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The Project Gutenberg eBook of In Great Waters, by Thomas A. Janvier.
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<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60811 ***</div>
<p class="box">Transcriber's Notes:<br />
<br />
Blank pages have been eliminated.<br />
<br />
Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the
original.<br />
<br />
A few typographical errors have been corrected.<br />
<br />
The cover page was created by the transcriber and can be considered public domain.</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<div class="figcenter4em" id="frontpiece"><img src="images/frontpiece.jpg" width="500"
height="726" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
See <a href="#Page_223">page 223</a><br />
"HOME ALONG THE BEACH FOR THE SECOND TIME"
</div></div></div>
<div class="chapter">
<h1>IN GREAT WATERS</h1>
<p class="center">Four Stories</p>
<p class="center p4">By</p>
<p class="center large">THOMAS A. JANVIER</p>
<p class="center">Author of<br />
"The Uncle of an Angel" "The Aztec Treasure-House"
"The Passing of Thomas" "In Old New York" etc.</p>
<p class="center p2"><i>ILLUSTRATED</i></p>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/title.jpg" width="200"
height="194" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p class="center p2">NEW YORK AND LONDON<br />
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS<br />
1901</p></div>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p6 center">Copyright, 1901, by <span class="smcap">Harper & Brothers</span>.</p>
<p class="center"><i>All rights reserved.</i><br />
November, 1901.</p></div><hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p6 center">TO</p>
<p class="center p2">C. A. J.</p></div>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2>Contents</h2></div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" summary="indice">
<tr>
<td class="tdr" colspan="2">PAGE</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl smcam"><a href="#Zee">The Wrath of the Zuyder Zee</a></td>
<td class="tdrb">3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl smcam"><a href="#Tragedy">A Duluth Tragedy</a></td>
<td class="tdrb">65</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl smcam"><a href="#Martigues">The Death-Fires of Les Martigues</a></td>
<td class="tdrb">135</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl smcam"><a href="#Upcast">A Sea Upcast</a></td>
<td class="tdrb">171</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<h2>Illustrations</h2></div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" summary="Illustrations">
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#frontpiece">"HOME ALONG THE BEACH FOR THE SECOND TIME</a></td>
<td class="tdrb " colspan="2"><i>Frontispiece</i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#MAN">"HE WAS A CRAZED MAN"</a></td>
<td class="tdc"><i>Facing p.</i></td><td class="tdrb">6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#DWELLING">"IT WAS A STATELY DWELLING"</a></td>
<td class="tdc">"</td><td class="tdrb">24</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#JAAP">OLD JAAP</a></td>
<td class="tdc">"</td><td class="tdrb">56</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#HEART">"'I HAVE LOVED YOU WITH MY WHOLE HEART'"</a></td>
<td class="tdc">"</td><td class="tdrb">126</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#MARIUS">MARIUS</a></td>
<td class="tdc">"</td><td class="tdrb">136</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#ROCKS">"THE OTHERS WERE UPCAST ON THE ROCKS"</a></td>
<td class="tdc">"</td><td class="tdrb">166</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tdl"><a href="#ME">"THEN I COULD USE MY EYES TO LOOK BEHIND ME"</a></td>
<td class="tdc">"</td><td class="tdrb">220</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p6"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
<h2 id="Zee">The Wrath of the Zuyder Zee</h2></div>
<h3>I</h3>
<p>Old Jaap Visser was mad. Out there on the
island of Marken, in the Zuyder Zee, he was
the one madman, and a curiosity. The little boys—all
born web-footed, and eager as soon as
they could walk to toddle off on their stout
little Dutch legs and take to the water—used
to run after him and jeer at him. An underlying
fear gave zest to this amusement. The
older of them knew that he could lay a strange
binding curse upon people. The younger
of them, resolving this concept into simpler
terms, knew that he could say something
that would hurt more than a spanking; and that
would keep on hurting, in some unexplained
but dreadful way, beyond the sting of the worst
spanking that ever they had known. Therefore,
while they jeered, they jeered circumspect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>ly.
Out in the open—on the brick-paved pathways
which traverse the low marsh-land and
unite the little knolls on which are the villages:
the Hafenbeurt (where the harbour is), the
Kerkehof, and the Kesbeurt—butter would not
melt in their small Dutch mouths when they met
him. But when they had him at their mercy
among the houses of one or another of the villages
things went differently. Then they would
yell "Old Jaap!" "Mad old Jaap!" after him—and
as he turned upon them would whip
off their sabots, that they might run the more
lightly, and would dash around corners into
safety: with delightful thrills of dread running
through their small scampish bodies at
the thought of the curse that certainly was flying
after them, and that certainly would make
them no better than dead jelly-fish if they did
not get around the corner in time to ward it
off! And old Jaap would be left free for a
moment from his tormentors, brandishing his
staff in angry flourishes and shouting his strange
curse after them: "May you perish in the wrath
of the Zuyder Zee!"</p>
<p>The young men and women of Marken, who
never had known old Jaap save as a madman,
felt toward him much as the children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
did; though as they got older, and came to
understand the cause of his madness and the
effectiveness of his curse, their dread of him
was apt to take on a more serious cast. Even
Krelis Kess, a notorious daredevil in all other
directions, and for a long while one of old
Jaap's most persistent tormentors, came in the
end to treat him with a very obliging civility.
But then, to be sure, Marretje de Witt was old
Jaap's granddaughter—and everybody in Marken
knew that this gentle Marretje, because of
her very unlikeness to him it was supposed,
had made capture of Krelis Kess's much too
vagrant heart. One person, it is true, did
dissent from this view of the matter, and that
was Geert Thysen—who declared that Krelis
was too much of a man really to care for a
pale-faced thing fit only to marry another oyster
like herself. And Geert's black eyes would
snap, and her strong white teeth would show
in a smile that was not a pleasant one as she
added: "A live man who knows the nip of gin-and-water
does not waste his time in drinking
weak tea!" But then, to quote the sense of the
island folk again, everybody in Marken knew
that to win Krelis's love for herself Geert
Thysen would have given those bold black<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
eyes of hers, and would have said thank you,
too!</p>
<p>Among the old people of Marken, who had
known old Jaap before his madness came upon
him, a very different feeling prevailed. They
dreaded him, of course, because they knew what
his curse could accomplish; but, also, they sorrowed
for him—remembering the cruel grief
which had come upon him in his youth suddenly
and had driven him mad. Well enough, they
said, might he call down his strange curse upon
those who angered him, for twice had he known
the bitterness of it: when death, and again worse
than death, had struck at that which was dearer
than the very heart of him through the wrath
of the Zuyder Zee.</p>
<p>It all had happened so long back that only
the old people had knowledge of it—in the great
storm out of the Arctic Ocean which had driven
into the Zuyder Zee the North Sea waters; and
there had banked them up, higher and higher,
until the whole island of Marken was flooded
and half the dykes of the mainland were overrun.
Old Jaap—who was young Jaap, then—was
afloat at his fishing when the storm came
on, and his young wife and her baby were alone
at home. In her fear for him she came down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
from the Kerkehof, where their home was, to
the Hafenbeurt; and there, standing upon the
sea-wall that shelters the little harbour, watching
for him, was the last that ever was seen of
her alive. When his schuyt came in she had
vanished—caught away by the up-leaping sea.
That was bad enough, but worse followed. A
month later, when he was at his fishing again—glad
to be at work, that in the stress of it he
might a little forget his sorrow—his net came
up heavy, and in it was his dead wife.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="MAN"><img src="images/pag6b.jpg" width="500"
height="375" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
"HE WAS A CRAZED MAN"
</div></div>
<p>Then it was that his madness fell upon him.
By the time that he was come back to Marken—sailing
his schuyt for a long night through
the dark waters with that grewsomely ghastly
lading—he was a crazed man.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>The shadow that rested on Jaap Visser's
mind was a deep melancholy that for the most
part kept him silent, yet that was broken now
and then by outbursts of rage in which he raved
against the cruel wickedness of the sea. It did
not unfit him for work. He had his living to
make; and he made it, as all the men of Marken
made their living, by fishing. But those who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
sailed with him in his schuyt said that always
as the net came home he hauled upon it with
tight-shut eyes; that always, as it was drawn
inboard, he turned away—until the thrashing
of the fish and some word about the catch from
his companions assured him that he might look
without fear of such a sight as that which had
flashed burning through his eyes and had turned
his brain.</p>
<p>When he was on land he spent little time in
his own home: of which, and of the baby
motherless, his mother had taken charge. Usually
he was to be found within or lingering near
the graveyard that lies between the Kerkehof
and the Hafenbeurt: an artificial mound, like
those whereon the several villages on the island
are built, raised high enough to be above the
level of the waters which cover Marken in times
of great storm. Before this strange habit of
his had become a matter of notoriety, a dozen
or more of the islanders, as they passed at night
along the path beside the graveyard, had been
frightened pretty well out of their wits by seeing
his tall figure rise from among the graves
suddenly and stand sharply outlined against
the star-gleam of the sky.</p>
<p>But in those days, as I have said, his mad<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>ness
was no more than a sombre melancholy—save
for his fitful outbursts of rage against the
sea. The bitterness that came into his heart
came later: when his daughter was a woman
grown and Jan de Witt married her—and presently
deserted her, as was known openly, for an
Edam jade over on the mainland. Things went
worse and worse for a while: until one day
when old Jaap—even then they were beginning
to call him old Jaap—fell into a burning rage
with his son-in-law and cursed him as he deserved
for the scoundrel that he was.</p>
<p>It was down at the dock that the two men
came together. The schuyts were going out,
and Jan was aboard his own boat making ready
to cast off. Half the island folk were there—the
fishermen about to sail, and their people
come to see them get away. Some one—who
did not see old Jaap standing on the piling near
where Jan's boat lay—called out: "The fishing
is good off Edam still, eh, Jan?" And then
there was a general laugh as Jan answered,
laughing also: "Yes, there's good fishing off
Edam—better than there is nearer home."</p>
<p>At this old Jaap broke forth into a passionate
outburst against his son-in-law: calling him by
all the evil names that he could get together,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
crying out against his wickedness and his cruelty,
and ending—as Jan's boat slid away from
her moorings, with Jan standing at the tiller
laughing at the old man's fury—by calling out
with a deep grave energy, in strange contrast
with his previous angry ravings: "God cannot
and will not forgive. He will judge you and
He will punish you. In His name I say to you:
May the might of the angered waters be upon
you—may you perish in the wrath of the Zuyder
Zee!"</p>
<p>There was such a majesty in old Jaap's tone
as he spoke those words, and such intense conviction,
that all who heard him were thrilled
strangely. Some of the old men of Marken,
who were there that day, still will tell you that
it seemed as though they heard the voice of
one who truly was the very mouth-piece of God.
Even Jan, they say, paled a little; but only for
a moment—and then he was off out of the harbour
with a jeer and a laugh.</p>
<p>But that was Jan's last laugh and jeer at
his father-in-law, and his last sight of Marken.
The next day the boats came hurrying home
before a storm, but Jan's boat did not come
with them. At first it was thought that he had
put into the canal leading up to Edam—it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
about there that the other fishermen had lost
sight of him—but a couple of days later his
boat drifted ashore, bottom upward, in the bight
of Goudzee south of Monnikendam. That left
room for guess-work. Certainty came at the
end of a fortnight: when the two men who had
been with him got back to Marken—after a
trip to England in the steamer that had picked
them up afloat—and told how the schuyt had
gone over in the gale and spilt them all out
into the sea. As for Jan, he never came back at
all. As he and the other two men were thorough
good sailors, and as the survivors themselves
were quite at a loss to account for their catastrophe,
there was only one way to explain the
matter: old Jaap's curse had taken effect!</p>
<p>After that old Jaap had a place still more
apart from the other islanders. What he had
done to one he could do to another, it was whispered—and
thenceforward he was both shunned
and dreaded because of the power for life and
death that was believed to be his. The reflex
of this popular conviction seemed to find a
place in his own heart, and now and again
he would threaten with his curse those who
got at odds with him. But he never uttered
it; and the fact was observed that even in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
case of the teasing little boys he was careful not
to curse any one of his tormentors by name.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>Certainly, if ever old Jaap had cursed any
particular little boy it would have been Krelis
Kess—who was quite the worst boy on the island,
and who usually was the leader of the
troop that hung about the old man's heels.</p>
<p>And even when Krelis got to be a big young
fellow of twenty—old enough to go on escapades
in Amsterdam of which the rumour, coming
back to Marken, made all steady-going folk
on the island look askance at him—he still
took an ugly pleasure, as occasion offered, in
stirring up old Jaap's wrath. If the old man
chanced to pass by while he was sitting of a
Sunday afternoon in Jan de Jong's tavern,
drinking more gin-and-water than was good for
him, it was one of his jokes to call out through
the open window "Mad old Jaap!" in the shrill
voice of a child; and to repeat his cry, with different
inflections but always in the same shrill
tones, until the old man would go off into a
fury and shout his curse at the little boys who
seemed to be so close about him but who could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
not anywhere be seen. At that Krelis would
fall to laughing mightily, and so would the
loose young fellows his companions—who had
found out that that would send his hand to his
pocket and give them free drinks all around.</p>
<p>Under such conditions it is not surprising
that the wonder, and also the regret, of these
young scapegraces was very great when on
a certain Sunday afternoon in mid-spring time
Krelis not only did not volunteer his usual pleasantry
at old Jaap's expense—as the old man
came shambling up the narrow street toward
the tavern—but actually refused to practise it
when it was suggested to him. And the wonder
grew to be blank astonishment, a minute later,
when he went to the window and begged Herr
Visser to come in and have a glass of schnapps
with him! To hear old Jaap called "Herr
Visser" by anybody was enough to stretch to
the widest any pair of Marken ears; but to hear
him addressed in that stately fashion by Krelis
Kess was enough to make any Marken man believe
that his ears had gone crazy!</p>
<p>At first the young scamps in the tavern were
quite sure that Krelis was about to play some
new trick on old Jaap, and that this wonderful
politeness was the beginning of it. But the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
marvel increased when the old man—who liked
schnapps as well as anybody—joined the little
company of tosspots and was treated by Krelis
with as much respect as though he had been a
burgomaster! And more than that, when the
session was ended—and old Jaap, to whom such
treats came rarely, was so far fuddled that he
could not manage his legs easily—Krelis said
that nothing could be pleasanter than a walk
across to the Kerkehof in the cool of the evening,
and so gave him a steadying arm home.
As the two set off together the young fellows
left behind stared at each other in sheer amazement;
and such of the Marken folk as chanced
to meet this strangely assorted couple marching
amicably arm in arm together were inclined
to disbelieve in their own eyes!</p>
<p>For a week, while they all were away at their
fishing, there was a lull in the excitement; but
it was aroused again the next Sunday when
Krelis did not come as usual to the tavern—and
went to a white heat when a late arrival, a
young fellow who lived in the Kerkehof, told
that as he came past Jaap Visser's house he
had seen Krelis sitting on the bench in front
of it talking away with old Jaap and making
eyes behind old Jaap's back at Marret<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>je.
At first, being so entirely incredible, this
statement was scouted scornfully; but it aroused
so lively a discussion that presently the whole
company left the tavern and went over in a
body to the Kerkehof bent upon disproving or
verifying it—and there, sure enough, were old
Jaap and Krelis smoking their pipes together,
and Marretje along with them, on the bench in
front of old Jaap's door!</p>
<p>Young Jan de Jong—the son of the tavern-keeper—expressed
the feelings of the company
when he said, later, that as they stood there
looking at that strange sight you might have
knocked down the whole of them with the flirt
of a skate's tail! But they did not stop long
to look at it. Krelis glared at them so savagely,
and his big fists doubled up in so threatening
a fashion, that they took themselves off in a
hurry—and back to the tavern to talk it over,
while they bathed their wonder in very lightly
watered gin.</p>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p>That was the beginning of Krelis Kess's
courting of Marretje de Witt—about which, in
a moment, all the island blazed with talk. Until
then, in a light-loving way, Krelis had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
keeping company with Geert Thysen. That
seemed a natural sort of match, for Geert and
Krelis had much the same bold way with them
and well enough might have paired. But Geert,
like Krelis, had a devil of a temper, and it was
supposed that an angry spat between them had
sent Krelis flying off in a rage from her spit-firing—and
that the gentle Marretje had caught
his heart on the rebound. The elders, reasoning
together out of their worldly wisdom, perceived
that under the law of liking for unlike this bold-going
young fellow very well might be drawn
toward a maiden all gentleness; and that, because
of her gentleness, Marretje would find a
thrilling pleasure in the strong love-making with
which Krelis would strive to take her heart by
storm. All that, as they knew, was human
nature. Had they known books also they would
have cited the case of Desdemona and the Moor.</p>
<p>However, there was not much time for talking.
Krelis was not of the sort to let grass
grow under his feet in any matter, and in a love
matter least of all. Nor were there any obstacles
to bar his way. He had his own boat,
that came to him when his father was drowned;
and he had his own house in the Kesbeurt, where
he had lived alone since his mother had ended<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
a notably short widowhood by marrying a second
time. Old Jaap, moreover, was ready
enough to accept as a son-in-law the only man
in Marken who ever had styled him Herr Visser,
and who in addition to that unparalleled
courtesy had given him in quick succession nearly
a dozen bottles of the best Schiedam. There
was nothing to hinder the marriage, therefore,
but Marretje's shyness—and Krelis overcame
that quickly in his own masterful way.</p>
<p>And so everybody saw that matters were like
to come quickly to a climax—everybody, that
is, except Geert Thysen, who said flatly that the
marriage was both impossible and absurd. Geert
had her own notion that Krelis was serving her
out for her hard words to him, and was only
waiting for a soft word to come back to her—and
she bit those full red lips of hers with her
strong teeth and resolved that she would keep
him waiting until he was quite in despair.
Then, at the very last, she would whistle him
back to her—with a laugh in his face first, and
then such a kiss as all the Marretjes in the
world could not give him—and the comedy of
his mock courtship would be at an end. Sometimes,
to be sure, the thought did cross her
mind that Krelis might not come to her whistle.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
Then the color would go out of her red cheeks
a little, and as she ground her big white teeth
together she would have a half-formed vision
of Krelis lying dead somewhere with a knife
in his heart. But visions of this sort came
seldom, and were quickly banished—with a
sharp little laugh at her own folly in fancying
even for an instant that Krelis could hesitate
in choosing between herself and that limp pale
doll.</p>
<p>And then, one day, she found herself face to
face with the fact that Krelis had not been playing
a comedy at all. The news was all over
the island that he and Marretje were to be married
the next Sunday; and that he meant to
be married handsomely, with a great wedding-feast
at Jan de Jong's tavern in Jan de Jong's
best style. "So there's an end of your lover for
you, Geert Thysen!" said Jaantje de Waard,
who brought the news to her.</p>
<p>At this Geert's red cheeks grew a little redder,
and her big black eyes had a brighter flash
to them; but she only laughed as she answered:
"It's one thing to lay the net—but it's another
to haul it in!" And Jaantje remembered afterward
what a strange look was in her face as
she said those strange words.</p>
<p class="p2"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span></p>
<h3>V</h3>
<p>The wedding was the finest that had been
known in Marken for years. At the church
the parson gave his "Golden Clasp" address,
which was the most beautiful of his three wedding
addresses and cost five gulden. Then the
company streamed away along the brick-paved
pathway from the Kerkehof to the Hafenbeurt,
with the sunshine gleaming gallantly on the
white caps and white aprons of the women and
on the shiny high hats of the men, while the
wind fluttered the little Dutch flags—and they
all walked much more steadily then than they
did when they took their after-breakfast walk,
before the dancing began. In that second walk
the men's legs wavered a good deal, and some
of them had trouble in steering the stems of
their long pipes to their mouths. But that is
not to be wondered at when you think what a
breakfast it was! Jan de Jong fairly excelled
himself. They talk about it in Marken to this
day!</p>
<p>While the wedding-party walked unsteadily
abroad the big room in the tavern was cleared;
and when the company was come back again,
much the better for fresh air and exercise, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
dancing began. And just then a very queer
thing happened: Krelis led off the dance with
Geert Thysen instead of with Marretje his
bride!</p>
<p>Some say that Geert made him promise to
do this as the price of her coming to the wedding;
others say that it was done on the spur
of the moment—was one of Geert's sudden
whims that Krelis, who also was given to sudden
whims, fell in with. About the truth of this
matter there can be only guess-work, but about
what happened there is plain fact: Just as the
set was forming, Krelis dropped Marretje's
hand and said lightly: "You won't mind, Marretje,
will you? It's for old friendship's sake,
you know." And with that he took the hand
of Geert Thysen, who was standing close beside
him, and away he went with her in the dance.
Those who think that it had been arranged between
them beforehand point out that Geert had
refused all offers to dance and had come close
to Krelis just as the set was formed. There
is something in that, I think. But whether
they had planned it or had not planned it, the
fact remains that Marretje's place at the head
of the dance at her own wedding was taken by
another woman; and as the set was complete<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
without her, she did not dance at all until the
first figure came to an end. They say that
there were tears in her eyes as she stood alone
there—and that she was very white when Krelis
took her hand again, at the end of the first
figure, and gave her for the rest of the dance
the place at the head of it that was hers. They
say, too, that Geert stood watching them—when
Krelis had left her and had taken his bride
again—with a hot blaze of color coming and
going in her cheeks, and with a wonderful flashing
and sparkling of her great black eyes. And
before the dance ended Geert went home.</p>
<p>There was a great crackling of talk, of course,
about this slight that Krelis had put upon Marretje
on her wedding-day; and people shook
their heads and said that worse must come after
it. Some of the stories about Krelis's escapades
in Amsterdam were raked up again and were
pointed with a fresh moral. As for Geert, the
Marken women had but one opinion of her—and
the least unkindly expression of it was
that she was walking in a very dangerous path.
But when echoes of this talk came to Geert's
ears—as they did, of course—she merely
curled her red lips a little and said that as
she was neither a weak woman nor a fool<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>ish
woman she was safe to walk where she
pleased.</p>
<h3>VI</h3>
<p>It was a little disconcerting to the prophets
of evil that the weeks and the months slipped
away without any signs of the fulfilment of
their prophecies. However keen may have been
Marretje's sorrow on her wedding-day, it was
not lasting. Indeed, her gentle nature was so
filled with a worshipping love for Krelis that
he had only to give her a single light look of
affection or a half-careless kiss to fill her whole
being with happiness. He was a god to her—this
gayly daring young fellow who had raised
her up to be a shy little queen in a queendom,
she was sure, such as never had been for any
other woman in all the world. And Krelis
was very well pleased with her frank adoration.
It was tickling to his vanity that she
should be so completely and so eagerly his loving
slave.</p>
<p>Next to her love for Krelis—and partly because
it was a part of her love for him—Marretje's
greatest joy was in her housekeeping.
She had taken a just pride in the tidiness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
her housekeeping for her grandfather; but it
was a very different and far more exciting matter
to furbish and polish a house that really
was her own. And Krelis's house, of which
she was the proud mistress, was far bigger and
far finer than her old home. It was a stately
dwelling, for Marken, standing on an out-jutting
ridge of earth at the back of the Kesbeurt,
close upon a delightful little canal—and from
the back doorway was a restful far-off outlook
over the marsh-land to the level horizon of the
Zuyder Zee. Marretje loved that outlook, and
she had it before her often: for down beside
the canal was her scouring-shelf—where she
scoured away through long sunny mornings,
while Krelis was away at his fishing, until her
pots and kettles ranged in the sunlight shone
like burnished gold.</p>
<p>Yet the fact should be added that when the
old men of Marken talked together about this
fine house of Krelis Kess's they would shake
their heads a little—saying that a better spending
of money would have been for a smaller
house founded on solid piling, instead of for
this showy dwelling standing on an out-thrust
earth bank which well enough might crumble
away beneath it in some time of tremendous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
tempest when all the island should be overswept
and beaten by the sea.</p>
<p>For the most part, of course—save for little
chats with her neighbours—Marretje was alone
in that fine house of hers. Old Jaap had come
to live with the young people—as was only fair,
since he had no one but his granddaughter to
care for him—but both he and Krelis spent all
their week-days afloat at their fishing and only
their Sundays at home. Yet now and then the
old man, making some excuse for not going out
with the fleet, would give himself a turn at shore
duty; and would sit in his big chair, smoking his
long pipe very contentedly, watching his granddaughter
at her endless scouring and cleaning,
and listening to her little bursts of song. In
his unsettled old mind he sometimes fancied
that the years had rolled backward and that he
was watching his own young wife again; and
in his old heart he would dream young love-dreams
by the hour together—blessedly forgetting
that the love and the happiness which had
made his life beautiful had been snatched away
from him and lost forever in the wrathful waters
of the Zuyder Zee.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="DWELLING"><img src="images/illo2.jpg" width="500"
height="378" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
"IT WAS A STATELY DWELLING"
</div></div>
<p>But Marretje's love-dreams were living ones.
As Krelis lounged over his pipe of a Sunday<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
morning, taking life easily in his clean Sunday
clothes, he would say an airy word or two in
praise of her housekeeping that fairly would
set her to blushing with happiness—and what
with the colour in her fair face and the light in
her blue eyes she would be so entirely charming
that Krelis's own eyes would go to sparkling,
and he would draw her close to him and fondle
her in a genuinely loverlike fashion that would
fill her with a very tender joy. Krelis was
quite sincere in his love-making. His little
Marretje's soft beauty, and her shy delight in
his caresses, went down into an unsounded depth
and touched an unknown strain of gentleness in
his easy-going heart.</p>
<p>But even on the first Sunday after they were
married Krelis went off after dinner—it had
been a wonder of a dinner that Marretje had
cooked for him: she had been planning it the
week through!—to join his companions as usual
at Jan de Jong's. This came hard on Marretje.
She had been counting so much on that afternoon!
A dozen little tender confidences had
been put aside during the morning to be made
then comfortably: when the dinner things would
all be cleared away, and her grandfather would
have gone to take his usual Sunday look at his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
boat, and she and Krelis would be sitting at
their ease—delightfully alone together for the
first time in their lives!</p>
<p>She had thought it all out, and had arranged
in her own mind that they would sit on the
steps above her scouring-shelf—at the back of
the house and hidden away from everybody—with
the canal at their feet, and in front of
them the level loneliness of the marsh-land
stretching away and losing itself in the level
loneliness of the sea. She had a cushion all
ready for Krelis to sit on, and a smaller cushion
for herself that was to go on the next lower step—and
she blushed a little to herself as she
thought how she would make a back to lean
against out of Krelis's big knees. And then,
just as she had finished her clearing away and
was getting out the cushions, Krelis put on his
hat and said that he thought he would step
across to the tavern and have a look at the boys.
