Five nights at the Five Pines

WITH my frantic demonstration of human 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 The menace had withdrawn.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 enthusiasm, 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 for one who was not accustomed to swimming in October. I persuaded him to go around and examine the furniture while I found something to eat, and while I was trying to accomplish 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.

“A regular gold mine!” he kept saying. “Gee! I wish Thompson could see this!” (Thompson was a collector he knew in New York.) And then, later, when the full force of the value of his possessions had come to him: “I wouldn’t let Thompson see this for anything.”

We had known that whatever was in the house went with it, but we had not expected much. No one had been inside the door for so many years that it had no reputation for containing antiques, as had so many of the old houses of Star Harbor, and it had escaped the weeding out and selling off that leaves to most of them in this generation only the mid-Victorian walnut and the modern white iron bed. The House of the Five Pines still held its original Colonial furniture—great horse-hair sofas and mahogany chests of drawers, hand-made chairs and rope-strung beds, and chests full of homespun linen and intricately patched quilts. It would take weeks to inventory all of it. As a before-breakfast sport, it had to be abandoned. We were so pleased with ourselves for our foresight, as we chose to term it, in acquiring a house with such unspoiled plunder that we almost forgot to eat. 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.

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 trying 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 rôle 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 forgotten 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 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 relationship 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’ll 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 doing is accomplished between sunrise and sunset and his spiritual house is set in order, as it habitually pretends to be. This was not one of the days.

After he had gone I set myself to finding out what was the matter with the headboard. I went up to the little bedroom over the kitchen, where we had spent the night, and prepared to move the furniture. There never was a house in which one tenant can follow another without changing every stick in it, and I had a particularly urgent reason for beginning on the bed.

Subconsciously, perhaps, I was looking for it; at least, I was not surprised when I found it. Behind the headboard was another door.

This door was little and low, and had a hand-made brass latch that sprang open when I tried it. Stooping down, I found myself in a long blind closet under the eaves, where the roof of the ell that made the big room behind the kitchen was fastened to the old house. We had not supposed there was a room above the one below, which was the one that the New Captain had added for his own uses, but now I began to see, coming out of the darkness, the outlines of another 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 remembrance 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 October sunshine revived my courage. Jasper 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 discovering 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 rungless chairs and stepless ladders, oil-stoves and a spinning-wheel, two rowboats and half a 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, amiably plodding back and forth.

I called out to the driver:

“Yoo-hoo! Wait a minute!”

He looked at me, but kept on driving past.

“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 swearing 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 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 begin 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 baggagemen’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 without 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, 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 hadn’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 account of the wind. It would rip ’em right off, take a big tempest.”

“What do they do with their old furniture, then?”

“Use it.”

“Or throw it under the house?”

“Don’t you go worrying about what’s under the house,” said Alf. “You got enough to worry about with what’s in it.”

I did not like to hear him say that. By this time I had come to realize that what the natives thought about the house was probably more than true. I wished that they would stop talking about it and putting curses on it. I ate my boiled beef in chastened silence and wandered on home.

This seemed as good a time as any to unpack Jasper’s books and papers and get ready for his return, because I knew that he would begin on a new manuscript before he paused to cut the grass. I would have his things in order, at least. There was a high bookcase over a desk that looked as if it would be useful if I cleaned off some of the shelves. I stood on a chair and began taking down the old books.

From the first volume that I held in my hand fluttered a letter. I might have absently dropped it into the scrap-basket, but leaning down to get it, the address arrested my attention:

To the new missus.

That might be me.

I opened it, and, on a piece of ruled pad-paper, read:

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.