CONSTANCE SHERRILL
In the morning a great change had come over the lake. The wind still
blew freshly, but no longer fiercely, from the west; and now, from
before the beach beyond the drive, and from the piers and breakwaters
at the harbor mouth, and from all the western shore, the ice had
departed. Far out, a nearly indiscernible white line marked the
ice-floe where it was traveling eastward before the wind; nearer, and
with only a gleaming crystal fringe of frozen snow clinging to the
shore edge, the water sparkled, blue and dimpling, under the morning
sun; multitudes of gulls, hungry after the storm, called to one another
and circled over the breakwaters, the piers, and out over the water as
far as the eye could see; and a half mile off shore, a little work
boat--a shallop twenty feet long--was put-put-ing on some errand along
a path where twelve hours before no horsepower creatable by man could
have driven the hugest steamer.
Constance Sherrill, awakened by the sunlight reflected from the water
upon her ceiling, found nothing odd or startling in this change; it
roused her but did not surprise her. Except for the short periods of
her visits away from Chicago, she had lived all her life on the shore
of the lake: the water--wonderful, ever altering--was the first sight
each morning. As it made wilder and more grim the desolation of a
stormy day, so it made brighter and more smiling the splendor of the
sunshine and, by that much more, influenced one's feelings.
Constance held by preference to the seagoing traditions of her family.
Since she was a child, the lake and the life of the ships had delighted
and fascinated her; very early she had discovered that, upon the lake,
she was permitted privileges sternly denied upon land--an arbitrary
distinction which led her to designate water, when she was a little
girl, as her family's "respectable element." For while her father's
investments were, in part, on the water, her mother's property all was
on the land. Her mother, who was a Seaton, owned property somewhere in
the city, in common with Constance's uncles; this property consisted,
as Constance succeeded in ascertaining about the time she was nine, of
large, wholesale grocery buildings. They and the "brand" had been in
the possession of the Seaton family for many years; both Constance's
uncles worked in the big buildings where the canning was done; and,
when Constance was taken to visit them, she found the place most
interesting--the berries and fruit coming up in great steaming
cauldrons; the machines pushing the cans under the enormous faucets
where the preserves ran out and then sealing the cans and pasting the
bright Seaton "brand" about them. The people there were
interesting--the girls with flying fingers sorting fruit, and the men
pounding the big boxes together; and the great shaggy-hoofed horses
which pulled the huge, groaning wagons were most fascinating. She
wanted to ride on one of the wagons; but her request was promptly and
completely squashed.
It was not "done"; nor was anything about the groceries and the canning
to be mentioned before visitors; Constance brought up the subject once
and found out. It was different about her father's ships. She could
talk about them when she wanted to; and her father often spoke of them;
and any one who came to the house could speak about them. Ships,
apparently, were respectable.
When she went down to the docks with her father, she could climb all
over them, if she was only careful of her clothes; she could spend a
day watching one of her father's boats discharging grain or another
unloading ore; and, when she was twelve, for a great treat, her father
took her on one of the freighters to Duluth; and for one delightful,
wonderful week she chummed with the captain and mates and wheelmen and
learned all the pilot signals and the way the different lighthouses
winked.
Mr. Spearman, who recently had become a partner of her father's, was
also on the boat upon that trip. He had no particular duty; he was
just "an owner" like her father; but Constance observed that, while the
captain and the mates and the engineers were always polite and
respectful to her father, they asked Mr. Spearman's opinion about
things in a very different way and paid real attention--not merely
polite attention--when he talked. He was a most desirable sort of
acquisition; for he was a friend who could come to the house at any
time, and yet he, himself, had done all sorts of exciting things. He
had not just gone to Harvard and then become an owner, as Constance's
father had; at fifteen, he had run away from his father's farm back
from the east shore of little Traverse Bay near the northern end of
Lake Michigan. At eighteen, after all sorts of adventures, he had
become mate of a lumber schooner; he had "taken to steam" shortly after
that and had been an officer upon many kinds of ships. Then Uncle
Benny had taken him into partnership. Constance had a most exciting
example of what he could do when the ship ran into a big storm on Lake
Superior.
Coming into Whitefish Bay, a barge had blundered against the vessel; a
seam started, and water came in so fast that it gained on the pumps.
Instantly, Mr. Spearman, not the captain, was in command and, from the
way he steered the ship to protect the seam and from the scheme he
devised to stay the inrush of water, the pumps began to gain at once,
and the ship went into Duluth safe and dry. Constance liked that in a
man of the sort whom people knew. For, as the most active
partner--though not the chief stockholder--of Corvet, Sherrill and
Spearman, almost every one in the city knew him. He had his bachelor
"rooms" in one of the newest and most fashionable of the apartment
buildings facing the lake just north of the downtown city; he had
become a member of the best city and country clubs; and he was welcomed
quickly along the Drive, where the Sherrills' mansion was coming to be
considered a characteristic "old" Chicago home.
But little over forty, and appearing even younger, Spearman was
distinctly of the new generation; and Constance Sherrill was only one
of many of the younger girls who found in Henry Spearman refreshing
relief from the youths who were the sons of men but who could never
become men themselves. They were nice, earnest boys with all sorts of
serious Marxian ideas of establishing social justice in the plants
which their fathers had built; and carrying the highest motives into
the city or national politics. But the industrial reformers, Constance
was quite certain, never could have built up the industries with which
they now, so superiorly, were finding fault; the political purifiers
either failed of election or, if elected, seemed to leave politics
pretty much as they had been before. The picture of Spearman,
instantly appealed to and instantly in charge in the emergency,
remained and became more vivid within Constance, because she never saw
him except when he dominated.
And a decade most amazingly had bridged the abyss which had separated
twelve years and thirty-two. At twenty-two, Constance Sherrill was
finding Henry Spearman--age forty-two--the most vitalizing and
interesting of the men who moved, socially, about the restricted
ellipse which curved down the lake shore south of the park and up Astor
Street. He had, very early, recognized that he possessed the vigor and
courage to carry him far, and he had disciplined himself until the
coarseness and roughness, which had sometimes offended the little girl
of ten years before, had almost vanished. What crudities still came
out, romantically reminded of his hard, early life on the lakes. Had
there been anything in that life of his of which he had not told
her--something worse than merely rough and rugged, which could strike
at her? Uncle Benny's last, dramatic appeal to her had suggested that;
but even at the moment when he was talking to her, fright for Uncle
Benny--not dread that there had been anything wrong in Henry's
life--had most moved her. Uncle Benny very evidently was not himself.
As long as Constance could remember, he had quarreled violently with
Henry; his antagonism to Henry had become almost an obsession; and
Constance had her father's word for it that, a greater part of the
time, Uncle Benny had no just ground for his quarrel with Henry. A
most violent quarrel had occurred upon that last day, and undoubtedly
its fury had carried Uncle Benny to the length of going to Constance as
he did.
Constance had come to this conclusion during the last gloomy and stormy
days; this morning, gazing out upon the shining lake, clear blue under
the wintry sun, she was more satisfied than before. Summoning her
maid, she inquired first whether anything had been heard since last
night of Mr. Corvet. She was quite sure, if her father had had word,
he would have awakened her; and there was no news. But Uncle Benny's
son, she remembered, was coming to breakfast.
Uncle Benny's son! That suggested to Constance's mother only something
unpleasant, something to be avoided and considered as little as
possible. But Alan--Uncle Benny's son--was not unpleasant at all; he
was, in fact, quite the reverse. Constance had liked him from the
moment that, confused a little by Benjamin Corvet's absence and
Simons's manner in greeting him, he had turned to her for explanation;
she had liked the way he had openly studied her and approved her, as
she was approving him; she had liked the way he had told her of
himself, and the fact that he knew nothing of the man who proved to be
his father; she had liked very much the complete absence of impulse to
force or to pretend feeling when she had brought him the picture of his
father--when he, amazed at himself for not feeling, had looked at her;
and she had liked most of all his refusal, for himself and for his
father, to accept positive stigma until it should be proved.
She had not designated any hour for breakfast, and she supposed that,
coming from the country, he would believe breakfast to be early. But
when she got downstairs, though it was nearly nine o'clock, he had not
come; she went to the front window to watch for him, and after a few
minutes she saw him approaching, looking often to the lake as though
amazed by the change in it.
She went to the door and herself let him in.
"Father has gone down-town," she told him, as he took off his things.
"Mr. Spearman returns from Duluth this morning, and father wished to
tell him about you as soon as possible. I told father you had come to
see him last night; and he said to bring you down to the office."
"I overslept, I'm afraid," Alan said.
"You slept well, then?"
"Very well--after a while."
"I'll take you down-town myself after breakfast."
She said no more but led him into the breakfast room. It was a
delightful, cozy little room, Dutch furnished, with a single wide
window to the east, an enormous hooded fireplace taking up half the
north wall, and blue Delft tiles set above it and paneled in the walls
all about the room. There were the quaint blue windmills, the fishing
boats, the baggy-breeked, wooden-shod folk, the canals and barges, the
dikes and their guardians, and the fishing ship on the Zuyder Zee.
Alan gazed about at these with quick, appreciative interest. His
quality of instantly noticing and appreciating anything unusual was,
Constance thought, one of his pleasantest and best characteristics.
"I like those too; I selected them myself in Holland," she observed.
She took her place beside the coffee pot, and when he remained
standing--"Mother always has her breakfast in bed; that's your place,"
she said.
He took the chair opposite her. There was fruit upon the table;
Constance took an orange and passed the little silver basket across.
"This is such a little table; we never use it if there's more than two
or three of us; and we like to help ourselves here."
"I like it very much," Alan said.
"Coffee right away or later?"
"Whenever you do. You see," he explained, smiling in a way that
pleased her, "I haven't the slightest idea what else is coming or
whether anything more at all is coming." A servant entered, bringing
cereal and cream; he removed the fruit plates, put the cereal dish and
two bowls before Constance, and went out. "And if any one in Blue
Rapids," Alan went on, "had a man waiting in the dining-room and at
least one other in the kitchen, they would not speak of our activities
here as 'helping ourselves.' I'm not sure just how they would speak of
them; we--the people I was with in Kansas--had a maidservant at one
time when we were on the farm, and when we engaged her, she asked, 'Do
you do your own stretching?' That meant serving from the stove to the
table, usually."
He was silent for a few moments; when he looked at her across the table
again, he seemed about to speak seriously. His gaze left her face and
then came back.
"Miss Sherrill," he said gravely, "what is, or was, the _Miwaka_? A
ship?"
He made no attempt to put the question casually; rather, he had made it
more evident that it was of concern to him by the change in his manner.
"The _Miwaka_?" Constance said.
"Do you know what it was?"
"Yes; I know; and it was a ship."
"You mean it doesn't exist any more?"
"No; it was lost a long time ago."
"On the lakes here?"
"On Lake Michigan."
"You mean by lost that it was sunk?"
"It was sunk, of course; but no one knows what happened to it--whether
it was wrecked or burned or merely foundered."
The thought of the unknown fate of the ship and crew--of the ship which
had sailed and never reached port and of which nothing ever had been
heard but the beating of the Indian drum--set her blood tingling as it
had done before, when she had been told about the ship, or when she had
told others about it and the superstition connected with it. It was
plain Alan Conrad had not asked about it idly; something about the
_Miwaka_ had come to him recently and had excited his intense concern.
"Whose ship was it?" he asked. "My father's?"
"No; it belonged to Stafford and Ramsdell. They were two of the big
men of their time in the carrying trade on the lakes, but their line
has been out of business for years; both Mr. Stafford and Mr. Ramsdell
were lost with the _Miwaka_."
"Will you tell me about it, and them, please?"
"I've told you almost all I can about Stafford and Ramsdell, I'm
afraid; I've just heard father say that they were men who could have
amounted to a great deal on the lakes, if they had lived--especially
Mr. Stafford, who was very young. The _Miwaka_ was a great new steel
ship--built the year after I was born; it was the first of nearly a
dozen that Stafford and Ramsdell had planned to build. There was some
doubt among lake men about steel boats at that time; they had begun to
be built very largely quite a few years before, but recently there had
been some serious losses with them. Whether it was because they were
built on models not fitted for the lakes, no one knew; but several of
them had broken in two and sunk, and a good many men were talking about
going back to wood. But Stafford and Ramsdell believed in steel and
had finished this first one of their new boats.
"She left Duluth for Chicago, loaded with ore, on the first day of
December, with both owners and part of their families on board. She
passed the Soo on the third and went through the Straits of Mackinac on
the fourth into Lake Michigan. After that, nothing was ever heard of
her."
"So probably she broke in two like the others?"
"Mr. Spearman and your father both thought so; but nobody ever knew--no
wreckage came ashore--no message of any sort from any one on board. A
very sudden winter storm had come up and was at its worst on the
morning of the fifth. Uncle Benny--your father--told me once, when I
asked him about it, that it was as severe for a time as any he had ever
experienced. He very nearly lost his life in it. He had just finished
laying up one of his boats--the _Martha Corvet_--at Manistee for the
winter; and he and Mr. Spearman, who then was mate of the _Martha
Corvet_, were crossing the lake in a tug with a crew of four men to
Manitowoc, where they were going to lay up more ships. The captain and
one of the deck hands of the tug were washed overboard, and the
engineer was lost trying to save them. Uncle Benny and Mr. Spearman
and the stoker brought the tug in. The storm was worst about five in
the morning, when the _Miwaka_ sunk."
"How do you know that the _Miwaka_ sunk at five," Alan asked, "if no
one ever heard from the ship?"
"Oh; that was told by the Drum!"
"The Drum?"
"Yes; the Indian Drum! I forgot; of course you didn't know. It's a
superstition that some of the lake men have, particularly those who
come from people at the other end of the lake. The Indian Drum is in
the woods there, they say. No one has seen it; but many people believe
that they have heard it. It's a spirit drum which beats, they say, for
every ship lost on the lake. There's a particular superstition about
it in regard to the _Miwaka_; for the drum beat wrong for the _Miwaka_.
You see, the people about there swear that about five o'clock in the
morning of the fifth, while the storm was blowing terribly, they heard
the drum beating and knew that a ship was going down. They counted the
sounds as it beat the roll of the dead. It beat twenty-four before it
stopped and then began to beat again and beat twenty-four; so, later,
everybody knew it had been beating for the _Miwaka_; for every other
ship on the lake got to port; but there were twenty-five altogether on
the _Miwaka_, so either the drum beat wrong or--" she hesitated.
"Or what?"
"Or the drum was right, and some one was saved. Many people believed
that. It was years before the families of the men on board gave up
hope, because of the Drum; maybe some haven't given up hope yet."
Alan made no comment for a moment. Constance had seen the blood flush
to his face and then leave it, and her own pulse had beat as swiftly as
she rehearsed the superstition. As he gazed at her and then away, it
was plain that he had heard something additional about the
_Miwaka_--something which he was trying to fit into what she told him.
"That's all anybody knows?" His gaze came back to her at last.
"Yes; why did you ask about it--the _Miwaka_? I mean, how did you hear
about it so you wanted to know?"
He considered an instant before replying. "I encountered a reference
to the _Miwaka_--I supposed it must be a ship--in my father's house
last night."
His manner, as he looked down at his coffee cup, toying with it,
prevented her then from asking more; he seemed to know that she wished
to press it, and he looked up quickly.
"I met my servant--my father's servant--this morning," he said.
"Yes; he got back this morning. He came here early to report to father
that he had no news of Uncle Benny; and father told him you were at the
house and sent him over."
Alan was studying the coffee cup again, a queer expression on his face
which she could not read.
"He was there when I woke up this morning, Miss Sherrill. I hadn't
heard anybody in the house, but I saw a little table on wheels standing
in the hall outside my door and a spirit lamp and a little coffee pot
on it, and a man bending over it, warming the cup. His back was toward
me, and he had straight black hair, so that at first I thought he was a
Jap; but when he turned around, I saw he was an American Indian."
"Yes; that was Wassaquam."
"Is that his name? He told me it was Judah."
"Yes--Judah Wassaquam. He's a Chippewa from the north end of the lake.
They're very religious there, most of the Indians at the foot of the
lake; and many of them have a Biblical name which they use for a first
name and use their Indian name for a last one."
"He called me 'Alan' and my father 'Ben.'"
"The Indians almost always call people by their first names."
"He said that he had always served 'Ben' his coffee that way before he
got up, and so he had supposed he was to do the same by me; and also
that, long ago, he used to be a deck hand on one of my father's ships."
"Yes; when Uncle Benny began to operate ships of his own, many of the
ships on the lakes had Indians among the deck hands; some had all
Indians for crews and white men only for officers. Wassaquam was on
the first freighter Uncle Benny ever owned a share in; afterwards he
came here to Chicago with Uncle Benny. He's been looking after Uncle
Benny all alone now for more than ten years--and he's very much devoted
to him, and fully trustworthy; and besides that, he's a wonderful cook;
but I've wondered sometimes whether Uncle Benny wasn't the only city
man in the world who had an Indian body servant."
"You know a good deal about Indians."
"A little about the lake Indians, the Chippewas and Pottawatomies in
northern Michigan."
"Recollection's a funny thing," Alan said, after considering a moment.
"This morning, after seeing Judah and talking to him--or rather hearing
him talk--somehow a story got running in my head. I can't make out
exactly what it was--about a lot of animals on a raft; and there was
some one with them--I don't know who; I can't fit any name to him; but
he had a name."
Constance bent forward quickly. "Was the name Michabou?" she asked.
He returned her look, surprised. "That's it; how did you know?"
"I think I know the story; and Wassaquam would have known it too, I
think, if you'd ask him; but probably he would have thought it impious
to tell it, because he and his people are great Christians now.
Michabou is one of the Indian names for Manitou. What else do you
remember of the story?"
"Not much, I'm afraid--just sort of scenes here and there; but I can
remember the beginning now that you have given me the name: 'In the
beginning of all things there was only water and Michabou was floating
on the raft with all the animals.' Michabou, it seemed, wanted the
land brought up so that men and animals could live on it, and he asked
one of the animals to go down and bring it up--"
"The beaver," Constance supplied.
"Was the beaver the first one? The beaver dived and stayed down a long
time, so long that when he came up he was breathless and completely
exhausted, but he had not been able to reach the bottom. Then Michabou
sent down--"
"The otter."
"And he stayed down much longer than the beaver, and when he came up at
last, they dragged him on to the raft quite senseless; but he hadn't
been able to reach the bottom either. So the animals and Michabou
himself were ready to give it up; but then the little muskrat spoke
up--am I right? Was this the muskrat?"
"Yes."
"Then you can finish it for me?"
"He dived and he stayed down, the little muskrat," Constance continued,
"longer than the beaver and the otter both together. Michabou and the
animals waited all day for him to come up, and they watched all through
the night; so then they knew he must be dead. And, sure enough, they
came after a while across the body floating on the water and apparently
lifeless. They dragged him onto the raft and found that his little
paws were all tight shut. They forced open three of the paws and found
nothing in them, but when they opened the last one, they found one
grain of sand tightly clutched in it. The little muskrat had done it;
he'd reached the bottom! And out of that one grain of sand, Michabou
made the world."
"That's it," he said. "Now what is it?"
"The Indian story of creation--or one of them."
"Not a story of the plain Indians surely."
"No; of the Indians who live about the lakes and so got the idea that
everything was water in the first place--the Indians who live on the
islands and peninsulas. That's how I came to know it."
"I thought that must be it," Alan said. His hand trembled a little as
he lifted his coffee cup to his lips.
Constance too flushed a little with excitement; it was a surprisingly
close and intimate thing to have explored with another back into the
concealments of his first child consciousness, to have aided another in
the sensitive task of revealing himself to himself. This which she had
helped to bring back to him must have been one of the first stories
told him; he had been a very little boy, when he had been taken to
Kansas, away from where he must have heard this story--the lakes. She
was a little nervous also from watching the time as told by the tiny
watch on her wrist. Henry's train from Duluth must be in now; and he
had not yet called her, as had been his custom recently, as soon as he
returned to town after a trip. But, in a minute, a servant entered to
inform her that Mr. Spearman wished to speak to her. She excused
herself to Alan and hurried out. Henry was calling her from the
railroad station and, he said, from a most particularly stuffy booth
and, besides having a poor connection, there was any amount of noise
about him; but he was very anxious to see Constance as soon as
possible. Could she be in town that morning and have luncheon with
him? Yes; she was going down-town very soon and, after luncheon, he
could come home with her if he wished. He certainly did wish, but he
couldn't tell yet what he might have to do in the afternoon, but please
would she save the evening for him. She promised and started to tell
him about Alan, then recollected that Henry was going to see her father
immediately at the office.
Alan was standing, waiting for her, when she returned to the breakfast
room.
"Ready to go down-town?" she asked.
"Whenever you are."
"I'll be ready in a minute. I'm planning to drive; are you afraid?"
He smiled in his pleasant way as he glanced over her; she had become
conscious of saying that sort of thing to tempt the smile. "Oh, I'll
take the risk."