The boys would laugh at him, he said, if he
settled right down into being an old married
man—and he tried to give a better send-off to
this small pleasantry by laughing at it himself.
But he did not laugh very heartily, and he
almost turned back again when he got to the
bridge—thinking how the light of happiness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
which had made Marretje's face so beautiful
through that Sunday morning suddenly had
died out of it as he came away. And then he
pulled himself together with the reflection that
she would be all right again when he got back
to her at supper-time, and so went on. When
he was come to the tavern he forgot all about
Marretje's unhappiness, for the boys welcomed
him with a cheer.</p>
<p>Being in this way forsaken, Marretje carried
out what was left of her broken plan forlornly—arranging
the cushions on the two steps, and
sitting on the lower one with her elbow resting
on the upper one, and gazing out sorrowfully
across the marsh-land and the sea. That great
loneliness of sedge and sea and sky made her
own loneliness more bitter: and then came the
hurting thought that just a week before, very
nearly at that same hour, Krelis still more
cruelly had forsaken her while he led with Geert
Thysen their wedding-dance.</p>
<p>After a while old Jaap came home and seated
himself beside her. He was silent, as was
his habit, but having him that way soothed
and comforted her. As she leaned her head
against his shoulder and held his big bony
hands the old man went off into one of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
dream-fancies that his young wife was beside
him again—and perhaps, in some subtle way,
that also helped to take the sting out of her
pain. When Krelis came home at supper-time,
walking a little unsteadily, he did not miss
her flow of chattering talk that had gone on
through the morning; and presently it began
again—for Krelis returned in high good-humour,
and his fire of pretty speeches and his
kisses quickly brought happiness back to her
sore little heart. Knowing thereafter what to
expect of a Sunday, her pleasure was less lively—but
so was her pain.</p>
<h3>VII</h3>
<p>It was a little past the turn of the half-year
after the wedding that the prophets of evil pricked
up their ears hopefully—as there began to
go humming through Marken a soft buzz of talk
about the carryings on of Geert Thysen and
Krelis Kess. It was only vague talk, to be
sure; but then when talk of that sort is vague
there is the more seaway for speculation and
inference. All sorts of rumours went flashing
about—and carried the more weight, perhaps,
because they could not be traced to a starting-point<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
and were disavowed by each person who
passed them on. The sum of them became
quite amazing before long!</p>
<p>In the end, of course, this talk worked around
to Marretje. Bit by bit, one kind friend after
another brought her variations of the same budget
of news, pleading their friendship for her
as the excuse for their chattering; and all of
them were a good deal disconcerted by the
placid way, with scarcely a word of comment,
in which she suffered them to talk on. Only
when they took to saying harsh things about
Krelis did they rouse her a little. Then she
would stop them shortly, and with a quiet insistence
that put them in an awkward corner,
by asking them to remember that it was her
husband whom they were talking about, and
that what they were saying was not fit for his
wife to hear. This line of rejoinder was disconcerting
to her interlocutors. To be put in
the wrong, that way, while performing for
conscience' sake a very unpleasant duty, could
not but arouse resentment. Presently it began
to be said that Marretje was a poor-spirited
thing upon whom friendly sympathy was thrown
away.</p>
<p>Perhaps it was because Marretje was not feel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>ing
very strong just then that she took matters
so quietly. Certainly she had not much energy
to spare, and her days went slowly and heavily.
Even on the Sunday mornings when she had
Krelis at home with her—and a good many
of his Sundays were spent away from the
island, in order, as he explained, that he might
get off on the Mondays earlier to his fishing—she
found it hard to keep up the laughing talk
and the light-hearted way with him that he
seemed to think always were his due. When she
flagged a little he told her not to be sulky—and
that cut her sharply, for she thought that he
ought to feel in his own heart how very tenderly
she was loving him in those days, and how
earnestly she was longing for a tender and sustaining
love in return.</p>
<p>It is uncertain how much of all this old Jaap
understood, but a part of it he certainly did
understand. In some matters his clouded brain
seemed to work with a curious clearness, and
especially had he a strange faculty for getting
close to troubled hearts. Many there were in
Marken, on whom sorrow had fallen, who had
been comforted by his sympathy; and who
had found it the more soothing and helpful
because it was given with no more than a gentle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
look or a few gentle words. In this same soft
way, that asked for no answer and that needed
none, he comforted Marretje in that sad time
of her loneliness. Many a day, when the other
fishermen kept the sea, he kept the land—letting
his boat go away to the fishing without
him while he made company at home for his
granddaughter, and even helped her in the heavier
part of her house-work with his big clumsy
old hands. These awkward efforts to serve her
touched Marretje's heart very keenly—yet also
added a pang to her sorrow because of her longing
that Krelis might show his love for her
in the same way.</p>
<p>But old Jaap had his work to do at sea, and
Marretje had to make the best of many and
many a weary and lonely day. Being in so
poor a way she could busy herself but little
with her house-work—nor was there much incentive
to scour and polish since Krelis had
ceased to commend her housekeeping; and, indeed,
was at home so little that he was indifferent
as to whether she kept her house well or
ill.</p>
<p>And so she spent much of her time as she
had spent that first lonely Sunday afternoon—sitting
on the steps above her scouring-shelf,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
looking out sadly and dreamily across the marsh-land
and the sea. Or she would walk slowly
to the end of the village, where rough steps
went down to a little-used canal, and there
would lean against the rail while she gazed
steadfastly across the marshes seaward—trying
to fancy that she could see the fishing fleet,
and trying to build in her breast little hope-castles
in which Krelis again was all her own.
They comforted her, these hope-castles: even
though always, when the week ended and the
fleet was back again, they came crashing down.
Sometimes Krelis's boat did not return at all.
Sometimes it returned without him. When he
did come back in it very little of his idle Sunday
was passed at home. The dark months of
winter dragged on wearily. Grey chill clouds
hung over Marken, and grey chill clouds rested
on this poor Marretje's heart.</p>
<h3>VIII</h3>
<p>But one glad day in the early spring-time the
sun shone again—when Krelis bent down over
her bed with a look of real love in his bright
eyes and kissed her; and then—in a half-fearful
way that made her laugh at him with a weak<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
little laugh in which there was great happiness—kissed
also his little son. "As if his father's
kiss could hurt this great strong boy!" she said
in a tone of vast superiority: and held the little
atom close to her breast with all the strength
of her feeble arms. She loved with a double
love this little Krelis: greatly for himself and
for the strong thrilling joy of motherhood, but
perhaps even more because his coming had
brought the other Krelis back again into the
deep chambers of her heart.</p>
<p>It was the prettiest of sights, presently, when
she was up and about again, to see Marretje
standing in front of her own door in the spring
sunshine holding this famous little Krelis in
her arms. Then, as now, young mothers were
common enough in Marken; but there was a
look of radiant happiness about Marretje—so
the old people will tell you—that made her
different from any young mother whom ever
they saw. "Her face was as shining as the
face of an angel!" one of the old women said
to me—when I heard this story told in Marken
on a summer day. And this same old woman
told me that through that time of Marretje's
great happiness Geert Thysen walked sullen:
ready at any moment, without cause or reason,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
to fly out into what the old woman called a
yellow rage.</p>
<p>But even from the first the matrons of the
island, knowing in such matters, pulled long
faces when they talked about the little Krelis
among themselves. Krelis Kess's son, they said,
should not have been so frail a child; and then
they would account for this puny baby by casting
back to the time when Marretje was orphaned
before she was weaned, and so was started
in life without the toughness and sturdiness
with which the Marken folk as a rule are dowered.
These worthy women had much good advice
to give, and gave it freely, as to how the
little Krelis should be dealt with to strengthen
him; but Marretje paid scant attention to
their suggestions, being satisfied in her own
mind that this wonderful baby of hers really
was—as she had said he was on the day when
his father first kissed him—a great strong boy.</p>
<p>Krelis, seeing his little son only once a
week, was the first to notice that he was not so
strong as a healthy child should be; but when he
said so to Marretje she gave him such a rating
that he decided he must be all wrong. And
then, one day, Geert Thysen opened both his
and Marretje's eyes.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
It was a bright Sunday afternoon, when the
little Krelis was between two and three months
old, that Marretje was sitting with him on her
lap, suckling him, on the steps above her scouring-shelf;
and Krelis was seated on the step
above her, and she really was making a back
of his big knees. What with the joy of her
motherhood, and her joy because her Krelis was
her own again, it seemed to Marretje as though
in all the world there was only happiness. She
held the little Krelis close to her, crooning
a soft song sweetly over the tiny creature nestled
to her heart; and as she suckled him there
tingled through her breast, and thence through
all her being, thrills of that strange subtle
ecstasy which only mothers know. And Krelis,
in his own way, shared Marretje's great happiness:
as they sat there lonely, looking out
over the marsh-land seaward, their hearts very
near together because of the deep love that was
in both of them for their child. Presently
Krelis leaned a little forward, and with a touch
rarely loving and tender encircled the two in
his big arms and drew Marretje still closer
against his knees. And they sat there for a
while so—in the bright silence of that sunny
afternoon, fronting that still outlook over level<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
spaces cut only by the level sky-line far away—their
two hearts throbbing gently and very
full.</p>
<p>A little noise broke the deep silence suddenly,
and an instant later Geert Thysen was almost
within arm's-length of them—standing in a boat
which she had poled very quietly along the
canal. Krelis unclasped his arms and drew
back quickly; but Marretje bent forward and
grasped the little Krelis still more closely, as
though to shield him from harm. For a moment
there was silence. Krelis flushed and looked
uneasy, almost ashamed. There was a dull
burning light in Geert's black eyes and her
face was pale and drawn. She was the first
to speak.</p>
<p>"You're quite right to make the most of your
sick baby," she said. "You won't have him
long."</p>
<p>"He's not a sick baby," Marretje answered
furiously. "He's as strong and well as he can
be!"</p>
<p>Geert laughed. "That puny little thing
strong and well!" she answered. "Much it
is that you know about babies, Marretje! Don't
you see how the veins show through his skin?
Don't you see the marks under his eyes? Don't<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
you see how little he is, and how he don't
grow? In another month you'll know more.
He'll be over yonder in the graveyard by that
time!" And then she flashed a look on Krelis
of that sort of hate which comes when love goes
wrong as she added: "And it is no more than
you deserve, Krelis Kess. You might have had
a strong woman for a wife, and then you would
have had a strong child!" With that she gave
a sudden thrust with the pole that sent her boat
flying away from them, and in an instant vanished
around a turn in the canal.</p>
<h3>IX</h3>
<p>Within a week the story of what had happened
between them was all over Marken. Geert
Thysen herself must have told what she had
done. Certainly Krelis did not tell; and Marretje,
having no one else to turn to, told only
her grandfather. But various versions of the
story went about the island, and the comment
upon all of them by the Marken folk was the
same: that Krelis had played the part of a coward
in suffering such words to be spoken to his
wife with never a word on his side of reply.
Old Jaap, they say, blazed out into one of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
his mad rages against his son-in-law. Some say
that he then laid the curse upon him—but that
never will be known certainly, for the bout between
the two men took place when they were
alone.</p>
<p>What is known to be true is that Krelis for
a while was as a man stunned; and that when
he came to himself again—this was after the
little Krelis was laid away in the graveyard—what
love he had for Marretje was turned to
an angry hatred because she had let his boy die.
He said this not only to his neighbours but to
Marretje herself—telling her that their child
had died because she had borne it weakly into
the world and had given it no strength with
which to live.</p>
<p>Even a strong woman, being well-nigh heart-broken—as
Marretje was when her baby was
lost to her—could not have stood up against a
blow like that. And Marretje, who was not a
strong woman, felt the heart-breaking bitterness
of what Krelis said because she knew that
it was true. Very soon she was as feeble and
as wan as the little Krelis had been. Happiness
was no more for her, and she longed only
for the forgetfulness of sorrow which would
come to her when she should be as the little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
Krelis was. And so her slight hold on life
loosened quickly, and presently she and the little
Krelis lay in the graveyard side by side.</p>
<p>She had a very nice funeral, so one of the
old women in Marken told me: the best bier
and the best pall were used, and the minister
gave his best address—the one called "The
Mourning Wreath"—at the grave. And, to end
with, there was a breakfast in Jan de Jong's
tavern that was of the best too. It was only
just to Krelis, the old woman said, to say that
in the matter of the funeral he behaved very
well indeed.</p>
<p>But one thing which he did at that breakfast
showed that it was for his own pride, and
not for the sake of Marretje, that everything
was done in so fine a style. On Marken there
was left no near woman relative of Marretje's,
and when the guests came to the table they were
a good deal scandalized by finding that Geert
Thysen was to be seated on Krelis's right hand.
Old Jaap's place was on his left, but when the
old man saw who was to take the seat on the
right he drew back quickly from the table
and left the room.</p>
<p>At that, for a full half-minute there was an
awkward pause—until Krelis, in a strong voice,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
bade the company be seated: and added that no
one had a better right to the seat beside him
than Marretje's oldest friend. As he made this
speech a little buzzing whisper went around
among the company, and some one even snickered
down at the lower end of the big room.
But there was the breakfast, as good as it could
be, before them. It was much too good a breakfast
to lose on a mere point of etiquette. The
whispering died out, and for a moment the
guests looked at one another in silence—and
then there was a great scraping and rattling
of chairs as they all sat down. And Krelis and
Geert presided over the funeral feast with a
most proper gravity—save that now and then
a glance passed between them that seemed to
have more meaning than was quite decorous
in the case of those two: the one being a maiden,
and the other a widower whose wife had not
been buried quite two hours.</p>
<p>Of course there was a good deal of talk
about all this afterward; but as public opinion
had been moulded under favour able conditions—while
the mellowing influence of the good
food and abundant drink was still operative—the
talk was not by any means relentlessly
harsh. The men openly smiled at the proof<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
which Krelis had given that his loss was not
irreparable; and the women, with a certain
primness, admitted that—after all the talk there
had been—Krelis owed it to Geert to marry her
with as little delay as the proprieties of the
case would allow.</p>
<p>But even this kindly public opinion was
strained sharply by the discovery that the marriage
was to take place only two months after
that funeral feast at which, to all intents and
purposes, it had been announced. That was
going, the women said, altogether too fast. But
the men only laughed again—partly at the way
in which the women were standing up for the
respect due to their sex, and partly at Krelis's
hurry to take on again the bonds from which
he had been so very recently set free.</p>
<p>Here and there among the talkers a questioning
word would be put in as to how old Jaap
would take this move on the part of his son-in-law.
But even the few people who bothered
their heads with this phase of the matter held
that old Jaap never would have a clear enough
understanding of it to resent the dishonour put
upon his granddaughter's memory. He had returned
to his home in the Kerkehof and was
living there, in his own queer way, solitary.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
He was madder than ever, people said; and it
was certain that he had gone back to his old
habit of spending in the graveyard all of the
days and many of the nights which he passed
ashore. Often those who passed by night between
the Hafenbeurt and the Kerkehof saw
him there—keeping his strange watch among
the graves.</p>
<h3>X</h3>
<p>What the Marken folk still speak of as
"the great storm"—the worst storm of which
there is record in the island's history—set in
a good four-and-twenty hours before the December
day on which Geert Thysen and Krelis Kess
were married. From the Polar ice-fields a
rushing and a mighty wind thundered southward
over the Arctic Ocean and down across
the shallows of the North Sea—sucking away
the water from the Baltic, sending a roaring
tide out through the English Channel into the
Atlantic, and piling higher and higher against
the Holland coast a wall of ocean: which broke
at the one opening and went pouring onward
into the Zuyder Zee.</p>
<p>Already on the morning of that wild wedding-day
the waves were lapping high about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
Marken, and here and there a dull gleam of
water showed where the marshes were overflowed.
Just before daybreak the storm lulled
a little, but came on again with a fresh force
after the unseen sunrise, and grew stronger and
stronger as the black day wore on. Down by
the little haven the fishermen were gathered in
groups anxiously watching their tossing boats—in
dread lest in spite of the doubled and tripled
moorings they should fetch away. Steadily
from the black sky poured downward sheets
of rain.</p>
<p>According to Marken notions, even a landsman
should not have ventured to marry on a
day like that; and for a fisherman to marry
while such a storm was raging was a sheer
tempting of all the forces which work together
for evil in the tempests of the sea. Every one
expected that the wedding would be put off;
and when word was passed around that it was
not to be put off, all of the older and steadier
folk refused with one voice to have anything
to do with it. How Krelis succeeded in inducing
the minister to perform the ceremony
no one ever knew—for the minister was one of
the many that day on Marken who never saw
the rising of another sun. He was not well<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
liked, that minister, and stories not to his
credit were whispered about him; at least so
one of the old women told me—and more than
half hinted that what happened to him was a
judgment upon him for his sins.</p>
<p>Even when the wedding-party came across
from the Kerkehof to the Hafenbeurt, some
little time before mid-day, the marshes on each
side of the raised path were marshes no longer,
but open water—that was whipped southward
before the gale in little angry waves. There
was no chance for a show of finery. The men
wore their oil-skins over their Sunday clothes,
and the women were wrapped in cloaks and
shawls. But it was a company of young dare-devils,
that wedding-party, and the members
of it came on through the storm laughing and
shouting—with Geert and Krelis leading and
the gayest madcaps of them all. So far from
being dismayed by the roaring tempest, those
two wild natures seemed only to be stirred and
aroused by it to a fierce happiness. They say
that Geert never was so beautiful as she was
that day—her face glowing with a strong rich
colour, her eyes sparkling with a wonderful brilliancy,
her full red lips parted and showing the
gleam of those strong white teeth of hers, her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
lithe body erect and poised confidently against
the furious wind which swept them all forward
along the path.</p>
<p>But as the party came near to the graveyard,
lying midway between the Kerkehof and
the Hafenbeurt close beside the path, some of
the young men and women found their merriment
oozing out of them. In that day of
black storm the rain-sodden mound was inexpressibly
desolate. All around it, save for the
pathway leading up to its gate, the marsh was
flooded. The graveyard almost was an island—would
be quite an island should the water
rise another foot. Rushed onward by the gale,
shrewd little waves were beating against its
windward side so sharply that the soft soil
visibly was crumbling away—a sight which
recalled a dim but very grisly legend of how
once a great storm had hurled such a sea upon
Marken that the dead bodies lying in that very
spot had been torn from their resting-places by
the tumultuous waves. But crueler still was the
shivering thought of Marretje, only two months
dead, lying in that sodden ground in her storm-beaten
grave.</p>
<p>And then, as they came closer, the memory
of Marretje was brought home to them still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
more sharply and in a strangely startling way:
as they saw old Jaap uprise suddenly from
where he had been crouched amidst the graves.
Bareheaded, with his long grey hair and long
grey beard soaked with the falling torrent and
flying out before the wind, he stood upright
on the crest of the mound close above them—his
tall lean figure towering commandingly
against the black rain clouds, defiant as some
old sea-god of the furious storm.</p>
<p>He seemed to be speaking, but the storm
noises were as a wall shutting him off from
them, and not until they had passed on a little
and were to leeward of him could they hear
his words. Then they heard him clearly: speaking
slowly, with no trace of anger in his tones
but with a strange solemn fervour—as though
he felt himself to be out beyond the line which
separates Time from Eternity, and from that
vantage-point uttered with authority the judgments
of an outraged God. It was to Geert
and Krelis that he spoke, pointing at them with
one outstretched hand while the other was
raised as though in invocation toward the wild
black sky: "For your sins the anger of God
is loosed upon you in His tempests, and in His
name I curse you with a binding curse. May<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
the raging waters be upon you! May you perish
in the wrath of the Zuyder Zee!"</p>
<p>A shudder went through all the wedding
company. Even Krelis, half stopping, suddenly
paled. Only Geert, bolder than all of them
put together, held her own. With a quick motion
she drew Krelis onward, and her lip curled in
that way of hers as she said to him: "What
has old Jaap to do with you or me, Krelis?
He is a mad old fool!" And then she looked
straight at old Jaap, into the very eyes of
him, and laughed scornfully—as they all together
went on again through the wind and
rain.</p>
<p>But when they came to Jan de Jong's tavern,
where the wedding-breakfast was waiting
for them, Krelis was the first to call for gin.
He said that he was cold.</p>
<h3>XI</h3>
<p>It was the strangest wedding-feast, they
say, that ever was held on Marken: with the
black tempest beating outside, and all the lamps
in the big room lighted—although the day still
was on the morning side of noon. Young Jan
de Jong—the same who is old Jan de Jong<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
now, and who now keeps the tavern—remembers
it all well, and tells how his mother was for
bundling the whole company out of doors. Such
doings would bring bad luck upon the house,
she said—and went up-stairs and locked herself
into her room and took to praying when her
husband told her that bad luck never came
with good money, and that what Krelis was
willing to pay for Krelis should have.</p>
<p>But it was the wife who was right that time—as
the husband knew a very little later on.
For that night Krelis's boat was one of those
swept away from their moorings and foundered,
and Krelis's fine house was undermined by
the water and went out over the Zuyder Zee in
fragments—and so the wedding-feast never
was paid for at all. And she always said that
but for her prayers their son would have been
lost to them too. Old Jan was very grave when
he told me about this—and from some of the
others I learned that it was because of what happened
to him that night that he gave over the
wild life that he had been leading and became
a steady man.</p>
<p>At first, what with the blackness of the storm
and the ringing in everybody's ears of old Jaap's
curse, the company was a dismal one. But the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
plentiful hot gin-and-water that Krelis ordered—and
led in drinking—soon brought cheerfulness
back again. As for Geert, she had
no need of gin-and-water: her high spirits held
from first to last. Seated on Krelis's right—just
as she had been seated only a little while
before on the day of Marretje's funeral—she
rattled away steadily with her gay talk; and
every now and then, they say, turned to
Krelis with a look that brought fire into his
eyes!</p>
<p>The walk after breakfast was out of the
question. As the afternoon went on the storm
raged more and more tumultuously. There was
nothing for it but to have the room cleared of
the chairs and table and go straight on to the
dancing; and that they did—excepting some
of the weaker-headed ones, whose legs were too
badly tangled for such gay exercise and who
sat limply on the benches against the wall.</p>
<p>This time it was not by favour but by right
that Geert led the dance with Krelis—her black
eyes shining and her face all of a rich red
glow. And as she took her place at the head of
it she said to Jaantje de Waard: "Who's got
him now, this lover of mine you said I'd lost,
Jaantje? Didn't I tell you that it's one thing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
to lay the net, but it's another to haul it in?"
And away she went, caught close to Krelis,
with a laugh on those red lips of hers and a
brighter sparkle in her black eyes. Jaantje
said—it was she who told me, an old woman
now—that somehow this speech of Geert's, and
the sudden thought that it brought of dead
Marretje out there in the graveyard, made her
feel so queasy in her stomach that she left the
dance and went home bare-headed through the
storm.</p>
<p>The dancing, with plenty of drink between
whiles, went on until evening; and after night-fall
the company grew still merrier—partly
because of the punch, but more because the feast
lost much of its grewsomeness when they all
knew that the darkness outside was the ordinary
darkness of black night and not the
strange darkness of that black day. But there
was no break in the storm; and now and then,
when a fierce burst of wind fairly set the house
to rocking on its foundations, and sent the rain
dashing in sheets against the windows, there
would be anxious talk among those of the dancers
who came from the Kerkehof or the Kesbeurt
as to how they were to get home. From
time to time one of the men would open the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
door a little and take a look outside—and would
draw in again in a hurry and go straight to the
punch-bowl for comforting: for none of them
had seen any storm like that on Marken in all
their lives.</p>
<p>And so, when at last the storm did lull a
little—this was about eight o'clock in the evening,
close upon the moonrise—there was a general
disposition to take advantage of the break
and get away. And Krelis did not urge his
guests to stay longer, for he was of the same
mind with them—being eager to carry off homeward
his Geert with the flashing eyes.</p>
<p>But when the men went out of doors together
to have a look about them they were brought
up suddenly with a round turn. It is only a
step from Jan de Jong's tavern to the head
of the path that dips downward and leads across
the marshes to the other villages. But when
they had taken that step no path was to be
seen! Close at their feet, and stretching away
in front of them as far as their eyes could
reach through the night-gloom, was to be seen
only tumultuous black water flecked here and
there with patches of foam. Everywhere over
Marken, save the graveyard mound and the
knolls on which stood the several villages, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
ocean was in possession: right across the island
were sweeping the storm-lashed waves of the
Zuyder Zee!</p>
<h3>XII</h3>
<p>Though they all were filled with punch-begotten
Dutch courage, not one of them but
Krelis—as they stood together looking out over
what should have been marsh-land and what
was angry sea—thought even for a moment of
getting homeward before daylight should come
again and the gale should break away. And
even Krelis would not have been for facing
such danger at an ordinary time: but just then
his soul and body were in commotion, and over
the black stormy water he saw visions of Geert
beckoning him to those red lips of hers, and
firing him with the sparkle of her flashing eyes.</p>
<p>"It's a bit of sea," he said lightly, "but if one
of you will lend a hand at an oar with me we'll
manage it easily. Just here it's baddish. But
a stiff pull of a hundred yards will fetch us into
smoother water under the lee of the graveyard,
and beyond that we'll be a little under the lee of
the Kerkehof—and then another spurt of stiff
pulling will fetch us home. Geert will steer,
and we can count on her to steer well. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
wouldn't have risked it with Marretje at the
tiller—but I've got another sort of a wife now.
