CAELUM NON ANIMUM

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 6, 11 August 1909, Page 49

CAELUM NON ANIMUM

A ROMANCE OF THE SEA

» > RS. STORY sat in the oscillating IV| cabin under the skylight, and I I drove her machine in a race I against the failing light. Mrs. w Story enjoyed economising oil, and even down here at fifty degrees south latitude in December, she did not find the days long enough. After all, her thread broke with a snap, and she must call on Jim Alden to light the swinging lamp. Jim had been coiled on the sofa, straining his eyes over a Clark Russel novel; under the'lit lamp he showed for a sailorlike lad, husky and handsome, a dark ruddy chap, well set off by his blue dungaree jumper, the bright tip of his sheath knife showing below it. Jim was rated as an ordinary seaman by a fiction he was trying to turn into fact, and he was a passenger by facts that were satisfactory as they stood. Thus he was an anomaly anywhere on the ship, but anomalies bothered no one aboard the Sea Reaper. Mrs. Story had named her that because she said one half of the name at any rate would remind her of Christian doings. It we Mrs. Story’s theory that she always had and always would pine for life on the farm up in the State of Maine.

Jim Alden was a cousin indefinitely removed of Captain Story, and had come aboard at Seattle. Brooklyn was his home, and as he had gotten so far afield by rail, he was gratified to go back more adventurously. When the swinging lamp’s yellow light was playing hide and seek with the little cabin’s contracting and expanding shadows, and Mrs. Story had rethreaded her needle, she turned to another person eoiled up on the other end of the sofa. “Petrel,” said she, “you go right out on deck and get some exercise before night. A growing girl like you snoozing around like an old woman!” “I wasn’t snoozing, ma,” Petrel protested, perfunctorily, as she went to her stateroom. “Might as well have been. Wrap up good. Jim, hand me those gussets—yes, tjiat’s what I want. I wish you’d go for’ard before supper and see if Amos has kept that bandage tight, though I don’t know as I fix it again to-night whether he has or not.” When the youngsters were gone, Captain Story made his appearance. A long clothes-pin of a mariner was he, and finding his wife temporarily detached from the machine while she basted something. he availed himself of the chance for a little domestic chat. After an interchange of speech about wind and weather, he spat carefully into a cuspidor and calculated that Jim Alden might make a sailor yet if he’d only stick to it. “He‘s spryer now getting round in the rigging than that fool Amos.” (Amos had “busted his head open just stumbling over his own feet,” according to the Captain.) “I suppose you’re trying to spoil that boy for any decent life ashore,” said the wife of his bosom. “Maria ought to get damages out of you if you do. But he doesn’t know anything about navigation, and I don’t see that he’s in any hurry to learn—l’m thankful to say.” “Petrel ought to be teaching him,” Said the captain. “She don’t seem to act very hospitable to Jim. I should think she’d be glad enough to have some young company aboard.” “Petrel’s backward with young folks. I get real out of patience with her sometimes, but the child’s had no chance to get used to any Christian ways.” Mrs. Story bent again to her machine, with womanlike turnings of wheels and adjustment of treadles, and the ensuing buzz drove the perturbed captain hence. Up above Petrel and Jim were walking the quarterdeck, and even now making some advance in their singularly delayed comradeship. Jim had shown little interest in making friends witn a backward girl. Fellows of his age .surely do, so an alladjusting uaually sees to it that the girls are more fcrihpntting than they. Petrel was seventeen and Jim twentytwo. But for the helmsman they had ths Quarter-deck to themselves.

