The Lightning Conductor Discovers America Part 20

Caspian tries to be like that, but it seems an imitation. With the real ones it is true, and not for effect.

It seems that our family must be very old, because everybody, even these grandest ones, are kind to us, and think it is great fun that we keep a hotel. Molly and Jack they like of course, because M. and J. are "great swells."

Now, cherie, I must stop, and go for a walk with them. Molly calls it a "potter." But you will not know what that word means!

A hundred wishes and loves! Your

PATRICE.

XX

NIGHT LETTER TELEGRAM FROM PETER STORM TO JAMES STRICKLAND

_New London._

Just missed getting into sc.r.a.pe here. Saved by presence of mind. You have heard me speak of Ipanoff. Met him accidentally. He has relatives seeing America, awaiting them New London; found me instead. Shall stay to-morrow, letting my party go on. Meet Fall River by train. Couldn't stand Newport. Writing you on business.

P. S.

XXI

MOLLY WINSTON TO MERCeDES LANE

_A Gorgeous Hotel in dear old Boston._

BEST MERCeDES:

I am thrilled with New England! It has got into my blood, which is of the south. Why do we--you and I and the rest of us--dash over to Europe before we're old enough to see much of and appreciate our own country?

Still, I'm thankful we did, or we shouldn't have met Jack or Monty.

Are you tired of travelling with me and my Lightning Conductor? You said you couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't be; so if you've changed your mind, you've brought this on yourself.

I didn't quite realize, even with my first warm glow of admiration, all that New England meant, in a _concrete_ way. I realized the beauty, the individual charm, the historic interest, but now I'm beginning to put them together in a bouquet where one flower sets off another. Oh, dear, I wish that not _quite_ so many things had happened before our day! It would have been easier to sort them about a hundred and fifty years ago.

Yet, a hundred and fifty years ago there wouldn't have been an Emerson, a Th.o.r.eau, a Hawthorne, a Longfellow, a Whittier, a Bryant, a Lowell, or an Oliver Wendell Holmes, to say nothing of half a dozen others I'm too excited to recall at the moment. It would have been sad to come here before they lived and embroidered the tapestry of life with their lovely thoughts--almost the difference between travelling on a gray day and in clear suns.h.i.+ne. For New England belongs to these philosophers and poets just as much as it belongs to the Indians and Puritans and Soldiers of the Revolution.

Now you see what my mood is! I think Jack has inspired it, for he can quote most of the New England writers, if not by the yard at least by the _inch_. He says he used to learn their wit and wisdom to repeat "at his mother's knee." I shouldn't have supposed Lady Brightelmston's knee capable of it; but one never knows!

The last time I wrote you was at New London. I posted the letter at Groton, I remember, because I was thinking so hard of "The Peter Storm Mystery" that everything else went out of my head. My dear, _he stayed behind_, with his Russian friend, leaving Pat to the mercy of Caspian!

You have to cross by ferry to get to Groton--old Fort Griswold--and the New London side is _too_ amusing. Practically all the boy population of America seemed to be there to see us off. They had come on purpose to tell motorists what to do and whither to proceed, thus extracting dimes in grat.i.tude or blackmail. Good gracious! If we tried to do half the things they advised, nay, insisted on, we'd be as busy as bees the rest of our lives or else go mad! I can tell you we were thankful to escape on to the charming, peaceful road we found after the ferry had shed us on the other side. Soon we turned off on to a rough short cut; but it was fascinating, too, and would have been like scenery on the Crinan Ca.n.a.l if it hadn't been still more like itself. The hydrangeas growing in the gardens were marvellous, great trees of them, with different shaped flowers from ordinary human hydrangeas, flowers like huge bunches of white grapes seen from a distance. The flat blue and pink kind prefer to grow close by the sh.o.r.e. There was another darling tree--one on every lawn nearly--Rose of Sharon. Do you know it? The name alone makes Jack glad he came to America. And then, the colour of the marshes!--crimson and orange-gold, with streaks of emerald. Where there weren't marshes, the meadows were white with Queen Anne's lace. She must have sent a lot of it to America! Tiger lilies grew wild, dazzling colonies of them, and from gray rocks ferns spurted and showered. Isn't it charming that a river called the Mystic should run, or, rather, gently dawdle, through a world like this? Its mother is the Sound; and perhaps because it's very historic, it justified its dignity by leading us out of this flowery fairyland, past stern, faded farmhouses to a wide country of rolling downs, bathed in silver light--downs whose sides were spread with forests like dark tracts of shadow.

We pa.s.sed through Westerly of the granite quarries, and suddenly we realized that we were in Rhode Island. Don't you like the name "Watch Hill?" I do. And I liked the place, which "summer people" love. But all the neighbourhood is enchanting. It doesn't matter _where_ you stay! I never saw so many flowers, wild and tame: tame hydrangeas, wild grapes, wild spirea and bayberry, half-tamed, worried-looking sunflowers, with so much sun they don't know which way to turn. All this within sight of the Sound, with islands and necks of blue-green land like a door ajar to the ocean.

