THE CAPTAIN’S PARTY
“Do you girls realize that it is the first week in August?”
It was about a week after the doctor’s talk, and they had just come up
to the porch after a dip in the bay.
“Let’s stay down in the sand, and dry off,” Ted suggested. “It’s early
yet.”
So down they trailed again, and sat on the sand. One special charm of
belonging to this yacht club was that you could do just what you wanted
when you wanted. As Polly said, it took all the fun out of anything when
you had to wait for it.
“Poor old King Solomon,” she would say, “I don’t know what it was he
longed for, but I am sure he never got it, because he said so
mournfully, ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’ And I know just how
he felt when he said it.”
“I ought to mend my jacket,” said Sue, easily. “But there’s plenty of
time.”
“That’s what Sue always says,” Kate declared. “I think her motto and
Ted’s should be ‘There’s plenty of time.’”
“Well, there isn’t,” Polly remarked, as she sat down on a sand dune, and
rested her chin on her hands, with her hair falling around her like a
meditative mermaid. “The regatta is the fifteenth, and we’ve got to have
our boats all spick and span for the race.”
“You’re not really going to race for the Junior cup, are you, Polly?”
Isabel’s tone was very discouraging.
“I am.” Polly smiled at the big white club house across the bay quite as
if she expected it to nod back at her. “The _Tidy Jane_ is just as fine
a catboat as there is on the bay, and so are all our boats. Nancy’s
going to race the _Pirate_, Tom’s knockabout, and the other afternoon
when we sailed to the inlet and back, I had the best of her all the way.
Of course I shall race.”
“Is there a prize?” asked Crullers, the practical. The girls all broke
into a peal of laughter, and Ruth declared that Crullers never could see
anything in empty glory. There had to be a tangible goal for her to
exert herself.
“There’s a silver cup for the big boats to race for,” Polly replied.
“Commodore Vaughan’s sloop, _Adventure_, has held it for sixty-footers
for three years, they say. And there’s a smaller cup for twenty-footers
and under. We’d come under that head.”
“What will you use it for, Polly, after you win it?” asked Sue,
innocently, and Polly promptly threw sand at her, till she cried
quarter.
“Whether I win it or not, it’s the sport of the thing that counts,” she
said. “I never saw a race in all my life that I didn’t wish I was in it,
just for the chance of winning. It isn’t the prize so much, it’s the
honor of the thing, and the sport.”
“I know, Polly, that’s perfectly right,” rejoined Kate, approvingly.
“What if no one ever entered a race for fear they might not win; there’d
be no racing at all.”
“Well, if you intend entering, I shall too,” said Sue. “For I know that
the _Patsy D._ can outsail anything on this bay if she once ‘gets
a’going,’ as the Captain says. The trouble is, she won’t ‘get a’going’
until she has a mind to. I can’t seem to make her grab hold of a breeze
and pull.”
“You don’t let go your main sheet right,” Polly told her. “You hoist
your sail, and let it wobble before you let the boom swing about, and
catch the wind into the sail right. Makes me think of a story the
Captain told about one of the summer cottagers last year, who went out
with Tom and him one day. There was a big sea on, and when a puff of
wind caught her, the Captain called out, ‘Let go that jib, let go that
jib’. And the guest was really angry and indignant. ‘Who’s touching your
old jib, I should like to know,’ he said, huffily. The Captain just
shook when he told it.”
Ruth sat up suddenly, and put back her hair from her face.
“I just saw a boat put off from the Orienta dock,” she said. “It looks
like the _Nixie_. Bess is at the tiller. I wonder what they can want.
They’re making for here.”
It took hardly ten minutes to cross the bay at its narrow end, with a
good wind to help, and before the girls had time to run up to the
cottage and dress, the _Nixie_ was at the landing, with reefed sails.
“Mamma sent us over,” Dorothy exclaimed, as soon as she stepped ashore.
“The _Portland_ brought a consignment of fruit for the club last night,
and papa sends you over a basket of it with his compliments.”
The girls bore the heavy basket up to the porch and promptly explored
its contents. There was a large watermelon, some canteloupes, peaches
and pears, and a box of stuffed dates.
“Mamma put those in because she says she knows what girls like,” said
Bess, perching herself on the porch railing contentedly. “And what do
you think? We’ve teased and begged to be allowed to come over here with
you for regatta week, and now we may if you will let us. You can get a
better view of the bay from this porch than you can from the club.”