Which of you'll come along?"</p>
<p>There was a dead silence at that, for every
one of the young fellows standing there knew
that to take a boat out into that water meant
a fight for life at every inch of the way.</p>
<p>"Well, since you're all so modest," Krelis
went on with a laugh, "I'll pick out big Jan
here to pull with me—and no offence to the rest
of you, for we all know that not another man
on Marken pulls so strong an oar."</p>
<p>It was old Jan himself who told me this,
and he said that when Krelis chose him that
way there was nothing for him to do but to say
that he'd go. But he said that he went pale
at the thought of what was before him, and
would have given anything in the world to get
out of the job. All the others spoke up against
their trying it; and that, he said, while it scared
him still more—for they all, in spite of the
punch that was in them, spoke very seriously—helped
him to go ahead. It would be something
to talk about afterward, he thought, that
he had done what everybody else was afraid to
do. And when the others found that he and
Krelis were not to be shaken, they set themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
to bringing a strong boat across from the other
side of the village and getting it into the water—in
a smooth place under the lee of one of the
houses—and lashing a lantern fast into its
bows.</p>
<p>When Krelis and Jan went back to the tavern
to fetch Geert there was another outcry. All
the women got around Geert and declared that
she should not go. But Geert was ready always
for any bit of daredeviltry, and the readier when
anybody tried to hold her back from it—and
then the way that Krelis looked at her would
have taken her with him through the very gates
of hell. She only laughed at the other women,
and made them help her to put on the oil-skin
hat and coat that Krelis fetched for her to keep
her dry against the pelting rain. And she
laughed still louder when she was rigged out
in that queer dress—and what with her sparkling
eyes and her splendid colour was so bewitching
under the big hat that Krelis snatched
a kiss from her and swore that at last he had
a wife just to his mind.</p>
<p>All the company, muffled in shawls and
cloaks, went along with them to the water-side
to see them start; and because there was no
commotion in the quiet nook where the boat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
was lying, and the darkness hid the tumbling
waves beyond, most of them thought that the
only danger ahead for Geert and the others was
a thorough drenching—and were disposed to
make fun of this queer wedding-journey on
which they were bound. But the young men
who had launched the boat knew better, and
they tried once more to make Krelis give over
his purpose—or, at least, to wait until the moon
should rise a little and thin the clouds. And
all the answer that they got was a laugh from
Geert and a joking invitation from Krelis to
come across to the Kesbeurt in the morning and
join him in a glass of grog.</p>
<p>Krelis was to pull stroke, and so big Jan
got into the boat ahead of him—with his heart
fairly down in his boots, he told me—and then
Krelis got in; and last of all Geert took her
seat in the stern, and as she gripped the tiller
steadily gave the order to shove off. With a
strong push the young men gave the boat a
start that sent it well out from the shore, and
then the oars bit into the water and they were
under way.</p>
<p>One of the old women whom I talked with
was of the wedding-party, and down there by
the shore that night, and she told me that they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
all cheered and laughed for a minute as the
boat with the lantern in her bows shot off
from the land. The thought of danger, she
said, was quite out of their minds. Right in
front of them, less than a quarter of a mile
away, they saw the lights of the houses in the
Kesbeurt shining brightly, and plainly setting
the course for Geert to steer; and they knew
that the two strongest men on Marken were at
the oars. What they all were laughing about,
she said, was that anybody should be going
from the one village to the other in a boat—and
that it should be a wedding-journey, too!</p>
<p>But it was only for a moment that their
laughter lasted. The instant that the boat was
out of the sheltered smooth water they all knew
that not by one chance in a thousand could she
live to fetch across. By the light of the lantern
fixed in her bows they saw plainly the wild
tumult of the sea around her—that caught
her and seemed to stand her almost straight on
end as Geert held her strongly against the oncoming
waves. The old woman said that a
thrill of horror ran through them all as they
realized what certainly must happen. By a
common impulse down they all went on their
knees on the sodden ground, with the rain pelt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>ing
them—and she heard some one cry out in
the darkness: "Old Jaap's curse is upon them!
May God pity and help them and have mercy
on their souls!"</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="JAAP"><img src="images/illo3.jpg" width="450"
height="722" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
<p>OLD JAAP</p>
</div></div>
<h3>XIII</h3>
<p>Old Jan, who alone knew it, told me the
rest of the story—but speaking slowly and unwillingly,
as though it all still were fresh before
him and very horribly real.</p>
<p>He said that when the boat lifted as that
first sea struck her it was plain enough what
was likely to happen to them—for they could
not put about to make the shore again without
swamping, and with such a sea running they
were pretty certain to swamp quickly if they
went on. But Krelis was not the sort to give in,
and he shouted over his shoulder: "I've got
you into a scrape, Jan; but if we can pull up
under the lee of the graveyard there's a chance
for us still." And then he called to Geert:
"Now you can show what stuff you're made of,
Geert. Steer for the graveyard—and for God's
sake hold her straight to the sea!" As for Geert,
she was as cool as the best man could have been,
and she steered as well as any man could have
steered. The light from the lantern shone full<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
in her face, and old Jan said that her eyes kept
on sparkling and that her colour never changed.</p>
<p>With that tremendous wind sweeping down
on them, and with the waves butting against the
boat, and throwing her head up every instant,
even Jan and Krelis—and they were the best
oarsmen on Marken—could make only snail's
way. But it heartened them to find that
they made any way at all—as they could tell
that they were doing by seeing the lights ashore
crawling past them—and so they lashed away
with their oars and found a little hope growing
again. Presently Krelis called out: "The water's
getting smoother, Jan. Another fifty yards
and we'll be all right!"</p>
<p>That was true. They were creeping up steadily
under the lee of the graveyard, and the
closer they got to it the more would it break the
force of the waves. If they could reach it they
would be safe.</p>
<p>Just as Krelis spoke, the boat struck against
something so sharply that she quivered all over
and lost way. Neither of the men dared to turn
even for an instant; nor could their turning
have done any good—all that they could do
was to row on. But Geert could look ahead,
and the lantern in the bows cast a little circle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
of light upon the furious sea. As she peered
over their shoulders a strange look came into
her face, Jan said, and then she spoke in a
voice strained and strange: "It's a coffin," she
said, "and I see another one a little farther
on. The sea is washing away the graveyard—as
it did that time long ago!" And then the
coffin went past them, so close that it struck
against and nearly unshipped Krelis's oar.</p>
<p>Jan said that he trembled all over, and that
a cold sweat broke out on him. He felt himself
going sick and giddy, and fell to wondering
what would happen should he be unable
to keep on pulling—and how long it took a
man to drown. Then—but because of a ringing
in his ears the voice seemed to come faintly
from very far away—he heard Krelis cry
out cheerily: "Pull, Jan! If we're getting
among the coffins we'll be safe in a dozen strokes
more!"</p>
<p>It was at that instant that a great wave lifted
the bow of the boat high out of the water, and
as she fell away into the trough of the sea she
struck again—but that time with a crash that
had in it the sound of breaking boards. Jan
knew that they must have struck the other coffin
that Geert had seen, and he was sure that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
the boat was stove in and in another moment
would fill and sink from under them.</p>
<p>For what seemed a whole age to him there
was a grinding and a crunching beneath the
keel; and then, as the boat swung free again,
he saw Geert go chalk-pale suddenly—as she
stood peering eagerly forward—and heard her
give a great wild cry. And then her color rushed
back into her cheeks and her eyes glittered
as she called out in a strong voice resolutely:
"It's Marretje come to take you from me,
Krelis—but she sha'n't, she sha'n't! You never
really were her lover—and you always were
and always shall be mine! And I hate her
and I'll get the better of her dead just as I
hated her and got the better of her alive!"
And with that Geert let go her hold upon the
tiller and sprang forward and clasped Krelis
in her arms.</p>
<p>Jan could not tell clearly what happened
after that. All that he was sure of was the
sight for an instant, tossing beside the boat in
the circle of light cast by the lantern, of a lidless
coffin in which lay wrapped in her white
shroud the dead golden-haired Marretje—and
then the boat broached to and went over, and
there was nothing about him but blackness and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
the tumultuous waves. As he went down into
a hollow of the sea he felt the ground beneath
his feet, and that put courage into him to make
a fight for life. Struggling against the gale,
and against waves which grew smaller as he
battled on through them, he went forward with
a heart-breaking slowness; and the strength was
clean gone out of him when he won his way
at last up the lee side of the little mound—and
dropped down at full length there, in safe
shelter amidst the graves.</p>
<p>"And Geert and Krelis?" I asked.</p>
<p>"With her arms tight about him there
was no chance for either of them," he answered.
And then he went on, speaking very solemnly:
"The word that was truth had been spoken
against them. They perished in the wrath of
the Zuyder Zee!"</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p6"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span></p>
<h2 id="Tragedy">A Duluth Tragedy</h2></div>
<h3>I</h3>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo4.jpg" width="500"
height="117" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>Jutting out from the rocky coast, a sand
spit nearly seven miles long, Minnesota Point
is as a strong arm stretched forth to defend the
harbour of Duluth against the storms which
breed in the frozen North and come roaring
down Lake Superior. Wisconsin Point, less
than half its length, almost meets it from the
other shore. Between the two is the narrow
inlet through which in old times came the
Canadian voyageurs—on their way across Saint
Louis Bay and up the windings of the Saint
Louis River to Pond du Lac, twenty miles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
farther westward. That was in the fur-trading
days of little sailing-vessels and birch-bark canoes.
Now, close to its shoulder, the Point is
cut by a canal through which the great black
steamships come and go.</p>
<p>Five-and-twenty years ago—before the canal
was thought of, and when the Duluth of the
present, with its backing of twenty thousand
miles of railway, was a dream just beginning to
be realized—Minnesota Point was believed to
have a great future. Close to its shoulder a
town site was staked out, and little wooden
houses were built at a great rate. Corner
lots on that sand spit were at a premium. The
"boom" was on. The smash of '73 knocked
the bottom out of everything for a while. When
good times came again the town site moved on
westward a half-mile or so and settled itself on
the mainland. The little houses on the Point
were out of the running and were taken up by
Swedes—who were content, as Americans were
not, to live a few steps away from the strenuous
centre of that inchoate metropolis. That
time the "boom" was a genuine one. The new
city had come to stay. In course of time, to
meet its growing trade requirements, the canal
was cut which made the Point an island—and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
after that the Point was dead for good and
all.</p>
<p>Nowadays it is only in summer that a little
life, other than that of its few inhabitants,
shows itself on Minnesota Point—when camping-parties
and picnic-parties go down by three
miles of shaky tramway to Oatka Beach. During
all the rest of the year that sandy barren,
with its forlorn decaying houses and its dreary
growth of pines stunted by the harsh lake winds,
is forgotten and desolate. Now and then is
heard the cry of a gull flying across it slowly;
and always against its outer side—with a thunderous
crash in times of storm, in times of
calm with a sad soft lap-lapping—surge or ripple
the deathly cold waters of Lake Superior:
waters so cold that whoever drowns in them
sinks quickly—not to rise again (as the drowned
do usually), but for all time, in chill companionship
with the countless dead gathered
there through the ages, to be lost and hidden
in those icy depths.</p>
<p>The ghastly coldness of the water in which
it is merged seems to have numbed the Point
and reconciled it to its bleak destiny. It has
accepted its fate: recognizing with a grim indifference
that its once glowing future has van<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>ished
irrevocably into what now is the hopelessness
of its nearly forgotten past.</p>
<div class="chapter">
<h3>II</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo5.jpg" width="500"
height="223" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>George Maltham, wandering out on the Point
one Sunday morning in the early spring-time—he
had just come up from Chicago to take
charge of the Duluth end of his father's line
of lake steamers and was lonely in that strange
place, and was the more disposed to be misanthropic
because he had a headache left over
from the previous wet night at the club—came
promptly to the conclusion that he never had
struck a place so god-forsakenly dismal. Aside
from his own feelings, there was even more
than usual to justify this opinion. The day
was grey and chill. A strong northeast wind
was blowing that covered the lake with white-caps<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
and that sent a heavy surf rolling shoreward.
A little ice, left from the spring break-up,
still was floating in the harbour. Under
these conditions the Point was at its cheerless
worst.</p>
<p>Maltham had crossed the canal by the row-boat
ferry. Having mounted the sodden steps
and looked about him for a moment—in which
time his conclusion was reached as to the Point's
god-forsaken dismalness—he was for abandoning
his intended explorations and going straight-away
back to the mainland. But when he turned
to descend the steps the boat had received
some waiting passengers—three church-bound
Swedish women in their Sunday clothes—and
had just pushed off. That little turn of chance
decided him. After all, he said to himself,
it did not make much difference. What he
wanted was a walk to rid him of his headache;
and the Point offered him, as the rocky hill-sides
of the mainland conspicuously did not,
a good long stretch of level land.</p>
<p>Before him extended an absurdly wide street—laid
out in magnificent expectation of the
traffic that never came to it—flanked in far-reaching
perspective by the little houses which
sprang up in such a hurry when the "boom"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
was on. In its centre was the tramway, its
road-bed laid with wooden planks. The dingy
open tram-car, in which the church-bound Swedish
women had come up to the ferry, started
away creakingly while he stood watching it.
That was the only sight or sound of life. For
some little time, in the stillness, he could hear
the driver addressing Swedish remarks of an
encouraging or abusive nature to his mule.</p>
<p>Taking the planked tramway in preference
to the rotten wooden sidewalks full of pitfalls,
Maltham walked on briskly for a mile or so—his
headache leaving him in the keen air—until
the last of the little houses was passed. There
the vast street suddenly dribbled off into a
straggling sandy road, which wound through
thickets of bushy white birch and a sparse
growth of stunted pines. The tramway, along
which he continued, went on through the brush
in a straight line. The Point had narrowed to
a couple of hundred yards. Through rifts in
the tangle about him he could see heaps of
storm-piled drift-wood scattered along the lake-side
beach—on which the surf was pounding
heavily. On the harbour side the beach was
broken by inthrusts of sedgy swamp. Presently
he came to a sandy open space in which, beside<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
a weather-worn little wooden church, was a neglected
graveyard that seemed to give the last
touch of dreariness to that dismal solitude.</p>
<p>The graveyard was a waste of sand, save
where bushy patches of birch had sprung up
in it from wind-borne seeds. Swept by many
storms, the sandy mounds were disappearing.
Still marking the graves were a few shabby
wooden crosses and a dozen or so of slanting
or fallen wooden slabs. Once these short-lived
monuments had been painted white and had
borne legends in black lettering. But only a
Swedish word or a Swedish name remained here
and there legible—for the sun and the wind and
the rain had been doing their erasing work
steadily for years. One slab alone stood nearly
upright and retained a few partly decipherable
lines in English. But even on that Maltham
could make out only the scattered words:
"Sacred.... Ulrica.... Royal House of Sweden
... ever beloved ... of Major Calhoun
Ashley," and a date that seemed to be 1879.</p>
<p>His headache had gone, but it had left him
heavy and dejected. That fragmentary epitaph
increased his sombreness. Even had he been
in a cheerful mood he could not have failed to
perceive the pathetic irony of it all. There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
was more than the ordinary cruelty of death
and forgetfulness, he thought, about that grave
so desolate of one who had been connected—it
did not matter how—with a "royal house,"
and who was described in those almost illegible
lines as "ever beloved." That was human
nature down to the hard pan, he thought; and
with a half-smile and a half-sigh over the fate
of that poor dead Ulrica he turned away from
the graveyard and walked on. Half-whimsically
he wondered if he had reached the climax of
the melancholy which brooded over that dreary
sand spit. As he stated the case to himself,
short of finding a man lying murdered among
the birch-bushes it was not likely that he would
strike anything able to raise that graveyard's
hand!</p>
<p>The murdered man did not materialize, and
the next out-of-the-way sight that he came across—when
he had walked on past the dingy and
forgotten-looking little church—was a big ramshackling
wooden house of such pretentious
absurdity that his first glimpse of it fairly
made him laugh. Its square centre was a wooden
tower of three stories, battlemented, flanked
by two battlemented wings. A veranda ran
along the lower floor, and above the veranda<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
was a gallery. Some of the windows were boarded
over; others had scraps of carpet stuck into
their glassless gaps—and all had Venetian shutters
(singularly at odds with the climate of
that region) hanging dubiously and with many
broken slats. The paint had weathered away,
and bricks had fallen from the chimney-tops—a
loss which gave to the queer structure, in conjunction
with lapses in its wooden battlements,
a sadly broken-crested air. As a whole, it suggested
a badly done caricature of an old-fashioned
Southern homestead—of which the essence
of the caricature was finding it in that bleak
Northern land.</p>
<div class="chapter">
<h3>III</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo6.jpg" width="500"
height="220" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>Maltham had come to a full stop in front
of this absurd dwelling, which was set a little
back from the road in a dishevelled enclosure,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
and as he stood examining in an amused way
its various eccentricities he became aware that
from one of the lower windows a man was
watching him.</p>
<p>This was disconcerting, and he turned to
walk on. But before he had gone a dozen steps
the front door opened and the man came outside.
He was dressed in shabby grey clothes
with a certain suggestion of a military cut about
them; but in spite of his shabbiness he had the
look of a gentleman. He was sixty, or thereabouts,
and seemed to have been well set up
when he was younger—before the slouch had
settled on his shoulders and before he had taken
on a good many unnecessary inches about his
waist. From where he stood on the veranda
he hailed Maltham cordially:</p>
<p>"Won't yo' come in, suh? I have obsehved
youah smiles at my old house heah— No,
no, yo' owe me no apology, suh," he went on
quickly, as Maltham attempted a confused disclaimer.
"Yo' ah quite justified in laughing,
suh, at my foolish fancy—that went wrong
mainly because the Yankee ca'pentah whom I
employed to realize it was a hopelessly damned
fool. But it was a creditable sentiment, suh,
which led me to desiah to reproduce heah in god<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>fo'saken
Minnesotah my ancestral home in the
grand old State of South Cahrolina—the house
that my grandfatheh built theah and named
Eutaw Castle, as I have named its pore successeh,
because of the honorable paht he bo'
in the battle of Eutaw Springs. The result,
I admit, is a thing to laugh at, suh—but not
the ideah. No, suh, not the ideah! But come
in, suh, come in! The exterioh of Eutaw Castle
may be a failuah; but within it, suh, yo' will
find in this cold No'th'en region the genuine
wahm hospitality of a true Southe'n home!"</p>
<p>Maltham perceived that the only apology
which he could offer for laughing at this absurd
house—the absurdity of which became rather
pathetic, he thought, in view of its genesis—was
to accept its owner's invitation to enter it.
Acting on this conclusion, he turned into the
enclosure—the gate, hanging loosely on a single
hinge, was standing open—and mounted the
veranda steps.</p>
<p>As he reached the top step his host advanced
and shook hands with him warmly. "Yo'ah
vehy welcome, suh," he said; and added, after
putting his hand to a pocket in search of something
that evidently was not there: "Ah, I find
that I have not my cahd-case about me. Yo'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
must pehmit me to introduce myself: Majoh
Calhoun Ashley, of the Confedehrate sehvice,
suh—and vehy much at youahs."</p>
<p>Maltham started a little as he heard this
name, and the small shock so far threw him off
his balance that as he handed his card to the
Major he said: "Then it was your name that
I saw just now in—" And stopped short, inwardly
cursing himself for his awkwardness.</p>
<p>"That yo' saw in the little graveyahd, on the
tomb of my eveh-beloved wife, suh," the Major
replied—with a quaver in his voice which compelled
Maltham mentally to reverse his recent
generalizations. The Major was silent for a
moment, and then continued: "Heh grave is
not yet mahked fitly, suh, as no doubt yo' obsehved.
Cihcumstances oveh which I have had
no control have prevented me from erecting as
yet a suitable monument oveh heh sacred remains.
She was my queen, suh"—his voice
broke again—"and of a line of queens: a descendant,
suh, from a collateral branch of the
ancient royal house of Sweden. I am hoping,
I am hoping, suh, that I shall be able soon to
erect oveh heh last resting-place a monument
wo'thy of heh noble lineage and of hehself. I
am hoping, suh, to do that vehy soon."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span></p>
<p>The Major again was silent for a moment;
and then, pulling himself together, he looked
at Maltham's card—holding it a long way off
from his eyes. "Youah name is familiar to
me, suh," he said, "though fo' the moment
I do not place it, and I am most happy to make
youah acquaintance. But come in, suh, come
in. I am fo'getting myself—keeping you standing
this way outside of my own doah."</p>
<p>He took Maltham cordially by the arm and
led him through the doorway into a wide bare
hall; and thence into a big room on the right,
that was very scantily furnished but that was
made cheerful by a rousing drift-wood fire.
Over the high mantel-piece was hung an officer's
sword with its belt. On the buckle of the belt
were the letters C. S. A. Excepting this rather
pregnant bit of decoration, the whitewashed
walls were bare.</p>
<p>The Major bustled with hospitality—pulling
the bigger and more comfortable of two arm-chairs
to the fire and seating Maltham in it,
and then bringing out glasses and a bottle from
a queer structure of unpainted white pine that
stood at one end of the room and had the look
of a sideboard gone wrong.</p>
<p>"At the moment, suh," he said apologetically,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
"my cellah is badly fuhnished and I am unable
to offeh yo' wine. But if yo' have an appreciative
taste fo' Bourbon," he went on with
more assurance, "I am satisfied that yo' will
find the ahticle in this bottle as sound as any
that the noble State of Kentucky eveh has produced.
Will yo' oblige me, suh, by saying
when!"</p>
<p>Not knowing about the previous wet night,
and its still lingering consequences, the promptness
with which Maltham said "when" seemed
to disconcert the Major a little—but not sufficiently
to deter him from filling his own glass
with a handsome liberality. Holding it at
a level with his lips, he turned toward his
guest with the obvious intention of drinking
a toast.</p>
<p>"May I have a little water, please?" put in
Maltham.</p>
<p>"I beg youah pahdon, suh. I humbly beg
youah pahdon," the Major answered. "I am
not accustomed to dilute my own liquoh, and I
most thoughtlessly assumed that yo' would not
desiah to dilute youahs. I trust that yo' will
excuse my seeming rudeness, suh. Yo' shall
have at once the bevehrage which yo' desiah."</p>
<p>While still apologizing, the Major placed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
his glass on the table and went to the door.
Opening it he called: "Ulrica, my child, bring
a pitcheh of fresh wateh right away."</p>
<p>Again Maltham gave a little start—as he had
done when the Major had introduced himself.
In a vague sub-conscious way he felt that there
was something uncanny in thus finding living
owners of names which he had seen, within that
very hour, scarcely legible above an uncared-for
grave. But the Major, talking on volubly,
did not give him much opportunity for these
psychological reflections; and presently there
was the sound of footsteps in the hall outside,
and then the door opened and the owner of the
grave-name appeared.</p>
<div class="chapter">
<h3>IV</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo7.jpg" width="500"
height="219" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>Because of the odd channel in which his
thoughts were running, Maltham had the still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
odder fancy for an instant that the young
girl who entered the room was the dead Ulrica
of whom the Major had spoken—"a queen,
and of a line of queens." And even when this
thought had passed—so quickly that it was gone
before he had risen to his feet to greet her—the
impression of her queenliness remained.
For this living woman bearing a dead name
might have been Aslauga herself: so tall and
stately was she, and so fair with that cold
beauty of the North of which the soul is fire.
Instinctively he felt the fire, and knew that
it still slumbered—and knew, too, that in the
fulness of time, being awakened, it would
glow with a consuming splendour in her dark
eyes.</p>
<p>All this went in a flash through his mind before
the Major said: "Pehmit me, Mr. Maltham,
to present yo' to my daughteh, Miss
Ulrica Ashley." And added: "Mr. Maltham
was passing, Ulrica, and did me the honeh to
accept my invitation to come in."</p>
<p>She put down the pitcher of water and gave
Maltham her hand. "It was very kind of you,
sir," she said gravely. "We do not have many
visitors, and my father gets lonely with only
me. It was very kind of you, sir, indeed."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
She spoke with a certain precision, and with
a very slight accent—so slight that Maltham
did not immediately notice it. What he did
notice, with her first words, was the curiously
thrilling quality of her low-pitched and very
rich voice.</p>
<p>"And don't you get lonely too?" he asked.</p>
<p>"Why no," she answered with a little air
of surprise. And speaking slowly, as though
she were working the matter out in her mind,
she added: "With me it is different, you see.
I was born here on the Point and I love it.
And then I have the house to look after. And
I have my boat. And I can talk with the
neighbours—though I do not often care to.
Father cannot talk with them, because he does
not know Swedish as I do. When he wants
company he has to go all the way up to town.
You see, it is not the same with us at all."
And then, as though she had explained the
matter sufficiently, she turned to the Major
and asked: "Do you want anything more,
father?"</p>
<p>"Nothing mo', my child—except that an extra
place is to be set at table. Mr. Maltham
will dine with us, of co'se."</p>
<p>At this Maltham protested a little; but pres<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>ently
yielded to Ulrica's, "You will be doing
a real kindness to father if you will stay, Mr.
Maltham," backed by the Major's peremptory:
"Yo' ah my prisoneh, suh, and in Eutaw Castle
we don't permit ouah prisonehs to stahve!"
The matter being thus settled, Ulrica made a
little formal bow and left the room.</p>
<p>"The wateh is at youah sehvice, suh," said
the Major as the door closed behind her. "I
beg that yo' will dilute youah liquoh to youah
liking. Heah's to youah very good health, suh—and
to ouah betteh acquaintance." He drank
his whiskey appreciatively, and as he set down
his empty glass continued: "May I ask, suh,
if yo' ah living in Duluth, oh mehly passing
through? I ventuah to ask because a
resident of this town sca'cely would be likely
to come down on the Point at this time of
yeah."</p>
<p>"I began to be a resident only day before
yesterday," Maltham answered. "I've come
to take charge here of our steamers—the Sunrise
Line."</p>
<p>"The Sunrise Line!" repeated the Major in
a very eager tone. "The biggest transpo'tation
line on the lakes. The line of which that great
capitalist Mr. John L. Maltham is president.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
And to think, suh, that I did not recognize
youah name!"</p>
<p>"John L. Maltham is my father," the young
man said.</p>
<p>"Why, of co'se, of co'se! I might have had
the sense to know that as soon as I looked at
youah cahd. This is a most fo'tunate meeting, Mr.
Maltham—most fo'tunate for both of us. I shall
not on this occasion, when yo' ah my guest, enteh
into a discussion of business mattehs. But
at an eahly day I shall have the honeh to
lay befo' yo' convincing reasons why youah
tehminal docks should be established heah on
the Point—which a beneficent Providence cleahly
intended to be the shipping centeh of this
metropolis—and prefehrably, suh, as the meahest
glance at a chaht of the bay will demonstrate,
heah on my land. Yo' will have the first choice
of the wha'ves which I have projected; and I
may even say, suh, that any altehrations which
will affo'd mo' convenient accommodations to
youah vessels still ah possible. Yes, suh, the
matteh has not gone so fah but that any reasonable
changes which yo' may desiah may yet be
made."</p>
<p>Remembering the sedgy swamps beside which
he had passed that morning, Maltham was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
satisfied that the Major's concluding statement
was well within the bounds of truth. But he
was not prepared to meet off-hand so radical
a proposition, and while he was fumbling in his
mind for some sort of non-committal answer the
Major went on again.</p>
<p>"It is not fo' myself, suh," he said, "that
I desiah to realize this magnificent undehtaking.
