XXVI MOLLY WINSTON TO MERCEDES LANE

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Bretton Woods.

Dearest Girl:

I am positively afraid to write you, lest you and Monty think me a Beast for harrowing up your feelings about Peter Storm and the book of photographs, and Aunt Mary's garret, the way I did, and then letting you down with a dull thud.

Jack says it was cruelty to animals (he doesn't state what kind) to have told you anything, as I couldn't tell you all. But I just got going, and couldn't bear to stop till I had to!

We've travelled such a long way now, since Wenham, that I can't describe all the places to you as I generally do in my letters, and, besides, it might make you even more cross with me than you are already, to read on and on, hoping for some startling development about the Stormy Petrel, and find nothing but scenery. However, I've kept a diary to enclose in this, which you can read or not, as you like. If you do, you won't be buoyed up with false expectations.

About Peter: as the war correspondents say, "We may look for great events in the course of the next few weeks."

About Pat: she is still engaged to Ed Caspian, but I am looking for great events in that direction also. The only trouble is, one can't tell with her which way the wind will blow. If Caspian gets into deep water, she may feel—oh, well, we must pray that things will shape themselves just right all round.

YORK A bit of the rock-bound Maine coast

About Larry: I don't think I'd much care if it weren't for Pat. For a perfectly fascinating human creature he is the most selfish pig I ever met, and for a selfish pig he is the most charming being! He has certainly tried Lily's patience to the breaking point, but it hasn't broken, and seems warranted not to break. Sometimes I've thought that he wanted to force the woman to throw him over, then I've changed my mind and decided that he doesn't flirt for a motive. He simply can't help it. And if the fleshpots of Egypt can only be his, mixed with a diet of orange blossoms, I verily believe he'll take them together.

Ever your affectionate and apologetic,

Molly of the Guilty Secret.

MOLLY'S DIARY FOR MERCÉDES

From Wenham to Bretton Woods

Jack said at Ipswich that one ought to have a guide-catcher on one's automobile, like a cowcatcher on an engine. The air was dark with would-be guides, though it's a beautiful town to get lost in. We came to it from Wenham (where I ought to have mentioned the polo, Jack wouldn't have forgotten) along a dream of a road lined with lovely white birches and lovely white houses. The houses keep on being lovely at Ipswich, and the wonderful elms are many-branched, like immense Jewish candlesticks of green-gold. You would never think the devil would come to such a place! But it seems he did. There was a church he had heard of where the folk were particularly religious, and he wanted to have a look. One was enough, however. He jumped right over the church to avoid it and get back home as quickly as he could, and to this day you can see his footprint on a black rock in the park.

That's one story. Another is that instead of going home, he bounded to Rowley, where there is another charming church, looking the very haunt of peace, good will to men. I can quite believe that even the devil might come a long way to gaze at some of these old New England churches. You can't think what a feeling of pure delight they give to the mind, in spite of, or because of, their simplicity. The green banks where they are built might be vast altars with elms for the altar candlesticks, and the smooth sward for the altar cloth. The devil may have heard all this, and wanted to see for himself if it were true. I don't know how he escaped from Rowley, as he left no footprint, though the easiest way would have been along the good Bay Road! Maybe he had a secret passage down under the sea, which isn't very far off. Spinning on between meadows, you can see it away to the right, misty blue as the wild forget-me-nots which mingle with a thousand other wild flowers.

Newburyport is like a perfume bottle for its sweetness, or, rather, two perfume bottles: one filled with salt fragrance from the sea, the other with the scent of apple blossoms from countless orchards. That sounds as if it were only a small village, but it isn't: it's a town, and one of the most historic. Almost everything exciting that can happen in New England has happened at Newburyport—from earthquakes which uprooted corn and set all the bells to ringing, to visits of the French aristocracy, dashing exploits of privateers, the entertaining of General Washington, and the quickest proposal of marriage on record. Almost the nicest thing about Newburyport, however, and one of the nicest things I ever heard, is the story of Timothy Dexter, who grew very rich, nominated himself for the peerage, and assumed the title of "Lord." He was considered a half-witted sort of fellow, who inherited a little money and didn't know what business to engage in. "Charter a ship," said a practical joker whom he consulted. "Buy a cargo of warming-pans and send them to Cuba." Timothy Dexter did as he was told; but fortune is always supposed to favour simpletons, you know! It happened in Cuba that there were not nearly enough buckets to bail up the syrup from the vats in the sugar-cane mills, and those at hand were too small. Dexter's warming-pans were just the thing! The whole cargo was bought up, fetching huge prices, and "Lord" Timothy's fortune was made. After that he bought himself a big house and planted his garden full of dreadful wooden statues, the worst of all representing himself.

We lost our fine roads as we left Massachusetts for New Hampshire, but the country was beautiful: stone-wall country again, with straight, dark pines; and the road grew better as we neared the dear old sea-going town of Portsmouth, full of beautiful and romantic houses. In one of the best of them Governor Wentworth invited his friends to a party and flabbergasted them all by turning the "party" into a wedding. He married his housemaid—but she was a beauty! But of all the pleasant things of Portsmouth the Thomas Bailey Aldrich house is the best. This lovely old house is kept exactly as he left it. His spirit seems to pervade the place as a fragrance lingers after the flowers have gone.

You may call Portsmouth "Strawberry Bank" if you like. And once, at the mouth of Great Bay, there was a terrible bar of rocks beautifully named "Pull-and-be-Damned-Point." People used to love saying it when they felt cross, for even the ministers couldn't scold them for mentioning it; but an interfering government took it away for the prosaic motive of making a fine harbour.

Across the Piscataqua River we were plumped into Maine, at Kittery, where there's a big navy yard now, and where once they made splendid ships.

By a road that ran through woods and past ideal, storybook farmhouses we came to York, where Captain John Smith came by sea. There we had to stop and look at "Ye Olde Gaol," because it's the very oldest building of the American Commonwealth. The prisoners used to be "sold" for several years, to work out their punishment, just as if they were regular slaves; and now in the gaol they have all sorts of relics of past, queer customs. There's a fort still standing, too, with an overhanging upper story to shoot Indians from, like the houses I wrote you about when we first came into New England. There was a frightful massacre of the settlers once upon a time, and a frightful revenge. Also there was a witch, who lies buried under a great stone, so huge that she can't possibly squeeze through at night to ride on her deserted broomstick. There are legends, too, and the nicest we heard was the ghost-tale of Pirate Trickey, who was hanged on the seashore. That atonement wasn't enough for his crimes, though! He still haunts the beach, ever binding sand with a rope, and groaning above the sound of the waves as the sand slips away. And I mustn't forget "Handkerchief Moody," who gave Hawthorne his idea for the "Minister's Black Veil"; but he was real and neither ghost nor legend.

There's a modern York, too, and so much of it that you might almost miss the old if you didn't know. Lots of interesting people have stayed there: Mr. Howells, and Mark Twain, and your beloved Thomas Nelson Page among the rest, but beyond their zone is the zone of the tiny toy cottages, the crowded boarding-houses, the snub-nosed Lord motor cars rolling along the beach close to the rolling waves, and beginning to sink in the sand if they stop. Beyond again, woods which might be primeval, broken with farms as hidden away in their midst as those of the early settlers; here and there a pile of fragrant cut timber; now and then a few hayricks, in fields surrounded by vast tracts of pineland. Jack and I began to think we were on the most beautiful road yet.

