(From _Harper's Magazine_)
Coming ashore one summer's night from Meteor Island, Jethro Rackby was
met by Peter Loud--Deep-water Peter he was called, because even so early
he had gone one foreign voyage. Peter was going round with a paper
containing the subscription to a dance.
"Come, Harbor Master," he said; "put your thumb mark in the corner along
with the rest of us."
Rackby drew back. "Why should I dance?" he muttered.
He was town clerk as well as harbor master--a scholarly man with
visionary, pale eyes, and a great solitary, as Peter knew.
"Why? I'll tell you why," said Peter. "To bring joy to Caddie Sill's
heart, if nothing more. The girl would throw all the rest of us in a
heap tomorrow for a firm hold of you, Rackby."
He winked at Zinie Shadd, who swayed on his heels soberly.
Rackby turned his eyes toward the black mound of Meteor, which lay like
a shaggy stone Cerberus at the harbor's mouth.
The star-pointed harbor was quiet at his feet. Shadows in the water were
deep and languid, betokening an early fall of rain through the still
air. But from the rim of the sea, where the surf was seen only as a
white glow waxing and waning, a constant drone was borne in to them--a
thunder of the white horses' hoofs trampling on Pull-an'-be-Damned; the
vindictive sound of seas falling down one after another on wasted rocks,
on shifting sand bars--a powerful monotone seeming to increase in the
ear with fuller attention. The contrast was marked between the
heavy-lying peace of the inner harbor and that hungry reverberation from
without of waters seeking fresh holds along a mutilated coast. On damp
nights when the wind hauled to the southeast, men stood still in their
tracks, and said, simply, "There's the Old Roke," as if it was the Old
Man of the Sea himself. The sound was a living personality in their
ears.--Women whom the sea had widowed shivered and rattled irons when
the Old Roke came close to their windows; but the men listened, as if
they had been called--each by his own name.
"What's the ringle jingle of feet by the side of that?" Rackby said, his
mystified face turned toward the water. "I'm a man for slow tunes,
Peter. No, no, no; put your paper up again."
"No? You're a denying sort of a crab, and no mistake. Always seeing how
fast you can crawl backward out of pleasure."
"I mistrust women."
"You cleave to the spirit and turn from the flesh, that I know. But
here's a woman with a voice to waken the dead."
"That's the voice on the seaward side of Meteor," answered Rackby.
"Cad Sills is flesh and blood of the Old Roke, I'm agreed," said
Deep-water Peter. "She's a seafaring woman, that's certain. Next door to
ending in a fish's tail, too, sometimes I think, when I see her carrying
on--Maybe you've seen her sporting with the horse-shoe crabs and all o'
that at Pull-an'-be-Damned?"
"No, I can't say that."
"No, it wasn't to be expected, you with your head and shoulders walking
around in a barrel of jam."
The harbor master smiled wistfully.
"More I don't require," he said.
"Ah, so you say now--Well, marry the sea, then. It's a slippery embrace,
take the word of a man who has gone foreign voyages."
"I mistrust the sea," said Jethro.
"So you do.--You mistrust the sea and the like o' that, and you mistrust
women and the like o' that. There's too much heaving and tossing in such
waters for a harbor master, hey?"
"I'm at home here, that's a fact," said Jethro. "I know the tides and
the buoys. I can find my way in the dark, where another man would be at
a total loss. I'm never suffering for landmarks."
"Landmarks!" roared Deep-water Peter. "What's a landmark good for but to
take a new departure?"
To the sea-goers, tilted on a bench in the shadow of the Customs House,
he added, "What life must be without a touch of lady fever is more than
I can tell."
A red-bearded viking at the end of the bench rose and took Peter's
shoulders in a fearful grip.
"What's all this talk of lady fever?"
"Let be, Cap'n Dreed!" cried Peter. His boisterousness failed him like
wind going out of a sail. He twisted out of the big seaman's grip and
from a distance shouted, "If you weren't so cussed bashful, you might
have had something more than a libel pinned to your mainmast by now,
with all this time in port."
There was a general shifting along the bench, to make room for possible
fray. It was a sore point with Sam Dreed that the ship chandler had that
day effected a lien for labor on his ship, and the libel was nailed to
the mast.
"Now they'll scandalize each other," murmured Zinie Shadd.
They were turned from that purpose only by the sudden passing at their
backs of the woman in question, Caddie Sills.
Quiet reigned. The older men crossed their legs, sat far down on their
spines, and narrowed their eyes. The brick wall of the Customs House,
held from collapsing by a row of rusty iron stars, seemed to bulge more
than its wont for the moment--its upper window, a ship's deadlight,
round and expressionless as the eye of a codfish.
Cad Sills ran her eye over them deftly, as if they were the separate
strings of an instrument which could afford gratification to her only
when swept lightly all at one time by her tingling finger tips, or,
more likely, by the intangible plectrum in her black eye.
The man she selected for her nod was Sam Dreed, however.
Peter Loud felt the walls of his heart pinch together with jealousy.
It was all in a second's dreaming. "Gape and swallow," as Zinie Shadd
said, from his end of the bench. The woman passed with a supercilious
turn of her head away from them.
"That's a foot-loose woman if ever there was one."
With all her gift of badinage, she was a solitary soul. The men feared
no less than they admired her. They were shy of that wild courage,
fearful to put so dark a mystery to the solution. The women hated her,
backbit and would not make friends, because of the fatal instantaneous
power she wielded to spin men's blood and pitch their souls derelict on
that impassioned current. Who shall put his finger on the source of this
power? There were girls upon girls with eyes as black, cheeks as like
hers as fruit ripened on the same bough, hair as thick and lustrous--yet
at the sound of Caddie Sills's bare footfall eyes shifted and glowed,
and in the imaginations of these men the women of their choice grew pale
as the ashes that fringe a fallen fire.
"She's a perilous woman," muttered the collector of the port. "Sticks in
the slant of a man's eye like the shadow of sin. Ah! there he goes, like
the leaves of autumn."
Samuel Dreed trod the dust of the road with a wonderful swaying of his
body, denominated the Western Ocean roll. He was a mighty man, all were
agreed; not a nose of wax, even for Cad Sills to twist.
"Plump she'll go in his canvas bag, along with his sea boots and his
palm and needle, if she's not precious careful, with her
shillyshallying," said Zinie Shadd. "I know the character of the man,
from long acquaintance, and I know that what he says he'll do he'll do,
and no holding off at arm's length, either, for any considerable period
of time."
Such was the situation of Cad Sills. A dark, lush, ignorant, entrancing
woman, for whose sake decent men stood ready to drop their principles
like rags--yes, at a mere secret sign manifested in her eye, where the
warmth of her blood was sometimes seen as a crimson spark alighted on
black velvet. She went against the good government of souls.
Even Rackby had taken note of her once, deep as his head was in the
clouds by preference and custom. It was a day in late November. No snow
had fallen, and she floated past him like a cloud shadow as he plodded
in the yellow road which turned east at the Preaching Tree. She passed,
looked back, slashed a piece of dripping kelp through the air so close
that salt drops stung his pale eyes, laughed aloud, and at the top of
her laugh, broke into a wild, sweet song unfamiliar to him. It was a
voice unlike the flat voices of women thereabouts--strong, sweet,
sustained, throbbing with a personal sense of the passion which lurked
in the warm notes.
Her foot was bare, and more shapely in consequence than if she had had a
habit of wearing shoes. Its shape was the delicate shape of strength
native to such a foot, and each toe left its print distinct and even in
the dust. With his eye for queer details, he remembered that print and
associated with it the yellow-rutted road, the rusty alders in the
meadow beyond, and the pale spire of the church thrust into a November
sky.
He called this to mind when on the night of the dance information came
to his ear that she had sold her pearls to lift the lien on Cap'n Sam
Dreed's ship, with her own hands tearing down the libel from the mast
and grinding it under her heel.
No man whom she had once passed and silently interrogated could quite
forget her, not even Jethro Rackby. The harbor master swayed on his
oars, collected himself, and looked forward across the dimpled floor of
his harbor, which in its quietude was like a lump of massy silver or
rich ore, displaying here and there a spur of light, a surface sparkle.
