Bright Island

by Mabel L. Robinson

  His face crinkled into a wide grin when he saw it coming and he jammed it onto his head. “B’gosh, Thankful,” he said, “I never had any idea what a sport you were!” The door flew open and he caught a glimpse of Selina still on the run. “Beat it!” he cried to the driver and the car slewed off down the drive before Selina had reached the bottom step.

  She hooked her arm in Thankful’s, wholly undaunted. “In a hurry, wasn’t he?” and forgot all about him. “Say, Evelyn’s back, and is she mad at me! Oh, don’t mind,” she said to Thankful’s disturbed face, “Robert is comforting her. Now, buck up, my gal, I might as well tell you before someone else does, she’s Robert’s new girl!” She halted before opening the door to see the effect on Thankful.

  “That so?” said Thankful. “Let’s get inside. I’m cold.” And to her enormous relief she found that cold was practically the only feeling which disturbed her.

  Selina sighed because she had no broken heart on her hands and carefully balancing her cake box, led the way upstairs. In their room she cut them each a large square and delivered the news. Robert had heard by the morning mail that he had failed pretty thoroughly, and now he was in a mood. Selina said that nothing but his pride was hurt because he didn’t want to go to Harvard anyway. Evelyn’s father was a movie producer and she was going to see about getting him into the movies. “And that settled me,” Selina said mournfully. “She always promised to put me in if I’d be her roommate.”

  “Why didn’t you then?” Thankful finished her cake and took off her hat, twirling it thoughtfully on one finger.

  “Well,” Selina did have an engaging grin, “I like the one I’ve got.”

  Thankful had a quick vision of herself that first night at school last fall, and felt warm and pleased. “Robert would be good in the movies,” was all she said.

  A Course in Navigation

  The winter moved slowly on. Protected from its force, remote from its progress, Thankful could no longer realize it as time passing. The weeks seemed to her like waves at sea, each one like the other, rolling up and flattening out, leaving no record behind. Her island almanac did not read true for these steam-heated rooms and indoor sports. She felt that she had no way to check up the march of the seasons and that winter might mark time forever.

  When the midyear examinations at the end of January stirred up a flurry of excitement, part pleasure at a break in the monotony, part real terror, the contagion of feeling caught Thankful. She studied harder than she needed and enjoyed looking at her wan face. She shared Selina’s expectations of failure though secretly the examinations seemed so easy that she thought their menace must lie in some fiendish system of marking. She finished up the semester with great ease, as did Selina, and mailed the record of her achievement home to her mother, still a little puzzled at its high quality. Mary Curtis mentioned it in her next letter as casually as if it had been an extra good box of blueberries. Thankful forgot the examinations in the agitation of choosing new courses.

  She wavered between following Selina into art or electing a course in philosophy, wanting neither. Robert settled the matter for her.

  “Too bad you girls have to take such dull stuff.” It sometimes seemed to Thankful that he took unnecessary pains to impress her. “They’re offering a course in navigation for a few of us seniors. Only the fellows interested in boats,” he added.

  “Guess I’ll take it,” said Thankful unexpectedly.

  Robert looked shocked. So did Selina. “You couldn’t,” he said. “It’s not meant for girls.” But he watched her uneasily.

  Thankful considered. A course in navigation was, she felt, exactly what she needed. With it she could meet Dave on his own grounds. With it, and this thought she would have shared with no one, she could realize a little of Gramp’s life even while she followed his orders here. She had a conference with the head of the mathematics department and elected the course in navigation, the only girl. Robert pretended not to see her there.

  At the second meeting Orin Fletcher strolled in and seated himself at the seminar table with the small group of students. “Permission from the Dean.” He grinned at the instructor and shoved a blue slip at him. “I’ve always wanted to know the laws of navigation.”

  He wasn’t very good at it either, Thankful thought, when it came to working out the problems. He never knew the proper logarithms. She helped him all that she could but she felt that he took her diagrams rather lightly. She told him one day that he could use the right equations if he would put his mind to it, and then was horrified at her impatience when she remembered how his Latin had set her on her school feet.

