Among all the memories of my boyhood in Urkey Island the story of Mary
Matheson and the Blake boys comes back to me now, more than any other,
with the sense of a thing seen in a glass darkly. And the darkness of
the glass was my own adolescence.
I know that now, and I'm sorry. I'm ashamed to find myself suspecting
that half of Mary Matheson's mature beauty in my eyes may have been
romance, and half the romance mystery, and half of that the unsettling
discovery that the other sex does not fade at seventeen and wither quite
away at twenty, as had been taken somehow for granted. I'm glad there is
no possibility of meeting her again as she was at thirty, and so making
sure: I shall wish to remember her as the boy of sixteen saw her that
night waiting in the dunes above the wreck of the "India ship," with
Rolldown Nickerson bleating as he fled from the small, queer casket of
polished wood he had flung on the sand, and the bridegroom peering out
of the church window, over the moors in Urkey Village.
The thing began when I was too young to make much of it yet, a wonder of
less than seven days among all the other bright, fragmentary wonders of
a boy's life at six. Mainly I remember that Mary Matheson was a fool;
every one in Urkey Village was saying that.
I can't tell how long the Blake boys had been courting her. I came too
late to see anything but the climax of that unbrotherly tournament, and
only by grace of the hundredth chance of luck did I witness even one act
of that.
I was coming home one autumn evening just at dusk, loitering up the cow
street from the eastward where the big boys had been playing "Run,
Sheep, Run," and I watching from the vantage of Aunt Dee Nickerson's
hen-house and getting whacked when I told. And I had come almost to the
turning into Drugstore Lane when the sound of a voice fetched me up, all
eyes and ears, against the pickets of the Matheson place.
It was the voice of my cousin Duncan, the only father I ever knew. He
was constable of Urkey Village, and there was something in the voice as
I heard it in the yard that told you why.
"Drop it, Joshua! Drop it, or by heavens----!"
Of Duncan I could see only the back, large and near. But the faces of
the others were plain to my peep-hole between the pickets, or as plain
as might be in the falling dusk. The sky overhead was still bright, but
the blue shadow of the bluff lay all across that part of the town, and
it deepened to a still bluer and cooler mystery under the apple-tree
canopy sheltering the dooryard. I never see that light to this day, a
high gloaming sifted through leaves on turf, without the faintest memory
of a shiver. For that was the first I had even known of anger, the still
and deadly anger of grown men.
My cousin had spoken to Joshua Blake, and I saw that Joshua held a
pistol in his hand, the old, single-ball dueling weapon that had
belonged to his father. His face was white, and the pallor seemed to
refine still further the blade-like features of the Blake, the aquiline
nose, the sloping, patrician forehead, the narrow lip, blue to the
pressure of the teeth.
That was Joshua. Andrew, his brother, stood facing him three or four
paces away. He was the younger of the two, the less favored, the more
sensitive.
He had what no other Blake had had, a suspicion of freckle on his high,
flat cheek. And he had what no one else in Urkey had then, a brace of
gold teeth, the second and third to the left in the upper jaw, where Lem
White's boom had caught him, jibing off the Head. They showed now as the
slowly working lip revealed them, glimmering with a moist, dull sheen.
He, too, was white.
His hands were empty, hanging down palms forward. But in his eyes there
was no look of the defenseless: only a light of passionate contempt.
And between the two, and beyond them, as I looked, stood Mary, framed by
the white pillars of the doorway, her hands at her throat and her long
eyes dilated with a girl's fright more precious than exultation. So the
three remained in tableau while, as if on another planet, the dusk
deepened from moment to moment: Gramma Pilot, two yards away, brought
supper to her squealing sow; and further off, out on the waning mirror
of the harbor, a conch lowed faintly for some schooner's bait.
* * * * *
"Drop it, Joshua!" Duncan's voice came loud and clear.
And this time, following the hush, it seemed to exercise the devil of
quietude. I heard Mary's breath between her lips, and saw Andrew wheel
sharply to pick a scale from the tree-trunk with a thumb-nail. Joshua's
eyes went down to the preposterous metal in his hand; he shivered
slightly like a dreamer awakening and thrust it in his pocket. And then,
seeing Duncan turning toward the fence and me, I took the better part of
valor and ran, and saw no more.
There were serious men in town that night when it was known what a pass
the thing had come to; men that walked and women that talked. It was all
Mary's fault. Long ago she ought to have taken one of them and "sent the
other packing." That's what Miah White said, sitting behind the stove in
our kitchen over the shop; that's what Duncan thought as he paced back
and forth, shaking his head. That's what they were all saying or
thinking as they sat or wandered about.
