Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. 20 August 1877 by Various

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 745 lines and 83875 words, and 15 pages

"No doubt. The old captain wrote to me that he had bought Sutphen's Tuckerton skiff."

"Aha? You did not tell me that. What else did he say?"

"Oh, nothing. 'Crabs would be scarce this season; and couldn't we come down?' The larks were beginning to rise in the marshes."

Jane nodded thoughtfully: "A Tuckerton skiff? Now, I'm surprised at that, father. I should prefer something heavier--a yawl, say--for coming in on that beach. Well--The wind must be dead sou'-west to-day. It would bring the spray right up into your face if you were lying on the sand."

She was silent for some time, looking steadily out of doors.

Jane brought his pipe and lighted it for him. "I am dreadfully tired!" stretching her arm out, pushing up the sleeve, and looking at it as if it had done a day's ploughing. "Now, I suppose the men are all out in their boats by this time, but a person could easily rig Lantrim's little sloop and join them; or we could camp on the marshes all day. The scent of the pines would be heavy in this damp wind."

The captain nodded gravely and puffed in silence a while: "It's no use, Jane," taking the pipe from his mouth. "I haven't a penny."

She sprang up, ran to a writing-desk and took out a glove-box. In it were a pair of well-darned kid gloves and two tiny paper packages. She laid them before him: "It's all in silver: this is for your summer hat, and that for my shoes. What do you say, father? We are in time for the eight-o'clock train. We should have nearly the whole day on the beach."

"Hat? What do I want with a hat? But your shoes are broken."

"They can be patched," with a gasp of delight. "Here! clear away the work, father, while I put up a basket of dinner." She stopped by the window, looking out: "Somebody is coming through the apple trees: I smell a cigar. Now, remember, nothing must detain you. We can't break our engagement."

The visitor came in sight from under the apple trees--a sombre, heavy man in gray, the editor Neckart, to whom Mr. Waring had criticised the Swendons with such freedom the night before. Mr. Neckart had known the captain years ago. When he was a boy, too poor to pay for schooling, he used to go to the captain at night for help in his Greek or mathematics. Swendon had always preferred the companionship of younger men than himself, and was never without a "following" of clever, unruly schoolboys, whom he was as ready to help when they were lazy, as to tip with silver half-dollars--when he had them. Some of them had brought young Neckart to the captain, knowing nothing about him, except that he was miserably poor, with a desire for knowledge which they thought insane enough. Now that Neckart was a man, living in New York, and with very different problems to work from those of Euclid, he had but little intercourse with the slow, easy-going captain. They met occasionally, when Neckart came to Philadelphia, at the club or at dinner somewhere, when there would be a few minutes' hasty gossip about the old pranks of the boys--White, who died in California, or Porter, who was now in the Senate--and then a shake of the hand and good-bye, Neckart usually wondering to himself, as they parted, how soon that fellow Laidley would cease to cumber the earth and the captain would have his own and wear a decent coat again and the bits of gaudy jewelry in which he used so to delight.

The old man hurried down the garden-walk now to meet him, and wrung his hand heartily: "Bruce! is it possible? You have not crossed my threshold since the old Epictetus days."

"No, and I interrupt you now? You are going out? I only called for a few words on business."

"Plenty of time, plenty of time! My little girl and I were going to run down to the shore to vagabondize for a day.--Jane, this is my old friend Mr. Neckart.--We have plenty of time in which to catch the train. Sit down, Bruce."

Mr. Neckart did not sit down, however. He found some difficulty now in putting his business into a few concise words. He had heard Laidley's avowal the night before that he proposed to leave the captain penniless. All his boyish regard for the old man woke in force. His boyish feelings were apt to waken and clog Mr. Neckart's strait-lined path to success. He did not sentimentalize about his old teacher, but he set aside half an hour in which to look in on him and see what could be done for him. Anything could be done in half an hour by a man who chose to work hard enough.

He expected to find the captain totally disheartened by this blow, but here he was making ready for a day's fooling on the beach; for the captain, finding that his visitor did not promptly broach the subject of his errand, went on with his preparations.

So it happened that they fell into a brief silence. The old man by the fire screwed his rod as though rods were the business of life: the young girl sat by the window, a white-covered lunch-basket on the floor beside her, sewing strings on a wide-rimmed hat which she meant to wear. Her yellow hair was bound loosely about her head, fastened by a band of black velvet: it made a faint shadow about the calm, delicate face. The dog sat at her feet, his head on her knee, watching her intently. She took her stitches slowly and with care, stopping now and then to put her hand on Bruno's muzzle and nod at him significantly about the fun they were going to have presently. It was a quiet, pretty picture.