  He agreed. “You’d be surprised at what my mind’s on,” he said. Then when she looked at him suspiciously, “Bought me a car. Secondhand, low grade moron of a car, but can she go!” He grinned boyishly at her.

  After the car was delivered and somewhat repaired, he offered Thankful rides in return for a certain amount of tutoring in navigation. “I expect we’ll find occasion to apply all we know to this car,” he remarked to its dark interior when they were stuck in the early mud of a shore road. Thankful enjoyed their explorations and even learned to drive irregularly on a straight pavement. But she found it difficult to secure the proper attention for navigation problems. “I’ve enough of my own,” he said.

  Selina became openly envious of the perquisites of the navigation course. “If I’d known Mr. Fletcher was coming into it, nothing would have kept me out,” she mourned. “Here I sit drawing little pictures of geraniums while you go joyriding all over the country! And who knows what else will come of it!”

  “What else has already come,” remarked Thankful. “The class goes on a field trip Saturday, guess where?”

  Selina tore a geranium in two. “Wherever it is, I’m going.”

  “Not you,” said Thankful, “we’re going to study navigation firsthand on the government cutter. President Davis arranged the trip.”

  “My officer’s cutter? Dave’s cutter? The one I rode on?”

  “That very steam yacht. And at last Robert’s going to get aboard her,” and Thankful marveled that it made so little difference to her.

  “It’s practically settled then.” Selina’s tone convinced both herself and Thankful. “I’ll see Prexie during office hours.”

  On Saturday, a brisk March day, Selina accompanied the group of navigation students to the government cutter. Thankful never knew how she managed it, but she suspected that it had something to do with herself. She could almost hear Selina offering a companion for the only girl with all those men. And she was glad to have her along. The officer, Dave, Orin Fletcher, where would Selina’s laws of navigation take her this time?

  Selina, very trim and as nautical as the March wind allowed, settled that problem at once. Captain Gilkie had commissioned Dave to conduct the party and Selina stuck to his side. Her questions dealt less with navigation than with him, and Thankful thought that he seemed to answer them with more pleasure than the technical ones of the instructor. After a deep, curious look at her and Orin Fletcher standing together, he paid no further attention to Thankful. She watched him, proud of his great size and quiet ways. Proud at the way he turned aside Robert’s heckling. She had told Orin Fletcher warmly about him and she felt a little hurt at Dave’s indifference.

  But the day through all its bluster smelled of a spring that Thankful knew would not come to the wind-driven coast for weeks. Still the water had changed from its winter indigo and steel to a fair blue, and Thankful read the island signs in it. Spring would come now, she knew, and even as she watched, winter seemed to step from marking time into a quick march past her. No one could really hurt her on a day so filled with promise. She lifted her eyes from the outer water, feather white in the wind, just as Dave’s speculative gaze slipped away from her. Orin was watching her, too, and she felt uncomfortable, stripped of her thoughts until he smiled at her.

  “Navigation problem one,” he said. “How long would it take at plenty of kno
ts an hour to whip across to a certain island so many miles out at sea?”

  Thankful laughed. “It’s no wonder,” she said, “that you have a hard time to get answers to your problems. You have to be exact in navigation.” But she bent her attention upon the shining instruments.

  They were not unfamiliar to her. Gramp had found her, of all the children, a willing listener. Together they had charted their course across many a mapped ocean. In his neat shop she had learned respect for the polished tools which could guide a great ship to safety or to destruction. She would have made a good skipper, Gramp said regretfully, and Thankful cherished his praise.

  Now she listened absently, hearing his voice through the Captain’s explanations to the boys, answering a question put suddenly to her as if it had been Gramp. Captain Gilkie was getting interested in his own talk.

  “We’ll put out to sea a bit,” he decided. “It’s no more than a school lesson unless you see her under way.”