It was a fine drive, after Wakefield, along the Narragansett front, the most countrylike road imaginable, with wild shrubbery on either side, and then the most ultra-civilized hotels, an army of them on parade, with the sea for their drill sergeant.

At Saunderstown we took ferry for Newport--a double ferry, but neither journey was long. A mist floated over the water like the ghost of the Queen Anne lace we had pa.s.sed; but we had glimpses of Fort Greble and Fort Adams. Oh, there's _heaps_ to see at Newport besides the haunts of the Four Hundred! We landed at last in a dear old town with quaint but rich-looking houses of retired sea captains and other comfortable folk who simply don't exist for the eyes of Society, though they no doubt have a background crowded with brave ancestors. Jack and I meant to stop at a nice little hotel which exists apologetically; but friends of Larry's insisted on our staying with them. We should have thought up some excuse to refuse (not that we'd _fib_: but it's fair to economize truth at times!) if Pat hadn't begged us to accept. You see, Ed Caspian was invited as her fiance, and Mrs. Shuster as Larry's, and there was to be a dinner in honour of the two couples. The poor child, a lamb led to the slaughter, seemed to think that the altar of sacrifice would be more tolerable if we were present to scatter rosemary and rue upon it. We consented, of course. But I felt quite hard toward Peter Storm, who had, in a way, been appointed by Jack and himself as her unofficial guardian in the Grayles-Grice, and had apparently _failed_ her by stopping behind with his Russian.

We were able to relieve the strain a little by taking the girl out for walks in the old town, a part of Newport most interesting to us, least interesting to Caspian. Dear Father brought me once to Newport to visit people in a house which called itself a cottage and looked like a castle, but that was when I was seventeen, in a summer holiday in the midst of school life. I had the intense ambition of a flapper to be a debutante; and because I envied girls who were "out" I did all I could to usurp their prerogatives by flirting and "dressing up." I didn't care a rap for anything or anybody over thirty. The Casino, the Yacht Club, Bellevue Avenue for shopping or driving, Bailey's Beach, that haven for any modern Venus to rise from the foam if she has a lovely bathing dress, the twelve-mile Ocean Drive in all its luxury and millionairish beauty--these represented Newport for me; and I _bet_ they'd have meant the same for you in your salad days! They're still great fun, and perfectly delightful and almost unique, it is true, but now I feel, with Jack, the "call of the past." The Old Stone Mill, with its contradictory histories, is more fascinating than the Casino. I could get quite hot and angry arguing with any one who disputes the fact--_fact_, I say!--that this extraordinary gray-stone tower draped with creepers and backed with trees is the memorial of a Viking's wife. Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armour" was one of those poems which Lady Brighthelmston's knee taught to Jack. "Speak, speak, thou fearful guest!" I had forgotten, I'm ashamed to say, but Jack has reminded me about the figure in "rude armour drest" which appeared when they took away a wall. I just won't have my Viking Tower torn out of the eleventh century and stuck into the seventeenth. So there! I don't see why it isn't right to believe the nicest things in the past of a country instead of the worst, as you must do with a woman, if you're not a cat!

Pat and I are going to read Fenimore Cooper's "Red Rover" because the scenes are laid in this neighbourhood; at least I am going to read it, and Pat will if Caspian gives her a chance to do anything intelligent in future. He won't if he can help it, I'm sure! You ought to have seen the boiled codfish look in his eyes when Pat, arriving at Moon Pond after an excursion with us, tried to entertain him by talking of Matthew Perry building the first steam vessel in the American Navy and arranging a treaty that opened the door of j.a.pan to the west! There's a monument to him in the park, and we'd been looking at it.

Well, in spite of Fate, I think the child enjoyed her Newport days, if not her Newport evenings, and indeed, she seemed to have the feeling that they were s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaws of the said ruthless lady. We mooned about among the entirely charming and more or less famous houses, in what ought to be called Oldport, a very, very important place for more than a hundred years before a tidal wave of fas.h.i.+on swept over it about the middle of the eighteenth century: great families coming in their own schooners, with their servants and horses, from Charleston and Savannah. You can't think of the exciting, historic things we found out in our "moonings": history on the sea, even before Captain Kidd's privateers were being chased along the sh.o.r.e, for Rhode Island always "loved to fight if she could fight on the sea"; history on land, from the time that the inhabitants were abandoning their houses in fear of Sir Henry Clinton and the British fleet, up to these brilliant days of Astors and Belmonts and Vanderbilts. Jack and I got so resigned to visiting Larry's pleasant friends that we should have been sorry to leave if it hadn't been for our curiosity to see "what would happen next" in the Peter affair.

The last thing we did was to get up with the sun and start out for an excursion to the Forty Steps. But, after all, Jack was too lame to manage them. He was very cut up, but his sense of humour came to the rescue as usual, and he was showing a brave face again when we started off in the motor once more, for Fall River--and beyond. Then, if not before, we should have realized what a marvellous frame Newport has. I suppose in some ways no other spot is equal to it. Even Jack says that, and there are few of the great show places of the world he hasn't seen.

