Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  ‘The whole look of things’ was indeed changing, and with a rapidity unexampled in my previous experiences on that coast. Filtered sunshine was gone, and, though neither in that westward dark thickening nor anywhere else could we see shape or outline of a cloud, all yellow was brushed out of the air in a moment, and the ‘shower’ advanced upon the sea with lightnings and crashing thunder — thunder that all at once sounded near at hand.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a lot of wind in it, too’, Edgar said. ‘It looks like — it looks like quite a squall.’

  After that the eruption of nature confronting us encouraged neither of us to speak. For a few more moments only, we lay on a sea turned to black glass; then a great white confluence of water rolled at us out of the west and we were struck by a wind that had already unroofed summer shacks and twisted great branches out of stout old elms ashore. As if under power and being steered, the ‘One o’Clock’, disregarding her anchor rope, instantly moved round into the trough of the sudden white-topped waves and went into such extremities of violent action that she seemed a creature independently alive and taking a death-struggle into her own hands.

  Thrown from my feet and grasping foolishly at overturned chairs, I had one of those freaks of memory that crises sometimes bring, and in my mind’s eye saw old Cap’n Amos Wheeler standing in morning sunshine on the Stonehaven village wharf discussing a bad blow of the preceding night. ‘Not, sir; that wasn’t no squall’, he’d said. ‘That was a bolt. A bolt’s ten times wuss’n a squall. What we got last night was a bolt.’ That was years ago; Cap’n Amos Wheeler had lain long in his family’s cemetery now; but, sliding on the bucking floor-boards of the ‘One o’Clock’, I remembered him and knew what he meant by a bolt.

  This was one. Gallons of frothy water, too salt in the mouth, flopped upon me as the ‘One o’Clock’ convulsed herself in the short deep trough; then Edgar Semple, on his knees, pulled at my arm till my right hand grasped the upright shaft of the steering-wheel. I got my back to the wall of the cabin and so sat, rollingly, holding to that steel shaft and finding my soul ill prepared for my body’s drowning.

  The ‘One o’Clock’ seemed to be the leaping and dodging lonely target of a colossal animosity. Tropical-like lightnings, intolerably bright and discharging simultaneous blasts of thunder, searched for us closer and closer; a water-spout walked in that turmoil, though we were spared seeing it. We saw almost nothing except flying water and those target-hunting flashes — then came crashing rain as tropical as the lightning and we lived within a curtain of it.

  Edgar, staggering and caroming, was on his feet; he clutched a cleat on the cabin’s roof. My wet and dizzy eyes saw his figure rise above me, drop down and rise again with the contortions of our frightened boat. Not a yard from me, he was shouting at me: ‘Thank the rain!

  If it holds for ten minutes like this—’ I saw him look upward, addressing the uproarious deluge. ‘Rain harder! Let’s have the best you’ve got! Pour it down, Old Scout!’

  This personification of the prodigious power above and about us, ‘Old Scout’, seemed to reach the mark and Edgar’s request to be granted — never had I known such impassioned rain. It did last ten minutes, or more, and was our defender, beating down the vicious deep chop, bringing the ‘One o’Clock’ easement. The valiant old boat still flopped but upon watery hummocks only; the great wind of the bolt passed on, and then the rain, as if satisfied with having done this business for us, thinned the size of its drops, became sparse, gave us a final congratulatory wetting and ceased to be.

  I got to my feet and Edgar released his cleat. ‘Good old “One o’Clock”!’ he said. ‘What’s the reason we didn’t crawl into the cabin and keep dry?’

  I told him. ‘We didn’t like the idea of being drowned in a box, Edgar.’

  He shook his head, not in denial but in rueful assent as we looked about us. With unbelievable celerity the bolt had become nothing. In less than half an hour it had come and gone, and now, except for lumpy water, there was no vestige of it. To the eastward, the direction in which it had passed, the cooled air was crystal and everywhere the world lay clear under an after-sunset sky. West and north-west stretched the long thin land, neatly dark blue beyond miles of pale sea; but this silent, abrupt unveiling was strange. No peace came with it.

  ‘Of course—’ Edgar began, stopped; then said, ‘Of course—’ again.