  Selina looked uneasily at the rough outer water and then toward the land. But Captain Gilkie was already in the pilothouse and his orders sounded final. She jiggled Thankful’s elbow. “You don’t suppose anybody’d have a piece of gum, do you?”

  Thankful shook her head. “Just sit still and don’t talk. You’ll be all right.”

  “No, I’ve got to keep my mind off it,” Selina muttered.

  Thankful watched her anxiously for a few moments keeping her mind off the boat’s motion with a feverish zeal which drove Dave into retirement. Then she forgot her, lurching down to the lower deck with the boys to watch the change of course. The water rushed past their very feet smashing its spray over the slippery deck. Its roar and speed rushed her senses along with it until she was part of it again.

  The cutter swung suddenly to port and met the waves full on just as Selina, with no further hope of keeping her mind off them, dashed toward the low rail. Her feet slipped on the wet deck. She swung against the swift turn of the boat straight into the roaring water.

  Out of the clamor a bell clanged, the cutter slowed, men’s feet rushed back and forth, life preservers leaped frantically into the waves, and Thankful was stripping off her heavy coat, all, all in one moment of frenzied time. Not a chance, she knew, that icy water, the heavy clothes, seasick and dizzy, what if Selina could swim! Selina, she must get Selina! A great figure wrenching off its coat as it ran, shoved her back, balanced an instant, and plunged like a plummet so close that she felt the rush past her. Dave! It was Dave! Headed straight for that small white face with the red gash of a painted mouth. He would get her! Dave could get her!

  Dave had her easily, slung across his shoulder, not trying to swim toward the hastily lowered boats, treading water, easing the gagging gasping head. That bitter, bitter cold water! And Selina so soft, so unhardened to anything. Thankful shrugged impatiently back into her own warm coat that someone was forcing upon her. Orin Fletcher kept his arm across her shoulders and she felt it tremble.

  “She’s all right, she’s all right.” He shook her gently. “Now come with me and we’ll fix something hot and dry. She’ll need it.” Thankful hurried gratefully after him. Dave would need it, too.

  In a small empty stateroom they gathered blankets and hot water bags and steaming toddy which the Captain, upset and angry, brought to them. Then Selina staggered in, held between two stout sailors who passed her over to Thankful with infinite relief. Selina looked with bleary satisfaction at the worried men crowding out of the door.

  She drank the toddy and revived instantly under the heat. “Getting shipwrecked seems to be my line,” she said shakily. “And not such a bad one either.”

  Thankful rasped a harsh towel over Selina’s tender skin. She was filled with the fury which follows panic. “Try that once more,” she slashed with an even rougher towel, “and I’ll swim out and hold your head under.”

  “If you’d been holding my head instead of Fletcher’s hand, I wouldn’t ’a’ drowned. And quit skinning me!”

  Thankful gave up. You’d have to do more than rub her skin off to change Selina. And anyway she was here. She gave her a mighty hug.

  Dressed in the cabin boy’s clothes Selina tried to push a wave back into her hair. “I feel fine now the boat’s standing still,” she observed and Thankful realized that they must have docked. “Look kind of cute, don’t I?” But her lips, washed pale of their rouge, suddenly trembled and she turned away from Thankful. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  But her clothes had to be dried in the engine room and the captain, still gruff, insisted upon lunch for the girls and Orin Fletcher, who had stayed behind the rest to take them back to school. A gloomy enough meal with Dave in overalls glum at the end of the table, and the captain wholly resistant to Selina’s wiles and intent only on emptying his boat of inconvenient passengers. Selina made one arch attempt to treat Dave as her hero and promptly gave it up. But she ate a good lunch and thanked the captain prettily for it.

  Outside, Thankful started for the engine room when above the hatchway she saw Dave’s tousled head peering around. He looked relieved when he found her and beckoned. “Hey,” he whispered loudly, “my pants are shrinking. What’ll I do, Thankful?”

  “Your beautiful blue suit?”

  He nodded gloomily. “I’ll look like a bluebottle fly by the time it’s dry. What’ll I do, Thankful? It’s up to my ankles already.”

