The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 1
The Isle of Seven Moons
CHAPTER I
THE PORT
The island was there, yet it has gone. The seas have been scoured to every point of the compass by the scientifically or morbidly curious, by those lustful of blood or gold, yet no keel has sailed between its Twin Horns under the Seven Moons since that memorable year. One would swear that the very seas which the island jeweled were uncharted. Real enough, however, they were to the voyagers in that mad venture, for, after all, there is nothing quite so astounding and bewildering, nothing so romantic or so heavily veiled in illusion, as stark, naked Truth.
Reverse your camera, Time; flash back over the years; unreel your myriad little pictures on the silver screen; turn your long finger of light upon the protagonists—no, not that crazy New York crowd—not yet—but on those simpler folk who from childhood curled their fingers in the manes of the wild seahorses, who knew what it meant to sail out into the white shroud of the sea.
They are vanishing fast, these types, like the lone horsemen from the plains of the West, but they were more than types—vital enough, God knows. In 1910 the last of the riders of the watery plains were still faring forth from Salthaven, but far more had gone down under the white hoofs of their own steeds, or else were drawn up on the beach like battered hulks, useful at best for mere rowboat voyages between house and wharf or the post-office on Preble Square, their cargoes,—a weekly newspaper, a spool of thread. However, for a last port there could have been no more peaceful, no lovelier spot than Salthaven.
To the North, the superb lines of the Lighthouse upspring into the blue; under it, Challenge Rock shatters the league-long, rolling green walls into an eternal snowfall. The landscape to the West, undulating too, back from the rocky shore in sandy billows, is covered with fish-rod-jointed "mare's-tail," and, inland, clumps of cedar, feathery pine, and silver birch, and here and there a solitary hunchback of a house, white and gray against the silver and green. To the South stretches a narrow tongue of land, buff and very barren, and between the two capes, the crescent shoreline and the village,—roofs and chimneys, masts and ropes, a delightful jumble of dark lines, arcs, and angles against the gold and blue of a summer sky.
But the great half of the picture always to the East—tumbling, tossing, wallowing, shambling, raging, sleeping, thundering, whispering; blue or gray or green, all gold or black infinitely lipped with white—the vast, multitudinously-mooded chameleon of an ocean.
Just a mile and a half from the foot of Challenge Rock, the visitor, skirting the crescent of the smoother shore-line, encounters the first of the weather-steeped shacks, which increase in number as they improve in appearance until, by the deeper part of the harbour, Salthaven comprises a fair number of cottages, clambering up the gently-sloping hill to the more pretentious homes at the top, perhaps eighty feet above the roadstead.
In the narrow streets at the foot of the hill, a few ancient buildings, ship-chandleries, storehouses, and sail-lofts, clus ter around the wharves, huddling together like old cronies in the sun. But the thick forest of masts has been felled, leaving only the humbler second growth,—the naked topmasts and less intricate cordage of schooners, plying between the port and the Banks or engaged in the coastwise lumber trade.
Still, though a little out at elbow here, the town is not at all forlorn. Many of its respected citizens are retired skippers and shipowners, rich in health and salty vernacular, with pensions and incomes sufficient for all necessities and even those luxuries which the good folk of the place deem Christian. But the younger men—that is the more ambitious of them—one by one are drifting away, some to ships that clear from larger ports, others, detouring from the straight line of their inheritance, to Boston or Providence, becoming mere genuflecting shoe-clerks, or automobile-mechanics forever lying prone under graceless iron hulks instead of walking good decks manwise, with their hands on the tiller and their eyes on the stars.
At about four bells, or two o'clock of June sixth, a group of ancient fishermen, gnarled like apple-trees, had caught a glimpse of the old glory that sometimes lingered around the port when the last of the "square-riggers" came home. That morning, the North Star had stalked into the harbour like a white ghost of the old days. They were alternately watching her "standing to" out in the harbour, and a queer-hatted fellow who was sitting before a tripod, making odd passes with a brush and meticulous pats with his thumb—incomprehensible way of making a living.