Such are the difficulties of serious men. And even while it all went on,
Mary Matheson had gone about her choosing in the way that seemed fit to
youth. In the warm-lit publicity of Miss Alma Beedie's birthday-party,
shaking off so soon the memory of that brief glint of pistol-play under
the apple-trees, she took a fantastic vow to marry the one that brought
her the wedding-ring--promised with her left hand on Miss Beedie's
album and her right lifted toward the allegorical print of the Good
Shepherd that the one who, first across the Sound to the jeweler's at
Gillyport and back again, fetched her the golden-ring--that he should be
her husband "for better or for worse, till death us do part, and so
forth and so on, Amen!"
And those who were there remembered afterwards that while Joshua stood
his ground and laughed and clapped with the best of them, his brother
Andrew left the house. They said his face was a sick white, and that he
looked back at Mary for an instant from the doorway with a curious, hurt
expression in his eyes, as if to say, "Is it only a game to you then?
And if it's only a game, is it worth the candle?" They remembered it
afterward, I say; long afterward.
They thought he had gone out for just a moment; that presently he would
return to hold up his end of the gay challenge over the cakes and
cordial. But to that party Andrew Blake never returned. Their first hint
of what was afoot they had when Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber,
came running in, shining with the wet of the autumn gale that began that
night. He wanted Joshua to look out for his brother. Being innocent of
what had happened at the party, he thought Andrew had gone out of his
head.
"Here I come onto him in the lee of White's wharf putting a compass into
the old man's sail-dory, and I says to him, 'What you up to, Andrew?'
And he says with a kind of laugh, 'Oh, taking a little sail for other
parts,' says he--like that. Now, just imagine, Josh, with this here
weather coming on--all hell bu'sting loose to the north'rd!"
* * * * *
They say that there came a look into Joshua's eyes that none of them had
ever seen before. He stood there for a moment, motionless and silent,
and Rolldown, deceived by his attitude, was at him again.
"You don't realize, man, or else you'd stop him!"
"Oh, I'll _stop_ him!" It was hardly above a breath.
"I'll _stop_ him!" And throwing his greatcoat over his shoulders, Joshua
went out.
You may believe that the house would not hold the party after that.
Whispering, giggling, shivering, the young people trooped down Heman
Street to the shore. And there, under the phantom light of a moon hidden
by the drift of storm-clouds, they found Andrew gone and all they saw of
Joshua was a shadow--a shadow in black frock-clothes--wading away from
them over the half-covered flats, deeper and deeper, to where the Adams
sloop rode at her moorings, a shade tailing in the wind. They called,
but he did not answer, and before they could do anything he had the sail
up, and he, too, was gone, into the black heart of the night.
It is lonesome in the dark for a boy of six when the floor heaves and
the bed shivers and over his head the shingles make a sound in the wind
like the souls of all the lost men in the world. The hours from two till
dawn that night I spent under the table in the kitchen, where Miah White
and his brother Lem had come to talk with Duncan. And among the three of
them, all they could say was "My heavens! My heavens!" I say till dawn;
but our kitchen might have given on a city air-shaft for all the dawn we
got.
It is hard to give any one who has lived always in the shelter of the
land an idea of the day that followed, hour by waiting hour--how folks
walked the beaches and did not look at each other in passing, and how
others, climbing the bluff to have a better sight of the waters beyond
the Head, found themselves blinded by the smother at fifty yards and yet
still continued to stare.
Of them all, that day, Mary Matheson was the only one who kept still.
And she was as still as an image. Standing half-hidden in the untidy
nook behind the grocery, she remained staring out through the harbor
mists from dawn till another heavy night came down, and no one can say
whether she would have gone home then had not the appalled widow, her
mother, slipped down between the houses to take her.
She was at home, at any rate, when Joshua Blake came back.
After all that waiting and watching, no one saw him land on the
battered, black beach, for it was in the dead hour of the morning; of
the three persons who are said to have met him on his way to Mary's, two
were so tardy with their claims that a doubt has been cast on them. I do
believe, tho, that Mother Polly Freeman, the west-end midwife, saw him
and spoke with him in the light thrown from the drug-store window
(where, had I only known enough to be awake, I might have looked down on
them from my bed-room and got some fame of my own).
She says she thought at first he was a ghost come up from the bottom of
the sea, with his clothes plastered thin to his body, weed in his hair,
and his face drawn and creased like fish-flesh taken too soon out of the
pickle. Afterward, when he spoke, she thought he was crazy.
"I've got it!" he said, taking hold of her arm. Opening a blue hand he
held it out in the light for her to see the ring that had bitten his
palm with the grip. "See, I've got it, Mother Poll!" She says it was
hardly more than a whisper, like a secret, and that there was a look in
his eyes as if he had seen the Devil face to face.
She meant to run when he let her go, but when she saw him striding off
toward Mary Matheson's her better wisdom prevailed; following along the
lane and taking shelter behind Gramma Pilot's fence, she waited,
watched, and listened, to the enduring gain of Urkey's sisterhood.
She used to tell it well, Mother Poll. Remembering her tale now, I think
I can see the earth misting under the trees in the calm dawn, and hear
Joshua's fist pounding, pounding, on the panels of the door.
