Laughing Last - Jane Abbott (portable ebook reader .txt) 📗

big anchor and can’t move only when the water is in it swings around on it just as though it was going. And when the water is out the boat is up real high and looks so funny and lopsided, like that dreadful old drunken man who walked past school one day. Mr. Dugald and Lavender took me out to the Arabella the very first day. We went out in a rowboat—I mean dory, and Mr. Dugald rowed. Oh, it was so thrilling, my heart sang within my breast. It seemed as though I was going far out to sea and the little waves danced and were so blue and everything smelled so salty and there were boats all around and some of them moving with big sails and a three-masted schooner went right close to us—I mean we went right close to it because it was fastened—and I could breathe only with difficulty I was so excited. Dear friend—at that moment I said to myself I did not mind my relatives not living in a big house on an eminence. This, meaning all the boats and the lovely docks and things, is worth my quest. It was very hazardous climbing on to the Arabella for it wiggled so but at last we were on and then!—Oh! Do you know, it was like a pirate’s ship. And it has a wheel and a little house and the cutest cabins downstairs and a funny little kitchen. I am going to ask Aunt Achsa—I have decided to call her that because she seems too old to be a cousin—to let me cook out on the Arabella. Mr. Dugald will not let Lavender cook on it for fear he will set the boat on fire. It would be funny to have a boat burn right in the water, but then I have read of ships that burned at sea. Mr. Dugald has fixed everything up real nice and he goes out a lot and draws. He says that as long as I know how to swim I can go out anytime with Lavender. It is certainly the most different thing I ever dreamed of doing and next best to sailing far away on a young boat. The boat rocked like a cradle and we laid down on the deck in the sun and it was a delightful sensation. I am going to take books out there and I will sometime take you, dear friend, and write in you as I rock upon the bosom of the ocean—though this is a bay it is ocean water.

“Next most exciting to the Arabella was going to the backside which is what they call the other side of the Cape the side that is on the outside on the map. We tramped over for Mr. Dugald says that is the only way to navigate on Cape Cod. It was not the least bit hot for there was such a lovely breeze and the road is hard and right through sand hills that looked awfully big and just have a little grass on them and funny little trees. Mr. Dugald told me that the heavy winds keep shifting the sand and that after ever and ever so many years the whole Cape will be moved and maybe was somewhere else a long time ago and the State of Massachusetts is planting a lot of pine trees to hold it where it is now and that the reason the trees look so small is that every fall and winter when the big storms come they blow the sand over them until they are almost buried. I suppose if one could dig down you would find a big tree. Mr. Dugald told me all this as we walked over the dunes. He told me how after one big storm years and years ago the school children went to school and found it buried under sand right up to the roof. I wish that would happen to my school. But that is how different this place is. Well, we finally came to a ridge of sand that was bigger and higher than any of the others so that it took my breath to climb it like the trail back of Cascade and then when I got to the top it was so beautiful that I felt hurt inside and felt afraid. Before me, dear friend, swept the endless ocean. And as far as eye could see there was naught but sand. And you seemed close enough to the blue in the sky to touch it. You felt it the way you do the furnace when you go into the furnace room. And not a living being anywhere around, except us. And the beach is the loveliest beach I ever dreamed of—and you see it is the first real beach I have ever seen. It is wide and hard and part of it is wet where the big waves roll in and it moans beautifully. And there are lots of little funny flowers, like wild sweet peas, and pretty grasses grow on it and the sand up away from the water is white and glistens like jewels. I did not like to go near the water at first for the waves looked like angry monsters with tossing white manes tearing in at me with their arms raised to clutch me. But I kept close to Mr. Dugald who sometimes goes in swimming right in the breakers. And he pointed out the Coast Guard Station which was a cute little white house nestled in the sand dunes and he told me there was a man up in the square tower who was watching us and every move we made and if a wave did catch us he’d give the alarm and a lifeguard would dash out in a minute and save us. That would be very exciting but it did not tempt me. We picked up beautiful shells on the beach and I poked a horrid jelly fish and then we visited the Station where the men were very nice and showed us everything. The big man who is Commander Nelson told us how the sand when it blows against the windows of the house turns the glass all funny and frosted so that you cannot see out of it, and he said they have to keep putting in new glass every few days. And Mr. Dugald told me as we walked back how the men from the Coast Guard Stations patrol the shores of our country so that there is not a bit of our seacoast that is not guarded. One starts out from one station and meets another from another station and they exchange little checks which they take back so that their commanders know they have been all the way. Is it not a lovely feeling to think that as we sleep someone is watching our shores by night? Only I wonder how if there are any pirates, and Captain Davies said there still were, they can land anywhere without one of these guards seeing them. Maybe they wait until the watchmen start back with their checks.

