PLAYING SUBMARINE
"Ils ne l'aurout plus,
_Jamais! Jamais!_"
Sesooā drove her boat's nose on to the bar to the tune of the old
Frenchwoman's triumphant chant of defiance to the invaders, who had
wrecked her dwelling, but would never have it again! Never, never!
The Camp Fire Girl was flinging it now as a merry challenge to the
seals, the big, spotted harbor-seals, treating them as invaders--where
they were more at home than she was--and disputing with them the right
of possession of the milky sand-bar at low tide.
It was a teeming settlement, at low water, that Ipswich Bar--a long,
white street fringed by wavy greenery of billows, which had risen
miraculously out of the bay, thronged by a motley multitude of gulls,
herons, wee sandpipers, petrels, strutting to and fro, exchanging now
and again a squawky greeting, hobnobbing with brother or cousin, or
coolly ignoring one of another tribe, occasionally parting with a fish
to a young one--a dazzling, bewildering Great White Way of birds.
And the flippered, bulky harbor-seals--the marbled seals--in their
spotted hair-coats, lay around upon the sands, a whole herd of them,
like lazy merchants who, tired of displaying their wares, had reclined,
to bask in the sun.
Ploughing the waves to this White Way came another settler, which a
certain old sea-dog, Captain Andy Davis, friend of the Morning-Glory
Group of Camp Fire Girls, called alternately, with briny disrespect, "a
loose old wagon" or an "old red settler,"--in plain English, a broad,
flat-bottomed, ruddy-painted camp-boat, impossible to capsize.
This "settler," bobbing over the green tide, gave the strange effect,
somewhat, of a portly, waddling, ruddy old duck which had ambitiously
adopted a cygnet. For towed in her wake came a silvery something,
graceful as a young swan--a light birch-bark shell, a fifteen-foot canoe
whose bark skin shone like satin--with a delicate decoration of ferns,
where the outer layer of bark had been scraped away into a pattern, at
each tapering end.
The red mother-settler had aboard a cargo--a precious cargo of
girlhood--of which one shifting item done up in a bathing-suit, crowned
by a red silk handkerchief wound around a curly head, leaned over the
stern of the mother-skiff, in rapt admiration of that feather-weight
canoe.
"I believe--really believe--that I could have paddled over here to the
bar from our beach in her!" burst sanguinely from the lips of that
flesh-and-blood item, Lilia Kemp, otherwise Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl. "Even
if a green comber had capsized her, I could have righted her again and
scrambled in. I could do it, fully dressed, let alone to say in a
bathing-suit."
"Which means you could undress in the water, right her, and get aboard!"
corrected an older girl, of shading, twinkling eyelashes between which
hovered a firefly glance like a glow-worm playing through an amber
fringe of grasses. "Well!--well, I shouldn't mind a premature ducking
myself," she ran on, her lithe body rhythmically swaying to one of the
red oars which she was wielding. "Perhaps--who knows--we may get it,
too, if the seals regard us as invaders! Ginger! will you look at
them--a whole herd, thirty at least, out of water, sunning themselves on
the sands!"
"Oh! we see them, Sara." It was a general responsive chorus in half a
dozen gay young voices. "Goody! I never, never, came so near to a
seal--a mustached man-fish--before! We're going to have the frolic of
our lives!" from one in piping solo. "And the birds--birds--birds! Ever
see anything like them? Fishing, strutting, squabbling, holding a Peace
Conference!"
"No! I never saw anything like them before. Nor you, either! There's
nothing to equal the wild life on the Ipswich Bar, at low tide, nearer
than the bird reservation on Three Arch Rocks, off the Oregon Coast;
that's what I heard a great naturalist say!... And, oh! see--see! there
are some of my cousins, the great herons, just gobbling up everything in
sight," trilled Olive Deering--Blue Heron--in a shrill treble of
excitement which, winging right out of her, fluttered on to the bar, to
greet those feathered fisher-folk, her cousins.
"Of course, the Arch Rocks, _being_ a reservation, go a long way beyond
anything we could see here, for the teeming multitudes of their
bird-life--the grandeur of their nested arches," she added softly, her
dark eyes alight, her breast rising and falling, light as a cork, upon a
pure, primitive flame of being, typified by the red tongue of flame of
the Torch Bearer's emblem, with crossed logs and pearly smoke,
embroidered upon the bosom of her glossy bathing-suit.
It was one of those outdoor moments when, as she had told Lieutenant
Davenport, there seemed to be but an illumined fag-end of her real self
left in the five feet nine of red-crowned girlish form perched airily,
now, upon the side of the red-skinned settler.
