Silver Shoal Light/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
SEA CAVERNS
JOAN, to whom the white duck hat had afforded little protection, was well sunburned,—not a nice tan, but a uniform and painful red.
"It looks rather like a boiled crab now," said Garth, when she came down to breakfast the next day, "but it'll turn brown soon. The only thing to do is to get some more before that has a chance to come off. You might get some while we're poking in the sea-caverns."
"Sea-caverns?" said Joan.
"Yes; the ones we meant to look at yesterday afternoon, only we went sailing instead. Will the tide be right, Fogger?"
"You'll want it on the ebb," said Pemberley. "Yes, it'll be ready for you about nine o'clock."
Since everyone seemed to think that poking in sea-caverns was a perfectly rational occupation, Joan could not well refuse and accepted the project in silence.
"Jim has vanished for a time to perform the solemn rites of his post," Elspeth explained, as she and Joan washed the breakfast things. "Cleaning the lamp, and fiddling about with oil-cans, and writing up the official journal take almost all the morning until swimming time."
"I hope that he has a chance to play," Joan said.
"Oh, yes, indeed," Elspeth assured her; "we all have fun together in the afternoon; sometimes sailing, as we did yesterday, or picnics and such. Of course Jim's always back by sunset, and never leaves at all in a fog, but Caleb's perfectly capable of looking out for everything in the daytime. Jim has one practice, however, which I don't approve," Elspeth added, proffering a dry tea-towel; "he sits up till all hours studying for the Navy—he wants to get in, you know—and then even later, writing and proof-reading. He says that he's only performing his duty, as he ought to have an eye on the lamp."
"Oh!" said Joan, continuing to wipe a perfectly dried dish in her surprise. Writing was Joan's profession, or at least what she liked to call her profession when she was at home. "What does he write?" she inquired.
"Tales about what he calls 'the good days,'—salt-water things," Elspeth explained. "One of the reasons why we came out here was so that Jim could have a quiet place to work in; also a change of climate. He was getting much too thin and nervous in town. And it was a chance for Garth, too. Jim knew this coast thoroughly. When we heard that the old keeper of Silver Shoal had died, Jim applied. It's usually very hard to get a station, but fortunately the man next in line withdrew on account of illness. Jim got the post, and we came. We've been here for over four years, and we're all utterly happy. Jim has written twice as much as he did in town, and—we have Garth."
"Was he ill?" asked Joan.
"Very," said Elspeth; "poliomyelitis, as they call it now. He'll never be able to walk properly, because one poor old leg didn't get much of its action back and the other isn't a great deal better. He was a good little person," she smiled with a far-away look. "Jim used to carry him down to the landing, and they both lay on a mattress, with their hats over their eyes, and Jim told him stories endlessly. The doctor said that if we'd stayed in town he couldn't have promised that Garth would ever be able to do more than sit up in a chair. And now—" She stopped abruptly as Garth himself plunged in suddenly from the living-room and caught Joan's hand.
"The tide's zackly right for the sea-caverns!" he cried. "She's finished with the dishes, hasn't she, Mudder?"
"I'll let her go," smiled Mrs. Pemberley.
"So he writes!" thought Joan, as she went slowly after Garth into the blazing sunlight. Everything was explained now—the names of the boats, the books in the living-room, all that had puzzled her. She stepped out at the door with a much fuller understanding of the life at Silver Shoal.
Garth stopped where tumbled rocks made a rough breakwater at the northern end of the ledge. Here were deep irregular pockets, walled with stone and half-covered by leaning-slabs. The water sucked in and out between the stones with a hollow sound.
"The best way to do," explained Garth, "is to lie down, like this, and put your head under the rock, so that it shuts out the light."
"With your head in the water?" inquired Joan somewhat dubiously.
"Oh, no," said Garth; "sometimes a wave hits you on the nose, but it doesn't matter. There's plenty of room for both of us, Joan."
She lay down rather cautiously, thrust her head in under the slab very close to Garth, and looked into the water. At first she could see nothing whatever; then, as her eyes grew more used to the sunshot dimness, she began to perceive strange and beautiful things. The sides of the rocks were covered with a glowing broidery of red and orange, very much as though brightly-colored lichens could grow under the sea. A little fish hovered in for a moment at the sea-mouth of the pool, where the sunlight, striking through, made the water clear and lemon-green. As the swell filled the little cavern and sucked out again, Joan saw clumps of bronze-colored weed flat against the rock. When the surge swayed them, their short-fingered tufts twinkled suddenly with wonderful darting lights of purple and blue and iridescent green, which faded and flashed and died.
"Is it true," she said, "that I see a purple starfish?"
"Yes," said Garth softly; "I can see five of them."
Joan would once have said that there couldn't be such things as purple starfish; but, searching the quivering gloom, she saw them, all five, faintly lavender, richly violet, lifting occasionally their stiff arms as the water swirled in. On the pure white sand at the bottom of the cavern, strange, transparent, apricot-colored things were putting forth petals like chrysanthemums.
"Sea-anemones," said Garth. "I'm watching the barnacles."
His curly hair swept Joan's cheek as she looked down where he was pointing. The barnacles, from their fastnesses on the rock, were opening their little folding-doors and shooting out wispy, thread-like fingers which opened and closed steadily, like animated bits of thistle-down.
"They're eating their dinner," whispered Garth, "the nice things."
A periwinkle came creeping up past the barnacles, his tiny horns just showing beneath his shell.
"I never knew that they could walk," murmured Joan.
"If I stare into the cavern," said Garth, "in a little while I feel as though I were living down there. Don't you?"
Joan half shut her eyes.
"I see what you mean," she said. Then she smiled. "'Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep, where the winds are all asleep,'" she quoted, half to herself; "'where the spent lights quiver and gleam, where the salt weed sways in the stream.'"
"That's nice," said Garth; "go on."
"I don't think you'd understand the whole of it," Joan said.
"I like things I don't understand," said Garth. "Please say it."
So, more to please herself than anything else, Joan repeated "The Forsaken Merman" rather dramatically, for though she did not believe in mermaids, she believed sincerely in Matthew Arnold. When she had finished, Garth rubbed his eyes furtively.
"I do understand it," he said; "but I think she was horrid. The poor merbabies, sitting on the cold tombstones and looking in at her through the window! You wouldn't have done that, if you'd married a merman, would you, Joan?"
"I shouldn't have married the merman, to begin with," she said. "Garth! How perfectly ridiculous, to cry over a made-up poem! There's your father calling for us to go swimming."
"But the poor littlest merbaby that used to sit on her knee," murmured Garth as he scrambled to his feet.