  ‘Why, yes, of course!’ I spoke out sharply. ‘They had plenty of time to make it — plenty. They’d at least have been in the harbour before it struck. No doubt in the world they made it safely. They—’

  ‘Yes, they had to.’ Edgar stopped staring landward, picked up the fallen chairs and sat down. ‘One thing’s certain’, he said. ‘Irvie’s never cared to be out on the water much; but he’s good enough at the oars, he’s strong as a horse and he’s got plenty of nerve. He wouldn’t lose his head; he wouldn’t be afraid, and of course Emma wouldn’t, either.’

  ‘No, never, Edgar.’

  ‘We know that much, anyhow’, he said. ‘Of course, though, they made the harbour before the blow. Well — nothing for us to do again except sit and listen to the water running out of the scuppers. We dragged anchor a lot. We must be a long way from where we were when they left us. Now about six or seven miles out, wouldn’t you say so, sir?’

  ‘Just about, Edgar. We might have a longer wait than we expected.’

  He was looking landward again. ‘I don’t care how long we wait to get towed in’, he said. ‘I — I wish somebody’d come and tell us, though!’

  That haggard wish for somebody to come and tell us — tell us that our flimsy dinghy had reached the harbour before the ‘bolt’ struck — was what we both could have shouted and shouted, while all we did was to sit and wait. Last echoes of sunset left the sky. Faraway tiny sparks were the lights coming out on shore — we sat in darkness and still nobody came to tell us.

  Edgar broke the silence we’d held neither of us knew how long. ‘Of course there isn’t a dry cigarette on board.’ His voice was hushed and uncertain. ‘Well, I don’t — don’t care.’ From a pocket he took a sodden packet and tossed it into the water where it made a dismal little splash. ‘There goes the last of mine and I didn’t want ’em anyhow.’ Then he rose quickly. ‘Hello! Do you hear something?’ From far away over the water there came through the darkness unmistakably a faint chugging sound, and Edgar’s voice was abruptly loud. ‘By Golly!’ he cried. ‘It’s a boat and I’ll bet a thousand dollars it’s looking for us! It’s the boat Irvie said he’d send for us. Everything’s going to be all right. By Golly, sir, everything is all right. They got there! I’ll give that boat a light to show where we are.’

  In exuberant relief he dashed into the cabin, brought forth a tin bucket, a big chart-book and a box of dry matches he’d found in a locker. He set the bucket on the roof of the cabin, tore the chart-book into sections and made a bonfire of its pages in the bucket. The flames shone merrily, the chugging grew louder and within five minutes a voice familiar but surprising to me hailed us crossly.

  ‘Hi there! Can’t you folks get along without draggin’ a sick man out o’ bed?’

  The voice was Orion Clafley’s, and he complained talkatively as he drew nearer. He’d known I’d never be able to take care of myself if anything like a real breeze came up, he declared, and when his wife had told him that ‘quite a shower’ was on the way he’d got up, put on his clothes and borrowed his brother’s boat to come out and see why we hadn’t had sense enough to go home before we got our feet wet. In fact, all the boats in Stonehaven had come out to look for us — people at the Inn ‘seemed a mite anxious and runnin’ all this way and that, offerin’ rewards’, Orion said.

  ‘Might a-give up, myself,’ he added, from a boat’s length away, ‘if you hadn’t showed that light. Ain’t goin’ to tow you in. Take too long. I’ll git my nephew,’ Lonzo, to come out and bring the boat in tomorrow morning. That anchor ain’t goin’ to drag no more tonight. Needn’t tell me the
engine broke down; knowed you’d let it jest exackly at the wust time in twenty years!’ He was now alongside and grasping our gunwale to keep the two boats from rubbing. ‘Git aboard. I’ll run you home quick as I can make it. Your folk’s makin’ plenty distubbance over you and so’s the hull village and everybody else.’ Then, as Edgar and I clambered over the side and were in his boat, his husky voice changed tone. ‘Everybody ashore told me there was five o’ you. Godfrey Mighty, where’s the rest o’ you?’

  That hour of dark voyage to Stonehaven was the vilest I ever spent in a boat or perhaps anywhere, and I think Edgar Semple would say that same for himself. Orion Clafley tried to be tactful; but his first words after we’d answered his question about the ‘rest of us’ had been impulsive.

  ‘In that dinghy? You let ’em?’

  How easily Irvie’s sunny confidence had made us let them! What had my indecision and ignorance done to myself — and ah, to my sister and to my best friends, Will and Evelyn, and to the father and mother of Mary Reame!

