When Pat came to John Evered to announce his decision to go with the others, John tried to dissuade him; and Dan, listening to their talk together, seeing Pat’s stubborn determination which outran his father’s best persuasions, remembered the old Irishman’s sombre bearing in these three years since the flood, and thought Pat was glad to get away from some secret unhappiness which beset him here, was seizing this chance to escape.
John tried to laugh the Irishman out of his intent. ‘You’ve said yourself you weren’t meant to be a rich man, Pat!’ he reminded the other. ‘You’re comfortable here, well fixed, and nothing to worry about. You don’t want to go back to pick and shovel work again!’
But Pat would not be dissuaded. He had made his plans in detail before he spoke to John. Ruth and the children would go to live with her widower brother on his farm in Waldoboro. ‘I’ve saved my money, Mr. Evered,’ he said, ‘and she’ll have all she needs. Her brother wants her, him with no woman to his name and two young ones, and she’ll get along—till I come back with my pockets full of gold, to be sure!’
There was at his own word a twinkle in his eyes, as though he laughed at himself; but Dan suddenly knew Pat never would come back at all.
His mother said the same thing when she heard Pat’s decision. ‘He’s tired of Ruth, that’s the fact of it.’ She added: ‘Men do grow tired of their wives, you know, John.’
Dan sensed the malice in her word, but he thought it more likely that Ruth was tired of Pat. It was years since he had seen her show Pat any tenderness or outward affection, and her shrewish tongue grew sharper all the time.
‘I don’t think it’s that,’ Dan’s father dissented. ‘I’m sure it’s not. There’s something on Pat’s mind, something that distresses him. I’ve noticed it before.’ And he said thoughtfully: ‘Whatever it is, it developed suddenly. He’s never been the same, never at ease with me, since the flood three years ago. It’s as though he wanted to tell me something and couldn’t bring himself to do so. In fact, I’ve asked him what the trouble was, but he always denied there was anything at all.’
Dan had a sharp impression that his mother was frightened. She said quickly: ‘If he’s dissatisfied, by all means let him go.’
‘I hate to. I like the old man—and if he’s troubled about something I’d like to help him.’
‘Nonsense,’ she insisted. ‘He’s caught the gold fever, that’s all. Let him go!’
In the end Pat had his way. He took Ruth and the children to Waldoboro a few days before his departure; and on the day the Lucy brig would sail from Searsport they all went down to see her depart and to stay the night with Aunt Meg. Beth, Meg’s daughter, who had been born the summer of the flood, was now three years old, and on this occasion she took an immediate fancy for Dan, and he for her. She followed him everywhere, and she was in his arms on the wharf when the brig’s lines were loosed.
In that last moment, Meg clung to Captain Pawl, whispering loving farewells; and old Mrs. Pawl, crippled with rheumatism, sat in the big chair in which she had been carried down from the house and with stony composure watched her son sail away. They stayed on the wharf till the brig was under full sail, and then went back to the house, since from the front stoop they could still see her work down the Bay. Old Mrs. Pawl in her chair on the walk below the stoop watched the departing vessel with unwinking eyes; and Meg brought a shawl to draw around her shoulders and said comfortingly:
‘There, mother! Cap’n Pawl has a fine breeze to clear the Bay, hasn’t he!’
Dan was near Meg as he liked to be, little Beth clinging possessively to his hand. Old Mrs. Pawl said quietly, her eyes never leaving the distant vessel: ‘I’ve always known there’d be one time he’d sail away and I’d never see him again. This is the time, Meg.’
‘Now, mother, you’re just fine!’ Meg tenderly protested. ‘And he’ll be back before you know it. He’s not going to stay in the gold fields, you know. The sea’s his place. He’ll stick to it; and he’ll come safely home.’
‘Aye,’ the old woman agreed. ‘He’ll come home to you, my dear; but I’ll not be here.’ She smiled a little, and patted Meg’s hand, and Dan marked how old and dry her hand was, the knuckles swollen, the dark veins showing, while Meg’s hand was so slender and soft and smooth. ‘But I know I’ll never see him again, and so does he. Don’t distress yourself, Meg. We’ve said our good-byes.’
Dan was a little frightened by her words, but he felt in her a deep peace curiously reassuring; and he saw that she was not afraid.
She died, in fact, in January of the winter following; died quietly in her sleep, and Dan heard his father tell his mother: ‘Meg found her in the morning—as though she had known she was going—lying straight and all composed, with her crossed hands on her breast.’
Dan felt a mystic sweetness in that, but his mother said quietly: ‘I suppose you’ll hurry down to Searsport to comfort Meg.’
His father looked at her in a still fashion, not speaking; but they all went down for old Mis. Pawl’s funeral, and Jenny was serene and strong, and Aunt Meg drew strength from her.
‘I’m scared, Jenny,’ Dan heard her say. ‘She knew she was going to die before Cap’n Pawl came home, and now I’m worried about him.’
Jenny said reassuringly: ‘Don’t be worried, Meg dear.’ Dan sometimes thought that his mother did not like Aunt Meg, but certainly no one could have guessed it from her manner now, just as no one could guess, seeing her and his father together, that she was anything but a devoted wife. ‘He’ll come home one day safe and sound, Meg. Never fear.’
So Aunt Meg was comforted; but Captain Pawl never did come home again, nor any word of him, nor of the Bangor men—Pat and the others—who sailed aboard the brig. The Lucy had been sighted off the east coast of South America, and she was in good order then; but no one ever saw her on the Pacific side. There were months of waiting, months of fading hope before at last it came to be accepted that she had somehow met disaster in her attempt to round the Horn, crashing on some hidden ledge, smashing into a floating berg, dismasted and swept under in some gale, or perhaps carried far southward to be lost forever in Antarctic ice. She was last sighted in late December, and there were some who thought, with a sense of dark, unseen forces in the world, that perhaps old Mrs. Pawl and her son had died at the same hour, their spirits ten thousand miles apart leaving their bodies for a swift and eternal reunion; but no one ever knew. Margaret, after a year or two of waiting had killed the last hope of her husband’s return, sold the Searsport house and came back to Bangor, she and Beth, to live with her father again. This meant that Dan saw them often, and Beth was rapturously fond of him, watching him with a shy pleasure whenever he was near.
IV
There were in the world during these years so many great events that the far-off death of Captain Pawl did not greatly move Dan. He was proud of his place in the Cadets, and when Neal Dow himself came to Bangor to speak to a tremendous gathering in a grove out at the end of Broadway, he lodged at their house, and Dan felt the driving force in the man and was hypnotized by his energy and zeal. Neal Dow was at this time approaching his hour of triumph. The prohibitory legislation which he himself had drafted was presently to be submitted to the Legislature. ‘It may fail this year,’ he told Jenny. Dan was near, proud that he was himself in a small way one of the crusaders whom this man commanded and inspired. ‘But if it fails now, another year will surely bring success. The time will come when no political party can survive in Maine unless it accepts prohibition as the settled policy of the state.’
‘We want so to help,’ Dan’s mother told him.
‘The heart and soul of the movement are the church members engaged in it,’ the great man assured her. ‘The liquor traffic exists only by the sufferance of the churches. Seek to win your whole congregation to the work. The problem is simple. There is the grogshop. When you say “go” and when your husbands vote “go,” it will go.’
Dan was breathless with wonder at the ma
n, and Neal Dow went on: ‘Victory is near, but with victory our most dangerous hour will strike; for when the law is passed, it must be enforced.’ He said he himself would be a candidate for Mayor of Portland on the platform of enforcement. ‘It will be a hard fight at first,’ he predicted. ‘But a good one, a fight worth winning.’ His nostrils dilated, so that Dan thought of a horse, excited and prancing. ‘We will win,’ he said.
Dan carried for a long time in his heart the memory of Neal Dow, feeling himself ennobled by that contact. Pie confided this to his father. John at the time of Neal Dow’s visit was not at home, having gone to Ellsworth to consult Colonel Black, who as he grew older began to be infirm and his sight to fail so that he seldom came to Bangor. Dan’s father agreed with him that Neal Dow was a great man.
‘And it’s a good thing to know great men, and to admire them, Dan,’ he said. ‘To recognize and to be moved by greatness in others is one way to become fine and strong ourselves.’
These two could talk more frankly now as Dan grew older, and between them an increasingly strong bond was developing. John, if he were to be away, always reminded Dan that he was during these absences the head of the family, bound to be helpful to his mother in every way; and Dan tried to carry out these instructions. He had sometimes to check incipient rebellion in Will and Tom. While Dan and Mat were as much like their own father in disposition as they were like Tim Hager in stature and outward appearance, the other two were of a swifter temper and of a quick and impatient mind. They had when they chose endearing qualities which made Dan think of his mother, who when she would could be so altogether lovable; but by the same token, they were more often at odds with her, quicker to argue, quicker to resent her directions and commands. Dan more than once had to interfere to end these discords, protecting her.
V
Jenny’s work in the temperance cause did not use up all her energy. When the cholera epidemic hit Bangor—a hundred and sixty people died before the terror passed—she threw herself tirelessly into the effort to do everything possible for the sick and dying. Marshal Farnham, as directing head of the forces which kept order in the town, organized not only the doctors but as many ladies as would serve to bring what comfort was possible to the sick and dying, and Dan’s mother and Aunt Meg worked together among these volunteers.
It was during this epidemic of the cholera that Will—he was just thirteen—told Dan one day that when he grew up he intended to become a doctor. This ambition was a secret between the two boys for years, although Will himself confided in Doctor Mason, who had attended them through their many youthful ailments; and he told Dan he had done so.
‘He’s going to let me come and see him and he’s going to teach me things,’ he said happily. ‘He says doctors don’t really know very much. He says he used to know a lot about curing people, but now he knows he didn’t really know anything. He says most people when they’re sick just get well anyway, and he says a doctor can help them mostly just by keeping them from being scared. He says people are always scared when they’re sick; but if they send for a doctor and he comes and they see he’s not worried about them, they get over being scared, and then they get well.’
Will in the years that followed was forever repeating to Dan the things Doctor Mason told him, and the Doctor’s every word remained firmly imprinted on his youthful mind. Tom and young Mat were not so quick to decide on what they wished to do, but as he came into his ’teens Tom began to spend much time along the waterfront, watching the vessels loading there. The steady growth of the lumber business, since all the lumber was shipped by water—Bangor had no rail connection with Portland and the outer world till 1855—meant that during the ice-free months the river was crowded, and the harbor master’had a harrowing time finding berths for new arrivals. Schooners and brigs came loaded with coal and departed with lumber stowed in their holds and piled on every clear foot of deck space. Lime, cement, iron, salt, grain—everything the city had to import arrived by water; and there was always a cargo of lumber ready so that no vessel, large or small, had to leave Bangor empty. Hay too was shipped out by water, with deck loads, as high as the handling of the sails would permit, bulging out over the rails. There were times when craft waiting to load filled the river so completely that an agile boy could cross to the Brewer shore, just below the bridge, by leaping or swinging from one vessel to another or by using the rafts of sawed lumber lying alongside to be loaded as stepping stones upon the way.
In this fine rich confusion of shouting men, creaking yards and complaining cables, Tom spent long summer days, loving the smell of sawed pine and of the great piles of cedar shingles and of tar, loving the voices of the men and the aroma of far places and of forgotten cargoes which each vessel brought with it; and he told Dan one day that when he grew up he wanted to go to sea. The younger boys were always apt to confide in Dan. He had a strength beyond his years, developed by the fact that his father so often impressed upon him the necessity for accepting responsibility; and they found in him a readiness to listen without dissent or protest and a capacity for keeping their secrets which they early learned to value.
As for Dan himself, when he was sixteen he worked during the early summer at the sorting boom up-river above Old Town, where the great logs were held as the drive came down till they covered every inch of the water for miles, The whole drive was handled by a single organization, which John had been instrumental in organizing years before, and to which every operator along the river contributed; so the logs in the boom had many owners, and each bore a distinguishing mark, usually of a sort which could be easily made with an axe. There were diamonds, double darts, crow’s feet, anchors, girdles—and these and other marks appeared not only singly but in many combinations. It was the business of the boom crew to sort logs by ownership, securing each operator’s logs in rafts held together by warps and wedges, ready to be moved down-river to the mills.
Dan loved the work, the long days on the water with no footing except the huge logs, some of them so tremendous that his weight seemed to have no effect on them; and since he was already over six feet tall and with strength to match his size, he held his own with the men among whom he worked. He came home when the logs were all sorted, toughened and hardened, with calloused hands and shoulders which seemed inches broader than they had been in the spring. His father was not at home on the day of his return, had gone to Ellsworth on some business matter, and when he arrived at the house Will and Tom and Mat were away upon their own concerns; so he and his mother had an hour alone. He had not known how much these weeks had changed him till he saw himself through her eyes—and through her words. When they met she looked at him for a moment as though he were a stranger.
‘Why, Dan!’ she cried, almost breathlessly. ‘You’re not my little boy any more. You’re a grown man!’ She laughed in a rich, husky fashion entirely unlike her usual laughter. ‘You’ve grown so much that sleeves are too short, Dan.’
He colored with embarrassed pleasure, and she stood on tiptoe, pulling his head down to kiss him, making him sit in the great chair, perching on his knee, rumpling his dark shock of hair. ‘My, my, darling!’ she said teasingly. ‘What a lot of feminine hearts will turn topsy-turvy when they see you!’ And she added: ‘Why, I feel as if I had a new sweetheart myself!’
‘Well, you have! I guess you’re the only sweetheart I want for a few years yet,’ he told her. He had forgotten how beautiful this mother of his could be. Just now it was easy to forget that she was anything but a lovely girl smiling on his knee, waiting to be kissed.
She asked curiously: ‘Haven’t you really anyone at all?’
‘Just you and Beth!’
She laughed. ‘Beth’s cunning, isn’t she. But you ought to have a real grown-up someone. I know the men you worked with all had, even if it was only in the grogshops at Old Town. Or here in Bangor.’
He flushed uncomfortably. ‘I guess so.’
‘You must have seen some of them in Old Town,’ she insisted, wa
tching him curiously. He nodded, and she kissed him quickly. ‘There, dear!
You know, you’re a sweet boy,’ Her head tipped prettily on one side and she said: ‘I’m not sure you’re not just about the sweetest boy I ever saw! It makes me feel like a girl again, just to see you.’
‘You look like one,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve never seen anybody that could match you—and Aunt Meg. You’re both just about as pretty as anyone can be.’
Her eyes darkened as a sunny hillside is darkened by a passing cloud. ‘You think Aunt Meg’s lovely?’
‘Yes,’ He grinned at himself. ‘I’ve always been sort of in love with her, you know, since I was little.’
For a moment she did not speak, and her eyes were sombre. ‘You’re like your father,’ she said then, in a low tone, in that way which always made him mysteriously uncomfortable. ‘He’s always—liked her, too, since long before we were married.’ Then she laughed. ‘I’m glad you didn’t like any of the tavern girls, Dan. But—weren’t they pretty too?’
‘Gosh, no!’ he told her. ‘I was always sort of sorry for them.’
Her face suddenly set in lines of angry pain. ‘You men!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re always so high and mighty, sorry for every woman who tries too hard to please you!’ She rose from his knee, moving her arms in a nervous way as though to forget some strange hurt. ‘I don’t want anyone to be sorry for me!’ she said in low-voiced, resentful protest. ‘I won’t have anyone sorry for me!’
The Strange Woman Page 51