Living heah costs little, and what I get
from renting my land to camping pahties and
fo' picnics gives me all I need. And I'm an old
man, anyway, and whetheh I die rich oh pore
don't matteh. It's fo' my daughteh's sake that
I seek wealth, suh, not fo' my own. That deah
child of mine is heh sainted motheh oveh again,
Mr. Maltham—except that heh motheh's eyes
weh blue. That is the only diffehrence. And
beside heh looks she has identically the same
sweet natuah, suh—the same exquisite goodness
and beauty of haht. When my great
loss came to me," the Major's voice broke
badly, "it was my love fo' that deah child
kept me alive. It breaks my haht, suh, to
think of dying and leaving heh heah alone
and pore."</p>
<p>Maltham had got to his bearings by this
time and was able to frame a reasonably diplo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>matic
reply. "Well, perhaps we'd better not
go into the matter to-day," he said. "You see,
our line has traffic agreements with the N. P.
and the Northwestern that must hold for the
present, anyway. And then I've only just taken
charge, you know, and I must look around a
little before I do anything at all. But I might
write to my father to come up here when
he can, and then he and you could have a
talk."</p>
<p>The Major's look of eager cheerfulness faded
at the beginning of this cooling rejoinder, but
he brightened again at its end. "A talk with
youah fatheh, suh," he answered, "would suit
me down to the ground-flo'. An oppo'tunity
to discuss this great matteh info'mally with a
great capitalist has been what I've most desiahed
fo' yeahs. But I beg youah pahdon, suh. I
am fo'getting the sacred duties of hospitality.
Pehmit me to fill youah glass."</p>
<p>It seemed to pain him that his guest refused
this invitation; but, finding him obdurate, he
kept the sacred duties of hospitality in working
order by exercising them freely upon himself.
"Heah's to the glorious futuah of Minnesotah
Point, suh!" he said as he raised his glass—and
it was obvious that he would be off again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
upon the exploitation of his hopelessly impossible
project as soon as he put it down.
Greatly to Maltham's relief, the door opened
at that juncture and Ulrica entered to
call them to dinner; and he was still more
relieved, when they were seated at table, by
finding that his host dropped business matters
and left the glorious future of Minnesota Point
hanging in the air.</p>
<p>At his own table, indeed, the Major was quite
at his best. He told good stories of his army
life, and of his adventurous wanderings which
ended when he struck Duluth just at the beginning
of its first "boom"; and very entertaining
was what he had to tell of that metropolis
in its embryotic days.</p>
<p>But good though the Major's stories were,
Maltham found still more interesting the Major's
daughter—who spoke but little, and who
seemed to be quite lost at times in her own
thoughts. As he sat slightly turned toward her
father he could feel her eyes fixed upon him;
and more than once, facing about suddenly,
he met her look full. When this happened she
was not disconcerted, nor did she immediately
look away from him—and he found himself
thrilled curiously by her deeply intent gaze.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
Yet the very frankness of it gave it a quality
that was not precisely flattering. He had the
feeling that she was studying him in much the
same spirit that she would have studied some
strange creature that she might have come across
in her walks in the woods. When he tried to
bring her into the talk he did not succeed;
but this was mainly because the Major invariably
cut in before he could get beyond a direct
question and a direct reply. Only once—when
her father made some reference to her love
for sailing—was her reserve, which was not shyness,
a little broken; and the few words that
she spoke before the Major broke in again
were spoken so very eagerly that Maltham resolved
to bring her back to that subject when
he could get the chance. Knowing something
of the ways of women, he knew that to set her
to talking about anything in which she was
profoundly interested would lower her guard
at all points—and so would enable him to come
in touch with her thoughts. He wanted to get
at her thoughts. He was sure that they were
not of a commonplace kind.</p>
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p2"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></p>
<h3>V</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo8.jpg" width="500"
height="216" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>When the dinner was ended he made a stroke
for the chance that he wanted. "Will you show
me your boat?" he asked. "I'm a bit of a
sailor myself, and I should like to see her
very much indeed."</p>
<p>"Oh, would you? I am so glad!" she answered
eagerly. And then added more quietly:
"It is a real pleasure to show you the <i>Nixie</i>.
I am very fond of her and very proud of her.
Father gave her to me three years ago—after
he sold a lot over in West Superior. And it
was very good of him, because he does not like
sailing at all. Will you come now? It is only
a step down to the wharf."</p>
<p>The Major declared that he must have his
after-dinner pipe in comfort, and they went off
without him—going out by a side door and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
across a half-acre of kitchen-garden, still in winter
disorder, to the wharf on the bay-side where
the <i>Nixie</i> was moored. She was a half-decked
twenty-foot cat-boat, clean in her lines and
with the look of being able to hold her own
pretty well in a blow.</p>
<p>"Is she not beautiful?" Ulrica asked with
great pride. And presently, when Maltham
came to a pause in his praises, she added hesitatingly:
"Would you—would you care to
come out in her for a little while?"</p>
<p>"Indeed I would!" he answered instantly
and earnestly.</p>
<p>"Oh, thank you, thank you!" Ulrica exclaimed.
"I do want you to see how wonderfully
she sails!"</p>
<p>The boat was moored with her stern close
to the wharf and with her bow made fast to
an outstanding stake. When they had boarded
her Ulrica cast off the stern mooring, ran the
boat out to the stake and made fast with a
short hitch, and then—as the boat swung around
slowly in the slack air under the land—set about
hoisting the sail. She would not permit Maltham
to help her. He sat aft, steadying the
tiller, watching with delight her vigorous dexterity
and her display of absolute strength.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
When she had sheeted home and made fast she
cast off the bow mooring, and then stepped
aft quickly and took the tiller from his hand.
For a few moments they drifted slowly. Then
the breeze, coming over the tree-tops, caught them
and she leaned forward and dropped the centreboard
and brought the boat on the wind. It was
a leading wind, directly off the lake, that enabled
them to make a single leg of it across the
bay. As the boat heeled over Maltham shifted
his seat to the weather side. This brought him
a little in front of Ulrica, and below her as
she stood to steer. From under the bows came
a soft hissing and bubbling as the boat slid
rapidly along.</p>
<p>"Is she not wonderful?" Ulrica asked with a
glowing enthusiasm. "Just see how we are
dropping that big sloop over yonder—and the
Nixie not half her size! But the <i>Nixie</i> is
well bred, you see, and the sloop is not. She
is as heavy all over as the <i>Nixie</i> is clean and
fine. Father says that breeding is everything—in
boats and in horses and in men. He says
that a gentleman is the finest thing that God
ever created. It was because the Southerners
all were gentlemen that they whipped the Yankees,
you know."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span></p>
<p>"But they didn't—the Yankees whipped
them."</p>
<p>"Only in the last few battles, father says—and
those did not count, so far as the principle
is concerned," Ulrica answered conclusively.</p>
<p>Maltham did not see his way to replying
to this presentation of the matter and was
silent. Presently she went on, with a slight
air of apology: "I hope you did not mind my
looking at you so much while we were at dinner,
Mr. Maltham. You see, except father, you
are the only gentleman I ever have had a chance
to look at close, that way, in my whole life.
Father will not have much to do with the people
living up in town. Most of them are Yankees,
and he does not like them. None of them ever
come to see us. The only people I ever talk with
are our neighbours; and they are just common
people, you know—though some of them are
as good as they can be. And as father always
is talking about what a gentleman ought to be
or ought not to be it is very interesting really
to meet one. That was the reason why I
stared at you so. I hope you did not mind."</p>
<p>"I'm glad I interested you, even if it was
only as a specimen of a class," Maltham answer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>ed.
"I hope that you found me a good specimen."
Her simplicity was so refreshing that
he sought by a leading question to induce a
farther exhibition of it. "What is your ideal
of a gentleman?" he asked.</p>
<p>"Oh, just the ordinary one," she replied in
a matter-of-fact tone. "A gentleman must be
absolutely brave, and must kill any man who
insults him—or, at least, must hurt him badly.
He must be absolutely honest—though he is not
bound, of course, to tell all that he knows when
he is selling a horse. He must be absolutely true
to the woman he loves, and must never deceive
her in any way. He must not refuse to drink
with another gentleman unless he is willing to
fight him. He must protect women and children.
He must always be courteous—though
he may be excused for a little rudeness when he
has been drinking and so is not quite himself.
He must be hospitable—ready to share his last
crust with anybody, and his last drink with
anybody of his class. And he must know how
to ride and shoot and play the principal games
of cards. Those are the main things. You are
all that, are you not?"</p>
<p>She looked straight at him as she asked this
question, speaking still in the same entirely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
matter-of-fact tone. But Maltham did not look
straight back at her as he answered it. The
creed that she set forth had queer articles in
it, but its essentials were searching—so searching
that his look was directed rather indefinitely
toward the horizon as he replied, a little weakly
perhaps: "Why, of course."</p>
<p>She seemed to be content with this not wholly
conclusive answer; but as he was not content
with it himself, and rather dreaded a cross-examination,
he somewhat suddenly shifted the
talk to a subject that he was sure would engross
her thoughts. "How splendidly the <i>Nixie</i>
goes!" he said. "She is a racer, and no mistake!"</p>
<p>"Indeed she is!" Ulrica exclaimed, with the
fervour upon which he had counted. "She is
the very fastest boat on the bay. And then
she is so weatherly! Why, I can sail her into
the very eye of the wind!"</p>
<p>"Yes, she has the look of being weatherly.
But she wouldn't be if you didn't manage her
so well. Who taught you how to sail?"</p>
<p>"It was old Gustav Bergmann—one of the
fishermen here on the Point, you know. And
he said," she went on with a little touch of
pride, "that he never could have made such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
good sailor of me if I had not had it in my
blood—because I am a Swede."</p>
<p>"But you are an American."</p>
<p>Ulrica did not answer him immediately,
and when she did speak it was with the same
curiously slow thoughtfulness that he had observed
when she was explaining the difference
between her father's life and her own life in
the solitude of Minnesota Point.</p>
<p>"I do not think I am," she said. "I do
not know many American women, but I am not
like any American woman I know. You see,
I am very like my mother. Father says so, and
I feel it—I cannot tell you just how I feel
it, but I do. For one thing, I am more than
half a savage, father says—like some of the
wild Indians he has known. He is in fun,
of course, when he says that; but he really is
right, I am sure. Did you ever want to kill
anybody, Mr. Maltham?"</p>
<p>"No," said Maltham with a laugh, "I never
did. Did you?"</p>
<p>Ulrica remained grave. "Yes," she answered,
"and I almost did it, too. You see,
it was this way: A man, one of the campers
down on the Point, was rude to me. He was
drunk, I think. But I did not think about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
his being drunk, and that I ought to make allowances
for him. Somehow, I had not time
to think. Everything got red suddenly—and
before I knew what I was doing I had out my
knife. The man gave a scream—not a cry,
but a real scream: he must have been a great
coward, I suppose—and jumped away just as
I struck at him. I cut his arm a little, I think.
But I am not sure, for he ran away as hard as
he could run. I was very sorry that I had
not killed him. I am very sorry still whenever
I think about it. Now that was not like
an American woman. At least, I do not know
any American woman who would try to kill
a man that way because she really could not
help trying to. Do you?"</p>
<p>"No," Maltham answered, drawing a quick
breath that came close to being a gasp. Ulrica's
entire placidity, and her argumentative manner,
had made her story rather coldly thrilling—and
it was quite thrilling enough without
those adjuncts, he thought.</p>
<p>She seemed pleased that his answer confirmed
her own opinion. "Yes, I think I am right
about myself," she went on. "I am sure that
it is my Swedish blood that makes me like
that. We do not often get angry, you know,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
we Swedes: but when we do, our anger is
rage. We do not think nor reason. Suddenly
we see red, as I did that day, and we want
to strike to kill. It is queer, is it not, that we
should be made like that?"</p>
<p>Maltham certainly was discovering the
strange thoughts that he had set himself to
search for. They rather set his nerves on edge.
As she uttered her calm reflection upon the
oddity of the Swedish temperament he shivered
a little.</p>
<p>"I am afraid that you are cold," she said
anxiously. "Shall we go about? Father will
not like it if I make you uncomfortable."</p>
<p>"I am not at all cold," he answered. "And
the sailing is delightful. Don't let us go about
yet."</p>
<p>"Well, if you are quite sure that you are
not cold, we will not. I do want to take you
down to the inlet and show you what a glorious
sea is running on the lake to-day. It is only
half a mile more."</p>
<p>They sailed on for a little while in silence.
The swift send of the boat through the water
seemed so to fill Ulrica with delight that she
did not care to speak—nor did Maltham, who
was busied with his own confused thoughts.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
Suddenly some new and startling concepts of
manhood and of womanhood had been thrust
into his mind. They puzzled him, and he was
not at all sure that he liked them. But he
was absolutely sure that this curious and very
beautiful woman who had uttered them interested
him more profoundly than any woman whom
ever he had known. That fact also bothered
him, and he tried to blink it. That he could
not blink it was one reason why his thoughts
were confused. Presently, being accustomed to
slide along the lines of least resistance, he gave
up trying. "After all," was his conclusion, so
far as he came to a conclusion, "it is only for
a day."</p>
<div class="chapter">
<h3>VI</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo9.jpg" width="500"
height="216" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>As they neared the inlet the water roughened
a little and the wind grew stronger. Ulrica
eased off the sheet, and steadied it with a turn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
around the pin. In a few minutes more they
had opened the inlet fairly, and beyond it
could see the lake—stretching away indefinitely
until its cold grey surface was lost against the
cold grey sky. A very heavy sea was running.
In every direction was the gleam of white-caps.
On the beaches to the left and right of them
a high surf was booming in. They ran on, close-hauled,
until they were nearly through the inlet
and were come into a bubble of water that set
the boat to dancing like a cork. Now and then,
as she fell off, a wave would take her with a
thump and cover them with a cloud of spray.</p>
<p>The helm was pulling hard, but Ulrica managed
it as easily and as knowingly as she had
managed the setting of the sail—standing with
her feet well apart, firmly braced, her tall
figure yielding to the boat's motion with a superb
grace. Suddenly a gust of wind carried
away her hat, and in another moment the great
mass of her golden hair was blowing out behind
her in the strong eddy from the sail. Her face
was radiant. Every drop of her Norse blood was
tingling in her veins. Aslauga herself never
was more gloriously beautiful—and never more
joyously drove her boat onward through a
stormy sea.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span></p>
<p>But Maltham did not perceive her beauty,
nor did he in the least share her glowing enthusiasm.
He had passed beyond mere nervousness
and was beginning to be frightened. It seemed
to him that she let the boat fall off purposely—as
though to give the waves a chance to buffet
it, and then to show her command over them
by bringing it up again sharply into the wind;
and he was certain that if they carried on for
another five minutes, and so got outside the
inlet, they would be swamped.</p>
<p>"Don't you think that we had better go
about?" he asked. It did not please him to
find that he had not complete control over his
voice.</p>
<p>"But it is so glorious," she answered.
"Shall we not keep on just a little way?"</p>
<p>"No!" he said sharply. "We must go about
at once. We are in great danger as it is."
He felt that he had turned pale. In spite of
his strong effort to steady it, his voice shook
badly and also was a little shrill.</p>
<p>"Oh, of course," she replied, with a queer
glance at him that he did not at all fancy;
"if you feel that way about it we will." The
radiance died away from her face as she spoke,
and with it went her intoxication of delight. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
then her expression grew anxious as she looked
about her, and in an anxious tone she added:
"Indeed you are quite right, Mr. Maltham.
We really are in a bad place here. I ought
never to have come out so far. We must try
to get back at once. But it will not be easy.
I am not sure that the <i>Nixie</i> will stand it.
I am sure, though, that she will do her best—and
I will try to wear her as soon as I see
a chance."</p>
<p>She luffed a little, that she might get more
sea-room to leeward, and scanned the oncoming
waves closely but without a sign of fear.
"Now I think I can do it," she said presently,
and put up the helm.</p>
<p>It was a ticklish move, for they were at the
very mouth of the inlet, but the <i>Nixie</i> paid off
steadily until she came full into the trough of
the sea. There she wallowed for a bad ten
seconds. A wave broke over the coaming of the
cockpit and set it all aflow. Maltham went still
whiter, and began to take off his coat. It was
with the greatest difficulty that he kept back a
scream. Then the boat swung around to her
course—Ulrica's hold upon the tiller was a very
steady one—and in another minute they were
sliding back safely before the wind. In five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
minutes more they were in the smooth water
of the bay.</p>
<p>Ulrica was the first to speak, and she spoke
in most contrite tones. "It was very, very
wrong in me to do that, Mr. Maltham," she
said. "And it was wicked of me, too—for I
have given my solemn promise to father that
I never will go out on the lake when it is
rough at all. Please, please forgive me for taking
you into such danger in such a foolish way.
It was touch and go, you know, that we pulled
through. Please say that you forgive me. It
will make me a little less wretched if you do."</p>
<p>The danger was all over, and Maltham had
got back both his color and his courage again.
"Why, it was nothing!" he said. "Or, rather,
it was a good deal—for it gave me a chance to
see what a magnificent sailor you are. And—and
it was splendidly exciting out there, wasn't
it?"</p>
<p>"Wasn't it!" she echoed rapturously. "And
oh," she went on, "I <i>am</i> so glad that you take
it that way! It is a real load off my mind!
Will you please take the tiller for a minute
while I put up my hair?"</p>
<p>As she arranged the shining masses of her
golden hair—her full round arms uplifted, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
wind pressing her draperies close about her—Maltham
watched her with a burning intentness.
The glowing reaction following escape from
mortal peril was upon him and the tide of his
barely saved life was running full. In Ulrica's
stronger nature the same tide may have been
running still more impetuously. For an instant
their eyes met. She flushed and looked
away.</p>
<p>He did not speak, and the silence seemed
to grow irksome to her. She broke it, but with
a perceptible effort, as she took the tiller again.
"Do you know," she said, "I did think for
a minute that you were scared." She laughed
a little, and then went on more easily: "And
if you really had been scared I should have
known, of course, that you were not a gentleman!
Was it not absurd?"</p>
<p>Her words roused him, and at the same time
chilled him. "Yes, it was very absurd," he
answered not quite easily. And then, with
presence of mind added: "But I <i>was</i> scared,
and badly scared—for you. I did not see how
I possibly could get you ashore if the boat
filled."</p>
<p>"You could not have done it—we should
have been drowned," Ulrica replied with quiet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
conviction. "But because you are a gentleman
it was natural, I suppose, for you not to
think about yourself and to worry that way
about me. You could not help it, of course—but
I like it, all the same."</p>
<p>Maltham reddened slightly. Instead of answering
her he asked: "Would you mind running
up along the Point and landing me on the
other side of the canal? I want to hurry home
and get into dry things—and that will save me
a lot of time, you know."</p>
<p>"Oh," she cried in a tone of deep concern,
"are you not coming back with me? I shall
have a dreadful time with father, and I am
counting on you to help me through."</p>
<p>Maltham had foreseen that trouble with the
Major was impending, and wanted to keep out
of it. He disliked scenes. "Of course, if you
want me to, I'll go back with you," he answered.
And added, drawing himself together and
shivering a little, "I don't believe that I shall
catch much cold."</p>
<p>"What a selfish creature I am!" Ulrica exclaimed
impetuously. "Of course you must
hurry home as fast as you can. What I shall
get from father will not be the half of what
I deserve. And to think of my thinking about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
your getting me off from a scolding at the cost
of your being ill! Please do not hate me for
it—though you ought to, I am sure!"</p>
<p>Having carried his point, Maltham could afford
to be amiable again. He looked straight
into her eyes, and for an instant touched her
hand, as he said: "No, I shall not—hate
you!" His voice was low. He drawled slightly.
The break gave to his phrase a telling
emphasis.</p>
<p>It was not quite fair. He knew thoroughly
the game that he was playing; while Ulrica,
save so far as her instinct might guide her,
did not know it at all. She did not answer him—and
he was silent because silence just then
was the right move. And so they went on without
words until they were come to the landing-place
beside the canal. Even then—for he did
not wish to weaken a strong impression—he
made the parting a short one: urging that she
also must hurry home and get on dry clothes. It
did not strike her, either then or later, that he
would have shown a more practical solicitude
in the premises had he not made her come three
miles out of her way.</p>
<p>Indeed, as she sailed those three miles back
again, her mind was in no condition to work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
clearly. In a confused way, that yet was very
delightful, she went over to herself the events
of that wonderful day—in which, as she vaguely
realized, her girlhood had ended and her womanhood
had begun. But she dwelt most upon
the look that he had given her when he told
her, with the break in his phrase, that he would
not hate her; and upon the touch of his hand
at parting, and his final speech, also with a
break in it: "I shall see you to-morrow—if you
care to have me come."</p>
<p>At the club that evening Maltham wrote a
very entertaining letter to Miss Eleanor Strangford,
in Chicago: telling her about the queer
old Major and his half-wild daughter, and how
the daughter had taken him out sailing and
had brought him back drenched through. He
was a believer in frankness, and this letter—while
not exhaustive—was of a sort to put him
right on the record in case an account of his
adventures should reach his correspondent by
some other way. He would have written it
promptly in any circumstances. It was the
more apposite because he had promised to
write every Sunday to Miss Strangford—to
whom he was engaged.</p>
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p2"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
<h3>VII</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo10.jpg" width="500"
height="221" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>Maltham left his office early the next afternoon
and went down the Point again. He had
no headache, the wind had shifted to the southward,
and all about him was a flood of spring sunshine.
Yet even under these cheerful conditions
he found the Point rather drearily desolate. He
gave the graveyard a wide berth when he came
to it, and looked away from it. His desire was
strong that he might forget where he had seen
Ulrica's name for the first time. He was not
superstitious, exactly; but his sub-consciousness
that the direction in which he was sliding—along
the lines of least resistance—was at least
questionable, made him rather open to feelings
about bad and good luck.</p>
<p>Being arrived at Eutaw Castle, he inferred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
from what the Major said and from what Ulrica
looked that the domestic storm of the previous
day had been a vigorous one—and was
glad that he had kept out of it. But it had
blown over pretty well, and his good-natured
chaff about their adventure swept away the few
remaining clouds.</p>
<p>"It is vehy handsome of yo', suh," said the
Major, "to treat the matteh as yo' do. My
daughteh's conduct was most inexcusable—fo'
when she cahried yo' into that great dangeh she
broke heh sacred wo'd to me."</p>
<p>"But it was quite as much my fault as hers,"
Maltham answered. "I should not have let her
go. You see, the sailing was so delightfully
exciting that we both lost our heads a little.
Luckily, I got mine back before it was too late."</p>
<p>"Yo' behaved nobly, suh, nobly! My daughteh
has told me how youah only thought was
of heh dangeh, and how white yo' went when yo'
realized youah inability to save heh if the boat
went down. Those weh the feelings of a gentleman,
suh, and of a vehy gallant gentleman—such
as yo' suahly ah. Youah conduct could
not have been fineh, Mr. Maltham, had yo' been
bo'n and bred in South Cahrolina. Suh, I can
say no mo' than that!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span></p>
<p>Ulrica took little part in the talk. Her eyes
were dull and she moved languidly, as though
she were weary. Not until her father left
the room—going to fetch his maps and charts,
that he might demonstrate the Point's glorious
future—did she speak freely.</p>
<p>"I could not sleep last night, Mr. Maltham,"
she said hurriedly. "I lay awake the whole
night—thinking about what I had done, and
about what you must think about me for doing
it. If I had drowned you, after breaking my
word to father that way, it would have been
almost murder. It was very noble of you, just
now, to say that it was as much your fault as
it was mine. But it was not. It was my fault
all the way through."</p>
<p>"But the danger was just as great for you
as it was for me," Maltham answered. "You
would have been drowned too, you know."</p>
<p>"Oh, that would not have counted. It would
not have counted at all. I should have got
only what I deserved."</p>
<p>Maltham came close to her and took her
hand. "Don't you think that it would have
counted for a good deal to <i>me</i>?" he asked. Then
he dropped her hand quickly and moved away
from her as the Major re-entered the room.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></p>
<p>Inasmuch as he would have been drowned
along with her, this speech was lacking in
logic; but Ulrica, who was not on the lookout
for logic just then, was more than satisfied with
it. Suddenly she was elate again. For the
dread that had kept her wakeful had vanished:
his second thoughts about the peril into which
she had taken him had not set him against
her—he still was the same! She could not
answer him with her lips, but she answered
him with her eyes.</p>
<p>Maltham's feelings were complex as he saw
the effect that his words had upon her. He had
made several resolutions not to say anything
of that sort to her again. Even if she did like
flirting (as he had put it in his own mind) it
was not quite the thing, under the existing
conditions, for him to flirt with her. He resolutely
kept the word flirting well forward in
his thoughts. It agreeably qualified the entire
situation. As he very well knew, Miss Strangford
was not above flirting herself. But it
was not easy to classify under that head Ulrica's
sudden change in manner and the look that she
had given him. In spite of himself, his first
impression of her would come back and get
in the way of the new impression that he very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
much wished to form. When he first had
seen her—only the day before, but time does
not count in the ordinary way in the case of
those who have been close to the gates of death
together—he had felt the fire that was in her,
and had known that it slumbered. After what
he had just seen in her eyes he could not conquer
the conviction that the fire slumbered no
longer and that he had kindled its strong flame.</p>
<p>Nor did he wholly wish to conquer this conviction.
It was thrillingly delightful to think
that he had gained so great a power over her, for
all her queenliness, in so short a time. Over
Miss Strangford—the contrast was a natural
one—he had very little power. That young
lady was not queenly, but she had a notable
aptitude for ruling—and came by it honestly,
from a father whose hard head and hard hand
made him conspicuous even among Chicago men
of affairs. It was her strength that had attracted
him to her; and the discovery that with
her strength was sweetness that had made him
love her. He was satisfied that she loved him
in return—but he could not fancy her giving
him such a look as Ulrica had just given him;
still less could he fancy her whole being irradiated
by a touch and a word.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
And so he came again to the same half-formed
conclusion that he had come to in the boat
on the preceding day: he would let matters
drift along pleasantly a little farther before
he set them as they should be with a strong
hand.</p>
<p>This chain of thought went through his mind
while the Major was exhibiting the maps and
expounding the Point's future; and his half-conclusion
was a little hastened by the Major's
abrupt stop, and sudden facing about upon
him with: "I feah, suh, that yo' do not quite
follow me. If I have not made myself cleah,
suh, I will present the matteh in anotheh
way."</p>
<p>Maltham shot a quizzical glance at Ulrica—which
made her think that she knew where
his thoughts had been wool-gathering, and so
brought more light to her eyes—and answered
with a becoming gravity: "The fact is I didn't
quite catch the point that you were making,
Major, and I'll be very much obliged if you'll
take the trouble to go over it again."</p>
<p>"It is no trouble—it is a pleasuah, suh,"
the Major replied with an animated affability.