“Well, young lady, you’ll get your view of the race from the stern
locker of the _Nixie_,” said Dorothy, firmly. “Polly won’t allow us in
the club unless we agree to race for the glory of it, will you?”
“No, ma’am,” returned Polly, serenely, as she knelt down, and spread out
several newspapers.
“What are you going to do, Polly?” asked Isabel, who believed firmly in
the fitness of things. “Oh, don’t cut into the melon out here, dear. Put
it on the ice, and let it cool.”
“Put it on the ice!” Polly repeated, with fine scorn. “Listen to her,
girls. You’d think we had a whole refrigerator handy. Dorothy, all the
ice we own is wrapped up in Ruth’s old waterproof cape, in a tub down in
the cellar. It’s about the size of a pincushion, and if I were to set
this watermelon on it, it would just evaporate. We will eat the melon
now to save it.”
“It’s plenty cold,” Dorothy helped lift the melon down on the papers.
“But, Polly, will it be all right if we come over and stay for regatta
week?”
“It will, and we’ll be ever and ever so glad to have you. It’s very
stylish, Isabel, to entertain guests during a regatta week. Will you
please bring along your own blankets, as we haven’t enough to go
’round.”
“Indeed, we will,” Dorothy cried, happily, “and I’m so pleased. Mamma
always is busy regatta week, and so is papa, and Bess and I just have to
look after ourselves. She’s going on the Adventure too for the race. Oh,
Polly, it’s splendid to watch them. Last year, at the finish, the
_Adventure_ and _Mermaid_ were right together, and we all stood up on
chairs, and waved flags at them, and shouted as they came down the last
stretch with every inch of canvas crowded on.”
Polly was very busy carving the watermelon in fancy fashion, so that
when it fell apart, it looked like a huge, red-hearted lily.
“Makes it taste better,” she said, judiciously. “Who won last year,
Dorothy?”
“Oh, the _Adventure_, of course. Right at the very last they crowded on
another reef—what do you call that little bit of a sail way up top on a
sloop, Polly?”
Polly shook her head.
“T’gallant something, isn’t it? That’s what the Captain calls my
eyebrows. Tarry top lights, and t’gallant eyebrows, so it must mean
something way high up.”
“Probably,” Dorothy agreed. “Anyway, they let out another reef, and the
_Adventure_ just slipped by the _Mermaid_ like a bit of down. Papa’s
boat’s a sloop. It seems to me it’s all sails. It looks like a great
gull with outspread wings when it’s going full tilt out to sea.”
“You must always speak of a ship as she or her,” corrected Bess. “Papa
called you a sandpiper for that, Dolly.”
“I don’t care,” Dorothy laughed. “I want to tell the girls about it.
There are six staterooms on it, and when the season closes up here at
Eagle Bay, we sail south to Boston, and then home. Bess and I go to
boarding-school.”
Just then Tom appeared around the west shore, holding down the _Pirate_,
while he called,
“Want anything over to Eastport?”
“Yes. Mail, potatoes and soap,” called back Polly, with a smile and wave
of her hand; then to Dorothy, as if no interruption had occurred, “We’re
going out with the Captain for a sail around the Point Light, and down
to Tarker’s Light. He said he’d take us if we behaved for a week, and we
have. Haven’t been out once in a bad wind, haven’t made any trouble at
all, so now we’re going. Why can’t you and Bess stay and have dinner
with us, though? We won’t start before two, and Aunty’s making clam pie,
Maryland style, and baked, stuffed tomatoes, and peach dumplings.”
“Oh, we’ll stay fast enough,” cried Bess, while Dorothy just smiled.
“You do have the best things to eat over here that I know anything
about. Papa says he’s coming over some day just to sample them, and find
out if it’s really true. Doctor Smith says it is; so papa can’t really
tell us out and out that we are coloring it up a little.”
“Tell him we’d be delighted to entertain him any time, and Mrs. Vaughan,
too,” exclaimed Polly, with true Southern hospitality. “We’ll have fried
sweet potatoes, and fried chicken, and corn fritters, and corn pone, all
from Aunty Welcome’s special recipes. She’ll be so proud to get up a
dinner and we’d love to have you.”
“Where’s Isabel?” asked Sue suddenly. “Did she go up to dress?”
“No, I’m up here in the hammock. I don’t want to get all freckled in
that sunlight,” came Isabel’s tones from the shadiest corner of the
porch.
