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“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 independent son of the Puritan
Fathers on Cape Cod will only work as a favor, and out of kindness
charges you more than if he were drawing union wages.
“What do you do when you are busy?”
“Oh,—boats.”
“Wouldn’t you have time in the fall?”
“In the fall I won’t be here,” he answered, with a relieved sigh.
Mr. Turtle gave a guffaw, but when I looked at him sharply he was
methodically cutting a piece of cheese. “Will you have a sample?” he
asked me, holding a sliver out to me on the end of a knife.
I slammed the screen-door.
As soon as I arrived in the hospitable back-yard of Mrs. Dove, I
asked her what was wrong with them, or with me, that they should
rebuff me so. Stout and red-faced with exertion, she was laboriously
washing on a bench under the trees and kept on splashing the suds.
Being the only laundry in town, she could not waste time on
explanations. Mrs. Dove contracted to do the summer people’s
clothing by the dozen, and, counting almost everything that was
given her as not rightfully within that dozen, supplied herself with
sufficient funds to hibernate for the winter. During the dull season
she prepared for the next year’s trade by making rag-rugs and mats
with button-eyed cats, the patterns for which had traditionally been
brought back from Newfoundland by the sailors. After 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’ll have a hard time all right, getting any one to go near the
place. They’re all against it.”
“But why?”
“Well, it has a bad name around here.”
That was what the judge had said. That was the reason he was
willing to sell it cheap.
“Do you mean it is haunted?”
Mrs. Dove held a child’s rompers up to the sunlight, soaped a spot
on the seat, and rubbed hard again.
“Well, not ghosts, precisely, but there’s always been strange goings-
on there, things a person could not understand and that never has
been explained. All the men is down on it, because the New Captain
didn’t hire none of them to work on the wing he built.”
“But that was years ago!”
“Fifty, maybe. The house was put up in the first place by ships’
carpenters from Boston, and there’s some is still jealous of that. Still,
when the New Captain added to it, seems as if he might have hired
folks around 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
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 Captain. They was young people then,
and just the age. She wouldn’t let him have a penny of the Old
Captain’s fortune. I suppose it was because she wouldn’t give him
any cash to 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 any one, it’s them that is the
masters.
“I don’t believe Mattie ever would ’a’ come back after that, she was
so long away, only one day the New Captain hitched up his horse
and went and fetched her. His mother simply couldn’t do without her
another minute. It was winter and there was no ships plying. The
harbor was ice from here way over to the lighthouse-point; I
remember it. And we didn’t have trains clear down the cape in those
times. So what did the New Captain do but drive all the way down to
Boston and back in his square box-buggy. He was gone days and
days. I saw them coming home that night, the horse’s coat all
roughed up and sweaty and his breath steaming into the cold, like
smoke, the side-curtains drawn tight 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 whimpering-like inside. He must have
thought a powerful sight of Mattie to have made that journey for her.”
“Were they happy after that?”
“Not that anybody knows of. There was old Mis’ Hawes so set
against his marrying her that she would fly into a passion if she saw
you was even so much as thinking of such a thing; and yet, what
could she do about it? Or what did she even know about it, shut up
in one room? Yes, ma’am, there’s been strange goings-on in that
house, and there is still. That’s why the men they won’t go near it.
When the New Captain wanted the roof shingled or the pipes
mended from time to time, he had to do it himself.”
“Well, I’m not going to paint the house myself,” I said. “After I get in
and have it all opened up, they will feel differently about it.” I held up
my chin defiantly.
“That is, if you ever get in,” rejoined Mrs. Dove.
I walked on down the back street with my 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 spiritual. These wear out. To renew the physical life, all
that is needed is a few shingles and a can of white lead and a
thorough overhauling of the drains. The regeneration of the spiritual
is more complex, requiring a change of occupant. The deterioration
of a family within the walls of a house leaves an aroma of decay that
only the complete relinquishment of the last surviving occupant can
dissipate. Even then, the new tenant, in order to be exempt from the
influence of past psychological experiences, must be unaware of
them. I was learning too much about the House of the Five Pines. I
determined that I would inquire no further, but brush these
revelations from my mind and make a clean beginning. I would go
back to New York now, remembering the house only in its external
aspect, impressing that alone upon my husband and forestalling his
reaction to the side of the situation that lent itself to fiction, which
was his profession, by not telling him all of these legends that I had
recently unearthed. Jasper was more sensitive to such suggestions
than myself, and I felt that if he knew what I did we should have no
peace. To protect myself from exhaustive argument and speculation,
it would be wiser to repeat nothing.
The road where I was walking led across the rear of the premises of
the House of the Five Pines, which extended a block, from what was
always called the “Front Street” to the “Back Street.” From here one
had a view of the garden and the four-foot brick walls that held up
the precious earth hauled from such a distance. The century’s
growth of the five pine-trees had burst open the wall along one side,
and their roots, extending into the next yard, had been ruthlessly
chopped off. I hoped that these new neighbors would not extend
their animosity to me. The land sloped gradually down from the
house until it rose again in a wooded hill on the further side of Back
Street. This incline had necessitated the placing of piles, topped with
inverted tin pans, as they are in country corn-bins, to hold up the rear
of the captain’s wing. The space thus formed beneath 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 speculation, a little old woman came around the side of the
mysterious house. She was dragging two heavy oars behind her
which she propped against a tree, and, setting down a wicker fish-
basket beside them, lifted out a live green lobster.