And with that he was off again, and ran on for
an hour or more—until he had established the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
glorious future of Minnesota Point in what
he believed to be convincing terms. "When the
time to which I am looking fo'wa'd comes, Mr.
Maltham, and it will come vehy soon, suh," he
said in enthusiastic conclusion, "it stands to
reason that the fortunes of this great metropolis
of the No'thwest will be fo'eveh and unchangeably
established. Only I must wahn yo', suh,
that we must begin to get ready fo' it right away.
We must take time by the fo'lock and provide
at once—I say at once, suh—fo' the needs of
that magnificent futuah that is almost heah
now!"</p>
<p>He took a long breath as he finished his
peroration, and then came down smiling to the
level of ordinary conversation and added: "I
feah, Mr. Maltham, that I pehmit my enthusiasm
to get away with me a little. I feah I
may even boah yo', suh. I promise not to
say anotheh wohd on the subject this evening.
And now, as it is only a little while befo' suppeh,
we cannot do betteh, suh, than to take a
drink."</p>
<p>Maltham had not intended to stay to supper.
He even had intended not to. But he did—and
on through the evening until the Major had to
warn him that he either must consent to sleep<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
in Eutaw Castle or else hurry along up the
Point before the ferry-boat stopped running
for the night. The Major urged him warmly
to stay. Finding that his invitation certainly
would not be accepted, he went off for a lantern—and
was rather put out when Maltham
declined it and said that he could find his
way very well by the light of the stars.</p>
<p>Actually, Maltham did not find his way very
well by the light of the stars. Two or three
times he ran against trees. Once—this was
while he was trying to give the graveyard a
wide offing—he stumbled over a root and fell
heavily. When he got up again he found that
he had wrenched his leg, and that every step
he took gave him intense pain. But he was
glad of his flounderings against trees, and of
his fall and the keen pain that followed it—for
he was savage with himself.</p>
<p>And yet it was not his fault, he grumbled.
Why had the Major gone off that way to hunt
up a lantern—and so left them alone? Toward
the end of his walk—his pain having quieted
his excitement, and so lessened his hatred
of himself—he added much more lightly:
"But what does a single kiss amount to, after
all?"</p>
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p2"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span></p>
<h3>VIII</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo11.jpg" width="500"
height="222" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>It was on a day in the early autumn that
Maltham at last decided definitely—making
effective his half-formed resolution of the
spring-time—to stop drifting and to set things
as they should be with a strong hand. But
he had to admit, even as he formed this resolution,
that setting things quite as they should
be no longer was within his power.</p>
<p>The summer had gone quickly, most astonishingly
quickly, he thought; and for the most
part pleasantly—though it had been broken by
certain interludes, not pleasant, during which
he had been even more savage with himself than
he had been during that walk homeward from
Eutaw Castle in the dark. But, no matter how
it had gone, the summer definitely was ended—and
so were his amusing sessions with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
Major over the future of Minnesota Point, and
his sails with Ulrica on the lake and about the
bay. Ice already had begun to form in the
sheltered parts of the harbour, and the next
shift of wind into the North would close the
port for the winter by freezing everything hard
and fast. All the big ships had steamed away
eastward. On the previous day he had despatched
the last vessel of his own line. His work for
the season was over, and he was ready to return
to Chicago. In fact, he had his berth engaged
on that night's train. Moreover, in another
month he was to be married: in her latest
letter Miss Strangford had fixed the day. Then
they were going over to the Riviera, and probably
to Egypt. In the spring they were coming
back again, but not to Duluth nor even to
Chicago. He was to take charge of the Eastern
office of the line, and their home would be in
New York. These various moves were so definite
and so final as to justify him in saying
to himself, as he did say to himself, that the
Duluth episode was closed.</p>
<p>He had hesitated about going down to Eutaw
Castle to say good-bye, but in the end had perceived
that the visit was a necessity. The
Major and Ulrica knew that he was to leave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
Duluth when navigation was closed for the winter—indeed,
of late, Ulrica had referred to
that fact frequently—but he had not confided
to them the remainder of his rather radical
programme. He meant to do that later by letter—from
the Riviera or from Egypt. In the
mean time, until he was married and across the
Atlantic, it was essential to keep unbroken the
friendly relations which had made his summer—even
with its bad interludes—so keenly delightful
to him; and to go away without paying
a farewell visit he knew would be to risk a
rupture that very easily might lead on to a
catastrophe. Moreover, as he said to himself,
there need not be anything final about it. Even
though the harbour did freeze, the railways remained
open—and it was only sixteen hours
from Chicago to Duluth by the fast train. To
suggest that he might be running up again soon
would be a very simple matter: and would not
be straining the truth, for he knew that the
pull upon him to run up in just that way would
be almost irresistibly strong.</p>
<p>In fact, the pull was of such strength that all
of his not excessive will power had to be exerted
to make him go away at all—at least, to go away
alone. Very many times he had thought of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
possibility of reversing his programme completely:
of making his wedding journey with
Ulrica, and of writing from some far-off place
to Miss Strangford that he had happened to
marry somebody else and that she was free.
But each time that he had considered this
alternative he had realized that its cost would
come too high: a break with his own people,
the loss of the good berth open to him in New
York, the loss of his share of Miss Strangford's
share of the grain-elevators and other desirable
properties which would come to her when her
father died. But for these practical considerations,
as he frequently and sorrowingly had
assured himself, he would not have hesitated
for a moment—being satisfied that, aside from
them, such a reversal of his plans would be
better in every way. For he knew that while
Miss Strangford had and Ulrica had not his
formal promise to marry her, it was Ulrica
who had the firmer hold upon his heart; and he
also knew that while Ulrica would meet his
decision against her savagely—and, as he believed,
feebly—with her passion, Miss Strangford
would meet the reverse of that decision
calmly and firmly with her strength. The dilemma
so nearly touched the verge of his en<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>durance
that he even had contemplated evading
it altogether by shooting himself. But he had
not got beyond contemplation. For that sort
of thing he was lacking in nerve.</p>
<p>It was because facing what he knew was a
final parting—even though Ulrica would not
know it—would be so bitter hard for him that
he had hesitated about making his visit of good-bye.
But when he had decided that it was a necessity—that
the risk involved in not making it
outweighed the pain that it would cost him—he
came about again: adding to his argument, almost
with a sob, that he could not go away like
that, anyhow—that he <i>must</i> see her once more!</p>
<p>And so he went down the Point again, knowing
that he went for the last time—and on much
the same sort of a day, as it happened, as that
on which his first visit had been made: a grey,
chill day, with a strong wind drawing down the
lake that tufted it with white-caps and that sent
a heavy surf booming in upon the shore. He
had no headache, but he had a heartache that
was still harder to bear.</p>
<p>He had intended to take the tram-car—that
he might hurry down to the Castle, and get
through with what he had to do there, and so
away again quickly. But when he had crossed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
the canal he let the car go off without him—for
the good reason that the meeting and the parting
might not come so soon. And for this same
reason he walked slowly, irresolutely. Once or
twice he halted and almost turned back. It all
was very unlike his brisk, assured advance on that
far back day—ages before, it seemed to him—when
he went down the Point for the first time.</p>
<p>As he went onward, slowly, he was thinking
about that day: how it had been without intention
that he turned eastward instead of westward
when he started on his walk; how a whim
of the moment had led him to cross the canal;
how the mere chance of the three church-bound
women hurrying into the ferry-boat had prevented
his immediate return. He fell to wondering,
dully, what "chance" is, anyway—this
force which with a grim humour uses our most
unconsidered actions for the making or the unmaking
of our lives; and the hopeless puzzle
of it all kept his mind unprofitably employed
until he had passed the last of the little houses,
and had gone on through the stunted pines,
and so was come to the desolate graveyard.</p>
<p>He did not shun the graveyard, as he had
shunned it all the summer long. The need for
that was past—now that, in reality, Ulrica's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
name had come to be to him a name upon a
grave. For a while he stood with his arms
resting on the broken fence, looking before him
in a dull way and feeling a dull surprise because
he found the dismal place still precisely as he
remembered it. That in so very long a time
it should not have become more ruinous seemed
to him unreasonable. Then he walked on past
the little church, still slowly and hesitatingly,
and so came at last to the Castle. Oddly enough,
the Major was standing again at the same lower
window, and saw him, and came out to welcome
him. For a moment he had a queer feeling that
perhaps it still was that first day—that he might
have been dozing in the pine woods, somewhere,
and that the past summer was all a dream.</p>
<p>The Major was beaming with friendliness.
"Aha, Masteh Geo'ge, I'm glad to see yo' and
to congratulate yo'!" he said heartily. And
he gave Maltham a cordial dig in the ribs as he
added: "Yo' ah a sly dog, a vehy sly dog, my
boy, to keep youah secret from us! But I happened
to be up in town yestehday, and by the
mehest chance I met Captain Todd, of youah
boat, and he told me why yo' ah going back to
Chicago in such a huhy, suh! It is a great
match, a magnificent match that yo' ah mak<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>ing,
Geo'ge, and I congratulate yo' with all
my haht. I should be glad of the oppo'tunity
to congratulate Miss Strangfo'd also. Fo' I am
not flattehing yo', Geo'ge, when I tell yo' that
she could not have found a betteh husband had
she gone to look fo' him in South Cahrolina.
Suh, I can say no mo' than that!"</p>
<p>The Major's speech was long enough, fortunately,
for Maltham to get over the shock of
its beginning before he had to answer it. But
even with that breathing space his answer was
so lame that the Major had to invent an excuse
for its lack of heartiness. "I don't doubt that
afteh youah chilly walk, Geo'ge, yo' ah half
frozen," he said. "Come right in and have
a drink. It will do yo' good, suh. It will take
the chill out of youah bones!"</p>
<p>Maltham was glad to accept this invitation,
and the size of the drink that he took did the
Major's heart good. "That's right, Geo'ge!"
he said with great approval. "A South-Cahrolinian
couldn't show a betteh appreciation of
good liquoh than that!" He raised his glass
and continued: "I drink, suh, to Miss Strangfo'd's
health, and to youahs. May yo' both have
the long lives of happiness that yo' both desehve!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
He put down his empty glass and added:
"I will call Ulrica. She will be glad to see
yo' and to offeh yo' heh congratulations." He
paused for a moment, and then went on in a
less cheerful tone: "But I must wahn yo',
Geo'ge, that she has a bad headache and is not
quite hehself to-day—and so may not manifest
that wahm co'diality in regahd to youah present
and futuah happiness that she suahly feels.
I confess, Geo'ge," the Major continued anxiously,
"I am not quite comfo'table about heh.
She seems mo' out of so'ts than a meah headache
ought to make heh. And fo' the last
month and mo', as yo' may have obsehved youahself,
she has not seemed to be hehself at all.
I don't mind speaking this way frankly to yo',
Geo'ge, fo' yo' know how my haht is wrapped
up in heh. As I once told yo', it was only my
love fo' that deah child that kept me alive when
heh motheh left me," the Major's voice was very
unsteady, "and it is God's own truth that if
anything went wrong with heh; if—if I weh
to lose heh too, Geo'ge, I suahly should want
to give right up and die. I could not live without
heh—I don't think that I could live without
heh fo' a single day!"</p>
<p>There were tears in the Major's eyes as he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
spoke, and his last word was almost a sob. Maltham
was very pale. He did not attempt an
answer.</p>
<p>"Thank yo', Geo'ge," the Major went on
presently. "I see by youah looks that I have
youah sympathy. I am most grateful to yo' fo'
it, most grateful indeed!" In a moment he
added: "Hahk! She's coming now! I heah
heh step outside. Hahk how heavy and slow
it is—and she always as light on heh feet as
a bird! To heah heh walk that way almost
breaks my haht!" And then he checked himself
suddenly, and tried to look rather unusually
cheerful as Ulrica entered the room.</p>
<div class="chapter">
<h3>IX</h3></div>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo12.jpg" width="500"
height="218" alt="" title="" /></div>
<p>Being braced to meet some sort of a storm,
Maltham was rather put about by not encountering
it. Ulrica certainly was looking the worse<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
for her headache—her eyes were duller than
usual, and there were dark marks under them,
and she was very pale; but she did not seem
to be at all excited, and the greeting that she
gave him was out of the ordinary only in that
she did not offer him her hand. He drew a
quick breath, and the tense muscles of his mind
relaxed. If she were taking it in that quiet
way, he thought, he had worked himself into
heroics for nothing. And then, quite naturally,
he felt a sharp pang of resentment because she
did take it so quietly. Her calmness ruffled his
self-love.</p>
<p>As she remained silent, making no reference
to Maltham's engagement, the Major felt that
the proprieties of the case were not being attended
to and prompted her. "I have been
wishing Geo'ge joy and prospehrity, my deah,"
he said. "Have yo' nothing to say to him
youahself about his coming happiness?"</p>
<p>"Yes," she answered slowly, "I have a great
deal to say to him—so much that I am going
to carry him off in the <i>Nixie</i> to say it." She
turned to Maltham and added: "You will come
with me for a last sail, will you not?"</p>
<p>Maltham hesitated, and then answered doubtfully:
"Isn't it a little cold for sailing to-day?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
Your father says that you are not feeling well.
I do think that it will be better not to go—unless
you really insist upon it, of course."</p>
<p>"Yo' mustn't think of such a thing!" the
Major struck in peremptorily. "The weatheh is
like ice. Yo' will catch yo' death of cold!"</p>
<p>"It is no colder, father, than that day when
I took George out in the <i>Nixie</i> for the first time—and
it will do my head good," Ulrica answered.
And added, to Maltham: "I do insist.
Come!"</p>
<p>Against the Major's active remonstrance, and
against Maltham's passive resistance, she carried
her point. "Come!" she said again—and
led Maltham out by the side door into the ragged
garden. There she left him for a moment and
returned to her father—who was standing in a
very melancholy way before the fire.</p>
<p>"Do not mind, father," she said. "It is
the best thing for me—it is the only thing for
me."</p>
<p>He looked at her inquiringly, puzzled by her
words and by her vehement tone. Suddenly
she put her arms around his neck and kissed
him. "Remember always, father, that I have
loved you with my whole heart for almost my
whole life long. And remember always," she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
went on with a curiously savage earnestness,
"that I am loving you with my whole heart—with
every bit of it—to-day!"</p>
<p>"I am suah yo' ah, my daughteh," the Major
answered, very huskily.</p>
<p>She kissed him again, holding him tight in
her arms. Then she unclasped her arms with
a sudden quick energy and swiftly left the
room.</p>
<p>She led Maltham silently to the boat, and silently—when
she had cast off the mooring—motioned
to him to enter it. He found this silence
ominous, and tried to break it. But the
commonplace words which he wanted to speak
would not come.</p>
<p>And then, as he sat in the stern and mechanically
steadied the tiller while she hoisted the
sail, the queer feeling again came over him that
it still was that wonderful first day. This feeling
grew stronger as all that he remembered
so well was repeated: Ulrica's rapid movement
aft to the tiller; his own shifting of his seat;
her quick loosing of the centreboard as the wind
caught them; and then the heeling over of the
boat, and her steady motion, and the bubbling
hiss of the water beneath the bow. It all so lulled
him, so numbed his sense of time and fact,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
that suddenly he looked up in her face and
smiled—just as he had done on that first day.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="HEART"><img src="images/illo13.jpg" width="425"
height="803" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
"'I HAVE LOVED YOU WITH MY WHOLE HEART'"
</div></div>
<p>But the look in Ulrica's eyes killed his smile,
and brought him back with a sharp wrench to
reality. Her eyes no longer were dull. They
were glowing—and they seemed to cut into him
like knives.</p>
<p>"Well," she asked, "have you anything to
say for yourself?"</p>
<p>"No," he answered, "except that fate has
been too strong for me."</p>
<p>"Fate sometimes is held accountable for a
great deal," she said dryly, but with a catch
in her voice.</p>
<p>They were silent again, and for a long while.
The boat was running down the bay rapidly—even
more rapidly, the wind being much stronger,
than on that first day. They could hear,
as they had not heard then, the surf crashing
upon the outer beach of the Point.</p>
<p>The silence became more than he could stand.
"Can you forgive me?" he asked at last.</p>
<p>Ulrica looked at him with a curious surprise.
"No," she answered quite calmly. "Think for
a moment about what you have done and about
what you intend to do. Do you not see that it
is impossible?"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
"But I love you!" he cried eagerly. "I love
you more than I can tell. It is not my will that
is separating us—it is fate!"</p>
<p>Her look softened for an instant as he began,
but as he ended it hardened again. She did
not answer him. A strong gust of wind heeled
the boat farther over. They were going at a
slashing rate. Before them the inlet was opening.
The booming of the surf was very loud.</p>
<p>He saw that his words had taken hold upon
her, and repeated them: "I do love you, Ulrica—and,
oh, you don't know how very wretched I
have been! More than once in this past month
I have been very near killing myself."</p>
<p>She gave him a searching look, and seemed
satisfied that he spoke the truth. "I am glad
that you have wanted to kill yourself," she said
slowly and earnestly. They were at the mouth
of the inlet. As she spoke, she luffed sharply
and they entered it close-hauled.</p>
<p>"Yes," she repeated, speaking still more earnestly,
"I am very glad of that. It makes me
feel much easier in my mind about what I am
going to do."</p>
<p>Her tone startled him. He looked up at her
quickly and anxiously. "What are you going
to do?" he asked.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
"Drown you," she answered simply.</p>
<p>For an instant he did not take in the meaning
of her words. Then his face became very
white, though he tried to smile. His voice shook
as he said: "I do not think that this is a good
time for joking." The boat was biting her way
into the wind sharply, plunging and bucketing
through the partly spent waves which came in
from outside.</p>
<p>"You know that I am not joking," Ulrica
answered very quietly. "I am going to drown
you, and to drown myself too. I have thought
it all out, and this seems the best thing to do.
It is the best for father," her voice trembled,
"and it is the best," she went on again, firmly,
"for me. As for you, it does not matter whether
it is the best for you or not—it is what you
deserve. For you are a liar and a traitor—a
liar and a traitor to me, and to that other woman
too!" As she spoke these last words her
calmness left her, and there was the ring of
passionate anger in her tone. The fire that she
had been smothering, at last was in full blaze.</p>
<p>They were at the very mouth of the inlet.
The white-capped surface of the lake swelled
and tossed before them. The boat was wallowing
heavily.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
Maltham's paleness changed to a greenish-grey.
He uttered a shrill scream—a cry of
weakly helpless terror. "Put about! For
God's sake put about!" he gasped. "We shall
be drowned!"</p>
<p>For answer, she hauled the sheet a little and
brought the boat still closer into the wind—heading
straight out into the lake. "I told you
once that the <i>Nixie</i> could sail into the wind's
eye," she said, coolly. "Now she is doing it.
Does she not go well?"</p>
<p>At that, being desperate, he rallied a little.
Springing to his feet, but standing unsteadily,
he grasped the tiller and tried to shift the helm.
Ulrica, standing firmly, laid her hand flat
against his breast and thrust him away savagely—with
such force that he reeled backward and
fell, striking against the combing and barely
missing going over the side.</p>
<p>"You fool!" she exclaimed. "Do you not
see that it is too late?" She did not trouble
herself to look at him. Her gaze was fixed
in a keen ecstasy on the great oncoming waves.</p>
<p>What she said was true—it was too late.
They were fairly out on the open lake, and
all possibility of return was gone. To try to
go about would be to throw the <i>Nixie</i> into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
trough of the sea—and so send her rolling over
like a log. At the best, the little boat could
live in that surge and welter for only a very
few minutes more.</p>
<p>Maltham did not attempt to rise. His fall
had hurt him, and what little was left of his
spirit was cowed. He lay in a miserable heap,
uttering little whimpering moans. The complaining
noise that he made annoyed her. For
the last time she looked at him, burning him
for an instant with her glowing eyes. "Silence,
you coward!" she cried, fiercely—and at
her strong command he was still. Then her look
was fixed on the great oncoming waves again,
and she cast him out from her mind.</p>
<p>Even in her rage—partly because of it—Ulrica
felt in every drop of her Norse blood the
glow and the thrill of this glorious battle with
great waters. The sheer delight of it was worth
dying for—and so richly worth living through
to the very last tingling instant that she steered
with a strong and a steady hand. And again—as
she stood firmly on the tossing boat, her
draperies blown close about her, her loosened
hair streaming out in golden splendour—she
was Aslauga's very self. Sorrow and life together
were ending well for her—in high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
emotion that filled and satisfied her soul. Magnificent,
commanding, defiant, she sailed on
in joyful triumph: glad and eager to give herself
strongly to the strong death-clasp of the
waves.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em"><img src="images/illo14.jpg" width="500"
height="179" alt="" title="" /></div>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p6"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>
<h2 id="Martigues">The Death-Fires of Les Martigues</h2></div>
<h3>I</h3>
<p>"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!"</p>
<p>That is one of our old sayings here in Provence.
I used to laugh at it when I was young.
I do not laugh at it now. When those words
come into my heart, and they come often, I
go by the rough hard way that leads upward to
Notre Dame de la Garde until I come to the
Crime Cross—it is a wearying toil for me
to get up that steep hill-side, I am so stiff and
old now—and there I cast fresh stones upon the
heap at the foot of the cross. Each stone cast
there, you know, is a prayer for forgiveness
for some hidden crime: not a light fault, but a
crime. The stones must be little stones, yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
the heap is very wide and high—though
every winter, when the great mistrals are
blowing across the Étang de Berre, the little
stones are whirled away down the hill-side. I
do not know how this custom began, nor when;
but it is a very old custom with us here in Les
Martigues.</p>
<p>Once in every year I go up to the Crime
Cross by night. This is on All Souls Eve. First
I light the lamp over Magali's breast where
she lies sleeping in the graveyard: going to the
graveyard at dusk, as the others do, in the long
procession that creeps up thither from the three
parts of our town—from Jonquières, and the
Isle, and Ferrières—to light the death-fires
over the dear dead ones' graves. I go with
the very first, as soon as the sun is down. I like
to be alone with Magali while I light the little
lamp that will be a guide for her soul through
that night when souls are free; that will keep
it safe from the devils who are free that night
too. I do not like the low buzzing of voices
which comes later, when the crowd is there, nor
the broken cries and sobs. And when her lamp
is lit, and I have lit my mother's lamp, I hurry
away from the graveyard and the moaning people—threading
my steps among the graves on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
which the lights are beginning to glimmer, and
through the oncoming crowd, and then by the
lonely path through the olive-orchards, and so
up the stony height until I come at last to the
Crime Cross—panting, aching—and my watch
begins.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="MARIUS"><img src="images/illo15.jpg" width="475"
height="757" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
MARIUS
</div></div>
<p>Up on that high hill-side, open to the west,
a little of the dying daylight lingers. Eastward,
like a big black mirror, lies the great
étang; and far away across its still waters the
mountain chain above Berre and Rognac rises
purple-grey against the darker sky. In the
west still are faint crimson blotches, or dashes
of dull blood-red—reflected again, and made
brighter, in the Étang de Caronte: that stretches
away between the long downward slopes of the
hills, on which stone-pines stand out in black
patches, until its gleaming waters merge into
the faint glow upon the waters of the Mediterranean.
Above me is the sanctuary of Notre
Dame de la Garde, a dark mass on the height
above the olive-trees: of old a refuge for sinful
bodies, and still a refuge where sinful souls may
seek grace in prayer from their agony. And
below me, on the slope far downward, is the
graveyard: where the death-fires multiply each
moment, as more and more lamps are lighted,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
until at last it is like a little fallen heaven of
tiny stars. Only in its midst is an island of
darkness where no lamps are. That is where
the children lie together: the blessed innocents
who have died sinless, and who wander not on
All Souls Eve because when sweet death came
to them their pure spirits went straight home
to God. And beyond the graveyard, below it,
is the black outspread of the town: its blackness
deepened by a bright window here and
there, and by the few street lamps, and by the
bright reflections which shine up from the
waters of its canals.</p>
<p>Seeing all this—yet only half seeing it, for
my heart is full of other things—I sit there
at the foot of the Crime Cross in the darkness,
prayerful, sorrowful, while the night wears
on. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming up the
rocky path, and then the shadowy figure of a
man or of a woman breaks out from the gloom
and suddenly is close beside me—and I hear
the rattle of little stones cast upon the heap
behind me, on the other side of the cross. Presently,
the rite ended, whoever it is fades back
into the gloom again and passes away. And
I know that another sinful soul has been close
beside my sinful soul for a moment: seeking in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
penitent supplication, as I am seeking, rest
in forgiveness for an undiscovered crime. But
I am sure that none of them sees—as I see in
the gloom there always—a man's white face
on which the moonlight is shining, and beyond
that white face the glint of moonlight on a raging
sea; and I am sure that on none of their
blackened souls rests a burden as heavy as that
which rests on mine.</p>
<p>I am very weary of my burden, and old and
broken too. It is my comfort to know that I
shall die soon. But, also, the thought of that
comfort troubles me. For I am a lone man,
and childless. When I go, none of Magali's
race, none of my race, will be left alive here
in Les Martigues. Our death-fires will not be
lighted. We shall wander in darkness on All
Souls Eve.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!"</p>
<p>My old mother, God rest her, said that to
me when first she began to see that my love
was set on Magali—and saw, too, that I was
winning from Magali the love that belonged to
Jan, who had her promise.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
"It is an old man's lifetime, mother," I said,
"since a wolf has been seen near Les Martigues."
And I laughed and kissed her.</p>
<p>"Worse than a wolf is a heart that covets
what it may not have, Marius," she answered.
"Magali is as good as Jan's wife, and you
know it. For a year she has been promised
to him. She is my dead sister's child, and she
is in my care—and in your care too, because
you and she and I are all that is left of us,
and you are the head of our house, the man.