The rest, the main part, had become one with the joyful feather-folk,
the spotted mammals sunning themselves, with the blue of the sky above,
the dazzling flower of foam on the bonnet of the green old whistling
tide, off on a holiday from the shore--and with a Father Presence in
all, scarce veiled, so radiantly apprehended at the moment that faith
was almost sight.
She came to herself with a backward glance at a twilight balcony, at a
young soldier who had, in feeling, come nearer to God since he
volunteered--came to her transfigured self in time to hear that
officer's little flame of a sister gaily protesting: "Bah! Three Arch
Rocks! Who craves for Oregon? This is good enough for us. Now--now--now
comes the shock, as the soldiers say; now, for finding out how near
those seals will let us get to them, before they take to the water!
Hitherto they've had the bar all to themselves, except for the birds.
But:
"'Ils ne l'aurout plus,
Jamais! Jamais!'
"_We're_ out for possession, too, this summer!... Oh, mercy! Here they
come, stampeding--flopping. Oh, sit tight, girls; if they strike the
boat, they may----"
"They can't capsize us!" burst explosively from sister lips. "The old
settler----"
She was a settler, a sturdy one, that camp skiff. She rocked and
wallowed, but settled down, as in a nest, in the green hubbub of tide
and foam stirred up by the wildly startled plunging-off of thirty
sportive young seals, which, striking the water with the heavy splashes
of men bathers, swam deliriously around in all directions, whipping the
eddies with their active flippers, amid a low tornado of broken
exclamations from the girls.
"Oh, mercy! Look! Aren't their dark heads just like those of a lot of
boys, swimming round? And did you--did you see them when they made a
dash for the water?"
"They were so quick that you couldn't see them!"
"Yes, _I_ did! They--they floundered off the bar with the funniest
kangaroo roll, half-upright, their little fore-flippers in the air--like
puppies' paws--swinging the hind parts of their bodies first to one
side, then--then to the other--the queerest teeter! Oh! I'll never
forget it!... Never!"
Olive's own voice "teetered" upon the protests that softly lashed the
sunshine around the boat, breaking in upon the general medley of her
companions' excitement.
As she perched upon the ruddy rim of the old red settler, her arm was
about the shoulders of the adopted Camp Fire Sister, little Flamina,
whose Green Leaf was a perfect quiver leaf now, the night-black pupils
of her eyes--big dilated--shining through their jetty lashes, like
radium in the dark.
"Ah, Madonna! How I am excita'! _Vitello marina!_ De bigga seal! I no
see such bigga sealla on shore of Napoli--me!" she cried, her childish
mind traveling back by aërial route--the sisterly arm about her made it
a rainbowed route--from the lonely wildness of the Ipswich Sand-bar to
the sunny beauty of her native shores on the blue bay of Naples as she
had occasionally beheld them.
"Ha! Justa looka!" panted Flamina again, liquidly musical as a little
spring brook, hugging her excitement passionately, within locked arms,
to the breast of her small pea-green sweater. "De bigges' seal ees no
mova--heem stay on sand--rolla ova! Ah! Brava! Brava!"
"Brava, indeed! Did you ever see such bravado?" It was Sesooā's low,
laughing outburst. "Three of them--four--aren't stirring--not making a
break for the water at all! Ginger! we must be within thirty yards of
them now. The Big Four lying up there, high an' dry, on the ridge of the
sloping bar! And--and one of them a monster! Perfect 'whale,' as the
boys would say! Oh-h! will you look at his fangs--long yellow fangs--and
his mustache twinkling with brine!
"And the round, brown spots all over him! See him roll over on his side
and grin, as if he dared--dared us to come nearer! Mercy! Hasn't he a
half-human kind of face! I'm afraid; he looks like a man-fish,
a--monster!"
Little Owl--Lilla--was crouching, hands clasped, in the red stern of the
old settler, as the words tumbled forth through her parted lips. Behind
her, rocking upon the eddies, was the fern-decked, birch canoe.
"Sara! Sara Davenport! you're too daring! He--they--might attack us.
Let's row off and land at a little distance, upon another part of the
bar! Upon my word! he does look ugly--wicked. I--I'm 'creepy' all
over--positively. He seems bent on holding the fort--the sand-bar!"
Arline's voice shook upon a moist rainbow of excitement.
