The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 32

The harbor master stared hard at the low ridge of an outlying island where a cow had been put to pasture. The hillocky back of that lone ruminant grew black as ink in the glow of sunset. The creature exhibited a strange fixity of outline, as if it had been a chance configuration of rocks. Rackby in due time felt a flaming impatience shoot upward from his heels. Water soughed and chuckled at the foot of the crab-apple tree, but these eager little voices could no longer soothe or even detain him with their familiar a.s.surances.

He jumped up and stared hard at the west face of the clock, whose gilt hands were still discernible in the fading light. It was five minutes of eight.

When he slipped into the shadow of the Preaching Tree it had grown dark.

Fitful lightning flashed. In the meadow fireflies were thick. They made him think of the eager beating of many fiery little hearts, exposed by gloom, lost again in that opalescent glare on the horizon against which the ragged leaves of elm and maple were hung like blobs of ink or swarms of bees.

He breathed fast; he heard mysterious fluted calls. A victim of torturing uncertainty, he strained his ear for that swift footfall.

Suddenly he felt her come upon him from behind, buoyant, like a warm wave, and press firm hands over his eyelids. Her hair stung his cheek like wire.

"Guess three times."

Rackby felt the strong beat of that adventurous heart like drums of conquest. He crushed her in his arms until she all but cried out. There was nothing he could say. Her breath carried the keen scent of crushed checkerberry plums. She had been nibbling at tender pippins by the way, like a wild thing.

The harbor master remembered later that he seemed to have twice the number of senses appointed to mortals in that hour. A heavy fragrance fell through the dusk out of the thick of the horse-chestnut tree. A load of hay went by, the rack creaking, the driver sunk well out of sight. He heard the dreaming note of the tree toad; frogs croaked in the lush meadow, water babbled under the crazy wooden sidewalk.--The meadow was one vast pulse of fireflies. He felt this industrious flame enter his own wrists.

Then the birches over the way threshed about in a gust of wind. Almost at once rain fell in heavy drops; blinds banged to and fro, a strong smell of dust was in his nostrils, beat up from the road by driving rain.

The girl first put the palm of her hand hard against his cheek, then yielded, with a pliant and surprising motion of the whole body. Her eyes were full of a strange, bright wickedness. Like torches they seemed to cast a crimson light on the already glowing cheek.

Fascinated by this thought, Rackby bent closer. The tented leaves of the horse-chestnut did not stir. Surely the dusky cheek had actually a touch of crimson in the gloom.

This effect, far from being an illusion was produced by a lantern in the fist of a man swinging toward them with vast strides. And now the clock, obeying its north face, struck eight.

Before the last stroke had sounded the girl was made aware of the betraying light. She whirled out of Rackby's arms and ran toward Sam Dreed. The big viking stood with his feet planted well apart, and a mistrustful finger in his beard.

"Touch and go!" cried Caddie Sills, falling on his neck. "Do we go at the top of the tide, mister?"

"What h.e.l.lion is that under the trees?" he boomed at her, striking the arm down savagely.

"You will laugh when you see," said Cad Sills, wrung with pain, but returning to him on the instant.

"On the wrong side of my face, maybe."

"Can't you see? It's the little harbor master."

"Ah! and standing in the same piece of dark with you, my girl."

Cad Sills laughed wildly. "Did ever I look for more thanks than this from any mortal man? Then I'm not disappointed. But let me ask you, have you taken your s.h.i.+p inside the island to catch the tide?"

"Yes."

"Oh, you have. And would you have done that with the harbor master looking on? Hauled short across the harbor lines? Maybe you think I have a whole chest of pearls at your beck and call, Sam Dreed. Oh, what vexation! Here I hold the little man blindfolded by my wiles--and this is my thanks!"

The voice was tearful with self-pity.

"Is that so, my puss?" roared the seaman, melted in a flash. He swung the girl by the waist with his free arm. "You _have_ got just enough natural impudence for the tall water and no mistake. Come along."

"Wait!" cried Jethro Rackby. He stepped forward. He felt the first of many wild pangs in thus subjecting himself to last insult. "Where are you going?"

The words had the pitiful vacuity of a detaining question. For what should it matter to Jethro where she went, if she went in company with Sam Dreed?

"How can I tell you that, little man?" Cad Sills flung over her shoulder at him. "The sea is wide and uncertain."

Her full cheek, with its emphatic curve, was almost gaunt in the moment when she fixed her eyes on the wolfish face of that tousle-headed giant who encircled her. Her shoulder blades were pinched back; the line of the marvelous full throat lengthened; she devoured the man with a vehemence of love, brief and fierce as the summer lightning which played below the dark horizon.

She was gone, planting that aerial foot willfully in the dust. Raindrops ticked from one to another of the broad, green leaves over the harbor master's head. Water might be heard frothing in a nearby cistern.

Suddenly the moon glittered on the parson's birch-wood pile, and slanted a beam under the Preaching Tree. Sunk in the thick dust which the rain had slightly stippled in slow droppings, he saw the tender prints of a bare foot and the cruel tracks of the seaman's great, square-toed boots pointing together toward the sea.

He raised his eyes only with a profound effort. They encountered a blackboard affixed to the fat trunk of the Preaching Tree, on which from day to day the parson wrote the text for its preachments in colored chalk. The moon was full upon it, and Rackby saw in crimson lettering the words, "Woman, hath no man d.a.m.ned thee?" The rest of the text he had rubbed out with his own shoulders in turning to take the girl into his arms.

"I d.a.m.n ye!" he cried, raising his arms wildly. "Yes, by the Lord, I d.a.m.n ye up and down. May you burn as I burn, where the worm dieth not, and the fires are not quenched."

So saying, he set his foot down deliberately on the first of the light footprints she had made in springing from his side--as if he might as easily as that blot out the memory of his enslavement.

Thereafter the Customs House twitted him, as if it knew the full extent of his shame. Zinie Shadd called after him to know if he had heard that voice from the sea yet, in his comings and goings.

"Peter Loud was not so easy hung by the heels," that aged loiterer affirmed, "s.h.i.+pping as he did along with the lady herself, as bo's'n for Cap'n Sam Dreed."

Jethro Rackby took to drink somewhat, to drown these utterances, or perhaps to quench some stinging thirst within him which he knew not to be of the soul.

When certain of the elders asked him why he did not cut the drink and take a decent wife, he laughed like a demon, and cried out:

"What's that but to swap the devil for a witch?"

Others he met with a counter question:

"Do you think I will tie a knot with my tongue that I can't untie with my teeth?"

So he sat by himself at the back windows of a water-front saloon, and when he caught a glimpse of the water s.h.i.+ning there low in its channels he would shut his lips tight.--Who could have thought that it would be the sea itself to throw in his path the woman who had set this blistering agony in his soul? There it lay like rolled gla.s.s; the black piles under the footbridge were prolonged to twice their length by their own shadows, so that the bridge seemed lifted enormously high out of water. Beyond the bridge the seine pockets of the mackerel men hung on the shrouds like black cobwebs, and the s.h.i.+ps had a blighting look of funeral s.h.i.+ps.--

He had mistrusted the sea. It was life; it was death; flow, slack, and ebb--and his pulse followed it.

Officials of the Customs House could testify that for better than a year, if he mentioned women at all, it was in a tone to convey that his fingers had been sorely burned in that flame and smarted still.

The second autumn, from that moment under the Preaching Tree, found him of the same opinion still. He trod the dust a very phantom, while little leaves of cardinal red spun past his nose like the ebbing heart's blood of full-bodied summer. The long leaves of the sumach, too, were like guilty fingers dipped in blood. But the little man paid no heed to the a.n.a.logies which the seasons presented to his conscience in their dying.

Though he thought often of his curse, he had not lifted it. But when he saw a cl.u.s.ter of checkerberry plums in spring gleam withered red against gray moss, on some stony upland, he stood still and pondered.

Then, on a night when the fall wind was at its mightiest, and shook the house on Meteor Island as if clods of turf had been hurled against it, he took down his Bible from its stand. At the first page to which he turned, his eye rested on the words, "Woman, hath no man d.a.m.ned thee?"

He bent close, his hand shook, and his blunt finger traced the remainder of that text which he and Cad Sills together had unwittingly erased from the Preaching Tree.

"No man, Lord."--"Neither do I d.a.m.n thee: go, and sin no more."

He left the Bible standing open and ran out-of-doors.

The hemlock grove confronted him a ma.s.s of solid green. Night was coming on, as if with an ague, in a succession of coppery cold squalls which had not yet overtaken the dying west. In that quarter the sky was like a vast porch of crimson woodbine.