THE WATCH FIRES OF APPLEDORE
It was Easter Sunday and Billy and his Aunt were going to church. The
day was to bring forth strange things, but it began as any Sunday might,
with bright weather that was a little hot, with a pleasant walk up
through the fields while the bells were ringing, with entry into the
cool, dim little church and a silent wait, for Aunt Mattie was one of
the people who are always early. There was a good deal of stiff rustling
of the Appledore population’s Sunday best, as in twos and threes the
congregation filed in, fishermen and their wives, some more prosperous
ones who farmed as well as fished, the hotel proprietor, and Harvey
Jarreth in a suit of very new clothes.
Billy knew well that one should not look around, but he nevertheless
turned full about to smile a greeting at Sally Shute when she came into
the pew behind him. Her stiff skirts stood out almost straight around
her and her yellow braids were brushed until they shone. He observed
that she had grown a little taller since last year, but that her pink
cheeks were as round as ever and her face as earnest. Her father and
mother were with her, and young Jacky, very restless and making
continual trouble.
The service began with a prayer that Billy sometimes, during idle
moments in a long sermon, had examined curiously in the prayer book and
wondered if it were ever used. “In Time of War and Tumults,” it was
headed, and reminded him of what for a little time he had forgotten,
that there was a war. He looked out of the window and tried to think of
it as true, but failed. No, there certainly could not be a war, not on
such a day as this. Then he saw that one of the fishermen’s wives was
crying quietly behind her pew, yes, and there was another over in the
corner doing the same thing. They had boys who were bluejackets in the
Navy, he supposed, and were foolish enough to think that something might
happen to them. On the way up the hill, Aunt Mattie had been giving him
a little talk on history and had pointed out that nearly all of our wars
began in April. Why in April, he wondered, when everything seemed less
like war then than at any other time of the year. He began to think idly
of how many Easter Sundays there must have been just like this one,
back, back as far as the Revolution, when women bravely put on their
best and toiled up to the church, only to cry in secret behind the pews
because there was going to be a war. Why—
His mind was wandering farther and farther from the service. Suddenly it
was brought back by a quick touch upon his arm.
“Captain Saulsby is in the doorway,” whispered Sally Shute behind him.
“I think he wants you for something.”
There indeed stood the old sailor in the door, looking distressed and
uncomfortable and peering about as though in search of some one. He
seemed much relieved when he caught Billy’s eye and saw the boy rise to
tiptoe out. He put a paper into Billy’s hand as they went down the path
together.
“I want that telephoned to the telegraph office at Rockport,” he said.
“I have tried to do it myself, but I can’t hear quite well enough to
make sure they have got it right, and I don’t want the hotel clerk to
give it for me, or he would be telling it all over the Island. I hope
your Aunt won’t mind it that I called you out of the church.”
Billy read over the message, then, in bewilderment, read it again.
“Why, Captain Saulsby,” he said, “it doesn’t make sense!”
“I know it,” agreed the Captain, “and I don’t quite know what it stands
for myself. But that naval officer from Piscataqua who was out here
yesterday told me to send such and such a message if this thing or that
thing happened; he wrote out several to cover different cases. I suppose
he thought I couldn’t get a regular cipher code straight. Maybe I
couldn’t.”
The day before, Captain Saulsby had had a visitor whose coming had
seemed both to please him and to make him feel important. An officer
from one of the warships lying in the harbour of Piscataqua had come all
the way to Appledore to see him. At first the old man had announced that
he would speak to no officer unless he came to apologize for the Navy’s
refusal of its best recruit; but he had finally changed his mind and had
held a long and earnest talk with his guest in the garden.
“There’s a use for old men after all, if they just know something,” he
said mysteriously to Billy that evening, and had seemed so cheered that
he could even speak of potato-planting without bitterness.
Billy went into the hotel’s telephone booth and sent the message,
spelling out each word laboriously, since the girl operator at the other
end was not used to taking code messages and seemed much annoyed at the
lack of meaning.
“I can’t waste my time sending such nonsense,” was her first tart
comment, and it required much persuasion to make her believe that all
was as it should be.
When he had finished with Captain Saulsby’s message, he proceeded to
send another on his own account. It was a cablegram to his father,
asking if he would give his consent, should Billy wish to enlist in the
Navy.
“If there is going to be a real war I might want to go in by and by,” he
reflected. “It will take two months to get a letter answered, so I may
as well ask this way. I’m afraid he won’t say yes. If I were eighteen I
wouldn’t have to ask him. But once it is done I know he and mother
wouldn’t object.”
It took some little time to get this dispatch off, as he had first to go
up to his room to look up the address. His father had left his mother in
Lima and had gone up to some little mining town in the Andes, where the
Spanish names were of the most unpronounceable kind. The operator’s
short temper was quite exhausted when at last she had got it all.
“When you think up anything new, let me know,” was her acid farewell as
she rang off.
Captain Saulsby had grown tired of waiting and had walked back to his
cottage. Billy found him at the foot of the garden, staring out to sea
through the binoculars that had been one of the trophies of their
adventure at the mill.
“Nice glasses that German fellow left us,” the old sailor remarked as he
lowered them to change the focus. Then he added more slowly, “I
shouldn’t wonder if he would be coming back for them one of these days.”
“Why, how can you think that?” cried Billy astonished.
“Well,” the Captain returned reflectively, “there’s Harvey Jarreth now.
He has been sporting a lot of new clothes lately and has been getting
money from somebody. There is no person about here complaining that
Harvey has cheated him, so it must be coming from outside. He is bound
that he will prove yet that he wasn’t fooled in that affair last summer,
and we can’t tell just how far that folly will take him. There are other
things, too, big and little, down to foot-tracks in my potato patch. But
the last one is that yacht out there; she has gone by the Island three
times already today, and I don’t like her looks. She may belong to some
harmless, dirt-common millionaire, and then she may not. I know all of
that kind of vessel that sails in these waters and she’s a new one to
me.”
He adjusted the glass again and looked long at the moving speck and the
wreath of smoke that trailed across the sea.
“I don’t like her,” he repeated, shaking his head, “and I’ve sent a
message to that officer telling him so.”
Billy had a look at the vessel also, but could make nothing of her. To
him she might have been any one of a thousand pleasure boats that plied
those seas in summer time.
“Well, there is nothing to do but wait,” the Captain said at last, as
the yacht disappeared and he closed the glasses into their case with a
snap.
Wait they did through the length of a hot, sultry day. Aunt Mattie’s
friendship for the Captain was even great enough to secure her
forgiveness for his having called Billy out of church. The boy was sent
up to the hotel with a great bunch of spring flowers as a peace
offering, but, having delivered them, he went back to the cottage once
more to spend the slow hours sitting on Captain Saulsby’s doorstep or
walking restlessly up and down the garden.
What he was expecting, or what Captain Saulsby expected, he did not know
at all; but whatever the possibilities were, for long hours nothing
occurred. The sun disappeared under a cloud, the atmosphere grew hotter
and heavier: it was plain that a storm was coming, although as yet there
was no wind. Far out to sea the big bell-buoy was rocking in the uneasy
swells, and ringing fitfully. The time passed, the afternoon darkened to
twilight, the sun emerged a moment, then went down in a blaze of angry,
coppery red, but still nothing happened. Perhaps Captain Saulsby had
been quite mistaken.
It had grown quite dark and the church bells were ringing again for the
evening service, but Billy was still sitting before Captain Saulsby’s
door. Quick steps—they could be no other than Sally Shute’s—came across
the garden, and the little girl stepped out of the dark and sat down
beside him.
“Mother and Jacky have gone to church,” she said, “but I came over here
to see the Captain. Is he sick again, or anything? Is something wrong?”
“No,” returned Billy with an effort, “No, nothing’s wrong.”
Even if he had felt free to tell her, he could hardly have explained
what was amiss. A heavy feeling in the air, a queer thrill inside him, a
vague sensation that something big, too big to understand, was about to
happen: could one call that “something wrong”? Billy hardly thought so
and therefore kept silent.
Sally moved about uneasily for a little while, got up, seated herself
again, then finally jumped up once more.
“I can’t keep still, Billy Wentworth, and no more can you,” she
announced. “Let’s go down on the beach.”
They went down over the sparse sea-grass, across the smooth water-worn
rocks to the beach, left hard and wet by the receding tide.
For a short time they walked on the sand without speaking. The winter
storms had washed up quantities of driftwood that now lay, dry and
bleached white, in tumbled heaps here and there above high water mark.
The two sat down by one of them at last, when they became weary of
tramping up and down. Suddenly Sally lifted her head to listen.
“Why does the bell-buoy ring louder?” she questioned.
It was true that the far-off clanging voice sounded clearer, all at
once; it rang loud and steady through the quiet night for a moment, then
dropped again to the faint, intermittent “clang-clang-clang,” to which
Billy had listened all the afternoon.
“What could ring it like that?” he was asking himself, but even while he
was so thinking the answer came to him. The waves of a passing steamer
would rock the buoy for just that length of time, setting it to calling
louder through the windless silence. They sat waiting and by and by
heard a sharp swish, swish, as a succession of heavier swells broke upon
the sandy beach. Yes, it must have been a steamer, coming close in,
under cover of the dark. What was she? The shore boat?
No, that had been lying at the wharf for an hour. The Boston steamer?
That was not yet running. Could she be a certain white yacht of
clean-cut, racing lines, the one that had slipped by Appledore in the
fog, that night of the adventure at the mill, the one that had passed
the Island three times already that day?
“I think I had better tell Captain Saulsby,” Billy said.
He had not far to go, for he met the old sailor stumbling his way
through the dark half-way down the path. Even his dull old ears had
heard the change in the bell-buoy’s voice, and he had come in such haste
that he still carried his lighted pipe in one hand and the bundle of
papers he had been reading in the other.
“Did you see anything? Did you hear anything?” he demanded as Billy came
to his side. Before the boy could answer, Sally’s quick feet came
pattering behind him.
“There is a boat,” she cried. “I heard oars! Oh, come quickly.”
When, however, they all three arrived upon the beach there was nothing
to be heard except ripples lapping quietly against the sand. A little
breeze had arisen, but here, inside the point, the water was still very
smooth. Over to the right they could see the lights of the hotel;
beyond, a little further around the curve of the bay, the clustered,
twinkling lamps of the village. Above, on the hill, Billy could see the
shining pointed windows of the little church and could even distinguish
the sound of a hymn tune that came drifting down to them. But here upon
the shore all was utterly silent, while no amount of peering through the
blind dark could give any clue as to what manner of ship might be
swinging at her anchor out yonder in the tide. Sally assured them in
excited whispers that she could not have been mistaken, but the old
Captain made no reply, as he alternately puffed fiercely upon his pipe
or let it go out. He had just pulled out his match box to relight it for
the third time when Billy touched his arm.
“I hear it,” he whispered. “Listen.”
The monotonous creak of rowlocks was plainly to be heard now, and the
quiet dip and splash of oars as they rose and fell.
“But—but—they are coming from over toward the village: they are going
past us,” Sally exclaimed. “What can that mean?”
It was puzzlingly true that the sound seemed to be moving parallel to
the shore and was beginning to pass them. What was even more bewildering
was that suddenly the dipping oars stopped entirely and there came
across the water the sound of low voices, more than one speaking at a
time, as though in heated argument. The three looked at each other in
mystified astonishment.
“I think—” began Sally but never got any further. A voice rose suddenly
out of the darkness, a man’s voice, but shouting so loud and high that
it was almost a scream.
“No,” they heard. “No, no, I will not go!”
There arose a tumult of oaths, of confused, angry words; there was a
noise of oars cracking together, then a mighty splash. Billy and Sally
Shute ran down the beach with Captain Saulsby vainly trying to follow as
quickly.
“I know that voice,” cried Sally, then lifted her own to its utmost
strength to call valiantly through the dark.
“Johann, Johann Happs,” she shouted with all her might, then again,
“Johann, Johann; we are here.”
Something darker than the dark water emerged suddenly into their sight,
somebody plunged through the shallow breakers and fell gasping on the
beach. In a moment the tall, sprawling figure was up and running through
the sand toward Captain Saulsby. It was indeed Johann, trembling,
breathless, sobbing, his face like chalk and his eyes burning.
“Captain Saulsby,” he cried, then stumbling, dropped on his knees in the
sand. He clung to the old man’s coat crying out again and again, “I will
not go, I will not go.”
In a moment of quiet they heard the oars dipping again as the boat
followed him in shore.
“Don’t let them take me away,” cried Johann wildly. They all stared at
each other and at the vague shape moving toward them through the dark.
What was to be done?
It was Billy who, in that extremity, had a sudden inspiration. He had
trodden on the Captain’s match box in the sand and had perhaps caught
his idea from that. In a second he had run to the nearest heap of
driftwood, had struck a match and kindled a little struggling flame.
“Quick, Sally,” he directed, “take these and those papers, go light the
other piles down toward the point. They won’t dare land where it is
light.”
He blew upon the blaze until the sparks flew and the rapid flame ran
through the dry fuel. Higher and higher the red beacon arose, until it
shone out over the water and showed the boat, slowly backing away into
the dark to seek another landing place. Billy ran to another driftwood
heap, glancing over his shoulder to see that Sally had successfully
started hers and was hastening on to kindle others. The whole beach was
lit by the red glare, the crests of the little waves caught and
reflected the glow as they came running in, while, with the lighted
circle spreading farther and farther out over the water, the boat drew
back more and more to keep in the sheltering darkness. Johann Happs’
tall figure and Captain Saulsby’s huge, bent one looked gigantic against
the crimson light, with their moving shadows trailing down to the
water’s edge.
The services were over in the little church, and the congregation,
seeing the line of flame along the shore, came trooping down to see what
it could mean. Once having caught an idea of the situation, every one
went to work to give assistance. The guardian fires spread farther and
farther—all around the harbour, across the point and beyond the
mill-stream cove. Children ran to and fro like ants, gathering fuel; the
crackling driftwood burned blue and green and golden, lifting high
flames to signal defiance to the enemy.
Scorched, smoke-begrimed, weary with toil and excitement, Billy and
Sally Shute at last made their way back to where Johann and Captain
Saulsby were still talking. A little group had gathered about them, but
of these Johann scarcely seemed aware, so intent was he upon what he was
saying.
“And they keep telling me always that I must work for the Fatherland
here, or go back to aid her at home,” he was saying as Billy came close.
“But I answered that this was my Fatherland and I had no other. Yet they
keep repeating that a man can have but one, and if it is once Germany so
must it always be Germany.”
“But you were born here,” said the old sailor, “and your father was
banished from his own country.”
“Yes, he was driven out, but he longed always to return, perhaps because
he knew he never could. He wished that I should go back there to live
after he died; I did go, but it was only for a year.”
“Didn’t you like it, Joe?” asked one of the fishermen lightly.
Johann regarded him with solemn, earnest eyes.
“I thought at first I would like it,” he answered. “The order appealed
to me, and the lack of waste and the doing everything so well. But in a
little I saw that it was too well done, too perfect. Does Nature never
waste? Did the dear Gott make us perfect? No, but they try to think they
can make you so in Germany.” He was silent a moment, then his last words
broke from him almost with a cry. “To be perfect you must be a thing—not
a man. And in Germany they would make you a thing, they would break your
heart, they would trample on your soul!”
“And they have been over here trying to get you to help them?” the old
Captain questioned gently.
“Yes, they keep saying do this, or do that; it is for the Fatherland.
‘That lighthouse, should an accident happen there and some of the ships
go on the rocks, it will be so many less against the Fatherland.’ Or,
‘That wireless station at Rockford, it is working to our harm; help to
destroy it for the Fatherland.’ I sunk my boat that they might no longer
try to send me on their errands. I have tried to flee from Appledore,
but I could not go, there are my little house and my good friends here,
and the wide blue sea that I love so much. Then at last it came to their
saying that if I have not the spirit to help them here I must go back
and fight for Germany. I thought and thought, night and day I had
nothing else in my unhappy mind, and at last, partly because I thought
it was my duty, partly because I was afraid, I said I would go.”
Billy looked at Johann and thought of those mild blue eyes of his being
ordered to look with approval on the sights of this most terrible of
wars, thought of his gentle, capable hands being set to the burning and
pillaging of stricken Belgium. He shuddered.
“I believed they had bruised my spirit until there was no more life in
it,” Johann went on, “but when they came for me tonight, when we passed
the point and I saw the lights of Captain Saulsby’s cottage, when I
thought of fighting against his country and that of all the friends I
loved, why then I could not go. I jumped overboard and swam ashore; this
little girl’s brave voice showed me the way; this boy’s quick wit
prevented my enemies from following me, and here I am.”
So absorbed had Billy been, that it was not until Sally nudged him, that
he observed the last addition to Johann’s group of listeners. Then he
saw a little, bedraggled man, hatless and blackened with the charcoal of
the fires they had been tending. He did not realize who it was until the
men about them parted, leaving the newcomer face to face with Captain
Saulsby.
“Harvey Jarreth,” the old sailor said, “are you still trying to pass
yourself off as a fit companion for honest men? That friend of yours is
out there on the yacht; this boy Johann is too good to go with him, but
you are not. You had better join them out there, Harvey; there is
nothing left here for you. No one will ever trust or respect you again;
you will probably be in jail in another hour if you stay. There are
plenty of men here will offer you a boat, just to get rid of you. You
had better go to your friends, Harvey.”
Jarreth received the Captain’s words in unprotesting silence. He seemed
to be thinking very deeply, and of unhappy things, but when he spoke at
last it was with a queer twisted smile.
“I don’t believe I’ll go, Ned,” he answered, “no matter what comes to me
here. I am certainly the biggest fool in the United States, and perhaps
the biggest rascal; but after all I am in the United States and I think
I will stay there. He has gone beyond anything I ever bargained for,
that friend of mine; he has made a monkey of me just the way you said,
and I am glad to know it at last. Yes, I guess I will stay. I would
rather go to jail than to Germany.”
He pulled a roll of papers out of his pocket, turned them over once or
twice and then tore them across.
“I always said it was criminal, the way you looked after your affairs,
Ned Saulsby,” he went on, “and I had got a clear title to most of your
land; these were the proofs.” He tossed the torn papers into the nearest
fire where they burst into flame.
“I’d kind of like to go to jail,” he concluded at last, with a tremor in
his once arrogant voice. “I believe it would make me feel better about
having been such a fool. Tell any one who wants me that I’ll be waiting
at my house.”
Without another word he turned in the flickering firelight, and trudged
slowly away through the heavy sand.