What Happened at Quasi: The Story of a Carolina Cruise

by George Cary Eggleston

  I

  INTERSTATE CHUMMING

  IT was hot in Charleston—intensely hot—with not a breath of airin motion anywhere. The glossy leaves of the magnolia trees in thegrounds that surrounded the Rutledge house drooped despairingly in thewithering, scorching, blistering sunlight of a summer afternoon in theyear 1886. The cocker spaniel in the courtyard panted with tongue out,between the dips he took at brief intervals in the water-vat providedfor his use. A glance down King Street showed no living creature, manor beast, astir in Charleston’s busiest thoroughfare.

  In the upper verandah of the Rutledge mansion, four boys, as lightlydressed as propriety permitted, were doing their best to keep endurablycool and three of them were succeeding. The fourth was making adismal failure of the attempt. He was Richard Wentworth of Boston,and he naturally knew little of the arts by which the people of hotclimates manage to endure torrid weather with tolerable comfort andsatisfaction. He kept his blood excited by the exertion of violentlyfanning himself. While the others sat perfectly still in bamboo chairs,or lay motionless on joggling boards, Dick Wentworth was constantlystirring about in search of a cooler place which he did not find.

  Presently he went for the fourth or fifth time to the end of the porch,where he could see a part of the street by peering through the greatgreen jalousies or slatted shutters that barred out the fierce sunlight.

  “What do you do that for, Dick?” asked Lawrence Rutledge in a languidtone and without lifting his head from the head-rest of the jogglingboard.

  “What do I do what for?” asked Dick in return.

  “Why run to the end of the verandah every five minutes? What do youdo it for? Don’t you know it’s hot? Don’t you realize that violentexertion like that is unfit for weather like this? Why, I regardunnecessary winking as exercise altogether too strenuous at such atime, and so I don’t open my eyes except in little slits, and I do eventhat only when I must. You see, I’m doing my best to keep cool, whileyou are stirring about all the time and fretting and fuming in a waythat would set a kettle boiling. Why do you do it?”

  “Oh, I’m only observing, in a strange land,” answered Dick, sinkinginto a wicker chair. “I’ll be quiet, now that I have found out thefacts.”

  “What are they, Dick?” asked Tom Garnett, otherwise known to hiscompanions as “the Virginia delegation,” he being the only Virginian inthe group. “What have you found out?”

  “Only that the cobblestones, with which the street out there is paved,have been vulcanized, just as dentists treat rubber mouth plates.Otherwise they would melt.”

  “I’d laugh at that joke, Dick, if I dared risk the exertion,” drawledCalhoun Rutledge, the fourth boy in the group, and Lawrence Rutledge’stwin brother. “Ah, there it comes!” he exclaimed, rolling off hisjoggling board and busying himself with turning the broad slats of thejalousies so as to admit the cool sea breeze that had set in with theturning of the tide.

  Lawrence—or “Larry”—Rutledge did the same, and Tom Garnett slid outof his bamboo chair, stretched himself and exclaimed:

  “Well, that _is_ a relief!”

  Dick Wentworth sat still, not realizing the sudden change until a stiffbreeze streaming in through the blinds blew straight into his face,bearing with it a delicious odor from the cape jessamines that grewthickly about the house. Then he rose and hurried to an open lattice,quite as if he had expected to discover there some huge bellows or somegigantic electric fan stirring the air into rapid motion.

  “What has happened?” he asked in astonishment.

  “Nothing, except that the tide has turned,” answered Larry.

  “But the breeze? Where does that come from?”

  “From the sea. It always comes in with the flood-tide, and we’ve beenwaiting for it. Pull on your coat or stand out of the draught; thesudden change might give you a cold.”

  “Then you don’t have to melt for whole days at a time, but get a littlerelief like this, now and then?”

  “We don’t melt at all. We don’t suffer half as much from hot weather asthe people of northern cities do—particularly New York.”

  “But why not, if you have to undergo a grilling like this every day?”

