Platter was irritated. “Look out or I will!” he retorted; but, disturbed by his more humane impulses, he made a magnanimous offer. “Listen! On account of your not having any more sense than to come out here on that shingle, I’ll let you climb into my after cockpit; and then Claire and I’ll take you back inside the harbour, where you belong. You can stay there and pretend you’re out in the real ocean and have just as good a time as you think you’re having now. Hurry up and climb aboard; I can’t fool with you all morning.”
“Run along!” Nelson said. “When you want to really learn something about boats come around and ask me; I’ll give you beginners’ lessons free.”
His tone, like Platter’s, was not one of good-natured badinage, though it assumed to be that; there was a goading superiority in it, intended to exasperate. Small boys often take this tone with one another; and older boys, even of eighteen or twenty, are so little older that sometimes they use it, too — most frequently, no doubt, in the presence of a courted, pretty young creature like Claire. Nelson and Platter were really insulting each other, though affecting to engage in casual raillery.
The fact that they did affect at least the air of raillery is an indication that civilization is progressing; two young sprigs, rivals for a maiden’s favour in the sixteenth century, would have made no such pretense; daggers would have been tapped, but in spite of our increasing civilization, young rivals still sometimes go to life-and-death lengths; and Nelson deliberately went to that length now. He profoundly desired the security — indeed, the salvation — of the Caliph’s after cockpit; he knew that if he rejected it and the motorboat departed, his position would be critical; yet he did reject it. Flopping wildly upon the rushing seas, into which he kept the Peanut headed by only the most watchful effort, he nevertheless successfully concealed his real desperation. “Run along!” he said. “Run along and pretend you’re scarin’ the jellyfishes to death!”
Platter, stung, looked down upon him darkly. “All right,” he said. “Don’t blame me if you drown!” With that, he slid forward a strip of brass upon the wheel; the Caliph’s exhaust again began to roar and the boat slapped forward into the chop. A moment later it was tossing the foam from its risen bows and beginning to speed; Nelson and the Peanut receded quickly as Claire looked back at them.
“Dear me!” she said, still laughing. “He certainly thought he was razzing us, didn’t he? How funny he does look — exactly like a grasshopper on a cucumber rind! Such splashing and lurching! You’d almost think he was going to upset.”
“He will if he isn’t careful,” Platter said crossly. “Well, it’d be his own fault. When you offer to help people at sea and they won’t take it, you’re supposed to let ’em alone; it’s a kind of an unwritten law or something; but anyhow he’s prob’ly all right. That’s his sister’s canoe and he ought to know how much it’ll stand. He’ll turn around and go back as soon as we’re out of sight and he can’t show off any more.”
“I guess so,” she returned; then she pointed to three small black triangles lifted at the moment from the surface of the water. “Aren’t those sharks?”
“Yes, they are.”
“They’re going the other way, aren’t they, Platter?”
“Yes, toward shore.”
She laughed delightedly. “How thrilling! If they keep on they’ll pass right by Nelson. You s’pose he’ll see them? You s’pose it’ll make him nervous?”
“Do him good if they did,” Platter said severely, and then added, with little hope for his former friend’s chances of improvement: “But they never do hurt anybody and I guess he knows it.”
Here his surmise was correct. To the best of Nelson’s information the sharks in these waters had never attacked a living person and were not man-eaters; nevertheless there is a striking difference between knowing such a thing on shore, or on a staunch vessel, and knowing it in a fourteen-foot canoe undecided between swamping and capsizing. For the three sharks did indeed hold their course toward the coast; Nelson did indeed see them; and they did indeed make him nervous, though without doing him the “good” so securely prophesied for him by young Mr. Thomas.
“You get away from here!” Nelson said angrily to the three triangles when they were revealed to his view almost directly ahead of him, and only a few short waves distant.
They continued to approach, placidly sinister.
