Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

To my surprise, he turned to the right along the crest of the last great dune above the tree-tops, then slid back, down an unbroken hill into the woods once more, and I felt the roof of a hut under my feet. Here was a hermitage, not on the path where wandering steps would ever find it, but hidden in this spot accessible only to those who knew the way.

The top of the low cabin hidden under the trees was half-buried in the sand of the dune behind it. We slid down off the roof and knocked at the front door. A colored man opened it cautiously, bowed gravely, and let us in. We found ourselves in a darkened room with five other persons, who were quietly waiting for us, sitting in a half-circle on the bare floor.

A colored man on Cape Cod is as exotic a growth as mistletoe. Where this one dark-skinned man had come from I could not guess; why he stayed was easier to imagine. His power as the representative of another race was as unquestioned as a white man’s is in an African jungle or a Chinese in Alaska. He was not so old as to have lost the use of his keenest faculties, nor so young as to under-estimate them. He was small of stature, with an intellectual face and quick-moving light-palmed hands. He wore a white tight-fitting jersey and high-turned corduroy trousers. The great toes of his bare feet were separated, like those of an ape. He seemed like a mixture of a cave-man and the motion-picture conception of a cave-man; as if, knowing the value of his picturesqueness, he not so much cultivated as accepted it. There were no chairs or tables; the bunk was covered with boughs and fastened to the wall, but there was a very capable-looking blue-flame oil-stove and also a phonograph. The windows on either side were shielded with curtains of yellow-batiked cheese-cloth that our host must have purloined from an art-student.

“He’s educated,” whispered the judge, motioning me to join the circle seated on the sandy floor.

“I can see that,” I answered.

The men who had met here were all matter-of-fact and uncompromisingly solid. One was a captain of a fishing-vessel, another a “gob” off one of our cruisers, a third I recognized as the proprietor of the “Bee-hive” general store. The other two were Portuguese. The store proprietor kept talking about having to get back at five to let “Will” go home for supper. The captain was garrulously explaining about other séances he had attended, better ones, which statement was heartily argued by the sailor-boy, who claimed he had attended them from Maine to Panama, and never found any one as good as this here colored man. One of the Portuguese kept asking over and over again, “Do you see anything new for me?” in a hopeless voice, and the other one continually urged him to “shut up.”

The medium began to speak.

“This is very unusual,” he said, “to give a séance by daylight. I only agreed to it to please our friend here of the navy, who has been an inspiration to me in his enthusiasm and who was most anxious to get into contact with his dear ones once more before he left us for foreign waters. I trust all will go well, as usual. You will pardon me while I darken the room.”

I was left gasping. He spoke with the accent of Harvard, in the manner of an English drawing-room. I had half-expected some African voodoo revelations. Now I did not know what to expect.

The judge smiled at me.