A sullen daylight lingered in the vast gray hollow of the sky, and in the west a sullen red was fading fast. The sea ran in those long swells that roll for ever around Cape Horn. A few black-winged sea birds flew wide around the ship. Against that background the little figures on her deck looked pathetic with all the pathos of the human race. Petrel was expressing herself pathetically, too, not to so large a tune but as to her own proportionately microscopic affairs. “ I wish we’d taken a girl on board,” said she as they turned their tenth lap, not rudely, but as if in a wistful confidence that ignored the other person’s human egotism. “A girl! Do you wish I was a girl?” Jim’s incredulity seemed almost fearful, as if perchance his manhood might suffer some sea change from such an unholy idea. “You see, I never get any chance to Ee like other girls”—Petrel was intent on her own thoughts—“and if I had one to watch through a whole voyage ” “Why don’t you go to boarding school?” “I’d hate it. I’d hate the girls, silly, stuckup things! I’d hate staying ashore, too. I know more than most of them do. I’ve had history, and geography out of a book, besides the kind I’m getting going round the world, and pa’s taught me navigation, and I can make knots and hitches, and there’s not a rope in this ship I don’t know."' “Well, then, what do you want to be like other girls for?” ■“I don’t.” “You said you did.” “Yes, I do! If I were like them I could say it all out so you couldn’t take me up—they’re so glib. Saying things don’t say them at all when I talk.” Jim pondered. “I don’t believe lots of the glib ones do any better, really. You want to learn to talk more without trying to say much of anything; that’s how they turn the trick.” “I will,” said Petrel firmly. “But then I don’t know how to do my hair either.” “What’s wrong about it? Your hair’s pretty”; that was the emphasis, yet Petrel brightened gratefully. “Is it really? I’m afraid about it sometimes, it’s so straight and smooth, and I

haven’t much else to go on.” Also, it was as thick in its braid as Jim’s wrist, and was the colour of brown sand, and as charmingly responsive to sun and spray. But Jim did not mention these facts, he only said: “Why do girls bother so much about looks? I’d be willing to look like a monkey on a stick if I knew as much about navigation as you do.” Petrel turned an unseen side glance upon him, broad shouldered, thin in the flank, his compact, dark head and straight, blunt nose were shown up against the sky as the ship swung high. “You can learn navigation without losing any of your good looks,” said Petrel. It was Jim’s turn to give the sidewise glance; was she poking fun at him? No, poor Petrel's honesty was dense, but the flattery was tempered by an abstraction that showed all her real attention centred upon herself. After supper, with the captain’s urgent approval, Jim persuaded Petrel to undertake his education in navigation. “All right,” said she, “but I’d a good deal rather be learning something myself.” “11l teach you to be like other girls,” said Jim mischievously—now how much did he mean by that? At any rate Petrel paid it no more tribute than a depressed and sceptical shake of the head. Sailormen are supposed to be a simple lot, but here was a sailor-girl that carried the tradition to a point that might have challenged a dead man. But Jim was a boy, and, as has been already suggested, these are not the ways that entice boys. Jim dropped badinage and took up his studies with the simple good faith that Petrel’s honest efforts merited. From this time forth they got on together better than before, that is up to the day they caught the albatross; whether that occasion brought an advance in friendliness or the other thing, femained for a time in doubt. It was a day of blue sea and blue sky, cold, but sparkling and sunny. They stood on the quarter-deck, reeling away at lines that stretched astern to where an albatross and some cape pigeons were riding the water; other pigeons flew about the ship, and with them one snowy albatross shining in the sun, marvellous in beauty and power. “I don’t seem to catch on,” said Jim; “ the bird didn’t, sure. That old pirate’s gotten away with my pork three times running.” “You can’t expect to learn how the first time trying,” said Petrel. “I was a big girl before I quit drawing in too soon and jumping up and down with excitement.” She certainly was doing neither now, but the sport had brightened her eyes and reddened her cheeks. Petrel’s features were all good, but though she was as strong as a young tree, for the last

