I shall never forget Lily May’s expression when she saw Tish trying on
the knickerbockers which are her usual wear when in the open.
“Oh, I wouldn’t!” she said in a sort of wail.
“Why not?” Tish demanded tartly. “At least they cover me, which is more
than I can say of some of your clothes.”
“But they’re not--not feminine,” said Lily May, and Tish stared at her.
“Feminine!” she said. “The outdoors is not a matter of sex. Thank God,
the sea is sexless; so are the rocks and trees.”
“But the people----”
“There will be no people,” said Tish with an air of finality.
The next few days were busy ones. Tish had immediately, on learning
that the New England coast has several varieties of fish, decided that
we could combine change and isolation with fishing for the market.
“Save for the cost of the bait,” she said, “which should be immaterial,
there is no expense involved. The sea is still free, although the
bootleggers seem to think they own it. But I do not intend to profit by
this freedom. The money thus earned will go to foreign missions.”
She bought a book on New England fish, and spent a long time studying
it. Then she went to our local fish market and secured a list of prices.
“With any luck,” she said, “we should catch a hundred pounds or so
a day. At sixty cents a pound, that’s sixty dollars, or we’ll say
thirty-six hundred dollars for the summer. There may be a bad day now
and then.”
Mr. Ostermaier, our clergyman, was greatly impressed, and felt that the
money should perhaps go toward a new organ. Tish, however, held out for
missions, and in the end they compromised on a kitchen for the parish
house.
Toward the end, Lily May began to take more interest in our
preparations. At first she had been almost indifferent, observing that
any old place would do, and the sooner the better.
“It will give you something to do,” Tish told her severely.
“So would a case of hives,” she replied, and lapsed again into the
lethargy which Tish found so trying.
But, as I have said, she cheered up greatly before our departure, and
we all felt much encouraged. She never spoke to us of Billy Field, but
she had made Hannah a confidante, and Hannah told Aggie that it was
apparently off.
“It’s this way, Miss Aggie,” she said. “He’s got to earn a thousand
dollars this summer, one way or another, and I guess he’s about as
likely to do it as you are to catch a whale.”
Perhaps it was significant, although I did not think of it at the time,
that Aggie did catch a whale later on; and that indeed our troubles
began with that unlucky incident.
But Lily May became really quite cheery as the time for departure
approached, and we began to grow very much attached to her, although
she inadvertently got us into a certain amount of trouble on the train
going up.
She had brought along a pack of cards, and taught us a game called cold
hands, a curious name, but a most interesting idea. One is dealt five
cards, and puts a match in the center of the table. Then one holds
up various combinations, such as pairs, three of a kind, and so on,
and draws again. Whoever has the best hand at the end takes all the
matches.
Tish, I remember, had all the matches in front of her, and rang for the
porter to bring a fresh box. But when he came back the conductor came
along and said gambling was not allowed.
“Gambling!” Tish said. “Gambling! Do you suppose I would gamble on this
miserable railroad of yours, when at any moment I may have to meet my
Creator?”
“If it isn’t gambling, what is it?”
And then Lily May looked up at him sweetly and said, “Now run away and
don’t tease, or mamma spank.”
That is exactly what she said. And instead of reproving her that
wretched conductor only grinned at her and went away. What, as Tish
says, can one do with a generation which threatens an older and wiser
one with corporal punishment?
We had telegraphed ahead for a motor boat to meet us and take us over
to Paris Island, and we found it waiting; quite a handsome boat named
the Swallow, a name which Tish later observed evidently did not refer
to the bird of that sort, but to other qualities it possessed.
“Swallow!” she snorted. “It’s well named. The thing tried to swallow
the whole Atlantic Ocean.”
It was in charge of a young fisherman named Christopher Columbus
Jefferson Spudd.
“It sounds rather like a coal bucket falling down the cellar stairs,”
said Lily May, giving him a cold glance.
And indeed he looked very queer. He had a nice face and a good figure,
but his clothes were simply horrible. He wore a checked suit with
a short coat, very tight at the waist, and pockets with buttons on
everywhere. And he had a baby-blue necktie and a straw hat with a fancy
ribbon on it, and too small for his head.
Lily May put her hand up as if he dazzled her, and said, “What do we
call you if we want you? If we ever do,” she added unpleasantly.
“Just call me anything you like, miss,” he said with a long look at
her, “and I’ll come running. I kind of like Christopher myself.”
“You would!” said Lily May, and turned her back on him.
But, as Tish said that night, we might as well employ him as anyone
else.
“Do what we will,” she said, “we might as well recognize the fact that
the presence of Lily May is to the other sex what catnip is to a cat.
It simply sets them rolling. And,” she added, “if it must be somebody,
better Christopher, who is young and presumably unattached, than an
older man with a wife and children. Besides, his boat is a fast one,
and we shall lose no time getting to and from the fishing grounds.”
We therefore decided to retain Christopher and the Swallow, although
the price, two hundred and fifty dollars a month, seemed rather high.
“We do not need Christopher,” she said, “but if we must take him with
the boat we must. He can chop wood and so on.”
We spent the next day getting settled. The island was a small one, with
only a few fishermen’s houses on it, and Tish drew a sigh of relief.
“No man except Christopher,” she said to me. “And she detests him. And
who can be small in the presence of the Atlantic Ocean? She will go
back a different girl, Lizzie. Already she is less selfish. I heard
her tell Hannah to-night, referring to Christopher, to ‘feed the brute
well.’ There was true thoughtfulness behind that.”
Christopher, of course, ate in the kitchen.
It was the next morning that Tish called him in from the woodpile and
asked him about the size of codfish.
“Codfish?” he said. “Well, now, I reckon they’d run a pound or so.”
“A pound or so?” Tish demanded indignantly. “There is one in the
natural history museum at home that must weigh sixty pounds.”
“Oh, well,” he said, “if you’re talking about museum pieces, there are
whales around here that weigh pretty considerable. But you take the run
of cod, the oil variety, and you get ’em all sizes. Depends on their
age,” he added.
Tish says that she knew then that he was no fisherman, but it was not
for several days that he told her his story.
“I am not exactly a fisherman,” he said. “I can run a boat all right,
so you needn’t worry, but in the winter I clerk in a shoe store in
Bangor, Maine. But there is no career in the shoe business, especially
on a commission basis. In New England the real money goes to the
half-sole-and-heel people.”
“I suppose that’s so,” said Tish. “I never thought of it.”
“Then,” he went on, “you take automobiles. Did you ever think how
they’ve hurt the sale of shoes? Nobody walks. Folks that used to buy a
pair of shoes every year have dropped clean off my list. The tailors
are getting my business.”
“Tailors?” Tish asked.
“Putting new seats in trousers,” he said gloomily, and stalked away.
The boat, he told us later, belonged to his uncle, who was a tailor.
But he was not tailoring at present. As a matter of fact, he was at
the moment in the state penitentiary, and that was how Christopher had
the Swallow.
“He took to bootlegging on the side,” he explained.
“It was a sort of natural evolution, as you may say. He noticed the
wear and tear on hip pockets from carrying flasks, and it seized on his
imagination.” He mopped discouragedly at the boat, in which we were
about to go on our first fishing trip, and sighed. “Many a case of good
hard liquor has run the revenue blockade in this,” he said.
“Well, there will be no liquor run in it while I’m renting it,” said
Tish firmly.