The feud between Hat Tyler and Mrs. Elmer Higgins sprang out of a chance
laugh of Elmer's when he was making his first trip as cadet. Hat Tyler
was a sea captain, and of a formidable type. She was master of the
_Susie P. Oliver_, and her husband, Tyler, was mate. They were bound for
New York with a load of paving stones when they collided with the
coasting steamer _Alfred de Vigny_, in which Elmer was serving his
apprenticeship as a cadet officer.
The old cadet had just come up on the bridge from taking a sounding--he
even had a specimen of the bottom in his hand, he said later, sand with
black specks and broken shell--when something queer attracted his
attention half a point on the starboard bow. It was a thick foggy night,
ships bellowing all round, and a weird-looking tow coming up astern with
a string of lights one over another like a lot of Chinese lanterns. It
was probably these lights that had drawn the mate's attention away from
the ship's bows.
At all events he was standing with a megaphone to his ear hearkening for
noises on the port hand when Elmer took him by the elbow and called out:
"What in the name of Sam Hill would you call that great contraption
mouching across our bows? My sorrows, Fred, it's a schooner!"
The mate went cold along his spine, and the vertebrae distributed there
jostled together like knucklebones on the back of a girl's hand, and he
yelled "Port helm!"
"I told Fred," Elmer said in discussing this circumstance later with
his cronies of the Tall Stove Club--he had got back safe and sound to
Winter Harbor by that time--"I says to him, 'Fred, we're going to bump
into that ship jest as sure as taxes!' There he stood, swearing a blue
streak. I never knew a man to be so downright profane over the little
things of life as he was. And I was right when it come to that too.
There was that long Spanish ghost of a schooner dead in our path, with
her port light shining out there as red as an apple. They wanted me to
say later--I know the skipper come to me personally and says, 'Elmer,
now you know you didn't see no light.' 'Captain Tin,' I says to him, 'I
have got the greatest respect for you as a man, and I would favor you in
all ways possible if 'twas so 'st I could; but if I was to testify the
way you want me to I would go against conscience. I wouldn't feel that I
could go on paying my pew tax. These people here want to know the truth
and I am going to give it to them.' Yes, sir, I saw the light as plain
as plain, and I pointed it out to Fred, but the devil and Tom Walker
couldn't have prevented them ships from walking right up and into each
other, situated as they was then.
"My conscience, warn't there works when those two come together! 'Fred,'
I says--I was down on my knees; throwed there, you understand--'we're
hit!' 'Tell me something I don't know, will you?' he says. He always was
comical, jest as comical as he could be. 'Get down there and look at her
snout,' he said to me. 'Find out which of us is going to sink.' That was
Fred all over--one of these fellows, all bluster, where it's a bucket of
wind against a thimbleful of go-ahead."
"I know him," interposed another member of the Tall Stove Club. "I knew
the whole family. He never amounted to nothing till he got to going to
sea."
"Well, I down off the bridge," went on Elmer, "and I up on the fo'c'stle
head, and there I see the schooner leaning over sort of faintish, jest
the way a man will when he's sick to his stomach, and I says to myself,
'That ship's going the way of the wicked.' I sung out to Fred to keep
the _Alfred_ going slow ahead, so as to give the crew a chance to come
aboard, and it warn't no time before they was swarming up into our
chains like so many ants out of a hill that has been knocked
galley-west. I see we was all wrinkled up forward ourselves--the
_Alfred_ was a tin ship--and it warn't to be wondered at when you come
to consider that the _Susie Oliver_ was jest as full as she could hold
of paving stones.
"And the next thing I knew there was Jed Tyler, right out of the blue
sky, standing side of me in his shirt sleeves, and looking down,
mournful enough. 'Where's Hat?' I sung out to him. 'Drowned,' he says.
'Drowned, am I?' Hat sung out. 'I guess that's just another case of the
thought being father to the wish, that's what I guess!'
"So I leaned down, and my stars, there was Hat Tyler! She'd come up jest
as she was--there she was sitting on the fluke of the starboard anchor.
And warn't she immense! I down over the ship's side with a rope, and s'
I, 'Heave and away, my girl!' and I got a grip of her, and away she come
over the rail, mad as a wet hen, and jest as wet, too, with her hair
stringing down, and her dander up, if ever I see a woman with her dander
up."
"I hear she leads Tyler a life," said a member.
"Well, I laughed; I couldn't help it," continued Elmer, moving his ears
at the recollection of it.
"'Hat,' I says, 'you never was caught out this way before in all your
born days,' I says. She was fit to be tied. 'Laugh!' she says. 'You
great booby!' 'Hat,' I says, 'I shall give up, I know I shall.' 'It's
jest your ignorance,' she says. 'I know it,' I says, 'but I couldn't
help it no more than if you had slid a knife into me.' And I out with
another. 'Come down into my cabin,' I says, 'and I will give you a
little something in a glass.' And down she come, past all them sailors,
in the face and eyes of everybody."
"She didn't lose nothing by what I hear," said Zinie Shadd. "They tell
me the underwriters had just as good as told her that they wouldn't let
the schooner go to sea again."
And now by your leave a word from Hat herself. There are two sides to
every story. She told her tale just across the street from the ship
chandler's, where the Tall Stove Club held its meetings. In Mrs.
Kidder's bake-shop were gathered the henchmen of Hat Tyler.
"Well, I never see your equal for falling on your feet," Lena Kidder
said admiringly. "If I've told my husband once I've told him twenty
times I'd rather have Hat Tyler's luck than a license to steal."
"Everybody has got a right to their own opinion on that point," said Hat
Tyler heavily, sinking her jaws toward the mug of milk which Mrs. Kidder
had set before her.
Hat Tyler was certainly a handful. Her shoulders were wide, as she often
said herself, her cheeks were brick-red, her voice was as deep as the
fattest gold pipe on the church organ, and the palm of her hand rasped
when she took hold of a body. There wasn't a hornier-handed woman in the
county. She wore tarred rope round her girth for a belt, knotted at the
ends with star knots. She was what Margaret Fuller had in mind when she
said to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Let them be sea captains if they will."
"Where was you when she hit, Hat?" asked Mrs. Kidder.
"Asleep," said Mrs. Tyler. "I come up out of my bunk all standing, and
went out on deck just as I was. And lo and behold, I had just time to
get a grip on that anchor when the _Oliver_ give a lurch and over she
went. She didn't shilly-shally, I can tell you, with that load of paving
stones in her belly. Let me have another quart of milk, Lena. Talking's
thirsty business. Well, I thought I'd get my never-get-over, waiting for
those men to get a rig ready for me. And then who should I see but that
fool Elmer Higgins looking down at me. 'Hang on, Hat,' he said, 'while I
think what to do,' 'Think what to do!' I says. 'If you're any part of a
man you'll fling me a rope.' 'Jest half a second,' he says. 'Rome wasn't
built in a day.' 'It was burned up in a night, though,' I says quick as
a flash, and I guess that floored him. 'Can't you lift me up, man?'
'Much as ever I can,' he says. 'And you call yourself an able seaman,' I
said to him. 'I would sell out if I was you.'"
"He's going round with a different version, Hat," said Lena Kidder.
"Didn't he laugh as he says he did?"
"Laugh? I would like to see the man that would laugh," said Hat in her
great hardy voice. Her fist closed round the mug of milk. "I'll have him
laughing on the wrong side of his face."
"He says he give a bellow fit to wake the dead."
"That man? He stood there like a brazen image, and I had to say to him:
'Are you going to let me stand here in this perishing cold without so
much as lifting a hand? Just you stir your stumps and hotfoot a slug of
square-faced gin into me if you know what's for your own best good.'
"That man? Why, I taught him all he knows. I was sailing my own ships
when he was a deckhand."
The truth was--and Pearl Higgins, his wife, could never quite forget it
or forgive it--Elmer had once shipped before the mast on Hat Tyler's
ships; and Hat was not likely to forget it either. Rumor had it that Hat
and Elmer had been as thick as thieves at one time, and that it was
You-tickle-me-and-I'll-kiss-you between them then. But if such was the
case they had later had a falling out, and Elmer had gone one way and
Hat another.
"As a matter of fact I was more glad than sorry at what took place," Hat
now continued. "That cargo of paving stones up and shifted and started
her in a new place. She was leaking like a sieve. That little rat of an
underwriter said to me: 'If I were you, as soon as I got out of sight of
land I would turn round and kick the stern off her with a tap of my
foot.' 'Maybe I will, for all you know,' I said. I'd like to see them
bamboozle me!"
"Trust you, Hat!" said Lena Kidder in a voice of admiration.
"And so Elmer Higgins has the cast-iron nerve to say that he laughed at
me to my face, does he?" continued Mrs. Tyler. "Well, he lies when he
says it."
So the lie was passed, and hostilities began; for before night word came
to Pearl Higgins that Hat Tyler was back in town running down her
husband for his part in the rescue. Elmer's wife, a dark thin-featured
woman, had felt all along that Elmer had never been able to shake off
vestiges of that time when he and Hat had been so kind of hand-in-glove;
and she had privately determined to put the woman at a safe distance
once and for all.
"The long and short of it is," she said grimly when Elmer had come home
and spread his navigation books on the kitchen table "she's round town
calling you a liar; and now I suppose you'll be just meek enough to put
up with it."
Elmer took off his spectacles and rubbed his brow thoughtfully.
"I shouldn't wonder if it was a case of necessity, mamma," he said
musingly. "If I know one thing better than another it is that I would
want to go in training for a spell before crossing that woman. I know
when I was before the mast with her--"
Pearl Higgins burst into tears promptly. "I think you might spare me an
account of that," she sobbed. "I'm sure I don't want to hear about your
goings-on with anyone so ignorant as Hat Tyler. Yes, she is; she's
ignorant, and comes of ignorant people. What does she amount to, I'd
like to know? There's nothing to her at all. And now," she blazed forth
in fierier tones, "you're half in sympathy with the woman this blessed
minute! I suppose you think just because you rescued her from a watery
grave you're in duty bound to side in with her and take her part against
your own wife. I don't know how it is, but everything seems to fall out
in that woman's favor."
"Well, ain't it so!" said Elmer, not as a question but as if the full
force of the proposition had just struck him. "Now you mention it, I
don't know that I ever knew Hat Tyler to come off second best in a
transaction. I was talking to a party only the other day, and he said
the same thing himself. He says, 'Hat's a smart woman, Elmer.'"
"Why didn't you have her then, when you might have had her?"
"Always said I wouldn't marry a woman that had the heft of me," said
Elmer sagely with a fond twinkle at his Pearl. "I know that night when I
saw her arm on the fluke of that anchor I said to myself, 'I done just
right to steer clear of you, my lady.' There 't was, bare to the
shoulder, freckled all the way up, and jest that pretty size!"
"It's as big as a stovepipe!" shrieked Pearl.
"'T was smooth as a smelt," Elmer averred dreamily, "and jest of a
bigness to work, and work well, in a pinch. A woman like that would be
some protection to a man, Pearl. I wish you could have seen how she
clim up into those anchor chains. But I said to myself, 'That woman has
got too much iron in her blood to go with my constitution!'
"But she's smart; Hat is smart. All is, a man never knows how to take
her. But she's smart as a steel trap."
"Well, I wish she'd shut it then," said Pearl Higgins grimly.
Silence reigned; and in that silence could be heard the steeple clock
ticking on the mantel and the sound of waves lapping under the house.
They were living in Pearl's father's house. Pearl's father had been a
seaman and wharf owner, and in his declining years had established a sea
grill on one of his wharves, and lived up over it. To get to the Higgins
home you ascended an outside staircase.
The subject of Hat Tyler had a fatal fascination for Pearl Higgins.
"Do you know what I heard downtown this morning?" she resumed. "They say
Jim Rackby's going to make her skipper of the new schooner. After she's
just lost one by not keeping her eyes open too! The luck of some women!
I don't pretend to know how she does it. A great coarse thing like
her----"
"Still there's a different kind of a send-off to her, I was going to
say," said Elmer. "Hat's a seaman, I'll say that for her."
"I guess there ain't much you won't say for her," Pearl retorted.
"Then again, when the _Alfred_ run her down she had the right of way."
"I guess her weight give her that," countered his wife.
Elmer got up and stared across the harbor at the new schooner which Hat
was to command. The _Minnie Williams_ sat on the ways resplendent, her
masts of yellow Oregon pine tapering into a blue sky. A mellow clack of
calking hammers rang across the water.
"Those ways are pitched pretty steep, it seems to me," he said. "When
she goes she'll go with a flourish."
Among those who swore by Elmer for a man of wisdom was Jim Rackby, the
owner of the schooner. Next day the two men met in her shadow. The ship
had just been pumped full of water, and now the calking gang were going
round staring up with open mouths to see where the water came out.
Taking advantage of their absorption Jim Rackby asked Elmer in low tones
whether he considered Hat Tyler a fit person to be intrusted with a
ship.
"I don't know a better," Elmer answered in the same low tone.
"How about her losing this last ship?"
"I wouldn't say this to my wife, it would only aggravate her," said
Elmer, grinding up a piece off his plug, "but the loss of that ship is
only another example of what that woman can do in the way of pure
calculation when she sets out to. There she had that good-for-nothing
schooner on her hands. Why, she had to come in here on these very flats
and squat and squirt mud up into her seams, trip after trip, as I've
seen with my own eyes, to keep the cargo from falling out as much as
anything, let alone water coming in; and as soon as the mud had washed
out it was all hands on the pumps, boys, for dear life.
"Well, as I say, she took that ship out there in a fog, like a cat in a
bag you might say, and filled up with paving stones to boot, and she
planted her right there where the _Alfred_ could come slap up against
her and give the owners a chance to say 'Good morning' to the
underwriters. And she owner of a good fourth at the time. Why, she's got
dollars laid away now where you and I have got buttons. And, mind you,
the underwriters had as good as told her that that would be her last
trip. The insurance was going to fall in as soon as she made port. Now
ain't that what you would call a smart woman, laying all joking aside?
But I wouldn't want my wife to hear this, Jim. There's a little jealousy
mixed in there, between you and me and the bedpost."
"Well," said Rackby, satisfied, "I had always understood that she was
one of these kind that if they was let out they would always find their
way home somehow."
"Yes, sir!" said Elmer heartily. "Why, I was over here the day they was
stepping the mainmast, and Hat was going to slip a five-dollar gold
piece under the mast for luck, the way the last man did, but she thought
better of it. I see her change her mind at the last minute and reach in
and take out a bright penny and creep that under quick, thinking the
Lord would never notice the difference. I never knew a woman that was
more downright fore-handed. Yes, sir, she's a dabster!"
How true it is that we never know our friends in this world so largely
made up of conjecture! Could Hat have known how powerfully Elmer had
pleaded her cause, and at a time when it was half lost, would she have
moved heaven and earth, as she was moving them, to bring him into
disrepute? Would she have looked at him when they met with a dagger in
either eye and one between her teeth? Would she have tugged that rope
girdle tighter about her hips and passed him, as she did, with only a
resolute quiver of her person?
Elmer was in hopes that she would come round in time. "She's not much of
a hand to hold a thing up against a body, Hat isn't," he tried to tell
himself. And yet a vague presentiment, something like trouble in the
wind, oppressed him.
Affairs were in this posture when launching day dawned fair. The _Minnie
Williams_ stood ready on the ways, dressed in her international code
flags, which flew from all trucks. Sails of stiff new duck were bent to
the booms, anchor chains had been roused up and laid on the windlass
wildcat, a fire was kindled in the galley and a collation laid in the
saloon. The owner was aboard.
Hat Tyler was very much in evidence, fore and aft, giving orders to the
crew as to what was to be done as soon as the ship left the ways.
"I want that starboard hook dropped the minute we get the red buoy
abeam. Understand? Jake Hawkins, you stand by the windlass. Take care
when you snub her not to break that friction band. And stand by to let
go the other hook in case we need it. This harbor ain't much bigger than
a ten-quart can, when all is said."
Hat was dressed in a splendid traveling suit of heavy brocaded stuff.
She wore an enormous green-and-purple hat and carried a green bottle
with red, white and blue streamers tied round its neck. Being skipper
and a lady at one and the same time, she had chosen to christen the ship
herself.
"What's in the bottle, Hat?" sang out one of her admirers.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Hat retorted wittily. She was in high
spirits.
"Ain't it a waste of good stuff!" shouted another. "I guess it ain't
everybody that can be trusted to christian a ship these hard times."
"It ain't the last drink she will get either," a more remote voice
floated up to her. "I hear she's taking rum to France from Porto Rico."
Hat Tyler took a firmer grip of the bottle under its streamers, for this
was the voice of Pearl Higgins.
Time pressed. Already the shore gang were splitting out the keel blocks.
The whole town stood at gaze. The children had been let out of school. A
group of the larger ones were gathered on the after deck, ready to sing
America when the ship took the water. It was a gala day. Hat felt that
all eyes were centered on her, and her commands rolled along the decks
like so many red-hot solid shot.
The strokes of the men under her keel rang faster and faster yet. When
the last block was split out from under that oaken keel it was expected
that the ship would settle on the ways, that two smooth tallowed
surfaces would come together, that the ship and all her five hundred
tons would move the fraction of an inch, would slip, would slide, would
speed stern foremost into what is called her native element. But ships
are notional, and these expectations are sometimes dashed.
And now Elmer and his wife, who were stationed ankle deep in that yellow
sea of chips under her prow, could see the brows of the shore gang
beaded with sweat, and a look of desperate hurry in the eyes of the
youngster coming with the paint pot and painting the bottom of the keel
as the blocks fell one by one. Well he might hurry; for sometimes the
ship trips the last dozen blocks or so, and thus stepped on with all
that tonnage they snap and crackle, and splinters fly in every
direction.
Nothing now held the ship but a single iron dog which bound the two
tallowed surfaces together. One stroke of the maul knocked this away.
Still the ship hung fire.
"Run back and forth thwartships, you there; all you good people!" cried
Hat hoarsely. "See if we can't start her that way."
So the ship's launching company ran back and forth, and fore and aft,
until their tongues were hanging out. Elmer nudged his wife and asked
her if she remembered that night when they had danced up and down
themselves at a moonlight launching. Pearl replied with a trace of acid
that she had good cause to remember it. It was then that Elmer had
screwed his courage to the speaking point.
In vain, all in vain Hat Tyler roared her orders. The _Minnie Williams_
budged not, nor felt a thrill of life along her keel. The crowd beside
the ways scarcely drew breath; the suspense was racking.
At length the ship's company stopped for lack of breath; and in a moment
of hush a voice cried: "You better get out of that traveling suit, Hat
Tyler. You won't travel to-day."
It was Pearl Higgins. She followed up her witty saying by a peal of
jeering laughter, which punctured the tense mood of that great throng of
friends and neighbors; and such a roar of laughter went up at Hat's
expense that the _Minnie Williams_--and Hat no less--quivered from stem
to stern.
The sea captain burst frankly into tears.
"No, sir," Elmer said to a member of the Tall Stove Club who had missed
the launching, "I never see Hat go all to pieces the way she did then.
She was all broken up over it. Well, she might have mistrusted that
Pearl had a bone to pick with her. Pearl had been between a sweat and a
shiver to get in a word, and she see her chance and let her have it
slap. 'T was just what the doctor ordered. It come in so kind of comical
too. There was Hat, all twittered up in that great poison-green hat of
hers with the little heap of crab apples over one eye--and she stood
there and couldn't say ay, yes or no. And then it was boo-hoo, you know,
same as women will when a thing ain't jest according to their liking.
Hat's a smart woman, all right enough, but she don't show to her best
advantage when she blubbers. I stood there looking at her and I couldn't
think of nothing but that old adage that runs: 'Hell is nothing to put
alongside of a woman that has been laughed at.' 'Pearl,' I says, 'you've
done it now. You can't tell me you haven't made an enemy of that woman.'
And Pearl says to me, 'That great baby! I guess she'll survive.' 'Well,'
I says, 'the fat's in the fire.' And Pearl says to me, ''T won't hurt
her if she does lose a little flesh over it.' I don't know why it is
these women can't live together in peace without kicking up such a touse
all the time over trifles."
Elmer was not free on the occasion itself to spend himself in narrative,
however. His wife kept him close by her after her triumph. In grim
silence she preceded him up the outside staircase, threw open the door
to the house of Higgins and marched in. She commanded him to fetch a hod
of coal. She rattled her irons, touched her finger to the bottom of a
hot one--tszt--and brought it down on the ironing board with a masterful
jounce. And then she glared out of the window at the massive stern of
the _Minnie Williams_.
"I guess she'll know better another time," she said grimly.
"Ain't you two women been at swords' points long enough?" pleaded Elmer.
"If she thinks she can walk all over me she'll find she's mightily
mistaken."
"All is, I mistrust she won't leave a stone unturned," Elmer said,
scratching his ear. He was deep in the study of navigation again. "Hat's
contrary; yes, she is; she's mulish when she's crossed. And I don't know
when I've seen her get her back up the way she did to-day."
He spoke as briefly as possible on the subject, however. Good navigation
began at home; and there were shallows there that would put to shame the
terrors of Pollock Rip Slue. As he was going to bed near the hour of
midnight he did just say that he would rather not have Hat Tyler for an
enemy.
"There's no telling when she may bob up and put a spoke in your wheel,"
he said, taking off his necktie.
"You see to it that you put on a clean collar in the morning," said
Pearl Higgins from the bed. "The one you've got on's filthy dirty."
"I wish you could see it in a little different light Pearl," said her
spouse. "It ain't as if Hat Tyler was the fiend incarnate. But she'll
naturally hanker to get back at you; and with me away and all----"
"I can take care of myself, thank you," said Pearl.
"Still and all, I don't like to leave you with things this way."
"A precious lot you care how you leave things--going off at your age and
getting into this awful war when there ain't a particle of need of it."
"Ain't we had that all out once?"
"And then you stand up there and defend that woman."
"Now, Pearl----"
"Yes, you are! You're defending her, and I shouldn't wonder if you
didn't think as much of her as ever you did in your heart of hearts. Oh,
if you only knew how it wrings me to think of you and she together!"
"There, there! Why, in those days I hadn't so much as--I didn't so much
as know you were on earth."
"We can't ever forget our first loves," said Pearl. "It's no use your
standing up there and letting on. I know what I know. Put out the light
and get into bed. Your feet are getting cold standing there that way."
Her mouth turned into the pillow, she went on: "I remember just as well
as if it was yesterday when her father lay dying--you know how much he
thought of that horse of his, and how it always had red tassels hung on
its ears the first day of spring, and the brass on the harness was
enough to put your eyes out, he worked over it so. He thought the world
of that horse, and when he see he was going to go, he got up and said,
'Hat, shoot the horse. I won't be quiet in my grave for thinking what
kind of treatment it may be getting.' And what does she do but out into
the barn and shoot the gun into the air, and come back and let on like
the horse is gone. And her poor father lying there at his last gasp."
"Still and all," said Elmer, "wouldn't it have been kind of too bad to
put a young horse like that out of its misery? It warn't a day over ten
years old."
"And now what?" continued Pearl. "I heard only to-day that she's been to
the first selectman about having our place here condemned on the ground
that it's unsafe. And the next thing I know I'll be turned out of house
and home and won't know which way to turn nor where to lay my head.
After I've slaved like a dog all my life and worse--and what thanks do I
get for it? Why, my husband--walks away--and leaves me--in the lurch.
That's how much he--thinks of me. Ain't you _never_ coming to bed?"
Elmer, who had stood listening, now in fact had his lips ready puffed to
blow out the light.
But he did not blow.