Mermaid. Grant M. Overton
glare that changed, at the horizons, to a blue haze of heat. White-sailed boats moved over the five-mile width of Great South Bay, taking to and fro men in white trousers and gaily-clad women and children who might wish to spend a day at the tavern to the westward of the station, a place of ragtime music, clicking billiard balls, “shore” dinners, and home-prepared lunches. The clean sand was daily littered with empty shoeboxes and crumpled paper napkins by these family groups who picnicked between dips in the surf. Except for a few inevitable “fine swimmers” they clung, laughing and shrieking, to a line of rope tethered to a barrel just beyond the break of the waves.
With the children of these beach parties Mermaid could play the day long and sometimes did; many of the visitors were summer residents of the south shore of Long Island, but not many of them had heard the little girl’s story; if they gave her any thought they accepted her as a child of one of the Coast Guardsmen. Strollers who came to the station to look at the apparatus of life saving—the breeches buoy, the life car which travelled to and from a distressed ship and the shore, the surf boat resting on its truck, and ready to be hauled laboriously through a mile or more of sand, the gun—these people would see Mermaid, but never think to ask her history. Why should they, indeed, even suppose she had one? And in telling of wrecks along the beach Cap’n Smiley generally omitted any mention of one; if he was asked about the time the Mermaid came ashore he would answer quite willingly, but a specific question was necessary to elicit the most romantic and still mysterious part of that story.
The keeper had many other tales unusual enough to satisfy the craving of the casual caller for a picturesque yarn. Out of his thirty years at the station he could supply episodes ranging from the ridiculous to the horrible, and many rehearsals, joined to some natural gift as a narrator, enabled him to tell his stories well. In pleasant summer weather, however, they lost much of their possible effectiveness; to appraise them at their true worth you had to hear them in winter, sitting and smoking or dreaming by the blazing stove in the station’s long living room, a lamp swinging overhead, the wind shaking the building while the sound of the not-distant surf came in to you as a thunderous and unbroken roar. On a summer’s night with all the stars shining, the wind whispering and bringing coolness from the leagues of ocean, the surf merely murmuring and—yes, the mosquitoes biting moderately—on such a night you could form no just conception of the setting in which these tales belonged.
With fall, came the question of Mermaid and school. After a severe mental struggle Cap’n Smiley decided that this could go over for a year. He could teach the child her letters; as a matter of fact, she already knew most of them from the weekly practice at wigwagging with the red and white flags. The keeper knew of no one on “the mainland” to whom he felt willing to entrust the child; he was inclined to consider his sister out of the question; in another year some satisfactory arrangement might present itself. Besides, both he and the men, but he himself particularly, would be loath to part with Mermaid. She was a big thing in their lives, and in Cap’n Smiley’s the biggest. Mrs. Biggles had said lately that she and her Henry were getting along; they contemplated giving up life on the beach except for a short while in summer. They would take a house in Blue Port and live there ten months out of the twelve. Should they do this Mermaid would have a good home while she was getting her schooling; Cap’n Smiley and the crew would miss her sorely, but their minds would be easy, and every one of them on his twenty-four hours’ leave could look in on her and see how she was. … When the time should be ripe to carry this general scheme into execution it was Cap’n Smiley’s intention legally to adopt Mermaid, although, as he said to himself, Mermaid Smiley would not do as a name. It had altogether too strong a flavour of the portraits on certain pages of the Sunday newspapers. He would adopt her as Mary Smiley … though in all likelihood she would always be called Mermaid. The name well befitted her, dancing about down there on the beach and slipping in and out of the water in the bathing suit Mrs. Biggles had made for her from some old dress of pale green with silver edgings. Musing over the name Cap’n Smiley burst into such laughter that Ha Ha the Gloomy, peeling potatoes in the kitchen, gave a start and cut his finger.
“I was just thinking of Henry Biggles’s father,” the keeper explained. “ ’Member him? Lived here on the beach. Eighteen children. Old Jacob Biggles hadn’t much education; in fact, he couldn’t read and write. Named most of the children after vessels that came ashore on the beach. One was Monarch Biggles—you’ve heard of Mon Biggles?—and another was Siamese Prince Biggles—that’s Si Biggles. Then along came a lot of boys and a lot of wrecks named the Queen, the Merry Maid, and other unsuitable things. Poor Jacob was in despair. Some of the boys had to wait eight years to get a handle.”
“He could have got names out of the Bible,” Ha Ha pointed out.
“He could get ’em but he couldn’t pronounce ’em.”
VII
In September Mermaid and Cap’n Smiley and Ho Ha went beach-plumming. As they wandered over the dunes picking the blue-red-purple berries there was much conversation, sometimes conducted in shouts, when the three were spread a little apart.
“D’ you know the Latin name of these plums, Hosea?” demanded the keeper. Ho Ha looked very serious.
“My bad mark in school was always in Latin!”
The keeper winked at Mermaid. Ho Ha had gone to a little red schoolhouse, winters, until he was thirteen.
“It’s prunus maritima,” he reminded the scholar. “That’s almost calling ’em maritime prunes.”
“They’re commoner than prunes with us. Do they get the name from being served in sailors’ boarding-houses?”
“You were shanghaied to sea, once, weren’t you, Hosea?”
“Sixteen when it happened. On South Street, New York. Froze my feet standing a trick at the wheel off Cape Horn. Mate came into the fo’c’s’le and grabbed one foot and twisted it until I howled; then he pulled me out on deck,” said the Coast Guard, reminiscently. “I’d always been sort of crazy about the sea from a kid.” He emptied his pickings into a big basket, straightened up a moment, resumed his picking, and said:
“I worshipped, just about, an uncle, my mother’s brother, who’d been to sea all his life. And when I was a shaver on our farm up in the hills in the middle of the Island I slept in the attic. Every night, Cap’n, as I got in bed I could see through a little attic window, right over the tree tops Fire Island light. ’Twas maybe twenty miles away. ’Twould show, just a faint spark, then kindle, then glow bright, then flame like—like a beacon. Just for a few seconds; then ’twould die out. Occulting. It seemed to beckon to me. I was only a kid and there was something wonderful and friendly about that light! And secret, too. It seemed to be signalling just to me, a little chap in an ice-cold attic on a lonely hill farm. Seemed as if that light said: ‘Come on, Hosea Hand! I’m set here to tell you that there’s a great world out here waiting for you! I’m an outpost! There’s lands and peoples and adventures and ten thousand leagues of ocean—and there’s life, the greatest adventure of all! Hurry up and grow up, Hosea Hand!’ And then all shivering and excited, I’d crouch under the big, pieced quilt and watch that light come and glow, shine and dim, flame and go out—until I’d fall asleep and dream I was out there where it called me!”
The little girl listened, fascinated. She had stopped picking, and her childish breast rose and fell with quick breathing. Cap’n Smiley picked perfunctorily and once his hand closed so tightly about the coloured plums that they crushed them. Ho Ha worked steadily and after a few moments he went on:
“I was fourteen when my father died. The year before I’d quit school to help work the farm. In those days there wasn’t any science called agriculture. We just tilled the soil. My father was always trying to get more land; I used to wonder what for, when it was such slavery to work it! Maybe he suspicioned the day would come when we’d understand the soil and know how to make it yield without back-breaking and heart-break.”