"Yes, they've had it all to themselves too long, but:
"'_Ils ne l'aurout plus...!_'"
Was it that a New England seal disliked to hear himself challenged in
the defiant chant which an old Frenchwoman had flung after retreating
Germans--to have his reign upon the milk-white bar--the heaven of the
low-water sands--disputed? Or was it that, after all, his grinning pep
was only surface spice--that whatever savage courage still remained in
him for battles with his own tribe, had been reduced by persecution to
arrant cowardice in man's direction, was not proof against the slow,
complacent advance, inch by inch, onto the bar, of an old red, wooden
settler, vibrant from stem to stern with the quivers and gasps of a
dozen wildly excited girls?
Whatever the reason--perhaps the sands on which his blubbery brain had
rested alone knew--whatever the reason, swiftly, suddenly, he threw the
switch, as it were, the lightning-switch, when the nosing old camp-boat
was only twenty yards from him, signaling to the three other big seals,
the ladies of his family, his marbled wives.
Lightning-like, they responded, making a kangaroo dash for the
water--led by their grinning lord--so quick that in the sunlight their
briny, oily hair-coats seemed phosphorescent.
But it was a day when strange, covert methods of warfare were in vogue.
Perhaps, even lying out at low tide upon the dry sands of the Ipswich
Bar, the big, brooding old dog-seal had seen strange fish-like
structures--gray and black--rising afar off from ocean's depths, and
from them had taken a hint.
At all events, no U-boat, yet, ever equalled the surprising swiftness
with which he played submarine--took it upon himself to play submarine.
Whether it was blind fear or baffled fury, creaming to blunder, in that
old blubber-head of his, he dove right under the boat, instead of
dodging by it!
Giving way before the red settler, he bumped against her flat bottom,
and hoisted her right out of the water--her delicate cygnet chick, the
birch canoe, too!
An easy matter for him, for he weighed a full three hundred pounds or
so, and made nothing of the leviathan feat of hoisting a cargo of girls
tumultuously out of one element into another--the spray-shot,
spray-curdled air!
The old wooden settler clucked and rocked dizzily, fiery red in the face
and mad as an old wet hen. But she could not hold on to her chicks--or
at least she could hold to but very few of them!
Out of her they shot on all sides! The green tide around her suddenly
bloomed with flower-like girlish heads done up in red silk
handkerchiefs.
The air was streaked with a curdled foam of sputtering cries: "The seal!
That big seal! Where--is--he? Dove r-right _un-der_--us! Played
submarine, he did!... Tchu! tchu! tchu! _C'est la Guerre! Guerre_, with
a vengeance--yes!... Oh! Where do we go from here, girls--where do we
go-o from here?"
"You _deserve_ to go to 'Davy Jones' from here, for letting a big seal
bounce you out! Great Neptune! haven't you a grain more sense than that,
after all the forty-one tricks I've taught you? Eh-h?"
It was a loud voice, whooping like a klaxon, that came suddenly ringing
over the swirling tide, seconded by a sound of oars. "D'you ask where
the seal is? Well! there he goes, swimming off--beating it to win'ard,
vowing by his ancestors, back to the tadpoles, that he'll never have
anything to do with girls again--after landing you all in the surf off
the old bar. An' each an' every one o' you as wet as a sea-mouse--a
feathered sea-mouse! Dear, dear! 'Bout time you had a convoy, I reckon!"
"'Convoy'! _Captain Andy!_ Captain Andy Davis! Well! it's no wonder a
big seal b-bounced us all out--got the better of us; you've been
neglecting us s-shamefully." It was Blue Heron's voice babbling through
brine as Olive's geranium-like head rose from the greenery of a
water-hill.
"Panky doodle! Have I, indeed? Want me to tow your old red settler of a
boat on to the sands? She's drifting off. The rest of you can swim, I
reckon. Good! In the water, anyhow, you behave as well as you look--an'
that's saying a lot!"
"Hurrah! Is it now? So--so you're thinking better of sending us to--Davy
Jones--right off, eh?" Sesooā's little flame of laughter shot back over
her shoulder, as, striking out boldly, she swam for the dry sands of the
long bar--the dazzling Great White Way of birds--her companions
following, Olive towing the foreign-born little sister, who was hampered
by having drawn the rough pea-green sweater, for warmth, over her
bathing-suit.
A dozen laughing nymphs they were, landing in madcap mood at the heart
of the frolic of the wild life on the bar.
Behind them, in charge of their ruddy old skiff and the tossed canoe,
came their friend and body-guard of former camping seasons, Captain
Andrew Davis, master mariner of Gloucester, whose massive figure was
still a tower of strength, and the light of his eye undimmed, at
seventy-two!