Warning Hill

by John P. Marquand

“Hey?” said Aunt Sarah. “Sell him what?”

  “The gunning shanty, Ma’am, that Mr. Michael built over by the beach. My brother couldn’t help but hear, and Jellett wouldn’t buy now, because he said he could get it cheaper later, because he knew Alf was—had lost money, Ma’am. Damn him for a bloodsucker! He might have bought it just as well, and Alf, he told him he wouldn’t get it ever. Oh, yes, Ma’am, Alf knew what he was doing when he stepped outside. Alf—was a dead game sport.”

  Aunt Sarah’s face was yellow in the lamplight. “He wouldn’t buy the gunning shanty?” she said.—“It’s lucky I own the house, or he’d have tried to sell it too.—He wouldn’t buy the gunning shanty when he’s been after us to sell it all year?”

  “No,” Jim Street’s voice broke. “And Alf he had to have the money, Ma’am. He told me so this mornin’ himself. And when he didn’t, he—”

  “It was an accident,” said Aunt Sarah. “Of course it was an accident.”

  “Of course it was an accident,” said Jim Street. “Yes, Ma’am, I understand.”

  Aunt Sarah reached for her stick that was by the table.

  “But just the same,” she said, “I’ll tell Jellett what I think of him. Give me your hand, Jim Street, I’m getting old. I’m getting dreadfully old.”

  And then Tommy found his voice, because he was afraid again, terribly afraid.

  “Daddy isn’t dead?” he cried. “Daddy isn’t dead?”

  And then their eyes were on him. He felt their glances as something tangible and heavy as a blow.

  “Yes,” Aunt Sarah said. “Come here and hold my hand.”

  “Did—” Tommy’s voice was hushed. It often seemed to him strange that he should have caught the significance as early as that of Jim Street’s words. “Did that man—who drove the horses—”

  His words trailed into stillness, and no one answered. The fear which Tommy had felt was leaving him in anger against that shining carriage and the man who held the reins.

  “When I grow up—” he began.

  “Be quiet, Tom,” Aunt Sarah said. “Come here and hold my hand.”

  “Just the same,” said Tommy Michael, “when I get big—”

  “You’ll have to be bigger’n me,” Jim Street replied, “before you can tackle folks on Warning Hill.”

  And then there was another face. His mother was in the door and her face too was white. She did not seem surprised to see Jim Street; she did not seem surprised at anything.

  “What is it?” she asked. Her voice was not more than a whisper. “Is Alfred—?”

  But she knew what they meant without their saying a single word. Her lips went very tight together. Neither of them cried—his mother nor Aunt Sarah.

  “Where is he?” Her voice was still nothing but a whisper.

  “Down by the shore, Ma’am,” Jim Street said.

  “And you left him?” Her voice was louder. “You left him all alone?”

  “I was going back, Ma’am,” said Jim Street. “I’m goin’ to stand by.”

  Estelle Michael turned toward the door, her lips still tight. “We’ve got to bring him here,” she said. “He can’t stay out there alone.”

  “We will,” said Jim Street, “just as soon as Elmer’s back with the doctor. It’ll take two, Ma’am.”

  “Of course it will take two,” the sharpness was back in his mother’s voice. “There’s you and me, isn’t there? And Tommy, get the lantern in the kitchen. Tell Nora she’s to light it.”

  “You ain’t going to take Tom?” cried Jim Street. “It ain’t right, Ma’am, to take—”

  “He’ll have harder things to do,” his mother said. “Tommy, you’re not afraid?”

  “No,” said Tommy, but his heart was deathly cold.

  And Jim Street looked at him as though he was a man and not a boy.

  “Alf would like it,” he said. “He’s like his daddy, Ma’am. A dead game sport, and I guess that goes for everybody here.” Jim Street coughed and looked embarrassed. “Maybe, Ma’am, you might let me take Tom home to-night. He might feel better and—nothing’s going to hurt him there.”

  But Tommy scarcely heard him. He was thinking still of the shining carriage and of that man who held the reins. Some intuition which balances the helplessness of little children must have made him know that there was danger in that carriage, as deadly as the danger of Pharaoh’s chariots. Though no one told him, he could tell that it had smitten his father down and that he too might fall beneath its wheels.

