"My imagination is stirred sufficiently here. You know that I detest
crowds, and parades. And I was going to plant again to-morrow."
She sighed softly, and smiled adorably. "Well, Adam, plant then. I knew
it would bore you to go. The middle of a crowd watching a parade is no
place for you. I should love to have you with me, but I think you had
better not come. I don't want _you_ to cry." And she laughed a little,
unsteadily.
"I might," I said somewhat gruffly. "It is conceivable. But there is
one thing. I hate to speak of it. Your father ought not to go off on
these long trips any more without a chauffeur. There may be hard work to
do, and he is--not young, Eve. Besides--"
"He is going to take a chauffeur," said Eve, interrupting me hurriedly.
"I think it almost breaks his heart to acknowledge it, but he realizes
that he ought to. Of course that wouldn't make any difference about your
going."
I shook my head. It was no part of my objection that I might be called
upon to do some hard work. I had planned to do a good deal of hard work
at home.
So Eve set off about eleven the next morning alone with her father and
the chauffeur. Old Goodwin was in the driver's seat, and it did not seem
likely that the chauffeur would have anything to do. And I stood in my
garden clothes, leaning on my hoe, and waved a good-bye to them, feeling
half regretful and wholly self-reproachful; and Eve made her father
stop, and she called me, and I came running, and she leaned out and
kissed me, and she went off smiling. I looked after them, and they had
not gone more than a hundred yards or so when they stopped again, and
Tom Ellis and Cecily came out of their door and got into the back seat
with Eve. And I smiled, and turned, and went back to my garden, thinking
that the best of women--and I gave a little start, for it had occurred
to me that the chauffeur was a Frenchman. And I wondered if they--but
of course they did. Such things do not happen by accident--with Old
Goodwin and Eve.
It was cold for the season. It had been cold and wet for three weeks,
and my corn was not up, nor my melons that I had put in three weeks
before, nor my beans. My experiment with melons has not yet been a
failure if it has not been a success this year. I was doubtful about the
corn, so I dug up a kernel, and I found it sprouted, and I put it back
and covered it. My peas were up, and doing bravely, and the beans were
about breaking through, for the earth was cracked all along the rows.
And I got out my sections of stout wire fencing, and put them in place
along the rows of peas. They take the place of pea-brush, and are much
easier to put up and to take down. The fencing is fastened to stout
posts, and the posts have pieces of iron, about a foot and a half long,
shaped much like a marlin-spike, bolted to them for driving into the
ground. I can take my sledgehammer and drive the posts, and get a row of
peas wired in a tenth the time needed to set brush, and the fencing is
much less expensive, in the long run. My fences have done service for
thirteen years already, and they are perfectly good.
So I fussed around among the peas, and planted more corn and more beans,
and more melons, and a row of chard, and two rows of okra, and some
other things. I often think that the place for tall green okra is the
flower garden. The blossoms are beautiful, delicate things, more
beautiful than most of the hollyhocks. And now and then I stopped my
planting--a man has to rest his back--and I leaned on my hoe or my rake
or whatever I happened to have in my hand, and I thought my thoughts.
They were many, and they were not, at such moments, of my planting.
The harbor was almost empty still. There was but one fisherman's boat
and two motor boats, little fellows, not suited to patrolling. And the
sky was gray, and getting darker, and the winter gulls flying across,
and wheeling and screaming harshly. Occasionally a gull beat across my
garden, flying low and screaming his harsh note. I watched them, and
envied them until I saw a fish-hawk sailing high up among the clouds.
Then I envied him: his calmness and serenity, and his powers of wing and
eye, seeing the swimming fish from that height, and perfectly secure.
Then, naturally enough, I thought of aeroplanes, sailing and circling
like the great hawk, and seeing their prey as surely as he. I never had
the slightest wish to go up in an aeroplane. The hawk seems secure in
his sailing, the aeroplane does not, and I may envy the hawk while
shrinking unaccountably from the aeroplane. But if they can see the
submarine from up there, and can pounce upon it as surely as the hawk
strikes his fish--well, if we had a plague of submarines, it would be a
comfort to see a hawk now and then. And I thought of Jimmy Wales and
Bobby Leverett and Ogilvie searching the waters for that which was not.