"Chunks of atmosphere, gobs of it," he murmured, raising his eyes from the bedaubed lily-pad board to the stertorous little tug, pushing and shoving and boosting the tall bark between the wharves. "Good Lord! if I could only get that smell of brine and bilge-water, the swish o' that cutwater, rattle o' block and tackle, shuffle o' feet, creak o' winch, and the crunch of her sides against the straining piles—it all ought to go in—not a discord, just close-shaved harmony, like Rachmaninoff—but you can't put it down in colour.
"'A thing of beauty'," he hummed, then outlined something rapidly on the canvas, not the tall beauty of trim spars but another in the line of his vision—seated on an upturned cask. "H'm! good line there," and he sketched in the middy, navy blue, and the skirt—even in the breeze it billowed modestly. "Didn't believe they ever cut 'em that way—good lines under it, too,—ankles, like the wrists, a bit sharply-boned but all right—thoroughbred, in fact—and a sapling figure" (she had risen from the cask as the snorting tug backed water) "but strong, perfect co-ordination. Can't get that wave in the black thatch, though—sort of a sea marcel."
The hawser thumped on the wharf; the gangplank slid to within a yard of the unconscious model. She had gauged it perfectly. Down they came, captain and mate, one sixty, the other, say twenty- four, both well-muscled, the younger without the seasoning.
"The old, old story of the sea, trite, commonplace, and yet not so commonplace, after all," sentimentalized the queer-hatted one. "The women waiting for 'their men,' but oh Lord!"—and he busily plied his crumbly eraser again.
"I've turned that brow into a regular movie Madonna's—Madonna's suggested, but, Man, put in the common sense! The nose, don't snub it—threatens to turn up but—for Heaven's sake! what does it do?—just—doesn't. And those features to which I've given a detestable movie cuteness—now she's three-quarters, I can see it—escape the 'diminutive'—by a fraction—chin, too, the 'fragile.'
"Now, steady there, Little Lady, ple-a-ase—I must get those lines—those fine, faintly-twitching, little lines, around your black eyes, and so delicately traced from the base of your nose. They mean a lot, and they crinkle like tiny ripples in a pond as you shiver yourself with excitement—like a silver birch in the breeze."
He drew back, surveyed the girl near the gangpank, the result on the canvas, then swore in disgust.
"I can mix paints—but not that mixture—and, top to toe, it's knit into the line,—delicacy and strength, same as the birch, the racehorse, that bird out there."
Almost "out of drawing," too, seemed that possessive, "their men." Father, uncle, godfather, the old one perhaps, but the boy? The painter caught it all,—the full cordiality for the captain, then the half-turn, the flicker of a glance at his companion, the shy constraint, the convulsive handclasp, and the sudden release of it.
"Hello, Ben!" and "Hello, Sally," that was all that was left of the greetings, so carefully conned-over for many nights, on the quarter-deck under the stars, and in the little white house up the hill.
The older man was evidently observant of more signs than those of the weather, for, after a few inquiries, and two or three playful tweaks of her ear, quite "in character" with the captain-and-god father rôle, correctly allotted him by the sentimental stranger, he said something about "supper, later at the house," and "tell your father to stow away that temper of his, and close down the hatches," then he walked briskly up the gangplank.
With the waning sun, the queer-hatted one folded up his tripod and kit, and walked off the pier—landward of course,—and quite out of Sally Fell's life. She never saw him or his picture, which didn't matter much, either, for, though it has been shown a number of times at exhibitions, it was an ideal, lukewarm sort of thing, therefore not Sally at all.
They were gone before him, the boy and girl, past the dingy warehouses, up Water Street, and Jeliffe, and Farragut, to Preble Square, where the silent soldier stood at his post, his rifle over his arm, as it had lain ever since the famous Brigadier Bartlett had taken the flag from his visored cap, over fifty years ago.
