“ ‘Heat wave hits East,’ ” Betsey read. “ ‘Prostration record of all time. Mercury soaring.’ Well, that’s gone and torn our peaceful vacation, that has. By to-night we’ll have a stack of telegrams a yard high from city-sizzling friends who want to get cooled off.”
I sighed a little. “I know,” I said wearily. As a perennial and thoroughly experienced summer cottager on Cape Cod I sat back to await the inevitable deluge.
“You groan as though it were an earthquake or a flood instead of a few visitors, Snoodles,” Betsey remarked.
Now my name is not Snoodles, but Prudence Whitsby, and for at least fifteen years I have tried to make my niece drop that absurd name she gave me in her childhood. I feel it is far from appropriate for a respectable spinster of fifty like myself. But Betsey refuses.
“No one knows better than I what nuisances record-temperature guests can be,” I told her. “They simply will not be content to sit on the porch and let the cool ocean breezes blow over them. They want violent action every minute of the day and night, and by the time their sunburn has been treated and their aching muscles rubbed with liniment, I feel as though I needed a rest cure myself. And,” I added, “I don’t see how we can have more than two.”
“We can’t. And unless we ask a properly married couple, one will have to use the spare bed in my room. The only thing we overlooked in this place was the accommodation of company.”
For many summers we had cast covetous eyes on the cottage we now occupied. We would still be envying the Bentleys, who had rented it from time immemorial, if they had not taken it into their heads to see Europe under the guidance of Mr. Cook. We liked our quarters principally because they neither leaked nor squeaked, two virtues which summer vacationists will recognize as paramount. The ship carpenters who had built the place in their spare time declared that Noah himself couldn’t have wished for a tighter or a better substitute for the Ark.
We were entranced by the truly spacious living-room and its mammoth fireplace, guaranteed by the agent to draw perfectly. Undeniably the view was the best in town, for the cottage was perched on the flat top of a sandy, bayberry-bush-covered hill from which we could see the greater part of Cape Cod Bay. The Bentleys had bragged that on a clear day they could see Plymouth Rock and the outlines of Boston, but fruitless hours spent with binoculars compelled us to set that statement down to over-enthusiasm on their part.
The bathroom was appallingly palatial. There was an electric light system and an electric pump. To be sure, the lights would and did go out during stormy and sometimes when there was no sign of bad weather, but poking about with feebly flickering candles once in a while was much more preferable than having kerosene lamps all the time.
There was a tiny room for Olga, our cook; a garage more than ample for Betsey’s car, and all the space in the world for Ginger the cat to roam about. There were no near neighbors, a fact which delighted us, for many a summer vacation had been spoiled for us by small squalling children who raced under our windows at dawn. Perhaps a hundred and fifty feet away there was the Bentley childrens’ playhouse, now converted into a rough one-room cabin, but we knew it was too small to contain any howling youngsters. It could be seen only from the kitchen window as the agent demonstrated when we objected to it, and we accepted his word that its size and lack of improvements would make it hard to rent.
There were only two drawbacks. One was the absence of a telephone which forced us to make countless trips to town each day. The other was the lack of room Betsey had mentioned. We could have but two extra guests with any degree of comfort.
The sheaf of nine telegrams we straightway received presented us with a task.
“All the old standbys,” Betsey said as she ran through them. “The Poors and Jock Ellis and his unspeakable fiancee. I say, Snoodles, here’s one from John Kurth. And look. Another from Maida Waring. We haven’t heard from those two since they were divorced, have we?”
“No. I had the impression that he was in Sumatra or some such place and she was in Paris.”
“That may be,” said Betsey, “but these are both from Boston, if the Western Union isn’t being funny.”
“I should like to see them again, but I understand that they’ve been at swords’ points since they parted. The whole thing was a pity. They were two of the most amusing people we knew.”
“Well, that counts them out, unless we want to ask them separately later on. How’ll we choose?”
“The usual way will do as well as any.”
Betsey took a handful of matches and cut them up into irregular pieces. Then thrusting an end into each telegram so that only the tip protruded, she held them out to me fanwise, like a bridge hand.”
“Longer end wins every time. Draw by twos.”
I drew. Betsey turned over the winning blanks. “That’s a grand combination. John and Maida, no less. Well, we’ll flip a coin.”
We flipped a coin, but the same two were again paired.
“I declare,” said Betsey crossly, “it’s a conspiracy. The fates are against us. That means we’d keep on drawing those two till Kingdom Come. And we can’t possibly ask them if they’re such sworn enemies.”
