its
component parts.
"I'll come," he swore. "I'll be there;
watch out for me!"
"Well, then, now!"
"No," he insisted, "not right away. I've
got to go home first—the cow—but I '11 be
back. Depend on me!"
He started off on a dog-trot up the rail-
road track, making a short-cut through the
back of the town. Reluctantly I turned
away toward my own house and sat down
on the step. It did not seem worth while
to go in and unpack any more of Jasper's
things. I might never live there.
While light lasted I lingered outside and
looked at the quiet bay and the fishermen
returning from their boats. They wore high
red rubber-boots and gray flannel shirts
open at the throat. Barefooted children in
denim overalls came running to meet them
on the boardwalk, and tugged at their brown
hands and begged for rides upon their shoul-
ders. . . . And I had thought that some


196 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
the big brass tongue as if all the world were
waiting for his message.
In front of the House of the Five Pines
he stopped short and with his back to it, read
out to the bay: "Burr . . . buzz. . . .
Sheriff's auction . . . Long Nook Road . . .
Monday. . . ."
He swung his bell again and hobbled up
the street. It was late for the town crier
to be abroad and he was in a hurry.
"That will be the next thing," I thought;
"that will happen to me. Some day the bell-
man will be going up and down the board-
walk advertising another house for sale, and
that one will be mine."
The idea was so discouraging that I tried
to think of something not so lugubrious.
Where was the judge? I picked up the
magazine that he had thrust upon me earlier
in the day and began to read it.
The cover had a large eye in the center
from which shot orange rays, and underneath
were symbols I did not understand. The
paper was cheap but well printed, one of
those ventures in sect literature which, like
those dedicated to social propaganda, are
always coming and going on the market and


THE FOURTH NIGHT 197
sending out subscription-blanks with every
issue. The advertisements were, for the most
part, how to get fat and how to get thin,
where to send words for songs and how to
sell motion-picture scenarios. The editorial
matter was equally erratic. One erudite
article held my interest: a savant had written
of the "aura" that surrounds a person. This
is the light which exudes from his body, an
excrescence imperceptible to the agnostic
outside the realm of "truth," but plainly
visible to the initiate. The aura was sup-
posed to radiate various distances, depending
on the magnetism of the subject, and its hue
changed with the individual. Red was the
color of youth and exuberance, blue designated
the purist, purple betrayed sex passion, and
yellow surrounded the intellectual. Pink
and heliotrope were the auras of the artistic;
green was the halo of genius. In life this
color might not be evident, but after death,
the body being expressed in highly magnetized
atoms, the color of the aura was quite clear,
being, in fact, the sole attribute of the appari-
tion. That is, instead of being visited by, the
subject reincarnated in mortal form, you
beheld his astral color. Understanding his


198 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
temperament in life, you recognized him by
the aura which represented him. Although
most difficult to discern with the naked eye,
this aura could easily be photographed, and
photographs were reproduced on the next
page—shadowy outlines of nude figures.
Much space was devoted to the female aura,
posed in interesting silhouette with a wavy
water-line around it, like the coast upon a
map. The subjects' names were given. It
was hoped that later they would be able to
reproduce the aura of a specter, to print a
colored photograph of light alone.
I shut the magazine. It had made fas-
cinating reading, but I would have to procure
the observations of more than one savant to
be convinced. I began to see how profound
a study the psychic might become, and why
Mattie and the New Captain had spent all
their time on it and gathered together so many
books on the occult. It was not so simple
as I had supposed when I knew nothing at
all about it. Did the judge believe this? I
wished that he would come.
It was nine o'clock.
If only this gnawing in my fagged brain
to discover the cause of my nocturnal obses-