The serenity of his own soul was in part a reflection of this nightly
calm, when the spruce on the bank could not be known from its fellow in
the water by a man standing on his head. Moreover, to maintain this
calm was the plain duty of the harbor master. For five years he had held
that office by an annual vote of the town meeting. With his title went
authority to say where were the harbor lines, to order the removal of
hulks, to provide for keeping open a channel through winter ice--in a
word, to keep the peace. This peace was of his own substance.
It was rudely shattered. On the night following the dance Cad Sills put
herself in his path for the second time and this time she gave him short
shrift. He was pushing forward, near sundown, to take the impulse of an
eddy at the edge of Pull-an'-be-Damned when he saw that predatory,
songful woman balanced knee-deep in rushing water, her arms tossing.
"She's drowning herself after her quarrel with Sam Dreed," was his first
thought. He had just heard a fine tale of that quarrel. The truth was
not quite so bold. She had been caught by the tide, which, first peering
over the rim of that extended flat, had then shot forth a frothy tongue,
and in a twinkling lapped her up.
Jethro presently brought up the webs of his two thumbs hard at her
armpits, and took her into his boat, dripping.
"She's not so plump as she was ashore," he said to himself with a vague
astonishment. She was as lean as a man at the hips, and finned away like
a mermaid, as became a daughter of the Old Roke.
"Steady now, my girl--. Heave and away."
There they stood confronting each other. Enraptured, life given into her
hand again, Cad Sills flung her arms about his neck and kissed him--a
moist, full-budded, passionate, and salty kiss. Even on the edge of
doom, it was plain, she would not be able to modulate, tone, or contain
these kisses, each of which launched a fiery barb into the recipient's
bosom.
The little fisherman had not known what elemental thing was in a kiss
before. He bit his lip and fell back slowly. Then, after a second's vain
reflection, he seized the butts of his oars, which had begun to knock
together. Caddie Sills sank across a thwart and shivered a little to
mark the crowding together of white horses at the very place where she
had stood. Contrary currents caused the tide to horse in strongly over
Pull-an'-be-Damned.
"What a ninny!" she whispered. "Was I sick with love, I wonder?"
The harbor master answered with the motion of his oars.
She glanced at him shrewdly, then struck her hands together at her
breast, which she caused to rise and fall stormily. She was, in fact, a
storm petrel in the guise of woman.
"You have saved my life," she cried out, "when not another man in all
this world would have lifted so much as his little finger. Do what you
will with me after this. Let me be your slave, your dog--. I am a lost
woman if you will not take pity on me."
Rackby's heart came into his throat with the slow surge of a sculpin on
a hook.
"Nothing--. Nothing at all. Nothing in the world. I happened along--.
Just a happen so."
The girl stood up, looked at him long and long, cried, "Thank you for
nothing, then, Mr. Happen-so," and from the humility of gratitude she
went to the extreme of impudence, and laughed in his face--a ringing,
brazen laugh, with the wild sweetness in it which he had noted in the
song she sang on that November hillside.
"You're a caution, little man, you're a caution," she said, slanting her
lashes. "You certainly are. I've heard of you. Yes, I have, only this
morning. I'm a solitary like yourself. See here. You and I could set the
world on fire if we joined hands. Do you know that?"
The little man was struck dumb at his oars for very fear of the boldness
of her advance. He recognized this for an original and fearsome, not to
say delectable, vein of talk. She came on like the sea itself, impetuous
and all-embracing. Unfathomed, too. Could fancy itself construct a woman
so, pat to his hand?
"Is it true that you despise women as they say?" she whispered. She
breathed close, and electrified the tip of his ear with a tendril of
hair. He saw that she wore coral now, in place of the pearls. But her
lips were redder than the coral. He raised his head.
"Yesterday morning you sold pearls for the benefit of Sam Dreed," he
said, in dull tones. "And here you are with your brimstone fairly in my
boat."
He looked at her as if the Old Roke himself had clambered into the boat,
with his spell of doom.
