Outside, the dusk of April is beginning to deepen over the woods and the ocean. The peepers are coming out clearer and louder with the soft April stars. Aunt Susan forgets to wield her fork like the baton of an orchestra leader, and she gets butter on her chin. The flounders come to an end. Uncle Timothy stares at the bare platter incredulously, and his mustache begins to droop. The flame and the glory begin to ebb from him. When nobody is looking, he runs a biscuit over the moist surface of the platter and collects the last golden crumbs of corn meal flavored with the delicacy of the sliders of the sea's bottom. Everybody sighs. But Uncle Timothy sighs deepest of all.
The feast of the first flounders of the spring is over. It is a memory: Ah, there will be plenty more flounders day after tomorrow when brothers have buried the hatchet of their hate and go nut in the skiff and spear new ones, or sit in the warm spring sun, with fat clam bellies for bait, and hand-line the flat fish up from deeper water. And mother will gel out her corn meal and fry them just as crisp and brown. Yes, later springs will come, just as they have been in the habit of doing for these millions of years. But it won't be the same thing. Not ever again. Not this year, anyway. Maybe not in a lifetime.
And Peter and James, who have provided this red-letter supper, forget their cold bath for the moment and swell so much in their clothes that they daren't move much for fear they will burst at all their seams.
As the month grows older and warmer, and the farm begins to green all over, the noise at the cove and around the new daughter of the farm grows and grows. The near-by spruce woods ring with the blows of hammers and the shouts of the men and boys. Father shines on his neck as he screws home the last screws. Uncle Timothy looks wide as the world as he sandpapers the curving timbers, and he vibrates all over from love as well as from the vibrations of the rough sandpaper he rubs.
And on a sun-drenched day near mid-April, when the Easter moon has filled out her girth, when the air runs silver and wine, the menfolks put the rollers under the new beauty at the tiptop moment of high tide, and the queen of glory goes into the sea. She sweeps down and cuts the Atlantic apart, rises high and lovely in the water. She rides on even keel, her tail perks up, her delicate nose lifts more archly than Aunt Susan's when she talks of culture and music, the Chicago Art Institute and the World's Fair that made her into the new being that she is.
The new Hampton is so white and beautiful, they do not make her work for some time. They do not soil her with lobster traps. She is company. They let her ride high, handsome, and holidayish for weeks among the loaded and muddy craft in the farm's busy harbor.
Now comes great work on the farm's other half, the green and land half. For the plows and harrows are taken our, harness is overhauled and oiled up. Hoes and shovels are made ready. For soon agriculture will join lushing on this farm, and seed potatoes and seed corn will be as important as lobsters and herring are now.
Peter is kept so busy he doesn't have time to go out for a single night with Uncle Cephus on the “Mary Louise.” The schooner floats out there as far away as the Delectable Mountains in Pilgrim's Progress, which is another book this month for Peter. Peter has to neglect his schoolbooks to tend out on his father and uncle. He has to neglect his love.
And disaster strikes. The last night of April comes, and most coast boys whose voices are starting to deepen think of love and go with paper baskets of pastel shades and hang them, full of gumdrops, on the doorknobs of the houses of girls, knock and run—but not so fast but what the girls can overtake them and kiss them, with blushes on both sides of the kiss. And the last night of this April finds a bigger basket than Peter's handmade one hanging on the Brown front door, and the kiss already planted on a boy with dark and sinister hair, a boy named Ben.
Peter comes too late. And in a fury he eats all the gumdrops and chocolates in his basket on the way home and vows he will never look at anyone in skirts again. Peter is through with love.
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