Beached Keels/Captain Christy/Chapter 3
III
Inside the cabin, neatly sombre with dark brown woodwork, it was neither day nor night. An old brass lamp against a bulkhead, stirring in the gimbals at the petty shock of harbor waves, cast a tremulous evening glow on the Mongol face of Zwinglius Turner, who sat on the lower stairs; but the venerable, rough head of the captain, who stood upright, caught a dull gleam—slanting down from tiny barred windows frost-white with fog—as from some wintry, dungeon-like dawn. The captain's air was of business and reflection; the mate's that heavy, embarrassed gloom, half melancholy decorum and half fidgets, seen in figures who line the walls at a rustic funeral.
His master contemplated a picture that he had just unscrewed from the bulkhead,—a discolored likeness of a patient, heroic face.
"Ab'ram Lincoln," he said, laying it on the table. "Follansbee won't want him. I do."
He stooped into the warm lamplight and shadow of the lower level, rummaged in a locker, and, drawing out various treasures, heaped them on the table.
"Now this"—it was an ancient swallow-tail burgee, red and white—"I 'll ask him if I can keep this. … Spare lead-line,—well, that's part o' the fittin's; that's his." A bundle of old saffron pamphlets thumped the table, and sent up a thin cloud of dust. "Leave him those for readin',—Farmer's Almanacs: the back of 'em has rafts o' good riddles and ketches." Then followed a small graven image in black tamarind wood, handfuls of cowrie shells, a shark-tooth necklace, a fly-whisk, the carved model of a Massoola boat, a Malay kriss, a paper of fish-hooks, and a brass telescope. The captain's hands ransacked the farthest corners of the locker; they stopped suddenly; his face became very grave.
"Can't have this, anyway," he said, in a voice changed and troubled. He drew forth a red and blue worsted doll, badly stained, with one boot-button eye. "No, by James Rice, he can't!" muttered the captain passionately. He sat down on the edge of his bunk, as in the black mouth of a crypt, and, bunching his beard in one gnarled fist, regarded sadly the absurd puppet in the other.
"I never expected to take this out again, somehow," he said, in a vacant tone of soliloquy. "She put it away in there herself—nigh on to forty year ago. You don't go so far back, do ye, Zing? I remember when it fell overboard; young Kit Chegwidden over after it. My, how Eunice cried! Then she kissed him for savin' it. A clever boy, Kit: master o' the Jennie Gus now, and children of his own. Time goes quick"—
The old man, still grasping the doll gently, stared downward as if through the floor shadows he saw into the deep void of the past.
"Don't think I could 'a' stood ever seein' St. Thomas again after that"—
He was thinking of the only voyage his wife had made with him, and of Eunice, their only child. With solemn inward vision, evoked by the touch of a lank worsted doll, he recalled the sultry nights of watching and heartbreak in this very cabin, the flush of the fever in the child's cheeks, the gleaming disorder of her bright hair on the pillow, the glare of tropic sun on a white-hot deck, their silent group at the rail, the trembling of a little black book, the lofty words of consolation, so hard to read aloud, so much harder to believe when that frail object, intolerably precious, was committed to the unstirring, blank, august emptiness of ocean.
"Zing, I can't bear to sell her," whispered the old man. Fumbling as if blind, he put away the doll in a breast pocket. "I can't bear to."
Zwinglius cleared his throat, said nothing, shifted his boots. In a heavy silence that grew tangible, he rose and slowly withdrew up the stairs, disappearing in a cloudy square of white which the closing door blotted out noiselessly.
The captain, alone, sat staring down into the dark pool of bygone years.
Outside, stumping hoofs passed slowly down the pier, a clatter of loose planks, and the doleful mooing of cattle. Shouts rose: "Gangway there! Hurrup!" Footsteps pounded the deck, and past the window broad shadows flitted, swiftly intersecting. But Captain Christy sat oblivious; not until the door flew open with a resounding jar, and in the haze above stood a pair of short, heavy-booted legs, did he slowly rise from his dream.
"Sour and thick!" shouted a hoarse voice. A burly little man began to clamber down, driving before him into the lamplight a thin aureole of fog. "Sour and thick!" he muttered, as he gained the floor. Unwinding a shepherd's muffler, he disclosed a swarthy, black-bearded face and twinkling eyes. "Sour and thick, Cap'n Christy! A spewy day. Joe e'enamost drove his cows over the bank. But I 'll git her off now—ketch this ebb—drop down 's fur as Lord's Nubble: one cow for the lightkeeper there—find my way that fur blindfold, so long's she can cut the fog, hey?" He laughed, as if at a pleasant fancy.
These plans for an alien future seemed hardly to touch the captain's mind.
"The' 's some things there on the table, Cap'n Follansbee," he said quietly. "Anything you don't want kep', I 'll take home."
"Curios, hey?" boomed the new master. He grinned at them like a good little pirate disdainful of plunder. "No, no, cap'n! Souverins o' foreign parts, eh? No, no, you keep 'em all. Good snug cabin, this,—fustrate!"
"Well, those almanacs," urged the captain, stowing the keepsakes away in spacious pockets. "Now you take those, go ahead. Ain't noo, o' course,—ketches and rebuses just as good,—lots o' facts, too."
"All right. Thank ye," said the other heartily. "I do n't care. They 'll keep my mind from evil thoughts."
"Time I was ashore," Captain Christy mumbled. He searched the cabin with one long look, as though to add this last to the scenes that thronged in his old memory; then preceded his brother mariner up into the fog.
At the rail the two shook hands. Captain Christy looked down, with lips compressed, as if something hurt.
"She's a clever bo't, Cap'n Follansbee," he said. "Treat her kind, now, won't ye?" And he swung himself over to the pier.
"Like—like a kitten!" shouted the younger man, already busied with ropes. "Here, Joe, ye stootchit, bear a hand with the spring!" The gap widened between her side and the pier-spilings. "Like a kitten!"
For the first time in years the schooner moved slowly outward along the wharf. A tow-rope over her bow rose taut, fell slack,—jerking from out the heart of the fog the smoky outline of a boat with waving oars,—rose dripping, and ran taut again into blank whiteness. Captain Christy, Zwinglius, and a knot of loungers walked alongside the ship out to the final snub-posts. Her stern loomed large, grew veiled and insubstantial, dissolved, and with the "chock-chock" of oars and lowing of disconsolate cows, the Rapscallion had become a name and pictured vanity of the past. The breath of her departure swept their dim group on the pier, in ponderous-rolling smoke as of some cold, noiseless battle.
"Why did n't ye go with her, Zing?" said the captain suddenly. "Follansbee promised me to offer ye the place."
The mate turned his face away; but for the first time in history he made a blunt answer.
"Did n't want to," he declared. This plunge made him dare another boldness.—"Come on home now, cap'n. No more to see."
"Well, cap'n, all over," called Bunty Gildersleeve, lurching up beside them, his beard a frosty silver with the damp. "Ye know, I kind o' miss her already. W'arf don't seem the same."
"Do ye?" replied Captain Christy, in a dazed fashion. "Yes, that's so." He stared into the fog. "All over," he repeated mechanically.
As he tramped homeward, the noon bell tolled dismally. School children, cowed by the cold mist, pattered by in a solemn little flock. Through the obscurity heaved a larger blur,—Joyce, their teacher, herding them.
The captain's vacant answer to her hail, his apathy as they walked on together, made Joyce linger at the gate to ask:—
"How is Mrs. Christy to-day?"
"Better, thank ye. 'Pears to be all right now, for some little time. Thank ye. Up and about, ye know."
"That's good," said Joyce. After a pause she asked: "Oh, captain, is it true, what they tell me, that you 're going to sell the schooner?" Her tone and aspect were of the utmost innocence.
"Hev sold it," he replied curtly. As she had hoped, he caught no drift between her two questions; but the cloud that settled over the kind old face made her repent of the strategy. "She went out this mornin's ebb," he continued. "Got a fair price, though."
Joyce had to break the silence.
"I'm glad Mrs. Christy's feeling better," she ventured lamely. "Has she—did she get outdoors on any of those pleasant days last week?"
"She don't go out much any time," said the captain with regret. "That's why she seems so much better now—better'n I 've seen her for a long time—talks o' goin' to visit Up the Line."
As this phrase meant anywhere between Cape Sable and Toronto, Joyce looked puzzled.
"Her fam'ly, the Defews," he explained. "She's kep' writin' to 'em—I mean," he added in confusion, "they 've kep' writin' to her to come up and visit. She says we can afford it now that—afford it better'n we could."
The girl's eyes grew very wide and round.
"Of course you 'll be going too?" she conjectured.
"Me?" said the captain, amazed; "Lord, no!"
Some strong emotion, following all this enlightenment, compelled Joyce to cut their interview short.
"I hope she 'll enjoy it." She spoke stiffly, and turned away, prim with self-restraint. "Good-morning, captain."
"Now what did I say to make her mad?" wondered Captain Christy, watching as the fog veiled and enveloped her. "I'm sorry— Humph!— Funny critters."
Still perplexed over this, and downcast from the morning's work, he navigated among the autumnal stalks in the little garden, stopped to see if his hydrangea had shaken off its last petals, and then, skirting round to the back door, entered his workshop. Here a bench, of spinster-like neatness, ran athwart a noble confusion: old coats, oilskins, boots, lined the walls like votive offerings after ship-wreck; in the window a frigate-bird, badly stuffed, perked a vicious bill as if to puncture the balloon breast of a dried sea-robin; and in the corners, over the floor, on shelves, lay heaps of nautical rubbish,—bits of chain, pots of dried paint, resin, and tar, broken oars.
coiled ropes, and a mound of gear—double, clew-line, long-tackle, and snatch-blocks,—like a cairn raised to mark an ended activity.
The captain had emptied his pockets of their "souverins," and, with one hand thrust in breast-high, was considering where to bestow the worsted doll, when the door from the kitchen opened, and Mrs. Christy stood looking in. Fortune, good or ill, had chosen this heavy-hearted moment of the captain's meditation.
"Who was that you were talking to?" she demanded, curiosity qualifying the wonted disapproval in her tone.
"Oh, that was Joyce," replied the captain, from a distance of thought.
"Again!" snapped his wife. A shadow of ill-will gathered on her heavy features. "Always gadding round with her, or some young woman. At your age of life, too!"
For the first time in many days, the captain's temper sounded in his voice.
"Come, Carrie, don't be foolish," he commanded sharply. "Don't say things you don't mean." He spoke more gently: "Joyce is a fine girl, and I'm master fond of her. Seems like a daughter,—a'most."
"Oh, so I'm a fool, am I?" inquired Mrs. Christy with bitterness. "Thank you. And next I s'pose you 'll remind me we have n't any children of our own"—
"Carrie," interrupted the old man, with a sad look, indescribable and penetrating. The faint color of aged, wintry emotion flushed in his cheeks above the white beard. "I did n't think you'd speak like this—rememberin'—well, rememberin' little Eunice."
Thus began another causeless battle, obscure, long-drawn, unworthy, involved in everyday matters, acts, words, looks, silences, trivial in themselves, but—as hovel, or hedge, or waterhole in greater warfare—invested with the unhappy dignity of conflict. The captain craved only peace; it was his wife who found the pretexts and broke the truces, with the aimless, chronic hostility that had become her nature and occupation.
The townspeople had already discussed her projected visit "Up the Line;" as bare autumn was freezing into winter they learned, with the gradual shock of placid minds, that she had gone, declaring her purpose never to come back. "If she said it, she 'll keep her word," the gossips decided, with deep knowledge of her character. Witnesses who had watched her embark in Sam Tipton's stage proved that she had said it repeatedly, loudly, in glib succession.
"She won't come back," Sam deposed, with a valedictory oath. "Am I sure? Hope so, anyway. I hat to drive her twenty mile."
Zwinglius Turner, when first cornered, was unsatisfactory. "No—that's right—she's gone fer good," he stammered, with a shy, golden grin. But his wish was too plainly father to that thought.
The captain himself supplied the final evidence. One chill and sparkling November day Mr. Gildersleeve found him pacing the empty wharf. His step was laggard, his carriage perceptibly older, and, though on a week day, he bore his Malacca stick with the carbine-cartridge ferule.
"The sea is powerful callin', ain't it?" he asked thoughtfully. Side by side they looked across the dancing sunlight of the harbor to the black fir islands patched with snow. "Powerful callin'. The' 's lots o' clumsy beggars aboard o' bo'ts, too— Ye know Bunty, the roughest part is, I might jus' as well kep' the vessel, after all."
It was the first time that his friend had ever heard him speak bitterly.