year or so she had been often dull in colour and expression. She laughed aloud when, with a well calculated twist of tile line, she secured ths hook firmly in the hill of the same old pirate that had outwitted Jim. She hauled in. the line hand over hand, and the great bird beat the water into clouds of foam and spray. Jim helped her pull him on deck, where he could only snap his hill and stagger about helplessly on his weak legs, an object lesson on the doctrine that beauty lies in the adaptation of means to an end. “He feels the way I do on shore,”' said Petrel; “we must tie some message on his neck and then set him free, quick? “We might keep him and stuff him,” said Jim, dead to ths warning of the Ancient Mariner. “You shan’t! lie’s my bird; you shan’t.” “Hello, Stormy Petrel! Of course not, if you say not. Stormy Petrel.” “Oh, well, I didn’t mean to be crosu, but—l catch them like this, but I wouldn’t have one killed; not an alba? tross, nor a petrel. They both—l feelas if they all belonged to me somehow; because I was born down here, you know, and perhaps I’m the only human being that ever was born way out here on the ocean among them.” “Oh, I say! Say, that’s great.. Perhaps you are! I never heard about that!” Jim looked at her as if he saw her in a new light. “Let’s put somathing about that around his neck.” “All right. You fix it up while Pgo get some cloth and the indelible ink.” Petrel glowed under Jim’s appreciation of her birth story. Jim irowned over notebook and pencil and when she returned he was ready to read her, with a pride that aped humitity, this production: “I was captured and freed by Petrel Story, The only one of mankind’s daughters Who ever had the mueh prized glory Of being born upon these waters,” Petrel listened as one who felt immortality hovering over her. “It seems to make it very wonderful and interesting,” she murmured; adding; “Of course you can’t say everything jjisft as it is in poetry. Well, f was thinking it reads as if boys might have been bom here off and on though no other girl was; and, of course, though at first it seems more probable about boys, it isn't really when you coine to think of it.” “Right you are,” said Jim with a twitching smile. “Wait now. I guess I can fix that.” Then, after a brief consultation with the muse, “How’s this? “ ‘I was captured and freed by Petrel Story, Who alone has the glory, Among all men’s sons and Of being a native of these waters.**

When this gem was carefully (with only one blot) inscribed on a piece of linen, Jim signed it, Petrel witnessed the signature, the name of the ship, its latitude ana longitude, and the date were added, and the document was tied on the captive. When the great bird was thrown over the side he was instantly transformed from a grotesque failure to a flying glory winged like an angel. Jim and Petrel watched him with something of poetic exaltation in their faces, though after Jim’s literary effort you may be surprised to hear it. Poetic feeling does not necessarily produce poetry. But such an uplift enjoyed in common does bring human beings nearer together; so it seemed natural enough when Petrel asked: “Jim, how did you come to be trapsing around the world like this ?” She knew that he had gone West to see a relative and attend to some family business, but that she evidently and correctly viewed as not a fact to forestall her question. “The real truth of it is that Aunt Maria wanted to break up a little love affair that was worrying her.” Was Jim a shade complacent over this disclosure? He was assuredly light hearted. “Your love affair?” Petrel’s voice Was hushed. Jim said, yes, his, and remarked on 'Aunt Maria’s hatred for love affairs in general. “Were you engaged?” asked Petrel, ■till in that awestruck and abashed voice. Jim’s answer was singularly unsatisfactory : “Why,” said Jim, “I don’t consider that I was.” Theory is always clear-cut against the ambiguities of actualities. “You must have been, if you don’t know that you Were not,” said Petrel. Jim continued unsatisfactory under this firm statement of sound doctrine. “Anyway,” said Petrel presently, and her voice vibrated with feeling, “you -are going to be true to her, ain’t you?” It was as if she plead the very cause ©f Romance. . “Oh, I say! Why ——” then rather Bulkily, “I haven’t thought very much about it lately.” > “You have a woman’s heart in your keeping.” Petrel’s eyes were fixed on j.the horizon and her voice sank low. /These be strange, shy things to talk about for the first time with a living (Bisn; but Petrel had read a good many j novels, and evidently she had sized this ‘-matter up with a rapidity possible only in the light of literature. . “Fickleness,” •she went on, ’’that’s a thing I just can’t bear.” Jim glowered in silence tin Petrel asked, eyes still afar, “Is she pretty?” “Yes, she is.” ' “Why did your Aunt Maria object?” Jim referred her to what he had previously said of his relative’s attitude towards matters amatory. “And anyhow,”.he added, “I guess your own relations always object, unless you’re not straight, and they want someone to reform you.” “I can’t see anything in that then, to make you forget her and throw’ her aside (I’m going below) ; I know it’s not my business, but Jim, I don’t believe you are really inconstant; you don’t want to find out too late that you’ve—you’ve been untrue to your deepest feelings.” Petrel was moved enough now to lift to him a transparent gaze, fit to inspire a cloud with aspirations after the high things of the heart. For the next week no one aboard the Sea Reaper seemed to contribute anything toward building this story. Petrel got interested in making a new dress, a blue dress she had had cut and fitted in Portland, Oregon, for wear in Portland, Maine. Mrs Story congratulated herself on this industry, which she chose to treat as exceptional, but it made the ship a more humdrum place than it was before. Petrel at the machine was disqualified for conversation, and when she was not at the machine she was still deep in basting or buttons or something else sartorial. Even Mrs Story said she did not know why Petrel must always run everything into the ground—this was a wonderfully exotic metaphor for that world of waters, but Mrs Story never changed her metaphors with her changing skiqs. In the evening Petrel gave what attention she could spare from her sewing to Jim’s navigation; but she seemed to really see him only in a few long looks that speakingly called on him to be true, Bot to s)ay Romance. Jim ignored these pleas, made no fur-