Now, silence or leisurely calm of any kind was rare in Mr. Neckart's daily life. He was the controller of a great journal: he was a leading politician. He had been making his own way, and dragging and goading slower men along, since he had left his cradle. Even his own party found the indomitable energy of this dwarfish giant intolerable sometimes. But his own action did not satisfy him. He had held his finger so long on the world's pulse that affairs in New York or Washington seemed but small matters. He liked to feel that they and he were linked by a thousand sympathies to the chances and changes of every country on the globe. A famine in India or an insurrection in Turkey were not mere newspaper items to him, but significant movements of the outer levers and pulleys of the great machine, part of which he was.

It is the straining horse that is always loaded, and there was no man in the party from whom such work was exacted as from Neckart. The night before he had received a deputation of French Communists proposing emigration: this morning he was to meet in secret caucus the leaders who would decide on the next candidate for the Presidency. So it went on day after day. To fall suddenly into this little room, among people to whom a day's fishing or sauntering with a dog through salt marshes was the object of life, startled him.

For years, too, people who talked to Neckart, though in but a street greeting, invariably recognized his power to help or harm them. If they had no favors to ask, they bore themselves deferentially, as to a power that could grant favors. To the captain he was still the boy Bruce, a good fellow, though dull in Greek: to the girl, intent on her holiday, he saw that he was an unwelcome guest, who would interfere with her journey. The jar of falling to the common level was sudden, yet oddly pleasant.

The captain, to fill up the time, began to discuss the different makes of fishing-rods. Mr. Neckart was used to give ten minutes each to men seeking interviews: their words had to be sharp as arrows, and driven straight home to the bull's eye of the matter to command his attention. Yet he listened to this lazy talk. The damp wind drove the perfume of the apple-blossoms in at the open window: the sunlight touched the glistening rings of hair on Jane's throat. How slow-moving and calm the girl was! He was quite sure that the blood had flowed leisurely in the veins under that pearly skin ever since she was born. None of that true American vim, sparkle, pushing energy here which he admired in his countrywomen.

"I really don't understand the new kinds of tackle," he said to Captain Swendon: "I have not had a rod in my hand for fifteen years."

"No. Of course not. You have other work to do. But Jane and I run down to the shore whenever we have money--I mean whenever we can manage to leave home. She knows every fisherman's hut from Henlopen to Barnegat. No better place to go for a breath of salt air than Sutphen's Point. You can troll with him all day, or dig for roots in the pine woods, or sleep on the beach in the sun."

Neckart smiled and glanced at his watch. At nine the committee would meet. Sun? Sleeping on the beach? He was a stout, strongly-built man, with muscles like steel, but, like most Americans who have urged their way relentlessly up, his brain before middle age gave signs of disease. As any other creature would, when overdriven for years it revolted, and failed in its work now and then. Night after night he lay sleepless, conscious only of a dull vacuity at the base of the brain; and by day, when some crisis demanded his most vigilant, keenest thought, thought suddenly blurred into momentary stupor. Any man who overworks his brain will understand how it was with him, and why, for physical reasons, this glimpse of absolute quiet and rest should touch his nerves as the taste of cordial would a fainting man. A sudden vision opened before him of yellow, silent sands, and dusky stretches of solemn pines, and the monotonous dash of the green sea all day, all night long. No doubt there were "old Sutphens" there, whole generations of people, outside of the living world, sleeping and sunning themselves. It was like a glimpse into some newly-discovered, silent, sunlit Hades.

Mr. Neckart put back his watch in his pocket, and looked irresolutely at the captain. The foolish, kindly old face belonged to his boyhood--to the time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation--unreasonable as that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over. Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on the situation which nobody but he could write, that must go to his paper by the next mail.

He took up his hat: "It is time for you to catch the train, captain. Will you take me with you?"

Captain Swendon looked at him hastily: "The very best thing you can do, Bruce! Just what I should advise.--Jane, go on before with Bruno. Mr. Neckart and I will follow."

Mr. Neckart was annoyed. He had forgotten that the girl was to go, and had thought of the captain as his only companion. But she walked far in front of them, through the apple trees, and down the quiet street, engrossed with the dog. She probably would not be in his way.