It must have been queer for Mother Poll. For while she heard that hollow
pounding under the portico, like the pounding of a heart in some deep
bosom of horror--all the while she could see Mary herself in an upper
window--just her face resting on one cold, still forearm on the sill.
And her eyes, Mother Poll says, were enough to make one pity her.
It was strange that she was so lazy, not to move or to speak in answer
while the summons of the triumphant lover went on booming through the
lower house. _He_ must have wondered. Perhaps it was then that the
first shadow of the ghost of doubt crept over him, or perhaps it was
when, stepping out on the turf, he raised his eyes and discovered Mary's
face in the open window.
He said nothing. But with a wide, uncontrolled gesture he held up the
ring for her to see. After a moment she opened her lips.
"Where's Andrew?"
That seemed to be the last straw: a feverish anger laid hold of him.
"Here's the ring! You see it! Damnation, Mary! You gave your word and I
took it, and God knows what I've been through. Now come! Get your things
on and bring your mother if you like--but to Minister Malden's you go
with me _now_! You hear Mary? I'll not wait!"
"Where's Andrew?"
"Andrew? Andrew? Why the devil do you keep on asking for Andrew? What's
_Andrew_ to you--now?"
"Where is he?"
"Mary, you're a fool!"
Her voice grew if anything more monotonous; his, higher and wilder.
"You're a fool," he cried again, "if you don't know where Andrew is."
"He's gone."
"Gone, yes! And how you can say it like that, so calm--God!"
"I knew he was going," she said. "He told Rolldown he was going to other
parts. But I knew it before that--when he turned at the door and looked
at me, Joshua. He said it as plain: 'If _that's_ love,' he said, 'then
I'm going off somewhere and forget it, and never come back to Urkey any
more.'"
The deadness went out of her voice, and it lifted to another note.
"Joshua, he's got to come back, for I can't bear it. I gave you my word,
and I'll marry you--when Andrew comes back to stand at the wedding. He's
got to--_got_ to!"
Mother Poll said that Joshua stared at her--simply stood there and
stared up at her in the queer, cold dawn, his mouth hanging open as if
with a kind of horror. Sweat shone on his face. Turning away without a
word by and by he laid an uncertain course for the gate, and leaving it
open behind him went off through the vapors of the cow street to the
east.
As they carried him along step by step, I think, the feet of the cheated
gambler grew heavier and heavier, his shoulders collapsed, the head,
with the memory in it he could never lose, hung down, and hell received
his soul.
It is impossible in so short a space to tell what the next ten years did
to those two. It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for
in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there
is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the
only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses are made of
glass.
In a city public opinion is mighty, but devious. In a village,
especially in an island village, it is as direct and violent as any "act
of God" written down in a ship's insurance papers. A word carries far
over the fences, and where it drops, like a swelling seed, a dozen words
spring up.
"It's a shame, Milly, a living shame, as sure's you're alive."
"You never said truer, Belle. As if 'twa'n't enough she should send Andy
to his death o' drownding----"
"Well, I hope she's satisfied, what she's done for Joshua. I saw him to
the post-office last evening, and the hang-dog look of him----"
"Yes, I saw him, too. A man can't stand being made a fool of...."
So, in the blue of a wash-day morning the words went winging back and
forth between the blossoming lines. Or, in a Winter dusk up to the
westward, where old Mrs. Paine scuttled about under the mackerel-twine
of her chicken-pen:
"Land alive, it's all very well to talk Temp'rance, and I'm not denying
it'd be a mercy for some folks--I ain't mentioning no names--not even
Miah White's. But, land sakes how you going to talk Temp'rance to a man
bereft and be-fooled like Joshua Blake? Where's your rime-nor-reason?
Where's your argument?"
Or there came Miah White himself up our outside stair on the darkest
evening of our Spring weather, and one glance at his crimson face was
enough to tell what all the Temperance they had preached to _him_ had
come to. Miah turned to the bottle as another man might to prayer.
"By the Lord!" he protested thickly. "Something's got to be done!"
"Done? About what?" I remember my cousin peering curiously at him
through the smoke and spatter of the sausage he was frying.
"About Josh, of course, and _her_. I tell you, Dunc, 'tain't right, and
I'll not bear it. I'll not see Josh, same as I seen him this night,
standing there in the dark of the outside beach and staring at the water
like a sleep-walker, staring and staring as if he'd stare right through
it and down to the bottom of the sea where his brother lay, and saying
to himself, _Who's to pay the bill? Who's to pay the bill?_ No, siree!
You and I are young fellows, Dunc, but we ain't so young we can't
remember them boys' father, and I guess he done a thing or two for us,
eh?"
"Yes," Duncan agreed calmly. "But what's to be done?"
"God knows! But look here, Dunc, you're constable, ain't you?"