I
On the morning of the last day of October, several years after it was
decided that Mermaid should live with Keturah Smiley in Blue Port, a
thin, pleasant-faced boy stopped in front of Keturah Smiley’s house and
whistled. Thereupon a girl of eleven slipped out of the second front
door of the house, the front door that faced the street from a jog on
the south side of the building, and ran out to meet him. She was as
tall as the boy, and he was thirteen; she had long and slightly curling
hair of so coppery a red as almost to match the polished mahogany in
Keturah Smiley’s tight-shut front parlour. She had a very white skin,
accentuated by three freckles of varying size on and about her straight
little nose. The firm and rounded chin was without a dimple, but two
dimples showed in her cheeks as she smiled, and she was smiling now;
and her blue eyes were of that brilliant and flashing blue that is to
be seen, as seamen say, “off soundings.” People who had occasion to say
much to Mary Smiley, whom everyone in Blue Port called Mermaid, were
frequently deceived by her eyes. The blue of them was so light that it
seemed shallow, nothing more than the reflection of the day’s sunshine
or the quicksilvering on two round little mirrors reflecting the merry
heart within her. Only a mariner, after all, could be expected to guess
that the very brightness and blueness was a sign of unfathomable depths.
“Good morning, Richard Hand, Jr.,” said the girl.
“Howdy, Mermaid,” retorted the boy.
They looked at each other a moment and smiled. They had become chums at
school on the day they discovered an uncle in common. But Hosea Hand of
the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, known as Ho Ha, was Dick Hand’s real
uncle, the brother of his father, whereas he was only Mermaid’s uncle
by adoption.
“To-night’s the night,” said the boy, amicably offering a jawbreaker.
Mermaid accepted the candy and said, with her mouth full, “I’ve
unfastened most of ’em, so if the wind doesn’t blow and make them bang,
they’ll be all ready for you. All you’ll have to do is unhinge them. Do
you suppose you can do that?”
“Sure,” said Dick. “They’re just ordinary shutters. Maybe a little
rusted.”
“I oiled some of them while she was up street yesterday,” the girl
reassured him.
They were conspiring, as a Hallowe’en prank, to detach as many
shutters as possible from Keturah Smiley’s tightly shuttered house;
and particularly, the shutters were to be got off the windows of the
sacred, sealed front parlour. In the three years or more that Mermaid
had been living with Cap’n Smiley’s sister these shutters had been
unfastened but twice a year: for a few hours in spring and a few hours
in fall at the time of Keturah Smiley’s semi-annual housecleaning. For
six months, from spring to fall, and again for six months, from fall to
spring, the front parlour and most of the other rooms of the house lay
in darkness. It seemed impossible that anything, even dust, could enter
there, but dust there always was when cleaning time came. At which
Mermaid used to wonder greatly, and Keturah Smiley to rage.
“Where do you suppose it comes from?” the girl would ask Miss Smiley.
“I don’t know where it comes from, but I know where it’s going to,”
Keturah replied, with such a savage accent as to make her remark almost
profane.
“Hell?” inquired Mermaid.
Miss Smiley straightened up and looked at her sternly.
“I was only asking a question,” explained Mermaid. “I wouldn’t think of
saying ‘hell’ except to ask a question. But any one who says ‘hell’ is
asking a big question, isn’t he, Miss Smiley?”
The funny child, as some folks in Blue Port called her, was not
expressing her doubt for the first time. She had first shocked a
Sunday School teacher with it. The Sunday School teacher had spoken to
Keturah Smiley but had regretted it immediately, for Keturah had said:
“Well, what’s the matter? Can’t you convince her there’s a hell? That’s
_your_ job! Why put it on me?”
So now when Mermaid put the general inquiry as to whether any one
saying “hell” were not asking a big question, Keturah merely gazed at
her darkly and replied:
“Most likely he’s answering one about himself.”
This tickled Mermaid. She renewed an old controversy concerning the
front parlour.
“What’s the use of singing, as we do at Sunday School, ‘Let a Little
Sunshine In,’ if the shutters are always fastened?” she demanded. “How
can you expect me to stand up and sing, ‘There’s Sunshine in My Heart
To-day,’ Miss Smiley, when there’s not even sunshine in the house?”
Keturah snorted. “My heart is not as big as my house,” she answered.
“Sunshine in some people’s hearts, like sunshine in some people’s
houses, would show up a good deal that would better be hidden.”
Mermaid’s blue eyes shone, even in the semi-darkness. From the very
first she had liked living with her Dad’s sister, despite that sister’s
dark moods and bleak rages, because Keturah Smiley had a gift for
saying sharp, true things, and saying them so you remembered them. She
had not been unkind to the girl and had even shown a certain grudging
liking for her as Mermaid, whether from some natural gift or from
crossing blades in conversational fencing, developed a faculty for
thinking her own thoughts and putting them in her own words--and more
and more the right words.