  “It doesn’t happen every day, or anything like every day. It neverlasts long and we know how to endure it.”

  “How? I’m anxious to learn. I may be put on the broiler again and Iwant to be prepared.”

  “Well, we begin by recognizing facts and meeting them sensibly. It isalways hot here in the sun, during the summer months, and so we don’tgo out into the glare during the torrid hours. From about eleven tillfour o’clock nobody thinks of quitting the coolest, shadiest place hecan find, while in northern cities those are the busiest hours of theday, even when the mercury is in the nineties. We do what we have todo in the early forenoon and the late afternoon. During the heat andburden of the day we keep still, avoiding exertion of every kind as wemight shun pestilence or poison. The result is that sun strokes andheat prostrations are unknown here, while at the north during every hotspell your newspapers print long columns of the names of persons whohave fallen victims.”

  “Then again,” added Calhoun, “we build for hot weather while you buildto meet arctic blasts. We set our houses separately in large plots ofground, while you pack yours as close together as possible. We provideourselves with broad verandahs and bury ourselves in shade, while youare planning your heating apparatus and doubling up your window sashesto keep the cold out.”

  “It distresses me sorely,” broke in Larry, “to interrupt an interestingdiscussion to which I have contributed all the wisdom I care to spare,but the sun is more than half way down the western slope of thefirmament, and if we are to get the dory into the water this afternoonit is high time for us to be wending our way through Spring Street tothe neighborhood of Gadsden’s Green—so called, I believe, because someGadsden of ancient times intended it to become green.”

  The four boys had been classmates for several years in a notedpreparatory school in Virginia. Dick Wentworth had been sent thitherfour years before for the sake of his threatened health. He hadquickly grown strong again in the kindly climate of Virginia, but inthe meanwhile he had learned to like his school and his schoolmates,particularly the two Rutledges and the Virginia boy, Tom Garnett. Hehad therefore remained at the school throughout the preparatory course.

  Their school days were at an end now, all of them having passed theircollege entrance examinations; but they planned to be classmates still,all attending the same university at the North.

  They were to spend the rest of the summer vacation together, with theCharleston home of the Rutledge boys for their base of operations,while campaigning for sport and adventure far and wide on the coast.

  That accounted for the dory. No boat of that type had ever been seen onthe Carolina coast, but Larry and Cal Rutledge had learned to know itscruising qualities while on a visit to Dick Wentworth during the summerbefore, and this year their father had given them a dory, speciallybuilt to his order at Swampscott and shipped south by a coastingsteamer.

  When she arrived, she had only a priming coat of dirty-looking whitepaint upon her, and the boys promptly set to work painting her in alittle boathouse of theirs on the Ashley river side of the city. Thenew paint was dry now and the boat was ready to take the water.

  “She’s a beauty and no mistake,” said Cal as the group studied herlines and examined her rather elaborate lockers and other fittings.

  “Yes, she’s all that,” responded his brother, “and we’ll try her pacesto-morrow morning.”

  “Not if she’s like all the other dories I’ve had anything to do with,”answered Dick. “She’s been out of water ever since she left her cradle,and it’ll take some time for her to soak up.”

  “Oh, of course she’ll leak a little, even after a night in the water,”said Cal, with his peculiar drawl which always made whatever he saidsound about equally like a mocking joke and the profoundest philosophy.“But who minds getting his
feet wet in warm salt water?”

  “Leak a little?” responded Dick; “leak a little? Why, she’ll fillherself half full within five minutes after we shove her in, and if weget into her to-morrow morning the other half will follow suit. It’lltake two days at least to make her seams tight.”

  “Why didn’t the caulkers put more oakum into her seams, then?” queriedTom, whose acquaintance with boats was very scant. “I should thinkthey’d jam and cram every seam so full that the boat would be watertight from the first.”

  “Perhaps they would,” languidly drawled Cal, “if they knew no moreabout such things than you do, Tom.”

  “How much do you know, Cal?” sharply asked the other.