200 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
Then they would go roller-skating, leaving
the subleties of color emanations to solve or
dissolve themselves.
But I had not been brought up that way.
I had plunged into this atmosphere un-
prepared. I never felt more ancient than at
that moment, when I realized that I was too
old to learn.
What was keeping the judge?
It was ten o'clock.
I got up and looked out of the window.
The street was quiet and dark as the water
beyond it. Cold stars shone feebly through
the clouds above the bay, and the revolving
planet at the lighthouse on Long Point
blinked every minute. From the highlands
another light shone steadily, and at the
entrance to the harbor a bell-buoy swung
sadly back and forth. The waves, rocking
the floating tongue, set it ringing louder as
they rose in strength, and let it die away again
to the tinkle of a tea-bell. I was glad the fog-
horns were not groaning in the harbor. I
hate fog-horns.
No man ever knows the weariness of a
woman who waits for him. No man has ever
experienced to the full the hours when the


THE FOURTH NIGHT 2Q5
furious with the judge for breaking his arm.
Why didn't he install a self-starter?
I considered the possibility of finding my
way to the Winkle-Man's or to Mrs. Dove's,
my old laundress, but as I never had taken
them into my confidence before, it was liter-
ally too late to begin. I could not imagine
living in the town longer than to-morrow
morning if I was found in the position of
begging lodging from door to door. And I
had not actually made up my mind to abandon
the place altogether; the instinct for home-
making was too strong.
The night was damp and foggy, but still
I lingered in the yard.
The old house fairly yawned with peace.
Such a quiet, innocent, companionable house!
The five pine-trees swept the roof with the
rhythm of the sea in their misty branches.
My chance glance clung to them.
There was a red light in the tops of the
trees.
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


CHAPTER XV
BEACH-PLUMS

ID you ever wake up looking at the in-
side 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
207


BEACH-PLUMS
209
"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 accus-
ingly. "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 luck-
less dwelling and any one who set his foot
within it. Last night insinuations had been


BEACH-PLUMS
211
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 to-
gether."
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 tele-
graph-office, snapping a yellow envelope at
the tall grass as he loitered along.
"Is that for me?" I ripped it open be-
fore I paused to sign.
Don't give up house. Am returning Saturday morn-
ing. .Wait.
Jasper.


212 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
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. More-
over, I was still angry with him in an unreason-
able 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.


BEACH-PLUMS
213
"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 '11 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 every-
thing is convenient."
She opened her mouth and closed it again
without speaking.
"You can stay all night with me," I hur-
ried 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


214 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
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 '11 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


BEACH-PLUMS
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 remembered my sailor, whom I had prom-
ised 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, chersy-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


BEACH-PLUMS
217
"We '11 put the plums on as soon as we
get back," she said, "and have some jam for
supper, maybe, or to-morrow when your hus-
band comes, anyway. He '11 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 an-
swered.
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 cap-
tain'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 would n't ask any men to
help him build it."


218 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"I would n't be suprised."
She bore with me in that patient way which
country women have of greeting life, expect-
ing nothing and counting extraordinary cir-
cumstances 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 '11
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


BEACH-PLUMS
219
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 rest-
ing 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


BEACH-PLUMS
221
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 some-
thing else when I asked him where Mattie
was. I remembered his wide gesture toward
the bay, which I had misconstrued into mean-
ing 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 tomb-
stone 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 our-
selves and that no men-folks were wanted.
She divided the beach-plums scrupulously in
half, in spite of my protest, and soon had my


222 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
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, exclaim-
ing 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 patch-
work 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.
"Did n'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


BEACH-PLUMS
223
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 fur-
nished 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 feel-
ing 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


224 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
here and that, no matter what might happen,
this would be my last night in the House of
the Five Pines.
One never knows.


