But why should he come like this, Tom? It isn’t like him not to let Doris, or anyone, know. Perhaps you’d better go to Boston and see him. Do you think there’s anything wrong.
— The whole thing is very queer. Do you think he suspects. Do you think we ought to say something to Doris.
— I think you’d better go to town and see him. Before anything worse happens. He ought not to come here, if that’s what he’s thinking of doing. I’m sure he suspects. It would hurt him too much to see it. It would be better if you talked to him.
— We’d better put off the picnic till next week. Too bad to disappoint the kids again, but it can’t be helped. It was queer to begin with that he let Doris come here alone, with the children, when he could perfectly well have come, too — his business was only an excuse. I think they had already quarreled about it.
They were talking about Father and Mother, and I went close to the partition, to listen, holding my breath; but the voices stopped, the door opened, and I heard Uncle Tom going down the stairs, and Aunt Norah pouring water out of the pitcher into the washbowl. No picnic at the Gurnett this week — the third time it had been postponed. Porper would probably cry when I told him, but instead Susan and I could take him down to the front beach and build villages out of shells, and show him the dead seal. In that little cleared place between the banks of eelgrass, flat and sandy at low tide, where the horseshoe crabs were. The new boy and girl, too, Warren and Gay, except that Gay was always crying, as when we had taken her to the log cabin in the pine woods and tried to make her undress. Had she told her mother and father about that, the little sneak.
— particularly the morning walk to the village, along the Point Road, past all the houses and windmills, the wild cherry trees and crab apples, to get the morning mail. The wooden windmills were the best, with their wings of fine white-painted slats, and the great wooden tanks at the top, and the strong girders of white-painted wood, and of these I couldn’t decide whether I preferred Daisy or Sunbeam. Of the metal ones, there were five Comets and three Aermotors, and our own Vulcan, the only three-legged one on the Point. They were all going busily in the east wind. The Tuppers had a special little shingled tower, with a red railing around the top, where Frank Tupper went with a telescope to watch the yacht races in the bay, but this I passed quickly, looking at the house and garden out of the tail of my eye, to see if Gwendolyn was there. Had she got the box of candy I had left on her porch for her, with the heart on it, and our initials. Would she laugh at me. Did I dare go in the afternoon to the drill of the Company at the Camp. Would she have told Frank about it, and would Frank say anything. When we were playing cross-tag I had caught her by her pigtail, and she had looked at me in a very queer way, half angry and half pleased, and then had refused to play any more. What was this about Father and Mother. Was it because she went sailing all the time with Uncle David, just like last year, and walks to the beach always at night after Porper and Susan had gone to bed. The stage passed me, coming from the morning train, the one named Priscilla, painted a bright yellow, with red wheels, and toothless Smiley driving the horses and saying “Giddup, giddup” out of the side of his mouth, spitting tobacco juice. I would be in plenty of time for the mail, in fact I would have time to go to the drugstore and have a chocolate milk shake at the marble fountain, which always smelled of vanilla. If it rained in the afternoon, we would play Gonko in the playhouse, and perhaps make some new racquets out of shingles. If it didn’t rain, I would go for a row in the dory, through the long bridge and up into the marsh channel towards Brant Rock and Marshfield, for the tide would be low, and I could explore the channels. If I got stuck, I could pretend to be just clam-digging, the way Uncle Tom always said the yachtsmen pretended to do when they got stuck on the mud flats in the bay. They always took pails and shovels with them in case they got stuck, and then rolled up their trousers and went digging, as if that was what they had come for. Or perhaps Uncle David would invite us out in his cabin motorboat, late in the afternoon, with Mother, and Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and that would be fun, except that I didn’t like Uncle David. I heard Molly saying to Margaret in their room when they were going to bed that he was always drunk. Did that mean falling down. I had never seen him fall down. But I had seen bottles under the bunk in the cabin of the motorboat several times and he had bottles in his room downstairs, on the table under the row of dried and mounted seaweeds, which Uncle Tom and I had put there the year before.
— and beyond the golf links, where I always left the bicycle path, paved with broken clamshells, to walk along the edge of the course, among the bayberry bushes and cherry trees, hoping for lost golf balls, prodding in the poison-ivy with a stick, beyond this the boarding house kept by old Mrs. Soule, where we had stayed last year and the year before, with the hen houses at the back, and the little sandy-rutted road which led down to the cove and the stone dyke where beach plums grew. The floors were painted gray, with white speckles, the whole house had a marine smell like a ship, conch shells lined the path and stood against the doors, and on the lawn, among the croquet wickets, I had found four-leaved clovers. Molly Soule always sat alone in the swing, large-eyed, pallid, her thin little hands around the ropes, looking sadly at us, because we never played with her. Nobody ever played with her, because her name was the same as her mother’s, and she had no father. She was always hanging about and watching us from a little distance, and would run away and cry if we said anything to her, especially the Sanford boy, who asked her so many times what her name was. This was where I played baseball with Father in the evening, or ran races with him from one telephone pole to another. Was it true that he was coming again this year. Why was it that this year we were staying with Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and Uncle David, instead of at the Soules’. Though it was nice, particularly as Uncle Tom knew so much about the wild flowers, and had that nice little tin cylinder to bring back the flowers in, the one he had brought all the way from Switzerland a long while ago. It hung over his shoulder on a strap, and we had found swamp pink in the marsh near Pembroke woods, and arrowhead, and ghost-flower. Jewelweed, on the way to the Standish Monument, pickerel weed, and buttonbush. If only he could go more often — we already had more than fifty kinds, pressed in the blank book, it would be easy to get a hundred before the summer was over. Why was he so thin, and his knees so funny, and he always wore that funny yachting cap with the green vizor, his ears sticking out at the sides, walking in his bathing suit over the humped grass to the Point with the rowlocks jingling in his hand. I said to him that I thought I was getting fatter. He gave that nice little chuckle and said, No danger, Andy. Why was it he and Uncle David had never learned to swim properly—
— when we got to the oak woods we decided after all to go to the pine woods instead, because the oak woods were smaller and closer together, there were no logs to build with, and no room anyway; so we took Warren and Gay with us and we sat in the houses of logs while it rained, and only a few drops of rain came through the roofs, which we had made out of pine boughs. Susan was in one house with Warren, and Gay was in the other with me. I asked if we should take our clothes off and go to bed, pretending it was night, but she said no and began to cry. Warren and Susan had taken off theirs. Warren didn’t mind, but Gay said she wanted to go home, and I was afraid she would tell her mother. So I told her about the villages we made of shells on the beach, and the dead seal.