  VIII

  That was how he came to know the Streets, and the dooryard by the river, and to be friends with Mal and Mary. They were kind to him that night. Even Mal was kind, and Mr. Street was right; nothing ever hurt him there; nothing ever hurt him until he went to Warning Hill, and seven years went by before he did that.

  Across the harbor, Warning Hill stood mysterious and splendid. But Tommy Michael never got there until he was fourteen. Mary was the one who helped him go, for Tommy got to Warning Hill in Mal Street’s skiff, the yellow one which Jim Street used sometimes for eels, with a spritsail on her covered with blue patches. Though a long time had passed, Tommy always knew he would get there some day—a long time, for is there ever a longer gap than that strangely misty lapse between seven and fourteen?

  So much happened in that time, and yet where it went, Tommy could never tell. It always seemed to him that all in that one day the chill world first smote him, and when it happened all that had gone before was vague and blurred, a jumble of old voices and old visions that sank into the silence of the Michael house, and in the wrinkles of his mother’s face, until it all became impossible and unconvincing, like Aunt Sarah’s stories of a greatness that was past. He never knew until that day how little they had told him. Indeed, he never knew until that day that he had a sense of pride that would make him as drunk as wine.

  “Remember, Tommy,” his mother used to say, when he was little and came home tired from school, “you’re just as good as any of them.” Years later he could shut his eyes and see her still, thin and very white with the gloss gone from her hair and the spring gone from her step, but with her lips held tightly together.

  “Eh, what’s that?” Aunt Sarah would say, and would put down her knitting. Aunt Sarah had grown very old, but she was always knitting.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. During the week it was always pleasant to think that Cooper did not need an errand boy at the National Bank of a Saturday afternoon. Tommy had on his school suit, which he wore to work in the summer, corduroy trousers, darned black stockings, and high black shoes, still solid, because he lifted up his toes when walking, as his mother had told him, except when he was thinking. He had a way of thinking, still.

  The sun was very bright that afternoon, in a clear warm summer sky, and the ripples of Michael’s Harbor sparkled in the sun. The Michael’s Harbor elms were whispering in the breeze, exactly as though some one might be hiding in their branches; and from the edge of Welcome River where Tommy stood, he could see across the harbor. The houses of Warning Hill were there, aloof and mysterious as they had always been, yet soft among a green that the distance made to verge on purple, with a golden light upon them from the sun, so that Warning Hill was like a promised land, closed and secret, as Tommy stared across the water.

  At the water’s edge, not five yards from where Tommy stood, Mal Street was working at his skiff, whistling between his teeth, as he stepped the mast and spread the sail. Mal’s hands already were strong, like Jim Street’s hands. Mal was bigger than Tommy Michael. He could swim farther than any boy at school, up by the dam near Munsey’s Bridge. His shoulders were heavy and long; his wrists jutted far out from his ragged shirt cuffs.

  “Nix,” said Mal, “you can keep on askin’ till your face gets blue. I’ll go ’round the edge, but I won’t land. Shucks—we’d only get thrown off, and anyway, I’m as good’s they are and better maybe. When you come right down to it, I wouldn’t wonder if you was better too.”

 
“Then why’re you afraid to go?” Tommy asked. “We’ll only just step ashore and look around.”

  “You shut your trap!” said Mal. “Afraid, huh? I guess I can lick any kid up there as easy as I can you. Shucks—they only make me tired. If you was ever to the golf club caddy-in’, you’d be tired of ’em too. You shut your trap.”

  Tommy shut it. He was a mild boy, slim and pale, and not like the other boys at the Michael’s Harbor school, but now and then, when Mal spoke, Tommy had the strangest thoughts.

  “Yes,” said Mal, “if you saw all those dudes who think they’re smart, you’d want to keep away, all right. They walk around in white pants like underdrawers. They make me sick.”

  Tommy had seen them. By that time it was hard to miss them, if you lived in Michael’s Harbor. He could stand by the gate posts any day at home, and watch the carriages go past, and now there were automobiles, lots of them, with shining brass and clouds of dust behind.

  “Lend me the boat, then,” said Tommy. “I can sail her alone.”