You are doing wickedness in trying to take her
away from Jan—and Jan your own close friend,
who saved your life out of the sea. The match
is a good match for Magali, and she was contented
with it until you—living here close beside
her in your own house—began to steal away
her heart from him. It is rascal work, Marius,
that you are doing. You are playing false as
a house-father and false as a friend—and God
help me that I must speak such words to my own
son! That is why I say, and I say it solemnly,
'God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!' That desire has no
right to be in your heart, Marius. Drag it out
of your heart and cast it away!"</p>
<p>But I only laughed and kissed her again,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
and told her that I would take good care of myself
if a she-wolf tried to eat me—and so I went
away, still laughing, to my fishing in the Gulf
of Fos.</p>
<p>But I did not laugh when I was alone in
my boat, slipping down the Étang de Caronte
seaward. What she had said had made me see
things clearly which until then had been half
hid in a haze. We had slipped into our love for
each other, Magali and I, softly and easily—just
as my boat was slipping down the étang.
Every day of our lives we were together, in the
close way that housemates are together in a
little house of four rooms. Before I got up
in the morning I could hear her moving near
me, only a thin wall between us; and her movements,
again, were the last sounds that I heard
at night. She waited on me at my meals. She
helped my mother to mend my clothes—the very
patches on my coat would bring to my mind
the sight of her as she sat sewing at night beside
the lamp. We were as close together as a brother
and a sister could be; and in my dulness I
had fancied for a long while that what I had
felt for her was only what a brother would
feel.</p>
<p>What first opened my eyes a little was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
way that I felt about it when she gave her
promise to Jan. For all our lives Jan and I
had been close friends: and most close since that
day when the squall struck our boats, as we lay
near together, and I went overboard, and Jan—letting
his own boat take its chances—came
overboard after me because he knew that I could
not swim. It was by a hair's-breadth only that
we were not drowned together. After we were
safe I told him that my life was his. And I
meant it, then. Until Magali came between us
I would have died for him with a right good
will. After that I was ready enough that he
should do the dying—and so be gone out of
my way.</p>
<p>When he got Magali's promise, I say, my
ugly feeling against him began. But it was not
very strong at first, and I was not clear about
it in my own mind. All that I felt was that,
somehow, he had got between me and the sun.
For one thing, I did not want to be clear about
it. Down in the roots of me I knew that I had
no right to that sunshine, and that Jan had—and
I could not help thinking about how he
had come overboard after me and had held me
up there in the tumbling sea, and how I had
told him that my life was his. But with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
went a little thin thought, stirring now and then
in the bottom of my mind though I would not
own to it, that in giving him my life—which
still was his if he wanted it—I had not given
him the right to spoil my life for me while leaving
me still alive. And I did my best not to
think one way or the other, and was glad that
it all was a blur and a haze.</p>
<p>And all the while I was living close beside
Magali in that little house, with the sound of
her steps always near me and the sound of her
voice always in my ears. She had a very sweet
voice, with a freshness and a brightness in it
that seemed to me like the brightness of her
eyes—and Magali's great black eyes were the
brightest eyes that ever I saw. Even in Arles,
where all the women are beautiful, there would
be a buzz among the people lining Les Lices
when Magali walked there of a feast-day, wearing
the beautiful dress that our women wear
here in Provence. To look at her made you
think of an Easter morning sun.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
<p>My mother's words kept on ringing in my
ears after I had left her. Suddenly the haze
was gone and I saw clearly—and I knew that
my heart's deep desire was to have Magali
for my very own. And with that sudden coming
of clear sight I knew, too, that I could have
her. Out of the past came a crowd of memories
which proved it to me. In my dull way,
I say, I had fancied that I loved Magali as a
sister, and I had tried to keep that fancy always
by me in my haze. But with the haze gone—swept
away by my mother's words as the mistral
sweeps away our Mediterranean fogs—I
knew that Magali never had been the fool that
I had been.</p>
<p>I remembered her looks and her ways with me
from the very day when she came to us, when
she was just turned of sixteen: how she used
sometimes to lay her hand lightly on my shoulder,
how she would bend over to look at the
net that I was mending until her hair
brushed against my cheek or my forehead, how
she always was bringing things to show me that
I could not see rightly unless she stood very
close at my side, and most of all how a dozen
times a day she would be flashing at me her
great black eyes. And I remembered how moody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
and how strange in her ways she was just before
Jan got his promise from her; and how,
when she told me that her promise was given,
she gave me a look like none that ever I had
from her, and said slowly: "The fisherman who
will not catch any fish at all because he cannot
catch the fish he wants most—is a fool, Marius!"</p>
<p>Yet even then I did not understand; though,
as I say, my eyes were opened a little and I had
the feeling that Jan had got between me and the
sun. That feeling grew stronger because of the
way that she treated him and treated me. Jan
was for hurrying the marriage, but she kept him
dangling and always was putting him off. As
for me, I got all sides of her moods and tempers.
Sometimes she scarcely would speak to me.
Sometimes she would give me looks from those
big black eyes of hers that thrilled me through!
Sometimes she would hang about me in a patient
sad way that made me think of a dog begging
for food. And the colour so went out of her
face that her big black eyes looked bigger and
blacker still.</p>
<p>Then it was that I began to find in the haze
that was about me a refuge—because I did not
want to see clear. I let my thoughts go out
to Magali, and stopped them before they got<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
to Jan. It would be time enough, I reasoned—though
I did not really reason it: I only felt
it—to think about him when I had to. For the
passing hours it was enough to have the sweetness
of being near Magali—and that grew to
be a greater sweetness with every fresh new
day. Presently I noticed that her colour had
come back again; and it seemed to me—though
that may have been only because of my new
love of her—that she had a new beauty, tender
and strange. Certainly there was a new brightness,
a curiously glowing brightness, in her eyes.</p>
<p>For Jan, things went hardly in those days.
Having her promise, he had rights in her—as
we say in Provence. But he did not get
many of his rights. Half the time when he
claimed her for walks on the hill-sides among
the olive-orchards, she would not go with him—because
she had her work to do at home,
she said. And there was I, where her work was,
at home! For a while Jan did not see beyond
the end of his nose about it. I do not think
that ever it crossed his mind to think of me in
the matter—not, that is, until some one with
better eyes than his eyes helped him to see.
For he knew that I was his friend, and I suppose
that he remembered what I had told him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
about my life being his. And even when his eyes
were helped, he would not at first fully believe
what he must plainly have seen. But he soon
believed enough to make him change his manner
toward me, and to make him watch sharp
for something that would give him the right to
speak words to me which would bring matters
to a fair settlement by blows. And I was ready,
as I have said—though I would not fairly own
it to myself—to come to blows with him. For
I wanted him dead, and out of my way.</p>
<p>And so my mother's words, which had made
me at last see clearly, stayed by me as I went
sailing in my boat softly seaward down the
étang. And they struck deeper into me because
Jan's boat was just ahead of mine; and the
sight of him, and the thought of how he had
saved my life only to cross it, made me long
to run him down and drown him, and so be
quit of him for good and all. I made up my
mind then that, whether I killed him or left
him living, it would be I who should have
Magali and not he.</p>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p>"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!"</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span></p>
<p>My mother said that again to me when I
came home that night from my fishing; and
she said it to me often as the days went on. She
saw the change that had come to me, and she
knew what was in my soul. It is not wonderful,
when you stop to think about it, that a man's
mother should know what is in his soul: for the
body in which that soul is, the living home of
it, is a part of her own. And she grew sad and
weary-looking when she found that her words
had no hold on me, and there came into her
eyes the sorrowful look that comes into the eyes
of old people who are soon to die.</p>
<p>But Magali's eyes were the only eyes that
I cared for then, and they seemed to me to grow
brighter and brighter every day. When she and
I walked in the olive-orchards together in the
starlight the glow of them outshone the star-glow.
It seemed to light up my heart.</p>
<p>I do not think that we talked much in those
walks. I do not seem to remember our talking.
But we understood each other, and we were
agreed about what we were to do. I was old
enough to marry as I pleased, but Magali was
not—she could not marry without my mother's
word. We meant to force that word. Some day
we would go off in my boat together—over to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
Les Saintes Maries, perhaps; or perhaps to
Marseille. It did not matter where we went.
When we came back again, at the end of two
or three days, my mother no longer could deny
us—she would have to give in. And no one
would think the worse of Magali: for that is
our common way of settling a tangled love-matter
here in Provence.</p>
<p>But I did not take account of Jan in my
plans, and that was where I made a mistake.
Jan had just as strong a will as I had, and
every bit of his will was set upon keeping
Magali for himself. I wanted her to break
with him entirely, but that she would not do.
She was a true Provençale—and I never yet
knew one of our women who would rest satisfied
with one lover when she could have two.
If she can get more than two, that is better
still. While I hung back from her, Magali was
more than ready to come to me; but when
she found me eager after her, and knew that
she had a grip on me, she danced away.</p>
<p>And so, before long, Jan again had his walks
with her in the olive-orchards by starlight just
as I did, and likely enough her eyes glowed
for him just as they did for me. When they
were off that way together I would get into a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
wild-beast rage over it. Sometimes I would follow
them, fingering my knife. I suppose that
he felt like that when the turn was mine. Anyhow,
the love-making chances which she gave
him—even though in my heart I still was sure
of her—kept me always watching him; and I
could see that he always was watching me. Very
likely he felt sure of her too, and that was his
reason—just as it was my reason—for not bringing
our matter to a fighting end. I was ready
enough to kill him, God knows. Unless his
eyes lied when he looked at me, he was ready
to kill me.</p>
<p>And in that way the summer slipped past
and the autumn came, and neither of us gained
anything. I was getting into a black rage over
it all. Down inside of me was a feeling like
fire in my stomach that made me not want to
eat, and that made what I did eat go wrong.
My poor mother had given up trying to talk to
me. She saw that she could not change my way—and,
too, I suppose that she pretty well understood
it all: for she had lived her life, and she
knew the ways of our men and of our women
when love stings them here in Provence. Only,
her sadness grew upon her with her hopelessness.
What I remember most clearly as I think of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
her in those last days is her pale old face and
the dying look in her sorrowful eyes.</p>
<p>But seeing her in that way grief-struck only
made my black rage blacker and the fire in my
stomach burn hotter. I had the feeling that
there was a devil down there who all the time
was getting bigger and stronger: and that before
long he and I would take matters in hand together
and settle them for good and all. As
for keeping on with things as they were, it
was not to be thought of. Better than much
more of such a hell-life would be ending everything
by killing Jan.</p>
<p>What made me hang back from that was the
certainty that if I did kill him—even in a fair
fight, with his chance as good as mine—I would
lose Magali beyond all hope: for the gendarmes
would have me away in a whiff to jail—and
then off would go my head, or, what would be
just as bad, off I would go head and all to
Cayenne. It was no comfort to me to know that
Magali would almost cry her eyes out over
losing me. Of course she would do that, being
a Provençale. But before her eyes were quite
out she would stop crying; and then in a moment
she would be laughing again; and in
another moment she would be freshly in love<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
once more—with some man who was not murdered
and who was not gone for his lifetime
over seas. And all that, also, would be because
she was a Provençale.</p>
<h3>V</h3>
<p>All the devils are let loose on earth on All
Souls Eve—that is a fact known to everybody
here in Provence. But whether it was one of
those loosed devils, or the devil that had grown
big in my own inside, that made me do what I
did I do not know. What I do know, certainly,
is that about dusk on All Saints Day the thought
of how I could force things to be as I wanted
them to be came into my heart.</p>
<p>My thought was not a new thought, exactly.
It was only that I would do what we had
planned to do to make my mother give in to us:
get Magali into my boat and carry her off with
me for a day or two to Les Saintes. But it
came to me with the new meaning that in that
way I could make Magali give in to me too.
When we came back she would be ready enough
to marry me, and my mother would be for hurrying
our marrying along. It all was as plain
and as sure as anything could be. And, as I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
said, nobody would think the worse of Magali
afterward; because that way of cutting through
such difficulties is a common way with us in
Provence.</p>
<p>And All Souls Eve was the time of all times
for doing it. The whole town is in commotion
then. In the churches, when the Vespers of
All Saints are finished, the Vespers of the Dead
are said. Then, just after sunset, the streets
are crowded with our people hurrying to the
graveyard with their lanterns for the graves.
Nothing is thought about but the death-fires.
From all the church towers—in Jonquières, in
the Isle, in Ferrières—comes the sad dull tolling
of bells. After that, for an hour or more,
the town is almost deserted. Only the very old,
and the very young, and the sick with their
watchers, and the bell-ringers in the towers, are
left there. Everybody else is in the graveyard,
high up on the hill-side: first busied in setting
the lights and in weeping over dead loved ones;
and then, when the duty to the dead ones is
done with, in walking about through the graveyard
to see the show. In Provence we take a
great interest in every sort of show.</p>
<p>Magali and I had no death-fires to kindle, for
in the graveyard were no dead of ours. Our peo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>ple
were of Les Saintes Maries, and there their
graves were—and my father, who was drowned
at his fishing, had no grave at all. But we went
always to the graveyard on All Souls Eve, and
most times together, that we might see the show
with the others and enjoy the bustle of the
crowd. And so there was nothing out of the
common when I asked her to come with me; and
off we started together—leaving my old mother
weeping at home for my dead father, who could
have no death-fire lit for him because his bones
were lying lost to us far away in the depths
of the sea.</p>
<p>Our house was in the eastern quarter of the
town, in Jonquières. To reach the graveyard
we had to cross the Isle, and go through Ferrières,
and then up the hill-side beyond. But I
did not mean that we should do that; and when
we had crossed the Canal du Roi I said to
Magali that we would turn, before we went onward,
and walk down past the Fish-market to
the end of the Isle—that from there we might
see the lights glowing in the dusk on the slope
rising above us black against the western sky.
We had done that before—it is a pretty sight
to see all those far-off glittering points of light
above, and then to see their glittering reflections<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
near by in the water below—and she willingly
came with me.</p>
<p>But I had more in view. Down at the end
of the Isle, along with the other boats moored
at the wharf there to be near the Fish-market,
my boat was lying; and when we were come
close to her I said suddenly, as though the
thought had entered my head that minute, that
we would go aboard of her and run out a little
way—and so see the death-fires more clearly
because they would be less hidden by the
shoulder of the hill. I did not have to speak
twice. Magali was aboard of the boat on the
instant, and was clapping her hands at the notion—for
she had, as all our women have, a
great pleasure in following any sudden fancy
which promises something amusing and also
a little strange. And I was quick after her,
and had the lines cast off and began to get
up the sail.</p>
<p>"Oh," she said, "won't the oars do? Need
we bother with the sail for such a little way?"</p>
<p>But I did not answer her, and went on with
what I was doing, while the boat drifted quickly
out from land before the gusts of wind which
struck us harder and harder as we cleared the
point of the Isle. Until then I had not thought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
about the weather—my mind had been full of
the other and bigger thought. The gusts of wind
waked me up a little, and as I looked at the
sky I began to have doubts that I could do what
I wanted to do; for it was plain that a gale
was rising which would make ticklish work for
me even out on the Gulf of Fos—and would
make pretty near impossible my keeping on to
Les Saintes over the open sea. And I had about
made up my mind that we must go back, and
that I must carry out my plan some other
time, when there came a hail to us from the
shore.</p>
<p>"Where are you going?" called a voice—and
as we turned our looks shoreward there was
Jan. He had been following us, I suppose—just
as I sometimes had followed him.</p>
<p>Before I could answer him, Magali spoke.
"We are going out on the water to see the
death-fires, Jan," she said. "We are going
only a very little way."</p>
<p>Her words angered me. There was something
in them that seemed to show that he had
the right to question her. That settled me in
my purpose. Storm or no storm, on I would
go. And I brought the boat up to the wind, so
as to lay our course straight down the Étang<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
de Caronte, and called out to him: "We are
going where you cannot follow. Good-bye!"</p>
<p>And then a gust of wind heeled us over, and
we went on suddenly with a dash—as a horse
goes when you spur him—and the water boiled
and hissed under our bows. In another half-minute
we were clear of the shelter of the point,
and then the wind came down on us off the
hills in a rush so strong that I had to ease off
the sheet sharply—and I had a queer feeling
about what was ahead of me out on the Gulf
of Fos.</p>
<p>"Marius! Marius! What are you doing?"
Magali cried in a shiver of fright: for she
knew by that time that something was back of
it all in my mind. As she spoke I could see
through the dusk that Jan was running up the
sail of his boat, and in a minute more would
be after us.</p>
<p>"I am doing what I ought to have done
long ago," I said. "I am taking you for my
own. There is nothing to fear, dear Magali.
You shall not be in danger. I had meant to
take you to Les Saintes. But a gale is rising
and we cannot get to Les Saintes to-night. We
will run across the Gulf of Fos and anchor in
the Grau de Gloria. There is a shepherd's hut<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
near the Grau. I will make a fire in it and
you can sleep there comfortably, while I watch
outside. After all, it makes no difference where
we go. I shall have carried you off—when we
go back you must be my wife."</p>
<p>She did not understand at first. She was too
much frightened with the suddenness of it all,
and with the coming of Jan, and with the
boat flying on through the rushing of the wind.
I looked back and saw that Jan had got away
after us. Dimly I could make out his sail
through the dusk that lay thick upon the water.
Beyond it and above it was a broad patch of
brightness where all the death-fires were burning
together in the graveyard. We had come
too far to see any longer those many points of
light singly. In a mass, they made against the
black hill-side a great bright glow.</p>
<h3>VI</h3>
<p>"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!"</p>
<p>My mother's words seemed to sound in my
ears loudly, coming with the rush of wind that
eddied around me out of the sail's belly. They
gave me a queer start, as the thought came with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
them that here at last my heart's deep desire
would be mine presently—if only I could snatch
it and keep it from the she-wolf of the sea.</p>
<p>Magali was silent—half standing, half sitting,
against the weather side of the boat, close
in front of me as I stood at the tiller with the
sheet in my hand. She had got over her fright. I
could tell that by the brightness of her eyes,
and by the warm colour in her cheeks that I
had a glimpse of as we flashed past the break
in the hills where the Mas Labillon stands.
And in that moment while the dusk was thinned
a little I could see, too, that she was breathing
hard. I know what our women are, and I
know what she was feeling. Our women like
to be fought for, and any one of them gladly
would have been in Magali's place—with the
two strongest and handsomest men in Les Martigues
in a fair way to come to a death-grip for
her in the whirl of a rising storm.</p>
<p>Back in the dusk, against the faint glow of
the death-fires, I could see the sail of Jan's
boat dipping and swaying with the thrusts of
the wind-gusts as it came on after me. It had
gained a little; and I knew that it would gain
more, for Jan's boat was a speedier boat than
mine on the wind. Close-hauled, I could walk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
away from him; but in running down the Étang
de Caronte I had no choice in my sailing. Out
on the Gulf of Fos, if I dared take that chance,
and if he dared follow me, I could bear up
to windward and so shake him off—making
for the Anse d'Auguette and taking shelter
there. But even my hot blood chilled a little
at the thought of going out that night on the
Gulf of Fos. When we were down near the
end of the étang—close to the Salines, where it
is widest—the wind that pelted down on us
from the hills was terribly strong. It was hard
to stand against even there, where the water
was smooth. Outside, it would be still stronger,
and the water would be all in a boil. And
at the end, to get into the Anse d'Auguette, we
should have to take the risk of a roaring sea
abeam.</p>
<p>But any risk was better than the risk of what
might happen if Jan overhauled me. Now that
I fairly had Magali away from him, I did not
want to fight him. What might come in a
fight in rough water—where the winds and the
waves would have to be reckoned with, and
with the most careful reckoning might play
tricks on me—was too uncertain; while if I
could stand him off and get away from him,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
so that even for one night I could keep Magali
with me, the game would be won. After that,
if he wanted it, I would fight him as much as
he pleased.</p>
<p>The thought that I would win—in spite of
Jan and in spite of the storm, too—made all my
blood tingle. More by habit than anything else
I sailed the boat: for my eyes were fixed on
Magali's eyes, shining there close to me, and my
heart was full of her. We did not speak, but
once she turned and looked at me—bending
forward a little, so that her face was within a
foot of mine. What she saw in my eyes was
so easy to read that she gave all at once a half-laugh
and a half-sob—and then turned away
and peered through the blustering darkness
toward Jan's sail. Somehow, the way she did
that made me feel that she was holding the
balance between us; that she was waiting—as
the she among wild beasts waits while the
males are fighting for her—for the stronger of
us to win. After that I was ready to face the
Gulf of Fos.</p>
<p>The time for facing the gulf was close on
me, too. We had run through the canal of
the Salines and were out in the open water
of Bouc—the great harbour at the mouth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
of the étang. The gale roared down on
us, now that there was little land to break it,
and we began to hear the boom of the waves
pounding on the rocks outside. I luffed well
into the wind and bore up for the narrows opening
seaward where the Fort de Bouc light-house
stands. The water still was not rough enough
to trouble us. It would not be rough until we
were at the very mouth of the narrows. Then,
all at once, would come the crush and fury of
the wind and sea. I knew what it would be like:
and again a chill shot through me at the thought
of risking everything on that one great chance.
But I had one thing to comfort me: the moon
had risen—and while the light came brokenly,
as the clouds thinned and thickened again, there
was brightness enough even at the darkest for
me to lay a course when I got out among the
tumbling waves. Yet only a man half mad with
passion would have thought of fronting such
a danger; and even I might have held back at
the last moment had I not been stung to go on.</p>
<p>Jan had so gained on me in the run down the
étang that as we came out from the canal of
the Salines his boat was within less than a dozen
rods of mine; and as I hauled my sheet and
bore up for the narrows he shot down upon us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
and for a moment was almost under our stern.
And at that Magali gave a little jump and a
half-gasp, and laid her hand upon mine, crying:
"Marius! Quick! Sail faster! He will
take me from you! Get me away! Get me
away!"</p>
<p>And then I knew that she no longer balanced
us, but that her heart was for me. After that
I would have faced not only the Gulf of Fos
but the open Mediterranean in the worst storm
that ever blew.</p>
<h3>VII</h3>
<p>"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from
your heart's deep desire!"</p>
<p>The words were in my ears again as we went
flying on toward the narrows—with the reflection
of the flame in the light-house making a
broad bright path for us, and the flame itself
rising high before us against the cloud-rack like
a ball of fire. But God was not with me then,
and I gave those warning words no heed. I was
drunk with the gladness that came to me when
Magali made her choice between us; and all
that I thought was that even if we did go down
together, out there in the Gulf of Fos, I still
would be keeping her from Jan and holding her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
for my own. That there might be any other
ending for us never crossed my mind.</p>
<p>Jan did not think, I suppose, that I would
dare to go outside the harbour. He was in a
rage too, no doubt; but, still, he must have
been a good deal cooler than I was—for a rage
of hate does not boil in the very bones of a
man, as a rage of love does—and so cool enough
to know that it was sheer craziness to take a
boat out into that sea. What I meant to do
must have come to him with suddenness—as we
drew so close to the light-house that the flame
no longer was reflected ahead of us, and the narrows
were open over my starboard bow, and I
let the boat fall off from the wind and headed
her into the broken water made by the inroll
of half-spent waves. In my run close-hauled I
had dropped him, but not so much as I thought
I should, and as I came on the wind again—and
hung for a moment before gathering fresh
headway—he ranged up once more within hail.</p>
<p>"Where are you going? Are you crazy?" he
called out—and though he must have shouted
with all the strength of his big lungs his voice
came thin through the wind to us, and broken
by the pounding of the sea.</p>
<p>"Where you won't dare to follow!" I called<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
back to him—and we went rushing on below
the big old fort, that carries the light on its
tower, through the short passage between the
harbour and the Gulf of Fos.</p>
<p>Something he answered, but what it was I
do not know: for as we cleared the shelter of
the fort—but while the tail of rock beyond it
still was to windward, so that I could not luff—down
with a crash on us came the gale. I
could only let fly the sheet—but even with the
sheet all out over we went until the sail was
deep in the water, and over the leeward gunwale
the waves came hissing in. I thought that there
was the end of it; but the boat had such way
on her that even on her beam ends and with
the sail dragging she went on until we had
cleared the rocks; and then I luffed her and
she rose slowly, and for the moment was safe
again with her nose in the wind.</p>
<p>Magali's face was dead white—like a dead
woman's face, only for her shining eyes. She
fell to leeward as the boat went over—I could
not spare a hand to save her—and struck hard
against the gunwale. When the boat righted
and she got up again her forehead was bleeding.
On her white face the blood was like a
black stain. But she put her hand on mine and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
said: "I am not frightened, Marius. I love
you!"</p>
<p>Jan was close aboard again. As our way had
deadened he had overhauled us; and because
he saw what had happened to my boat he was
able to bring his boat through the narrows without
going over.</p>
<p>"Marius! Marius! For God's sake, for Magali's
sake, put about!" he shouted. "It is the
only chance to save her. Put about, I say!"</p>
<p>He was only a little way to leeward of us,
but I barely made out his words. The wind
was roaring past us, and the waves were banging
like cannon on the rocks close by.</p>
<p>What he said was the truth, and I knew
it. I knew that the gale was only just beginning,
and that no boat could live through it
for another hour. And then one of the devils
loose on that All Souls Eve, or perhaps it was
my own devil inside of me, put a new evil
thought into my heart: making clear to me
how I might get rid of Jan for good and all,
and without its ending in my losing my head
or in my losing Magali by being sent overseas.
It was a chance, to be sure, and full of
danger. But just then I was ready for any danger
or for any chance.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="ROCKS"><img src="images/illo16.jpg" width="500"
height="317" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
"THE OTHERS WERE UPCAST ON THE ROCKS"
</div></div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
"Lie down in the bottom of the boat,
Magali," I called sharply. "That is the safest
place for you. We are going about."</p>
<p>I spoke the truth to Magali; but, also, I did
not want her to see what happened. She did
what I told her to do, and then I began to wear
the boat around. How I did it without swamping,
I do not know. Perhaps the devils of All
Souls Eve held up my mast through the black
moments while we lay wallowing in the trough
of the sea. But I did do it; and when I was
come about I headed straight for Jan's boat—lying
dead to leeward of me, not twenty yards
away. The clouds thinned suddenly and almost
the full light of the moon was with us. We
could see each other's faces plainly—and in
mine he saw what I meant to do.</p>
<p>"It will be all of us together, Marius!" he
called to me. "Do you want to murder Magali
too?"</p>
<p>But I did not believe that it would be all of
us together: for I knew that his boat was an old
one, and that mine was new and strong. And,
also, the devils had me in their hold. The
gale was behind me, driving me down upon him
like a thunder-bolt. As I shot close to him the
moon shone out full for a moment through a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
rift in the clouds. In that moment I saw his
face clearly. The moonlight gleamed on it.
It was a ghastly dead white. But I do not suppose
that it was for himself that he was afraid.