They zigzagged slowly over the climbing pavements, at a pace that finally slackened to a snail's, although she was sure she could hear the impatient "tamp, tamp, tamp," of an old man's cane on a porch, two turns to the right and three to the left up the hill.
She was shy, he inarticulate. But she did not resent his muteness, as she turned and measured him fondly.
No, six months hadn't changed him—just the same old Ben, hands fumbling at hips for pockets that never were there. But those broad powerful hands were very deft at furling sails and repairing winches. And those blue eyes which lighted his rather heavy features, even saving for them a sort of distinction, though they fell before hers, could hold a mutinous crew. Oh, "Captain Harve" had told her, called him "a man!"
Suddenly they both laughed—over nothing at all—but quite as suddenly hers trailed away.
"Tamp, tamp, tamp!" That cane was forever pricking the bubble of her happiness.
"Tamp, tamp, tamp, tamp!" It formed the heavy motif of her life, full time and double forty.
She slackened the pace still more, at the same time conversationally "going about," to get away as far as possible from that motif.
"You haven't told me the latest, Ben."
"Latest what?"
"Oh the most wonderful thing you saw on the voyage. You always tell me, you know."
"Well," he thought for a moment. "Oh, yes,—a vanishing island."
"An island that vanishes!"
"Yes, now it's here—hills and trees and rainbow bays—and then all-of-a-sudden it drops out of sight."
"Over the edge of the world?"
"I suppose."
"But you don't believe that?"
"Not exactly."
"And you haven't seen it?"
"Not exactly."
"Now you're jollying me."
"No, honest, Sally, I've met a lot of men you wouldn't call fools who swore they'd seen it."
"It's too spooky to be true."
"Of course."
"But you told me men you believed swore they'd seen it!"
"So they did, but I wouldn't worry about it. It's nice enough here."
"But it's more beautiful there, isn't it?"
"Where? In those vanishing islands? I haven't seen them."
"But the ones you have."
"Yes, it's beautiful enough, but it suits me here."
But Sally, though complimented, was straining at her anchor.
"Tell me about it."
"Well it's warm, and the people are dirty, and there isn't much plumbing"
"That isn't the way you told it before."
Well, how did I begin?"
"It's prettier than any play or Heaven"
"Yes"
"And there are royal palms"
"Yes"
"And wonderful shells and—oh, Ben, don't be mean, please."
"And sands as pink as coral," he started flood-tide to appease her, "and tangled forests full of birds that squawk horribly yet have the most scrumptious feathers—classier colours than any of the summer boarders sport. And the ocean is deep but clear as a spring, and in it are fish so queer they look like little jokes of God."
"That's it, Ben, the way you used to tell it! But does it seem real? Isn't it all like a dream?"
He thought a moment, his eyes many leagues south. But they had taken her with him, the black, star-pointers for the blue, the small hand resting in the big as on a trusty tiller.
"It does seem too pretty to be real, but it's real enough—the storms are anyway, and the fevers. When you go there, you're in another world as beautiful as Heaven. You come back home, and it seems far away—then you'd swear it was all a dream. You see it's pretty here but—like life." They had turned and were gazing down the hill over the sloping roofs which descended, each like the step in a staircase, to the sea.
"Look at the Light, now, and the harbour. You can put your finger on everything—pick it all out like a geometry problem. Down there it's just as clear, but it's kind of—," he groped for the word, "vague—so rich with the perfumes, and flowers, and air like opium—and a feeling like there was years and years all a-callin' to you that it's no use a-worryin'—or a-hurryin'."
"They say men forget very easily, there."
"Without much trouble," he answered.
"Did you?"
"Me? No! It's the drifters, the derelicts, not fellows with anchors."
All the allure suddenly came back for Sally, and she exclaimed, "How I'd like to go!"
"Tamp, tamp," again
"But I never can," she despairingly finished.
"Stranger things have happened."
"Than that? No, Ben."
"You see—someday I ll take you."
She went a little vivid at this, but the inarticulate boy had come back.
It was time, for they were at the Fell gate, and Captain Bluster was hard by.