  “Oh, not much—not half or a quarter as much as Dick does. But a partof the little that I know is the fact that when you wet a dry, whitecedar board it swells, and the further fact that when you soak dryoakum in water, it swells a great deal more. It is my conviction thatif a boat were caulked to water tightness while she was dry and thenput into the water, the swelling would warp and split and twist herinto a very fair imitation of a tall silk hat after a crazy mule hasdanced the highland fling upon it.”

  “Oh, I see, of course. But will she be really tight after she swellsup?”

  “As tight as a drum. But we’ll take some oakum along, and a caulkingtool or two, and a pot of white lead, so that if she gets a jolt of anykind and springs a leak we can haul her out and repair damages. We’lltake a little pot of paint, too, in one of the lockers.”

  “There’ll be time enough after supper,” interrupted Larry, “to discusseverything like that, and we must be prompt at supper, too, for youknow father is to leave for the North to-night to meet mother on CapeCod and his ship sails at midnight. So get hold of the boat, everyfellow of you, and let’s shove her in.”

  The launching was done within a minute or two, and after that the doryrocked herself to sleep—that’s what Cal said.

  “She’s certainly a beauty,” said Dick Wentworth. “And of course she’sbetter finished and finer every way than any dory I ever saw. You know,Tom, dories up north are rough fishing boats. This one is finishedlike a yacht, and—”

  “Oh, she’s hunky dory,” answered Tom, lapsing into slang.

  “That’s what we’ll name her, then,” drawled Cal. “She’s certainly‘hunky’ and she’s a dory, and if that doesn’t make her the _Hunkydory_,I’d very much like to know what s-o-x spells.”

  There was a little laugh all round. As the incoming water floated thebottom boards, the name of the boat was unanimously adopted, and afteranother admiring look at her, the four hurried away to supper. On theway Dick explained to Tom that a dory is built for sailing or rowing inrough seas, and running ashore through the surf on shelving beaches.

  “That accounts for the peculiar shape of her narrow, flat bottom, herheavy overhang at bow and stern, her widely sloping sides, and for thestill odder shape and set of her centre board and rudder. She can comehead-on to a beach, and as she glides up the sloping sand it shuts upher centre board and lifts her rudder out of its sockets without theleast danger of injuring either. In the water a dory is as nervous as aschoolgirl in a thunder storm. The least wind pressure on her sails orthe least shifting of her passengers or cargo, sends her heeling overalmost to her beam ends, but she is very hard to capsize, because hergunwales are so built out that they act as bilge keels.”

  “I’d understand all that a good deal better,” answered Tom, laughing,“if I had the smallest notion what the words mean. I have a vague ideathat I know what a rudder is, but when you talk of centre boards,overhangs, gunwales, and bilge keels, you tow me out beyond my depth.”

  “Never mind,” said Cal. “Wait till we get you out on the water, youland lubber, and then Dick can give you a rudimentary course ofinstruction in nautical nomenclature. Just now there is neither timenor occasion to think about anything but the broiled spring chickensand plates full of rice that we’re to have for supper, with a casualreflection upon the okra, the green peas and the sliced tomatoes thatwill escort them into our presence.”

  In an aside to Dick Wentworth—but spoken so that all could hear—Tomsaid:

  “I don’t believe Cal can help talking that way. I think if he weredrowning he’d put his cries of ‘help’ into elaborate sentences.”

  “Certainly, I should do precisely that,” answered Cal. “Why not? Ourthoughts are the children of our brains, and I think enough of mybrain-children to dress them as well as I can.”

  In part, Cal’s explanation was correct enough. But his habit ofelaborate speech was, in fact, also meant to be mildly humorous. Thiswas especially so when he deliberately overdressed his brain-childrenin ponderous words and stilted phrases.

  They were at the Rutledge mansion by this time, however, and furtherchatter was cut off by a negro servant’s announcement that “Supper’sready an’ yo’ fathah’s a waitin’.”