Five nights at the 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 boarders 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, and after standing on the platform until we realized that we might wait there all night without any interference, we picked up our things and sought the front street.

If we had arrived only a little earlier, by daylight, I would have insisted on going right up to the House of the Five Pines, but now supper was an immediate necessity. No one can wax enthusiastic about even his first home on an empty stomach.

The “Sailor’s Rest” was lighted up, although the doors were shut and there were no longer any chairs out on the sidewalk. It was not the custom here for the hotel to hang expectant on the arrival of the train. At this season of the year only the townspeople came and went on the accommodation, and they hurried home to eat with their own families. If we had been a schooner, now, putting in at Long Wharf, our host might have laid a couple of extra plates for the captain and the mate. He was deeply engrossed in his winter’s occupation of cataloguing stamps, which he had spread out all over the desk.

“Can we get something to eat here?” asked Jasper.

“I don’t know,” replied Alf, without looking at us. Then he got up slowly, as if annoyed at the interruption, and tiptoed out from behind his barricade.

“Don’t breathe 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 shining 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 dining-room. He showed symptoms of a hesitant curiosity as to whether we were expecting 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 wouldn’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.”

“You haven’t told us anything yet,” reminded 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 exasperated 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 expansively. “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; 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. Scientifically 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 wouldn’t ’a’ come up there on purpose—and she was to look at him through a knot-hole in the floor—just look, mind you, 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 lighthouse-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 responsibility, 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 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’ll 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, something 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 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 capriciously 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.

Some of the rooms were in the sort of disorder that comes through disuse, but the kitchen 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 presence, 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 document. 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?”

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, doubtless, 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 pessimism when we had left him at the Sailor’s Rest.

I was sorry that what my husband said 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 unaware, 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 darkness 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 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 chimney-shelf, one of them opening into the upper hall and the other into a small hall bedroom. On the outer wall opposite, two small doors opened into closets under the eaves, and between them a third topped the kitchen-stairs, which pitched down steeply, like a ship’s companionway. The wooden bed, with high painted headboard decorated with a medallion of carnations, stood against the back wall, facing the dormer-window. 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 heard came drifting back to me, borne in upon 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 gradually 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 repeated.

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.