  Mal looked up and scowled, because of course he could not understand.

  “What the blazes are you always wantin’ to go there for?” he demanded. “You’re just a village kid, ain’t you, the same as the rest of us kids? You’ll only get put off.”

  “Don’t you ever get thinking about it?” asked Tommy. “Sometimes I sit by the road and get to wondering, sort of—just sort of wondering—”

  Mal’s voice rose in high derision. “Shucks! You and Mary are always thinking, and it don’t get you anywheres!”

  As Mal spoke, a mincing quality in his words made Tommy aware that Mary had joined them. She had come down the shaky back steps of the Street house, timidly, one step at a time. She went bare-footed in the summer still; and the wind kept blowing her tangled hair about her face, and her voice had that far-away note that he remembered long ago. Tommy often remembered, in other days, how things looked when Mary came down those steps. He could feel the wind from the water, soft and cool, and hear its murmur, strangely distant. He could see those shaky steps which the improvident Jim Street never mended, descending to the dead eel grass on the shore, and a little girl upon them, bare-legged, with the wind playing lightly at her faded blue-checked dress, a slender little girl, who seemed always to be listening, a frail little girl on the shore of Welcome River, with a face that was sharp and sensitive, and singularly unlike the faces of other girls in school. Often and often Tommy knew that her mind was somewhere else. You could easily get yourself to think that her mind was flying too, right into the face of things where her mother’s once had flown—beyond the eel grass, and beyond the acrid scent of Jim Street’s corncob pipe. For Tommy and Mary were the ones who were always thinking.

  For no reason that he could tell, his throat would grow stiff sometimes as he remembered. Who knows? He might have never journeyed to strange lands if it had not been for her, and if the ripples of the harbor had not sparkled in the sun.

  “Why shouldn’t he think,” said Mary, “if he’s got a mind to think? Maybe he’s got more to think about than you.”

  “You shut your trap!” said Mal.

  Mary looked past him dreamily and pushed her hair from her shadowy brown face. “I guess I can talk, if I’ve a mind to!” She walked farther down the steps and dug her toes into the dusty sand. “What was it he was saying?”

  “He wants to take my boat,” said Mal, “over to Warning Hill. Ain’t he always wanting something?”

  Across the stretch of shining water the houses were like palaces in a book. You could see their roofs and chimneys. The sail of the boat was flapping. The sheet rope slapped against the stern.

  “He’s pretending, like I pretend,” said Mary. “You don’t know. He wants to make out he’s sailing to a foreign land. You let him take the boat.”

  Mal scowled and spat with the dexterity so carefully cultivated by the Michael’s Harbor boys. “I’ll let him take it—like ducks I will!”

  Her hair was always blowing across her eyes. She pushed it back again. What Mary said next she had never learned over the dishes in the sink. She looked at Tommy soberly, for she seldom smiled.

  “You ought to do what you’ve a mind to, Tom. You take his boat.”

  “Like ducks, he will!” said Mal.

  “Tom!” called Mary so suddenly that Tommy jumped, and as fiercely as Mal himself might, “Tom, you take that boat. Get in and shove her off. I’ll hold him, Tom. I want to see you go. You tell me what it looks like, Tommy, when you get back home.”

  There was no time to wonder, but later Tommy knew that they both must have been fired by the same bright wish. For no reason, unless you should do what you want to do, Mary wrapped her arms around Mal’s middle. There, perhaps, was the way of the world—a turn, and who knows what? Though Tommy was small, with pipestem arms, though he was perfectly sure that Mal could bruise his body, it made no difference. When Mary called to him, his spirit was not afraid. Tommy forgot his shoes were on, though they were the only pair he owned. He sprang into the mud of Welcome River and pushed off the yellow skiff.

  Mal had learned a lot of words from the barber shop and from the older boys who hung about the station platform. They burst from him like a pack of exploding firecrackers. It did not take Mal more than fifteen seconds to wrench himself away and spring into the water, but Tommy had seized the sheet rope. A gust of breeze took the sail, and the skiff slid from the shore. Tommy glanced back, afraid, he remembered always, and yet not wholly so. There was the shore of Welcome River as he had always known it, with the ramshackle boathouses and buildings along its edge, just as he had always known them. Yet it seemed to Tommy they were different. He was Ulysses leaving the Cyclops’ shore. His crew, in the galley benches, were churning the water of a wine-dark sea. Like the Cyclops, Mal had taken to throwing rocks. One of them whizzed close to Tommy’s ear.

  “You come back!” shrieked Mal. “I’ll be laying for you! I’ll knock your slats in when you come back!”

  Tommy knew Mal was the boy to do it, but in the strange elation which had seized him, Tommy thought nothing of consequences. Mary was standing on the shore, while Mal sought vainly for another stone. The wind was blowing at her dress, and Mary had raised her arm. Her voice came out to him over the breeze, very shrill and high.

  “Good-by, Tom! And don’t you be afraid of ’em at Warning Hill!”

  And Mary was like Calypso on the shore, as he had read of her in a broken-backed old Odyssey at home. Did Mary Street really know, he sometimes wondered, that he was going on a longer journey?

  Tommy Michael trimmed the sail, as the skiff slid from the river to the harbor. Long ago Jim Street, who seemed to have any amount of time, had taught him how to sail a boat. The little waves went slap against the bottom of the skiff. The fresh wind struck him, nearly as moist and cool as spray. As he pushed down the centerboard and plugged it fast, the water made a mysterious sound, like a hundred small soft voices. One of the harbor gulls swooped by him, all gray above and white as a cloud below. A foreign land, all new to him, was dead upon his bow.

  Yes, Warning Hill was new to Tommy then. You could not get to it by land any longer, unless you had business there. The road which led to it across the salt marshes had been closed by a gate several years before. If you came too near, a short, red-faced man would emerge from a small house by the gate, dressed in short trousers and gaiters.

  “Get out!” he would say. “This ain’t for the likes of you!”

  Oh, those were the days when gentlemen were gentlemen. You should have seen him touch his cap when the carriages rolled by! On the whole, however, he must have had a harassed time, because the village boys were always at him, as though they had been called to a holy war. To see the gates shutting you out from Warning Hill was enough to raise your ire, and it puzzled Michael’s Harbor, where old people lived who could remember when Warning Hill was nothing but a windswept pasture with a heap of rocks on its highest point, piled there by the Dutch, t
he story went, for a beacon fire on a stormy night. Those days when Tommy was a boy were so remote in manners if not in time, that people still were puzzled by the vagaries of invaders from the city who took the morning train. Before the Harbor was a suburb there were no barriers of class. Inside the barrier itself were people who disliked it. One recalls that Mr. Simeon Danforth said, as he stood watching the masons build the posts out of field stones.

  “Damme! If we aren’t getting soft!” he said. “We’re building a Roman wall around our children, but you wait till the Picts come down on us and the Danes strike us from the water.”

  Mr. Danforth might have said a great deal more, for Mr. Danforth knew. The wall and the gates of Warning Hill epitomized a phase of life itself. In the village and on the hill that age-old struggle ran. Every one was building barriers, struggling, pushing to keep their children safe, in some vain hope that walls would make them better.

  Time and again the Picts had come to Warning Hill. There were always boys with spirit enough to break away and to attempt to right the world. Tommy had been there once himself. They had sallied upon the gate like Crusaders skirmishing before the Holy City, six of them, barelegged and muddy, with Mal Street in the lead. Mal Street had been great that day, inspiring every one with his cool courage.

  “Hold steady till you see the whites of his eyes!” Mal told them, and he had hit the man in gaiters square on the nose with a rotten apple before they broke for cover.

  The waves were striking on the bottom of the skiff—slap-slap—as Tommy held his course to Warning Hill. Now and then a gust of wind would take the skiff with a sudden force, and would make the water sing as water must have sang since the beginning of all time.

  “Lay aft there!” Tommy called. “And ease the sheets!”

  It was not hard to play the game. You could easily think that there was some one also aboard; his footsteps sounded in the slapping of the water. Tommy could see his own house, over astern to port, gaunt and gray with the elms about it. He could see a smashed window in the cupola and broken shutters, and clothes hanging to dry by the old carriage house, and the bushes near the choked old garden by the beach. His house and everything he knew was slipping too far astern for help. The yellow skiff was very near to Warning Hill.