“I must now tell you of my new acquaintances.

“First there is Aunt Achsa and Lavender of whom I have written. Second, there is the boarder. His name is Dugald Allan which I think is a perfectly lovely name. I am sorry to say he is an artist. I would have preferred that he had been a fisherman. When I told him that he laughed very hard. He laughs at me a great deal which I did not like at first and then I decided it is his nature and he cannot help it. He spends every summer with Aunt Achsa and says he is her half-nephew. Even though he gave the Arabella to Lavender I think he must be a poor artist because his clothes look old and have no style. He knows everyone and everyone calls him Dug. At first I thought it was horrid visiting a relative who kept boarders but afterwards I learned that here in Provincetown someone else lives in nearly all the houses besides the families, because they are not nearly enough houses for all the people who want to come to Provincetown. Mr. Dugald says that artists and poets and musicians come here from all over the world for the inspiration. I cannot tell the men artists from the fishermen for they wear things like sailors but the women artists all wear big hats and smocks all covered with paint. I am sure I saw a poet yesterday and I do not know what a musician would look like and Mr. Dugald said he did not know, either. That was one of the times when he laughed. But I said then and repeat now that there are enough other people around so that I do not mind the artists and poets.

“Third of my acquaintance is Captain Phin Davies. Aunt Achsa says he is very rich, that he was smart enough to buy up a lot of fishing boats and a storage house of his own and he could laugh at the Boston and New York people. But he used to sail a boat like Cousin Zeke’s which is what they call my relative. And he is very, very nice and invited me to go to Wellfleet and visit him and his wife and Aunt Achsa says she does not see no harm in my going. Aunt Achsa’s grammar is so bad that I blush to write it here.

“Fourth, Martie Calkins who is Mrs. Eph Calkins’ granddaughter and lives in the house next to Aunt Achsa’s. She is very different from the girls I know at school and Nancy would shudder if she saw her for Nancy is so sensitive, but then this is not Middletown and I am sensitive like Nancy and Mart is just my age and she can go out on the Arabella with us, though she told me confidentially that her grandmother thought Achsa Green stark daffy to trust Lavender out of her sight. Mart does not think about Lavender the way Mr. Dugald taught me to think. She can tell the grandest stories of the sea because her father and grandfather were fishermen who went out on big boats and her father was lost at sea so she is an aristocrat, too. She is going to show me how to dig clams tomorrow. And we are going to the moving pictures on Saturday. It seems very queer and like home to have moving pictures here but Mr. Dugald says they are like the poor. To quote him exactly, ‘Alas, the movies—like the poor, we have always with us!’ He says very queer things.

“Fifth, Miss Letitia Vine, a most picturesque character. I quoted Mr. Dugald then for I did not know people could be picturesque. No one but Miss Letty herself knows how old she is and she won’t tell. Aunt Achsa said she paid to have the date and year of her mother’s death scratched off her tombstone so folks couldn’t figure out her age. But she is very cultured and is a music teacher, only a funny one. She drives all over this part of the Cape and gives music lessons. She has done it for years and years, Aunt Achsa calculates she has worn out three horses teaching folks their notes. She stays in one town two or three days sleeping round with her pupils and then hitches up and drives to the next. She scorns a Ford. Mr. Dugald says he’s thankful for that for a Ford would spoil the most perfect thing on the Cape. She looks like the figurehead of a ship (again quoting Mr. Dugald) and she isn’t afraid of man or beast. She and Mr. Dugald are very good friends and Mr. Dugald took me there to call and I