CHAPTER XVI
THE FIFTH NIGHT
MY sense of security was so natural tha
housekeeping was my last thought.
I fell to thinking of how I would have made
over the room if I had decided to stay in the
house. The dark walls would have to be
painted lighter and the -stuffy feather-bed
changed for new box-springs. I turned over
and over, trying to find a place that was
neither on the hard edge of the frame of the
bed nor directly under my comfortable com-
panion.
It was not easy to be neurasthenic when in
the society of Mrs. Dove, even if she was
asleep. To look at her and hear her quiet
breathing was like watching a peaceful baby.
All the repose of the country was embodied
in her relaxed form, from the tired hand rest-
ing on the patchwork quilt, to the head indulg-
ing in its one vanity of hair-curlers. I was
wishing that Mrs. Dove had stayed at the
225


THE FIFTH NIGHT 227
not allow themselves to be heard, but
as if their grief had passed beyond human
control.
At the sound all my scant and precious
reserve of courage was dissipated. The calm
repose of spirit that I had been developing
during the day was gone. The unearthly
manifestation played on my chilled heart. I
was appalled.
It was such a wailing suffocated cry!
Like some one in a nightmare, or a child
struggling in its sleep—or a child shut up in
a room! . . . That was it!
I tried not to comprehend the meaning of
this horror. I wanted to hide under the bed-
clothes, but a voice rose above the weeping.
I raised my cowardly head to be sure that
what I was straining to listen to was there. . .
It was like the seance. I did not believe in
it, but I heard it just the same. The tones
were not unlike those last faint whispers I
had heard in that eery hut on the sand-dunes.
It was a woman's voice, frightened and
trembling and shut away from me by two
partitions, but still I understood it.
"No— No— You can't go! He would
kill you if you ever got out."


THE FIFTH NIGHT 229
immediately and lock the downstairs closet.
I felt that I had to do this thing as much as
if some one were telling me to and urging
me not to put it off. There was barely time
if I was to turn the key before twelve o'clock.
And at the same time I felt that nothing I
could do would make any difference, that
what was about to happen had happened that
way before. Afraid, but drawn on despite
myself, I slipped out of bed and down through
the kitchen to the captain's room.
There I stopped. Some one was in the
room. I could not see any one in the
room, but I knew some one was there. The
moonlight flooded every corner of it and the
giant pine-trees outside cast great shadows
that ran like bars across the floor. The
closet door was partly open, and a faint red
light shone through. But that there was some-
thing alive in the room I felt so sure that I
dared not take another step. I was equally
unable to go forward or to retreat. Then
I heard soft steps descending the chimney,
heard them distinctly, as I had heard them
that night when I had slept down here in this
room, only now I knew them for what they
were.


230 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
I strained to hear the latch lifted, but did
not. This was my fault. I had left the door
open and it would slip out. Its mother would
not want it to get out!
I tried to call a warning, but it was too
late. Something brushed across the red crack
of the doorway, something that was no more
than an ugly gesture, a hiss, or a black
shadow. There was the sound of impact and
a blow, a body falling, a moan, a door bang-
ing. Then all was still.
The red aura had vanished.
"Murder!" I screamed.
I staggered back to the kitchen companion-
way, gasping and calling out, "Help! Help!
Murder!"
A light was descending the stairs and Mrs.
Dove was behind it. She stood on the step
in her starched white night-dress, holding a
candle high above her curl-papers.
"Murder!" I sobbed, and threw myself at
her feet.
"Why, dearie," said Mrs. Dove, "I did n't
hear nothing."


CHAPTER XVII
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
231


232 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
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 bedclothes 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.


DAWN
233
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 mop-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


234: FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
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. House-
keeping, 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,


236 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
ably, 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?"


DAWN
239
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?"


240 FIVE NIGHTS AT 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 seance
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 '11 tell you what is the matter with
you."
And because I looked so doubtful and path-
etic, I suppose, he hastened to add, "Oh, it's
nothing much, but it all works out so easily; it
does n'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


DAWN
241
thought he might elucidate the mystery. "It
is a pure case of materialization from the
subconscious mind, drawing an image of the
subsconcious across the threshold of conscious-
ness 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 temp-
tation to convince him of it by giggling hys-
terically 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 mov-


242 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
ing. 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 foot-
steps."
"My what?" I demanded.
Jasper did not bother to contradict his out-
rageous 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 have n'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


DAWN
243
other, so far as I know. Personally, I don't
believe or disbelieve anything."
"I have heard you say so before," I inter-
rupted, "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 some-
thing. 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
regime of Mattie, her soul must have been
reincarnated before she died, which is spin-
ning 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 after-
noon 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 uncondi-


244 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
tionally and ignominiously, much to her
chagrin. She had attempted to get an inter-
view 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
ingenue, and the two were doing such excel-
lent 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 fife job to get rid of them. I'm go-
ing 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?"