  Thankful sat on the edge of the hatchway. “Might tie flatirons to the legs.” It seemed natural to be devising ways and means with Dave.

  “Got none. And anyway that’d make ’em too tight. That empty-headed little hell-diver! Why can’t she stay on land where she belongs? Why can’t she?”

  “Well, I guess she will now,” encouraged Thankful. “But it’s too bad about those pants.”

  “Too bad! You got no idea how too bad it is! Thankful”—out of the gloom his eyes lightened—“I’m to see a man about a job that’ll set me on my feet for life. Wait till I tell you about it. So many darned people around I couldn’t get near you before …” Dave swung himself up beside her and they sat in the lee of the wind while he told her.

  The high March sky unfurled its wind clouds above them, and the wind hummed through the rigging, blowing excitement through them, drumming them into the future, their thoughts the sweet fifes. Dave’s words stumbled but his eyes were steady, on Thankful. She listened, the sunshine golden in her upturned face.

  Dave was to try for pilot of a great steamship, the one which was landed high and dry on an island by a city pilot last summer. No Maine pilot had ever grounded a ship. A man had to know the course and currents and the winds as he knew himself. A stranger was bound to be caught by one of them. The company had applied to the government cutter for a good man, and Captain Gilkie had recommended Dave.

  Here Dave’s excitement quieted. “I hate to leave the cutter,” he said, “but the Cap says we’ll be aground ourselves soon. The planes do all our work in the winter now. That’s why they let us break out the little islands. And if I’m to have no winter work, he says take a big job that’ll pay enough for the year. Winters I could”—he gave Thankful a quick speculative glance—“well, I could do most anything I wanted to.”

  Thankful’s eyes dreamed warmly over his plans. “There’s the island,” she said. “You could always come back there.”

  Dave stood, his great bulk towering beside her, and up among the humming winds she heard his voice, “I could come back only one way.…”

  “Thankful! Thankful!” Orin Fletcher doubled his lean body around a lifeboat, tried to withdraw when he saw them, and stood like a bent tree under the boat. “Sorry,” he said, “didn’t mean to interrupt. The cutter’s getting under way.” He backed out.

  “Thankful,” Dave whispered hoarsely, “what about my pants? How’ll I go to New York with ’em up to my knees?”

  “Borrow some.” Thankful shook out of her high mood.

  “Cap’s the only man as big as I am,” groaned Dave.

&nbs
p; “Borrow his.” Thankful was brazen.

  Dave slid down the hatchway. “I bet he’s got some old ones I could press. He never throws away anything! Say, don’t tell that girl,” he called back, “she’ll have me swimming all over New York harbor!”

  The drive back was quiet except for Selina who, squeezed between them among the gears, chattered about her swim and wrapped rugs around herself until no one could move. Her ruined clothes concerned her little.

  “Time we went shopping again,” she said. “You can’t wear that winter coat all summer. Remember, Mr. Fletcher? You helped Thankful buy a pipe last time we went.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  Thankful did not even hear them.

  Selina veered to another tack. “What I’d like to know is what Robert did when I went overboard. What did he do, Thankful?”

  What did he do? Thankful tried to remember him. “I don’t seem to know. Maybe he threw you a life preserver,” she suggested.

  “I bet he did. I bet he threw the one that nearly hit me in the head.” Selina was spiteful. “I bet he did.”

  “He yelled,” said Mr. Fletcher helpfully, “he yelled Help till some of the boys muzzled him.”

  Selina tried to shrug her shoulders but gave it up.

  The car turned from the shore road and chugged up grade. In the clear twilight Thankful could see that curved beach where old Dinkle housed his boat. The days are longer, she thought, much longer. The sky is bright like spring. He’ll get his boat off, and we’ll have Saturdays for lobstering, and soon it will be time to go back to Bright Island. And she fell to dreaming of Bright Island, and her own sailboat slipping through the blue water, and winter, winter with perhaps Dave there. But only one way, he said. And she thought about that awhile but came to no end with it.…