She tossed the entire bunch into the fireplace. “Why, Betsey!” I was surprised.
“I don’t care. I’m sick of having all the waifs and strays and homeless thrust themselves on us. Let’s institute a reform. Let’s ask two people we really want to have down, two people who don’t fly into a rage at the sight of each other. Let’s let all the ex-husbands and ex-wives go hang.”
I wondered vaguely why we hadn’t done that very thing long before.
“Now,” Betsey continued, “take Dot Cram. If the mercury is soaring the way the papers say, that settlement of hers on the East Side of Old Manhattan must be pretty uncomfortable. But does she cry for heat relief like so many politicians crying for drought relief? She does not. So I shall ask her. You know yourself that she’s one of my more normal friends, and I haven’t seen her half a dozen times since we left college. What do you think?”
“If she can get away, I think it’s a fine plan.”
“Of course she can get away. You approve of her, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I like Dot, and she does have better than average manners for this day and age. I wonder if she still burbles with adjectives.”
“You mean,” Betsey imitated her, “My dear, it’s too simply precious and marvelous for words? That sort of lingering emphasis as though she were loath to let the next word out? I suppose she does, though it may conceivably have worn off. But I know she’s still addicted to dangly earrings, and her hair is just the same.”
“It always reminded me of a chrysanthemum.” Betsey laughed. “It is rather like one. At college she claimed that no one really liked her till they found out it was naturally blonde and a stranger to peroxide. Who are you going to have?”
“Whom,” I corrected her, “and don’t say ‘No one-they.’ It’s a mystery to me how you ever acquired an education without gleaning a little knowledge of the English language by the wayside.”
“Whom, then, teacher, do you intend to ask?”
“I’ve been thinking of Emma Manton. She hates the heat, and I don’t think she’s been away from Boston since Henry Edward died.”
“I can well see how she wouldn’t enjoy the heat How much does she weigh?”
“Something over two hundred and twenty-five pounds,” I answered. “The exact fraction escapes me.”
“Funny, but I can’t think of her as the wife, or rather the widow, of a clergyman. Not even of such an eccentric clergyman as Henry Edward. She might have been the wife of some robust Englishman out of Dickens, but not the other. She’s too addicted to tweeds and jumper suits.”
“She’ll probably bring some fresh catnip from her garden for Ginger,” I said thoughtfully.
“You old plotter! But she’ll play Russian Banque with you. And she’s met Dot other summers, and they get along together beautifully. And neither one of ’em will want to rip and tear and dash places all the time. Fancy Emma dashing anyway.” She snickered. “I’ll drive up and send ’em unrefusable telegrams.”
The heat-wave head-lines had appeared in Wednesday’s paper and our guests arrived Friday on the early morning train. They were promptly dragged off to the beach by Betsey.
From my steamer chair on the porch I could just see the girls on the outer raft. Despite the crowd, holiday size on a common week-day morning, Emma’s large black-stockinged legs were exceedingly visible as they protruded from beneath the broad green stripes of my own favorite beach umbrella.
I picked up my book, the Lipstick Murderer, and prepared to revel with that doughty detective, Wyncheon Woodruff, until luncheon time. But Bill Porter’s voice interrupted me as I was gravely considering the value of a strand of red hair as a possible clue.
“Is it blood and thunder, Snoodles, or gin and sawdust? From the title it might be either.”
Bill Porter has used my frivolous nickname as long as Betsey, and upon him as upon my niece, persuasion has no effect.
“You know perfectly well,” I told him, “that I read mystery stories for the one and simple reason that they exercise my wits. I fail to get any stimulus out of these modern novels full of sordid reminiscences and biological details.”
“Hooey,” said Bill inelegantly. “Just as if you didn’t swipe my entire stock of Old Sleuth in days gone by and force me to read Trollope or something equally wordy. You said you did it to make me improve my mind, but I always thought you wanted them yourself. Now I’m sure of it. Think,” he sighed as though he were in great pain, “think of your reading that vulgar low-brow volume while a Dale Sanborn masterpiece sits cooling its heels by your elbow.” He helped himself to an apple turnover from the plateful Olga had thoughtfully left on the porch.
“Oily,” he added with his mouth full. “Very oily.”
“Olga said that they were particularly good to-day.”
“My dear and worthy Snoodles, I am not referring to these toothsome pastries, and you know it. I refer to that Sanborn gent, who is distinctly oily. How’d he ever land in the town?”