"I am not afraid of helping honest men in trouble that I know of," said
Cad Sills, sucking in her lower lip. "But do you throw that up to me?"
Jethro felt the wickedness of his position like a breath of fire fanning
his cheek. Perilously tempted, he sagged back on the oars without a
word.
"Soho! you're setting me ashore," said that dark woman, laughing. "I
don't wear very well in the eye and that's a plain conclusion."
She laid a finger to her breast, and her eye mocked him. This brazen
hardness put him from his half-formed purpose. He addressed himself to
the oars, and the dory grated on the shore.
"Good-bye, then, little man," she said, springing past him.
But even now she lingered and looked back, biting the coral and letting
it fall, intimating that a word, a whispered syllable, might lay her
low.
He sat like a man crushed to earth. When he raised his head she was
gone.
Was this the voice from the seaward side of Meteor? True, the sea had
yielded this wild being up, but did she speak with the sea's voice? She
had at least the sea's inconstancy, the sea's abandonment.
Her words were hot and heavy in little Rackby's heart. Serene harbor
master that he was, the unearthly quiet of his harbor was an affront
upon him in his present mood. Now that she was lost to him, he could
not, by any makeshift of reason, be rid of the impulse that had come
upon him to jump fairly out of his own skin in an effort to recapture
that tormenting woman--.
He drifted down upon Meteor Island, bowed and self-reproachful, like a
spirit approaching the confines of the dead. He stepped ashore and
passed the painter of his dory through its ring.
On the crest of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred,
a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick
grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange
inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead,
not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place
flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and twigs were quite
dissolved in darkness--nothing but the silver pattern of the leaves was
shown in random sprays. He felt for an instant disembodied, like these
leaves--as if, taking one step too many, he had floated out of his own
body and might not return.
"Bear and forbear," he thought. "You wouldn't have stirred, let her say
what she would," his heart whispered to the silver leaves.
But he could not forget that wild glance, the wet hand clinging to his
wrist, the laugh repeated like an echo from the symphony of that
November hillside. He reproached himself withal. What was known of Cad
Sills? Little known, and nothing cared to be known. A waif, pursuing him
invisibly with a twinkle or flare from her passionate eyes. She was the
daughter of a sea captain by his fifth wife. He had escaped the other
four. They had died or been deserted in foreign ports, but this one he
could not escape. Tradition had it that he lost the figurehead from his
ship on the nuptial voyage, attributed this disaster to his bride, and
so left her at Rosario, only to find her, after all sail was set, in the
forechains, at the very stem of his ship, half drowned, her arms
outstretched, a living figurehead. She had swum after him. She outlived
him, too, and died in giving birth to Cad Sills, whose blood had thus a
trace of sea water--.
He entered his house. In his domestic arrangements he was the very
figure of a bachelor. His slimsy silver spoon, dented with toothmarks of
an ancestor who had died in a delirium, was laid evenly by his plate.
The hand lamps on the shelf wore speckled brown-paper bags inverted over
their chimneys. A portrait of a man playing the violin hung out, in
massive gilt, over the table, like a ship's figurehead projecting over a
wharf's end. His red couch bore northeast and southwest, so that he
might not lose good sleep by opposing his body to the flow of magnetic
currents.
On this night he drew out from a hole in the upholstery of the couch a
bag of stenciled canvas, which chinked. It was full of money, in gold
and silver pieces. He counted it, and sat thoughtful. Later he went out
of the house and stood looking at the sea as if for a sign. But the sea
gave him no sign; and on that night at least had no voice.
It was three days before he came up with Cad Sills again. Then he spied
her at nightfall, reclining under the crab-apple tree at Hannan's
Landing.
The little man came close enough to tread on her shadow, cleared his
throat, and almost shouted:
"Did you mean what you said? Did you mean what you said, girl?"
She laughed and threw the core of an apple in his direction.
"I did when I said it, Mr. Happen-so. I did when I said it."
"I'm ready--. I'm ready now. We'll be married tomorrow, if you don't
mind."
"But will I sell my cabbages twice, I wonder? I've had a change of heart
since, if I must tell you."
"Surely not in this short space of time," Rackby gasped, dismayed.