The Caliph was now so far away that the two figures in the cockpit were indistinguishable. The boat appeared to be no more than a small brown arrowhead, flying upon two little white wings of spume; and Nelson knew that he himself and the Peanut had become invisible to the Caliph. His human loneliness upon the vast water all at once seemed a dreadful thing; and the next moment, when he saw the three dark fins close together and shining wetly in the dip of the wave just beyond the Peanut’s bow, uncontrollable panic seized upon him suddenly and completely.
“I told you to get away from here!” he shouted fiercely.
Then, forgetting his urgent need to keep his paddle every instant to its proper service, he swept it forward through the air in a gesture threatening the three ominous triangles. The bow of the Peanut immediately swung round into the trough and the little boat, caught upon its side, received a cargo of water and half capsized, half sank. Nelson went down into the cold salt water, gasping, “Oh, my gosh!” Mentally, he had an insufferably crowded moment beneath the surface. He felt excruciating annoyance, hatred, and an anguish of revulsion. The annoyance was with his own folly, which he had the pain of realizing fully, under water; the hatred was for Claire; the revulsion was from his own recent dramatic emotions — from all that had led him to offer himself as a drowning breakfast for three sharks.
V
THEN HE GOT his head out of the splashing water and one hand upon the side of the canoe, which was not wholly submerged. It gave him a slight support, enough to sustain him when he paddled with his other hand. The three triangles were not to be seen; but he had no need to fear them, nor indeed, to fear anything; for, on such a day, there are more keen eyes along that coast than landsmen at sea suspect. The waters there are like the Sahara, where Arabs and camels appear miraculously from the vacant expanses of sand. Both sea and sand, where the stranger sees nought else, are incredibly peopled.
A beating in Nelson’s ears grew louder and more definite; it was the hard voice of a one-cylinder engine in a lobster fisherman’s dory — a dory of the colour of the sea, a dory much the colour of its owner. “I see you when you come out the habbuh,” he explained, as he helped Nelson to climb aboard. “‘My godfrey mighty!’ I says. ‘Them summuh people do lean to fancy ideers about whut’s a good vessel to navigate in.’ Had my eye on you and wan’t surprised what happened. Didn’t reckanize you, Nelson. I wun’t spread it on you if you tell me why you done it.”
“Didn’t have any sense,” Nelson muttered, so abject was his mood. “Guess I found out I never did have any.”
In this he meant more than the rescuer perceived; he meant that he had risked his life to impress a worthless girl for whom he now felt the sharpest distaste, asking of destiny no greater boon than that he should never see her again. He thought of her with something like horror; and after they had emptied the Peanut and taken it in tow, he was glad to leave the scene of his idiocy and to be heading for the sane and undramatic shore. He wished to be far from the path of the Caliph on her return to the harbour.
That fast and hardy motorboat, however, speeding back with almost the accuracy of a bee over her outward course, passed within fifty yards of the spot now so loathsome to Nelson, and made a troublous discovery. The dory owner and Nelson had fished two of the Peanut’s cushions out of the water, but could not find the third, nor the paddle so carelessly misused by Nelson. The Caliph, higher in the air, and with a greater field of vision, found both. It was Claire who saw the green-and-white cushion.
“Something ahead to the left,” she said. “It’s just under water; but a little of it sticks out. Let’s see wh
at it is.”
Platter throttled the engine down, then threw out his clutch; the Caliph lost headway and lay heaving beside the water-logged green-and-white cushion against which bobbed and snuggled a yellow paddle. Platter’s mouth opened dismally.
“My goodness!” he exclaimed. “Say!”
“What’s the matter?”
“They’re his. They’re Nelson’s.”
“But you don’t — you don’t think—”
Platter swallowed heavily. “I told him he had no business out here in that canoe. I told him he didn’t. I told him he hadn’t any sense. I told him—”
“Platter! Do you mean he’s drowned?”
“No,” he said. “But — but — well, it begins to look kind of queer.”
“Oh!” she gasped. “How awful! How awful!”
“It begins to look pretty queer,” Platter repeated. “It certn’ly does.”