They had many duels, and Keturah Smiley did not always win them. She
early found in the child a streak of obstinacy as pronounced as her
own. When Mermaid was convinced of her right Keturah might be able to
silence her, but she would not be able to move her. And sometimes, to
her dumb astonishment, Miss Smiley found herself giving ground.
She had had to yield in quite a number of instances. When the
eight-year-old girl had come to live in Blue Port she had refused to
sleep with Miss Smiley, and Keturah had been forced to open a small
bedroom for her after the night when the child had run out of the house
and fastened herself in the woodshed. Mermaid had declined to walk two
miles in the noon recess of school and Keturah found herself putting
up a lunch and having the hot meal of her day at suppertime. This had
irked her a good deal, for Mermaid would not merely walk but run two
miles at play. The girl refused outright to wear to school a man’s old
coat fixed over as a jacket. She was as contrary as possible, it seemed
to Keturah, about her clothes. After repeated quarrels on the subject,
in the last of which Mermaid had threatened to appeal to her Dad the
next time he came over from the beach, Miss Smiley gave in. For it
was true that her brother gave her money to clothe the child, and she
knew him well enough to know that he would make her account for every
cent of it. Keturah Smiley was strictly honest, but it galled her to
put money on any one’s back. She would not even buy a mustard plaster,
though she would buy those mustard plasters which went by the name of
first mortgages--when she could get them sufficiently cheap. But she
did not starve the girl; she set a good table. She was stingy with
money and affection, but not with food and principles.
In three years she had come to respect her brother’s adopted daughter,
and sometimes to wonder where the girl got her firmness of character
and general good humour. Keturah had never seen her in tears. Once,
when she had been so angered as to lift her hand with a threat to
strike Mermaid, the girl, without wincing, had said quietly:
“If you hit me I’ll go away.”
She had not said she would tell her father. She had never, in any of
their disputes, threatened to appeal to Cap’n Smiley except in the long
dispute about what she should have to wear. And she had explained that
at the time by saying: “It’s only that Dad is buying them. If he says
you’re right, that’ll settle it.”
Keturah never reopened the argument. She put the money in the girl’s
hand.
“All right, Missy, spend the last cent and wear ribbons!”
But Mermaid had insisted on Miss Smiley’s going with her to the shop,
and had followed her advice on the quality of the goods, which Keturah
shredded with her fingers along the selvage and bit, a thread at a
time, with her very sound (and very own) teeth. Mermaid had then made
her own selection of styles and patterns, and on the way home had
handed Keturah $5 with the remark: “Will you send that to the savings
bank in Patchogue for me?”
“It might have been twice as much,” was Keturah’s only remark.
“And it might have been twice as little. And I might be half as happy,”
Mermaid exclaimed. “Would you be twice as happy if you had twice as
much money, Miss Smiley?”
“I’d be willing to try and find out,” said Keturah, sententiously.
Mermaid looked at her speculatively. “If there’s a chance of it, I’ll
help you all I can to get rich!” she declared with so much seriousness
that Keturah was uncertain how to take her, and so took her in silence.
Probably Mermaid’s words were not really so ironical as they sounded.
The girl was generally in earnest when she was not plainly in fun; as
children usually are. She had only the vaguest notion of Miss Smiley’s
means, and a very vivid notion of her money-stinting ways; Mermaid,
however, liked her Dad’s sister in spite of the difficulties of living
with her. Miss Smiley was “square” for all her harshness and even
hardness; she said cutting things which were, however, never mean, and
seldom really unkind. She could be wrathful, but she did not sneer, and
she had only scorn for those who sneered at her. Very little mercy, but
a rigid adherence to what she thought just, distinguished Keturah in
the girl’s eyes. And no one, Mermaid concluded, could live with Miss
Smiley and not be struck by the fact that she was thoroughly unhappy.
What would make her happy Mermaid had not the least idea; but if the
child could have given it to the woman she would have done it, even
at some cost to herself. For she was a generous child and she felt
generosity all about her, guarding her, befriending her, helping her.
Her Dad’s and her uncles’ liberality to her always touched her heart.
She knew now, at the age of eleven, that her Dad was not really her
Dad and that her uncles were not related to her by blood or marriage.
She knew she was a nameless child of unknown lineage, washed ashore
from the wreck of the ship by whose name she was known. Everyone except
Miss Smiley called her Mermaid; Miss Smiley called her Mary when she
called her by name at all, or “Missy,” when Mermaid had irritated her.
From the first the girl had called the woman Miss Smiley; it had never
occurred to her to address her as “Aunt Keturah,” and no one, not even
her Dad, had suggested it.