Silver Shoal Light/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
CURRANT WINE AND CURIOUS THINGS
WHEN they reached Quimpaug, the Count's boat was moored and its owner nowhere to be seen. The Pemberleys and Joan disembarked and went up into the village to do various errands. Before the delivery window at the post-office stood a plump old lady in an alpaca dress and a black straw bonnet amazingly small and rusty.
"That's old Mrs. Bassett," Elspeth murmured to Joan. "You saw her daughter, I think, when you were looking for a lodging that night."
The old lady turned just then, and her round face broke into a hundred kindly wrinkles of pleasure. She beamed delightedly through her silver-rimmed spectacles, and cried out:
"Well, now! Seems to me I jest never see you folks! You al'ays come in jest when I'm gen'ally back home. How be you?" She turned to Joan. "You're the young lady from the City, I shouldn't wonder. An' I've been jest honin' to see you ever sence thet night you come up with 'Bijah. I ain't had no chance to tell you how vexed I was we couldn't take you in; an' I been thinkin' ever sence how I guessed my daughter was tur'ble hasty with you; but 'Gusta Louise she's one that'll git so flustered she won't know where she's at."
"Don't think about that twice," Joan reassured her. "Of course she was upset when guests came so unexpectedly. It was too bad that we should have disturbed you at all."
"I guess you been havin' a better time out yonder than if you'd ha' stayed in Quimpaug," Mrs. Bassett ventured. "I've al'ays thought it must be real peaceful out there." She looked at Garth with bright, kindly eyes. "Seems to me," she proposed, "like I've jest got a notion I want this boy to go along up to my house with me an' make me a little visit. You ain't goin' right back so quick he couldn't stay a little spell, air you?"
"We've enough to do to keep us for a while," Elspeth told her. "It's ever so kind of you, Mrs. Bassett. We'll stop for him when we go."
So the two went off together up the bright, unshaded street, Mrs. Bassett carefully lifting her alpaca skirts, Garth trudging earnestly beside her, trailing his shoes in the dusty grass at the edge of the road. The hill was not easy for either of them to climb, and they proceeded slowly, talking most amiably.
"I don't think I've ever been inside your house," Garth said, as Mrs. Bassett clicked open the white gate and stopped to twine an escaped spray of honeysuckle back among the fence-palings.
"That's what I was thinkin'," she assented. "I thought 't was about time you come, seein' we known each other in passin' so long. You come right in here, whilst I take off my bunnit, an' then we'll go in the parlor an' look at some cur'ous things."
When she had removed the bonnet and straightened her dress, she led the way through the "settin'-room" and unlocked the door of the front parlor. It was very dark there, for the blinds were closed, so dark that Garth, newly come from the glaring white road, caught only a glint here and there from shapes in the gloom. There was a strange, composite smell of matting and old, imprisoned upholstery, and something spicy, too, and rare.
Mrs. Bassett rustled to the window and opened a shutter. A broad ray streamed in, full of dancing motes, and the room sprang suddenly into shape and color. The flowers of the carpet leaped into gaudy bloom, the haircloth-covered chairs seemed to stretch out their old arms to the unfamiliar light. And, made visible now, Garth saw many odd things ranged on the shelves and "whatnots" in the room. Mrs. Bassett beckoned him to her side, where she stood peering into a cupboard. She opened its glass doors and very carefully took out first one thing and then another, putting them in a row upon the table. There was a curious figure, made of ivory; a charm cut in jade and suspended from a tarnished silver tassel; a little roll of amber-colored India silk; a tiny boat, carved from a peach-stone and polished by the handling of many centuries.
"My father was a sea-farin' man," Mrs. Bassett explained, "an' my grandfather afore him. I can jest recollect, like 't was yesterday, runnin' down to the quay when gran'pa's ship come in. 'T wa'n't here in Quimpaug, but in my old home; I was a little thing, knee high to a hoppergrass. Gran'pa'd set me aboard, an' oh my, the things he'd show me in his cabin! An' then the things he'd bring up to our house—heathen things, though they was real pretty, unloaded out o' the boxes right in our yard an' settin' in our house. But 't is mostly my father's comin' home I remember. He sailed fust as mate with my grandfather, an' then when gran'pa died, he was master. Why, when I was a young girl, afore I was married, I went a vy'age round the Horn with pa."