“Pull her forth, girls,” ordered Polly, gaily. “She’s too exclusive. She
just wants to set herself up before us as a mirror of style, and we
won’t have it. Pull her forth, and walk her in the sun till she’s as
freckled as a cowslip. What do you think, Dorothy, this young person
wants to wear a bathing cap with a bow on the front and a ruffle around
it like an old maid’s nightcap, and she takes a bar of violet scented
soap with her into the deep blue sea when she trips down to bathe. It
once dropped like a stone down to the bottom, and she never got it.”
“‘Though lost to sight, to memory dear,’” quoted Sue; she linked arms
with Ted and sang the refrain over and over with variations, until
Isabel put her fingers in her ears and ran for the house. Suddenly the
majestic form of Aunty Welcome appeared on the porch, and waved a dish
towel at them.
“Ain’t dey nobody at all going to eat clam pie?” she called. “If you all
don’t look like a mess ob turtles burrowing in de sand, den I miss my
guess. And every one eating watermelon. Well, for de love ob cats! Miss
Polly, don’t you know you’s going ter be so freckled dat you can’t find
de jining places? You come on up out ob dat sand now, you hyar me?”
“Yes’m,” said Polly, meekly, and the rest trailed after her, for Aunty
Welcome’s word was law on Lost Island.
After dinner the Vaughan girls had to return, but the others dressed and
sat out on the steps, awaiting the Captain’s coming. The everyday suits
of blue duck had been discarded, and they had dressed in festal array to
honor the Captain. They were all in their best yachting suits of white
duck, trimmed in dark blue, with dark blue reefer jackets, and caps to
match. But before the trip was over, when the seas had swashed up
merrily over the sloop, as she keeled over to the lee-shore, they wished
they had worn the blue duck.
“What boat will he bring that can carry all of us?” asked Sue.
“Tom said the sloop,” answered Polly, as she sat up on the railing, and
re-tied Crullers’ hair bows into a semblance of neatness and taste. “It
belongs to the lighthouse keeper at the Point, but the Captain can
borrow it whenever he wants, and it’s a sea-going craft.”
“Is it, indeed?” giggled Sue. “Girls, do you notice how Commodore Polly
tosses around nautical phrases real careless-like nowadays?”
There hove into sight around the Knob, just then, the Captain and his
sloop. Nancy and Tom were aboard too, and acting as able seamen.
“Polly, I’ll get your soap and potatoes and mail to-night,” shouted Tom,
as they came within hail. “I saw Billy Clewen over at the Inlet with his
tender, and I hopped in so as to meet father at the Point, and come on
down.”
“That’s all right,” Polly responded. “Oh, girls, isn’t she handsome,” as
they watched the sloop under the Captain’s handling. Steadily, easily,
without any apparent fuss or bother, he brought her about, reefed her
sails, and left her standing, as Tom said, quiet as a lamb, without a
halter on.
“Who puts a halter on a lamb anyway, Tom?” teased Nancy. “Besides, the
_Lucy C._ has a halter on. Didn’t you see me just drop it overboard? We
can’t bring her up to the landing, Polly. She draws nine feet—”
“Seven,” corrected the Captain, as he smoked comfortably on his pet
pipe, an old briarwood whose bowl was all charred from long usage. “And
ten-foot beam.”
“How can we get aboard, then?” asked Polly.
“I’m coming after you in the ‘dink,’” Tom answered.
“Well, my land! If I ever see sech a top-heavy, lopsided thing,”
murmured Aunty Welcome. “Is you all going to trust your precious lives
out in mid ocean in sech a contrivance?”
“Don’t you fret one bit, not when we’re with Captain Carey,” Polly
laughed as she waved her hand. The last girl stepped aboard, and the
sails were hoisted. After the little spreads of canvas on their own
boats, it seemed to the girls as if the sails of the _Lucy C._ were
gigantic, but Tom and his father managed them trimly, and as the wind
filled them, they struck out across the bay with a tilt to leeward that
was delightful.
“Captain, do I walk with the right sort of roll?” asked Ted, her hands
deep in her reefer pockets, her cap on the back of her red curls, as she
stepped boldly out on the slanting deck. But the sloop dipped to a wave,
and came up with a lurch, and Ted sat down with startling suddenness.
“Well, not quite,” the Captain answered from the wheel, his blue eyes
twinkling. “You’d better get acquainted with her first. Now, you can’t
get up and do a grand march along the deck of a driving sloop. It’s
against all human nature and boat nature. You’ve got to sit tight, and
mind the sloop, and follow her moods, and get ahead of them too. A sloop
has got more moods than any boat I know of. A yawl is sort of divided in
her ways, like a widow after her second husband. She’s got one before,
and one behind, so to speak, and it steadies her a bit, but a sloop’s
sails act in close sympathy, and when one of them starts acting
kittenish, the rest follow suit.”
