Great Circle

II

(—particularly the smell of the pine-wood walls, soaked in sea fog, but pine-smelling also in the strong sea sunlight, smooth to the touch, golden-eyed with knotholes, and the wind singing through the rusty wire screens, fine-meshed and dusty, or clogged brightly with drops of dew, or drops of rain, or drops of fog — the morning outlook seaward, over the humped grass beyond the puddled tennis court, over the wild sea grass windblown, beyond the new house of bright shingles, where the new boy and girl lived, and then across the bay to Clark’s Island, and the long yellow outer beach, with its deserted and mysterious shacks of houses, and then the Gurnett — the small white twin lighthouses of the Gurnett — I was looking out of the window at this, at all of this, feeling the cool east wind from Provincetown, but with no mirage to show precisely where Province-town lay, and the voices came then over the low partition between the bedrooms. I was dressing, and as I put on my khaki shirt I looked at the fly-trap, which I had made out of fragments of window-screen wire, to see if my flies were all still alive after the night. What would they be saying now. The voices were low and secret, early morning voices, Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah. I removed the screw in the wall beside the washstand and peeped through into the maids’ room, saw a pink chemise very close to me, so close that I was frightened, and walked softly away, back to the window. Did Molly know I was there, that I was watching her day after day? I had seen them putting on their bathing suits. Afterward, when I met them on the porch, they were embarrassed, tried to pull down the short skirts over their knees, ran down the road giggling and looking back. Molly’s skin was very white, Margaret’s was brown.

But why should he come like this, Tom? It isn’t like him not to let Doris, or anyone, know. Perhaps you’d better go to Boston and see him. Do you think there’s anything wrong.

— The whole thing is very queer. Do you think he suspects. Do you think we ought to say something to Doris.

— I think you’d better go to town and see him. Before anything worse happens. He ought not to come here, if that’s what he’s thinking of doing. I’m sure he suspects. It would hurt him too much to see it. It would be better if you talked to him.

— We’d better put off the picnic till next week. Too bad to disappoint the kids again, but it can’t be helped. It was queer to begin with that he let Doris come here alone, with the children, when he could perfectly well have come, too — his business was only an excuse. I think they had already quarreled about it.

They were talking about Father and Mother, and I went close to the partition, to listen, holding my breath; but the voices stopped, the door opened, and I heard Uncle Tom going down the stairs, and Aunt Norah pouring water out of the pitcher into the washbowl. No picnic at the Gurnett this week — the third time it had been postponed. Porper would probably cry when I told him, but instead Susan and I could take him down to the front beach and build villages out of shells, and show him the dead seal. In that little cleared place between the banks of eelgrass, flat and sandy at low tide, where the horseshoe crabs were. The new boy and girl, too, Warren and Gay, except that Gay was always crying, as when we had taken her to the log cabin in the pine woods and tried to make her undress. Had she told her mother and father about that, the little sneak.

— particularly the morning walk to the village, along the Point Road, past all the houses and windmills, the wild cherry trees and crab apples, to get the morning mail. The wooden windmills were the best, with their wings of fine white-painted slats, and the great wooden tanks at the top, and the strong girders of white-painted wood, and of these I couldn’t decide whether I preferred Daisy or Sunbeam. Of the metal ones, there were five Comets and three Aermotors, and our own Vulcan, the only three-legged one on the Point. They were all going busily in the east wind. The Tuppers had a special little shingled tower, with a red railing around the top, where Frank Tupper went with a telescope to watch the yacht races in the bay, but this I passed quickly, looking at the house and garden out of the tail of my eye, to see if Gwendolyn was there. Had she got the box of candy I had left on her porch for her, with the heart on it, and our initials. Would she laugh at me. Did I dare go in the afternoon to the drill of the Company at the Camp. Would she have told Frank about it, and would Frank say anything. When we were playing cross-tag I had caught her by her pigtail, and she had looked at me in a very queer way, half angry and half pleased, and then had refused to play any more. What was this about Father and Mother. Was it because she went sailing all the time with Uncle David, just like last year, and walks to the beach always at night after Porper and Susan had gone to bed. The stage passed me, coming from the morning train, the one named Priscilla, painted a bright yellow, with red wheels, and toothless Smiley driving the horses and saying “Giddup, giddup” out of the side of his mouth, spitting tobacco juice. I would be in plenty of time for the mail, in fact I would have time to go to the drugstore and have a chocolate milk shake at the marble fountain, which always smelled of vanilla. If it rained in the afternoon, we would play Gonko in the playhouse, and perhaps make some new racquets out of shingles. If it didn’t rain, I would go for a row in the dory, through the long bridge and up into the marsh channel towards Brant Rock and Marshfield, for the tide would be low, and I could explore the channels. If I got stuck, I could pretend to be just clam-digging, the way Uncle Tom always said the yachtsmen pretended to do when they got stuck on the mud flats in the bay. They always took pails and shovels with them in case they got stuck, and then rolled up their trousers and went digging, as if that was what they had come for. Or perhaps Uncle David would invite us out in his cabin motorboat, late in the afternoon, with Mother, and Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and that would be fun, except that I didn’t like Uncle David. I heard Molly saying to Margaret in their room when they were going to bed that he was always drunk. Did that mean falling down. I had never seen him fall down. But I had seen bottles under the bunk in the cabin of the motorboat several times and he had bottles in his room downstairs, on the table under the row of dried and mounted seaweeds, which Uncle Tom and I had put there the year before.

— and beyond the golf links, where I always left the bicycle path, paved with broken clamshells, to walk along the edge of the course, among the bayberry bushes and cherry trees, hoping for lost golf balls, prodding in the poison-ivy with a stick, beyond this the boarding house kept by old Mrs. Soule, where we had stayed last year and the year before, with the hen houses at the back, and the little sandy-rutted road which led down to the cove and the stone dyke where beach plums grew. The floors were painted gray, with white speckles, the whole house had a marine smell like a ship, conch shells lined the path and stood against the doors, and on the lawn, among the croquet wickets, I had found four-leaved clovers. Molly Soule always sat alone in the swing, large-eyed, pallid, her thin little hands around the ropes, looking sadly at us, because we never played with her. Nobody ever played with her, because her name was the same as her mother’s, and she had no father. She was always hanging about and watching us from a little distance, and would run away and cry if we said anything to her, especially the Sanford boy, who asked her so many times what her name was. This was where I played baseball with Father in the evening, or ran races with him from one telephone pole to another. Was it true that he was coming again this year. Why was it that this year we were staying with Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and Uncle David, instead of at the Soules’. Though it was nice, particularly as Uncle Tom knew so much about the wild flowers, and had that nice little tin cylinder to bring back the flowers in, the one he had brought all the way from Switzerland a long while ago. It hung over his shoulder on a strap, and we had found swamp pink in the marsh near Pembroke woods, and arrowhead, and ghost-flower. Jewelweed, on the way to the Standish Monument, pickerel weed, and buttonbush. If only he could go more often — we already had more than fifty kinds, pressed in the blank book, it would be easy to get a hundred before the summer was over. Why was he so thin, and his knees so funny, and he always wore that funny yachting cap with the green vizor, his ears sticking out at the sides, walking in his bathing suit over the humped grass to the Point with the rowlocks jingling in his hand. I said to him that I thought I was getting fatter. He gave that nice little chuckle and said, No danger, Andy. Why was it he and Uncle David had never learned to swim properly—

— when we got to the oak woods we decided after all to go to the pine woods instead, because the oak woods were smaller and closer together, there were no logs to build with, and no room anyway; so we took Warren and Gay with us and we sat in the houses of logs while it rained, and only a few drops of rain came through the roofs, which we had made out of pine boughs. Susan was in one house with Warren, and Gay was in the other with me. I asked if we should take our clothes off and go to bed, pretending it was night, but she said no and began to cry. Warren and Susan had taken off theirs. Warren didn’t mind, but Gay said she wanted to go home, and I was afraid she would tell her mother. So I told her about the villages we made of shells on the beach, and the dead seal.

— It’s swarming with maggots.

— What are maggots.

— Little white worms, millions of them, and it smells so bad that you can smell it all the way up to the house when the wind is right.

— Do you go bathing every day, we go every day, and we have a sailboat at the Point.

— I have a dory of my own, and my uncle has a motorboat which he takes us out in. It has a real cabin with doors that lock.

The smell was so bad that we couldn’t get very near to the seal without feeling sick, but I showed her the maggots. Then Mother came down the hill walking very slowly, with Porper holding her hand. She was carrying a red silk parasol over her head.

— Porper wants to see the village. Show him how you build houses, Andy and Susan, I want to read my book. Are these your little friends? What are your names, children? Oh, you’re the little girl and boy who have just moved in next door, aren’t you.

We made houses out of rows of quartz pebbles in the sand, in between the beds of eelgrass. First they all had to buy their land from me with shells for money: scallop shells were five dollars, clam shells were one dollar, toenail shells were fifty cents. Mother had made a pile of dried eelgrass to lean against, and was reading a book under her parasol. Warren sold quartz pebbles to us for building material. Susan kept the bakery shop where we bought bread and cakes, Gay was the grocer. I built a house for Porper, and showed him how to go in and out of the imaginary door, and where the bedroom was, and how to go along the streets without stepping into the other houses by mistake. The tide was way out, all the mud flats in the bay were showing, and a little way out two men with a dory were digging clams.

— Shall we dig some clams for supper, Mother?

— Not today, Andy.

— When are we going to the Long Beach for a clambake, and to see the Gurnett. Tomorrow?

— Not till next week, I’m afraid. Now don’t bother Mother, she’s reading. And she may take a nap, she’s very tired and sleepy, so don’t disturb her.

Susan took off Porper’s sneakers so that he could go wading.

— There you are, lamb. Don’t mind about the clambake, we’ll have it next week, and you’ll see the ocean and all the dead fishes.

— What dead fishes.

— And here are some more scallop shells for you, and a horseshoe crab.

Warren and I walked along the beach toward the Point, and I showed him the hunting box, all covered deep in dried seaweed. We got into it and lay down for a while. It smelt very nice. There was an old beer bottle in the corner, with sand and water in it, and we took it out and threw stones at it until it was broken. Take that. And that. And that. And that for your old man.

When we went back, Uncle David had come, and was standing in front of Mother, with his hands in his duck trousers. He was looking down at her and laughing. The parasol had fallen on the sand, she was lying back with her hands under her head.

— Say that again.

— Why not?

— Well, say it.

They laughed together, and then he turned his head toward us and said, Hi, there: what mischief have you fellows been up to?

— Andy, why don’t you take your little friends down to the Point and show them your dory. I’m sure they’d like to see it. Wouldn’t you?

— at the Company Camp, on the edge of the other oak woods, in the late afternoon, with the long yellow sunset light coming over the stunted trees, Frank Tupper drilled us in a row, Sanford and myself and Gwendolyn and the two Peters girls, Warren sitting on the grass and watching us, because he hadn’t yet been elected. Present arms. Shoulder arms. Port arms. Ground arms. Parade rest. The wooden cannon was dragged out of the hut and loaded with a blank cartridge for the sunset salute. The Peters’ windmill, a Sunbeam, was pumping, and water was spattering down from the overflow pipe to the cement base. Frank looked at his watch, looked importantly at the sky, at the oak woods, behind which the sun might or might not have set, then gave the order to fire. Bang. The sun had set, and the cloud of blue smoke floated quickly away. Gwendolyn hadn’t said a word to me. What had she done with the box of candy. Had she shown it to any one. Was it she, or some one else, who had first found it there on the porch. Did she throw it away. Had she laughed. Was she angry. She stood next to me as we saluted the flag, which Frank was hauling down for the night, the folds winding themselves about his shoulders, but she was careful not to touch me. Did I dare to look at her. No. She was stronger than I, taller, but in the wrestling match I had got her down and held her down, with my hands hard on her shoulders. At the picnic in Pembroke woods, she and I had gone off by ourselves to look for firewood, and had gathered wood in a separate heap before taking it back to the others, but all the while we hadn’t said a word. Why was that. Was she as shy as I was, or was she annoyed with me. What was their house like, inside. I had never been into it. They had a bathing hut of their own, in the Cove, and a long narrow pier which led out across the eelgrass to deep water, with a float at the end, where their green canoe was hauled up. It was near the place where Molly and Margaret went to bathe. Once I had followed them down the road, to watch them bathe there, but when I got to the beach I saw Frank and Gwendolyn there on the float, so I had slunk away.

— Moved and seconded that Warren Walker be made a private in this Company. All those in favor say aye.

— Aye.

— in the evening, after helping the cat, Juniper, to catch grasshoppers among the hummocks of wild grass, swishing his tail against my leg, and purring, Uncle Tom and Uncle David and Aunt Norah and Mother having all gone to a dance at the McGills’, and Porper in bed, singing to himself in Mother’s room upstairs, and Susan swinging in a hammock on the porch, with one leg out so that she could push herself to and fro, I walked across the tennis court and watched the moon rise over the Long Beach. The tennis court needed hoeing again. And it needed new lines of whitewash. There were lights in the Walker house, and Mr. Walker went from the house to the barn with a pail in his hand. Then we sat at the dining table under the swinging lamp and played jackstraws.

— I heard Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah talking about Father and Mother.

— You shouldn’t have listened.

— I couldn’t help it. They were talking while I was dressing.

— What did they say.

— What do you want to know for, if you think I shouldn’t have listened.

— Oh, well, you don’t have to tell me, do you.

— They said they had quarreled.

— Who had quarreled.

— Father and Mother.

— I don’t believe it.

— You don’t have to. And they said something about Father coming down to Duxbury.

— Andy! He’s coming for the clambake! Is that it?

— How should I know. That’s all I heard, nitwit.

— Well, I’ll bet that’s what it is.

— Anyway, the clambake’s been put off again, hang it. We’ll never get to that Gurnett. I think I’ll go by myself. I’m sick and tired of waiting for them to get ready — first it’s one fool thing and then another.

— Well, go ahead, why don’t you. You could row there, couldn’t you?

— Row there! Seven miles there and seven miles back? I guess not. What about the tides. Or what about a thunderstorm. How’d you like to get caught in a thunderstorm in a dory, twit! If I go, I’ll walk.

— Well, you rowed to Clark’s Island, didn’t you?

— particularly also the sense of timelessness, the telescoping of day with day, of place with place, evening with evening, and morning with morning. The thunderstorms always coming from the southwest or west, the sky darkening first to cold gray, then to livid purple behind the Standish Monument, the wind rising to a scream across the black bay, the lightning stabbing unceasingly at the far, small figure of Miles Standish. Then the little house lashed wildly by the horizontal rain, the rush to shut the screens and doors and windows, the doors that would hardly shut against the wind, and the leaks everywhere, through walls and roof, pails and tins set out to receive the rapid pinging and clunking of drops, the struggle to get the hammocks in from the porch, take down the tennis net. Andy! Did you get the net in? The bows and arrows? Where are the rackets? Susan — Susan — where is Susan? Always the same thing. Or, at night, the splendid spectacle of the lightning across the bay, the storm advancing rapidly toward the open sea, and presently the lights of Plymouth far off across the water, like a long row of winking jewels, reappearing once more, and the lights of the Standish House, bright through the rain-washed evening air, as if nothing at all had happened.

Uncle David stared at them through the spyglass, from the wet porch.

— They must have turned the power off.

— Why do they turn the power off, Uncle David.

— Oh, I don’t know — to prevent a short circuit, or something.

— But they don’t turn them off in Boston.

— Well, Plymouth isn’t Boston.

— There they come again.

— Yes, now they’ve turned them on. Take a look, Tom? Here, Doris, take a look.

They all looked in turns through the little telescope, the same one through which they regarded the moon-mountains, sweeping it along the row of distant twinkling lights and the beards of reflected light in the water, Susan and myself coming last. Nothing to see, why bother? It was always Uncle David who went out first to see whether the Plymouth lights had yet been turned on. Or what trees had been hit, or whether a haystack or barn had been set afire. Uncle David this, and Uncle David that. Was it because Uncle David was rich. Or because he had nothing to do. He was always there, he was always in everything, pushing about with his red mustache and blue eyes, as if the world belonged to him. It was Uncle David who made us hoe the tennis court, and mark the lines, and who beat everybody except Father at tennis. This year, he was forever playing Mother, sometimes before breakfast, when the rest of us weren’t up yet, at seven o’clock. Several times I was waked up by hearing them, and got out of bed and went to the window to watch them, keeping back from the window so as not to be seen. Mother dressed in white, with her hair in a pigtail down her back, like a girl, and laughing a lot, and saying, David, how could you. Once she turned her ankle, running out into the field after a ball, and then Uncle David picked her up and carried her round the corner to the front of the house. It was because of those hummocks of wild grass, those hard tufts — it was easy to turn your ankle. But when I asked her about it at breakfast she looked surprised, and said it was nothing. Nothing at all.

— But, darling Andy, how did you happen to see? How did you happen to be up so early?

— I heard you playing, Mother.

— David, that was very naughty of us — we mustn’t do it again — we woke them up.

— Oh, I think the little rascal was up on his own account — weren’t you, Andy. He was probably catching flies for that cage of his.

— No I wasn’t, either. I heard you playing, and then I got up to see who it was.

— It doesn’t really matter, though I often think that on these summer mornings, when the light is so early, we might all get up earlier than we do. But, of course, Norah, we won’t — I know your habits too well. And the children must get their full sleep.

— and the tiny little brown pond deep down in the cleft behind the Wardman house, only a stone’s throw from our windmill, with the black alders around it, and the sumacs, and the frogs, and turtles, the turtles which sidled away into the dirty water when we came, and the high rock at one side. I went down to it in the morning and found a rose quartz Indian arrowhead in the sand at the edge of it, a perfect one, very small and sharp. It was a beauty. How Uncle Tom would be pleased when he saw it, for it was better than any we had found before, better even than the white quartz one we had found out at the end of the Point, better far than the flint ones. I sat there on the rock by the sumacs, and knew that it was Thursday, for on Thursday afternoons I had to go to the village and have my Latin lesson with Mr. Dearing, in the white house at the water’s edge, with his knockabout moored a little way out, in which, perhaps, after the lesson, he would take me for a sail. His house was a nice one, with lots of books and pictures, it was quiet and small like himself, and smelt of lavender. He was like Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom, if Mr. Dearing asks me to go for a sail, can I go. Last time he let me take the tiller, and I learned how to come about. We followed the yacht race, and beat them, on the same course, too, but outside them at every buoy, which made it longer. The course with the first leg toward Clark’s Island and the second toward the Point. You know the one, we’ve often watched them from the porch. Can I do that. Or can I go by myself to the woods on the other side of Standish Hill, to see if I can find some wild indigo, and press it, and see if it turns black in the book. Or would you like to come with me.

— No Porper, I can’t take you to the Horse Monument this afternoon, because Uncle Tom and I are going to the woods to look for wild flowers.

— But I want to see the Horse Monument.

— But you’ve seen it dozens of times, Porper.

— I want to see it. I want to see where the horse was buried.

— Why don’t you take him, Susan?

— Oh, Porper — why do you want to see it. You know what it’s like — it’s just like any other tombstone, only it’s made of bricks, and it’s because a horse was buried there, a man’s favorite horse, and he put up a monument for it when it died. He was a nice man, wasn’t he?

— I want to see the Horse Monument.

— Go on, Susan, and take him. It’s your turn. I took him last time.

At Mr. Dearing’s, the clock ticked on the white-painted wooden mantelpiece, between the model of a ship and a barometer, the clock ticked Latin, and Mr. Dearing’s gentle voice asked me questions, went through my exercise, alternately chastened and sustained me, while through the open window, on the side of the house toward the bay, the soft sound of the waves came, lapping among reeds and eelgrass, and the knocking of a dory against the float. If I turned my head I could see Mr. Dearing’s knockabout, with its boom, the mainsail neatly furled, propped up in its shears of wood. Now that declension again. You’re a little shaky on that declension. Those ablatives seem to bother you, don’t they? And those verbs. You must get them into your head. Utor, fruor, potior, fungor, and vescor. They have a nice sound, Andy, don’t you think? Utor, fruor, fungor, potior, and vescor.

Uncle Tom had on his white yachting cap, with the green vizor, and the tin cylinder hung from his shoulder, and as we climbed the sandy road over Standish Hill, I asked him if he had heard the bell ring, the bell of the Unitarian Church. We were passing a clump of sumacs.

— These aren’t poison sumacs, are they, Uncle Tom?

— No. But what about that bell?

— I rang it myself, at ten minutes past two.

And I told him how it had happened. The village barber was cutting my hair, and said that he was the church sexton, and that he had to go and wind the clock, and asked me if I’d like to see how he did it, it was just across the road. We unlocked the church and went in, and climbed up two flights of dark stairs in the tower, and then two ladders which went straight up through narrow trap doors until we got to a shaky landing beside the machinery of the clock, where there were lots of cobwebs and dust. The barber wound a crank, and we could hear the clock ticking very loud. Then he asked me if I would like to strike the bell, and gave me a short rope and told me to pull it: I gave it a pull, and the machinery began grinding to itself, a sort of growling, and then suddenly came the huge ring of sound, shaking the belfry, everything trembled with it, and I thought of the bell sound traveling all the way to Powder Point, and every one wondering what time it was.

Shad bush, wild sarsaparilla, St. John’s Wort, sand spurrey, wild indigo, and checkerberry. The goldenrods belong to the composite family, there are forty kinds in New England; but this sort, solidago sempervirens, which grows in the salt marshes, or near them — the heaviest, the strongest, the most fragrant — the one that the bees love, and the flies—

— or again to remember the first arrival, the arrival at the end of June after school was over, that first and sweetest deliciousness of escape and renewal, the foresight of so much delight, the largeness and wideness and brightness, the sun everywhere, the sea everywhere, the special salt spaciousness, which one felt even at the little shabby railway station, three miles inland, at the bottom of the hill, where the road turned. Even the weatherboards of the wooden station seemed to be soaked in salt sea fog, the little cherry trees had about them a special air as of knowing the sea, and the old coach, the Priscilla or the Miles Standish, with Smiley driving it, or Bart Cahoun, waiting for us there with its lean horses, had on its wheels the sand of Powder Point. In the very act of getting down from the train we already participated in the rich seaside summer — our trunks, lying on the platform, on the hot rough pine planks, shared in the mystery, became something other than the humble boxes into which we had put our bathing suits and sneakers. The world became dangerously brilliant, ourselves somehow smaller, but more meaningful; in the deep summer stillness, the country stillness, it seemed almost as if already we could hear the sea. Our voices, against the little cherry trees which the coach was passing, their boughs whitely shrouded by tent caterpillars, and the gray shingled cottages covered with trumpet vine, and the stone walls and the apple orchards, were different from our Cambridge voices. Even Mother became different, was smaller and more vivid. Would it all be the same again. Would the tide be out or in. Would the golden weathervane still be there. Would the dam under the village bridge be opened or closed. Would it be as nice living at Uncle Tom’s as at the Soules’. It was nearer to the end of the Point, nearer the long bridge, nearer the sea—

— Now you must remember, children, it’s not quite like staying at the Soules’, we are visitors, and Uncle Tom has built a nice play house for you, and you must try to play there as much as you can, so that the house can be quiet.

— Can Porper kneel up, Mother, he wants to look out.

— You can keep all your toys there, and on rainy days it will be very nice for you. It’s a nice little house, painted green, down at the foot of the hill, near that rock—

— You mean Plymouth Rock Junior.

— Yes.

— What’s Plymouth Rock Junior.

— Oh, Porper, you don’t remember, but you’ll see.

— Susan, will you keep hold of Porper’s hand?

— Is that Plymouth Rock Junior.

— No, that’s just a rock in front of the library. That’s where Andy goes on Wednesdays to get books, don’t you, Andy.

— I’m going to read Calumet K again. And Huckleberry Finn again.

Would there be any new books. To carry home under my raincoat in the rain, past the house that was always to let, and the bowling alleys, and then along the lagoon to King Caesar’s Road.

— Will Uncle David be there, Mother?

— Yes, I suppose so. He has a new motorboat.

— We must have a picnic on the outer beach soon, Mother, we must have two of them this year, not one like last year.

— Will we have blueberries and cream, and blueberry muffins?

— Yes, yes, now don’t bother Mother, Mother’s thinking.

— Why are you thinking.

— Andy, for goodness sake take Porper’s other hand. Sit still, Porper. Look, do you see the weather vane? It’s a rooster made out of gold.

— the particular breadth and suggestion of sea-wonder that began always when the coach turned north at the fork of the road, under the weather vane, and then rounded the lagoon toward King Caesar’s Road, and passing this, rattled along the rutted sand Point Road — we were getting nearer the sea, there was now water on both sides of us, water and marshes, we were going out into the Atlantic Ocean. We were getting nearer to the outer beach, and the long red bridge that led to it, nearer to the Gurnett, with its squat twin lighthouses. How soon would the picnic be. There would be steamed clams, and sweet potatoes, and corn, hidden in the nests of hot wet seaweed, on a bed of charred stones. We would gather shells. We would find fragments of driftwood and take them home with us in the little cart which Porper would sit in, with his legs spread out. We would climb the dunes and slide down the slopes of hot loose sand. There would be new breaches in the wall of dunes, where the sea had broken through during the winter, wide flat beds of stones. Where I went wading last year with Gwendolyn, and she held her dress up high, and I saw her garters, the quick exciting flash of silver. We were looking for live horseshoe crabs. I pretended to look for crabs, holding my head down, but was really watching her knees, and she knew that I was watching her, and held her dress higher. Andy, I’ve found three, and you haven’t found one. And look, here’s the smallest one yet—! She held it up out of the water by its beak, and it arched itself almost double, small and transparent. I took it in my hand and we looked at it together, and holding up her dress she leaned against me, and I heard her breathing.

— the night when Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah had gone to the Yacht Club to see the fireworks, riding on their bicycles, with the little lamps lighted, the red jewel at one side and the green at the other, and the smell of hot kerosene, we watched the little wobbling arcs of light moving away along the sand-ruts, and I pointed out to Susan the stars in Cassiopeia’s Chair, standing on the tennis court. Mother and Uncle David were talking on the porch, each in a different hammock, slapping at mosquitoes and laughing, for they had decided to stay at home and watch the fireworks from the Point. We sat down on the edge of the porch and looked at the Plymouth lights and waited for the fireworks, but they didn’t come. Perhaps they would be later. Mother was lying back in her hammock, with her hands under her head and her white elbows lifted and Uncle David was smoking a cigarette. When he drew in his breath, the end of the cigarette glowed and lit up his face, and he was always looking downward at the floor and frowning.

— Susan, darling, how did all that water get there on the floor.

— It was Porper, Mother, he was blowing soap bubbles before supper.

— Will one of you please clean it up. Andy, will you get a mop or a cloth from the kitchen and wipe it up. You’re the porch cleaner, aren’t you.

— Oh, Mother, I’ll have to sweep it in the morning anyway—

— But it doesn’t look nice. Run along. Perhaps afterward you and Susan would like to have a game of croquinole together.

— Could we go out for a row in the dory.

— If it’s a very short one. You must have Susan back in time for her bedtime.

In the kitchen, I stood by the sink and looked out of the window at the back, and saw someone carrying a lighted lamp across one of the windows in the Wardman house. Molly and Margaret were talking to a man in the darkness on the back porch, probably the chauffeur from the Tuppers, who was always hanging around them. I didn’t either. You did too. I didn’t either. You did too. You’re crazy to say such a thing you ought to know better than that I never said any such thing to him in my life, not me. I only said I saw them on the beach. I wouldn’t say more than that. What were they talking about? I listened, but they must have known I was there, for they lowered their voices, and I couldn’t make out anything else, especially as the windmill was pumping, and I could hear the groan of the rod and the regular gush of water into the cistern. I went out into the pantry to get the mop, went down the three wooden steps to the earthen floor, and stood there in the nice smell of potatoes and squashes and green corn and damp smell of earth, watching the indicator on the cistern, the little lead weight jiggling lower and lower against the pine boards as the water raised the float. Last year we had to pump all the water by hand. A hundred strokes without stopping. I rolled up my sleeves, and always felt my muscles when I had finished, to see how hard they were. Why was Mother always trying to get rid of us like this. With Father it was different, he always wanted to do things with us in the holidays. Like last year, when he gave me the camera and took me on walks and showed me how to take pictures, and I got the picture of the beach-plum dyke all crooked, so that it looked like a wave of cobblestones. And I took the Horse Monument, but it was out of focus, or light-struck, or something. But I had fifteen blueprints that were quite good.

When I got back to the porch Susan was alone.

— Where have they gone.

— Oh, down to the front beach or something.

— They make me sick always going off like that.

— Andy, you shouldn’t talk like that.

— Well, they do. I bet they’ve gone out in the motorboat, that’s what they’ve done, and without inviting us.

— They don’t have to invite us every time they go, do they?

— No, but they might invite us sometimes. Come on, we’ll go out in the dory, and I don’t care if we never get back.

— But we won’t see the fireworks, Andy.

— Who wants to see the fireworks, besides we could row around to this side of the Point, couldn’t we? Don’t be a twit.

We walked down across the humped grass to the Point, in the dark, the blades of the oars clacking together as I carried them over my shoulder, the rowlocks jingling in Susan’s hand. It was warm and the crickets were chirping. Susan was ahead of me when we got to the bluff, I watched her white dress vanish down the sandy path to the beach, and then I looked out at the water and saw a light in the cabin of Uncle David’s motorboat. It looked far out, because the tide was high, almost up to the foot of the bluff. Susan was already sitting in the stern of the dory, hanging her hands in the water, the ripples were slapping against the sides, and I pulled the anchor out of the bayberry bush and got in. Ought I to tell Susan what I was going to do, or not. If I didn’t, she might talk, and spoil everything. If I did, she might not want to, and besides we might see something—

— I tell you what we’ll do, we’ll pretend we’re spies, and row right around them. I’ll row around them so close we could touch them, and they won’t hear a sound.

— But, Andy—

— Shut up, will you?

I pushed the blade of the oar into the sand and shoved off with two shoves and then began rowing very softly, rowing backwards, so that I could face toward the motorboat. Why was I frightened. What was there to be frightened of. It was only like playing the Indian scouting game. It was only like the guerrilla war in the Pembroke Woods. How could they possibly hear us anyway, with the ripples washing against the Osprey, making that hollow coppery sound that you heard when you were down in the cabin. And they couldn’t see us, because the little yellow curtains were drawn across the two cabin portholes. I backed out till we were past the white bow, which looked very high, and then shipped my oars and let the tide take us slowly alongside. We could hear them talking. The tender, which was tied with too short a painter, was bumping against the port side of the stern, and in the cabin there was a thump as if something had been dropped on the floor.

— Come on, Doris, let’s have another.

— Oh, no, let’s—

— Oh, come on, the night is young.

— I don’t like it, David.

— What’s wrong with it? Are you getting a conscience or something?

— Oh, no, but if they thought—

— Thought what.

— Oh, you know as well as I do.

— Let them think. Here, try this—

— Please, David—

I gave a push with my hand against the brass corner of the stern plate and we just barely cleared the gunwale of the tender, which was swinging across. They were drinking, Uncle David must be trying to make Mother drunk, that was it, perhaps the thump was a bottle falling on the floor of the cabin. I let the tide carry us a little way toward the bridge, where I could see the high wooden piers of the draw, and then I shipped my oars and began to row.

— We’ll go through the draw, and then across to the outer beach. Then we’ll walk along the beach to the dunes and watch the fireworks.

— Andy, what were they saying, what was Mother saying.

— I couldn’t hear. Was the cabin door open or shut?

— It was shut.

I shot the dory through the draw, where the tide was swift, the deep eddies sucking and chuckling at the foot of the tall piles, and felt my face hot, and I wanted to do something, to go back there, to bank at the side of the Osprey, to shout. But what was the use.

— particularly always, too, the hour after lunch, the hot and peaceful hour, the sleepy hour, when Susan and Porper always had to have naps upstairs, and Mother and Aunt Norah stretched themselves out in hammocks on the porch, and Uncle David went into his room to read, and Uncle Tom wrote letters on the dining-room table, or painted screens on the grass in front of the house, the screens supported on wooden horses. What would we do later. Would we be sent to the playhouse for the whole afternoon, or would we go clam-digging, or take a walk to the cove, or would Sanford come to tell me that there was a baseball game at the Peters’. I went down to the playhouse by myself, it was very hot and smelt of new wood, greenhead flies were on the insides of the screens, and I thought it would be a good chance to see if I could take off the handle bars of Aunt Norah’s new Columbia bicycle, so I stood on the table, the one we played Gonko on, and hauled myself up to the top of the wooden partition, and dropped over into the bicycle shed. This business of taking naps after lunch. This hammock business. Mother’s hand lying over the edge of the yellow striped hammock, the fringe of long yellow strings rippling in the southwest wind, her book fallen to the veranda floor, the opened pages fluttering. Susan, pretending to take a nap in her room, but really reading. Uncle David pretending to take a nap, but really drinking out of one of those bottles, using the tumbler on the washstand, which always smelt like bay rum. I took the monkey wrench out of the little cylindrical tool kit under the saddle and got the handlebars off easily enough, but I was worried for fear I wouldn’t get them back on again at the same height and angle, and sweated at the thought that Aunt Norah might notice it. It was a Columbia Chainless, and what I really wanted to do was to open the gearbox and look at the gears, but the nuts were too tight, and I was afraid. Besides, somebody might come — Uncle Tom might take it into his head to come down looking for me, maybe to ask me to go on a wildflower hunt, and I wouldn’t have time to get it together again. I climbed back into the playhouse, and then I went outside and crawled under the floor and got some more shingles, with crickets walking on them, and took them into the playhouse to make some new Gonko rackets. We would need some more Ping-pong balls. Porper was always losing them or stepping on them. He kept throwing them into the bed of poison ivy at the foot of the hill, by the stone wall. That was where all the golf balls used to go when Uncle Tom and Father played golf. I looked at my shin to see if the little blue map of the golf ball was still there, and it was almost gone.

I walked down the lane as far as the Horse Monument, went back into the pine woods for a minute, near our houses, thinking about Gay, and then about Gwendolyn, and wondered what she would think if she knew I played house in the woods with my sister, like a little sissy. When I got to the hotel I went first out on to the stone wharf, and watched a tug towing a barge across the bay. Some of the maids from the hotel were in bathing suits, sitting on the stone edge of the wharf, and when they saw me they began laughing. I walked back to the hotel and went along the edge of the golf course, toward the Point Road. There was nobody playing golf, it was too early. Too hot. The sheep were all lying under a tree chewing their cuds. I threw acorns at them and made them get up, and then I was ashamed and went up between the houses and through the small oak woods to the Company Camp. The Peters were there, and Sanford, and Warren, and Frank Tupper, but not Gwendolyn. They were lying in the grass. What were we going to do. Should we go and play in the hayloft, dive down through the chute, slide down the rope.

— Andy’s got a sweetheart.

— Where’s Gwendolyn, Andy?

— Shut up.

Frank Tupper looked at me and then got up and walked to the Company hut. He went in, and in a minute came out again holding up a baseball bat.

— Scrub one, he said.

— Scrub two.

— Three.

— Four.

— Five.

We played baseball till Gwendolyn came, and then we took turns standing under the overflow of the windmill and letting the water splash on our heads. I turned my face up, and let the water spout out of my mouth.

— He thinks he’s smart.

— Rats live on no evil star.

— What do you mean by that?

— Just what I say. Rats live on no evil star.

Frank Tupper spat in his baseball glove.

— That’s an old one. A palindrome.

— A what?

— It spells the same thing backward.

Susan came running across the field and fell down and began to cry. I walked home with her, and we sat on Plymouth Rock Junior under the cherry tree, and she said that Mother and Aunt Norah were quarreling upstairs in Aunt Norah’s room, and Uncle Tom and Uncle David had gone off for a walk not saying a word, and Porper was all alone with the maids, sitting in the soapbox sailboat — and Molly with an earache—

— lying awake, too, with the wind singing through the wire screens, and the soft muslin curtains sucking and fluttering against the screens, and the sea-moon shining through them on to the floor and across the foot of my bed, and the crickets chirping like mad, the mosquitoes, too, humming so loudly outside the window that they sounded as if they were in the room. What was that they had said at supper. When Aunt Norah was pouring the cocoa out of the jug. It should have been here this evening. Who was it that got the mail. It was Smiley that brought it. Why didn’t Andy go. Well, anyway it didn’t come. Mother was humming as she buttered more bread for Porper; Uncle Tom tapped with his fingers on the bare edge of the table as if he were playing a tune on a piano. What letter was it that hadn’t come. Was it from Father. Were they expecting Father. What fun that would be. He would get out the cameras, and he would teach me how to pitch an out-drop. And now the two sets of voices downstairs — Molly and Margaret, at the back of the house, murmuring and giggling secretly, slyly, insinuatingly, and the others on the front porch, a little farther off, more intermittent, now and then more loudly, and Uncle David’s deep laugh which always sounded a little angry. Andy’s got a sweetheart. What did they mean by that. Had Gwendolyn told everybody about it, or was it perhaps Frank who had first found the box of candy. Perhaps he had found it and had never given it to Gwendolyn. Shame on Andy, shame on Andy. Let them say it. I would row right round Clark’s Island, taking all day if necessary, and find my way at low tide through the channels, counting the seals on the mud flats. I would row to Plymouth. I would borrow Mr. Dearing’s knockabout and sail right out past Plymouth Beach into Massachusetts Bay, and watch the Plymouth steamer going past on its way to Boston. I would swim across from the Point to the Long Beach. I would dive off the pier of the draw on the long bridge, twenty-feet down into the swift current of the tide. I would strike out Frank Tupper every time he came to bat. And I wouldn’t say a word to Gwen-dolyn, not another word all summer.

They were beginning to sing. It was always Uncle David who started them on that, he had a swelled head about his voice, and always sang when he was hoeing the tennis-court with us. Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll.

Margaret was talking to a man under my back window.

— Quit it.

— I will not.

— I said quit it, will you?

I got quickly out of bed and went to the window to see what they were doing, but I was too late, they had gone round the corner of the house into the shadow, to get out of the moonlight. I waited, listening, but they didn’t come back. He must have been kissing her. I would keep awake until they came to bed. Watch them through the hole by the washstand. It would be dark on my side of the wall, I would stand very still in bare feet, get back into bed without a sound, they would never suspect that I was watching them. Should I go to bed now or stay up. Better stay up, and watch the flies in the flytrap with the electric flashlight. I got the flashlight and looked at the flies. They were all asleep, standing upside down under the roof of screen wire, their white bellies turned towards the light. I ought to let them go, Uncle David was beginning to suspect why I kept them. Perhaps I had better give him one of my arrowheads. What mischief have you fellows been up to. Uncle David, I thought you might like to have one of my arrowheads, it’s a quartz one.

I went to the side window, beside the tennis court, to hear them singing. They were singing the song that Uncle David had made up. When I slap on the kalsomine I think about those gals o’ mine way down in old Kentucky where the moon is shining bright. When I slap on the Reckitts blue I think about the thickets through the mountains of Virginia where I walked with them at night. Walls and ceilings have their feelings the same as you and me. I’m only a paper hanger, but my heart is pure as mud. When they had finished it, they all laughed in the silly way they always did, the laughter rising and falling, mixing and unmixing, but I could make out Mother’s and Uncle David’s, particularly at the end, when Mother’s went up and Uncle David’s went down. The twits. The nitwits. But what about the letter, and why, come to think of it, hadn’t I been sent for the evening mail, as usual. Instead, I had been sent to the playhouse with Porper, and when I brought him back, I had to sail him in the soapbox sailboat.

Footsteps were coming up the stairs, candlelight wavered on the rough, pine beams of the unfinished roof; it was Molly and Margaret coming up to bed, and I tiptoed with cold, naked feet on the bare floor and stood by the washstand, hardly breathing, and waited.

— the dust, too, as the stage coach rattled past me and turned up King Caesar’s Road, to go to Powder Point Hall, skewing a little, the rear wheels slewing in the sandy ruts as Smiley touched up the old horses, the whole thing like Buffalo Bill. I looked through the packet of letters again, to make sure that there was none from Father. Harvard University. Jordan Marsh. Acme Cleaning Company. A small blue envelope, addressed in small handwriting, to Mother. Another, in the same handwriting, to Aunt Norah. Both postmarked Plymouth. Nothing that looked as if it might be from Father. By this time the train would be at Kingston. Or maybe at the Cordage. The people in the train would see the back of the Standish Monument, which I had seen only once, when we went to Plymouth to see the Plymouth Rock. We had lunch at that old house with four English elms in front of it, which Captain Something-or-Other had brought back from England in 1750.

I leaned against the wooden fence and looked at the two new knockabouts in the lagoon, exactly alike except that the Bobkat was brown, with a silver waterline, and the Moujik II was white with a gold waterline. The bowsprits were very short. Mr. McGill, who manufactured oil stoves, owned them both, and one or the other of them came in second in every race at the Yacht Club. Mr. McGill had that new house near Powder Point Hall, with the imitation windmill which had an electric pump inside. That was where the dance had been. Mother had brought back a Japanese lantern and Uncle David had brought home a clown’s mask with red holes for the eyes. He put it on at breakfast. What was that thing he had said to Mother, when we were going round Clark’s Island in the motorboat, something about drowning. To drown with thee. They were both holding the wheel, one on one side, and one on the other. Laughing, as I jumped down from the cabin roof into the cockpit. To drown with thee. It was that Quaker-talk that the old man had talked in Salem, putting his hand on my head. And Mother and Father had been talking it when I went to the top of the stairs that night after the card party in Cambridge. To drown with thee. What had they meant by that.

I played ducks and drakes, skipping one stone twelve times over the water towards the Bobkat, and then went through the bayberry jungle and the grove of wild cherry trees to the edge of the golf course. Should I try to kiss Gwendolyn or not. Did she expect me to. Was Sanford just trying to get me into trouble when he told me to. When she saw me diving off the end of the dory she laughed, turning her face back toward Dorothy Peters as if she were saying something about me. I swam out a long way into the channel, hoping they would row out toward me, but they didn’t. They went along the shore, very slowly, not looking at me again. And disappeared round the end of the Point, still laughing.

There were no golf balls in the bayberry jungle, though I kicked the grass in the places where I had found them before, so I went along the west side of the golf course until I got to the bungalows, and then crossed to the road and walked along the sandy bicycle path. The telephone poles were humming in the southwest wind, a little boy was trying to fly a kite on the lawn of the mystery house, behind the trumpet vine arbor, but he couldn’t run fast enough to get it off the ground. A pretty girl was leaning out of a tiny window in a dormer at the top of the house, watching him. I blushed when she looked at me, and walked on quickly, and was opposite the Soule House, where Molly was sitting in the swing, when Father — I was thinking about the box kite, meaning to ask Uncle Tom if we could hitch it to the cart and give Porper a ride over the tennis court—

He came out from the behind the lilac bushes and skimmed his panama hat at my head, twirling, so that it almost settled on my head, but fell on the path. He took the back of my neck in his hand and shook me, not saying anything. He was smoking a cigarette. Then he threw the cigarette away and sat down on the lawn where the four-leaf clovers were. His brown cigarette finger was tapping on his knee. He frowned and asked me how Porper and Susan were. I said they were very well, and asked him if he had come to the clambake. He wanted to know if Susan had learned to swim. I told him no. Had I played any baseball. Yes. Wild flowers. Yes. Done my Latin with Mr. Dearing. Yes. Was I a member of the Company this year. Yes.

He got up again, and we walked along the little road that led down to the cove and the dyke, past the henyard, where last year the trap used to be set at night for skunks. We had heard shots in the early morning and gone out to see the dead skunk. The road led through sweetgrass, the kind the Indians made into baskets. Every year they came, selling baskets from door to door, old women and old men. We walked as far as the top of the little bluff, overlooking the cove, and stood by a crab apple tree, talking, and Father asked me how far out into the water I could throw an apple. I threw one, and he smiled, watching it splash at the edge of a mud flat, and then said, Watch me. He took a short stick out of the grass and stuck an apple on the end of it and then whipped it with a whistling sound over his head: the apple went clear across the cove and thudded into the soft mud at the foot of the eelgrass. I tried it several times and sent one apple half way across, into the middle of the channel.

— That was a good one.

— Where did you learn to do that, Father?

— Your grandfather taught me at Jackson Falls.

— That was where the wildcats were.

— And the moosewood.

He took out his packet of Sweet Caporals and lit another cigarette. We started walking back slowly towards the Soules’.

— Did you come down for the clambake, Father? Are we going to have it this week?

— No. I don’t know.

He took off his spectacles and polished them with a blue silk handkerchief. He was frowning again.

— I don’t know how long I’m staying: I’m staying at the Soules’. I don’t want you to say anything about having seen me — understand? I may go back tonight, or I may stay for a week. But I don’t want you to say anything about it. I suppose you go for the mail every morning, don’t you.

— Yes, usually.

— Come here tomorrow morning to see if I’m still here. And now run along back.

He stood watching me, and I ran the whole length of the narrow bicycle path to show him that I could do it this year without slackening once. When I got to the end, by the crossroads, I turned round, but he had gone. I was out of breath, but it wasn’t because of the running. Did he mean that I couldn’t even tell Susan? Probably not, because, of course, the twit would get excited and say something without meaning to. What was it all about. Why was he staying at the Soules’ instead of coming to Uncle Tom’s. Why was he keeping it a secret. Did he want it to be a surprise, and did Mother know about it or not. Gwendolyn and Dorothy Peters coo-eed from the door of the Silliman barn, but I didn’t stop. Let them coo-eee. I took the short cut past the Wardman house and the little brown pond, dropped a twig close to a frog so that he dived into the warm soupy water, and then ran up the slope past the windmill and round to the front porch. Mother was cutting Porper’s hair, and laughing, and I didn’t dare to look at her when I gave her the letters. Uncle David was mending the tennis net with a reel of white cord.

— Why not use a bowl. Clap it on the young feller’s head and then cut round it.

— particularly also the food, the wonderful and perpetual sense of delicious and abundant food, the great jugs of rich cocoa, the great deep dish of blue-misted blueberries, the piles of muffins with their warm fragrance under the fresh napkins, the hot sweet corn wrapped in damp linen, the mountain of steamed clams. Porper beating with his spoon and saying second help, third help, fourth help, fifth help. The floating island pudding with the little white islands of stiff-beaten white of egg, which vanished on the tongue like sea fog, and the brown column of griddle cakes, Molly laughing as she brought in a new batch. This is the grub that makes the butterfly. Every time we had griddle cakes Uncle David said that. And the procession of covered carts that brought the food every morning, standing at the kitchen door by the corner of the tennis court — Mr. Crowell’s shiny white one with all kinds of meat in it, hanging on hooks, and the red board at the back where he cut it up, which he always scraped with a knife when he had finished; and the little blue fishcart, and the great truck of vegetables and fruit. Aunt Norah always standing with her hands on her wide hips and chaffing with Mr. Crowell or Mr. Peterson. You ought to grow vegetable marrows, they’re as easy to grow as squash, and have a much more delicate flavor. Why is it, Mr. Chase, that when we come to live by the sea we never can get fish. Or have to pay through the nose to get it. And those little mackerel — why they’re not big enough for the cat, let alone Porper here. Shall we buy Porper a whale?

— What whale.

— Juniper won’t need any fish heads or fish tails today, he had a mouse this morning.

— What mouse.

— But he never eats them, Aunt Norah.

Juniper followed me on to the tennis court, and I caught a grasshopper for him, which spat tobacco juice in my hand. What’s the use, what’s the use, chew tobacco and swallow the juice. I gave Juniper the grasshopper, and he purred, crunching it, and swished his striped tail against my leg. He ran after me, crying, when I went to the stone wall by the sumac, I bent down the loose strand of barbed wire to stoop through to the other side, and he stood on a lichen-covered stone as I walked away across the field toward the front beach. The silly little cat, always expecting me to take him with me, wherever I went. And now he would probably be sick on the porch, leave a little waffle of grasshopper legs and wings for me to clean up when I came back. Andy, the cat’s been sick again. Andy, will you turn on the windmill, the tank’s low. Andy, will you get out the targets, we’re going to have some archery practice. Andy, will you mix some limewash for the tennis court. Andy, you shouldn’t feed him grasshoppers, you know it always makes him sick. But he likes them, Mother. He likes them, Aunt Norah. All right then, but you must expect to clean up after him when he makes a mess.

The long grass combed and seething in the southwest wind, the dry whistle of the sand in the wind, the sea grass hissing as it bowed in green waves, and the short quick waves of green-and-white water rushing up amongst the bared brown roots of the eelgrass. The fiddler crabs hurried away, clicking, as I approached the edge of the mud flats, or farther off stood and waved their little fiddles, dancing absurdly on their hind legs, and when I trod beside the air holes in the mud, the clams squirted water like little geysers. We hadn’t had clams for a week. The clambake looked farther off than ever. This year I would help to build the fireplace of round stones, and fetch the driftwood myself, and lay the fire, and gather the wet seaweed, and put in the clams and sweet potatoes, the yams, the green corn. And we would take our bathing suits and bathe in the surf, the surf that came all the way from Provincetown. And after lunch, while the others dozed in the warm hollows among the sand dunes, Porper with his dolls and Susan with her collection of razor shells, and Uncle Tom reading Gray’s Botany. I would walk all the way to the Gurnett, see the twin lighthouse at the end of the Long Beach, come back in triumph and tell them about it. Look, Susan, I found this shell at the Gurnett. Look, Aunt Norah, I found this new kind of seaweed, one that we never got before, at the Gurnett. Mother, do you think Father will like this, it’s very fine, and a lovely red, do you think it will mount well, when it’s spread out.

There was a mullein wagging in the wind above my head when I lay down in the grass at the top of the beach, it was in flower, a tall one, but not as tall as the one Susan had found in the field between the McGills’ and the Horse Monument. Why did she always call them Grandfather Jacksons. And niggerhead grass, why was it called niggerhead grass, and who had invented the game of niggerheads. Uncle David always won, was it because he held them with a shorter stem, was it cheating, or did he pick out the good ones. Brothers looked very much alike, Uncle David looked like Father, but with red mustaches, like a Visigoth; he was taller too, and stronger, but his face was long and funny; I didn’t like it, and he looked at you with narrow blue eyes as if he didn’t like you. Why did he speak so much more quickly than Father, always making jokes. Why did he have so much money, and a motorboat, and an office in Boston that he never went to. And staying here all summer, making me help him hoe the tennis court.

I counted the flowers I could see from where I lay. Mullein. Marsh rosemary. Beach-plum. Vetch. Three kinds of goldenrod. Milkweed. Beach pea. Hawkweed. Button bush. Dandelion. Butter-and-eggs. And when we got back to Cambridge the chicory would be in bloom, with its large stars of pale blue, or deep blue, or sometimes pink—

— the quarreling hour after supper, the croquet hour, when we took down the soapbox sailboat, lowering the spritsail, which was made of gunny sack, and coiling the ropes, and putting the soapbox under the porch — and the wickets and posts put into their worn holes, among the crickets and grasshoppers, and our favorite mallets chosen. The black one was cracked, I always took it because it was cracked and no one else liked it, but it was heavy, and I liked it. The handle was too long for Porper, he bumped his chin and cried.

— Oh, Porper, how many times have I told you, why don’t you hold it by the end, not the middle.

— How can he, twit, he couldn’t get anywhere near the ball.

— He could, too.

— Here, Porper, like this.

— And don’t try to hit the ball so hard.

The long sunset light lay glistening on the humped grass of the slope, golden and ruddy, and clear amber through the gap in the oak woods. The crickets chirped faster and faster. What were they doing now. What were they talking about now. Why had we been sent out right after supper, like that, and told to play croquet for half an hour. Why half an hour, exactly. And why had they all stayed in the sitting room instead of coming out on the porch as they usually did. Did they know that Father had come, or think he was coming. The croquet balls went clop and clap and bounced over the hummocks and went along the worn familiar grooves and pathways. Mosquitoes hung in a cloud round Porper’s legs. I slapped them off with my handkerchief.

— Andy, you cheated, you didn’t keep your foot on the ball.

— I did too. It slipped. But I’ll play it over if you like, and you’ll see. It was a split shot.

— Let’s play poison.

— All right, let’s play poison. Porper, you can be poison. Try to hit my ball with yours. You can have two turns.

Molly and Margaret came out of the kitchen door, which slammed behind them on its spring with a double clack. It was their night out, and they were going to the village, dressed in dark blue. They looked over their shoulders at us and went quickly round the corner. I pretended to make a golfing stroke with my mallet, aiming toward the house, and let go of the handle, so that my mallet flew up on to the porch and skidded along the boards to the wall. When I went up to get it, I looked in through the long dining-room window. Mother was at the other end of the room, with her back turned, standing at the seaward window as if she were staring at the tennis court. Aunt Norah was rocking in the wicker rocking chair. Uncle Tom and Uncle David were walking to and fro, in opposite directions, along the long room, with their hands in their pockets. Nobody seemed to be saying anything. The lamps hadn’t been lighted. I dropped my mallet to the grass, and slid down under the porch railing. The boards of the porch were still warm under my hands.

— Oh, I’m sick of playing croquet. Let’s go down to the playhouse.

— But it’s Porper’s bedtime.

— Porper doesn’t want to go to bed, do you, Porper.

— No.

— But, Andy, you know perfectly well—

— Stop arguing, will you? They’re busy in there.

We sat on the doorstep of the playhouse, and made cups and saucers out of green acorns for Porper.

— Look, Porper, we’re having tea, this is what Grandfather showed me how to do.

— Where is Grandfather.

— Grandfather has gone away.

— Where.

— Oh, a long way, never mind. Drink your cambric tea.

— What’s cambric tea.

— Oh, you know what it is, Porper. It’s hot-water-sugar-spoon.

— What’s hot-water-sugar-spoon.

— It’s cambric tea. Andy, what were they doing.

— Do you always want to know everything.

— If you go spying you might at least tell me.

— I wasn’t spying.

— You were, too. You did that on purpose.

— Did what.

— Threw your mallet up there on the porch.

— What if I did. They weren’t doing anything, if that’s what you want to know, they were just talking.

— What about.

— How do I know. Nobody was saying anything when I looked in. But they looked as if they were having a quarrel.

— Is it about Father do you suppose.

— Why should it be about Father.

— Because he isn’t here. Because he hasn’t come to Duxbury this summer.

— Why should they quarrel about that.

— But if it isn’t Father, what is it.

— Look, I can squash my cups and saucers.

— Why so you can, Porper. Would you like some more? Give him a Ping-pong ball, Andy.

— There aren’t any. He’s lost or squashed them all. Look Porper, I’ll show you how I climb up into the bicycle shed. Watch me.

— I want a Ping-pong ball.

— But there aren’t any more Porper, they’re all gone. We’ll get some more tomorrow.

He began to cry, and Susan took his hand and led him out again.

— Would you like to sit on top of Plymouth Rock Junior. And see the frogs and turtles.

It was getting dark when the horn blew to call us back to the house, the long sad tin horn that Uncle Tom blew from the porch to call us in for meals. But it was Mother who had blown it.

— Why, Porper, you’ve been crying — my poor lamb — what have you children been doing to him—

— Nothing, Mother, he’s tired.

— My poor tired Porper — did you hear Mother blow the tin horn?

— Let me blow it.

— We’ll take the horn up to bed with us, shall we?

— Yes.

She lifted him up and kissed him, and gave him the horn, and kissed him again, ruffling his short hair with her hand, and put her face against his cheek while he tried to blow the horn. But he only spat into the horn, as he always did, and made a whiffling sound. She opened the screen door with one hand and her foot and took him into the house.

— Andy, Mother had been crying.

— How do you know.

— She had shiny streaks in the corners of her eyes. And her eyes were red. That’s always the way you can tell.

Uncle David came out, humming, he had on his gray knickerbockers and a blue shirt opened at the neck. He looked down at us with his eyes almost shut.

— Well, kids, how does your symptoms seem to segashuate?

He laughed, and went to the corner of the porch and took down his rowlocks from the hooks, and his oars, and walked off toward the Point. In a minute Uncle Tom came out, and without saying anything went down the hill toward the playhouse. We saw him disappear under the trees by the door to the bicycle shed, and saw a match flare, and another, and then he came back, with the bicycle lamp making a little yellow fan of light on the grass, bobbing up and down.

I think, Andy and Susan, you’d both better go to bed. I know it’s a little early, but we might be going on a picnic tomorrow. And don’t bother your mother, she’s very tired.

— Oh, Uncle Tom, do you really think—

— I don’t promise — I just say we might.

— Where are you going, Uncle Tom?

— Down to the village. Now go along, and be as quiet as you can.

And it was after I was asleep, it was in a dream, that suddenly Susan was standing by my bed. I woke up with her hand on my mouth, and she was saying shhhhh.

— Andy, be quiet, listen.

— What.

— I think Father is downstairs.

— Are you sure.

— I think so. I thought I heard his voice.

I got out of bed, and we tiptoed to the head of the stairs. What time was it. Was it midnight. Had Molly and Margaret come back from the village, and were they in their room, listening. We stood outside their door, and for a while there wasn’t a sound, and then we heard Father’s voice. It sounded far away, as if he were standing by one of the outside doors, or on the porch.

— I think Doris and I had better discuss this alone.

The screen door squeaked and clacked. We listened, but heard nothing else. Susan was shivering in her nightgown.

— Andy, let me come in and sleep with you.

— No.

— Please, Andy.

— No.

— Oh, please, Andy.

— with Calumet K under my coat, to take back to the Library, because it was raining, though not raining very much, only a drizzle, and it might get wet. Should I say anything or not. Should I tell him I had heard him or not. All the pretending. Pretending we hadn’t heard anything, or seen anything. Pretending we didn’t know anything. Pretending, pretending, pretending. I was sick of pretending. First from Father, and then from Mother, and then from Susan. What was the use. My sneakers were wet with walking through the wet grass, they began to bubble. I felt the cold bubbles under the naked soles of my feet and swished them through the thick weeds and grass beside the path to fill them and refill them with cold water. They squelched and squnched as I walked. The spider webs in the long privet hedge were heavy and bright with rain. I shook them and the spiders came out. The telephone poles were wet, the sand in the ruts was dark, the cherry trees were dripping slowly, but the sky over the village was beginning to brighten, in a little while the sun would come out again. And I ought to get Tanglewood Tales, to read for school. And Ivanhoe. But I could wait another week. I could get The Sign of the Four. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Black Arrow. The White Company.

When Father stepped out of the white-sanded gap in the road, I was surprised.

— And what has he got there under his jacket? Calumet K again?

— Yes. I like it.

— So do I. A good story. Have you tried Old St. Paul’s this summer?

— Oh, no, I forgot.

— Try it. But they may not have it. If they haven’t got it, I’ll send it to you.

He had his white raincoat on, but no hat, and his hair was standing up straight, and drops of rain sparkled on it. His hands were in his pockets. He took one of them out with an envelope in it.

— I’m sorry there was no picnic today. But we’ll have it soon, I’ll come down again soon, tell Susan and Porper I’ll be coming back. And when you go back from the Library, give this note to Mother.

— But Father, why can’t you stay—

— And tell her that I’m going up on the noon train. Will you?

— Yes, and I’ll give her the note.

— Be sure. It’s important.

— When you come back will you stay with us at Aunt Norah’s.

— I don’t think so. I’m afraid not. Not enough beds to go round, old fellow. Now run along—

— Can we take some more pictures.

— You bet we will. And now I must go and get ready. So long.

— So long, Dad.

He grinned and gave my white duck hat a tug so that it came down over my eyes, and then turned and went quickly toward the latticed porch of the Soule house. I walked along the path and then remembered the envelope in my hand. On it was written in Father’s small print: For Doris. Kindness of Andrew. It was a gray envelope, speckled, and I noticed that the flap was gummed only at the tip, it would be very easy to open. What was he writing to her like this, and why was he going back so quickly. Especially if, as Uncle Tom had said, he didn’t really need to for business. And why, after telling me not to say anything about his coming, had he gone to the house himself late at night. And why hadn’t Mother come to see him in the morning, or said anything about him.

The mail was already sorted when I got there, and there were no letters in Box 36, only the little slip of paper that said the box was ours for three months. I saw Smiley come out of the drugstore with a golden-brown cake of chewing tobacco in his hand, a little red tin label on it. He was cutting a piece off the corner with his knife. At the bridge I stopped to watch the tide go in through the opened sluice gates, carrying nests of green and brown eelgrass, powerful and slow and deep, eddying and clucking. Why was the letter important. What did it say—. At the Library I chose The White Company because it looked longer. I looked at St. Nicholas’ to see who had won the prizes for drawings and then started home. It had stopped raining, a pale beam of sunlight flashed on the wet golden rooster at the top of the flagpole, the railings of white wood along the lagoon were beginning to sparkle. The letter was in my raincoat pocket, I kept my hand on it, and my finger went under the flap of the envelope. Before I knew it, it was open. I blushed and took it out to look at it. It would be easy enough to stick it down again. Suppose Father should pass me on the road, going to the station. I turned to the right, along King Caesar’s Road, and walked faster. I passed the cottage with the rhododendrons, and Powder Point Hall, and when I got to the pine woods I went in to the left of the road and crawled into my pine-log cabin. It was gray inside and I sat on the pine needles. I must ask Gay if she would come down again. We might do it this afternoon, especially if it was raining. Perhaps she would come by herself, without Warren, which would be more exciting. Or with Susan. If I couldn’t persuade her, Susan might.

I unfolded the letter and began to read it, and then blushed and folded it and put it back, and then took it out again. It was wrong to read it. But I wanted to know what was going on. What was going on. Why all this secrecy. If anything was hidden from us, like this, and a chance came, like this, why not take it. Why not. “Pussy dear.” I had heard him call her that, and it had seemed silly. But typewritten, in a typewritten letter—

Drops of rain fell on the roof, dripped from the trees, each one a sound of threatened guilt. Who would come, no one could come, I was alone. I took out the letter again, listened, and began to read.

Pussy dear, am I mistaken in detecting a lurking trace of sympathy in thy note of apology when dealing with that evident leaning of D’s towards what thee calls the racy side of life? Does thee, as thee says he does, partake in that wistful eager-yearning to snatch, before it is too late, something that perhaps solely because it is forbidden, possesses the fascination of a last untasted morsel, wanting to insure completeness in the rounding of our little life?… Remember, dear heart—

I got up so quickly that I bumped my head on the low roof of the cabin, then ducked and ran along the road until I was out of the belt of pine woods, and went into the field. The letter was in my pocket. It was not that I had heard any one coming. I broke a switch of wild cherry off a small tree in a broken-down stone wall, and with this began whisking the nests of tent caterpillars out of the trees along the lane, and whipping the leaves of bayberry bushes. Take that. And that. And that. And take that, you bastard. And don’t come again until you are asked. I walked slowly up the deep lane, whipping left and right, and wondered what the letter meant, and what the rest of it was. But I already knew. It was Uncle David. Did the racy side of life mean his drinking, his getting drunk, all those empty bottles, and his trying to get Mother drunk in the motorboat. Was that it. Or was it more than that. Should I read the rest of it. Would I have time. I could stop in the playhouse and read it, or I could read it here, but here I might meet somebody, and besides I was walking. And kept on walking. It was more — of course it was — than his trying to get her drunk, and I knew what it was.

I passed the playhouse, walking fast up the slope of humped grass, kicking at the grasshoppers which skirred away from me on heavy-rattling wings, passed the grass-mat targets, which had been set up for archery practice, and let myself into the house through the screen door. It was silent, empty, and when I hallooed there was no answer. Had they all gone bathing. I went back to the porch and saw that the rowlocks had gone, and the oars, and the life preserver. And when I went in again, and looked at the stairs, my bathing-suit and towel had been put on the banisters. I took them up in my hand and felt the dry sand in them. But all the while I was thinking—

In my bedroom I began to undress, slowly, pulled my shirt over my head, drew the necktie out and hung it over the mirror, looked at the ugly, dishonest shape of my mouth in the mirror, pulled it down with two fingers and stuck out my tongue and said “yaa!” at myself, then began flexing and unflexing my right arm to watch the muscle. But this was a pretense. The letter was in my pocket on the chair. To avoid it further, I took the flytrap to the window, opened the screen, broke the trap by pressing the sides together, and let the flies go. They went slowly, as if they were dying. Would I have time to copy out the letter. Would I. Before they got back from bathing. I could say that the mail had been late. Mother, I was just coming, I had only just had time to change into my bathing suit. And here is a note for you.

… Remember dear heart, all the wisdom of the generations coined into the many world-old legends and allegories hung about this very glitter and seductive charm — trite little maxims and proverbs sure enough, but not wearing the outward marks of the pain and wretchedness, shame and filth, with which their lessons were learned, over and over again by the forgotten ones who in their own day thrilled with the excitement of adventuring and daring, of proving for themselves and filling out their own little lives! Surely, plenty have already put out forever the steady flame of their purity to follow the scintillating sparkle of gilded sin. And if thee ever fails to realize those broader, common, human warnings — if they fail to appeal to thee as too remote and cold to be real, or to touch thy heart with their warning of terror, then thee must remember that this other half of thy very self has been sent already and at thine own bidding through all the sin needed by thee and me! Treasure thy portion of the blessed purity at all cost, dear! It has to light my way as well as thine — and thee can never know how priceless it is in my sight! Will thee not believe me, dear, when I tell thee this is not mere jealousy or selfish temper or proprietorship on my part, but a loving yearning to protect thy soul as thee would guard one of thy babies from some dreadful disease like diphtheria? What brings this to my mind is something in my talk with Tom last night, that suggested the possibility of thy winter’s loneliness, whether we decide that it should be without me, or without thy children, breeding a restlessness that might in some moment of reckless desperation cause thee to grasp at that treacherous glitter as a possible object of momentary interest and self-forgetfulness. Forgive me for entertaining for a moment such an idea, Pussy — but I must recognize it just long enough to tell thee that deep as my concern is for the needful reorganization of our home life and home relations, for the salvation of the children, I must, nevertheless, tell thee that rather than that thee should be exposed to even the remotest possibility of such a risk, I will gladly give up every consideration of them — throw up the whole plan — and act only for thy moral security. For in my heart and life, thee comes before everything else: and that one thing thy crown of purity, is to me so precious that even the moral loss of the three children would be a small sacrifice! So that if thee needed the protection of motherly contact to keep wholesome thine own life, I would gladly turn the little ones all over to thee and give up my struggles in their behalf. Will thee promise me as thee loves thy babies to call on me to make good this statement before thee finds thy need of them too great to be safely borne?… This matter has had to do with depressing me, lying in my heart all day, so that tired as I am I cannot go to bed tonight until I have written it for thy reading. Again I ask thy forgiveness for assuming such a possibility, but that flaw in D’s otherwise charming character, and thy persistent championing and apologizing for him, together with my rule of safety — to deem all things possible — forces it upon me. Could thee not send D away? Ask him to go? Need I ask thee to ask? It is because I so reverence thine own purity and so shrink into a veritable soul’s death at thought of any least soil upon it that I must speak. Does thee understand, dear heart?

THY JOHN.

2. A.M.

I copied it out on the yellow paper that I used for Latin, and folded the copy, and hid it in the wildflower book. 2 A.M. What had they been talking about all that time. And what did this mean about the children. The salvation of the children. I looked out of the window and saw Mother and Porper coming slowly across the field by the Walker house, Porper holding her hand. I stood and watched them. Mother had on a raincoat over her bathing suit. She was walking slowly, looking down at the ground without saying anything, and Porper was skipping on one leg. I would meet them at the porch, or by the tennis court and give her the letter and then go on, running, towards the Point, as if to be in time to join Susan and Uncle Tom—

— the timelessness, the spacelessness, but also the wonderful and ever-renewed sense of the nearness and brightness and largeness, the vividness of small things, the extraordinary intenseness of grass-blades and cloverleaves and acorns, the warmth of sand in the hand, the sound of leaves tapping against the wooden walls of the playhouse — the queer new sense of brilliant exposure to all this, each year as we came back to it, as if one had forgotten what it was to see a cloud driven with unchanging shape from west to east across the blue sky, or to try to stare at the sun until one saw purple and green blots, to lie in the warm uneven grass as if one were a part of it, the grasshoppers and crickets crawling and tickling on one’s bare legs or getting into one’s clothes and making spots of tobacco juice — to come back to this, to be once more surprised by this and reimmersed in this, as if one again became a part of the wind, the sun, the earth—

— Look, Susan, if you almost close your eyes, but not quite, like this, and look at the sun, you see — wait a minute, and I’ll tell you what I see—

— Oh, anybody can do that, I’ve done that millions of times, you only do it because you saw Gwendolyn doing it that day at the Long Beach.

— I don’t either. Don’t be such a nitwit. What day do you mean.

— You know perfectly well what day I mean.

— You mean that time when we went across the long bridge to see how many new planks had been put in after the winter.

— Of course, you silly.

— Well, I didn’t even know what she was doing. Now it looks like a thick great jungle of hairy trees. All crisscross and savage and with a bright light coming through them. Gosh, isn’t it funny, how huge they look, and they’re only your eyelashes.

— That’s exactly what Gwendolyn said.

— Oh, shut up, will you. You try to spoil everything.

— It was the same day we went to look at the place where we had the clambake last year. You know as well as I do. And we met Gwendolyn on the beach, she was with Dorothy Peters, and Dorothy took off her clothes in the sand dunes and you said you’d seen her.

— I did not.

— Well, anyway, you said so.

— Have you tried looking through your fingers to see the red blood in them.

— And Gwendolyn was lying against the side of a dune with her eyes squeezed up, just like that, telling us what she saw. She said it was like a kaleidoscope.

— Kaleidoscope.

— Isn’t that what I said.

— I said kaleidoscope.

— So did I.

— You think so. That’s all you know.

— And you stood there looking down at Gwendolyn with that silly expression on your face—

— Will you shut up? Unless you can learn to talk a little sense once in a while.

— What else am I talking, I’d like to know.

— You’re talking nonsense, of course.

— But why you can get so excited about that stuck-up prig of a Gwendolyn, I’m sure I don’t know.

— Who said I was excited about her.

— Why any idiot could see it.

— Oh, could they.

— If you could have seen yourself—

— Shut up.

— Oh, I don’t care.

— Well, then, shut up.

— Nice manners older brothers seem to have.

— Will you shut up?

I closed my eyes, and felt the sun hot on my eyelids, and thought how queer it was that the redness I could see was nothing but my own blood. Susan knew too much. She was beginning to be a nuisance. What she said about my imitating Gwendolyn was perfectly true, the nitwit. But what did it matter. I was going to keep away from Gwendolyn for all the rest of the summer, and that would make everybody think there was nothing in it. Just the same, when I thought of the box of candy—

— Well if Uncle David thinks I’ll hang round here all afternoon for the pleasure of getting my feet dirty hoeing the tennis court, he’s got another guess coming. I’m going down to see if I can find Sanford. And if I find him I’ll take him out for a row in the dory. You can tell Uncle David to put that in his pipe and smoke it.

— Good-by, and good riddance.

— Keep the change.

Would Father really be coming back to Duxbury, and what did he mean about Mother’s being alone. Was she going away somewhere. And would we stay with Father in Cambridge, unless they bought the new house in Milton. And here it was August already, and no signs of a picnic! I climbed half way up the windmill, and then came down again. The leg nearest the house was getting looser, and ought to be fixed. Uncle Tom said it would have to be bedded in concrete — they would dig a hole and pour concrete in it. In a strong wind, when the windmill was pumping, you could see the whole leg lift up a little, sometimes almost a half an inch.

— Uncle Tom, I thought I’d ask Sanford to come out for a row with me, Uncle David doesn’t seem to be coming back to do the tennis court, and I thought maybe I’d take a bucket along and get some clams for supper. Do you think it would be a good idea.

— Well, I’m afraid as a matter of fact, Andy, your Aunt Norah has already ordered some, from Gerald Soule. Still, if you want to get a few more—

— You bet I will.

— Not too many, mind you.

— Are you fixing the box kite so we can take Porper for a ride in his cart with it. Do you remember the time when it carried him right across the tennis court, and into the field, and upset him?

— Yes, I thought we’d get it out and fix it. All it needs is this one cross strut — and I believe there are some left-over battens down in the bicycle house—

He was pulling his chin and staring at the box kite on the grass, and humming to himself in that queer mournful way without any tune in it, the red cloth of the box kite flickering stiffly in the wind, and I ran then down the hill past the playhouse, and jumped with a long jump over the wall covered with poison ivy and walked through the blackberry jungle, feeling the thorns catch hold of my sneakers and try to rip them.

When I got to the Soules’, Molly was swinging in the swing by herself, as usual, and said Sanford had gone to Plymouth in a motorboat with his mother. He wouldn’t be back till supper time. And not then, if they got stuck in the mud.

— Whose boat is it.

— Mr. Pigeon’s.

— Pigeons for ducks.

— My mother was invited to go, but she couldn’t.

— Didn’t they invite you, Molly?

— No, Sanford doesn’t like me. Would you like to try my swing?

— No, thanks, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to dig some clams.

— Could I come with you?

— Sure, if you like. If we have time, I might take you out in my dory.

We went across the golf links, keeping an eye out for balls, but there weren’t any, and then walked down the drive past Powder Point Hall. Molly kept wanting to hold my hand and then letting it go again. She said that her mother worked in the afternoons at Powder Point Hall, washing dishes, and wanted to stop and look in the windows to see if she could see her, but a lot of ladies were coming down the side steps and I walked quickly ahead, so that she came running after me and took hold of my hand again. We went past the Horse Monument and through the woods, where I showed her our houses, and she would have liked to stay there, but I took her down to the beach near the hunting box and told her to wait there without moving till I fetched the bucket and spade. I told her I was responsible for her, because she was small, and made her promise. If she would promise I might take her back to the houses afterwards.

When I got back, with the spade and bucket, she was crying. She was wiping her eyes with her thin dress, and I could see her white drawers. They weren’t very clean.

— What are you crying about. Do you want to go home.

— No.

— Well, then, what are you crying for.

— I won’t tell you.

— All right, then you can go home. I don’t want any crybabies with me.

— It was your mother.

— What do you mean.

— Your mother, she scolded me. She came out of that little house, and she was angry with me when she saw me. She said I ought not to be here alone, and I said you were coming back, and then she went away—

I put down the spade and bucket on the sand and went to the back of the hunting box, up above it, on the bluff, and looked down at it. Should I go and look into it, to see if there were any bottles there. No, it was like spying, or sneaking. The little door at the back was half open, and there wasn’t any sound, probably there was no one inside, but I didn’t like to go and look. Suppose Uncle David should be there, reading a book. Or drinking out of a bottle. And pretending that he didn’t know Molly and I were right there on the beach.

I gave Molly the bucket to carry, and I took the spade, and we went down through the beds of eelgrass to the mud flats, and began walking to and fro, pressing the mud with our feet, to see where the clams squirted. I began digging, and got some clams, but we put back all the small ones.

— Which way did my mother go.

— She went straight across to the pine woods.

— And there wasn’t anybody with her, Molly.

— No.

— And you’re sure she came out of the hunting-box?

— Yes.

— You saw her come out of it?

— Yes.

— and it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to do my Latin lesson, either, because I had sat in my room all evening, with the kerosene lamp on the table beside the wildflower book, turning the flame down to stop it from smoking, and the mosquitoes humming on the hot window screens as loudly as if they were in the room, and Susan thrashing about in her bed in the room across the hall, and talking in her sleep, or groaning — how could I remember. Susan, will you keep still, please. Well, how can I get to sleep with this light on my ceiling. You’ve done it before, you can do it again, it isn’t my fault if they didn’t build the partitions up to the ceiling, is it? Well, anyway. Well, anyway! And how can I study Latin if you make all that noise. Who asked you to, I don’t care about your Latin, I want to go to sleep. Well, for goodness sake, go to sleep and let me learn this verb.

— I’m afraid you’ve got to do better than this, Andy. You’ve got only two weeks now till I have to examine you, you know. I think you’d better begin reviewing. And I think we’d better not do any more sailing.

He told me to tell Uncle Tom, and to ask Uncle Tom to hear me recite the verbs and nouns. I had a chocolate milk shake at the drugstore, and ate the thick brown froth off the top with a spoon. On the way home, I watched the tide spilling out over the dam, and afterwards went into the long bowling alley, at the edge of the marsh, to watch the livery stable men bowling. Smiley let me throw one of his balls, but I missed, and it went along the groove at the side. I didn’t want to go back to Powder Point at all. I wanted to go to Boston. I walked slowly along the Point Road until I got to the Soules’, and went down to the dyke, where Father had shown me how to whip-throw with apples. Then I walked all the way along the beach until I got to the Tupper landing stage, with the canoe on it. It was wet, and the paddles beside it were wet, somebody had been out in it. Perhaps Gwendolyn. I had never been out in a canoe. Why did they never ask me to go. Was it because I had been so foolish about Gwendolyn. I took up one of the paddles, and found it was much lighter than my oars. That must be because a canoe was so much lighter than a dory. I put it down again and looked quickly up towards the Tupper lawn to see if any one was there, but there was nobody, and I climbed up the grass slope past the imitation windmill and pushed through the oak bushes on the other side of the road and went down to the little pond below the Wardman house. Had the Tuppers been up into the marshes towards Brant Rock, along my favorite channel. And at low tide, too. Where Uncle David was always taking Mother. In that deep, steep channel, with the sides of stiff, red mud and the marsh reeds growing out of it. Where the tide was so swift that you could hardly row against it. Was that where they had been. Did they go up all the way, and find that last hidden turning, the narrow one that led almost up to the Long Beach. Perhaps a canoe could go even farther up, at high tide, than a dory. And much farther than a motorboat, of course.

I sat down under the cherry tree by Plymouth Rock Junior, and felt tired. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to stretch out as if I were in bed. I put the Latin grammar on the grass, and ground my forehead against it, as if it were a pillow, pressing my feet against the base of the rock. I wanted to be asleep. I wanted to be dead. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and counted to five hundred by fives, and then said first the worst — second the same — third the best of all the game — the rhyme Mother always said for Porper when she blew out the light. One — two — three! Out. Goes. She. But I couldn’t get to sleep, so I opened my eyes, and watched the cherry leaves moving against the sky, and the clusters of wild cherries, which would soon be ripe. And I remembered the time when Susan and I had eaten too many, and Father made us drink a cup of mustard and water and we were both sick.

— the day of the storm, when the thunder went and came all day, moving in a great circle round the shore of the bay, crossing darkly over Kingston and Plymouth, from behind the Standish Monument, but never getting as far as South Duxbury, and then moving out to sea over the black hills at Manomet, the lightning stabbing down vividly from the belly of black cloud into the mass of white rain that hung over Plymouth and the sea, the thunder almost continuous. Before lunch, the wind rose to a steady scream, but on Powder Point the sun still shone brightly, and we tried to have archery practice. The wind blew the arrows every which way, blew our words back into our mouths, and Porper was always being flung down on the grass, and saying that he couldn’t breathe.

— Porper, you silly, stand here behind the corner of the porch, it’s nice and quiet here, you can watch the lightning just as well from here.

— What lightning.

— You see, the lightning over there, over Plymouth. And just listen to the thunder it sounds like lions.

— Where are the lions.

— At the zoo, don’t you remember?

— I want to see the lions.

Uncle David went in and got the box kite with the two enormous reels of twine, and Uncle Tom said we ought not to try it, the wind was too strong, and it might break away, but Uncle David laughed and said no, it was all right, he would hang on to it, and hitch it to the cart and give Porper a ride across the tennis court, or even down to the end of the Point. The wind almost blew it out of his hands when he took it out to the tennis court, and then he lifted it up over his head, staggering, and let go of it, while Uncle Tom ran past the porch with the cord, and the red kite gave a swoop to one side and then began to go up so fast that Uncle Tom just let the cord whizz through his glove, while the reel danced up and down on the ground at his feet.

— Andy. Susan. Go and get the cart. Where is the cart.

I pulled the cart from under the porch, but as soon as we tied the cord to the handle and tried to let it go the kite dragged it over on its side and yanked it in leaps and bounds over the tennis court, so that we had to sit on it and stop it. Uncle Tom and Uncle David both had hold of the cord, but it kept on pulling them step by step towards the Walker house, while Mother untied the cart again. It was hard to hear what people were saying in the wind.

— We’ll never be able to get it down.

— Of course we can.

— Everybody take hold, come on Doris, and you, Andy, and we’ll see if we can pull it back and make it fast to the porch.

We all pulled, but we couldn’t budge it. We stood there, holding it and watching it. It was high up, and seemed almost halfway to the end of the Point.

— Can we send up some messengers, Uncle Tom.

— No, I don’t think we’d better — we’ve got our hands full as it is—

— Susan could cut them out.

— We might manage to make it fast to the Walkers’ barn—

Susan was just running in to cut out the paper messengers, the little rings of paper to send up the cord, when suddenly there was a twang, the cord had snapped, and we all took a step backward, so that Uncle Tom almost had to sit down.

— It’s gone. As I thought.

We stood there, all of us, in the wind, and watched it go. It got smaller and smaller and in a few minutes we couldn’t see it at all. It was going straight out towards Provincetown, across Massachusetts Bay.

In the afternoon the wind dropped almost as suddenly as it had begun, but the clouds were gathering again behind the Standish Monument, getting blacker and blacker. Everything became silent. The trees and bushes were as still as if they were listening. We played bean bag in the sitting room with Porper, until Porper got silly and wanted to throw the pine-needle cushion at the board instead of the bean bag, so then we played the battleship card game, but Porper always wanted to have the Amphitrite and the Vesuvius, so he and Susan played croquinole, while I went down to the playhouse to study Latin. When I went out, Mother and Uncle David were standing on the porch, looking across the bay with the telescope.

— Are you going to the playhouse, Andy?

— Yes.

— Ten to one you’ll get wet on the way back.

— I don’t care.

In the playhouse it was almost too dark to read, so I left the door open; and I could watch the lightning behind the monument, and see the oak leaves beginning to stir again in an icy-cold draught of air that seemed to come very low over the ground. This was going to be a humdinger, and no mistake. What Aunt Norah always called a shingle-ripper, because it sounded as if the shingles were being ripped off the roof when the lightning and thunder came so close. Utor, fruor, fungor, potior, and vescor. The ablative absolute. Who wanted to know about ablatives. And what silly names they had for them, anyway. I went through the fourth declension three times, reciting it’ aloud while I bounced a cracked Ping-pong ball against the partition of the bicycle shed. That. And that. And that. And that. And then suddenly the wind came, and whirled half the pages in the book, and the window screen whistled, and when I went to the door I saw that the water in front of the Standish Hotel had gone completely white. I was afraid, but excited. Perhaps I’d better go back to the house, and be with the others. Before the storm actually got to us across the bay.

I closed the window and door and ran up the slope. By the time I got to the house the wind was so strong that it almost took me off my feet. I saw Uncle Tom standing at the base of the windmill, looking first upward at the top of it, with his eyes shaded by his hand, and then down at the foot. When I joined him he pointed to the leg of the windmill nearest to the house and then put his mouth close to my cheek and shouted.

— I’m afraid it will go over. We’ll have to lash it. Do you think you could climb — I’ll get the clothes line.

He went into the kitchen, while I stood and watched the windmill. The slender steel leg was heaving out of the ground and then settling again, four inches at a time. The mill was shut off, but spinning just the same, and pumping slowly; the wind was so irregular that whenever it caught the wheel broadside on, it whirled it and at the same time pushed it so violently that the whole frame of steel seemed to tug out of the ground. The diagonal struts were singing like telephone wires. I stood on the lowest strut and the leg lifted me right up with it.

Uncle Tom came back with the coil of clothes line.

Do you think you could climb up. You’re nimbler than I am. Are you afraid.

— No.

— All right, then, take this, and climb up to the third crosspiece and make it fast to this leg, above and below the crosspiece, and then carry the rope round the next leg, that one and then back again round this one. Do you see what I mean?

I took the coil of rope and climbed up the little galvanized iron steps, one at a time, with my khaki trousers flattened against my legs like boards, hardly able to breathe, and stepped out on the crosspiece. The whole windmill was rocking like the mast of a boat. I lowered myself to straddle the gray crosspiece and dropped the coil over the corner of it and brought it up, twice, and made three square knots, the way Mr. Dearing had showed me, and then slid along to the other leg and looped the rope twice over and under the crosspiece there.

— Now the same thing with the first one again.

I slid back and did it.

— Now drop me the rope. And come down. Before you get blown down.

He yelled this up at me, grinning, and I dropped the coil to him, and he went towards the kitchen porch with it. When I got there he had taken half a dozen turns round a post with it and was knotting it.

— That ought to hold. What do you think.

— If the post will hold, Uncle Tom.

— Oh, the post will hold all right. I’m not so sure about the rope.

We went back to the windmill and watched it. The leg was still lifting, but not so much, the rope was holding it down. The first rain was beginning, coming in large fierce drops, almost horizontally, separate and stinging, and smacking against the side of the house as loudly as hailstones. Aunt Norah came round the corner to the edge of the porch and shouted something.

— What did you say?

She put her hands to her mouth.

— If it’s all right—

— Yes, it’s all right.

— You’d better come in — Doris and David—

— What?

— Come in.

— All right, we’re coming.

It got dark very suddenly, and as we ran along the side porch I saw a lightning-flash crawl quite slowly down behind the statue of Miles Standish, a pale lilac color, very bright, and almost as slow as if it were being drawn down with a pen. I remembered what Father said about counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, a second to a mile, and started to count, but the crash came between the first count and the second, a terrific shingle-ripper, and so low and close that it seemed to go right over my hair. As I dived round the corner to the sheltered part of the porch at the front the rain made me shut my eyes, but I could still see the little black figure of Miles Standish with the sword stroke of light behind him. What was this about Doris and David. Uncle Tom was holding the screen door for me, but it got away from him just as I went in, and clapped back against the wall. Then he pulled it shut by main force, against the wind, which sang through it, and closed the inside door, and we were in the dining-room-and-sitting-room, where everything seemed quiet by contrast, and the lamps were lit, one of them hanging on chains over the dining-table, the other over the table at the other end of the room, with a bowl of bayberry leaves. I could hear Porper shouting to Susan upstairs. Aunt Norah was holding her spectacles in her hand and wiping the rain off her cheek.

— They’ve gone out to the boat—

— What do you mean.

— Doris and David. I tried to stop them—

— You mean in the Osprey—?

— It was David’s idea, he thought it would be nice to go out in a storm — do you think you could stop them. It isn’t safe. It’s crazy.

— When did they go.

— Five minutes ago. If you ran straight down to the Point—

— Can I go, Uncle Tom, I can run fast—

— No, Andy, you stay here.

— I’ll go down and see.

He took his raincoat from the cupboard under the stairs and went out. I wondered if he would be struck by lightning. And whether the Osprey would be struck, because of the little mast at the front. What a silly thing to do, it was just like Uncle David, he was probably drunk. I went upstairs to Susan’s room, where Susan and Porper were building a fortress in the middle of the floor with blocks and books and tin soldiers and the rockinghorse and the elephant, and the wastebasket for a tower, and helped them with it, now and then going to the front window to watch the storm, which got worse and worse. Every time the lightning came Porper shut his eyes, but he didn’t cry. The whole bay was dancing with lightning, and now and then we could see all of it, every single detail, even the white houses on Clark’s Island, in a green flash, but we couldn’t see any boats, only the water, which seemed to be nothing but whitecaps. Uncle Tom must be down at the Point now, but what could he do. How could they see him or hear him, even if they were still there. But where would they go.

It was after supper, Susan was putting Porper to bed, when he came back, soaked to the skin, and tired, and said he hadn’t been able to find them. They had gone off in the Osprey, and taken the tender with them, he could make out the mooring, but that was all. He had walked out on the long bridge as far as the draw without seeing anything, there were no lights in either direction. If they had gone out into the bay, and got caught, they might be safe enough by this time if they had got into the lagoon, by the village. Or they might have gone up through the bridge into the cove, and perhaps anchored there in the lee of the bluffs, or perhaps even beached the Osprey. In any case, he didn’t think anything more could be done. They were probably all right. What could you do, in this rain that came in sheets, and this wind like a hurricane. Though he thought the thunderstorm itself was about over, was moving out to sea.

— Do you think we ought to telephone the police.

— What could the police do. And probably they’ve cut off the telephone service.

— If they aren’t back by ten I think we ought to tell them.

— You mean send out a search party. But what could a search party do. Nobody would go out in a boat, not if he could help it. You can’t see as far as your hand.

It was after I had been sent up to bed that I heard the telephone ringing. The thunder had stopped, and the wind had gone down, but it was still raining hard. And a little later I heard voices downstairs, and the doors opening and shutting, and when I got out of bed and went to the window I saw Uncle Tom and two other men going off towards the Point with lanterns, the three lanterns noddling up and down over the drenched grass, and showing the bright yellow edges of sou’-westers. I got back into bed and listened to the hard rain on the roof, but I couldn’t go to sleep. It seemed to me that I was awake all night.

— and in the playhouse that afternoon, alone, it was hot and steamy there, and quiet, and Uncle Tom came in, and looked at me, tapping on the Gonko table with his fingers, and I could see that he was wondering if I had been crying. But I hadn’t been crying. And then he said that Sergeant Homer was at the house and wanted to ask me a few questions. Just a few questions. About how I had found them. About how I had found the Osprey in the marsh channel that morning.

— Don’t be worried, Andy. It’s just official. Just tell him what he wants to know, it won’t be long. It’s all right.

The Sergeant was sitting at the dining-room table, with his hat upside down on the floor beside him. Aunt Norah was standing by the window, she had just said something when we came in, and the Sergeant was writing it down with a pencil. She was blowing her nose.

— And your name, young man, is Andrew Cather, isn’t it?

— Yes, sir.

— You went out in your dory this morning at about five o’clock, that’s right isn’t it, and rowed up the marsh channel toward Brant Rock?

— Yes, sir.

— And you saw the tender of your uncle’s boat there, in the channel, and that led to your discovery that the Osprey had been sunk there. How much under water was the Osprey when you saw it, would you say.

— I should think about two feet.

— So that you could see everything quite clearly?

— Yes, sir.

— Was she on her side?

— A little on her port side.

— You could see quite clearly into the cockpit, you could even have got into it — but you didn’t get into it, did you, Andrew, or interfere with it in any way?

— No, sir.

— Was the door to the cabin open or shut.

— It was shut.

— You are sure of that. Did you notice whether the boat had been anchored?

— Yes, sir, the anchor had been dropped.

— Could you see anything through the portholes?

— I could see some brown cloth quite close to one of the portholes, and I knew it was my mother’s dress, the one she had on yesterday.

— You didn’t touch the doors of the cabin, did you?

— No, sir.

— Thank you, Andrew — that will be all.

I went out by myself to the tennis court, and met Juniper there, and he swished his tail against my bare leg and made the sound that Porper always called puttenyarruk, which meant that he wanted grasshoppers. I caught him a flying one, and he ate it. The tennis court was almost dry again, but the rain had made deltas in it, it would need rolling, and the lines were completely gone. It was August the 11th. I wished they hadn’t put Mother and Uncle David in the same room. And would Father come down to Duxbury now—)