George Eggleston - What Happened at Quasi - The Story of a Carolina Cruise

It was hot in Charleston – intensely hot – with not a breath of air in motion anywhere. The glossy leaves of the magnolia trees in the grounds that surrounded the Rutledge house drooped despairingly in the withering, scorching, blistering sunlight of a summer afternoon in the year 1886. The cocker spaniel in the courtyard panted with tongue out, between the dips he took at brief intervals in the water-vat provided for his use. A glance down King Street showed no living creature, man or beast, astir in Charleston’s busiest thoroughfare.

In the upper verandah of the Rutledge mansion, four boys, as lightly dressed as propriety permitted, were doing their best to keep endurably cool and three of them were succeeding. The fourth was making a dismal failure of the attempt. He was Richard Wentworth of Boston, and he naturally knew little of the arts by which the people of hot climates manage to endure torrid weather with tolerable comfort and satisfaction. He kept his blood excited by the exertion of violently fanning himself. While the others sat perfectly still in bamboo chairs, or lay motionless on joggling boards, Dick Wentworth was constantly stirring 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 great green jalousies or slatted shutters that barred out the fierce sunlight.

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

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

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

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

“What are they, Dick?” asked Tom Garnett, otherwise known to his companions as “the Virginia delegation,” he being the only Virginian in the 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,” drawled Calhoun Rutledge, the fourth boy in the group, and Lawrence Rutledge’s twin brother. “Ah, there it comes!” he exclaimed, rolling off his joggling board and busying himself with turning the broad slats of the jalousies so as to admit the cool sea breeze that had set in with the turning of the tide.

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

“Well, that is a relief!”

Dick Wentworth sat still, not realizing the sudden change until a stiff breeze streaming in through the blinds blew straight into his face, bearing with it a delicious odor from the cape jessamines that grew thickly 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 some gigantic 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 been waiting for it. Pull on your coat or stand out of the draught; the sudden change might give you a cold.”

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

“We don’t melt at all. We don’t suffer half as much from hot weather as the 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 never lasts long and we know how to endure it.”

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

“Well, we begin by recognizing facts and meeting them sensibly. It is always hot here in the sun, during the summer months, and so we don’t go out into the glare during the torrid hours. From about eleven till four o’clock nobody thinks of quitting the coolest, shadiest place he can find, while in northern cities those are the busiest hours of the day, even when the mercury is in the nineties. We do what we have to do in the early forenoon and the late afternoon. During the heat and burden of the day we keep still, avoiding exertion of every kind as we might shun pestilence or poison. The result is that sun strokes and heat prostrations are unknown here, while at the north during every hot spell your newspapers print long columns of the names of persons who have fallen victims.”

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

“It distresses me sorely,” broke in Larry, “to interrupt an interesting discussion 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 the firmament, and if we are to get the dory into the water this afternoon it is high time for us to be wending our way through Spring Street to the neighborhood of Gadsden’s Green – so called, I believe, because some Gadsden of ancient times intended it to become green.”

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

Their school days were at an end now, all of them having passed their college 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 the Charleston 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 on the Carolina coast, but Larry and Cal Rutledge had learned to know its cruising qualities while on a visit to Dick Wentworth during the summer before, and this year their father had given them a dory, specially built to his order at Swampscott and shipped south by a coasting steamer.

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