The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 30

Now she was knowing. She had wanted to push people aside and reach into the shadows for Howie. She began to see that it was not so she would reach him. It was in being as he had been--kind, caring--that she could have a sense of him near. Here was her chance--among the people she had thought stood between her and her chance. Howie had always cared for these people. On his way through the world with them he had always stopped to do the kind thing--as he stopped to make it right for the badly muzzled dog. Then there _was_ something for her to do in the world. She could do the kind things Howie would be doing if he were there! It would somehow--keep him. It would--fulfill him. Yes, fulfill him. Howie had made her more alive--warmer and kinder. If she became as she had been before--Howie would have failed. She moved so that the little girl who rested against her could rest the better. And as she did this--it was as if Howie had smiled. The one thing the picture had never given her--the sense that it was hers to keep--that stole through her now as the things come which we know we can never lose. For the first moment since she lost him, she had him. And all the people in that theater, and all the people in the world--_here_ was the truth! It cleared and righted as Howie's smile had righted the picture. In so far as she could come close to others she would come closer to him.

THE HARBOR MASTER[12]

By RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET

(From _Harper's Magazine_)

Coming ash.o.r.e one summer's night from Meteor Island, Jethro Rackby was met by Peter Loud--Deep-water Peter he was called, because even so early he had gone one foreign voyage. Peter was going round with a paper containing the subscription to a dance.

"Come, Harbor Master," he said; "put your thumb mark in the corner along with the rest of us."

Rackby drew back. "Why should I dance?" he muttered.

He was town clerk as well as harbor master--a scholarly man with visionary, pale eyes, and a great solitary, as Peter knew.

"Why? I'll tell you why," said Peter. "To bring joy to Caddie Sill's heart, if nothing more. The girl would throw all the rest of us in a heap tomorrow for a firm hold of you, Rackby."

He winked at Zinie Shadd, who swayed on his heels soberly.

Rackby turned his eyes toward the black mound of Meteor, which lay like a s.h.a.ggy stone Cerberus at the harbor's mouth.

The star-pointed harbor was quiet at his feet. Shadows in the water were deep and languid, betokening an early fall of rain through the still air. But from the rim of the sea, where the surf was seen only as a white glow waxing and waning, a constant drone was borne in to them--a thunder of the white horses' hoofs trampling on Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned; the vindictive sound of seas falling down one after another on wasted rocks, on s.h.i.+fting sand bars--a powerful monotone seeming to increase in the ear with fuller attention. The contrast was marked between the heavy-lying peace of the inner harbor and that hungry reverberation from without of waters seeking fresh holds along a mutilated coast. On damp nights when the wind hauled to the southeast, men stood still in their tracks, and said, simply, "There's the Old Roke," as if it was the Old Man of the Sea himself. The sound was a living personality in their ears.--Women whom the sea had widowed s.h.i.+vered and rattled irons when the Old Roke came close to their windows; but the men listened, as if they had been called--each by his own name.

"What's the ringle jingle of feet by the side of that?" Rackby said, his mystified face turned toward the water. "I'm a man for slow tunes, Peter. No, no, no; put your paper up again."

"No? You're a denying sort of a crab, and no mistake. Always seeing how fast you can crawl backward out of pleasure."

"I mistrust women."

"You cleave to the spirit and turn from the flesh, that I know. But here's a woman with a voice to waken the dead."

"That's the voice on the seaward side of Meteor," answered Rackby.

"Cad Sills is flesh and blood of the Old Roke, I'm agreed," said Deep-water Peter. "She's a seafaring woman, that's certain. Next door to ending in a fish's tail, too, sometimes I think, when I see her carrying on--Maybe you've seen her sporting with the horse-shoe crabs and all o'

that at Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned?"

"No, I can't say that."

"No, it wasn't to be expected, you with your head and shoulders walking around in a barrel of jam."

The harbor master smiled wistfully.

"More I don't require," he said.

"Ah, so you say now--Well, marry the sea, then. It's a slippery embrace, take the word of a man who has gone foreign voyages."

"I mistrust the sea," said Jethro.

"So you do.--You mistrust the sea and the like o' that, and you mistrust women and the like o' that. There's too much heaving and tossing in such waters for a harbor master, hey?"

"I'm at home here, that's a fact," said Jethro. "I know the tides and the buoys. I can find my way in the dark, where another man would be at a total loss. I'm never suffering for landmarks."