As a send-off, we gave ourselves a detour and said good-bye to the Ocean Drive. The fleet, which had been visiting for several days, was steaming off to sea. We looked across walls of blue hydrangeas and "rosa rugosa"

hung with berries like lumps of coral, out to the gray s.h.i.+ps speeding fast through cataracts of sapphire spray. It was a wonderful sight and a wonderful day! The morning sun seemed to paint the rocks purple and turn the high spurting surf to fountains of diamonds. It lit the young gold of maple trees, and the delicate crysophrase green of weeping beeches that sweep the lawns along the twelve-mile drive (consoled Niobes weeping only happy tears!) and threw ladders of light down to the marshes. You will think I am always writing you about marshes. But these are super-marshes. If there are marshes by the Sea of Gla.s.s they must be like these. They are so full of faded rainbows that their colour seems to drain into the crystal veins of water which wind into them from inlets of the sea, and turn the crystal into deep-dyed amethysts.

As we went on along the sh.o.r.e, the tiny waves ruffled under our eyes like frills of lace on a baby's baptismal dress. The sea became a wide river with dreamland visioned on the other side. Oh, what a contrast to all the beauty of the "Peaceful Isle" and its surroundings to dash into Fall River! Here and there is a house, or a charming name of a street, to tell that it was once a pleasant old village like other New England villages, but Commerce has sacked it of all that is beautiful--or, if it has left anything by mistake, we didn't see it. The ugly, work-marred town smote us like a blow in the face, and yet we saw that it has its own fierce, flaunting interest. I shall never again think of a Fall River boat as a restful thing. A Fall River boat was all I knew of Fall River before, except that a big Revolutionary battle was fought there.

Now a battle between Labour and Capital is ceaselessly going on. It was a joy--a selfish joy, perhaps--to spin out of the town limits and come into Devons.h.i.+re. Really, it _was_ Devons.h.i.+re--Devons.h.i.+re in look and in the names of places. What of Taunton, for instance? So we flew on to Boston, through a series of exquisite parks such as surely no other city in the world can have for a frame.

[Ill.u.s.tration: map]*

There was just one attractive feature about Fall River for us: not the Picture Palaces, of which there must be about a million; not the coloured posters of the Azores, put up to please the homesick Portuguese labourers, but the reappearance of Peter Storm. Frankly, dearest, I had been afraid in my inmost heart that the Mystery was going to close round Peter like a dark cloud, hiding him from our sight forever. Caspian had perhaps hoped that this might be the case. But Peter had said that he would be found standing at the corner of Elm Street (there wasn't an elm in it, or any other tree), and there he was, though we were early at the rendezvous rather than late.

I forgot to tell you that Pat started out from Newport in our car, the bride and bridegroom squeezing into the Grayles-Grice. I'd accused the girl of not looking well--a stupidity of which I should never be capable if I hadn't an object to gain--and she had owned to a slight headache. I said that I had some wonderful pillules that I could give her; but I must administer them myself, and they must be taken every half-hour. Of course there was nothing for it but she must come to us; and she brightened visibly with every mile, though whether owing to the pillules or the increasing nearness of Fall River, I can't say, and wouldn't if I could.

Having disposed of the honeymooners, there was room in our car for Peter. Jack and I had manoeuvred (by taking a short cut Jack found on a map) to reach Elm Street first; so we did a sort of Sabine business reversed: s.n.a.t.c.hed up Peter and dashed on. I could almost _hear_ Ed Caspian gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth in the G.-G. just behind. It was a sound like something wrong with the gear.

Boston you perhaps know more about than I do, at any rate from books.

But you would like to see Jack here--and Monty with him, of course: two wounded heroes enjoying a well-earned repose, as many a wounded hero has enjoyed in other days. He--Jack--wonders if the famous Tea is lying at the bottom of the harbour still, in hermetically sealed tins, and whether it improves with age.

I broke it to you with the top of my letter that we're in a perfectly gorgeous hotel. Jack and I have a suite which would be good enough for a king and queen. He was determined that we'd "do ourselves well," as we are to stay several days, running out to Plymouth and so on, and running back. We've been here now only one night and a morning, but already our sitting-room looks, in some ways, as if we'd taken it for life. Flowers, of course! Jack always buys me flowers; and books--books--books: Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and some glorified guides in volume form. I said, "Are we to carry all these in the car? We shall be boiling over with books, swamped with books, buried under books as Tarpeia was under the s.h.i.+elds and bracelets!" But Jack had made his plans. They will be sent home to Awepesha by the hotel people when we go, and we are to have the comfort of them here. As n.o.body else will have any books, they'll offer Pat an excuse to drop in on us--Peter, too. Jack ought to give "penny readings," I think!

I haven't, by the way, got any satisfaction out of Peter. We are partners in the Caspian-Shuster plot, but _his_ plot he keeps to himself. I wonder what, from all I have told you, Mercedes, _you_ think of him?

In spite of everything, Jack and I believe that he's _all right_, and vaguely we look for a Great Surprise, though of what nature we cannot say. I wish it would come before we get into Aunt Mary-land. I begin to need something to brace me up!

Love! Ever your MOLLY.

XXII

MOLLY WINSTON TO MERCeDES LANE

_Still Boston._

DEAR ONE: