The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 31

He called this to mind when on the night of the dance information came to his ear that she had sold her pearls to lift the lien on Cap'n Sam Dreed's s.h.i.+p, with her own hands tearing down the libel from the mast and grinding it under her heel.

No man whom she had once pa.s.sed and silently interrogated could quite forget her, not even Jethro Rackby. The harbor master swayed on his oars, collected himself, and looked forward across the dimpled floor of his harbor, which in its quietude was like a lump of ma.s.sy silver or rich ore, displaying here and there a spur of light, a surface sparkle.

The serenity of his own soul was in part a reflection of this nightly calm, when the spruce on the bank could not be known from its fellow in the water by a man standing on his head. Moreover, to maintain this calm was the plain duty of the harbor master. For five years he had held that office by an annual vote of the town meeting. With his t.i.tle went authority to say where were the harbor lines, to order the removal of hulks, to provide for keeping open a channel through winter ice--in a word, to keep the peace. This peace was of his own substance.

It was rudely shattered. On the night following the dance Cad Sills put herself in his path for the second time and this time she gave him short shrift. He was pus.h.i.+ng forward, near sundown, to take the impulse of an eddy at the edge of Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned when he saw that predatory, songful woman balanced knee-deep in rus.h.i.+ng water, her arms tossing.

"She's drowning herself after her quarrel with Sam Dreed," was his first thought. He had just heard a fine tale of that quarrel. The truth was not quite so bold. She had been caught by the tide, which, first peering over the rim of that extended flat, had then shot forth a frothy tongue, and in a twinkling lapped her up.

Jethro presently brought up the webs of his two thumbs hard at her armpits, and took her into his boat, dripping.

"She's not so plump as she was ash.o.r.e," he said to himself with a vague astonishment. She was as lean as a man at the hips, and finned away like a mermaid, as became a daughter of the Old Roke.

"Steady now, my girl--. Heave and away."

There they stood confronting each other. Enraptured, life given into her hand again, Cad Sills flung her arms about his neck and kissed him--a moist, full-budded, pa.s.sionate, and salty kiss. Even on the edge of doom, it was plain, she would not be able to modulate, tone, or contain these kisses, each of which launched a fiery barb into the recipient's bosom.

The little fisherman had not known what elemental thing was in a kiss before. He bit his lip and fell back slowly. Then, after a second's vain reflection, he seized the b.u.t.ts of his oars, which had begun to knock together. Caddie Sills sank across a thwart and s.h.i.+vered a little to mark the crowding together of white horses at the very place where she had stood. Contrary currents caused the tide to horse in strongly over Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned.

"What a ninny!" she whispered. "Was I sick with love, I wonder?"

The harbor master answered with the motion of his oars.

She glanced at him shrewdly, then struck her hands together at her breast, which she caused to rise and fall stormily. She was, in fact, a storm petrel in the guise of woman.

"You have saved my life," she cried out, "when not another man in all this world would have lifted so much as his little finger. Do what you will with me after this. Let me be your slave, your dog--. I am a lost woman if you will not take pity on me."

Rackby's heart came into his throat with the slow surge of a sculpin on a hook.

"Nothing--. Nothing at all. Nothing in the world. I happened along--.

Just a happen so."

The girl stood up, looked at him long and long, cried, "Thank you for nothing, then, Mr. Happen-so," and from the humility of grat.i.tude she went to the extreme of impudence, and laughed in his face--a ringing, brazen laugh, with the wild sweetness in it which he had noted in the song she sang on that November hillside.

"You're a caution, little man, you're a caution," she said, slanting her lashes. "You certainly are. I've heard of you. Yes, I have, only this morning. I'm a solitary like yourself. See here. You and I could set the world on fire if we joined hands. Do you know that?"

The little man was struck dumb at his oars for very fear of the boldness of her advance. He recognized this for an original and fearsome, not to say delectable, vein of talk. She came on like the sea itself, impetuous and all-embracing. Unfathomed, too. Could fancy itself construct a woman so, pat to his hand?

"Is it true that you despise women as they say?" she whispered. She breathed close, and electrified the tip of his ear with a tendril of hair. He saw that she wore coral now, in place of the pearls. But her lips were redder than the coral. He raised his head.

"Yesterday morning you sold pearls for the benefit of Sam Dreed," he said, in dull tones. "And here you are with your brimstone fairly in my boat."

He looked at her as if the Old Roke himself had clambered into the boat, with his spell of doom.

"I am not afraid of helping honest men in trouble that I know of," said Cad Sills, sucking in her lower lip. "But do you throw that up to me?"

Jethro felt the wickedness of his position like a breath of fire fanning his cheek. Perilously tempted, he sagged back on the oars without a word.

"Soho! you're setting me ash.o.r.e," said that dark woman, laughing. "I don't wear very well in the eye and that's a plain conclusion."

She laid a finger to her breast, and her eye mocked him. This brazen hardness put him from his half-formed purpose. He addressed himself to the oars, and the dory grated on the sh.o.r.e.

"Good-bye, then, little man," she said, springing past him.

But even now she lingered and looked back, biting the coral and letting it fall, intimating that a word, a whispered syllable, might lay her low.

He sat like a man crushed to earth. When he raised his head she was gone.

Was this the voice from the seaward side of Meteor? True, the sea had yielded this wild being up, but did she speak with the sea's voice? She had at least the sea's inconstancy, the sea's abandonment.

Her words were hot and heavy in little Rackby's heart. Serene harbor master that he was, the unearthly quiet of his harbor was an affront upon him in his present mood. Now that she was lost to him, he could not, by any makes.h.i.+ft of reason, be rid of the impulse that had come upon him to jump fairly out of his own skin in an effort to recapture that tormenting woman--.

He drifted down upon Meteor Island, bowed and self-reproachful, like a spirit approaching the confines of the dead. He stepped ash.o.r.e and pa.s.sed the painter of his dory through its ring.

On the crest of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred, a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead, not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and twigs were quite dissolved in darkness--nothing but the silver pattern of the leaves was shown in random sprays. He felt for an instant disembodied, like these leaves--as if, taking one step too many, he had floated out of his own body and might not return.

"Bear and forbear," he thought. "You wouldn't have stirred, let her say what she would," his heart whispered to the silver leaves.

But he could not forget that wild glance, the wet hand clinging to his wrist, the laugh repeated like an echo from the symphony of that November hillside. He reproached himself withal. What was known of Cad Sills? Little known, and nothing cared to be known. A waif, pursuing him invisibly with a twinkle or flare from her pa.s.sionate eyes. She was the daughter of a sea captain by his fifth wife. He had escaped the other four. They had died or been deserted in foreign ports, but this one he could not escape. Tradition had it that he lost the figurehead from his s.h.i.+p on the nuptial voyage, attributed this disaster to his bride, and so left her at Rosario, only to find her, after all sail was set, in the forechains, at the very stem of his s.h.i.+p, half drowned, her arms outstretched, a living figurehead. She had swum after him. She outlived him, too, and died in giving birth to Cad Sills, whose blood had thus a trace of sea water--.

He entered his house. In his domestic arrangements he was the very figure of a bachelor. His slimsy silver spoon, dented with toothmarks of an ancestor who had died in a delirium, was laid evenly by his plate.

The hand lamps on the shelf wore speckled brown-paper bags inverted over their chimneys. A portrait of a man playing the violin hung out, in ma.s.sive gilt, over the table, like a s.h.i.+p's figurehead projecting over a wharf's end. His red couch bore northeast and southwest, so that he might not lose good sleep by opposing his body to the flow of magnetic currents.

On this night he drew out from a hole in the upholstery of the couch a bag of stenciled canvas, which c.h.i.n.ked. It was full of money, in gold and silver pieces. He counted it, and sat thoughtful. Later he went out of the house and stood looking at the sea as if for a sign. But the sea gave him no sign; and on that night at least had no voice.

It was three days before he came up with Cad Sills again. Then he spied her at nightfall, reclining under the crab-apple tree at Hannan's Landing.

The little man came close enough to tread on her shadow, cleared his throat, and almost shouted:

"Did you mean what you said? Did you mean what you said, girl?"

She laughed and threw the core of an apple in his direction.

"I did when I said it, Mr. Happen-so. I did when I said it."

"I'm ready--. I'm ready now. We'll be married tomorrow, if you don't mind."

"But will I sell my cabbages twice, I wonder? I've had a change of heart since, if I must tell you."

"Surely not in this short s.p.a.ce of time," Rackby gasped, dismayed.

A light throbbed in her eye. "Well, perhaps I haven't."

The storm petrel hovered high, swooped close, her lips parted. Her teeth shone with a native l.u.s.ter, as if she had lived on roots and tough things all her life. Again little Rackby felt that glow of health and hardness in her person, as if one of the cynical and beautiful immortals of the Greeks confronted him. He was heartily afraid of her mystifying power of enchantment, which seemed to betray him to greater lengths than he had dreamed. Even now perhaps all was lost.

"I will meet you tonight, then--at the top of the hill. See? By the Preaching Tree."

She nodded her head toward the church corner. "At eight sharp, by the west face of the clock. And, mind you, Mr. Man, not one jot late or early."

Although he heard the quick fall of her feet in the dust grow fainter, it pleased him not to turn. There was a p.r.i.c.kling above his heart and at the cords of his throat. The harbor was as blue as a map suddenly unrolled at his feet. Clouds with a purple warp were ma.s.sing in the east.