“How large is this one, Captain?” asked Ruth, holding to her cap, as the
wind blew freshly around her.
“About forty foot, more or less. Her draught’s seven foot.”
“Why here we are to the channel already,” Polly sang out, as they
slipped past Smugglers’ Cove, and could see the view out to sea around
the Point. The doctor was sitting down on the landing fishing; fishing
tranquilly, in his own way. There were lines hanging all around him,
fastened to the planks with an invention of his own, by which a little
bell rang every time a fish took the bait. Placidly he sat there, his
hat tilted forward to shield his eyes, and a pile of magazines beside
him betraying his real occupation. The girls called and called to him;
at last he looked up and waved to them.
As they rounded the Point the wind freshened considerably. It was
glorious to sail with the sharp bow cutting the water like a knife, and
throwing up great clouds of spray that drenched the girls like an April
shower as the head wind threw it back on them. Overhead the canvas
tugged until the rigging sang a tune all its own.
Ted and Sue were singing at the tops of their voices, arms linked
closely, backed up against what Crullers called “the high side of her.”
The others joined in the choruses, except Polly, who stood beside the
Captain at the wheel. There was a look in her dark eyes that matched his
own, as she half closed them in the face of the wind, a look out at the
open sea they both loved well. Once the Captain turned his head, and
smiled down at her, as if to let her know he understood her feelings
exactly, and he let her help with the jib several times, while he and
Tom managed the main sail, and Nancy held her steady on her course at
the little pilot wheel.
“It’s ever so much rougher out here than it is in the bay, isn’t it?”
Isabel called faintly, but the wind drowned her voice, and she sat
huddled up on a locker with her coat turned up around her ears, for all
the world like a ship’s cat in a storm, Tom said.
Tarker’s Light was about five miles down the west shore towards
Portland. The seas were longer and heavier than those on the bay, but
the sloop rode them easily, and only shipped one big green fellow, as
the Captain tacked south of the Light, and cut across back towards home.
It splashed up over the deck house, and caught Isabel and the rest
fairly, until they shrieked. Polly and Nancy escaped, for they were with
the Captain, and they rounded the big bell buoy out in mid channel that
clanked a warning note as if it had a cold in its head, Sue said.
It was after five when they came up to the Life Saving Station on the
Point, and stood by handsomely while Billy Clewen, the keeper, came out
in a dory and took off the girls.
“I’m thinking that I’ll send you home by the shore road, with Tom and a
lantern,” said the Captain, as they walked up the beach towards the low
wooden buildings that nestled among the great hummocks of sand at the
Point. “I’m on the eight to twelve watch to-night, and I can walk a ways
with you myself, but the wind’s dropped down with the sun, and there’ll
hardly be a puff to carry you back by water.”
“How lonesome it looks out here,” said Polly, standing on one of the
sand dunes, and gazing around her. The Point of the Sickle came down to
what Tom called a mere “spit of sand.” There were few rocks out there,
except for the reef that lay east of the channel, towards the east
shore. On the Point there was just a long, low stretch of sand, with
great circling combers flowing in ceaselessly, breaking one above
another on the long, shallow shingle. Dark green they were underneath,
then lighter, and lighter, as the sunlight shot them through with
rainbow hues, and last of all the curling plumes of spray tossed on
their crests.
“Isn’t it all pretty,” cried Ruth, her cheeks turning pink as she ran to
Polly’s side. “Don’t you know some place in Kipling where he tells about
the white horses of the sea? Oh, Polly, I love it all so. I never saw
the real ocean before. I mean to stand on a shore, and look out and out
and out on just waves, and know that there’s no land for a thousand
miles.”
“Farther than that,” said Polly. “I think it’s beautiful.”
“So it is, so it is, now,” agreed the Captain, “but ’tain’t so pretty in
the winter, when the ice piles up, and the sleet beats you half down to
the ground, when you try to fight your way in its face.”
“Do you have to patrol all night long on the beach?” Polly asked, in her
earnest, compassionate way.
“Well, no. We take it in watches. One watch leaves about sunset, and
they travel two miles to the half-way house over yonder, and they meet
the next watch, and so it goes through the night.”
“What’s the name of that queer light they carry around their necks?”
asked Crullers. “It explodes, I think.”