Jan was not a coward, or he would not have
jumped after me when I was drowning in the
stormy sea.</p>
<p>Once more he called to me. "Marius! For
the sake of Magali—"</p>
<p>And then there was a crashing and a rending
of planks as I shot against his boat, and a sudden
upspringing of my own boat under me. And
after that, for a long while, a roaring of water
about me, and my own body tumbled and thrust
hither and thither in it, and at last a blow which
seemed to dash me down into a vast black depth
that was all buzzing with little blazing stars.</p>
<p class="p2">But the others were upcast on the rocks dead.</p>
<hr class="chap" />
<div class="chapter">
<p class="p6"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span></p>
<h2 id="Upcast">A Sea Upcast</h2></div>
<h3>I</h3>
<p>When we East Anglians be set to do a thing,
we be set firm. We come at what we want by
slow thinking, but when we know what we want
we hold fast by it—being born stubborn, and
also being born staunch. It is the same with
our hating and with our loving: we fire slowly,
but when at last the fire is kindled it burns so
strongly in the very hearts of us—with a white
glow, hotter than any flame—that there is no
putting it out again short of putting out our
lives.</p>
<p>Men and women alike, we are born that way;
and we fishermen of the Suffolk and Norfolk
coast likewise are bred that way: seeing that
from the time we go afloat as youngsters until
the time that we are drowned, or are grown so
old and rusty that there is no more strength<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
for sea-fighting left in us, our lives for the
most part are spent in fighting the North Sea.
That is a fight that needs stubbornness to carry
it through to a finish. Also, it needs knowledge
of the ocean's tricks and turns—because the
North Sea can do what we East Anglians can't
do: it can smile at you and lie. A man must
have a deal of training before he can tell by
the feel of it in his own insides that close over
beyond a still sea and a sun-bright sky a storm
is cooking up that will kill him if it can. And
even when he feels the coming of it—if he be
well to seaward, or if he be tempted by the
fish being plenty and by the bareness of his
own pockets to hold on in the face of it—he
must have more in his head than any coast
pilot has if he is to win home to Yarmouth
Harbour or to Lowestoft Roads.</p>
<p>For God in his cruelty has set more traps
to kill seafarers off this easterly outjut of England,
I do believe, than He has set anywhere
else in all the world: there being from Covehithe
Ness northward to the Winterton Overfalls
nothing but a maze of deadly shoals—all
cut up by channels in which there is no sea-room—that
fairly makes you queazy to think
about when you are coming shoreward in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
northeast gale. And as if that were not enough
to make sure of man-food for the fishes, the currents
that swirl and play among these shoals
are up to some fresh wickedness with every hour
of the tide-run and with every half shift of
wind. Whether you make in for Yarmouth
by Hemesby Hole to the north, or by the Hewett
Channel to the south, or split the difference by
running through Caister Road, it is all one:
twisting about the Overfalls and the Middle
Cross Sand and the South Scroby, there the
currents are. What they will be doing with you,
or how they will be doing it, you can't even
make a good guess at; all that you can know
for certain being that they will be doing their
worst by you at the half tide.</p>
<p>At least, though, the Lowestoft men and the
Yarmouth men have a good harbour when once
they fetch it; and by that much are better off
than we Southwold men, who have no harbour
at all. With anything of a sea running there
is no making a landing under Southwold Cliff—though
it is safe enough when once your boat
is beached and hauled up there; and so, if the
storm gets ahead of us, there is nothing left but
to run for Lowestoft: and a nice time we often
have of it, with an on-shore gale blowing, work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>ing
up into the Covehithe Channel under the tail
of the Barnard Bank! As for beating up to seaward
of the Barnard and running in through
Pakefield Gat, anybody can try for it who has
a mind to—and who has a boat that can eat
the very heart out of the wind. Sometimes
you do fetch it. But what happens to you most
times is best known to the Newcome Shoal.
When you have cleared the Barnard—if so be
you do clear it—the Newcome lies close under
your lee for all the rest of the run. What it has
done for us fishermen you can see when the
spring tides bare it and show black scraps of
old boats wrecked there, and sometimes a gleam
of sand-whitened bones.</p>
<p>For a good many years we had another
chance, though a poor one, and that was to
make a longish leg off shore and then run in
before the wind and cross the Barnard into
Covehithe Channel through what we called
the Wreck Gat—a cut in the bank that the
currents made striking against a wrecked ship
buried there. The Wreck Gat is gone now—closed
by the same storm that nearly closed
my life for me—and you will not find it marked
nowadays on the charts. Its going was a
good riddance. At the best it was a desperate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
bad place to get through; and at its worst it
was about the same as a sea pitfall: and that
nobody knows better than I do, seeing that
I was the last man to get through it alive. But
when you happened to be to windward of it,
if it served at all, it served better than running
down a half mile farther and trying to round
the tail of the bank.</p>
<p>Very many craft beside our own fisher-boats
find their death-harbour on our East Anglian
sands. Our coast, as it has a right to be, is the
dread of every sailor man who sails the narrow
seas. Great ships, storm-swept on our sands,
are sucked down into the depths of them, or are
hammered to pieces on the top of them, as light-heartedly
as though they were no more than
cock-boats. And the supply of ships to be wrecked
there is unending—since the half of the trade
of the world, they say, sails past our shores.
From every land they come: and many and
many a one of them comes but never goes.
Down on them bangs the northeast wind with
a roar and a rattle—and presently our sands
have hold of them with a grip that is to keep
them fast there till the last day! Sometimes
the dead men who were living sailors aboard
those ships come ashore to us, though they are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
more like to find graves in the sands that murdered
them or to be swept out to sea; sometimes,
by a twist of chance that you may call a miracle,
the sea has a fancy for casting one or two of
them ashore alive. Dazed and half mad creatures
those live ones are, usually: their wits
all jangled and shaken by the great horror that
has been upon them while they tossed among the
waves.</p>
<p>And so, as you may see, we men of the Suffolk
and Norfolk coast need the stiff backbone
that we have as our birthright for the sea-fighting
that is our life-work; and it is not to be
wondered at that our life of sea-fighting makes
us still more set and stubborn in our ways.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>My little Tess came to me, a sea upcast, after
one of our great northeast gales. I myself found
her: lying where the waves had landed her on
the shingle, and where they had left her with
the fall of the tide.</p>
<p>I was but a bit of a lad myself, then, going on
to be eight years old. Storms had no fright in
them for me in those days. What I most was
thinking about when one was blowing—while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
my poor mother, if my father was out in his
boat, would be looking wild-eyed seaward, or
in the bed-room praying for him on her knees—was
what I'd be picking up on the shingle
when the gale was over and the sea gone down.
Later on, when I came to know that at the
gale's end I might be lying myself on the
shingle, along with the other wreckage, I got
to looking at storms in a different way.</p>
<p>That blow that brought my Tess to me had
no fears in it for my poor mother, seeing that
it came in the night time and my father safe
at home. The noise of my father getting up
wakened me; and in a sleepy way I watched
him from my little bed, when he had the lamp
lighted, hurrying his clothes on that he might
go down to where his boat was hauled up on
the shingle and heave her with the capstan
still higher above the on-run of the waves. And
as I lay there, very drowsy, watching my father
drag his big boots on and hearing the roar of the
wind and feeling the shaking that it was giving
to our house-walls, there came suddenly the
sharp loud bang of a gun.</p>
<p>My father stopped as he heard it—with one
leg in the air and his hands gripping the boot-straps,
I can see him now. "That's from close<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
by!" he said. "God help them—they must be
ashore on the Barnard Bank!" Then he jammed
his other boot on, jumped into his sou'wester,
and was gone on a run. My mother ran to
the door—I know now, having myself helped
to get men ashore from wrecked ships at my
life's peril, what her fear was—and called after
him into the darkness: "Don't thou go to putting
thy life in danger, George May!" What
she said did no good. The wind swallowed her
words before they got to him. For a minute
or two she stood in the doorway, all blown
about; then, putting her weight on it, she got
the door shut and came back into the bed-room
and knelt by the bedside praying for him. I
still was very drowsy. Presently I went off
to sleep again, thinking—God forgive me for
it!—that if a ship had stranded on the Barnard
I'd find some pretty pickings when morning
came and the storm was over and I could
get down to the shore.</p>
<p>And that was my first thought when I wakened,
and found the sun shining and the wind blowing
no more than a gentle breeze. My father
was home again, and safe and sound. There
had been no chance for a rescue, he said—the
ship being deep down in the sands, and all her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
people swept out of her, by the time that daylight
came. And so I bolted my breakfast,
and the very minute that I had it inside of me
I was off down the cliff-path and along the beach
northward to find what I could find. All the
other Southwold boys were hurrying that way
too; but our house being up at the north end
of the village gave me the start of all of them
but John Heath, who lived close by us, and he
came down the cliff-path at my heels.</p>
<p>The Barnard Bank lies off shore from Covehithe
Ness, and under the Ness our pickings
would be most like to be. At the best they
would be but little things—buckets and baskets
and brooms and odd oars, and such like—the
coast guard men seeing to it that we got
no more; but things, all the same, that any boy
would jump for: and so away John and I ran
together, and we kept together until we were
under the Ness—and could see the broken stern-post
of the wreck, all that was left to see of her,
sticking up from the Barnard going bare with
the falling tide. There I passed him—he giving
a shout and stopping to pick up a basket
that I missed seeing because on my side weed
covered it—and so was leading him as we rounded
the Ness by a dozen yards. And then it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
I who gave a shout—and made a dash for a big
white bundle that was lying in a nook of the
shingle just above the lap of the waves.</p>
<p>John saw the bundle almost as soon as I did,
and raced me for it. But I did see it first, and
I touched it first, and so it fairly was mine.
A white sheet was the outside of it; and at
one corner, under the sheet, a bit of a blanket
showed. I would have none of John's help as
I unwrapped it. He stood beside me, though,
and said as I opened it that even if I had touched
it first we had seen it together—which wasn't
so—and that we must go share and share. I
did not answer him, being full of wonder what
I was like to come to when I had the bundle
undone. In a good deal of a hurry I got the
sheet loose, it was knotted at the corners, and
then the blanket, and then still another blanket
that was under the first one: and when that
inner wrapping was opened there was lying—a
little live baby! It looked up into my face with
its big black eyes, and it blinked them for a
minute—having been all shut up in the dark
and the sunlight bothering it—and then it
smiled at me as if I'd just waked it up not
from the very edge of death in the sea but from
a comfortable nap in its cradle on land!</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span></p>
<p>John Heath burst out laughing. "You can
have my share of it, George," said he; "we've
got babies enough of our own at home." And
with that he ran away and began to look again
for brooms and buckets along the shore.</p>
<p>But I loved my little Tess from that first
sight of her, and I was glad that John had
said that I might have his share in her; though
of course, because I first saw her and first touched
her, he had no real share in her at all. So
I wrapped her up again as well as I could in
her blankets—leaving the wet sheet lying there—and
set off for home along the shore, carrying
her in my arms. Tired enough I got before
I had lugged my load that long way, and up
the cliff, and so to our house door. In the doorway
my mother was standing, and I put the
bundle in her arms. "Lord save us!" said my
mother. "What's the boy got here?"</p>
<p>"Mother," said I, "it's a little beautiful live
baby—and I found it, and it's mine!"</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>That was the way that my Tess came to me:
and I know now how good my father and my
mother were in letting me keep her for my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
own—they with only what my father could
make by his fishing to live on, and the wolf
never very far away from the door. But the
look of those black eyes of hers and the smile
in them won my mother's love to her, just as it
had won mine; and my mother told me, too,
long years afterward, that her heart was hungry
for the girl baby that God had not given
her—and she said that Tess seemed to be her
very own baby from the minute that she took
her close to her breast from my tired little
arms.</p>
<p>As to where Tess came from—from what port
in all the wide world the ship sailed that
brought her to us—we had no way of knowing.
Nothing but Tess in her bundle came ashore
from the wreck; and what was left of the ship
burrowed down into the sands so fast and so
far that there was to be seen of her only a broken
bit of her stern-post at the storm's ending. Even
after the set of the currents against her sunken
hull, on the next spring tide, had cut through
the Barnard Bank and so made the Wreck Gat,
no part of her but her broken stern-post ever
showed. Tess herself, though, told us what her
own name was, and so gave us a notion as to
what land she belonged to; but we should have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
been none the wiser for her telling it—she talking
in words that were the same as Greek to us—if
the Vicar had not lent us a hand.</p>
<p>My finding the baby made a stir in the whole
village, and everybody had to have a look at
her. In the afternoon along came the Vicar
too—smiling through his gold spectacles, as he
always did, and swinging his black cane. By
that time, having had all the milk she could
hold, and a good nap, and more milk again,
Tess was as bright as a new sixpence: just as
though she had not passed that morning nearer
to death than ever she was like to pass again
and live. She was lying snug in my mother's
arms before the fire, and in her own fashion
was talking away at a great rate—and my mother's
heart quite breaking because her pretty chatter
was all in heathen words that nobody could
get at the meaning of. But the Vicar, being
very learned, understood her in a minute.
"Why, it's Spanish," said he. "It's Spanish
as sure as you're born! She's calling you 'madrecita,'
Mrs. May—which is the same as 'motherkin,'
you know. But I can't make even a
guess at the rest of it. Everything ends in
'ita'—real baby-talk."</p>
<p>"Do kindly ask her, sir, what her blessed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
little name is," said my mother. "It'll bring
her a deal closer to us to know her name."</p>
<p>"I'll try her in Latin," said the Vicar—"that's
the best that I can manage—and it'll be
hit or miss if she understands." And then he
bent over the little tot—she being then a bit
over two years old, my mother thought—and
asked her what her name was in Latin words.</p>
<p>For a minute there was a puzzled look in the
big black eyes of her and her brow puckered.
And then she smiled all over her pretty face
and answered, as clear as you please: "Tesita."
That a baby no bigger than that understood
Latin always has seemed to me most like a
miracle of anything that ever I have known!</p>
<p>My mother looked bothered and chap-fallen.
"It's not a real name at all," she said, and
sighed over it.</p>
<p>"It's a very good name indeed, Mrs. May,"
said the Vicar; "only she's giving you her baby
way of saying it. Her name is Theresa. 'Tesita'
is the same as our 'Tess' would be, you
know."</p>
<p>"Theresa! Tess!" cried my mother, brightening
up all in a minute. "Why, that was my
own dear mother's name! Her having that name
seems to make her in real truth mine, sir!" And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
she hugged the baby close to the heart of her,
and all in the same breath cried over it and
laughed over it—thinking, I suppose, of her
mother dead and buried, and thankful for the
daughter that she so longed for that had come
to her upcast by the sea.</p>
<p>More than what her name was, as is not
to be wondered at, Tess never told us; and the
only thing in the world that gave us any
knowledge of her—and that no more than that
her people were like to be gentlefolk—was a
gold chain about her neck, under her little night
gown, with a locket fast to it on which were
some letters in such a jumble that even the
Vicar could not make head nor tail of them,
though he tried hard.</p>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p>Whatever part of the world Tess came from,
it was plain enough by the look of her—and
more and more plain as she grew up into a tall
and lanky girl, and then into a tall slim woman—that
Suffolk was a long way off from the land
where she was born.</p>
<p>Our Suffolk folk, for the most part, are shortish
and thickset and fair and blue eyed. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
men—being whipped about by the wind and
weather, and the sea-salt tanned into us—lose
our fairness early and go a bun-brown; but our
women—having no salt spray in their faces, and
only their just allowance of sunshine—have
their blue eyes matched with the red and white
cheeks that they were born with; and their hair,
though sometimes it goes darkish, usually is a
bright chestnut or a bright brown. Also, our
women are steady-going and sensible; though
I must say that now and then they are a bit
hard to get along with: being given to doing
their thinking slowly, and to being mighty fast
set in their own notions when once they have
made their minds up—the same as we men. As
for Tess—with her black eyes and her black
hair, and her face all a cream white with not
a touch of red in it—she was like none of them;
and she could think more out-of-the-way things
and be more sorts of a girl in five minutes than
any Suffolk lass that ever I came across could
think or be in a whole year!</p>
<p>Tess was unlike our girls in another matter:
she had a mighty hot spit-fire temper of her own.
Our girls, the same as our men, are easy-going
and anger slowly; but when they do anger they
are glowing hot to their very finger-tips, and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
long while it takes them to cool off. But Tess
would blaze up all in a minute—and as often
as not with no real reason for it—and be for a
while such an out-and-out little fury that she
would send everything scudding before her; and
then would pull up suddenly in the thick of it,
and seem to forget all about it, and like enough
laugh at the people around her looking scared!
Somehow, though, it was seldom that she let
me have a turn of her tantrums; and when she
did they'd be over in no time, and she'd have
her arms around me and be begging me to kiss
her and to tell her that I didn't mind. I suppose
that she was that way with me because
for my part—having from the very first so
loved her that quarreling with her was clean impossible—I
used just to stand and stare at her
in her passions; and like enough be showing by
the look in my eyes the puzzled sorrow that
I was feeling in my inside. As to answering
her anger with my anger, it never once crossed
my mind.</p>
<p>With John Heath things went differently.
He would go ugly when she flew out at him—and
would keep his anger by him after hers
long was over and done with, and would show
it by putting some hurt upon her in a dirty way.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
A good many thrashings I gave John Heath,
at one time or another, for that sort of thing;
and the greatest piece of unreasonableness that
Tess ever put on me, which is saying much for it,
was on that score: she being then ten years old,
or thereabouts, and John and I well turned of
sixteen.</p>
<p>Some trick that he played on her—I don't
know what it was—set her in a rage against
him, and he made her worse by laughing at
her, and she ended by throwing sand in his eyes.
Then his anger got up, and he caught her—being
twice the size of her—and boxed her ears.
I came along just then, and I can see the look
of her now. She was not crying, as any ordinary
child would have been—John having meant
to hurt her, and hit hard. She was standing
straight in front of him with her little hands
gripped into fists as if she meant to fight him,
that cream white face of hers gone a real dead
white, a perfect blaze of passion in her big
black eyes. In another second or so she'd have
been flying at him if I'd given her the chance.
But I didn't—I sailed right in and myself gave
him what he needed; and when I had finished
with him I had so well blackened the two eyes
of him that he forgot about the sand. But after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
it all was over, so far from being obliged to me,
what did Tess do but fall to crying because I'd
hurt him, and to saying that he'd only given
her what she deserved! For a week and more
she would not speak to me, and all that time she
was trotting about sorrowfully at John's heels.
It seemed as though all of a sudden she had got
to loving him because he had played the man
and the master to her; and I'm sure that his
love for her had its beginning then too.</p>
<p>John's folks and my folks, as I have said,
lived up at the north end of the village, a bit
apart, and that made us three keep most together
while we were little; but Tess never had much
to do with the other children, even when she
got big enough to be with them at school. They
did not get along with her, being puzzled by her
whims and fancies and set against her by her
spit-fire ways. And she did not get along with
them because she was quick about everything
and all of them were slow. When she began
to grow up, though, matters changed a good
deal. The boys—she being like nobody else in
the village—picked her out to make love to, and
that set the girls by the ears. Tess liked the
love-making a deal more than I liked her to like
it; and she didn't mind what the girls said to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
her because her wits were nimbler than their
wits and she always could give them better than
they could send.</p>
<p>So things went while the years went till Tess
was turned of seventeen, and was shot up into
a tall slim woman in all ways so beautiful as to
be, I do believe, the most beautiful woman that
God ever made. And then it was that Grace
Gryce, damn her for it, found a whip that
served to lash her; and so cruel a whip that she
was near to lashing the life out of her with it
at a single blow.</p>
<h3>V</h3>
<p>According to our Suffolk notions, Grace Gryce
was a beauty: being strongly set up and full
built and well rounded, with cheeks as red as
strawberries, and blue eyes that for any good
looking man had a smile in them, and over all
a head of bright-brown hair. Had Tess been
out of the way she'd have had things all as she
wanted them, not another girl in the village
for looks coming near her; and so it was only
human nature, I suppose, that she hated Tess
for crossing her—making her always go second,
and a bad second, with the men.</p>
<p>It was about John Heath, though, that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
heart of the matter was. All the village knew
that Grace fancied him, and that he half fancied
her—and would have fancied her altogether had
Tess been out of the way. Making up his mind
between them—John always was a thick thinker—did
not seem to come easy to him. The whims
and the ways of Tess—that made a dozen different
sorts of girl of her in five minutes—seemed
to set him off from her a-most as much as
they set him on: being a sort of puzzle, I'm free
to say, that other men beside John couldn't well
understand. With Grace it was different. She
might blow hot or she might blow cold with
him; or she might show her temper—she had
a-plenty of it—and give him the rough side of
her tongue: but what she meant and what she
wanted always was plain and clear. To be sure,
this is only my guess why he hung in the wind
between them. Maybe he set too little store on
Tess's love because it came to him too easily;
maybe he thought that by seeming to love her
lightly he best could hold her fast.</p>
<p>Hold her fast he did, and that is certain.
In spite of all her whimsies, he had her love;
and it was his, as I have said, from the time
when he man-mastered her by boxing the little
ears of her—she being only ten years old. Al<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>ways
after that, even when she was at her sauciest
and her airiest, he had only to speak short
and sharp to her and she'd come to heel to him
like a dog. Sometimes, seeing her taking orders
from him that way was close to setting me wild:
I having my whole heart fixed on her, and ready
to give the very hands of me to have from her
the half of what she gave him. Not but what
she loved me too, in her own fashion, and dearly.
She showed that by the way that she used
to come to me in all her little hurts and troubles;
and the sweetness and the comfortingness of her
to me and to my mother always, but most when
my poor father was drowned, was beyond any
words that I have to put it in. But my pain
was that the love which she had for me was of
the same sort that she had for my mother—and
I was not wanting from her love of that kind.
And so it cut to the quick of me—I who would
have kissed her shoe-soles—to see her so ready
always to be meek and humble at a word from
John. There were times, and a good many of
them—seeing her so dog-faithful to him, and he
almost as careless of her as if she had been
no more than a dog to him—that I saw red
as I looked at him, and got burning hot in
the insides of me, and was as close to murder<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>ing
him as I well could be and he still go on
alive.</p>
<p>Like enough Grace Gryce—being of the same
stock that I was, and made much as I was—had
the same feeling for Tess that I had for John;
and Grace, being a woman, had nothing to stop
her from murdering Tess in a woman's way.
She would have done it sooner had her wits
been quicker. Time and again they had had
their word-fights together, and Tess always getting
the better of her because Grace's wits, like
the rest of her, were heavy and slow.</p>
<p>It was down by the boats, under the Gun Hill,
that they fought the round out in which Grace
drew blood at last. A lot of the girls were
together there and Tess, for a wonder, happened
to be with them. They all were saying to her
what hard things they could think of; and she,
in her quick way, was hitting back at them
and scoring off them all. Poor sort of stuff it
was that they were giving her: calling her
"Miss Fine-Airs" and "Miss Maypole," and
scorning the black eyes and the pale face of
her, and girding at her the best they could because
in no way was she like themselves.</p>
<p>"It's a pity I'm so many kinds of ugliness!"
says Tess in her saucy way, and making it worse<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
by laughing. "It's a true pity that I'm not
pretty, like all the rest of you, and so am left
lonely. If only I'd some of your good looks,
you see, I might have, as the rest of you have,
a lot of men at my heels."</p>
<p>That was a shot that hit all of them, but it
hit Grace the hardest and she answered it. "It's
better," said she, "to go your whole life without
a man at your heels than it is to spend your
whole life dog-tagging at the heels of a man."</p>
<p>The girls laughed at that, knowing well what
Grace was driving at. But Tess was ready with
her answer and whipped back with it: "Well,
it's better to tag at a man's heels and he pleased
with it than it is to want to tag there and he
not letting you—liking a may-pole, maybe, better
than a butter-tub, and caring more, maybe,
for grace by nature than for Grace by name."</p>
<p>That turned the joke—only it was no joke—on
Grace again; and as the girls had not much
more liking for her than they had for Tess, seeing
that she spoiled what few man-chances Tess
left them, they laughed at her as hard as they
could laugh.</p>
<p>Grace's slow anger had been getting hotter
and hotter in her. That shot of Tess's, and the
girls all laughing at her, brought it to a boil.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
<p>"Who be'st thou, to open thy ugly mouth to
me?" she jerked out, with a squeak in her voice
and her blue eyes blazing. "Who be'st thou,
anyway? Who knows the father or the mother
of thee? Who knows what foul folk in what
foul land bore thee? Dog-tag thou may'st, but—mark
my words—naught will come of it: because
thou'rt not fit for John Heath or for any
other honest man to have dealings with—thou
rotten upcast of the sea!"</p>
<p>Tess was holding her head high and was
scornful-looking when this speech began; but
the ending of it, so Mary Benacre told my mother,
seemed like a knife in her heart. Her face
went a sort of a pasty white, so Mary said; and
she seemed to choke, somehow, and put her
hand up to her throat in a fluttering kind of
way as if her throat hurt her. And then she
sort of staggered, and made a grab at the boat
she was standing by and leaned against it—looking,
so Mary said, as if she was like to die.</p>
<p>"Mayhap now thou'lt keep quiet a bit,"
Grace said, with her hands on her fat hips and
her elbows out; and with that, and a flounce
at her, turned away. The other girls, all except
Mary, went along with Grace; but not talking,
and most of them scared-looking: feeling, like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
enough, as men would feel standing by at the
end of a knife-fight, when one man is down with
a cut that has done for him and there is a smell
of blood in the air.</p>
<p>Mary staid behind—she was a good sort, was
Mary Benacre—and went to Tess and tried to
comfort her. Tess didn't answer her, but just
looked at her with a pitiful sort of stare out
of her black eyes that Mary said was like the
look of some poor dumb thing that had no other
way of telling how bad its hurt was. And then,
rousing herself up, Tess pushed Mary away
from her and started for home on a run. Mary
did not follow her, but later on she came and
told my mother just what had happened and
gave her Grace Gryce's words.</p>
<p>It was well that Mary came, that way, and
told a clear story about it all. What Tess told—when
she came flying into the house and
caught my mother around the neck and put her
poor head on my mother's breast and went off
into a passion of crying there—was such a muddle
that my mother knew only that Grace Gryce
had said something to her that was wickedly
cruel. Tess cried and cried, as if she'd cry the
very life out of her; and kept sobbing out that
she was a sea upcast, and a nobody's daughter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
and that the sea would have done better by her
had it drowned her, and that she hoped she'd
die soon and be forgotten—until she drove my
mother almost wild.</p>
<p>And so it went for a long while with her, my
mother petting her and crying over her, until
at last—the feel, I suppose, of my mother's
warm love for her getting into her poor hurt
heart and comforting her—she began to quiet
down. Then my mother got her to bed—she
was as weak as water—and made a pot of bone-set
tea for her; and pretty soon after she'd
drunk a cup or two of it she dropped off to sleep.