  All along the shore, near Stonehaven and half encircling the harbour, we saw, as we came closer, a multitude of twin brilliances — the headlights of so many automobiles that there was a glare upon the water and all through the air above it. Orion Clafley, long silent at his steering-wheel, explained this with a saturnine grunt.

  ‘Gathered from nigh and fur. Motored from all round about, they have. Think maybe they’ll git a chance to see your bodies brought in.’ Then, as we passed the bar at the harbour mouth, he shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Boat goin’ in some way ahead of us. It’s the “Flora Smith”, my nephew’ Lonzo’s. He come out when I did but turned off t’ the eastud. Headin’ in fer that little pier o’ yourn. Lot O’ people on it and down on your float, too. Likely headin’ in to tell ’em he couldn’t find nothin’.’ Orion paused, staring ahead; then he said, ‘Hey, listen! What’s that noise? Sounds like cheerin’. You don’t suppose—’

  We ourselves were in strong light now; but Lonzo Clafley’s boat, two hundred yards ahead of us, was in stronger, and we saw him lay his craft alongside the float at the water end of the short pier. Against the glare we saw heart-liftingly more — three silhouetted figures that rose up from the boat, stepped out upon the float and were enfolded by other figures crowding upon them. There was no question about the cheering now; it came hysterically from the float, from the pier and from the adjacent shores.

  ‘By Godfrey!’ Orion Chafley said. ‘This coast ain’t had such a bolt in twenty years, and if that young Irvie Pease has brought that dinghy through it alive he’s done somethin’ nobody could believe and there ain’t a seafarin’ man in Stonehaven that’d claim he could done it, himself. Yes, and by Godfrey there’s the dinghy tied on behind ‘Lonzo’s boat. By Godfrey Mighty that young Irvie Pease has done it!’

  We came to the float and with unintended irony we, too, were cheered; but the glory was all Irvie’s. George Prettiman and the other young people from Janey Blue’s party, shouting, were lifting him upon their shoulders. Will Pease, choking and half-weeping, seized upon Edgar and me, an arm about each of us.

  ‘That boy of mine! He brought ’em through! They’d blown miles eastward; but when Alonzo picked ’em up they’d come through the storm, it was all over and Irvie was rowing for shore. Oh, I tell you — that boy of mine! That boy of mine!’

  Emma threw her arms about my neck and kissed me; but Mary Reame was clinging to Harriet and seemed upon the point of collapse. At her resilient age and a very climax of romance — imminent deadly peril and saved by her lover — she should have been radiant; but hers was the only stricken figure in that illumined tumult of rejoicing.

  Emma ran back to her and with Harriet helped her up the gangway from the float to the pier. Ahead of us we saw Irvie’s laughing face on high, as he protested against being carried the whole length of the pier on the shoulders of his jubilant young friends — and I’d have liked to be one of them. Will, pushing along beside me, clutching my arm, was still murmuring, ‘That boy of mine!’

  Irvie Pease was a hero again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  AT THE INN, Josiah Labrosse, our landlord, had a late, hot dinner waiting for us in the smaller room off the large dining-room, and, when we shipwrecked five had changed our clothes, four of us sat down to it with Harriet and Will and Evelyn. Irvie was delayed, even in the doorway, by exclaiming people not till then able to reach him, beam upon him and shake his hand.

  ‘Good Lord!’ he said, laughing as he took his place between his mother and father. ‘You might think I was Columbus or the boy that stood on the burning deck whence all but him had fled. All I did was what I simply had to — or else! Ha! That lobster stew looks good. I’ll to it, hearties; I’ll to it!’

  I was glad to be more pleased with him than ever I’d been, especially with his making light of what he’d done.

  ‘What I simply had to — or else.’ His father, scarce able to eat for pride and joy, couldn’t let it pass.

  ‘Don’t try to minimize it, boy’, Will said. ‘You’ve shown the stuff you’re made of and everybody knows it.’

  Evelyn, still shaky and ready to shed more tears of relief, couldn’t restrain herself. ‘Oh, when we saw that white wall of water coming across the bay and the horrible blackness above it! We knew you were out there in it — but didn’t dream you were in that eggshell; we thought at least you were in the bigger boat — and oh, you weren’t! and yet you fought it and came through and saved yourself and — and saved these two dear girls—’ She flung an arm about Irvie’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Oh, you darling bravest of the brave!’