Jimmy has put in here every few days. It is hard to see why, but we have
seen a good deal of Ogilvie and Bobby, and Bobby has seen more or less
of Elizabeth Radnor. She is still rather a mystery to me, a girl that
Mrs. Goodwin chanced upon somewhere, and took a great fancy to. That is
not strange, that Miss Radnor should have been fancied, but it is
strange that Mrs. Goodwin should have taken the fancy, and that she
should have asked her here for an indefinite stay. Mrs. Goodwin did not
use to fancy obscure teachers of athletics or gymnastics or dancing in
girls' schools, and Miss Radnor is or was something of the kind. She may
be giving lessons in dancing to Mrs. Goodwin for all I know--or to
Bobby. It is not of much consequence. If Bobby should really come upon
submarines, it would be of little consequence to him.
Thinking upon submarines, there came into my head the account that I had
just seen in the London "Times" of the capture of a submarine by a
trawler. As I recollect it, the trawler was going about her business in
the North Sea--a business not unconnected with submarines--when suddenly
a submarine began to emerge from the deep just ahead. The trawler put on
all the speed she had time for, and rammed the submarine amidships,
sliding up on its body half her length, so that the captain found
himself well-nigh stranded near the periscope. Whereupon he called for
an axe, and smashed that periscope into scrap iron and fragments of
glass. The trawler then slid off, and the submarine opened, and the crew
poured forth upon her deck and forthwith surrendered, and the trawler
towed them into an English port. Thinking upon this, I laughed aloud to
the gulls and the hawk. I had refrained from going to Boston to have my
imagination stirred by looking at a parade and listening to the bands!
To stir my imagination! I had but to picture to myself the destroyer
fight in the Channel on the night of April 20, two English destroyers,
Swift and Broke, against six German destroyers, in the darkness of a
black night; a five-minute battle, but those five minutes crowded full.
Ramming, torpedoing, repelling boarders, fighting with pistols and
cutlases and bayonets, responding to a treacherous call to save--it was
all worthy of the times of Drake. Stir my imagination! I found myself
starting forward and brandishing the hoe, my breath coming fast, and my
eyes, I have no doubt, flashing fire. I laughed again. It was raining.
It had been raining, I suppose, for five minutes at least, and I had not
known it. I gathered up my tools, put them in the shed, and went into
the house to change my clothes, and to consume my pint of milk, while my
daughter, opposite me, consumed hers--and some other things besides.
After luncheon I put on my rubber boots and went out. It was still
raining, a good hard drizzle from the southeast. It suited me well
enough, and I wandered the shores all the afternoon, or stood in the
shelter of a tree and looked out over the bay. I liked it. There is
something soothing and at the same time stirring in such a day and such
a place. There was a good heavy breeze, and the seas marched, and the
sound of their breaking, and the fresh wet wind on my cheek, and the
gray veil of rain over the rolling water, with not a sail or so much as
a smudge of smoke in sight--well, it is hardly worth while to say how it
affects me. Those who feel as I do will not need to be told, and for
those who do not it would be useless. But man seems a little thing, and
the affairs of man of no importance--absolutely none.
As the afternoon wore on, the drizzle became less and finally stopped,
although it was still gray. And then the clouds began to break, and I
wandered homeward along the shore, and I climbed the steep path, and sat
me on the seat under my great pine, where I could see the water and the
sun when he was ready to show his face. A long time I sat there, and I
heard no sound from the harbor except the screams of the gulls, and no
sound from the land except the sound of the wind blowing among the
needles of the pine above my head. And at last the gulls were gone, and
the sun peeped out from under the edge of the ragged and scudding cloud,
and I felt a gentle touch upon my arm. And I turned my head and looked,
and there was Pukkie; Pukkie, my little son, my well-beloved.
I put both arms around him, and I hugged him shamelessly. I was glad to
feel that he hugged me in turn, and hugged me hard. Usually I put my arm
around him gently and surreptitiously, for I would not draw his
attention to the act. I dread the time when he will shrink from my
embraces; but that time does not seem to have come yet.
"Oh, Pukkie!" I cried. "My dear little son, where in the world did you
come from?"
He laughed delightedly. "From school," he said; and he nestled against
me.
"But how did you get here? Your mother went--but have you seen her?
Where is she?"