For the birthday party they had Mrs. Biggles and her Henry as guests,
and a great cake made by Ho Ha from a recipe supplied by Mrs. Biggles.
It carried seven candles--one for each of Mermaid’s years and one,
the same ones, to be sure, for each of her seven uncles. Dad, as
Cap’n Smiley desired her to call him, blew them all out with one
vasty breath, whereat Mrs. Biggles cried out that this was Mermaid’s
privilege. But the little girl could not extinguish her seven candles
all at once any more than she could kiss her seven uncles collectively,
so she gave individual attention to each candle and each uncle. Mrs.
Biggles must have a kiss, too, and returned it several times over; and
became so excited that she kissed her Henry in his and the public eye,
but then, as she observed, his whiskers left her hardly any other
region and her surroundings left her hardly any other choice. There
was much jesting and even a drinking of healths in some cider Mrs.
Biggles’s Henry had contributed, the chief toast being Cap’n Smiley’s
“to my seven surfmen and one surfwoman” with a pinch of Mermaid’s soft
pink cheek.
Spring swept into summer; the green meadows were set off by great
blooms of pink marsh mallow; the sun, shining down vertically on the
white sand of the beach, caused a brilliant glare that changed, at the
horizons, to a blue haze of heat. White-sailed boats moved over the
five-mile width of Great South Bay, taking to and fro men in white
trousers and gaily-clad women and children who might wish to spend a
day at the tavern to the westward of the station, a place of ragtime
music, clicking billiard balls, “shore” dinners, and home-prepared
lunches. The clean sand was daily littered with empty shoeboxes and
crumpled paper napkins by these family groups who picnicked between
dips in the surf. Except for a few inevitable “fine swimmers” they
clung, laughing and shrieking, to a line of rope tethered to a barrel
just beyond the break of the waves.
With the children of these beach parties Mermaid could play the day
long and sometimes did; many of the visitors were summer residents of
the south shore of Long Island, but not many of them had heard the
little girl’s story; if they gave her any thought they accepted her
as a child of one of the Coast Guardsmen. Strollers who came to the
station to look at the apparatus of life saving--the breeches buoy,
the life car which travelled to and from a distressed ship and the
shore, the surf boat resting on its truck, and ready to be hauled
laboriously through a mile or more of sand, the gun--these people would
see Mermaid, but never think to ask her history. Why should they,
indeed, even suppose she had one? And in telling of wrecks along the
beach Cap’n Smiley generally omitted any mention of one; if he was
asked about the time the _Mermaid_ came ashore he would answer quite
willingly, but a specific question was necessary to elicit the most
romantic and still mysterious part of that story.
The keeper had many other tales unusual enough to satisfy the craving
of the casual caller for a picturesque yarn. Out of his thirty years
at the station he could supply episodes ranging from the ridiculous
to the horrible, and many rehearsals, joined to some natural gift as
a narrator, enabled him to tell his stories well. In pleasant summer
weather, however, they lost much of their possible effectiveness; to
appraise them at their true worth you had to hear them in winter,
sitting and smoking or dreaming by the blazing stove in the station’s
long living room, a lamp swinging overhead, the wind shaking the
building while the sound of the not-distant surf came in to you as a
thunderous and unbroken roar. On a summer’s night with all the stars
shining, the wind whispering and bringing coolness from the leagues
of ocean, the surf merely murmuring and--yes, the mosquitoes biting
moderately--on such a night you could form no just conception of the
setting in which these tales belonged.
With fall, came the question of Mermaid and school. After a severe
mental struggle Cap’n Smiley decided that this could go over for a
year. He could teach the child her letters; as a matter of fact, she
already knew most of them from the weekly practice at wigwagging with
the red and white flags. The keeper knew of no one on “the mainland” to
whom he felt willing to entrust the child; he was inclined to consider
his sister out of the question; in another year some satisfactory
arrangement might present itself. Besides, both he and the men, but
he himself particularly, would be loath to part with Mermaid. She was
a big thing in their lives, and in Cap’n Smiley’s the biggest. Mrs.
Biggles had said lately that she and her Henry were getting along;
they contemplated giving up life on the beach except for a short while
in summer. They would take a house in Blue Port and live there ten
months out of the twelve. Should they do this Mermaid would have a
good home while she was getting her schooling; Cap’n Smiley and the
crew would miss her sorely, but their minds would be easy, and every
one of them on his twenty-four hours’ leave could look in on her and
see how she was.... When the time should be ripe to carry this general
scheme into execution it was Cap’n Smiley’s intention legally to adopt
Mermaid, although, as he said to himself, Mermaid Smiley would _not_
do as a name. It had altogether too strong a flavour of the portraits
on certain pages of the Sunday newspapers. He would adopt her as Mary
Smiley ... though in all likelihood she would always be called Mermaid.
The name well befitted her, dancing about down there on the beach and
slipping in and out of the water in the bathing suit Mrs. Biggles had
made for her from some old dress of pale green with silver edgings.
Musing over the name Cap’n Smiley burst into such laughter that Ha Ha
the Gloomy, peeling potatoes in the kitchen, gave a start and cut his
finger.
“I was just thinking of Henry Biggles’s father,” the keeper explained.
“’Member him? Lived here on the beach. Eighteen children. Old Jacob
Biggles hadn’t much education; in fact, he couldn’t read and write.
Named most of the children after vessels that came ashore on the beach.
One was Monarch Biggles--you’ve heard of Mon Biggles?--and another was
Siamese Prince Biggles--that’s Si Biggles. Then along came a lot of
boys and a lot of wrecks named the _Queen_, the _Merry Maid_, and other
unsuitable things. Poor Jacob was in despair. Some of the boys had to
wait eight years to get a handle.”
“He could have got names out of the Bible,” Ha Ha pointed out.
“He could get ’em but he couldn’t pronounce ’em.”