  ‘Stop it!’ Irvie protested. ‘You’re making me spill lobster stew all over the tablecloth.’

  The rest of us, ready to laugh at nothing, did laugh at that — all except one, Mary Reame. She’d put on a pretty evening dress, brought with her to the Inn that afternoon when she’d arrived for the boating party. Patterned in apple blossoms, that slim dress seemed now a touching reference to the song Irvie Pease had so often sung to her. Emma, sitting next to her, straight and strong, looked exalted. Her eyes were bright and her chin was up; but Mary’s wasn’t and she didn’t let anybody see her eyes. The range of her gaze included only her plate and the tablecloth near it, and when she spoke, which was almost not at all, it wasn’t in a ‘natural’ voice. She made motions with a spoon or fork; she didn’t eat.

  I heard Emma murmuring to her. ‘Stop it! Brace up and eat something. Why isn’t everything all right? Don’t be this way!’

  Mary’s response was little better than a whisper. ‘Yes — yes, I know. Don’t bother about me.’

  Edgar spoke up briskly: ‘The old “One o’Clock” didn’t behave too badly, after all. She did shoot us right spang into the trough, though. You won’t believe it, Emma, but even during a whale of a ducking I was thinking of that argument of yours.’

  Emma didn’t respond; it was Will Pease who asked, ‘What argument?’

  Edgar looked placidly at my niece. ‘You don’t mind my rubbing it in, do you, Emma?’ Then he answered Will’s question. ‘Up to to-day she’s been insisting that if you were out in a boat like that dinghy and got caught in a blow you’d head her straight into wind and sea. I told her no, you’d put her stern to the waves and go with ’em or you’d swamp. She wouldn’t give in.’

  ‘Maybe because she was right’, Will said. ‘I don’t know anything about boats, myself; but couldn’t she—’

  ‘No, sir; and she knows better now. I’m just doing a gloat over her, Uncle Will,’ because she’s had a pretty eye-opening object lesson. When that sea struck him if Irvie hadn’t known enough to put the dinghy’s stern to it and run with it — well, I don’t care to dwell on horrors that didn’t happen; but if Irvie hadn’t done exactly that we wouldn’t be having this jolly little dinner-party in celebration, and Emma knows it.’

  Will and Evelyn didn’t care whether Edgar won his argument or not; all they saw in it was more laurel for Irvi
e. Evelyn kissed him again and Will patted him on the back. ‘By George!’ the glowing father exclaimed. ‘The more we learn of what you did this day, my boy, the more we marvel over you! The presence of mind and the knowing exactly what to do—’

  ‘Oh, see here!’ Irvie said. ‘How about dropping all this? As a matter of fact, I didn’t do it all. Mary did a tremendous job of bailing with that tin can Edgar threw on board — I think we’d have sunk if she hadn’t — and I even let Emma spell me a while at the oars and—’

  ‘Yes, yes; you hardly did a thing, yourself!’ the delighted Will exclaimed. ‘Just for once you might as well cut out the modesty; we all know better. I wish you’d heard what those waterfront people were saying about it. Even old fishermen who’ve been out in a thousand blows, themselves!’

  Harriet added her testimony. ‘Even that old curmudgeon, Orion Clafley himself. I heard him shouting to somebody out in the harbour that Irvie Pease ought to have a medal!’

  ‘Forget it!’ Irvie said. ‘We all did our best, and what’s it matter who gets the credit? Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘You’re wrong’, Emma said, speaking suddenly and loudly. ‘We none of us want to stop talking about you, so why should we? When people feel that somebody’s done a grand thing he ought to accept it and just be glad they do.’

  ‘Bravo, Emma!’ Will Pease cried. ‘Why, Irvie, the Stonehaven children of the next generation will hear their fathers tell the story of this storm and how Irving Pease, only a summer visitor and an inland boy at that, saved—’

  ‘Oh, well—’ Irvie interrupted, and, apparently in spite of himself, seemed to find the prediction rather gratifying. ‘No matter what people make of it or what they choose to say of me, the truth’s simply that we had luck. Luck was all there was to it.’

  At this, Mary Reame did look up. It was the slightest quickest flicker of a glance; but for that half second she looked toward Irvie and then looked down again. ‘At least drink your coffee!’ I heard Emma urging her, and Mary clinked her spoon against the cup but didn’t drink.