We lunched at Ogonquit, beloved of artists, and then fell so in love with it ourselves that we stayed all the rest of the day and all night, too. It's a fishing village, but you don't stop in the village. You stop under the wing of a large gray, mother-bird-looking hotel close to the shore, and away from everything else. On one side there is a cove with shiny brown rocks so thinly trimmed with grass that they look like a suit of giant armour showing through a ragged green cloak. On the other side is sea, blue by day as if it flowed over bluebell fields—strangely blue as it sweeps up to embrace the rose and golden sands, the apricot pink sands. Toward evening these sands were covered with gulls, lying thick as white petals shaken down from invisible orchards. And the mourning cry of the sea-birds was as constant and never ending as the sea-murmur. We forgot we heard it! But suddenly, as night fell, we remembered, because the crying ceased as if it obeyed a signal for silence. No sooner had it stopped than the moon blossomed out from the sea-mist like a huge rose unfolding behind a scarf of blue gauze. We were glad we had stayed!

Next morning we atoned for lost time by getting up early and starting on again: a pretty road through the village of Wells, with the sea in the distance. All the farmhouses seemed to take summer boarders or give meals, and sell vegetables or something. They showed nice enticing samples at their gates: strawberries, green peas, honeycomb, or gilded eggs. It did look so idyllic!

We couldn't mistake Kennebunk when we came to it, because it advertises itself on a sign-post: "This is Kennebunk, the Town You Read About." I hadn't read about it, but I felt I ought, for if ever there was a typical New England town, Kennebunk is It! We slipped in along a grass-grown, shady way, with old houses looking at us virtuously with sparkling eyes, as virtuously as if they hadn't been built with good gold paid for rum. I think that was what the ships used to bring back from their long voyages; but maybe the most virtuous-looking houses were built with molasses. The ships brought that, too.

There are two rivers—the Monsam (at the Monsam House Lafayette stayed) and the Kennebunk, and there's a roaring mill, but greatest of all attractions at Kennebunk is that of going on to Kennebunkport. Mrs. Deland has a house there, and Booth Tarkington, too, and it's a dear delightful place, with arbourlike streets running inland, and deep lawns with elms shaped like big shower bouquets for brides.

It wasn't long after Kennebunkport that we beheld for the first time sawmills, and logs that had come down from the White Mountains. That was a thrill! For we were on our way to the White Mountains. We saw no sign of them yet, but there was no cause for impatience. The landscape was as lovely as if planned by the master of all landscape gardeners. There were quaint features, too, as well as beautiful ones: everywhere funny little tin boxes standing up on sticks by the roadside, labelled "U.S. Mail," with no guardians but squirrels and birds, and apparently no one to read or send letters.

Biddeford was attractive, and so was Portland, but Portland was the means of delaying our car. Jack would go wandering to the eastern side of the nice city, to find a monument he had read about, overlooking Casco Bay. Underneath are buried, in one grave, the commanders of the Enterprise and the Boxer, British and American ships. The American won, but both commanders were killed, and the Britisher had been so brave that they thought their own captain would like to lie by his side. It wasn't a grand monument to see, but I love the idea. And another thing I love about Portland is the thought that Longfellow was born there in sight of the ocean.

By and by, a good long time after we had got out of Portland by Forest Avenue, our road began to run uphill. In a park leading to Raymond, where Hawthorne "savagized" as a boy, our hearts beat at sight of a sign saying "White Mts." Just that! Abrupt but alluring. White birches were like rays of moonlight striping the dark woods, and there was the incense smell of balsam firs. We sniffed the perfume joyously and reminded each other—Jack and I—that Maine is America's Scotland: like Scotland for beauty of lake and forest and mountain; like Scotland, too, "hard for the poor, and a playground for the rich."

Along a rough but never bad country road we flashed past lake after lake—Sebago the biggest—and ahead of us loomed far-off blue heights like huge incoming waves sweeping toward an unseen shore. No longer did we need a sign-post to point us to the mountains; but there were some things by the way that surprised us. Suddenly we found ourselves coming on the "Bay of Naples," a big sapphire sheet of water ringed in with some perfectly private little green mountains of its own. It was as if we had dreamed it, when we plunged into forests again, deep, mysterious forests of hemlock. Cowbells tinkled faintly, as in Switzerland, though we saw no cows, and there was no other sound save the sealike murmur of the trees—that sound which is the voice of Silence. Lakes and ponds lay at the feet of dark slopes, as if women in black had dropped their mirrors and forgotten to pick them up.

