In Great Waters: Four Stories

by Thomas A. Janvier

Taking the planked tramway in preference to the rotten wooden sidewalks full of pitfalls, Maltham walked on briskly for a mile or so—his headache leaving him in the keen air—until the last of the little houses was passed. There the vast street suddenly dribbled off into a straggling sandy road, which wound through thickets of bushy white birch and a sparse growth of stunted pines. The tramway, along which he continued, went on through the brush in a straight line. The Point had narrowed to a couple of hundred yards. Through rifts in the tangle about him he could see heaps of storm-piled drift-wood scattered along the lake-side beach—on which the surf was pounding heavily. On the harbour side the beach was broken by inthrusts of sedgy swamp. Presently he came to a sandy open space in which, beside a weather-worn little wooden church, was a neglected graveyard that seemed to give the last touch of dreariness to that dismal solitude.

The graveyard was a waste of sand, save where bushy patches of birch had sprung up in it from wind-borne seeds. Swept by many storms, the sandy mounds were disappearing. Still marking the graves were a few shabby wooden crosses and a dozen or so of slanting or fallen wooden slabs. Once these short-lived monuments had been painted white and had borne legends in black lettering. But only a Swedish word or a Swedish name remained here and there legible—for the sun and the wind and the rain had been doing their erasing work steadily for years. One slab alone stood nearly upright and retained a few partly decipherable lines in English. But even on that Maltham could make out only the scattered words: "Sacred.... Ulrica.... Royal House of Sweden ... ever beloved ... of Major Calhoun Ashley," and a date that seemed to be 1879.

His headache had gone, but it had left him heavy and dejected. That fragmentary epitaph increased his sombreness. Even had he been in a cheerful mood he could not have failed to perceive the pathetic irony of it all. There was more than the ordinary cruelty of death and forgetfulness, he thought, about that grave so desolate of one who had been connected—it did not matter how—with a "royal house," and who was described in those almost illegible lines as "ever beloved." That was human nature down to the hard pan, he thought; and with a half-smile and a half-sigh over the fate of that poor dead Ulrica he turned away from the graveyard and walked on. Half-whimsically he wondered if he had reached the climax of the melancholy which brooded over that dreary sand spit. As he stated the case to himself, short of finding a man lying murdered among the birch-bushes it was not likely that he would strike anything able to raise that graveyard's hand!

The murdered man did not materialize, and the next out-of-the-way sight that he came across—when he had walked on past the dingy and forgotten-looking little church—was a big ramshackling wooden house of such pretentious absurdity that his first glimpse of it fairly made him laugh. Its square centre was a wooden tower of three stories, battlemented, flanked by two battlemented wings. A veranda ran along the lower floor, and above the veranda was a gallery. Some of the windows were boarded over; others had scraps of carpet stuck into their glassless gaps—and all had Venetian shutters (singularly at odds with the climate of that region) hanging dubiously and with many broken slats. The paint had weathered away, and bricks had fallen from the chimney-tops—a loss which gave to the queer structure, in conjunction with lapses in its wooden battlements, a sadly broken-crested air. As a whole, it suggested a badly done caricature of an old-fashioned Southern homestead—of which the essence of the caricature was finding it in that bleak Northern land.

III

Maltham had come to a full stop in front of this absurd dwelling, which was set a little back from the road in a dishevelled enclosure, and as he stood examining in an amused way its various eccentricities he became aware that from one of the lower windows a man was watching him.

This was disconcerting, and he turned to walk on. But before he had gone a dozen steps the front door opened and the man came outside. He was dressed in shabby grey clothes with a certain suggestion of a military cut about them; but in spite of his shabbiness he had the look of a gentleman. He was sixty, or thereabouts, and seemed to have been well set up when he was younger—before the slouch had settled on his shoulders and before he had taken on a good many unnecessary inches about his waist. From where he stood on the veranda he hailed Maltham cordially:

"Won't yo' come in, suh? I have obsehved youah smiles at my old house heah— No, no, yo' owe me no apology, suh," he went on quickly, as Maltham attempted a confused disclaimer. "Yo' ah quite justified in laughing, suh, at my foolish fancy—that went wrong mainly because the Yankee ca'pentah whom I employed to realize it was a hopelessly damned fool. But it was a creditable sentiment, suh, which led me to desiah to reproduce heah in godfo'saken Minnesotah my ancestral home in the grand old State of South Cahrolina—the house that my grandfatheh built theah and named Eutaw Castle, as I have named its pore successeh, because of the honorable paht he bo' in the battle of Eutaw Springs. The result, I admit, is a thing to laugh at, suh—but not the ideah. No, suh, not the ideah! But come in, suh, come in! The exterioh of Eutaw Castle may be a failuah; but within it, suh, yo' will find in this cold No'th'en region the genuine wahm hospitality of a true Southe'n home!"

Maltham perceived that the only apology which he could offer for laughing at this absurd house—the absurdity of which became rather pathetic, he thought, in view of its genesis—was to accept its owner's invitation to enter it. Acting on this conclusion, he turned into the enclosure—the gate, hanging loosely on a single hinge, was standing open—and mounted the veranda steps.