"Landmarks!" roared Deep-water Peter. "What's a landmark good for but to take a new departure?"

To the sea-goers, tilted on a bench in the shadow of the Customs House, he added, "What life must be without a touch of lady fever is more than I can tell."

A red-bearded viking at the end of the bench rose and took Peter's shoulders in a fearful grip.

"What's all this talk of lady fever?"

"Let be, Cap'n Dreed!" cried Peter. His boisterousness failed him like wind going out of a sail. He twisted out of the big seaman's grip and from a distance shouted, "If you weren't so cussed bashful, you might have had something more than a libel pinned to your mainmast by now, with all this time in port."

There was a general s.h.i.+fting along the bench, to make room for possible fray. It was a sore point with Sam Dreed that the s.h.i.+p chandler had that day effected a lien for labor on his s.h.i.+p, and the libel was nailed to the mast.

"Now they'll scandalize each other," murmured Zinie Shadd.

They were turned from that purpose only by the sudden pa.s.sing at their backs of the woman in question, Caddie Sills.

Quiet reigned. The older men crossed their legs, sat far down on their spines, and narrowed their eyes. The brick wall of the Customs House, held from collapsing by a row of rusty iron stars, seemed to bulge more than its wont for the moment--its upper window, a s.h.i.+p's deadlight, round and expressionless as the eye of a codfish.

Cad Sills ran her eye over them deftly, as if they were the separate strings of an instrument which could afford gratification to her only when swept lightly all at one time by her tingling finger tips, or, more likely, by the intangible plectrum in her black eye.

The man she selected for her nod was Sam Dreed, however.

Peter Loud felt the walls of his heart pinch together with jealousy.

It was all in a second's dreaming. "Gape and swallow," as Zinie Shadd said, from his end of the bench. The woman pa.s.sed with a supercilious turn of her head away from them.

"That's a foot-loose woman if ever there was one."

With all her gift of badinage, she was a solitary soul. The men feared no less than they admired her. They were shy of that wild courage, fearful to put so dark a mystery to the solution. The women hated her, backbit and would not make friends, because of the fatal instantaneous power she wielded to spin men's blood and pitch their souls derelict on that impa.s.sioned current. Who shall put his finger on the source of this power? There were girls upon girls with eyes as black, cheeks as like hers as fruit ripened on the same bough, hair as thick and l.u.s.trous--yet at the sound of Caddie Sills's bare footfall eyes s.h.i.+fted and glowed, and in the imaginations of these men the women of their choice grew pale as the ashes that fringe a fallen fire.

"She's a perilous woman," muttered the collector of the port. "Sticks in the slant of a man's eye like the shadow of sin. Ah! there he goes, like the leaves of autumn."

Samuel Dreed trod the dust of the road with a wonderful swaying of his body, denominated the Western Ocean roll. He was a mighty man, all were agreed; not a nose of wax, even for Cad Sills to twist.

"Plump she'll go in his canvas bag, along with his sea boots and his palm and needle, if she's not precious careful, with her s.h.i.+llyshallying," said Zinie Shadd. "I know the character of the man, from long acquaintance, and I know that what he says he'll do he'll do, and no holding off at arm's length, either, for any considerable period of time."

Such was the situation of Cad Sills. A dark, lush, ignorant, entrancing woman, for whose sake decent men stood ready to drop their principles like rags--yes, at a mere secret sign manifested in her eye, where the warmth of her blood was sometimes seen as a crimson spark alighted on black velvet. She went against the good government of souls.

Even Rackby had taken note of her once, deep as his head was in the clouds by preference and custom. It was a day in late November. No snow had fallen, and she floated past him like a cloud shadow as he plodded in the yellow road which turned east at the Preaching Tree. She pa.s.sed, looked back, slashed a piece of dripping kelp through the air so close that salt drops stung his pale eyes, laughed aloud, and at the top of her laugh, broke into a wild, sweet song unfamiliar to him. It was a voice unlike the flat voices of women thereabouts--strong, sweet, sustained, throbbing with a personal sense of the pa.s.sion which lurked in the warm notes.

Her foot was bare, and more shapely in consequence than if she had had a habit of wearing shoes. Its shape was the delicate shape of strength native to such a foot, and each toe left its print distinct and even in the dust. With his eye for queer details, he remembered that print and a.s.sociated with it the yellow-rutted road, the rusty alders in the meadow beyond, and the pale spire of the church thrust into a November sky.