I

HER oldest child, a boy, was fourteen when Mrs. Guy Vanton lost her husband.

They had lived together for a little more than fifteen years. The newspapers of those years contain nothing to show or suggest what may have been wrong in their lives. If there was anything it did not show outwardly.

In the files of the Patchogue Advance, to be sure, the patient searcher might come upon a record of the death of Keturah Hand, only sister of John Smiley and a life-long resident of Blue Port. The article referred to her as the widow of Hosea Hand, who had lost his life three years earlier in an endeavour to save seamen from the wreck of a three-masted schooner, the Sirius. The Advance did not recall the details of this tragedy, no doubt because they were familiar to almost all its readers. Hosea Hand, with a rope about his waist, had gone into a maelstrom of pounding surf at the foot of the sand dunes, a maelstrom in which several dark bundles of what appeared to be water-soaked clothing were clashing about. The bundles were human flotsam, three poor devils washed from the rigging of the Sirius. Before Hosea Hand could lay hold of a single one a big piece of floating timber, part of the ship’s fence, struck him. He never recovered consciousness after being hauled inshore.

The tragedy had its effect on Keturah Hand in a perceptible loss of the rude vigour which had always characterized her. She failed very fast.

Keturah Hand left more than $200,000 which passed to her brother, John, keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, and this was settled by him upon his daughter, Mrs. Guy Vanton, with whom, after he quitted the Coast Guard service, he lived until his death. The closing years of John Smiley’s life were years of quiet happiness. He had a comfortable home, he had his daughter, and he had about him her four children. The oldest was named for him—John Smiley Vanton.

The father of the four children perplexed those youngsters vastly more than a father ought to do. Guy Vanton was quiet, self-contained, sometimes a little dreamy, rather quickly responsive to people and occurrences about him. Fashioner of several small volumes of verse which had received some discriminating praise, he was also the author of at least one play which had met with indifferent success. “At least one play,” for he never wrote under his own name and never used the same pen name twice; which may have been the result of modesty or of something else, lack of confidence, perhaps. Once or twice when those who knew him ventured to tax him with this peculiarity he smiled and said something about “changing personalities.” His wife, and possibly his father-in-law, could have been the only persons to fathom his odd behaviour. They knew that Guy Vanton considered himself a nameless man, something less than human, a misshapen legacy of a past at once monstrous and oppressive.

There are many kinds of oppression in the world, but the one that is never completely overthrown is the oppression of memory. Nothing could entirely displace from Guy Vanton’s life the first thirty years of it—thirty years, the entire formative period in the human existence.

The mould in which Guy Vanton had been shaped was broken just before his marriage with Mary Smiley, called Mermaid, but that was too late. The plasticity of youth was gone. And after a thing has begun to “set” what matters is not the shape but the material. Clay is often very beautiful, it has some exquisite colourings; it remains clay.

In a characteristic fit of melancholia Guy Vanton executed a deed by which he placed all his property in trust for his wife and his children. And having by this act safeguarded them so far as a man may, the man wrote a few lines informing his wife of what he had done and dropped out of sight.

II

Mrs. Guy Vanton’s closest friend, at the time of her husband’s disappearance, was Tom Lupton, the Tommy Lupton of her girlhood, who had succeeded her father as keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station. She went to Tommy—she had, very humanly and naturally, to go to someone—to tell him the news and talk over with him what should be done. She felt that she could the more honourably do this as Tom and her husband had been firm friends from the time, now many years ago, when seventeen-year-old Guy Vanton had thrown fifteen-year-old Tommy Lupton three times in a wrestling match of an unexpected character. Mary Smiley Vanton knew all about that match and knew the occasion of it, which had been herself. She was not self-conscious enough to suppose, however, that the outcome of that encounter in a clearing in the woods joined to certain sequential events had kept Tom Lupton a bachelor all these years. If she had thought about it at all she would probably have argued, quite justly, that the life of a Coast Guardsman on the Great South Beach is not favourable to marriage.

“This has not hit me so badly as I should have thought it would,” she confessed to her old friend as they sat together in the living room of the house John Hawkins had built, almost a century earlier, for himself and his wife. “Nor so badly, I am afraid, as it ought to hit me. Which is a wicked sign, or a sign of wickedness, I suppose. Not a good sign, anyway.”

“Why?” Tom Lupton wanted to know.

“Because,” she answered, “when things are not as bad as we expect them to be we generally think them a good deal better than they are.”

Tom Lupton turned over the implications of this remark in his mind for several minutes. At length he asked: “I imagine you have decided what you want to do?”

Mrs. Vanton let her hands fall loosely in her lap. They had been hovering for a moment over dark red hair, as heavy in its coils, as full of sombre brilliance, as it had been on the day of her marriage to Guy Vanton. The milky whiteness of her skin was not suggestive of a woman nearly forty. Her face was unwrinkled and her blue eyes were keen; reflecting, not reflective. Only in the look of her mouth was there some slight alteration indicative of the passage, not so much of time, as of experience.

“There are only two things to do, of course,” she answered. “One is to search actively for him, and the other is to accept the situation. Were I free to do so I think I should go out and try to find him. That might be against his wish but I should feel I had to do it. But I am not free. There are the children, four of them. They are my children as well as his, and I must do my best for them. I’m sure that he wanted to do his best for them, and he must have believed that in acting as he has done he was doing it.”

She paused and looked at Tom Lupton expectantly, as if waiting to be prompted further. And indeed, this may subconsciously have been her need of him. It was not so much that she needed his advice and counsel, in all likelihood, as that she needed someone who by a listening presence and by an occasional question or comment would help her to think the thing out and reach and record a clear conclusion. Her friend may have been aware of this. At any rate, he said: “Poor old Guy! I don’t think he’s to blame, do you?”

For an instant she was horrified by a conjecture.

“You don’t mean that you think he was not himself? That he was—out of his mind or anything like that?”

The man hastily disclaimed any such idea.

“I only meant,” he said, “that the person who is to blame is that old beast who brought him up.”

At this reference to Captain Buel Vanton she shuddered slightly, then said: “Yes, of course. But that would be a hopeful augury. Jacob King disappeared and Captain Vanton turned up in Blue Port. It was as if Dr. Jekyll had triumphed over Mr. Hyde.”

“I’d hardly call Captain Vanton a Dr. Jekyll,” Tom Lupton dissented.

Mary Vanton went on: “I think my husband wanted to remove from our children’s lives any trace of the darkness in which he himself grew up. He had, as you know, his moods of profound dejection, never lasting, but liable to make us all unhappy with the sense of something that could not be shaken off. It wasn’t his fault. Had the children been older it would not have mattered so much. But, as you know, they all worshipped him.”

With the idea of helping her past this obstacle the man said: “You have made up your mind what you will tell them—the children?”

She made a sound of assent.

“To John, the oldest, I shall tell part of the whole story. I shall tell him of his father’s boyhood and of Captain Vanton’s life here in Blue Port; I shall simply tell him that Captain Vanton was an insane man whose idea was that the world was so full of wickedness that no boy of his could be trusted in it; and so he kept his boy tied closely to a dreary old house with two old persons in it, the one always sick, the other insane. I shall tell him—John—that his father has never got over that experience, that the memory of it was what made him so unhappy from time to time, that he realized that these spells made everybody about him unhappy and worried. Then I shall tell John that his father, unable to overcome these feelings, has simply gone away. I shall tell the boy that we may never see him again, that he may come back some day entirely recovered and well and cheerful, or that we may see him return ill and old and unhappier than ever.

“That much I can say to my oldest; but I can and I shall say much more, and of greater importance. I want to impress upon him that he is the oldest and that I now have no one nearly related to me upon whom I can depend except himself. He must be as much of a man for my sake as he has it in him to be.

“Later, of course, I shall tell him more. I want to tell him now enough to awaken in him the sense of responsibility. As for the incentive to live up to that responsibility, that exists in myself, his mother, and his brother and two sisters, younger than he. The other incentive, which would exist if we were poor or penniless, I can’t create for him.

“I don’t know,” she continued, thoughtfully, after a moment’s pause. “I don’t know. Perhaps I ought to spend every cent I have—I have; you know I can’t touch Guy’s money—in hunting for him. But—I’m a mother. The instinct of the mother is to guard everything for her children. Money, and other things. I can’t go away on a hunt that might last for years and leave them. But what is most important is this: If I go looking for Guy what will the children think of their father? What shall I tell them? Won’t they think of him as a sort of guilty fugitive, a deserter, someone to be hunted and tracked down and brought to some sort of justice? Of course they will. And how far could I keep the whole story from them? I’m afraid there wouldn’t be much that they wouldn’t quickly know, and what they didn’t know would be matter for dreadful guesses.

“Their whole young lives would be dominated by their father’s act and the things that lay behind it, things they must not know until they are older. Their whole young lives would be shaped by the circumstance that their father ran away from something—or to something.”

Tom Lupton, smoking quietly, looked up at her at that.

“It was really running away to something and not from something, I think,” he said.

Mary Vanton developed this idea.

“Decidedly,” she assured him. “The only thing that Guy could have wished to run away from was the past; and there is no escape from that except in the present. The future doesn’t count, can’t be made to count for the purposes of escape. Guy was running away to the present—the present outside himself. Outside of us here. Out in the world he will find something that he ought to have had in the past. I feel that, even though I can’t say just what it is he will find. It amounts to this, I think: he will get a new past, and when he has got it he will bring it back to us. He will come back to us entirely reconstructed, the same and yet quite different.”

He was glad, with the gladness of a sincere and honourable friendship, to see her choice of the alternatives that awaited Guy Vanton, who might conceivably, but not very probably, return.

“The younger children I shall tell as little as possible—and that what John and I decide upon,” Mary Vanton was saying. “I am going to take all the children and go over to the beach house for the summer. It will give everything a chance to settle, including ourselves. I am glad now that we built a really comfortable house on the beach and I am glad it is at some distance from any of the beach settlements. It is not too far from Lone Cove for you to get over rather frequently to see us. With the boys you can help me a lot. Then in the fall I shall send John to school and I may take the younger children and go away somewhere.”

Tom Lupton rose. She offered him her hand and he shook it warmly. She smiled at him.

“Thank you, Tom,” she said. “You are a good friend, and you have helped me as much this day as in all the rest of your life put together.”

For a second an impulse to tell her how much he had always wanted to help her nearly took him off his feet. A slight quiver passed along his tall, broad-shouldered frame, and beneath the browned surface of his cheek a muscle moved slightly. His voice was the least bit husky as he said: “Any time. Any time at all. Send for me.”

He went out, quickly.

III

The unaccountable gray eyes of John Smiley Vanton looked straight at his mother as she talked to him. They saved her a good deal. In a way they offset the black hair and the snub nose which made him so strongly resemble, outwardly at least, his father. And there was something wonderfully cool and strong, to the mother, in the grayness of those boyish eyes. Granite colour.

“You aren’t telling me everything, mother,” said the boy.

She admitted it. In extenuation she promised that when he was older he should know the rest.

“You see, John, it really isn’t all mine to tell. If your father were dead it would be different. But there are some things which it is his right to tell you, and to be the only one to tell you, while he lives. Suppose he were to come back in a month or a year; then he could take it up with you himself, and that would be much fairer.”

He considered this and approved it.

“I ought to tell you this,” his mother added, “there is nothing that dishonours your father in what I have not told.”

“You know it all?” he asked. “Everything there is to tell?”

“I know all that there is to know,” she assured him, gravely.With this he was satisfied. They then spoke about his sister Keturah, who was two years younger. “You’d better,” John told his mother, “tell her just what you’ve told me. She’ll hear it, anyway. Guy and Mermaid are only ten and six and don’t matter much. I’ll talk to Guy.”

The masterful assumption of responsibility toward his younger brother pleased Mary Vanton. She checked an impulse to fold him to her. She offered her hand instead and he shook it, manifestly proud to conclude a compact of equals.

Keturah Vanton listened to her mother’s explanation silently. Tears stood in her eyes, but her anxiety seemed to be mostly for her mother. She asked her no questions but kissed her with fervour. Ten-year-old Guy heard what his older brother told him with the incuriosity of a person engaged in an intensive task of teaching a new dog old tricks.

“Play dead, Dick,” he commanded. Dick obeyed by rising hastily and loping away. At which six-year-old Mermaid burst out crying as if her heart would break. For some time afterward she appeared to entertain the appalling notion that her father had disappeared rather than play dead.

Mary Vanton lost no time in settling her house in Blue Port and taking her family over to the beach. She and her husband had what was by no means the most expensive house on that sand barrier separating bay and ocean, though it had always seemed to both of them the most comfortable. It fronted squarely on the ocean, bulwarked and protected by a tall and grassy line of dunes. There were a half dozen bedrooms and, on the ground floor, two immense living rooms with fireplaces. The house was constructed with unusual care and was habitable even in winter. And it gave, to the everlasting joy of those whose home it was, on the veritable sea. For the eternal Atlantic, the “Western Ocean” of sailors, is a breeding ground of men. A cleanser and sweetener of continents and islands, the ocean of storms and the ocean of victories, at once the world’s greatest highway and the last, the perpetual frontier. A sight nowhere transcended!

Mary Vanton often looked upon it. It renewed in her the sense of wonder, the sense of mystery, the feeling of hope, without which the soul is extinguished, without which the very heart of life dies.

IV

Tom Lupton got over to see the Vantons at least twice a week through the summer. And whether she was on the wide veranda or sitting under a beach parasol on the sand while the children bathed in the surf, Mary Vanton was always glad to see him. Sometimes she found herself looking forward to his coming, and then she had a moment of hesitation and self-rebuke. Yet ... why should she not? She expected a visitor in September and contemplated his coming with a pleasurable interest, as she told Tom Lupton.

“You’ll be glad to see Dick Hand again, won’t you?” she asked, as they sat on the beach together.

“Why, sure,” Tom answered, with some surprise. “Is he coming out?” Dick was still in New York, a chemical engineer of tremendous reputation. His latest feat had been to develop some old and neglected patents that were his father’s. The rights had nearly expired when Dick got to work at them and made improvements that enabled him to re-patent them. He thought he was going to make a fortune—or another fortune. He had several already.

“What are those patents of his, anyway?” asked Tom Lupton, rather perfunctorily.

“Why, they are processes with oyster shells by which he makes a sort of concrete that can be used for flooring, and some other substance that is good for roofs.”

Tom Lupton grew interested.

“Are those the patents he got from your aunt?” he inquired. “I mean the ones his father got from her?”

“I don’t know. What were those?”

Mary Vanton had never heard the story, but Tom Lupton had, and he related how Keturah Smiley, later Keturah Hand, had bested Richard Hand, Sr.

Mary Vanton heard it through and then exclaimed: “Wasn’t that like Aunt Keturah? I’m glad, though, that Dick is going to make something out of the patents.”

“It seems almost as if you really had a stake in them,” commented Keeper Tom. “Your aunt gave them away, practically, if they are worth anywhere near what Dick seems to think they are.”

“Oh, no; I have no right of any sort in them,” she disclaimed, quickly. “Aunt Keturah must have parted with them with the full consciousness of their possible value. She would never have realized anything from them nor would I. Besides, the greater part of their value has probably come as a result of the work Dick has done.”

“I suppose he is married and has children,” said Tom, absently. Mary glanced at him with equal indifference as she responded carelessly:

“No.”

V

Dick Hand at forty-two had, as has been said, a tremendous reputation and an equally tremendous dissatisfaction. The one had no perceptible relation to the other. Of the one the world was thoroughly aware, of the other it was not. His dissatisfaction was known to Richard Hand alone.

There were times when it swayed him absolutely, When it “came over him,” and he could not get away from it. He could not have told you what it was, really; for sometimes he felt it to be one thing, sometimes another. Now it was an immense discontent with all he had done or was doing, now it was an unreasonable irritation with life itself.

Everything, he found at such times, was worthless.

One day, in a fit of absolute disgust, he went to a specialist. He had no expectation that the man could help him, but he had got where he must do something.

He had expected to be shown into a darkened room where a fellow more or less dressed for a part would take his hand gravely, as if performing a rite, and then, retreating to the distance and becoming semi-invisible, would intone questions in a ceremonial voice while the conversation was written down on the wax tablets of a silently travelling phonograph.

But the office was as unlike that as possible, and so was the specialist.

A bright room with a sort of sun-parlour on the south side, a place of wicker furniture and cretonnes, with books and magazines lying about and tobacco on the table. With his eyeglasses and a sober seriousness of face when in repose, the man who received him was hardly distinguishable from a business man of comfortable habit, moderately large affairs, and fairly frequent preoccupations. They shook hands; the specialist offered Mr. Hand a cigarette and took one himself.

“Let’s come out here,” he said, indicating the sun-parlour. “It’s pleasanter and the chairs are better to lounge in.”

They disposed themselves and puffed away for a moment or two.

“I’ve come to see if you can help me,” explained Dick Hand, rather desperately. The other nodded.

“I get fairly sick of—existence,” Dick went on. “I’m restless and rottenly dissatisfied, and I don’t know why. Nothing seems to mean anything. I have these spells, and they are commoner than they used to be.”

“Tell me all about yourself,” suggested the other. “Only what you call to mind and only what you care to tell.”

Dick hesitated. “I thought,” he said, “that you people asked questions—to get at certain things hidden from us of whom you ask them.”

“Well, we do that,” admitted the specialist. “But it usually is better to hear a man’s own story first. After we have got the things a man readily recalls, comes the problem of getting at the things he doesn’t recall.”

“I suppose the idea is the relief afforded by making a clean breast of things,” hazarded Dick.

“Not entirely. It goes beyond that. It aims at relieving unsuspected pressures. There’s a sort of an analogy in a physical injury, such as a fracture. The man who has the fracture knows that something is wrong, he suffers intense pain, but he doesn’t know that a bone is broken, or, if he does, he doesn’t know just where, nor how to set it. And he suffers too much to be able to find out.”

“Well, there’s certainly a fracture somewhere in my life,” said Dick Hand, grimly. “And I suffer. And I don’t know where it is or how to set it.”

After a little pause he entered upon his story. It was when he had entirely finished and sat silent that the specialist spoke again.

“You say you were once in love?”

“It was the only time I ever was in love,” replied Richard Hand. “She was two years younger than I. We more or less grew up together. We were both in our twenties when she refused me for good and all. She was already in love with another man and she was married to him a little later.”

“You use the past tense. Is she dead?”

“No, she isn’t. She is alive and has four children. Her husband has disappeared lately, left her and the children. By the way, he would make a case for you! If you could cure him I’d say you could cure anybody.”

“It isn’t we who cure,” explained the other man patiently. “We no more cure a man than does the surgeon who sets a broken bone. We just try, like him, to get things straightened out so they can cure themselves. Tell me about her husband, who has disappeared.”

Dick recounted Guy Vanton’s story. It was a long recital but the specialist seemed interested. At the end Dick asked: “What do you make of it?”

“It is a bad case,” thoughtfully, “but it isn’t hopeless. It might even come out all right. I’m afraid not, though. If she—if his wife could not straighten things out for him there isn’t much likelihood that anybody else can. She must be a very fine woman. And they genuinely loved each other. No doubt of that. Love—and children. They are the ultimate satisfaction of most men and women, but not of all. I imagine that he is an exception to the general rule. There was something else that he hadn’t got. Perhaps he will find it.”

“A fine woman.... Love—and children ... the ultimate satisfaction.” The words struck something in Richard Hand. He looked up suddenly and spoke in a harsh voice:

“I suppose if I had got her and if—if they were my children...?”

The adviser looked at him gravely.

“I think there is no doubt about it,” he answered.

They sat there in the gathering twilight for some time in a silence fraught with the pain of a deep revelation. Richard Hand struggled with the thing that stood revealed to him and within him. After a while he said, in words that seemed to choke him: “But what shall I do? What—what can I do—about it—now?”

“Look the thing full in the face, as you are doing now, and conquer it,” the other counselled.After a pause he went on to explain: “You love her, you have always loved her. And because you love her you will love her children, as a part of her. As long as you suppressed your love for her, as long as you refused to acknowledge it even to yourself, so long it continued to punish you in other ways. It did not so act upon you as to prevent you doing good work and profiting by it; but when you had done great work and had profited by it this suppressed longing stepped in and robbed you of the reward you had earned by destroying all the beauty and meaning of life for you, by turning your victories to ashes in your mouth, by making everything you were doing or had done or might do, pointless and futile. For you the final satisfaction would have lain exclusively in doing all these things for her.

“Why haven’t you done them for her? Why don’t you? You can. You can make her yours and her children your own. I’m not, of course, suggesting anything disgraceful or dishonourable. I am suggesting that you look the truth in the face like an honest man—though you haven’t been intentionally dishonest with yourself. Outward conventions are responsible for most of the ingrowing minds. Look the truth in the face like an honest man and fight the good fight like a brave man.

“Say to yourself—you won’t have to say it to her—just this: ‘I love her; I have always loved her. I always shall. I have done everything I have done for her, always, though I didn’t perhaps know it, and certainly did not admit it. It isn’t wrong to recognize it and it’s not wrong to admit it to myself; it’s merely a piece of honesty, and it’s an outlet for what would otherwise be suppressed and denied until it fouled and poisoned my whole life. At the same time this thing must be kept under control, just as any outlet must be controlled. I mustn’t let it, in its flow, do damage as great as it would in its stagnation—and a worse. I must be as honest as the day about it and as strong as I am honest.’”

It was quite dark. The two sat there motionless for a while. Then Richard Hand got up and came toward the other man, offering him his hand.

“Thank you,” he said, and his voice was boyish and alive. “I think you have shown me a way out—if I am strong enough to take it and hold to it. I—I think I shall go and visit her—and find out.”

The adviser gripped his hand and shook it warmly.

“Go, by all means,” he declared. “Nothing is gained by denial of the truth; nothing is gained by suppression. Everything worth winning is won by fighting, and there is no impulse in us which cannot be bitted and bridled and curbed and made to serve us for a righteous end.”

VI

It was like an Old Home Week, Mary Vanton declared, when the three of them were all together on the ocean shore in front of the beach house. Dick had come down with the promise to stay a week and was living at the Coast Guard Station with Tommy. At least he was sleeping there and so, formally, Tommy’s guest. Actually he was Mary’s guest and all his hours were spent at her house or on the bay with her and the children, or in the surf with the children. Except for breakfast, which he and Tommy got for themselves, he ate at the Vantons’. Tommy, too, contrived to spend a good deal of time at the Vantons’ and to take rather better than half his meals there that week. Although as Keeper he remained technically on duty at the Coast Guard Station through the summer months, there was actually little for him to do.

“It’s rather hard on the visitors,” he explained to Mary about his absences, “who come over in droves, mornings and afternoons, but even if I were there I couldn’t demonstrate the use of the apparatus myself without the aid of any of my crew.”

The three sat regarding the ocean in which the four children were frolicking. The two boys could both swim, but were wisely not attempting to do more than duck in and out of the breakers.

“I think I shall stay here all winter,” Mary Vanton said, suddenly.

The men looked at her, but neither spoke.

“I have always loved the beach,” she went on, after a little hesitation. “I have always thought I should like to live here. We shall be comfortable and I think it will be good for the children.”

She spoke in a matter-of-fact way. Tommy Lupton wondered if she was setting herself a vigil of watching and waiting against the possibility and improbability of her husband’s return. Richard Hand also thought of this, but decided—he could hardly have said why—that there was something she wanted to think out, some plan she wanted to arrive at respecting herself and the children. Here, in a comparative isolation, she could work it out for herself. It seemed more in her character, somehow.

VII

When he left, Guy Vanton had in his pocket the sum of $350. With part of this he bought a railway ticket to San Francisco. He boarded the train, and as it was evening, dined, retreated to the club car, smoked and read for a couple of hours, and then went to his compartment.

The main thing was plainly to hit upon something to do that would make a little money, enough for his necessities, while he made acquaintance with the world, the real world, the world outside himself, outside Blue Port, outside his peculiar past.

It had taken him a long time to realize that what he needed, what he must have if life were to become worth living, was a touchstone in the shape of some direct experience, real and rough—something that would not be eaten away by the acid of his thoughts nor carven into gargoyles and grotesques, the chisellings of memory.

Guy Vanton was a poet. It was natural that he should recall the lives and adventures of other poets, and in the performance of Vachel Lindsay he found an example of what he sought. Lindsay had gone about the country with scrip and wallet preaching a gospel, the gospel of beauty, exchanging his poems, printed on slips of paper, for food and lodging. In the Colorado ranges, along Southern roads to the doors of mountaineers’ cabins, by Kansas wheatfields, and over stretches of prairie, from farmhouse to farmhouse Lindsay had travelled—chanting, reading, conversing, discoursing—and these adventures he had afterward chronicled. Guy had no armful of poems to read in exchange for food and a bed; he was certainly not the possessor of a gospel that people would stop to hear. He could not emulate Lindsay and the idea of doing it, to give him credit, never entered his head. What struck him was the fact that in America, at any rate, there was still room for a pioneer. Americans find something zestful and admirable in the spectacle of a man breaking a new path.

VIII

He was a long time turning the matter over in his mind. And after it all, he could make up his mind to one thing only. He would go through with what he had begun. This journey to San Francisco, for instance. Once there he would look about.... He could, at any rate, go to the Federal Employment Bureau, and see what he could get in the way of work. A job. Something to do. Something to worry about. Something two-fisted, hard ... but not hopeless.

IX

He got it. Lying in San Francisco Bay was the British ship Sea Wanderer, of Liverpool, a vessel of 2,000 tons, old and rather disreputable in appearance, ready to carry such cargo as she could get and make a precarious profit for her owners. Soon she would be scrapped. That is, if she did not go to pieces first.

And yet despite the clumsiness of her outline, with all her sail set, she was a beauty, a perfect swan of a ship; a swan with a streaked and dark and dirty breast and body. She had loaded with grain at Port Costa and now lay anchored in midstream waiting to get a crew. The skipper, a Welshman of Cardiff, had a charter to fulfil and was rapidly growing frantic. He was shipping anything and anybody who offered. He took a sharp look at Guy Vanton, noted the fact that here was a man no longer young, noted the further fact that this man no longer young was a person of intelligence and education, found out that Guy had had no sea experience, cursed a little, computed wages, remembered that Guy would be so many added pounds of beef on a rope and took him.

The passage was from San Francisco to Leith in Scotland. In the course of it Guy put on fifteen pounds and came to a clear understanding with himself and at least one man of the crew.

They fought, he and this other man, in the waist, surrounded by a ring of seamen whose sympathy was entirely against Guy and with the Scotchman, named Macpherson. Macpherson was about ten pounds heavier than Guy but made the mistake of clinching. Whereupon Guy turned the fight into a wrestling match and threw his opponent. Macpherson’s head striking on an iron butt, there was no more battle in him that day. Nor did he challenge Guy in the rest of the passage.

Guy’s understanding with himself was as forcible and as fortuitous. It was gained, as such comprehensions are, in loneliness and in struggle. He got some of it on the ship’s yards, striving with half-frozen fingers to clutch the wet and stiffened sail. He got some more of it as he lay at night in the tropics on the hatch, looking up at a star-sprinkled and gently rocking sky. He got most of it in the spectacle of his fellows, a race of men dedicated to the achievement of a common purpose for no real or visible reward. Certainly they did not sail the seas for the sake of the few dollars it put in their pockets. They could live more comfortably ashore in the easeful jails for vagrants—“with running water and everything,” as one of them put it. They were where they were for the sake of doing something together. They would sail that ship from port to port. They would sail her along a trackless path across the eternal frontier of the ocean in a voyage without precedent. Every ship, it came home to Guy Vanton, is a Santa Maria; every sailor a Columbus. If they failed, they failed gallantly; if they succeeded, they succeeded in an enterprise bigger than themselves.

And they did succeed. At night, under the glare of the arc-lights, alongside a stone quay at Leith they stood, a patient little group up forward, and heard the mate, standing on the fo’c’s’le head, address them with the immemorial benediction of the sea, four words:

“That’ll do ye, men.”

A straggling cheer went up and they turned to the shore.

X

Guy Vanton saw now what he had never seen before, what he had come more than 15,000 miles to see: that the world of men and women is a fellowship into which all are admitted in such degree as they care to enter and on such terms as they make for themselves.

Without any subtleties he perceived that the past could bind him only in so far as he allowed it to do so. It was not his father who proposed him for fellowship in the community of men and women, nor could his father withhold that fellowship from him.

Nor his mother, nor anything that they had done or left undone. With the birth of every mortal a new and clean page is turned in human history.

Every man writes his own page. What had he written? And he was getting out of middle age. There was not so much more time left to write. Not so much space.

He would go home to her whom he should never have left; to her whose page opened facing his; to her, the mother of his children, whom he had left to teach them, unaided by him, how to write on the clean, white page.

Together they would work out something better than themselves. What is written, lives on. What they wrote would stand as a record, for better or worse, after they were through inscribing it. The thing was—it must be done together.

He wandered about Edinburgh for a week and then shipped for New York from Liverpool. This was in early winter.

XI

Before Richard Hand said good-bye to Mary Vanton that September he told her frankly of his love for her.

“I am not doing a dishonourable thing,” he insisted. “If I tell you this, now, it is my right to speak and your right to hear.”Mary Vanton sat looking directly at him, the brilliance gone from her blue eyes, the depths in them showing, the depths in her showing, too, in the way she listened, and the words she uttered. Her wonderful hair, darkly red, lay framed against the white linen of a chair covering, a chair with a tall back that seemed to shield and protect her and bring out in relief the milky whiteness of her fine skin, unchanged by the sun and salt air, like a pure and unspotted marble.

“No,” she said, slowly, “it is not dishonourable. For it is not myself, Mary Vanton, that you love, but the girl Mermaid. I am not she. I am much altered.”

“You are Mermaid,” he said, simply, and in his voice there was reverence.

She shook her head at this and seemed to fall to pondering the questions his confession raised.

“Your husband,” he went on, “has deliberately turned his back. It is necessary that you should have some material assistance. It will be necessary—from time to time. I don’t mean money, but I do mean counsel, advice, someone to talk things over with, help with the children, particularly with the boys. Young John, for example. He’s fourteen and you are sending him away to school. You’re letting me take him and you don’t know what it means to me!” Like most people, Dick Hand was not ashamed to show feeling, though he hesitated, embarrassed, before a revelation of the depth of it. And this went deep. He lifted his head abruptly and his glance pierced the blue surface of the woman’s eyes and sank silently to unfathomable soundings.

In those strange regions they met. It was like the embodiment of a fancy as old as Kingsley’s “Water-Babies.” But it was not a meeting of sprites, not a meeting in play. She was Mermaid; he was Merman. She was the incarnation of youth for him; he was the incarnation of dreams for her. Each saw in the other something lost or denied.

“You are what I would most wish to be, were I not Mary Vanton,” she was saying, evenly, and he found it hard to believe that she was uttering the words, so magically did they echo his silent thought. “Remember that I, too, was a girl. I also studied—chemistry. Call it alchemy—wonderworking—the miracle of facts invested with the romance of their exploration and discovery. In my simplicity and eagerness I dreamed for myself a career.... You have had the career.... In your simplicity and hopefulness you dreamed for yourself the perpetuation of youth in an ideal love and the renewal of youth in your children.... That—has been mine. I have had the greater satisfaction. I have it now.

“But mine is the basic satisfaction. I have had, I still have, an ideal love. I have my children. The rest I can forego. The other dream I can have as a vicarious satisfaction in the splendid work you have done and are doing. You, on the other hand, have not had the underlying satisfaction that has been mine.... These things cannot be undone. We have to deal with them as they are. We have to make the most of them, exploit them bravely, gallantly. It is the feat of living which, I suppose, everyone is called upon to perform.”

“You are right,” he said, affirmatively. “But you are also partly wrong. I was your lover and am now your friend; I love your children, and it is at least permitted me to love them as if they were my own.”

“They are that part of me which it is still permitted you to love,” she said, gravely. “And as a friend, as an old friend, as my one-time lover, as the realizer of that part of my dream which I in my own person never can realize—as such you are near and dear to me. Between us there exists a strong tie. I do not think that anything will ever break it.”

“It is unbreakable and it exists. It can be no different, it need be no stronger,” he avowed.

A few moments later she heard him on the veranda, talking with her oldest boy.

“I’ll swim you a hundred yards in the bay and beat you,” he was saying to John in a youthfully challenging voice.

“You’re on,” replied the fourteen-year-old, concisely. “Say, you can’t do it, though!”

They moved away and their voices dwindled. Mary Vanton listened to the attenuating sound of their movements and chatter. A great thankfulness filled her heart, and when she rose from the chair where she had been sitting, motionless, tears were in her eyes.

XII

But Tom Lupton was not articulate. He walked beside Mary Vanton, sat at her table, declined cigars and apologetically lit his pipe instead, looked at his hostess and old friend with something kindling in his countenance, talked—the casual talk that there was to exchange in cheerful barter—and said nothing of what was in his heart. Yet Mary Vanton knew what was there.

The same thing was there that had been in the heart of the youngster, the boy, Tommy Lupton, she had known. It would be there always. But his attitude was different from Richard Hand’s. In spite of an existence that gave him plenty of opportunity for thinking things out there were things that Tommy never would think out. He would only dumbly feel.

If he couldn’t think them out he certainly couldn’t utter them in words. Without doubt he thought it wrong to feel them. All his life he had loved Mary Vanton just as, in a boyish way, he had loved the girl Mermaid. But he did not realize it; would have thought it a wicked thing in him if he had realized it.

His attitude was simple. Mary developed it one day and defined it for her own satisfaction—developed and defined it for his unconscious satisfaction, too. He would feel the better for it, she knew, though he would not know why.

“What,” she asked him as they were walking along the ocean shore together, “are you going to do—eventually?”

Tom Lupton considered.

“Oh, I suppose I shall just stick along here,” he confessed. “It isn’t much. It’s all I have to look forward to.

“Other men,” he said, a moment later, “haven’t any special thing to look forward to, either. Take the fellows at the station. All the older ones are married and expect to retire on their pensions some day and take it easy. They’ve children. They can watch them grow up. I’m not married. I’ll probably stay in the harness as long as I’m able and then I’ll have to quit, I suppose, whether I want to or not. I can watch other people’s children growing up. I can occupy myself some way. That’s what it comes to mostly—occupying yourself some way—doesn’t it?”

“Why don’t you marry?” If it was a cruelty he was mercifully unconscious of it.

He looked straight at her and replied: “I’ve never thought of marrying.”

It was literal truth. Mary Vanton understood that instantly. He had, from boyhood, always put her clean above him. He had fought for her, a boyish battle, and been defeated; and after that, while he continued to feel the same way about her, while he continued to love her, the fancy of adolescence maturing into the devotion of the grown man, he had never figured himself in the running. She had stepped outside of the circle of his life, and when she reËntered it, it was as the wife of another man—which was the whole story.

“Of course,” he was saying, with his admirable simplicity and acceptance of the facts—so far as he recognized them. “Of course I wish I might have married. It would have been pleasanter. I should either have been much happier or very much unhappier.”

Again he looked at her with his smile in which the boy he had been was so clearly visible. When he smiled the little wrinkles at the comers of his eyes, got from much seaward gazing, made him look younger.

“I’m worried about you,” he told her, with the directness that was to be expected of him. “Do you think you ought to stay here this winter?”

“I think I must,” she answered. “It’s not from any idea of shunning people but because I have got to arrive at some way of living. If Guy were dead I could make an unalterable decision. With Guy alive I have to consider the possibility of his return, the probability of it.”

“You feel sure he will return?”

“Quite sure. If I thought he were never to return I would reconcile myself to it as best I could, make my plans, and go ahead. Even then I should have to provide for the fact that he might come back. But believing as I do that he is sure to come back, and feeling as I do utterly uncertain how long he will be away, I am very badly perplexed.”

“Why do anything?” he asked, wonderingly. “It is not as if you had to earn your bread.”

“It is more difficult,” she explained. “When you have to earn your bread, and your children’s bread, you are spared the necessity of any decision. You just set about earning it the best way you can, and puzzle over nothing except how more advantageously to earn it. Or how to earn more.

“Those are not my problems and I have everything to be thankful for, no doubt, that they aren’t. And yet—I wonder if it isn’t easier to deal with difficulties under the pressure of necessity? Do you realize that I have no necessity, immediate or remote, pressing upon me to compel me to address myself to my problem, to solve it?”

This was not so subtle but that Tom Lupton saw it and said so.

“You’d be better off, in a way, if you had to make up your mind to something,” he agreed. “But what I can’t see is what you need to make up your mind to.”

Mary Vanton permitted herself a slight gesture of spreading hands.“If Guy were to be gone but a short time, if I knew that, could feel certain of it, I would simply stay here and keep things as they are,” she declared. “The children come first in any calculation I may make. But if I knew he were to be gone for a period of years I’d do quite differently. I’d go into something, something where I could have them with me and where we’d all be pretty constantly at work together. A big farm, I think. I don’t know anything about farming, but I dare say I could learn something about it, and surely a boy like John could learn it from the ground up—or perhaps farming is learned from the ground down,” she finished, smilingly.

“What I am getting at is this,” she went on. “I feel the need of productive labour. I am not a theorist and I have no set of passionate political or economic interests. But I count it a real misfortune that at this crisis in my life I do not have to work for my living and my children’s living. It would be better for me if I had to, and it will be better for them if they are trained to. Under the trust left by Guy I can’t impoverish myself and the children if I wished to; and certainly I don’t wish to. Money is an obligation, just as much as any other form of property, and more than most. The obligation is to use it as rightly as you know how, as productively as you can. And that obligation certainly isn’t discharged by filling our five mouths with food and putting clothes on the five of us. It is rather more fitly discharged by educating ourselves, but it can only be fully discharged in the end by productive labour. That’s the conscientious and dutiful view I take of it; from the purely selfish view there is a good deal also to be said for a big farm. We need a new set of interests and healthful occupation. It needn’t be a farm, except that I can’t think of any other productive occupation where the children could healthfully bear their share. I couldn’t,” she added, humorously, “organize a factory for the five of us nor set up a factory in which we would be much use to the world or to ourselves.”

“You could carry out this idea, anyway,” Tom Lupton meditated aloud.

“I shouldn’t feel that I could embark on anything of the sort if I felt certain of Guy’s return within a comparatively short time,” she corrected. “If he comes back and approves of my idea we ought to execute it together. That would be as it should be. If I knew he were not going to return for five or ten years I would go ahead. Because five or ten years would change all of us so much that an absolutely new adjustment would be necessary, anyway. And it would be as easily made in an entirely different setting as in the old one but a little altered—more easily, I have no doubt. You must remember, Tommy, that after years of any absence we always return to make rediscoveries. The delight is in finding something essential and unchanged in what is superficial and very much changed. If things are outwardly the same we are disappointed and stop there with our disappointment—we never do get beneath the surface again.”

Big Tom Lupton, with his simple way of viewing everything about him, felt himself beyond his depth.

“How will you decide what to do?” he asked, finally.

“This winter will tell me,” Mary Vanton asserted. “I can do nothing about it before spring—I won’t, at least. If by spring I have received no word, if there is then no indication, nothing to guide me, I shall have to go ahead in my own fashion, take all our lives in my own hands, run my own risks, make my own mistakes, stand or fall by what I do and the way I do it.”

XIII

Richard Hand had taken John Vanton to a school in New Jersey and had seen him settled there before going back to New York to prepare for a job in Arizona. The Western enterprise necessitated a long absence from his office in lower Broadway, and made it improbable that he would be able to see the Vantons for nearly a year. But late in October Mary Vanton got a letter from him in which he said:

Things are in such shape here that I think I shall be able to run away for a couple of weeks at Christmas time, and if you like I will go to the school and pick up John, who will be coming home about then for the holidays. I am going to invite myself to come and stay with you part of the time I am East—the first part of it. After Christmas I shall have to get back to the New York office and clean up some work there. May I come?

I do not suppose you have heard from Guy, though I sincerely hope you may have. I made some inquiries in New York and did a little investigation by wire. Through a friend in Washington I had a search made of records of the Federal Employment Bureaus in some of the cities and we found that under his own name he had been shipped on a British vessel, the Sea Wanderer, of Liverpool, sailing from San Francisco to Leith, Scotland. That was months ago.

The Sea Wanderer is an old ship, a squarerigger, and she went around Cape Horn. Of course I inquired right away about her and learned that she arrived safely at Leith after a passage of five months—not very swift, you see. I wasn’t able to find out what became of Guy after that, but he reached Scotland all right, for there was no trouble on the passage and no one was lost or died. He was paid off at the Board of Trade office in Leith along with the rest of the crew.

He appears to have gone straight to San Francisco from New York and to have shipped there on this passage before doing anything else. The time interval is too short to have allowed him to do anything else. It was not more than ten days, apparently, from the time he left New York to the day the Sea Wanderer sailed. The people at the Federal Employment Bureau in San Francisco have no recollection of him. They don’t recall anything he said nor what he looked like. He was just one of hundreds of others they deal with every day. The only actual identification, of course, lies in the name, and it is highly improbable that the man who was shipped on the Sea Wanderer was some other Guy Vanton. I think that, in a way, you will be glad to know that he kept his own name. It makes him seem more like a fellow going about his proper business and not trying to hide or run away from something.

He wasn’t doing that, I feel sure. He was just going after something he hadn’t got. Let’s hope he gets it and comes back safely with it.

John is a trump. I like that older boy of yours and suspect he’s got great stuff in him—not that it surprises me. As your boy I should be surprised if he hadn’t. I rather expected, though, that he would say something about his father, talk to me about him in some way, try to get my opinion or something of that sort. But he never opened his mouth on the subject. He’s self-contained without being conceited. He’ll get on well at school. And whatever befalls, when he gets a little older you are going to be able to have real reliance on him. He writes me regularly and seems to like the place and the fellows. I think he inherits your taste for chemistry, and as I’m a chemical engineer he thinks something of me on that account. In fact, when we’re alone together it’s pretty much a case of “talk shop” for me all the time. Not that I mind that! I never knew before how interesting shop talk can be. And if I give him my confidence he won’t withhold his. I wonder, anyway, if a certain relation of friendliness and exchanged confidence and shared confidence doesn’t come rather easier between two people who aren’t joined by ties of blood. It has sometimes struck me, from what I’ve seen of other men and their sons, that the very fact that a man is a boy’s father somehow makes it more difficult for him to come into a real confidential relation with the boy—at times, anyway. For even nowadays the father is more or less an embodiment of Authority, more or less the sovereign, and intimacy with the sovereign is not particularly easy. Since I have no real authority over John he is rather more inclined to listen to my advice and heed it. “If I were you” gets farther, lots of times, than “You must.” Well, I won’t theorize about it; the fact is what matters, and the fact is what gives me immense pleasure and a sort of general gratitude that belongs to you and John and things in general.

I wish there were some way of finding out what Guy did after reaching Leith, but from the day when he left the Sailors’ Home there no trace of him appears. I have had the people at the Sailors’ Home questioned but he did not talk about his plans. They remember him there rather distinctly—not his personal appearance but the fact that he seemed to be a man of education and breeding. When he left he took his dunnage with him, which would make it seem probable that he intended to go to sea again. If so he may be on his way home now. I sincerely hope so. I not only hope he’ll come back, but I hope he’ll come back as speedily as possible and in his best estate, physically and mentally and spiritually.

Tell me what the girls would most like for Christmas presents. And if there is anything I can get for you on my way East let me know. John and I are planning to spend a day in New York buying some gifts. What would you like? I shall bring along a toy wireless outfit for Guy, Jr.

Mary Vanton read this letter with attention. The news it contained of her husband stirred her profoundly. At first she wondered if the career of Captain Vanton had had anything to do with Guy Vanton going to sea; but after some reflection she concluded it had not. Guy had always loved the sea, which was one of the reasons they had built the beach house she was living in. The sea had been a mutual bond between them—the sea and the beach. Fully half of the verse he had from time to time written dealt with the ocean, and he and she had shared a certain interpretation of it, that the sea was the last, the irremovable, the perpetual frontier on which the race of men could renew themselves, renew their hardihood, exhibit their courage, their daring, their resourcefulness, their faith.

“The sea,” Guy had once avowed, “is the only frontier that never vanishes and never recedes. Men triumph over it: ‘A thousand fleets roll over thee in vain,’ and the same victory has to be won anew each time a ship sets sail. Steam and wireless and all sorts of other inventions make sea travel safer and easier and swifter only in the long run, and in the case of the ‘thousand fleets’—in the case of any single voyage or any single ship the actual risks, the possible hardships, the prerequisite of latent courage and absolute devotion on the part of the men who sail her, remain exactly the same as when the Phoenicians went forth in trading vessels and shuddered to go beyond the pillars of Hercules, into the dark, unknown ocean that rolled away to the end of the world.”

This, he had argued, and Mary Vanton agreed with him, constituted the real immortality of the sea and the undying freshness of its adventure. They both felt that there was something in their attitude that wasn’t a part of the ordinary landsman’s attitude toward deep water. Both had been brought up in the tradition of tall ships and men who manned them. It showed in their outlook on life and their tastes in reading. Joseph Conrad was the passion of both. Although they agreed in thinking his greatest novel to be not a sea tale at all—“Nostromo”—they were of one mind respecting his finest story. Together they picked “Youth,” despite the apparent preponderance of critical opinion in favour of “Heart of Darkness.” Perhaps this was because in their own lives they had their heart of darkness; and in Guy’s case there must have been, in respect of “Youth,” an inextinguishable yearning for something he could hardly be said ever to have enjoyed in his own strange and sad experience.

Much of all this passed through Mary Vanton’s mind as she stood on the wide veranda of the beach house, alone. The water was now far too cold for bathing and the children had scattered to their own devices. It was a chilly, sunshiny, October day. Hull down on the restless horizon Mary could see a steamship moving almost imperceptibly westward. By nightfall she would be at anchor off Quarantine. That same night or the next morning her passengers would troop ashore and add themselves to New York’s millions. And even as she watched this liner creep along, not more rapidly than the minute hand of a watch, a thin plume of smoke on the eastern horizon announced the presence of another vessel. So they followed each other, day in and day out, going west, going east, seldom missing from the scene for an hour. More rarely you saw a great ship under full sail come up over the rim of the world, move past with curved white beauty, and then sink over the world’s rim again.

XIV

The vessel struck with the greatest suddenness and with such force that even above the roar of the wind and the thunder of the surf pounding at the foot of the dunes the people gathered in the Vanton house heard the dull crash and jumped to their feet.

Dick Hand exclaimed: “What’s that!”

Mary Vanton answered with the thought that was in all their minds: “A ship!”

Her mind ran instantly to the children, absurdly, as if they were in danger.

Seven-year-old Mermaid, the youngest, was in bed and was not likely to be awakened by sounds outside. Keturah and the two boys were with Richard Hand and herself.She spoke to the three of them with stern distinctness:

“Children, whatever happens, you mustn’t leave the house. You mustn’t step off the veranda. The sea is up to the foot of the dunes.”

She called the servant and governess and ordered them to keep to the house and to help her.

Richard Hand was already at the telephone and calling the Lone Cove Station.

“Hello, Tommy!” they heard him say. “A ship has struck just opposite the house. Wait a moment.” He lifted his head from the transmitter and asked: “Can you see anything?”

“They’re sending up rockets,” replied Mary Vanton. She was at the window, the two boys crowding close to her to look out.

“It’s certain,” Richard Hand said into the telephone. “We can see her distress signals.... All right.”

He hung up the receiver with a crash and went to the window to see for himself.

The utter darkness of the angry night was broken, at a distance of perhaps 400 yards from where these onlookers were clustered, by a stream of rockets, which lit the blackness faintly for an instant and then expired, making the night seem darker than before. The illumination was not sufficient to disclose much of the vessel but she seemed to be a schooner or ship with three masts. Not a large craft; something of about 2,500 tons and something more than 200 feet long, Richard Hand surmised.

There was no sail on her that they could see. What little she had been carrying must have been blown from the bolt-ropes before she struck, and this, indeed, had probably caused the disaster to her, forcing her on a lee shore. The gale was from the southwest. It had been blowing all day, with hail and snow flurries, and it was bitterly cold.

Mary Vanton left the window and taking the servant went into the kitchen. She dragged out a washboiler, took from a cupboard a fresh can of coffee, emptied the coffee in the washboiler, but not without measuring and estimating, put the boiler on the stove and began pouring in water.

She ransacked the pantry and sent her older boy to the cellar. From that region John emerged bringing a side of bacon.

“Bread!” exclaimed Mary, and for a moment she stopped in complete perplexity. Then a recollection relieved her.

“John,” she told the boy, “go down cellar again and bring up all the hardtack there is there. Bring it up a little at a time. Don’t try to bring it all at once. There’s plenty of that, anyway.”

Her attention was caught by certain preparations that Dick Hand was making.“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to join the United States Coast Guard on a temporary assignment to active duty,” he responded, grinning as he struggled to get into a pair of hipboots belonging to her husband. Mary’s face showed a moment’s dismay but cleared instantly.

“Tommy will appreciate it.”

“He’d better,” Dick asserted. “Pretty way to celebrate the holiday season, this!” But he changed his tone a second later. “I ought to be kicked for jesting about it,” he said. “Think of the poor devils on that boat!”

He had got into the boots and was wrapping an oilskin coat about him.

John and Guy, holding the lookout at the window, shouted: “The man on patrol is out here sending up answering rockets.”

Keturah, dissatisfied, came to her mother’s side in the kitchen.

“Can’t I help here?” she asked.

“Break out some of the ship’s biscuit,” replied her mother, perhaps unconsciously falling into sea speech. Keturah began opening a box of the hardtack.

Having got under way the work of preparing food and a hot drink for those who would soon be needing both, Mary Vanton allowed herself a moment at the window with the boys.

Above the steady diapason of wind and ocean came sounds of men shouting faintly. This was the crew of the Lone Cove Station, dragging apparatus to the dunes close by the Vanton house. A moment later Keeper Tom Lupton came in, banging the door; that being, indeed, the only way to close it against the force of the gale.

Mary Vanton hastened toward him.

“We shall go around the house,” he said, without wasting time in greeting her. “We can work better in the lee of the house. It will be a wonderful protection to us and if the line falls short it will be less likely to be fouled.”

“The whole house is yours,” Mary Vanton told him, quietly. “Use it. Come and go as you like. I am making gallons of hot coffee; there will be bacon and bread or hardtack.”

He thanked her and praised her with a single glance. “I must be getting outside,” he said, and left.

The boys had deserted the south window for one looking east where they could see the life savers bringing up their apparatus on the crest of a dune close by the house. Their mother spoke to them:

“John and Guy, bring in wood and get some dry wood up from the cellar and start fires in the fireplaces.”

They obeyed willingly enough. Mary went into the kitchen and sped the servant and her daughter in the task of victualling.

It is bad enough to move Coast Guard apparatus along the level ocean shore, dragging it through the sand, but to move it back from the ocean, up and down over the uneven line of the sand dunes, is more difficult still. When the ocean is up to the foot of the dunes and is biting angrily at their bases this difficult portage has to be made.

The Vanton house was not more than a half mile east of the Lone Cove Station, so the Coast Guardsmen’s task was not as bad as it might have been in this respect. Sometimes it is necessary to drag life boats mounted on trucks, and all the other paraphernalia, for several miles.

To be able to work with such a base as this big house right at hand was an immense advantage, and to be able to work in the lee of it, more or less huddled under its eastern wall, seemed a piece of fortune hardly less great.

Everything else was about the worst it could have been in the circumstances. The darkness was absolute. The gale was of hurricane force, blowing at more than 60 miles an hour. It was early in the evening, not yet ten o’clock, and there was all the night to fight through. The barometer, as Keeper Tom Lupton well knew, was still falling, and the height of the storm had probably not been reached and would not be reached until toward morning. The chance of the sky lightening, until daybreak compelled a recession of the darkness, was almost nil. The chance of the wind abating was no better. And even should the night become a little lighter and the wind lessen, the tremendous seas which were assaulting the sand dunes and breaking over the stranded ship would not go down. It takes hours after a heavy gale for the sea it has kicked up to lessen perceptibly.

The wind, against which a man could sometimes hardly stand or keep upon his feet, was not the worst thing for those who had to make the fight to save life from the shore. It was hailing intermittently and the ice particles were fairly driven into the skin of men’s faces like a peppering of fine shot. There was little snow on the ground, which was a thing to be thankful for. More, however, would come later when the wind began to abate.

Keeper Tom marshalled his men and his machinery as close as possible to the Vanton house. Within forty minutes from the time he himself finished speaking with Richard Hand, his men and his apparatus were posted and he was ready to begin operations. In the meantime, Dick Hand had bumped against him in the blackness and shouted indistinctly:

“Tommy!... Dick! Anything you want ... help you....”

“Thanks!” the keeper had bawled back with his hands on his old friend’s shoulders.The little cannon began booming and a thin line began whipping seaward.

Nothing was visible. What those ashore would have seen, if there had been light, was a three-masted ship which had struck the outer bar and had been driven past that until she lay on the inner bar, so far inshore that it might have been possible to wade to her at low tide in peaceful weather. The stress of her blow on the outer bar and the pounding to which she had been subjected in being driven past it, as well as the continuous assault she was now under, had battered her very badly. She had not opened up at her seams but would, and at almost any instant. Her foremast had been carried away completely—snapped off a few feet above her deck. Some of her yards—the spars carrying her sails—were gone; two of these dangled loosely, menacing the lives of any one on her decks. But there was no one on her decks. All hands had, of necessity, taken to the rigging.

They could just be glimpsed by the flare of her rocketing distress signals—little dark figures in the maintop, in the topgallant crosstrees, in the mizzen shrouds. They appeared not at all human. They seemed to be nothing but slight lumps or warts on the fine tracery of the rigging, the slender filaments of masts and yards and stays, wood, wire and rope, limned against the formidable blackness in which sky and sea met each other and were indistinguishable.No boat, of course, could live for a moment in the sea that was raging. The only chance was in getting a line to the vessel. And in doing that every instant counted.

The first shots with the line were useless, as was to have been expected. It was necessary to determine direction and drift, and to make a heavy and exact allowance for windage. The ship lay directly south, the gale was from the southwest. The line had to be shot almost straight against the wind, which then carried it to the south. But so shot, it became evident that it was falling short. A heavier charge was used and still the line fell short.

“We can’t stay here,” bellowed Keeper Tom who, when he wanted to give an order, was under the practical necessity of bawling it separately in each man’s ear. “We’ll have to leave the lee of the house and go to windward, well to windward.”

This was that they might not have to shoot the line squarely in the teeth of the gale when the wind, getting under it, lifted it high in the air and seriously shortened the horizontal distance it travelled—like a “pop” fly in a baseball game or a golf ball driven straight into the wind.

Leaving the lee of the Vanton house was just another hardship added to those they were already enduring. All the apparatus was moved and a post was taken on a dune well to the west. From this site better results were got almost immediately. The gale still carried the line to the eastward but this could be allowed for and the lateral journey of the line was not materially lessened. After a few shots to get the wind allowance the line was dropped squarely over the wreck.

XVI

Inside the house Mary Vanton, having assured herself that there would be plenty to eat and drink when it was wanted, having approved the work of her sons in building roaring wood fires in the fireplaces, went upstairs and began to overhaul bedding. In this she had the help of the governess while Keturah and the servant remained active in the kitchen. There was a great deal of bedding in the house and Mary got it all out. Some of it she carried down to one of the living rooms, requisitioning John and Guy to struggle with the mattresses.

Then she went to her medicine closet and looked that over. Most of the rough-and-ready remedies were there in reasonable quantities. Alcohol, peroxide of hydrogen, iodine, camphor, and so on. There was some prepared bandaging and, of course, linen could be torn up in strips. She bethought herself of stimulants and was relieved to recall a half-dozen bottles of brandy in the cellar.

Was there plenty of hot water?

What next?

Something new occurred to her always before she completed the task in hand. At length she went through the house, upstairs and down. Everything, she decided, was as nearly ready for the emergency as it could be. The fires burned brightly in the living rooms and the smell of coffee filled the place. In one of the living rooms four mattresses were ranged on the floor and had been made up with sheets, pillows, and coverlets. In the other the large table had been cleared of books and papers. A cloth covered it and it was heaped high with piles of plates, with hardtack, with some cold meat, with what bread there was, with cups. In the centre stood several pots of coffee. In the kitchen the servant was frying bacon, Keturah slicing it for her. The governess had run upstairs to assure herself that Mermaid, the youngest, had not been wakened by all the bustle, or to quiet her if she had. The two boys were replenishing the fires and between times darting to the windows, now the south and now the west windows. But they could see little or nothing from either.

Mary completed her inspection and stepped to the south window. It was at that instant that the lifeline reached the wreck.

XVII

The line passed close to the mainmast and a stiffened arm reached out and caught it, drew it inboard at the maintop, some thirty feet or so above the wave-washed deck. There followed an interval of minutes—they did not seem like hours but they seemed tragically long—in which the two or three men gathered in the maintop, which is a small semi-circular platform with barely standing room for three, made various movements making fast the line; and having guarded against losing it they began slowly to pull its length in toward them.

The light line for firing carried to them a stouter rope, bent to the end of it, and a block and tackle. Eventually the block reached them and the people on shore prepared for the running out of the breeches buoy.

And all this dark and sightless while the distress of the motionless figures lashed in the mizzen rigging was something palpable, acute, and sensed without the need of a single gesture, a single sign, a moment’s glimpse. How were these unfortunates to avail themselves of the breeches buoy even when it reached the ship? To get to it they would have to unlash themselves, descend, and cross the deck between the mizzenmast and the mainmast and ascend to the maintop. To cross the deck would be impossible. As well try to walk fifty feet on the surface of the Atlantic.

It was not certain, furthermore, that those in the mizzen retained any power of physical movement. They did not shift their positions. Although they had lashed themselves in pairs close together they did not strike each other about the head, shoulders, and body, as they should be doing if they had any vigour left, in the imperative effort to keep from freezing.

Slowly, with a painful slowness, the line was got ready for the running of the breeches buoy. And then it was that Keeper Tom Lupton manifested his intention of being hauled out in the buoy to the vessel.

There was emphatic dissent. The men pleaded with him in shouts, shrieking arguments that the wind tore from their lips and the great thunder of the ocean drowned. These were not circumstances under which he should feel impelled to go aboard; the risk of travel either way was too serious for a single unnecessary journey in the buoy to be undertaken; the line might not have been made fast properly, in which event he would be the first man lost; in the conditions that existed he could do nothing when he got aboard, and he would become merely one more man to be hauled ashore.

These pleas were without avail. Keeper Tom admitted that he “didn’t know what he could do till he got there. The thing,” he added, “is to get there.”

“Dick,” he shouted in Richard Hand’s ear, “in any case, I can’t do much alone. I can’t ask any of my men to risk their lives by coming out on the next trip out of the buoy. I’m not asking you to. But men——”

The racket of the storm made the end of the sentence inaudible. Dick Hand did not need it. He flung his arm about Tom Lupton and bellowed: “I’ll be there. Next trip out.”

Keeper Tom communicated the order to his men. It was not until Tom Lupton was in the buoy and moving over the boiling surf at the foot of the sand dunes that Richard Hand thought, with a shock, of Mary Vanton. Three men in the world were charged, in varying degrees, with some responsibility to stand by her and aid her. One had disappeared and the other two were about to jeopard their lives.

XVIII

He felt he must see Mary for a moment and speak to her. He left the cluster of men on the dune and hurried to the house.

He found her on the rug in the east living room. One or two of the crew were warming their hands and swallowing hot coffee in the other large room. The men came over, not more than two at a time, at intervals, to get thawed out.

“Tom,” he said, “has gone off in the buoy.”

“I know,” she answered. “I saw someone being hauled out and I knew it must be he.”

He hesitated, then told her.

“The worst of it is, I must go on the next trip. He practically asked me to. And I said I would.”

At that for the first time in all her life, so far as he could remember, she seemed panicky and likely, for an instant, to collapse. He stepped hurriedly toward her but she had got hold of herself and made a gesture to keep him away.

“No, no! I’m all right.” But she let John, who had approached them, bring her a chair and she leaned on it. The boy kept near them, regarding them silently. His gray eyes were inscrutable but the look he gave his mother was one of sympathy, and Dick Hand thought that there was confidence in the glance that was directed at himself. It somehow came over Dick that this boy was a big factor in all their lives, potentially at least. If Tommy and himself did not come back——

Mary Vanton was calm and self-reliant again. She motioned to Richard Hand that he had better drink some coffee. He took the hand she offered him, waved to John, and hurried into the other room, impatiently swallowing the coffee and going out the door with the two other men.

XIX

The buoy had travelled out safely and the half-frozen workers ashore had seen the Keeper disengage himself and clamber into the maintop. They had also seen him help one of the crew into the buoy and had received the signal—jerks on the rope—to haul away.

Hauling away with a will they brought to the top of the dune, half-drowned by the upleaping surf as he was borne shoreward, a sailor, one of the forecastle crowd. Two men picked him up and carried him to the house.

As they cleared the buoy for the trip out Dick Hand came forward to take his place in it. He put himself in, first one leg then the other, and shouted: “All fast!”

They began hauling him out.

Out he went, not rapidly, out over the dark and frightful tangle of waters that flooded the smooth beach below him. He was facing shoreward. The moment his feet left the edge of the dune he was, to all intents and purposes, in the midst of an immense void, a bottomless region of water and blackness and cutting, stinging wind without landmark or landfall, terrible, thunderous, and empty of anything but sound. Beneath him the stout strength of the buoy bore him up. That, at least, was tangible. It was as if he rode slowly through chaos on an invisible steed, winged, at home in the air.

A little way and then a great wall of water coming unseen out of the darkness rose and curved and fell upon him. One instant he sensed its black, glittering height at his back, the next he was in the midst of it, as submerged as though he had been a thousand fathoms below the immense Atlantic; an instant later he was free of the barrier, drenched, drowning, water running off him in streams—riding slowly seaward, riding slowly on.

The line carrying the breeches buoy was as taut as it was possible to make it but inevitably it sagged in the middle, especially when the buoy was bearing a man’s weight. For a part of his journey Dick was under water almost continuously. He had to hold his breath and draw breath as cautiously as a swimmer in a heavy sea. The impact of waves bruised and shook him, the roar of the water deafened him. He could see neither ship nor shore. He grew doubtful, almost, of his own existence. Still he rode on.

As he neared the ship he was lifted above the angry flood that seethed about the vessel. Now he went forward more slowly, for he had to be hauled not only out but upward. Eventually he found himself hard upon the ship’s maintop, her torn rigging, singing deep bass notes in the wind, all about him. A little farther, a little farther, yet a little more and he was able to reach out his hand and clutch a ratline. A moment more and he was struggling to get his feet on the tiny platform of the top, Tom’s hand was under his shoulders, and Tom’s voice was in his ear.

“Fine work! Good boy! You’re just....” That much Tom’s voice managed to get to him above the awful noise.

XX

Mary did not see Richard Hand’s trip out in the buoy. She was busy ministering to the first man ashore, the sailor whom two of the Lone Cove crew had brought to the house. One of the men hurried back to help haul the buoy; the other stayed and, aided by John, stripped the sailor of his wet clothing and got him into night clothes and a bathrobe. He was unconscious.

Mary, arriving with a bottle of brandy, poured out a drink and they managed to get it down his throat as he revived.

He sat up and looked about him stupidly and pathetically. He was a big fellow with blond hair and blue eyes, a Scandinavian, apparently. After he had swallowed a little more brandy they put him in one of the beds in the living room which Mary had converted for hospital purposes. He did not appear to be frostbitten and, closing his eyes, he fell into a slumber that was not much lighter than the unconscious state in which he had reached the land.

Mary stood for a moment regarding the first—and it might be the only—life wrested from the clutch of the sea. He was handsome in a way and evidently not very old. A mere, overgrown boy, she thought to herself, but he might not be so young as he looked with his light hair and fair skin, almost beardless. He came of a seafaring race, whether Norwegian, Swedish, or Dane; he would not think very deeply of his adventure. She wondered for a moment what he thought about the sea, how he felt about it, how he would feel about it now; but she reflected that his escape would probably present itself to him as a piece of luck, nothing more, as something all in the day’s—or the year’s—work—nothing romantic about it.

XXI

Mutely, working together on the slight foothold that the maintop afforded them, the few boards beneath their feet shaking to the tremendous violence of waves breaking over the decks below, Tom Lupton and Richard Hand got first one and then the other of the two men on the maintop with them into the breeches buoy and sent them ashore. In the rigging above, close to the topgallant crosstrees, were two other figures. But even as they worked, getting their second man into the buoy, one of these black huddles that was a man dropped past them and struck the deck with a noise distinct and apart from the noise of the general tumult. In the spectacle of that hopeless black clump falling down past them, in the sound of that blow as it struck the deck, in the quickness with which the shape was swallowed up by the glassy black of the ocean, raging with frothing crests, there was something to make the bravest soul momentarily faint and turn the body sick.

“I’m going after the other,” said Keeper Tom by gesture. And by gesture Dick inquired if he should go, too. Tom Lupton shook his head. “Stay here,” he ordered, and started up the ratlines.

From below, fearful and anxious to aid him but feeling the obligation to obey orders, Dick Hand watched.The keeper went up slowly, the wind flattening him against the weather rigging. Dick saw him gain the crosstrees and moving toward the lashed man begin work with a sheath knife. After some moments the keeper got the man free. The fellow was so little able to help or move about that the keeper abandoned an evident intention to carry him down the weather rigging on his back. He slashed about with his sheath knife, and Dick could make out that he had cut some sail rope. This he proceeded to tie about the man, fastening it under his shoulders and knotting a bowline. Very slowly, very cautiously, working on the weather side, the keeper began to lower the man to the maintop. It was a perilous enterprise and was only managed by turns of the rope around a shroud; and it took minutes. But it was accomplished and Dick received the man safely.

He contrived to get the fellow in the buoy and away while Tom was climbing carefully down.

There remained now the great problem of the people on the mizzenmast. The deck was impassable. Not only that, but the ship was beginning to break up. Her bow had been bitten off raggedly by the sea. It was impossible to tell where she would split or when. She might break in twain amidships. In that case the mainmast would almost certainly go by the board, Dick and Tom would both be lost, the connection with the shore would be broken, and in all likelihood not another soul would reach the beach alive.They had rescued four. There were three on the mizzenmast. A full half of the crew had certainly been drowned, some, perhaps, going down when the foremast had broken off.

Something like a miracle happened as Dick Hand and Keeper Tom stood together again in the maintop, having sent four men ashore.

A wave of unusual height rose up, shone inkily against the blackness of the sky, curled, and burst, burying the poop deck completely and falling with all its might against the base of the mizzenmast. There was a noise of splitting wood and of rending stays that rose above the loud song of the wind in the rigging, and with a tremendous crash the mizzenmast fell. By some freak of circumstance it fell straight to windward, and the wind and some resisting fibres of wood at the point of fracture retarded its fall. It came down slowly, tearing through the outer main rigging to windward, the mizzen topmast shearing things down. For the moment the mizzenmast rested squarely on the main upper topsail yard halfway out, then as the ship rolled slightly it came inboard and close to the mast. Dick and Tom, watching anxiously and in terror, waited to see what it would do. But it had done what it had to do. There it rested, close to the mainmast, supported by the main upper topsail yard; there it seemed destined to stay for no one knew just how long—perhaps ten seconds, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour.But the inexplicable chance which had broken off the mizzenmast and laid it carelessly, like a match, diagonally against the mainmast and close to the maintop had shaken from their lashings two of the three human figures that had been visible on it and had brought the third, and only remaining one, almost within arm’s reach of the two rescuers.

There was no trouble getting him free and into the maintop where the buoy was waiting, empty, ready to give someone a ride to the shore.

He was immovable and partly frozen, lifeless or nearly so. One would not have judged that there could be much chance of saving him even if he were got ashore; but that was not a question to take into consideration.

The wind howled, the sea made an indescribable noise. The two could just manage to strap the man to the buoy and give the signal to haul away.

XXII

Ashore, in the house, Mary Vanton’s foresight and careful preparation were being vindicated, and the facilities that she had at her disposal were being taxed to the limit.

Four men had been brought ashore in the buoy. All four of them had to be stripped of their clothing and partially reclothed in dry apparel. All four needed brandy, coffee, food, none of them was in a condition to receive. Of these and of the Coast Guardsmen some were frostbitten and had to be rubbed with snow, others had cuts and bruises that required attention. Two were delirious, and for these she found some sedative; no one, herself included, ever could remember afterward what it was. One long living room did really resemble a hospital ward. The other living room resembled a free-lunch counter in unusual disarray. Food was beginning to play out, but of hot coffee there remained a plenty for all.

Keturah and the servant tended to the food and drink, except that Mary herself kept charge of the brandy. The governess was busy with bandages and liniments; John stood watch over the patients and ministered to them as best he could, helping his mother. Young Guy, exhausted from the excitement, had been carried at last, half asleep, to his bed and simply dropped upon it with his clothes on. Through all the excitement the youngest child, Mermaid, had slept without waking. It was now two o’clock in the morning.

The door opened, for the one hundred and thirty-first time, perhaps, that night, and two Coast Guardsmen stumbled in carrying the lifeless body of Guy Vanton. Mary Vanton looked upon it without a tremor, kept control of herself absolutely until it was certain that he was dead. Then she had him carried into her room upstairs and herself covered his face. She came out quietly and turned the key in the door, slipped it into her pocket, and started downstairs.Something in her expression sent terror striking right through the heart of her first-born. John was beside her, had kept beside her from the moment when his father’s body was brought in. His arm went about her.

“Mother!”

She stopped uncertainly on the staircase and looked at him. Her lips moved a little but she did not say anything. Her foot slipped on the step, but she caught herself by the handrail and then stood there in absolute quiet. The boy looked at her steadily. Their eyes met. She reached out her hand, with a weary effort, and drew him close to her.

XXIII

Dick Hand did his best to compel Torn Lupton to get in the buoy, but could not. Tom, who had muscles of iron, held back and at the same time gripped Dick with a grip that meant business and thrust him forward, yelling against the side of his face: “Skipper last! I’m skipper here ... all there is.... Get in. Wonderful work ... thanks....”

So Dick got in and was hauled back to land. He made all haste to the house and got there to find Mary Vanton at the foot of the staircase, her boy beside her.

At the sight of him she lifted her eyes, and they showed some of their usual brilliance in the joy at seeing him standing safely before her. She made a gesture up the stairs, took the key of her room from her pocket, and handed it to him.

Dick went up, not knowing what he should find. He took a long look at the face of what had been Guy Vanton, left the room, quietly relocking the door, and came downstairs. Without pausing for warmth or coffee he hurried out into the storm. He must be on hand when Tommy landed.

He gained the top of the dune and looked seaward. It was still two hours or more to faintest daybreak. Out of the blackness beyond the signal to haul away had been received. The men began hauling.

Just what happened is a matter of conjecture. Whether the whole ship dissolved in pieces all at once or whether the mainmast, weighted by the fallen mizzen carried away and fell, it can never matter. Of a sudden the line bearing the buoy collapsed into the water. With shrieks, yells, prayers, and frantic effort the men of the crew, Dick helping them, hauled away as for their lives—it was, most certainly, for one of their lives, the best, the worthiest. But the falling line had become entangled in floating wreckage; there was no light to see what had taken place; after a succession of mighty efforts the line snapped and they hauled inshore nothing but a frayed end of rope. Tommy Lupton, who had been keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, who had risked his life to save a few poor sailors, Tommy, forever a boy, forever dreaming of doing some act of bravery, simple, devoted, courageous Tommy, had fulfilled his hope and gained his desire.

There is something priceless in the world. He possessed it.

XXIV

There was no more to do that night, although some of the crew remained always on the dune until day, dawning, showed no trace of a vessel, but only traces of where a vessel had been, pieces of wreckage floating about. The wind had gone down; the sea was still high but would soon begin to lessen in violence. Already snow was commencing to fall. It fell all day, mantling the dunes, covering all the external marks of the night’s horrors, a great winding sheet laid upon the trampled ground. Only where it struck the black and restless sea did the white blanket fail to disguise what had taken place—that which would take place again and again, from generation to generation, as long as the sea rolled and men sailed.

But even the snow did not go on falling, stopping at dusk, and the next day it was fair. The sun shone and the air was warm—the weather might have been that of late spring. And on the day following it was equally warm and pleasant; and this was Christmas.

Richard Hand remained with the Vantons for two weeks after Christmas. At length Mary Vanton decided to close the beach house and spend the rest of the winter in Blue Port. Richard Hand saw her settled there and then, with her reluctant assent, took John back to school.

He had postponed his own work, let it drop, let it wait, let it go! Work could not matter just then.

But after he had left John at school he returned to New York and pitched in as hard as he could. It was some time before he could get away to run down to Blue Port, but at last he managed it.

Mary Vanton met him at the little station, smiling. All the way to the house he was conscious of nothing but her presence beside him. When they stood together in the house, alone, facing each other, something dynamic swept over him. He could hardly see, and tears sprang to his eyes. He felt himself suffocating, drowning in a sea of feeling. The Mermaid of immortal youth who lived on in Mary Vanton was folded in his eager arms.

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