She still was sleeping when Mary Benacre came
and told the whole story; and so stirred up my
mother's anger—and she was a very gentle-natured
woman, my mother was—that it was all
she could do, she said afterwards, not to go
straight off to Grace Gryce and give her a beating
with her own hands.</p>
<h3>VI</h3>
<p>When Tess came to breakfast the next morning
it gave me a real turn to look at her. Somehow,
at a single jump, she seemed to have
changed from a girl to a woman—and to an old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
woman at that. Suddenly she had got to be all
withered like, and the airs that she used to give
herself and all the pretty ways of her were gone.
She just moped in a chair in a corner—she
who'd never been quiet for five minutes together,
any more than a bird—with a far-away look in
her beautiful eyes, and the glint of tears in
them. Sorrow had got into the very bones of
her. "Dost think I really am come of such
foul folk that I'm not fit for honest company?"
she asked my mother—and if she asked that
question once that morning she asked it a dozen
times.</p>
<p>In a way, of course, she had known what she
was all her life long. "My sea-baby" was my
mother's pet name for her at the first; and by
that pet-name, when most tender with her, my
mother called her till the last. How she had
come to us, how I had found her where the
waves had left her and had carried her home
in my little tired arms, she had been told over
and over again. Sometimes she used to make
up stories about herself in her light-fancied
way: telling us that she was a great lady of
Spain, and that some fine morning the great
Spanish lord her father would come to Southwold
by some chance or other, and would know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
her by the chain and the locket, and would take
her home with him and marry her to a duke—or
to a prince, even—in her own land. We'd see
that she'd be pretending to herself while she told
them to us that these stories were true, and I
think that she did half believe in them. But
it was not real believing that she had in them;
it was the sort of believing that you have in
things in dreams. Her love was given to my
mother and to my father—and to me, too,
though not in the way that I wanted it—and
we were the true kinsfolk of her heart. On our
side, we all so loved her, and made her feel so
truly that she was our very own, that the
thought of her being a nobody's child never
had a chance to get into her mind. And her
own fancies about herself—always that her own
dream people were great people in the dream
land where they lived—kept her from seeing
the other chance of the matter: that they as well
might be mean people, who would put shame on
her should ever she come to know who they were.
Into her head that cruel thought never got until
Grace Gryce put it there; and put there with
it the crueller thought that her being a nobody's
child was what made John stand off from her,
he thinking her not fit to be his wife.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span></p>
<p>Tess was fearing, maybe, that even if John
had not had that feeling about her he was like
to have it after Grace had set him in the way of
it. And maybe she was thinking, too, that if she
had been hurt for the sake of him, and so deserved
loving pity from him, it was Grace who
for the sake of him had done the hurting—and
that it was Grace who had won. Our girls are
best pleased with the lover who fights to a finish
some other man in love with them and well
thrashes him. Tess may have fancied that John
would take it that way; and so end by settling
that Grace, having the most fire and fight in
her, was the most to his mind. But what really
came of it all with John, as far as I can make
out, was that his getting them fairly set the
one against the other cleared his thick wits up
and brought him to a choice.</p>
<p>And so, being in every way sorrowful, Tess
was like a dead girl that day; and my heart
was just breaking for her. When dinner time
came she roused up a bit and helped my mother,
as she always did—though my mother wanted
her to keep resting—and tried in a pitiful sort
of way to talk a little and to pretend that she
was not in bitter pain; but those pretty feet of
hers, so light always, dragged after her in her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
walking, and she was all wizened-looking, and
there were black marks under her beautiful sorrowing
eyes. My mother helped to make talk
with her, though my mother was wiping her own
tears away when she got the chance; but as for
me, I was tongue-tied by the hurt and the anger
in me and could not say a word. What I was
thinking was, how glad I'd be to wring Grace
Gryce's neck for her if only she was a man!</p>
<p>After dinner I went out to a bench in front
of our house, but a bit away from it, and sat
there trying to comfort myself with a pipe—and
not finding much even in a pipe to comfort me—until
the sun, all yellow, began to drop down
toward the Gun Hill into a bad looking yellow
sky. All the while I had the tail of my eye
bearing on our door, and at last I saw Tess come
out of it. She took a quick look at the back
of me, sitting quiet there; and then, I not
turning toward her, off she walked along the
edge of the cliff to the northward. At first I
didn't know what to do—thinking that if she
wanted to be alone I ought to leave her to her
loneliness—and I sat on and smoked another
pipe before I could make up my mind. But the
longer I sat there the stronger my drawing was
to go to her. What was hurting her most, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
I well enough knew, was the thought of having
neither kith nor kin for herself, along with
the dread that even if she found her people they
might only be a shame to her—and that was a
hurt that having a husband would cure for her,
seeing that she would get a new and a good rating
in the world when she got her husband's
name. And so, at last, I started after her to tell
her all that was in the heart of me; and thinking
more, and this is the truth, of what I could
do to comfort her by taking the sting out of
Grace Gryce's words than of how in that same
way I could win my own happiness.</p>
<p>I walked on so far—across the dip in the land
where the old river was, and up on the cliffs
again—that I began to think she had turned
about inland and so had gone that way home.
But at last I came up with her, on the very
top of Covehithe Ness.</p>
<p>She was sitting at the cliff-edge, bent forward
a little with her elbows on her knees and her
face in her hands; and as I came close to her I
saw that she was crying in that quiet sort of
way that people cry in when they have touched
despair. I walked so softly on the grass that
she did not hear my footsteps; but she was not
put out when she looked up and saw me stand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>ing
over her—by which I think, and am the
happier for thinking it, that she had not gone
there of set purpose to meet with John.</p>
<p>"Sit thee down here, George. I'm glad
thou'rt come," she said, and she reached me her
hand.</p>
<p>When I was on the grass beside her—she still
keeping her hand in mine, as if the touch of
something that loved her was a comfort to her—she
had nothing to say for a bit, but just
leaned her head against my shoulder and cried
softly there.</p>
<p>The tide was out and a long stretch of the
Barnard Bank lay bared below us, with here
and there the black bones of some dead ship
lying buried in them sticking up from the sands.
Slicing deep in the bank was the Wreck Gat,
with the last of the ebb running out through it
from the Covehithe Channel and the undercut
sides of it falling down into the water and melting
away. At the edge of it was the sunken ship
that had made it: the ship that had brought
Tess to us from her birth-land beyond the seas.
As I have said, no more of the wreck showed
than her broken stern-post: a bit of black timber,
all jagged with twisted iron bolts and weed-grown
and barnacled, upstanding at one side of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
the channel from the water and not high out
of it even at low tide. When the tide was in,
and any sort of a sea was running, you stood
a good chance of finding just where it was by
having your boat stove on it: for then it did
not show at all, except now and then in the
hollow of the waves.</p>
<p>Tess was looking down on it, her head still
resting on my shoulder, and after a while she
said: "If only we could dig that ship up,
George, we might find what would tell that I'm
not come of foul folk, after all"—and then she
began to cry again in the same silent sort of
way. I couldn't get an answer for her—what
she said hurt me so, and she crying on my shoulder,
and I feeling the beating of her heart.</p>
<p>"It was good of thee, George," she went on
again, presently, "to save the baby life of me;
but it's a true truth thou'dst have done me more
of a kindness hadst thou just thrown me back
into the sea. I'd be glad to be there now, George.
Down there under the water it would make no
difference what sort of folk I come of. And
I'd be resting there as I can't rest here—for
down there my pain would be gone."</p>
<p>My throat was so choked up that I had hard
work to get my words out of it, and when they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
did come they sounded queer. "Tess! Tess!"
I said. "Thou'lt kill me dead talking that
way. As if the like of thee could come of foul
folk! A lord duke would be the least to be fit
father to thee—and proud of thee he well might
be! But what does it matter, Tess, what thy
folk were who owned thee at the beginning?
They gave thee to the sea's keeping—and the
sea gave thee to me. By right of finding, thou'rt
mine. It was I who found thee, down on the
shingle there, and from the first minute that ever
I laid eyes on thee I loved thee—and the only
change in me has been that always I've loved
thee more and more. Whether thy people were
foul folk or fair folk is all one to me. It's thyself
that I'm loving—and with every bit of the
love that is in my heart. Let me make thee the
wife of me, Tess—and then thou'lt have no need
to fret about who thy forbears were for thou'lt
have no more to do with them, being made a
part of me and mine."</p>
<p>I talked at such a rate, when I did get set
a-going, that my own words ran away with me;
and I got the feeling that they ran away with
Tess too. But when I had ended, and she lifted
up her head from my shoulder and looked
straight into the eyes of me, I knew by what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
her eyes had in them—before ever she said a
word back to me—that what I wanted most in
the whole world for myself I could not have.</p>
<p>It seemed to me an hour before she spoke, she
all the time looking straight into my eyes and
her own eyes full of tears. At last she did
speak. "George," said she, "if I could be wife
to thee, as thou'dst have me be, I'd go down
on my knees and thank God! But it can't be,
George. It can't be! I've set my heart."</p>
<p>There was no doubting what she said. In the
sound of her voice there was something that
seemed as much as her words to settle the matter
for good and all. Whenever I am at a funeral
and hear the reading of the burial service it
brings back to me the sound of her voice that
day. Only there is a promise of hope in the
burial service—and that there was not for me
in Tess's words.</p>
<p>"It's John that's between us?" I asked.</p>
<p>"Yes," she said, speaking slow, "it's John."
She was quiet for a minute and then went on
again, still speaking slow: "I don't understand
it myself, George. Thou'rt a better-hearted man
than he is, and I truly think I love him less
than I do thee. But—but I love him in another
way."</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span></p>
<p>"Damn him!" said I.</p>
<p>That got out before I could stop it, but when
it had got out I wasn't sorry. It told what I felt
then—and it tells what I feel now. John's taking
her from me was stealing, and nothing less.
We were together when I found her, he and I;
but I first saw her and I first touched her—and
he gave me his share in her, though he had no
real share in her, when he knew what my finding
was. And so his taking her from me was stealing:
and that is God's truth!</p>
<p>Tess said nothing back to me. She only looked
at me sorrowful for a minute, and then looked
down again at the bit of wreck on the sands.
By the sigh she gave I knew pretty well what
was in her mind.</p>
<p>I'd had my answer, and that was the end of it.
"I'll be going now, Tess," I said; and I got
up and she got up with me. I was not feeling
steady on my legs, and like enough I had a queer
look on me. As for Tess, she was near as white
as a dead woman, though some of her whiteness
may have come from the yellow sunshine on her
out of the western sky. Up there on top of the
Ness we still had the sun with us, though he
was almost gone among the foul weather yellow
clouds.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span></p>
<p>"Thou'lt try to forgive me, George," she said,
speaking low, and her mouth sort of twitching.</p>
<p>"I love thee, Tess," I said; "and where
there's love there can be no talk of forgiveness.
But John has the hate of me, and I tell thee
fairly I'll hurt him if I can!"</p>
<p>With that I left her—there on Covehithe
Ness, over the very spot where the sea brought
her to me—and went walking back along the
cliff-edge: and not seeing anything clearly because
I was thinking about John, and what I'd
like to do to him, and there was a sort of red
blur before my eyes.</p>
<p>After a while I turned and looked back. My
eyes had cleared a bit, but what I saw made them
red again. Tess was not alone on the Ness. John
was with her. The two stood out strong in the
last of the yellow sunshine against a cloud-bank
on the far edge of the sky. I suppose that Tess
being hurt that way for him brought John to
his bearings—making him love her the more for
sorrow's sake, and for anger's sake making him
ready to throw Grace Gryce over. Like enough
he had been watching for his chance to get
to her, waiting till I was gone. Anyway, there
he was—and I knew what he was saying to her
as well as if I'd heard the words. It is no won<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>der
that the blood got into my eyes again as I
started back along the path. But I did not go
far. Somehow I managed to pull myself together
and turn again. What I had to settle
with John Heath could be settled best when he
and I were alone.</p>
<h3>VII</h3>
<p>When Tess came home to supper that night
she was all changed again: her looks gay once
more, and her step light, and a sort of flutter
about her lips—as if she was wanting to smile
and was trying not to—and a soft look in her
eyes that I never had seen there, but knew the
meaning of and found the worst of all.</p>
<p>I couldn't eat my supper; and got up presently
and went out leaving it—my mother looking
after me wondering—and walked up and
down on the cliff-edge in the darkness with my
heart all in a blaze of hate for John. For a
good while I had been looking for what I knew
was in the way of coming to me; but it was
different, and worse, and hurt more than I had
counted on, when at last it came. Out there in
the darkness I staid until the night was well
on—not wanting for a while to hear the sound of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
Tess's voice nor to lay eyes on her. Not until
I was sure, by the lights being out in the house,
that she'd gone to bed, did I go in again. My
mother was waiting waking for me. She came
to me in the dark and put her arms around me
and kissed me; by which I knew that Tess had
been telling her—and knew, too, she always
having looked to the wedding of us, that her
heart was sore along with mine. But I could
not bear even her soft touch on the hurt that
I had. I just kissed her back again and broke
away from her and went to bed. And in the
very early morning, not having slept much, I
slipped out of the house before either she or
Tess was stirring and down to my boat and so
away to sea.</p>
<p>What I was after was to get some quiet time
to myself that would steady me before I had
things out with John. I was not clear in my
mind how I meant to settle with him. I did
know, though, that I meant to have some sort of
a fair fight with him that would end in my killing
him or in him killing me—and I knew that
to tackle him with my head all in a buzz would
be to throw too many chances his way. And so I
got away in my boat, at the day-dawn, to the
sea's quietness: where I could clear my head of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
the buzzing that was in it and put some sort of
shape to my plans.</p>
<p>Had I been in my sober senses that morning
I never should have gone away seaward at all.
Backing up the promise of the yellow sunset of
the night before, pink clouds were showing in
the eastern sky as I started; and as I sailed on
in loneliness—standing straight out from the
land on a soft leading wind from the south-west
westerly—the pink turned to a pale red and then
to a deep red, and at last the sun came up out
of the water a great ball of fire. The look of the
sea, too, all in an oily bubble, and the set of the
ground-swell, told me plain enough—even without
the sunrise fairly shouting it in the ears of
me—that a change of wind was coming before
mid-day, and that pretty soon after the wind
shifted it would be blowing a gale.</p>
<p>I will say this, though: If I'd missed seeing
the red sunrise—and all the more if I'd been
full of happiness and my wits gone a wool-gathering—I
might have thought from the look
and the feel of the water, and from the set of
the high clouds, that the wind would not blow
to hurt anything for a good twelve hours. That
much I'll say by way of excuse for John. Like
enough he slept late that morning—through ly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>ing
awake the night before thinking what he'd
be likely to think—and so missed seeing the sun's
warning. When he did get away in his boat
it was well past eight o'clock; and there was no
man on the beach when he started, so they told
me, to counsel him. And, all being said, even a
good sailor—and that John was—starting off as
he was to buy a wedding-ring might not look as
sharp as he ought to look at the sea and at the sky.</p>
<p>As to my own sailing seaward—I seeing the
storm-signals and knowing the meaning of them—I
have no more to say than that I was hot
for a fight with anything that morning, and
didn't care much what I had it with or how it
came. Anybody who knows how to sail a boat,
and to sail one well, knows what joy there is
in getting the better of foul winds and rough
seas for the mere fun of the thing; but there is
still more joy in a tussle of that sort when you
are in a towering rage. Then you are ready to
push the fight farther by taking more and bigger
death-chances: since a man in bitter anger—at
least in such bitter anger as I was in then—does
not care much whether he pulls through
safely or gets drowned. And so I went on my
course seaward, on that soft wind blowing more
and more lazily, until the coast line was lost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
in the water behind me: knowing well enough,
and glad to have it that way, that the wind
would lull and lull until it failed me, and that
then I would get a blow out of the northeast
that would give me all the fight I wanted, and
perhaps a bit to spare!</p>
<p>But because I meant my fight to be a good
one, and meant to win it, I got myself ready for
it. When the wind did fail—the sun was put
out by that time, and from high up in the northeast
the scud was flying over me—I took in and
snugged away everything but my mainsail, and
put a double reef in that with the reef-points
knotted to hold. Then I waited, drifting south
a little—the flood having made half an hour before,
and the set of the ebb taking me that way.</p>
<p>I did not have to wait long. Out of the mist,
banked thick to the north-eastward, came the
moaning that a strong wind makes when it's
rushing down on you; then from under the
mist swept out a dark riffle that broke the oily
bubble of the water and put life into it; and
then the wind got to me with a bang. There was
more of it than I had counted on having at the
first, showing that the gale behind it was a
strong one and coming down fast; but I had
the nose of my boat pointed up to meet it, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
with no more than a bit of a rattle I got away
close-hauled. There was no going back to Southwold,
of course. What I was heading for was
the Pakefield Gat into the Stanford Channel,
and so to the harbour at Lowestoft; and I pretty
well knew from the first that no matter how close
I bit into the wind—and my boat was a
weatherly one—I had my work cut out for me
if I meant to keep from going to leeward of the
Pakefield Gat in the gale that was coming on.</p>
<p>Go to leeward I did, and badly. When I
raised the coast again, and a lift of the mist
gave me my bearings, I saw that Kessingland
tower was my landfall. As to working up from
there to the Pakefield Gat—the edge of the gale
by that time being fairly on me—I knew that
it was clean impossible. I still had two chances
left—one being to cross the Barnard by the
Wreck Gat, and the other to round into Covehithe
Channel across the tail of the bank. To
the first of these the wind would help me; but
I knew that even with the wind's help it would
be ticklish work trying to squeeze through that
narrow place at the half ebb—when the strong
outset of the current would be meeting the inpour
of the storm-driven sea. It would be better,
so I settled after a minute's thinking, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
pass that chance and take the other—which
would be a fairly sure one, though a close one
too. And so I wore around—with a bad wallow
in the trough of the sea that set everything to
shaking for a minute—and got on my new
course pretty well on the wind.</p>
<p>Just as I was making ready for wearing, and
so had my hands full, I glimpsed the sail of
a boat in the mist up to windward; and when I
was come about she was abeam to leeward, showing
her high weather side to me, not twenty
yards away. Then I saw that it was John
Heath's boat, and that John was standing up
alone in her at the helm. Why the fool had
not staid safe in Lowestoft harbour, God only
knows. But it's only fair to him, again, to say
that he must have got away from Lowestoft a
good while before the wind shifted; and like
enough he would have worked down to Southwold,
and got his boat safe beached there before
trouble came, if the calm had not caught
him sooner than it did me—he being all the time
close under the land.</p>
<h3>VIII</h3>
<p>Some of my rage had gone out of me in my
fight to windward in the gale's teeth; but when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
I saw John close by me there it all came back to
me. For half a minute the thought was in my
head to run him down and sink him—and I had
the wind of him and could have done it. Even
in my rage, though, I could not play a coward
trick like that on him; and before I could make
any other plan up he set me in the way of one
himself.</p>
<p>"I'm making for the Wreck Gat," he sung
out. "Give me a lead in, George—'tis better
known to thee than to me."</p>
<p>Had I stopped to think about it, his asking
me to lead him in would have been a puzzle
to me, he being just as good a sailor as I was
and just as well knowing every twist of the
sea and the sands. But I didn't stop to think
about the queerness of what he wanted—why he
was for making things double safe by my leading
him is clear enough to me now—because my
wits were at work at something else.</p>
<p>While the words were coming out of his
mouth—it all was in my head like a flash—I
saw my way to settling with him, and to settling
fair. He was crazy to want to try for it through
the Wreck Gat on the half tide, with the run of
the ebb meeting the onset of the breakers and
a whole gale blowing. But his being crazy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
that way was his look out, not mine. I'd give
him the lead in that he wanted—asking him to
take nothing that I didn't take first myself, and
giving him a better chance than I had because
I'd be setting the course for him and he'd have
only to follow on. That either of us would pull
through would be as it might be. As to my own
chance, such as it was, I was ready for it: knowing
that I would be no worse off dead with him
than I was living with him—and a long sight
better off if I put him in the way of the drowning
that would finish him, and yet myself won
through alive.</p>
<p>That was what got into my head like a flash
while he was hailing me, and mighty pleased I
was with it. "Follow on," I sung out. "I'll
give thee a lead." And to myself I was saying:
"Yes, a lead to hell!"</p>
<p>"All right," he sung out back to me—and
let his boat fall off a bit that I might draw
ahead of him. As he dropped astern, and the
uptilt of his weather rail no longer hid the inside
of his boat from me, I saw that there was a
biggish bunch of something covered with a tarpaulin'
in the stern sheets close by his feet.
But I gave no thought to it: all my thought
being fixed on what was ahead of me and him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
in the next half hour. I was glad that we had
to wait a little. Every minute of waiting meant
more wind, and so a bigger fight in the Wreck
Gat between the out-running current and the in-running
sea. I had a feeling in my bones that
I would pull through and that he wouldn't, and
I was keen to see the smash of him as his boat
took the sands. After that smash came, the rest
of his life could be counted in minutes and seconds—as
he floundered and drowned in that
wild tumble of sand-thickened waves. So I'd
have done with him and be quit of him; and
would have a good show—if I didn't drown
along with him—for winning Tess for my own.
If I did drown with him, or if—not being
drowned—Tess would have none of me, there
still would be this much to the good: I'd have
served him out for crossing me in my deep
heart-wish, and I'd have made certain that he
and she never could come together in this world
alive.</p>
<p>All that I was thinking as I stood on ahead of
him, bucketing through the waves that every
minute were heavier with the churned up sand.
And I also was thinking, and I remember laughing
as the thought came to me, that there was
a sort of rightness in the way things were work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>ing
out with us—seeing that the ship that had
brought me my Tess, and the sea that had given
her to me, together were making the death-trap
for the man who had stolen away from me her
love.</p>
<p>The wind was well up to a gale as we drove
on together, me leading him by a half dozen
boats' lengths, and from all along to leeward
of us came to us through the mist a sort of
a groaning roar as the breakers went banging
and grinding on the Barnard Bank. Nothing
but having the wind and the sea both with us,
when we stood in for the gat, saved us from
foundering; and yet that same also put us in
peril of it, because we had a wide open chance
of being pooped by the great following waves
which came hanging over and dragging at our
sterns.</p>
<p>The mist thinned as we got closer in shoreward,
showing me the sand-heavy surf waiting
for its chance to scour the life out of us; but also
showing me Covehithe Ness, and Covehithe
church tower off to the left of it, and so giving
me the points that I wanted to steer by. As for
the look of the Wreck Gat, when we opened it,
the waves blustered over it so big, and were all
in such a whirl and a fury with the current meet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>ing
them, that only a crazy man—as I have
said—ever would have tried for it. Just about
crazy I then was, and the look of it suited me.
In that sea the narrow channel was so lashed
by the breakers running off from the sands to
windward of it that there was no sign of a cleft
anywhere. No matter how we steered, getting
through it would be just hit or miss with us—and
with all my heart and soul I hoped that it
would be hit for me and miss for John.</p>
<p>To make in, I had to bear up a little; and
getting the wind by even that little abeam gave
my boat a send to leeward that was near to
doing for me. I was glad of it, though; because
I knew that John would get that same send
in the wake of me—and with more chance of
its finishing him, his boat being a deal less
weatherly than mine. And so—as I grazed the
sands, and after the graze went on safe again—my
heart was light with the thought that
I'd got the better of him at last.</p>
<div class="figcenter2em" id="ME"><img src="images/illo17.jpg" width="500"
height="421" alt="" title="" />
<div class="caption">
"THEN I COULD USE MY EYES TO LOOK BEHIND ME"
</div></div>
<p>There was no looking back, though, to see
what had gone with him. All my eyes were
needed for my steering. Everywhere about me
the sand-heavy water was hugely rising in a
great roar and tumble; and as for the sands
under it, and there the worst danger was, it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
just good luck or bad luck about striking them—and
that was all that you could say. Twice
I felt a jar under me as the boat went deep
in the sea-trough; but I did not strike hard
enough to hurt me, and I lifted again so quick
that I did not broach-to. And then, when I
thought that I was fairly through, and had safe
water right ahead of me, there came a bang on
the boat's side—as the sea-trough took me down
again—that near stove me: and right at the
side of me, so close that I could have touched
it as I lay for a second there in the deep wave-hollow,
was the stern-post of Tess's sand-bedded
ship rising black out of the scum and foam.
One foot farther to leeward and the jagged iron
of it would have had me past praying for. But
it did no harm to me—and as the water covered
it again I shot on beyond it into what seemed
to me, after the sea I'd hammered through, almost
a mill-pond on the lee side of the bank.</p>
<p>Then I could use my eyes to look behind me:
and what I saw will stay fixed in them till the
copper pennies cover them and I see with them
no more.</p>
<p>In spite of his send to leeward at the start,
John had come through after me without taking
the ground; but he had gone farther to leeward<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
than I had, and so was set—when smooth water
lay close ahead of him—fairly in death's way.
As I looked back I saw only the bow of his boat,
with the scrap of sail above it, riding on the
top of an oncoming wave. Then the boat tilted
forward, and came tearing down the wave-front
at a slant toward me, and I saw the whole
length of her: and what burned my eyes out
was seeing Tess there, standing brave and steady,
the two hands of her gripping fast the mast.</p>
<p>It was not much more than a second that I had
to look at her. With a sharp sound of wood
splintering, that I heard above the noise that
the sea was making, the boat struck fair and full
on that iron set timber—and then the wave that
had sent her there was playing with the scattered
bits of her, and the sand-heavy breakers were
tumbling about the bodies of the two that she
had borne.</p>
<p class="p2">If the sea meant to give me back my dead
Tess again, I knew where I should find her—and
there I did find her. On the shingle under
Covehithe Ness she was lying: come to me
there at the last, as she came to me there at
the first, a sea upcast. That last time she was
all mine. There was no John left living to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
steal her away from me. And if she was not
mine as I wanted her, at least she never was
his at all. In that far I had my will and way
over him, and for that much I am glad.</p>
<p>And so, she being all my own, home along the
beach for the second time I carried her. It was
a wonder to me, as she lay in my arms, how light
she was—and she so tall!</p>
<p class="p6 center">THE END</p>
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60811 ***</div>
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