CHAPTER XVIII
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MBS. DOVE
YAWNING hole was in the center of
"Jasper," I called, "where are you?"
"Here!" answered a far-off voice.
The kitchen oilcloth had been torn up and
rolled to one side, exposing a trap-door. I
leaned over the edge and peered into a pit.
"Are you there, Jasper?"
"Yes."
"Is Mrs. Dove there?"
"No."
"Anybody else?"
"No, nobody but me; come on down."
But on learning that he was safe, my fears
leaped to the finding of Mrs. Dove. If it
was she who had opened up that trap-door,
or if some one had unfastened it from under-
neath, I was terror-stricken. What had
burst forth, and what had happened to her?
"Mrs. Dove!" I called out. "O Mrs.
Dove!"

247


DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE 249
"The aura," said I, handing it to Jasper.
"The what?"
"The aura."
But he had never seen it; the red light
meant nothing to him.
"Look!" he said; "he got out that way!"
In the gloom I made out double wooden
doors halfway up the further wall of the
round room, one of which was open, but
through which came no light. I followed his
lead up over a box that had been placed be-
neath them, and found myself in the "under."
We crawled out from behind a boat which
concealed and darkened the entrance, and
discovered that we were banked in on every
side by the stuff that had been stored there.
"What is it all about?" asked Jasper.
"I hardly know myself," said I, "but those
doors must have been in plain sight at the back
of the house, if they were there before the
captain's wing was built. The rubbish thrown
in here from year to year has covered them
up. Perhaps they used that place for some-
thing."
"Some one is using it now, all right," said
Jasper. "Who do you think it is?"
"Oh, don't ask me."


250 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
I doubled up in a heap on an old wheel-
barrow. Neither of us could stand upright,
or we would have bumped our heads on the
flooring. Jasper was leaning over me, un-
certain what to do.
"Go and find Mrs. Dove!" I wept. "Run
down to her house on the back street; she
may have gone there, if she got away at all.
And bring her husband back with you." I
pointed out the direction from beneath the
house. "Run! We've got to find her.
Hurry f"
Jasper, with a perplexed glance at the chaos
he was leaving, dashed off down the yard. If
I had had my wits about me, I should never
have sent him. He had no sooner left than I
heard something moving. Peeping between
the heaps of piled-up furniture, I saw two legs
vanishing upward at the further end of the
"under."
"Mrs. Dove!' I called wildly. But Mrs.
Dove did not wear red rubber boots.
I began crawling over to where they had
disappeared, and found a well denned path in
that direction, as if the broken beds and old
chests had been drawn aside to make it pos-
sible for some one, crouching, to reach the


DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE 251
further end of the "under" without being seen.
Standing upright at last, in the higher part
beneath the chimney, I suddenly realized that
I had raised myself much too far. What was
I looking at? My head had passed the floor
and my eyes were on a level with the captain's
room. There was the old rosewood desk and
the cat asleep in the rocking-chair. Wheel-
ing about, I confronted the back entrance to
the secret stairs.
I had stood up directly under the chimney-
closet, whose whole floor was lifted against
the wall. There it was, to one side, with the
hasp that had fastened it from underneath
hanging loosely. In the hasp was an open
padlock.
I had no time to wonder how it came to
be that way or why I had never noticed it
before. Some one had just opened this door
and gone through it. He was still going.
I could hear him on the secret stairs.
We were not so far behind the ghost as
I had thought. I swung myself up into the
opening, but could climb no further. Horror
held me and gripped me from above and from
below. What was I chasing? What would
I find? I slammed the trap at my feet, which