ther confidences, and no reference to past ones. When the new frock was at last finished and at last tried on for the final and fifteenth time, Mrs Story, after scanning and twitching and turning her daughter about like a lay figure, gave it her approval, and the daughter such a word of laconic praise as from her bespoke bursting maternal pride. “And now,” said she, “you take it off, and go right up on deck; you’ve had hardly any air for a week, and you know we’re more than likely to run into dirty weather anytime now. You’re not going to keep that dress on? What for? You’re altogether too childish for your age, Petrel. If you go wearing it on shipboard, you’ll get it all rubbed'out before anybody sees it; but as you made it yourself I suppose you’ll have to have your way to-day.” Before she went on deck Petrel put her hair on top of her head like a young lady, and for all her lamented lack of skill made a good job of it. This new, smart young lady emerged on a scene where everyone had grown so accustomed to everyone else that such novelty as this struck the eye like a blazing bonfire. Jim Said that the welcome she received was her coming-out reception. Even Briggs, the taciturn old mate, limped up and doffed his hat to her with a gallant sweep of announced, pronounced tribute, a piece of play-act-ing manners which you would never have believed possible in Briggs. Petrel grew so merry you might have imagined she had forgotten she had a mission, tnat she was making Jim a proper knight; you would have done her a grave injustice. Dirty weather was due, and dirty weather came that night, and very dirty it was. The gale shrieked, the ship’s timbers groaned, the waters assaulted, and averything that could fetch loose did it, and added its clattering quota to the indescribable uproar, just as has been described thousands of times in thousands of stories. But it was all as real aboard the Sea Reaper as if it were a literary novelty, and before eight bells a landsman would have been frightened out of hope of ever seeing land again. Aboard the Sea Reaper even the women took the storm as all in the day’s work; they knew the ship’s peril as the landsman could not have known it, but they had lived through many perils. When Jim came into the cabin at two bells, he found Petrel standing, feet well apart, over a chart, moving the dividers as calmly as if all were calm. Jim made no sensation when he mentioned that he had been on the royal topsail yard, furling sail. Yet to go on the royal topsail yard that night was no mean feat, and perhaps he thought so. Most certainly it was an experience to stir young blood; the conservation of force is a scientific principle perhaps inadequately studied in its psychological aspects; excitement of one kind passes into action of another, and the confusion of much reasonable expectation as to what people will and will not do. “Come here and I’ll show you our last year’s course,” said Petrel. Petrel in her new gown, her blue gown; Jim’s glistening yellow oilskins threw up its blueness, and his own glowing face and wet black hair as well. “You see those miserable little days all crowded together in a bunch”—the dark head bent close above the fair one —- “every day it was head winds, and we were one hundred and twenty-six days coining round.” She seemed absorbed in this reminis-