They sat staring incredulously over the side of the boat at the bobbing cushion and paddle; and for a long and disturbing minute neither of them spoke again. Then she put a trembling hand upon his arm. “Ought we — ought we to’ve made him come with us, Platter?”
“That’s what everybody’ll say, I guess,” he answered huskily. He coughed, and his tone became querulous. “You heard me warn him. You can prove I did. You heard me tell him he had no business to be out here in that—”
“Platter!” she cried, interrupting him, in sharpest distress. “You mean you think if anything’s happened they’ll blame us?”
“I guess they will.”
“But why? How could people be so terrible? We didn’t have a thing to do with it — not a thing! We told him it was dangerous for him to be out here in that canoe; we begged him to get in our boat.”
“Yes. I know; but they’ll say—”
“It’s just horrible!” she said, and she began to cry. “We tried to make him come with us, and if something’s happened to him it was absolutely his own fault, and if people — if they could be so mean and cruel — if — if — —” Agitation overcame her; she failed of coherency and could get no further with her meaning.
“Well,” Platter said presently, “we don’t know. Somebody might ‘a’ picked him up.” But he gulped as he said it; and he added, “Of course it does begin to look kind of queer.”
“And they — they’ll blame us?”
For reply, he made an ominous motion with his head, not trusting his voice; and with that, Claire’s weeping became an audible sobbing. Platter sat silent, still gazing at the cushion and paddle; but after a time this inaction became intolerable to him. He took a boat hook from its fastenings; and with a little difficulty got the paddle and cushion aboard. Then his passenger asked brokenly, “What you — what you doing that for?”
“We got to,” he answered. “We got to take ’em to — to his family.”
She protested. “I can’t! I just can’t! Have we got to?”
“Yes,” he said doggedly. “We got to.” He stared with sombre eyes at the blue coastline; then drawing a long breath, he pushed forward the clutch lever, and slowly advanced the throttle. The Caliph moved forward with the running seas. “I guess if it’s true the whole place’ll go sour on us,” he said. “They’ll treat us like a couple o’ murderers all summer.” Then he added desperately, “Well, whatever they do, we got to stand it.”
“I can’t!” she sobbed. “I can’t! I can’t!”
But she knew that Platter spoke the truth. What awaited them on shore must be borne; and in this realization Claire suffered a sharper pain than any she had yet endured in the whole course of her life. For, though she did not know it and felt that she had lived much and at times suffered much, she had never, hitherto, borne anguish at all. She had endured little achings and some mortification while her teeth were being straightened; she had been through difficulties and discouragements at school; she had wept softly at the funeral of a great-uncle when a quartet sang “Lead, Kindly Light”; but, until to-day, the worst thing that had ever happened to her was a light attack of scarlatina. She had contracted it a week after she “came out,” just before the Christmas holidays, and she had wailed piteously to her mother that she was “missing everything!” But though she had no suspicion that her life had been a child’s bed of roses, giving her no opportunity to learn anything worth knowing, she was wholly unprepared to be blamed for the drowning of a troubled suitor. For she knew well enough that it was on her account that he had come out into the open sea in the Peanut.
In justice, it must be said that if Nelson had been less arrogant when the Caliph offered him help, she might have spared more thought than she did for the pathos of his struggles in the water and for the probable grief of his family. But pathos does not attach itself to the memory of an overbearing person; and so her shocked imagination was fully occupied with miserable prophetic pictures of her own shattered summer. The season’s career, so triumphantly begun last night, was already a ruin; she would be coldly looked upon; she would be pointed out with harsh disapproval; and, what was sheerly unendurable, for the next week or two — her mother’s sense of good taste might insist upon longer — she could not even go to any of the dances. It was conceivable that the young people of this new place, at the outset so cordial, might “drop” her; and, shuddering, she faced a pariah’s tragedy.
“Platter!” she moaned. “I can’t go back! Turn the boat around. I can’t go back!”
“Got to,” he said. “We got to go through it.”
