Come and Find Me

by Elizabeth Robins

Chinsegut, Hernando County, Florida
Jan. 20, 1906

My Dear F. B.:

I believe it to be commonly the practice of authors to write the dedication last. But I, being summoned by the laconic imperative of the Atlantic cable to exchange London for Florida, and being thereby arrested midway in what I have always thought of as your book, must needs recover some of the old impulse that you gave me to begin it, before I can go on.

I invoke you as I would a breath of your invigorating Yorkshire, for I am captive in a land of idleness—myself idlest of all the easy, time-squandering folk that are making believe to finish my house here upon the sunburnt hilltop.

This lodge in the wilderness, uplifted like an island above encompassing seas of green; this wind-swept, sun-steeped place, ought, perhaps (in spite of latitude and longitude), to give me back without your aid the picture and the feeling of the North. For the first word I set at the top of my page, though Indian, would not have been understanded of my ancient neighbors here. Not the Seminoles, the Alaskans gave us our name. I and another for whom it means home, pronounced it first to the rhythm of breakers beating on that wild Bering coast—in the midst of the pandemonium of the “farthest North” gold boom, we dreamed and planned the picture I look out upon this morning. It might not seem beautiful to you, yet, in spite of your wise warning, there have gone into my effort to make the dream come true the most precious things I had. Into this Chinsegut, as you know, went, amongst the rest, a great faith.

So that, however reminiscent of people or conditions long since passed away, however much of the spirit of the past is garnered here as living influence, or as debris and as ashes, these were for me infinitesimal affairs by comparison with the hope for the Future that made me turn deaf ears to your admonishing. For this was to be a place where my fellow-dreamer and I should not only rest, but having rested, work as never before. Our best and biggest room was to be called the Workroom.

But some strange spell has hitherto hung over that apartment and all the house, since even the white remodelers of the slave-built dwelling have found it easier to play than work here.

As if foreseeing that the added wing, new stable, and the rest, would take more months a-building than they would need weeks in other climes, our “workmen,” uneasy perhaps under the misnomer, organized themselves into a Musical Society. They would lay a brick or rap in a nail, and then, casting aside trowel or hammer, would catch up fiddle and bow, horn, or clarinet, trying (since walls had been known to fall at trumpet blast) whether these could be induced to rise to strains of “Dixie.” One of the band to whom I owe my not very sound roof, was at least a person of imagination, as I will make your ladyship admit, if the distractions here will give me leave to try. These are not solely the growling of saws, the scraping of planes and of fiddles. I find myself forever running to and fro like a child in some enchanted playground, wooed by fifty things at once—but not one of them has aught to do with books or with any aspect of the art of letters.

My distractions have to do with such toys as the joy of re-discovering old friends in all three kingdoms, from the forgotten beauty of palms standing sentinel-like in sand as white as meal, to the blue heron that goes sailing by to the lake at our feet. Or I am called early to see the delicate print of a deer’s foot that passed our very gate; or I must watch the sun caught at setting in the great ilex, and see the light spilling into the Spanish moss, soaking into the long draperies, till they seem to hold refulgence in solution. Or I must go and plan the hedge of roses round an old burying-ground on the place, or listen half a morning to a mocking-bird, or steal down in the dusk to my beloved copse and play eavesdropper to the sullen owl who pretends he doesn’t haunt the magnolia above the spring. Or I must leave my coveted place of shade on the north veranda and come to watch our friend, Mr. Tarrypin, creeping heavily by in the hot sun on his way (I grieve to tell you) to the soup tureen. (“Lawd, yes. Tarrypin? He jes de same es chick’n, Miss ’Lizbess—once he in de pot!”)

Even my interviews with the cook, elsewhere so summarily despatched, are here a thief of time. For our Peter, who learned his craft of the Cubans during the late war, is the most beguiling of conversationalists. In beautiful sky-blue, brass-buttoned clothes showing under a spotless apron, he stands, interlarding his promise to “do it Spanish style,” with legends learned of his mother who was born in the negro quarters here in those more sumptuous days when our hill was crowned with the finest orange grove in all Hernando. Peter will tell you, chuckling, that our great twelve by twelve-inch cypress beams that turn the edge of the white carpenters’ tools, were hand-hewn by his grandfather, and by that gallant woodman “tied and pinned” to frame the house before the “orange” days—when all cleared land was cotton field.