252 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
comprised the entire floor of the closet, and,
stepping on it firmly, wired shut the door of
the secret stairs. It would be futile to lock
the door of the closet that led into the captain's
room. I wondered how many times that
strong looking copper wire had been unfas-
tened and fastened again, while I remained
oblivious beyond the further door. As I
wound the wire around the hook all was silent,
but when I had finished and had withdrawn
I heard footsteps crossing overhead. I ran
through the kitchen, skirting the great rolled-
up oilcloth and avoiding the opening in the
floor, and climbed the kitchen companionway
three steps at a time. I must be sure that the
little door above was still nailed shut, and as a
double precaution I shoved the bureau once
more in front of it.
"If you can't get out by night," I muttered,
"you won't get out by day!"
The footsteps came to the inside door of
the eaves closet, tried the latch, shook it fu-
riously, and, leaning against it, shoved with
mortal might. But the mirror of the bureau
did not move, the door on the further side
of the eaves closet held, and the frail parti-
tion remained firm. I heard the footsteps


DISAPPEARANCE OF MRS. DOVE 253
start the other way, and ran down to watch
results.
In the kitchen doorway two men were stand-
ing, 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.
"I don't know," said I. "Wait a while and
we will all find out."
They seemed in doubt as to how to take
this information.
"What's up?" asked Alf, pointing to the
kitchen floor.
"You can see," I answered.
"I see the door open to the round cellar, but
what for?"


254 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
"You know as much about it as I do! 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 did n'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."
"I never heard of such a thing," said I.
"But then," I added, "there are so many things
I never heard of."
"That reminds me," said the judge. "I
heard you was leaving. We came to say
good-by."
"I haven't got time to go just now," I
answered.
"I brought this back." The judge showed
me a wooden sign he was carrying—"For
Sale. Enquire Within."
Much good it had ever done any one to
enquire within!
"I'm glad we got here when we did," said
Alf. "Looks as if we was in on the killin'."
I winced. I was strung so taut that every


256 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
footsteps that crossed and recrossed the ceil-
ing.
Will Dove began to whisper. "My wife,
she thought"—we all drew closer together—
"she had to find a place to put the beach-
plum jelly—she's like that! She looked all
over the rooms, and then decided she would
rip up the kitchen oilcloth and see what was
below. And there it was—the door to the
round cellar! While she was taking up the
tacks she kept hearing noises, so she thought
she must be right and kept on going. Maybe
it was rats running around. She ain't afraid
of rats.
"The trap was n't locked, just covered over,
and she jerked it up and was going down,
when she see a man in there.
"'Who's that?' she yelled.
"He never answered, but he disappeared!
He was n't there any more! She looked down,
and lit a candle and held it over, but he was
gone. She could see where he had been livin',
but it was empty.
"That was too much for her. My wife
ain't afraid of rats or men, but that cellar was
too much for her. She cleared out by the
kitchen door, and run all the way home. I


CHAPTER XIX
I HIDE THE GHOST
ICOULD hear the men above me, like
bloodhounds on the trail.
Will Dove, following his shot, had rushed
off down the back street, hoping to find what
he had aimed at. I drew down the cellar
doors which opened beneath the house and
locked them, just as Alf began to prowl
around the "under."
"Stay here!" I whispered.
Mounting the ladder, I shut the trap-door
before the judge had time to negotiate the
kitchen companionway.
"There is no one in the round cellar," I lied.
And he was saying, "No one entered
Mattie's room."
"Look over on the back street," I advised,
and so got rid of him.
To every one I met I gave the same word;
"I saw him jump off the roof and escape that
way," pointing in the direction Will Dove had
taken, and seeing his retreating figure yelling
260