At that, overcome by the thought of the bitter injustice awaiting her, Claire again sobbed aloud. Platter, occupied with his own apprehensions of injustice, proved to be unsympathetic.
“Hush up!” he said. “Gosh!”
VI
THE CALIPH SPED into the harbour entrance and swished through the still water to the floats before the clubhouse, where two attendants, dressed like sailors, roped it in its accustomed berth. Nelson, still thoroughly damp, had just landed from the much slower dory; and he paused upon the veranda steps looking down icily upon the arrival of the Caliph. For a moment neither Platter nor Claire saw him, and as she stepped out upon the float Nelson perceived that she had been crying. Moreover, in the cockpit there lay his paddle and the Peanut’s cushion, and he understood what must have been their significance to those who discovered them.
His severity was shaken; he saw that she still wept, and that her thin young shoulders were hunched and bowed. Grief was there; was it for him?
Then she saw him, and her startled eyes grew round; a brightness came upon her face. She rushed to him, running over the swaying floats as fast as she could. She seized both of his hands and pressed them to her breast. “Nelson! Oh, thank heaven! Thank heaven!”
“What for?” he asked gruffly; but he was touched. Nay, he wavered. Once more they seemed to care for the same things; once more she seemed adorable.
In her agitation she spoke exactly what she felt and much too straight from the heart. “What for?” she cried. “Why, we thought you were drowned and everybody in the whole place would blame us for it! Everybody’d ‘a’ said I was to blame; I know they would!”
The revelation was complete and so was Nelson’s disillusionment. He tried to pull his hands from her; but in the happiness of her great relief she held them but the tighter, and then, in his renewed revulsion he forgot to be a gentleman.
“So that’s all you were thinking about! It didn’t matter a darn thing about my getting drowned and my father and mother and a few things like that!” He used a terrible word. His great-grandfather, under similar circumstances, might have caused a lady to faint by addressing to her the epithet, “heartless coquette.” Nelson’s generation has less care of its English. “Leggo my hands,” he said. “You Prom-Trotter!”
Staggered, she released him; and then slowly, her cheeks burning and her eyes fiery with the endured insult, she went through the clubhouse and walked up the dusty hill-road toward her cottage. “Prom-Trotter!” She had lost him,
lost the impetus his competition would give the others, and that could be borne; but the rage she felt — like the anguish that preceded it — was intolerable. Anyone passing her would have thought the hill too steep for her, though she could easily have taken it at a run. She had grown pale, and her breast heaved with her tumultuous breathing.
“He dared!” she panted. “He dared!”
Again tears were hot upon her eyelids; she clenched her small hands, and bit her tremulous lower lip to keep it still. Self-pity and hatred filled her. “I wish he had drowned! I wish those sharks—”
In her mind’s eye she saw Nelson struggling in the cold salt sea and the three grim fins approaching hungrily. “Eat him!” she imagined herself saying. “Eat him!” This time, she willingly accepted the responsibility; but she got no comfort out of it. She got no comfort out of anything; she was fiery with anger, yet helpless in a keen misery.
Then a strange thing happened to her. As she imagined Nelson in the water she seemed to see his scornful eyes looking at her with all the bitterness that was in them just now when he insulted her. Suddenly, and not knowing how it happened, she realized that Nelson was a person, a being like herself, full of himself as she was full of herself. He was not just some impressions made upon her senses, not just something for her to use, he was as much a person, in fact, as she was. Moreover, in this revelation she understood that he had suffered; that she had been nearly the cause of his death; and that to die meant as much to him as to die would mean to her.
She stopped short, looking up blankly at the warm noon sky above the brow of the hill. “Oh, my goodness!” she whispered. “He was right!”
She was dazed, stricken with her bewilderment and her unhappiness; what had happened to her appeared to her as nothing short of tragic. On the contrary, she should have been full of a new delight; for the thing that had just befallen her on the hillside was of a prophetic beauty; it was the beginning of her life as a being independent of her mechanical self. Out of her rage and pain and the hot pressure of old, old instincts and urges, intelligence was being born.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 421