We were back in New Hampshire again for the night, for we stopped in North Conway, at a hotel in a great garden. If it had liked, it could have called the whole valley its garden, for it is a vast flowery lawn with mountains for a wall. Such a strange wall, with a high-up stone shelf on which you might think the brave Pequawket Indians had left the images of their gods, beyond the reach of white men. They had a fine village of wigwams where our hotel stands now, facing the mountains it's named for, and the trees and the Saco River haven't forgotten their old masters' songs of war and of hunting.

This part of the world must be the intimate, hidden home of balsam firs. The air is spiced with their fragrance, and not only the gay little shops at North Conway, but each farmhouse and cottage we passed next day, going on to Crawford Notch, sold pillows of balsam fir.

By this time we began to pity and patronize ourselves, because we had thought that nothing could be as beautiful as our ways of yesterday. The ways of to-day were the most beautiful of all. We were going to Bretton Woods, and on the way we learned a great secret—this: that when the Fairies made their flit—the well-known Dymchurch Flit—they decided to emigrate to the White Mountains. Somebody had told them—probably it was the Moon—that the scenery there was marvellously suited to their tastes, and would give them a chance to try experiments in landscape gardening according to Fairy ideas. It seemed likely that they might remain undiscovered in the new fastness for many centuries, and that when the time came for their presence to be suspected, the world would have assumed a new policy toward the Fay race. No cruel calumnies would be written or spoken about them, such as saying that they cast spells on children or animals, and it would be between Man and Fairy a case of "live and let live."

Some dull, unobservant people might think that our road was walled on one side by gray-blue rocks, but in reality they are dark, uncut sapphires, a faÇade decoration for the Fairy King's palace. Those same dullards might talk of scattered boulders. They are trophies, teeth of giants slain by Fairy warriors. Fairies melt cairngorms and topazes which they find deep in the heart of the mountains, and pouring them into the sources of rivers and brooks give the colour of liquid gold to the water which might otherwise be a mere whitish-gray or brown. Fairies crust the stones with silver filagree-work dotted with diamonds. Fairies have planted blue asters and goldenrod and sumach in borders, studying every gradation of colour, and while the flowers lie under the spell of the sun they become magic jewels, because the seeds were brought from Fairyland. Fairies, who no longer bewitch children, have turned their attention instead to enchanting the young, slender birches of the mountain waysides. The enchantment consists in causing rays of moonlight always to glimmer mysteriously on the white trunks, in full daylight. They seem illuminated, even to eyes that haven't found out the secret. The carpets of moss are the Fairies' roof-gardens, where they dance and pretend to be ferns if you look at them. The round stones in the water-beds are the giants' pearls which were lost in the great battle. The music of the forest is an orchestra consisting of Fairy voices and stringed instruments, harps, violins, and 'cellos. And now and then I caught a high soprano note beyond the powers of a Tetrazzini.

It was a Fairy who told me that Mount Washington is bare because he gave his green velvet mantle to a smaller mountain, though he, at his cold height, needed it much more than his smaller brethren of the Presidential Range. And from a Fairy, too (after we had passed the wide wonder of Crawford's Notch), I heard the story of Nance's Brook. It is the gayest of all the gay brooks of the mountains, so evidently it has forgotten Nance and ceased to mourn her. But she—a beautiful girl of the neighbourhood—drowned herself there when her lover went off with a town beauty. The brook used to be the Fairies' favourite bathing-place, and they could enter from a secret corridor in their sapphire-fronted palace. Of course they could no longer use it after the drowning; but they cased the body of Nance in crystal, like a fly in amber; and there, under the running water, her face can sometimes be seen on midsummer nights.

Thus, MercÉdes, ends your Molly's diary, for we have come to Bretton Woods!


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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