I HIDE THE GHOST 261
and brandishing the shotgun they did not
lose any time in following. The house was
soon cleared.
Only to Jasper did I say, at a moment when
no one heard me, "Wait, I've caught the
ghost!"
But as soon as I had said it I regretted
confiding in him. Unequal to facing the
horror alone, he immediately set up a shout
after the last man in sight, "Hi, wait a
minute!"
Luckily the Winkle-Man did not hear him
and kept on going. He had tripped on his
long fork two or three times and was des-
perately trying to catch up.
"Before they return," said I, "look here!"
And I opened the trap and led Jasper down
the ladder.
A huddled figure lay prone upon the earth
where it had fallen, as if it had not moved since
I had left.
"What?"
"Stop!" I cried, for Jasper would have
wrenched the creature to its feet. "Can't you
see?" I turned the lifeless body over and
tried to raise it from the damp floor. "Help
me lift her on the mattress!"


262 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
Jasper caught hold of the limp form, and
at the feel of the light body in his strong arms
exclaimed again, "What—what is it?"
"It's Mattie," said I. "Don't you under-
stand? Mattie 'Charles T. Smith.'"
"She's not dead?" he asked.
"I hope not!"
I bathed her face with water from the pail
and made her limbs lie comfortably.
"I think we had better leave her here till she
comes to," I said. "I don't want all those
men pursuing her."
"Just as you say," he answered. He was
nonplussed and confused, willing to let me
manage matters any way I wanted to. "Sup-
pose you stay down here and watch, and I '11
go up to the door and head them off if they
come back. If you want anything, call.
I '11 be right near."
Jasper went up the ladder again, and I sat
down beside the prostrate form of Mattie and
waited for her return to consciousness.
The round cellar was dark now. Early
dusk was stealing the light of the short autumn
day, and except for the shaft of strained sun-
shine that seeped through the trap-door the
pit was dark. I opened the doors into the


264) FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
Mattie would recover from this wanton chase
or live through her devastating imprisonment.
Each syllable, I thought, might be her last,
and whatever clue she gave was important.
The house above me, where Jasper sat
waiting on the doorstep, was so silent that I
thought perhaps he might be able to hear her
talking. I took hold of one of Mattie's claw-
like hands and stroked it gently.
"I went—up there," the fluttering voice
repeated, "because I always went. Every
night of my life I spent in that room—ever
since—it happened."
"Yes, Mattie," I whispered, trying not to
frighten her.
"Jerry was a beautiful boy," murmured
Mattie. "Jerry—we named him for his
grandfather—but his grandmother never knew
it. Don't you think his grandmother would
have liked to know it?"
"Yes, Mattie."
"You would never have forgotten him if
you had ever seen him."
"I shall never forget him now," I said
softly.
"No one ever saw him."
The burden of her life came back to her


I HIDE THE GHOST 265
as she regained consciousness completely.
Tears trickled down her withered cheeks
beneath her closed veined lids.
"No one ever saw him," she repeated.
I was crying.
It was Mattie who sat up weakly and laid
her thin arm around my shaking shoulders,
the mood of motherliness so strong in her
that she could protect even her worst enemy.
"Don't take on," she said; "it can't be
helped. It never could be helped."
But I wept on and would not be comforted.
For the five nights that I had spent listening
to her presentation of her story, and the five
days I had wondered whether it were true,
and for all the empty days of Mattie's life,
and the lost opportunity of her neighbors
and the lonely people whom she served, tears
of contrition coursed unchecked.
"Mattie," I sobbed, "what can I do for you,
what can I do for you?"
She answered my question strangely.
"I'm ready to go," she said.
I thought she meant that she was prepared
to die.
Jasper could not stand the sound of crying
any longer and had descended the ladder.


266 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
When she saw him she looked worried, swung
her two feet in their absurd boots to the floor,
and stood up shakily.
"You can take me to the town home now,"
she said, with a brave little swagger.
Jasper and I were too suprised to speak.
At the amazement on our faces she became
disconcerted herself. A new terror assailed
her.
"Or is it the jail you will take me to, eh?
Is it against the law to be a ghost?" She
staggered back against the white-washed wall.
Jasper caught her in his arms.
"Here," he cried to me, "let's get her out
of this! Put her in bed, for Heaven's sake.
We've been down in this cave long enough!"
"Where are you taking me?" she implored.
"To your own room," said I; "to the gabled
room over the kitchen, where you belong."
Between us we managed her, and as I laid
her down once more and stripped off the
captain's ridiculous old clothes, and dressed
her in a decent nightgown and tucked her in
between the linen sheets with a hot-water
bottle, she said brokenly,
"Seems as if I couldn't stand havin' you
sleep in my bed."


I HIDE THE GHOST 267
"I know. It won't be that way any more,
I promise you."
Jasper went back to his vigil on the door-
step.
Mattie looked from me to the bureau and
the nailed-up door.
"You've changed things," she mumbled
drowsily, and then; "my, but you are a brave
woman!"
I smiled, and she smiled, too.
"I thought you would leave the house after
the first time," she continued. "I didn't
mean to do it before you come—not when I
wrote that note. I never meant to bother
you. Did you get a letter from me in a
book?"
"Yes."
"But afterward, when I knew you was
asleep in my room, the both of you, I just
gave way and threw myself against the little
door. I didn't care if you found me and
settled things then and there, but you did n't
do nothing. You never did."
"No," I answered, "I didn't think you
were anything—but my imagination."
Mattie turned her face from me.
"You did n't imagine nothing," she replied.


268 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
My heart stood still.
"I did n't make anything up. I just went
over and over it, like I always done, in my
mind. Seems as if I never thought of any-
thing else ever since."
"Then the only psychic thing," said I, more
to myself than to her, "was thought-trans-
ference."
I fell silent, but Mattie knew what was in
my mind.
"That last night—" she began, and seemed
to strangle.
"Hush, Mattie, it's all right; nobody be-
lieves anything about that fifth night but me,
and I'm your friend!"
Her eyes burned into mine, beseechingly.
"I believe you are." And then her feeble
fingers began to pick at the basket-pattern in
the quilt. "I never had none," she said, at
length.
"Mattie," I tried to make her understand,
"you have me now to take care of you, and
you can have this room and stay here as long
as you live."
"I can stilx work," said Mattie, with a tired
sigh.
"No, I don't mean that. I don't want you


I HIDE THE GHOST 269
to work for me. I just want you to be here
and be one of us, and—if you can—be happy."
Mattie shook her head as if she hardly be-
lieved me.
"That is," I added, "if you are willing to
let me and my husband live here, too."
Her answer surprised me.
"Have you any children?"
I looked at her and hesitated, blushing to
the roots of my hair.
"Why, no."
"I'd be more glad to stay," said Mattie.
"if you had some children. Oh, don't go away!
I did n't mean to hurt your feelings after
you've been so kind to me, and all. I only
meant there's plenty of room in the house
for all of us, and room for more than us, too.
. . . Because it always seemed to me, when
people were married and everything was easy
for them, and everybody knew it and was
glad, and would bring them presents—wed-
ding-presents and silver spoons for christen-
ings—and they could show the little dresses
all around—well, I don't understand it, that's
all, them not having any. . . . You must
excuse me."
I wished that Jasper had heard what she


I HIDE THE GHOST 271
mine as we lingered there in our doorway, in
the starlight.
Our intimate conversation was interrupted
by Caleb Snow and Judge Bell, who came
back tired and discouraged from the chase on
which I had sent them. Will Dove had
dropped off at his own house on the way back
from the woods, and Alf had been obliged to
give up the hunt long ago and go back to the
Sailor's Rest for supper.
"So it was Mattie!" said the judge, trying
to cover his disappointment. "I thought so
all the time."
"Yes, you did!" The Winkle-Man waxed
indignant. "You didn't know no more who
it was than the rest of us."
"Didn't I keep telling Will Dove not to
fire that gun off in the woods?"
"Sure! You says that he couldn't hit
nothin' with nothin'; that's what you says!"
"Well, I meant that it was either Mattie
or her ghost."
"I don't know what you meant," said Caleb,
"but when I told him to quit shootin' I meant
I was gosh-darned afraid he was goin' to hit
me.