“That’s the Coston light,” said the Captain. “I’ll show you some when we
get inside the station. We don’t use them unless there’s a ship in
danger at night. It’s to let the crew know they have been seen and help
will be sent. There’s a spring you tap, and a percussion cap explodes
that sets fire to the red light. Last spring, along the first of April,
we got the tail end of a gale that had traveled all along the coast, and
still had spunk enough to run a schooner on the reef yonder. We saw her
beating her way down about sunset. Lumber boat she was, bound for
Boston. I says then to Billy Clewen over at the Light that she’d never
get by the Point. So we was looking out for her, but the crew were all
Gloucester boys, and they wouldn’t give up till she’d struck fair and
square.”
“Then what?” Polly’s dark, straight brows drew together anxiously. She
looked out at the reef that showed its teeth about the incoming tide.
“We lost two of them,” said the Captain. “They was brothers, poor
laddies. They came ashore two and a half miles below here. But we took
off the rest.”
“Oh, I think it’s terrible, all the wrecks there are,” exclaimed Ruth,
tensely. “Death seems so useless when it’s an accident.”
“Well, I’m thinking there ain’t anything that happens under the sun you
can call useless,” rejoined the old sailor, placidly.
Polly began to sing, her voice rising clear and high on the breeze that
blew up from the west, as the sun went down.
“Three fishers went sailing out into the west,
Out into the west as the sun went down,
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,
And the children stood watching them out of the town.
For men must work and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.”
“Oh, Polly, don’t, please,” cried Ruth and Isabel together. “It makes
the cold chills run down your back.”
“Well, now, I never feel that way about it,” said the Captain,
contentedly. “Our times are in His hands, do you mind? Our times are in
His hands. Don’t you ever forget that. When I was a youngster like you
girls and Tom here, I used to reason along those lines too, and I’d be
hoping I’d die this way and that way, and I’d be wishing for a chariot
and some angels. Well, now it rests me to feel that I’m going to tread
the same gangway as the rest, and my Captain is counting on me to stand
faithful to my articles. I’ve a pretty good notion this dying business
isn’t so troublesome as folks think. I’ve picked up a good many poor
lads along the shore, and not one of them looked worried. Some were sort
of smiling. It’s real comforting, if you look at it sensibly.”
The girls remembered that sunset hour all their lives. There was nothing
exciting about the quiet station, nor the lighthouse out on the Point,
although they did find the keeper, Billy Clewen, very kind. He was a
little old man about seventy-four, but everybody along the shore called
him Billy Clewen. One thing that he told them the girls thought very
pathetic. He said in bad weather the sea birds would see the light and
would fly to it, and beat their lives out against the heavy glass,
seeking shelter from a storm.
“Were you ever in danger out here, Mr. Clewen?” asked Isabel, whose mind
always drifted towards romance.
“Just call me Billy, miss,” answered the old fellow, happily, as he
followed them out into the neat garden, with its paling fence half
buried in sand. “I can’t just say as I was, and I can’t just say as I
wasn’t, nuther. It’s about ten years ago, and my wife was alive. Her
father used to be lighthouse tender before I come here, and she was born
in this house. And that winter I come down sick with pneumony. Pretty
bad sick I was, too, pretty bad sick. Sally, she had to turn in and trim
the lamps and see they was lighted up on time, and look after me
besides, and she was sorter tangled up herself with sciatic rheumatiz,
and if the ile didn’t give out on top of it all.”
“The what, Billy?” asked Crullers, innocently.
“Ile, ile, what we put into the lamps. Anyhow, I remembered it the last
thing, and told her the boys at the station would help her. There was a
nor’wester a-blowing round this Point that would have picked up an ocean
liner, and played ball with it, and the snow a-banking up around us like
sand dunes. I didn’t think Sally would weather it, but she started off.
The fever had me tight, but I held my course and when it grew dark and
no Sally, up I gets out of bed, and crept along on my hands and knees to
the passageway that leads to the tower, and that’s where the Captain
found me when he came to fill the lamps and light ’em up.”
“How did he know?” asked Polly, eagerly.
“He knew I was sick, and he was bringing me over some medicine Mis’
Carey fixed up for me, and he found Sarah in a drift, half-way between
the Station and this here fence, half froze, but he had the ile, Lord
bless your hearts, he had the ile, and he set the light burning.”
“Avast there, Billy,” shouted the Captain over his shoulder. “Are you
spinning that there oil yarn to those poor children?”
“I am, Cap, I am,” laughed Billy. “And I’ll spin it to Saint Peter too,
when I stop to rest a bit by the gates of pearl, if he’ll give me an
ear, just to let him know you’re coming.”