She wore a yellow oilskin hat, with the brim bent down around her
withered face, and a dirty sailor’s middy over a bedraggled skirt.
Holding her freshly-caught lobster in a way that would have been
precarious to most people, she talked to it like a pet, and as I
continued to watch her, fascinated, she carried it tenderly away. I
wondered if she would drop it into boiling water, which was its natural
destiny, or take it into the 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! What do you want it for anyway? The judge and me have
give up wondering what summer people wants anything for, ain’t we,
judge?”
Judge Bell would not answer; he was afraid Caleb was going to spoil
the sale.
“They always pick out the worst ramshackle down-at-the-heels
places that they can get for nothin’, and talks about the ‘possibilities’
of ’em, like a revivalist prayin’ over a sinner, until you would think the
blessed old rat-trap was something!”
“The House of the Five Pines isn’t a rat-trap,” said the judge,
touchily.
“No, it ain’t,” grinned Caleb, shouldering his long fork and picking up
his bait-bucket. “It’s a man-trap!”
He slouched off down the bank.
“Don’t you worry,” I reassured the judge, who was looking sour. “I’ll
take the house if I possibly can. You put your mind on getting Mattie
moved out of it, and I’ll write you.”
I told Ruth about my interviews when I reached the cottage. “You’ve
found out more about that house in the last twenty-four hours,” she
replied in her leisurely way, “than I’ve ever heard in the five years
I’ve lived here. I only pray you will take it now. The town-people won’t
like it if you don’t; you’ve got their hopes aroused.”
“I have my own aroused,” I replied. “I have more hope now for the
future than I have had for the last six months.”
Ruth saw me off cheerfully on the afternoon train, but I knew that in
her kind heart were forebodings as to what might happen in my life
before she could see me again. Her whole family would migrate
soon now, and our winters would be spent in cities too far apart for
us to help each other. If she could have known how much I was
going to need her, she would never have left Star Harbor.
 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 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, because of the constant necessity of his
profession 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
momentarily. 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 developed from a mystery that I had suggested
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
ménage, 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 telephone, from complaints
about the box-office, with which I had nothing at all to do, to
reproaches from the ingénue because she could not find the author.
It seemed to me, thinking it over while pressing out the dress I was
going to wear, that Myrtle was spending altogether 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 sometimes 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 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 architectural relation to each other,
whispers followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue loafed on the
stairs. We had outgrown unconventional (which is the same as
inconvenient) housekeeping. Jasper was getting bored and I was
becoming querulous before our married life had been given any
opportunity 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 saying to myself, when I
heard my husband coming down the hall, and my heart forgot
forebodings. I hurried to hide the ironing-board, there still being a
pretense between us that it was not necessary to do these things,
and put on the tea-kettle.
Jasper was tall and angular, with wispy light hair always in disorder
above a high forehead and gray eyes wide open in happy
excitement. 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 people take him
seriously, even his jokes. In a world eager to give him what he
wanted, I 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 I’ll 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’ll run up to the theater before I
come back and get you something.”
“You won’t have time; you’re going out for dinner, aren’t you?”
“I was.”
“Well, go ahead. I’ll 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 couldn’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. He
gave me the best he had, without any comment, 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, developing 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 every one had forgotten. As a watcher of the first
performance, alert to catch any criticism that might be useful, 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 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. Probably she did not know herself.
“Isn’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 Jasper 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.
“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 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 thinking: “Why doesn’t Jasper take
any better care of me? Why doesn’t he care what happens 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
LOBSTER-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 wakefulness, 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 approval 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 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
intentions beyond cavil. They had one criticism in common—they did
not like our ingénue, 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 depend upon her
for its success. He was not aware that it was the playwright who was
himself dependent upon her, who put her interests 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 Yesterday” 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 recently 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 reaction 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 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 Manners?”
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, Burton 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 ingénue was not originally important, but
her insistence, and Jasper’s willingness to please her, had altered it
until it threatened the lead. Therefore 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 lines cut and Myrtle Manners had
hers made increasingly important, 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. Probably, 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 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 believe they sent any one
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 isn’t up yet,” I replied, taking my hand away just in time
to hear her insistent 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, 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 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
intimate “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 continually, rooms from which there was some escape,
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 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 yesterday 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.
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 horseshoe-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 mosquitoes. The breakwater
itself was too lonely a walk for any one but lovers, who have the
nocturnal habits of the cat, but who do not patrol distant beaches to
see the sunrise. And no other person would ever have been in
shouting distance of the place where Mattie must have been
drowned. 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
floundered; 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 together 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 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!”
“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!”
“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’ll go
up there and get rested. That’s the best news this morning. Why
didn’t you tell me right away?”
“I didn’t know whether you’d be interested.”
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.”