272 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
They continued their argument as they
went down the street, and Jasper and I sat
and smiled. They were not half so surprised
as I thought they would be. They had lived
too close to the sea to be much amazed at any-
thing. If we wanted to keep Mattie and take
care of her, they had no objections. The ways
of city people were inexplicable, but as we had
taken the burden of decision off their hands,
they were glad to be relieved. The future of
Mattie "Charles T. Smith" would not rest
with the town council and the town home, nor
would her financial needs embarrass the tax-
payers. They eased their conscience by say-
ing we would not be bothered very long.
Consoling us and congratulating themselves,
they went off arguing. It was something,
after the trouble of their long evening's hunt
through the woods, to have the glory of
spreading the news.


274 FIVE NIGHTS AT THE FIVE PINES
All her life she had known no other home,
no other way of living, except here. She
could not allow herself to be evicted, because
she had nowhere to go. The New Captain
left her nothing to live on, and she had no
earning capacity. You heard how those men
talked. She would have become an unwel-
come public charge, and she had suffered too
much from the townspeople to tolerate hav-
ing them support her. She preferred death."
"Well, then, why didn't she really drown
herself, instead of just pretending she did?"
"Ah, that is different," I answered; "that
leads us out of practical speculation into the
realms of psychology. She was not that kind
of person."
I had thought so much about Mattie that
it seemed to me she was perfectly apparent
in her motives and sane in her actions.
"To each one who takes his own life there
must be five who go to the brink of death
and, looking over its fearful abyss, retreat
again and let their bark drift on the tide with-
out them. It has never been demonstrated
that people who take their lives in their own
hands do better with it than God. The


JEZEBEL
275
wreckage of one's life is mostly caused by
self. Mattie was the sort of person who does
not take any sinful initiative, but to whom
life is a whiphandle. The crimes of those
around her made her what she was. In other
circumstances she would have been what is
known as 'a good woman.' The old mother
who refused to let them marry might have
had enough determination to have committed
suicide if she had wanted to, but not Mattie.
Or the New Captain might have taken his
own life, for he took Mattie's life and spoiled
it, and her son's—and willed her home away
from her in his evil legacy after he had no
further use for it himself."
Jasper motioned for me not to speak so
loud.
"Do you still believe—about the boy—
what you told me coming from the train?"
"More than ever," I answered sadly.
We did not want to question Mattie. We
felt that the repose due her spirit was as
important as that which must resuscitate her
weakened body, if she was ever to be a normal
human being again. And so for months, all
the time that we were getting ready for winter


JEZEBEL
277
lowing winter, when we three sat in front of
the blazing fire in the captain's chimney, as
was our custom, that Mattie brought up the
subject of the fifth night. We had been
snow-bound for a week, and the white frost
sparkled on the crust of the drifts when I
opened the door upon the starlight and let
in Mattie's cat. The creature had been hunt-
ing fish too long on the icy shore and was
stiff with cold, despairing in its dumb way
of regaining our hospitality before it froze
to death on the doorstep. It bounded into
the house like a bad omen, as it had done that
day before the hurricane, and dashed through
the kitchen and into Mattie's arms, leaping
upon her before she could straighten herself
up in her chair and shake off her fireside
doze. She tumbled the cat back to the hearth
and looked at it reproachfully.
"That's the way you done, Jezebel, that
night you seen me through the crack in the
door," she said. "You jumped at me as I
was carrying my lantern down them steep
steps and knocked me over. I had hardly
time"—she turned to us with her wistful
crinkled smile—"to get back down through