And that was all I wanted.
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST NIGHT AT FIVE PINES
IT was only a matter of two weeks before we rounded up our affairs in New York, packed the furniture that had sufficed us in the studio in the arcade, and took the long ride down the cape on the afternoon train from Boston. It was early October, and traffic was all going the other way. Hardly a passenger was left on the sooty little local when, after dark, it panted in exhausted and threw us out with the mail-bags, covered with sand and dust.
In August when I had been at Star Harbor many people had met the train, summer boarders and jeering natives had made of this an evening’s diversion; but now only the baggage-master was on duty. The ticket-office was closed, and the conductor picked up a lantern and walked away up the dark road. No one jumped to take our bags or to force upon us a ride in either a station-barge or a jitney, and after standing on the platform until we realized that we might wait there all night without any interference, we picked up our things and sought the front street.
If we had arrived only a little earlier, by daylight, I would have insisted on going right up to the House of the Five Pines, but now supper was an immediate necessity. No one can wax enthusiastic about even his first home on an empty stomach.
The “Sailor’s Rest” was lighted up, although the doors were shut and there were no longer any chairs out on the sidewalk. It was not the custom here for the hotel to hang expectant on the arrival of the train. At this season of the year only the townspeople came and went on the accommodation, and they hurried home to eat with their own families. If we had been a schooner, now, putting in at Long Wharf, our host might have laid a couple of extra plates for the captain and the mate. He was deeply engrossed in his winter’s occupation of cataloguing stamps, which he had spread out all over the desk.
“Can we get something to eat here?” asked Jasper.
“I don’t know,” replied Alf, without looking at us. Then he got up slowly, as if annoyed at the interruption, and tiptoed out from behind his barricade.
“Don’t breathe on them,” he warned us, and went out through a swinging door.
The room we were in was big and clean, with hanging oil-lamps, a new linoleum, and shining brass spittoons. We shook the cinders off our coats carefully, so as not to blow away any of the postage-stamps, and sank down in two chairs. I had expected Jasper to say something caustic, but his writer’s sense had begun to reassert itself and he was sniffing the air like a hound. I saw that I had been right in bringing him up here.