"Did you? Really?" Garth cried eagerly, looking up from the array of wonders on the table.
"I did, for sure," Mrs. Bassett said. "All of it I didn't enj'y greatly, but we visited very cur'ous lands. Yes, 't was interestin'; an' I do love a ship on the sea, an' the life aboard her."
"My grandfather was a sea-faring man, too," Garth observed, poring over the intricacies of a smooth sandal-wood puzzle.
"Was he, now?" Mrs. Bassett said encouragingly. Quimpaug was always on the alert for scraps of information about the Pemberleys.
"My father is going into the Navy," Garth told her; "but that isn't quite like being a real sea-captain. My great-grandfather was in the Navy, too, but it was before battleships stopped having sails. He commanded a frigate, and it must have been much wonderfuller than commanding a dreadnaught."
"You've got the old feelin', ain't you!" Mrs. Bassett said. "My father was one could never abide nor abear steam. 'Give me good canvas,' says he, 'an' the four winds o' heaven thet God A'mighty meant fer us to use.' 'T was a trial to me, sometimes, thet my husband never keered about the sea. He farmed it all his life, an' it al'ays gave him a qualm, like, to set foot in a skiff. An' we never had e'er a son to follow the sea. I did hope fer thet, but 'Gusta Louise she's jest like her pa was,—you couldn't pay her to go near a boat. An' her brung up as a girl right aside o' the water, too. Ain't it cur'ous!"
"I should think you'd get somebody to take you on more voyages," Garth suggested, "when you like it so much. It's funny how, when people want to do things, they can't; and then lots of times people that can, don't want to. I want to follow the sea more than anything, and I'll never be able to."
"Sho', now!" Mrs. Bassett sympathized. "You're jest a little young one yet; I shouldn't wonder but what you can go to sea when you grow up."
Garth shook his head and bent over the golden filigree bracelet in his hand.
"No," he said gently, "not ever."
Mrs. Bassett wiped her spectacles and straightened them.
"You set here," she said, "an' I'll be right back in."
So Garth sat and fingered the treasures which the old seamen had brought from the ends of the world half a century and more ago, and dreamed of the way of a ship on the seas and of enchanted islands in far waters. And he was so deep in his imaginings that when Mrs. Bassett put down a tray on the table beside him, he started.
"Jest a sip o' current wine," she explained. "'T ain't really wine,—jest juice an' sugar; 't won't hurt ye. No, I don' keer fer any right now, thank you." For there was only one glass on the tray beside the saucer of hermit cookies.
It was a very wonderful glass. There could hardly have been more than one in the world, Garth thought. It was quite different from the glasses at Silver Shoal Light, for it was red, fading to yellow at the top, and it had a gold rim and golden flowers painted upon it.
"'T was my mother's," Mrs. Bassett told him. "I thought mebbe you'd relish a drink out o' it."
Garth did. Even if the currant wine had not been so exceedingly good, it would have seemed to be so, drunk from that remarkable glass.
"Look at this!" said the hostess, holding out a hook-handled gourd, with strange patterns burned upon it. "My father told me the heathen drank tea out o' it,—put a straw or a pipe in at this hole, an' sucked it up. I couldn't enj'y it thet way; I'd ruther have a good dish o' tea right from the pot into the cup. Real bad-tastin' stuff, my father said 't was, too. An' this drum I useter be able to beat on, but 't is gettin' so old now I'm a mite afeared to. 'T is a tom-tom the savages had. My father said they'd jest as soon put you in a pot an' cook you as not, dancin' around beatin' on them drums; but none o' the savages I ever see on my vy'age was anythin' but real pleasant an' friendly. An' 't was somethin' wonderful, my father said, the way some he seen had patterns painted all over their bare skin!"
"Oh, dear!" Garth cried, putting down the glass. "There comes Fogger up the path! I want to stay lots longer; I'm having such a nice time."
"Well, I'm real pleased!" beamed the old lady. "You'd ought to ha' come sooner. Wait, now, whilst I open the door fer your pa."
When she returned with Jim, Garth must show his father all the wonderful things, and rattled off such a hasty account of savages, tea, voyages to the Horn, tom-toms, and currant wine, that Jim was left gasping.
"You'd better take an hour this evening to tell me," he said. "I'm sorry to remove you from this treasure-room, but it's growing nearer and nearer light-up time.
Garth got up and held out his hand to Mrs. Bassett, who took it in both hers and then kissed him.
"I'd like to give you one o' my granpa's things," she said, "fer you to remember me by. Yes, I'm agoin' to," she persisted, in reply to Jim's protest. "Yes, Ga'th, I want you to have it. You've got the old feelin', like I said, an' 't will mean suthin' more to you than jest a gimcrack. 'Gusta Louise, she'll never think twicet o' these things when I'm gone."
And she put into his hand the little boat that was all carved from a peach-stone, with its curly prow, and its Chinese sailors, and its exquisitely cut cargo of rice bales, anciently golden, polished and smoothed by innumerable hands. Garth flung his arms impulsively about her as she bent toward him, and hugged her as he would have hugged Jim or Elspeth. Old Mrs. Bassett, who had no son to follow the sea, held him very tightly, with a comprehension of his own longing never to be fulfilled.
A Letter from Elspeth Pemberly to Her Brother
Silver Shoal,
July 3rd.
Dearest Brob:
I'm glad that you are not bored with hearing so much about Joan (I have followed Garth's early example and dropped the surname). Her week slipped away some time ago, and now she is staying on as a "paying guest." Government provisions are not involved, and Jim's Record is undisturbed. I asked her to stay at first because I was sorry for the poor soul,—homeless for the moment, and so worried,—but now we want her to be here because she's nice and fits in with everything we do quite as though she were one of us. She's really a dear, and a different person than she was at first. Garth is devoted to her, and she is with him all day long.
I hate to think of your adding "slumming" to your already busy days. You ought to ride, or something, after a hard morning's work, instead of poking through tenements. But you know I'm sympathetic. How I wish that your poor little pale kiddies could feel the breeze that is blowing through my window now, and could cultivate such a tan as Garth's! (And such an appetite!)
Oh, there was never a happier experiment than this! Of course, it can not last forever. If Jim really enters the Navy in the fall, this will be our last summer. But when I look back and review it all, I bless the inspiration that made us think of such an unheard-of plan. Do you remember how every one laughed? But behold us! Garth saved, Jim made over, a number of books to show for his leisure, your sister a marvel of health, energy, and contentment! The lighthouse pay, which seemed so small at first, goes amazingly far out here; it does make such a difference when fuel and lodging are supplied. Quimpaug certainly offers no temptations to part with extra shillings, and you know how we dress! Book royalties have a surprising way of mounting up, also, and we feel positively wealthy on what would shrivel to nothing in your horrible city.
We had a caller from Civilization the other day, incidentally. It was the Russian Count, if you please. His name is Stysalski, though Jim sticks to Fishashki. He did a weirdly awful futurist sketch from the landing, but despite that, Joan and I quite liked his earnest, Slavic intensity. Jim scorns him; nevertheless, we all go to tea with the noble gentleman on Friday. Joan seems quite interested in him. He plays the flute, by the way; better than he paints, we hope!
Jim sends his best greetings. He is grinding away at his naval work very hard, but he manages to have some fun with us, too. He tells me that I must stop, as he's going in for the mail now. Give my love to the tenement babies! Tell them that there is a lady who lives in a lighthouse (I don't suppose they could imaging a lighthouse, could. they?) and that she wishes she could send them a nice little wet wave, wrapped up in a sea-wind, but that she's afraid the postman wouldn't stand for it!
Lots of love,
Elspeth.