cence, conscious of Jim only as a halfrealised listener. On such a night was a man fresh from the royal topsail yard to be thus overlooked? Jim turned his head five inches and kissed Petrel full on the lips. Petrel’s petrified amazement could have showed no deeper had a bird flown out of her mouth, had a law of nature been broken instead of fulfilled; then the amazement was drowned out in a blush that began in a heavenly soft shyness, but, alas, while you’d be saying one, two, the blush became an indignant flush, and Petrel, fleeing to her room, cried over her shoulder: “You’re engaged, you’re engaged to her! ” Jim followed, shouting combatively, “I’m not, I’m not, I tell you!” fetching up against the closed door. With an utter change of inflection, he roared as gently as a sucking dove (roar he must to stand any chance of being heard), for Petrel to come out and speak to him. There was no sound audible behind the door, but the slopping and thumping and rattling prevailed everywhere. Jim turned and rushed on deck. There the limitless ocean and the storm and the night made little of this chip of a ship and its clinging ants, but Jim was not the person to let them bluff him into indifference to his own affairs. The chip and the ants were gallant all, but it is to be believed that the bravest absurdity, in these waters that night was Jim, Jim recurringly recalling a kiss, and considering the ways of a man with a maid. They were all like enough to go to the bottom before the sun rose, but life is not lived nor livable on a reasoning basis. Jim was under the great spell that keeps the ants everywhere “onto” their stupendous and inexplicable job. As you doubtless infer from the levity of this narrative, the ship did not go down. All night Mrs Story was in and out of the cabin, not to make any fuss of inquiry or lament, but to boss the steward in his coffee making and her husband in his coffee drinking, to get dry clothes airing, and such wet ones as she could grab a-drying', and to keep the place, if you amid all this, “tidied up.” In a wonderful beflowered dressing gown that had once been the captain’s, she was an angular, a singular, and an effective angel of mercy.’ ■ i Sometimes when the Sea Reaper all but stood- on her nose and hung and quivered . desperately ■ before she could gather herself for her incredible climb up a mountain of water, Mrs Story would cast an anxious eye on Petrel’s door; but that young lady kept her room, thoug.* we have more reason than had Mrs Story to doubt if she slept. Probably nothing less than a sinking ship would have driven her mother to show such solicitude as to open the door. In the morning, before day, there was a crash that thundered through the uproar of the storm as if on silence, and the ship that had been before demonstrating every kind of motion, invented still another and jarred in a new fashion. At last Petrel sprang into the cabin, where water was streaming beneath her feet. Almost as quick came Jim from the deck. With a bound he lifted the girl on to the table. “You’ll catch your death with wet feet,” he cried; at the same time, take notice, his hands left her sleeves soaking. He jerked up a crocheted “afghan,” and wrapped it around her. She was passive as an idol. Mrs Story was mopping up water and issuing commands to her steward.

“I’m not engaged to that girl,” howlel Jim. “I won’t have such a thing put on me. She don’t think I am. She wouldn’t have me if I asked her. She was just playing me to string another fellow, and I put up a job on Aunt Maria, so as to break away from home.” “Why didn’t you tell me before f” shrilled Petrel. Jim bent his ear, and she said it again. “Because 1 was an ass, and because till to-night I didn’t know how much I was in love with you.” This last came perforce in the same loud blare as the rest, but it made Petrel’s eyes fall for an instant, and when she raised them again, for another instant, they were very beautiful. The table canted anew and seemed to shunt her straight, parti-coloured afghan and all, into Jim’s oil-skinned arms. Simple luck that the steward was out. Mrs Story turned around from the stove. “Jim Alden, put her down. Are you crazy T” “No, only engaged to be married,” and, obeying the order, he sprang for the companionway, while Petrel gained her room. On the moment appeared Captain Story, looking like a big black beetle. “We’ve sprung a leak!’’ he croaked hoarsely and cheerfully. “It’s now for the pumps, but the gale’s going down.” “Petrel and Jim Alden say they are engaged to oe married.” “What?” And after another hearing, “By thunder! I thought you said Petrel was backward and didn’t like him? When did they do it?” “Drink your coffee. Far as I can make out they did it just now under my nose.” “Well, I’ve got to hear more about this, but ” He stopped an instant at the foot of the companionway, “I’ll say this: any man that can find time to court a girl and do the rest he’s done to-night would be thrown away ashore.” Plato says poets are wise without knowing it. Poets are not alone in this. Petrel was as honest as an all-wise Providence ever thinks fit to make a woman, but that new gown, that womancoiffured hair, that backing and filling in friendliness (a stimulant as old as Eve, that), yes, and that chart offered for such close scrutiny—all these, and many an unrecorded turn in the pretty game, show that for girls as well as waterfowl — “There is a Power whose care Teaches a way along the pathless coast.”