“I’ve wondered at it myself. He told me he thought it would be a good place to rest in before starting another book. What’s the name of the purple-covered thing on the table? Reverence. . Well, that is his latest effort, not available to the general public till next month sometime. We were formally presented with it last night. But whatever his reason for coming, Bill, he has made up his mind to stay.”
“That so? Where?”
“He’s taken the cabin for the rest of the season. He moved in, bag and baggage, this morning. I should have thought the place was too rough for such a fastidious soul, but he pronounced it enchanting.”
Bill made a wry face. “That may be a good two-dollar word, but I know darn few men who’d pronounce that shack enchanting. He’s a crazy sort of fellow.”
“Crazy?”
“Well,” Bill wound himself around a footstool. “Peculiar. He let slip the fact that he went to Harvard, but when I picked him up and asked his year, he hedged like fury. It took a good five minutes of my best Yankee pumping to find out that he was the class of ’20. Just for fun I looked him up in an old register at home, but I couldn’t find his name in it. Maybe he went incog., like a Student Prince. Maybe he is a Student Prince anyway. He’s got all the elements. Looks a little foreign and condescending. Say, do you think he’s falling for our Betsey?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know for sure. Numerous young men have fallen in love with Betsey at one time and another, and he’s shown some of the symptoms. Of course he didn’t decide to stay here till after he met her. But the only real peculiarity I’ve noticed in him is his tendency to say ‘Thank-you’ in one syllable, as though it were a thing you played billiards with.”
Bill chuckled. “I do hope he isn’t after Betsey. I always had a sneaking feeling that I’d like to marry the gal myself. Would you mind awfully having the scion of the Porter millions for a nephew-in-law?”
“On the contrary, I think I should like it.”
As a matter of fact I had always intended Bill to marry Betsey. Not because of the Porter money, for Betsey had enough of her own, but rather in spite of it. As Bill once remarked, it wasn’t his fault that his father turned the family carriage business into a prosperous automobile company.
“But would Betsey mind, do you think? At the moment she thinks I’m a wastrel of the worst type. She even has some fantastic notion about my going to work. Why,” he took another turnover, “why should I go to work?”
The question was rhetorical. There was no earthly reason why Bill Porter should work. His older brother Jimmy has carried off the business honors of the family since Porter, Senior, died, and Bill has always acknowledged his own incompetence as a business man.
“If,” he went on, “I got myself a job with the Porter outfit, Jimmy would put me to work balancing ledgers or filing blotters. And there are plenty of needy individuals in this world who can balance ledgers or file blotters better than I could hope to in a million years. And now that I’m a selectman and on the school committee I find enough to do right here in the town. My taxes swell the local coffers and make for better roads and things. In the city they wouldn’t even repair an aged cobblestone.”
“If she wants you to go to work,” I soothed him, “it’s because she thinks about your future and that means she’s interested, at least.”
“Maybe that’s so. I never thought of it in that light. I’ve been Billy the boy companion so long that I’m dubious of her ever thinking of me as Billy the fond husband. Besides, girls don’t want to marry people they know as well as Betsey knows me. She knows how I look when I haven’t had a shave and how I like my eggs cooked and everything else.”
He turned and looked morosely over the bay. The brilliant July sun flashed over the tiny waves as the tide slid unobtrusively in the harbor. An occasional squawking gull made a brief white dot on the sky of the Cape’s own particular blue. The gilt cupola of the house Grandfather Porter had built glittered from the left arm of the bay. Over to the right a group of town boys were diving from the dilapidated wharf that had once been the pride of the town. The oyster-shell lane that led from the cottage down the hill past the tennis courts shone like a piece of white satin ribbon. I remembered that Betsey’s impractical underclothing needed new straps. Beyond the road was the sandy strip where the natives and summer people alike made splotches of bright color.
“There’s Sanborn now,” Bill said suddenly. “Talking with Betsey and your visitors down by the bath house. I saw Dot and Mrs. Manton at the station this morning. Dot looked tired.”
“She says New York is simply a boiling steaming cauldron.”
Bill laughed. “You know, the more I look at your friend Emma the more she reminds me of that mammoth bronze Buddha, the resigned one in Japan somewhere. It’s fifty feet high and about double that in girth.”
“You say she’s like a Buddha and Betsey says she’s like the wife of some one out of Dickens.”
“She’s a combination of both. Did you ever read any of Sanborn’s books, Snoodles?”
“Not exactly. I started one of them once. That one they called The Greatest Expost of Married Life in America. It was all about a man—no; about a girl who loved a man who was married to a girl—I think this is straight—who loved a man who loved the first mentioned girl. It confused me to such an extent that I left off on page forty. It was a little nasty, too. I am not convinced that his characters bear any resemblance to human beings, though I am given to understand that he takes his stories from life.”
“Most authors,” Bill commented, “love to call their works the creation of a fertile imagination. I had an idea that it was a law of the author’s union or something to disclaim any connection with real life at all.”
“So did I. But he gloats over the fact that his tales are true. I haven’t tackled the new one yet. I haven’t had time, but I very much doubt whether I read it at all. I’m sure that the Lipstick Murderer is vastly more entertaining.”
“Better not let your niece hear any such heresy. She thinks he’s got Dreiser and those lads all sewed up in a sack.” He grinned.
Except when he grins, no one would accuse Bill Porter of being good-looking. For one thing, his nose is far too hawk-like and his ears protrude more than is permissible for masculine beauty. He has the Porter face, too, which my father used to describe as being double-breasted in shape. There is a long scar on his forehead where an enthusiastic hockey opponent thrust several inches of skate. But when Bill grins, one forgets these details and sees only that his eyes are gray and honest and his chin is firm.
His ensemble of dungarees and a faded blue shirt were not what one expects to find the well-dressed man wearing. Dale Sanborn, I reflected, would probably not care to be seen in Bill’s outfit at the proverbial dog-fight. Sanborn was always so perfectly dressed.
Bill rose from the stool as Betsey came up on the porch with Dot and Emma bringing up the rear.
“The water was too perfectly gorgeous, Miss Prudence,” Dot’s earrings jangled as she bobbed her head to emphasize her statement. “Wasn’t it just, Mrs. Manton? Wasn’t it absolutely divine? And why didn’t you tell me that Dale Sanborn was here? I thought he was out on Long Island, or some other island.”
“I didn’t know you knew him,” I said mildly. Almost any remark seems mild after listening to Dot flow on.
“But I do, really I do. And I think it’s too utterly splendid to find him down here.”
“If you have anything,” Emma interrupted, “that I could read, I think I’ll take it up-stairs and browse till luncheon.”
She looked at the collection on the table.
“Take your choice,” I said.
“Don’t you have anything but murders?” She asked plaintively. “Haven’t you anything in a calm restful story where the hero and the heroine end up happily in each other’s arms?”
“Betsey goes in for the moderns and I specialize in murder,” I said. “But here’s Dale Sanborn’s latest. I don’t know what it’s about, but I feel sure it’s nothing so commonplace as murder. And it’s autographed.”
“I’ll take it.” She stopped at the threshold. “Is lunch at one?”
“At two. It’s dinner to-day because Olga has the afternoon and evening off instead of Thursday. It’s inconvenient, but we have a pick-up supper. You can browse over Mr. Sanborn for two hours or so.”
“Is it his very newest?” Dot inquired. “How too wonderful.”
“Simply precious,” Bill teased her. “You know, just too truly splendiferous. You girls want to get the mail? If you do, I’ll take you up to the post-office in Lucinda. To prove my sterling worth, I’ll even take you to the grocery and let you do the family marketing for Snoodles.”
“Oh!” Dot squealed. “Do you have Lucinda even now? Do you still drive it?”
“Even now,” Betsey answered for him. “And he still drives the thing, though one of these fine days it’s going to disintegrate like the One Hoss Shay. Jimmy sent him a sixteen-cylinder roadster this spring. It’s got a special body, silver fittings and a lalaque radiator ornament, a trick horn and Lord knows what all else. It’s even got a radio tucked away somewhere. But does he use it? He does nothing of the kind.”
“Why, Bill, how utterly insane of you! ”
“It scares me to death,” he confessed. “And the town would think I was putting on side. And Lucinda understands me like a brother.”
“She ought to,” Betsey returned; “you’ve certainly driven that wreck for ten years at least.”
“Eleven,” said Bill placidly. “If you’re bound to malign her, give the lass her due.”
“Eleven then. And do you expect us to ride with you in those awful clothes?”
Dot found a slicker in Lucinda’s capacious tool chest and together they forced Bill into it.
He put his yachting cap at a forty-five-degree angle, wrapped the slicker around him and struck an attitude.
“ ‘My own convenience counts as nil,—it is my duty and I will!’ ” he declaimed. “Be good, Snoodles, until this here Light Brigade gets back, when and if it does.”
They wedged themselves into Lucinda’s worn front seat and drove off to town.
I wondered as I watched them down the hill if there were a front seat in existence into which at least four modern young people could not wedge themselves. I doubted it. Picking up my thriller, I went back to the clue of the strand of red hair.