Down on the coast the world suddenly broadened and lifted into larger spaces. In lieu of eight-feet strips of pavement to walk on, there were the gray sweeps of sand, and great marshes stained with patches of color in emerald and brown, rolling off into the hazy background: instead of the brick and wooden boxes wherein we shut ourselves up with bad air in town, there were the vast uncovered plain of the sea, shapeless ramparts of fog incessantly rising and fading, an horizon which retreated as you searched for it into opening sunlit space, refusing to shut you in. The very boats and ships in which these people lived were winged, ready for flight into some yet farther region.

"Are you glad to come out of doors, Bruno? I am," said Miss Swendon to her dog as she stood looking at the sea; and then they sauntered away together.

Her father and Mr. Neckart went down to the mouth of the Inlet, where some fishermen were patching a boat which they had drawn up on a heap of mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over, with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook hands gravely with him, and made room for him on the bottom of an up-turned, worm-eaten scow. They were all captains as well as he, and he was hail, fellow! well met! with them as with everybody.

Mr. Neckart, who was formally introduced, nodded curtly, but did not sit down.

"A good day for the perch, Sutphen," said the captain, handing round a bundle of cigars.

"Yaas."

"But you ought to have been on the banks by daylight." Mr. Neckart's sharp, irritable voice jarred somehow on the quiet sunshine.

"Yaas. But I lent my boat last week, and this here one's out of repair.--Give me more of them nails, David."

"The boat could have been mended at night, and ready for use," in the tone which a teacher might use to idle boys.--"It is singular, Captain Swendon," turning his back on the men as on so many mud-turtles, "that the sea-air begets improvident habits in all coast-people. You cannot account for it rationally, but it is a fact. Along the whole immediate shore-line of Europe you find the same traits. Unreadiness, torpor of mind and body.--Ah! Captain Swendon and I wish to hire a boat for the day," turning to the fishermen again. "Can any of you men furnish us with one?"

Sutphen lighted his cigar leisurely: "We always manage to provide Captain Swendon with a boat when he wants it. We kin obleege him," with a slight stress on the pronoun.

"At what rates?" sharply.

"Waal, we kin talk of rates when the day's over. The captain and us won't disagree, I reckon."

"I never do business in that way. Bring out your boat and put a price on it."

"Come, Neckart," said the captain, rising hastily, "we will walk up the beach a bit.--I'll see you about the boat presently, Sutphen.--You don't know these fellows, Bruce," when they had passed out of hearing and found a seat in the thin salt grass. "They are not used to being dealt with in such a prompt, drill-major fashion."

"I deal with all men alike. Order and promptness have been necessary to me in every step of my way. I must have them from others. I pay to a penny, and I exact to a penny. It is not the money I want: it is discipline in the people about me. They must move as if they were drilled if they move to further my ends."

The captain took his cigar out of his mouth and turned blankly on him: "'Further your ends?' But, Bruce?--"

Neckart laughed: "Oh, no doubt they were created with some other object in view than to serve my purposes. But that is the cognizance which I take of them. Really, captain, if you were in public life, and saw with what eagerness masses of men follow feeble leaders who know the trick of piping to them, and how willing they are to be manipulated, you would soon come to look upon the American public simply as a machine ready for your own use when you had the skill to work it."

The captain's cigar went out in his fingers as he sat staring with dull perplexity at Neckart. There was a certain nobility in the carriage of the powerful figure and black shaggy head, an occasional fire in the deep-set eyes, a humor in the fine smile, which argued a different order of man from this scheming, selfish politician.

"I can't place you at all, Bruce. Now, I should have thought you would have been a reformer--worked for humanity--that line, you know. You were a sensitive lad, like a girl."

"I am quite too warm-hearted a fellow to be a philanthropist," laughed Neckart. "The philanthropists I know work for principles, liberty, education and the like: they don't care a damn for the individual Tom and Jerry. The chances are, that your reformer is a cold-blooded tyrant at home: he makes a god of his one idea: his god makes him nervous, ill-conditioned--the last man in the world to choose for a friend or a husband."

"You amaze me! I should have said that they were the wisest and purest of men. Next to clergymen, of course. I don't go to church myself, but I respect the cloth. But speaking of yourself, Bruce, you were a most affectionate little fellow. Do you remember how you referred every new idea to your mother? I recollect you told me once that you read your lessons in your school classics to her to amuse her. You must have cleaned the translation sometimes to make it fit for her ear."

"Yes."

"And I remember, too," regardless of the sudden silence which had fallen on his companion, "how you watched my wife making a cap one day--she had nice fingers in such work, Virginie--and how you saved your money to buy lace and ribbon for her to make your mother a cap; and how anxiously you sat watching every stitch as it went in, and carried it off triumphantly when it was done."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet