Bennie Ben Cree | Page 2

Barnegat, and one of them left a tilted wreck in the
mid-Atlantic. And that same year my father made his last voyage,
though still young in a way; for he came back with his knee crushed by
the smack of a loose spar in a heavy sea, and walked with a crutch
forever after.
When my time came, there was no firm of Benson & Cree. Our
fortunes had not fallen altogether, but were moderate enough. Only
three persons remained of the two families. Uncle Ben Benson was
captain and part owner of the Saratoga, a good ship, carrying steam and
sail, and landing merchandize at Doty's Slip. The house was now the
Commodore Inn, kept by Tom Cree, my father. Ah, that was a brave
man, loud-voiced, joyful! I believe I would break my knee willingly,
and carry a crutch to the end of my days, to be so good a man, so
simple and full of the pleasure of things.
My mother was singularly quiet in her ways, but I think the success of
the Commodore came from my father's popularity and my mother's
management, and it was her hand that was on the tiller.
And now, speaking of the Commodore as if it were a ship, I come to
what is properly the beginning of this story.

Very few of those who came to the Commodore--and they were mostly
seafaring folk of the better class--ever saw my mother. She never
appeared on the front porch with the pillars, where my father sat often
and shouted heartily to any friend in sight; but she was always above,
and often in her sewing-room that looked out on the little garden in the
rear. I never knew her to come out of the front door, or to look from the
windows on the slip; but whenever she went abroad it was through the
back door and the little garden, gliding so quietly, so gently, that it
seemed wonderful to me, who could not move, any more than could my
father, without a thunderous racket. I can see her plainly, with her black
shawl and sweet still face under an overhanging bonnet, going out
through the little garden.
How early or in what way I learned it I am not sure, but it seems as if it
had always been a settled thing that I must not speak to her of the slip,
or the river, or the ships, or anything in view from the front porch; but
things which could be seen from the windows of her sewing-room, the
garden, the people in the other street, the carriages and 'busses, steeples
and distant roofs, these I might talk about. When Uncle Benson came
home, once a year perhaps, the difference between the porch or inn
parlour and the sewing-room was notable. For below the talk was all of
the sea, winds, and islands, and full queer phrases of the shipping--my
father loud and merry, and my uncle full of dry stories; my father's
huge beard rumpled on his chest with laughter; Uncle Benson, as
always when ashore, clean shaven and very natty in his clothes. But
when we went above to the sewing-room, my mother would make tea
on the hob, while the two men played backgammon, and you would
have thought, for all that was said of it, that there was no sea at all,
flowing and wrapped about the world. It was all quiet talk of the house,
the new minister at the Broadway Church, and how it were well for
Bennie to mind better his books.
All this did not seem strange to me until it was explained, and then it
seemed strange. For the things one is accustomed to when a little child
appear only a part of common nature, whatever they are, and no more
to be wondered at than tides and the flight of gulls.

I had learned the story of that sudden, disastrous year, '38, though not
from my father. He was a man curiously without shrewdness to suspect
what I might be thinking, and without that kind of courage--if I may
say so with affection--which enables a man to approach at need a
subject which is sad or sore to him inwardly. So that, while I had my
own thoughts, the thing was not all explained till I was a well-grown,
clumsy lad.
In this while it had come slowly upon me, until at last it was a great
conviction, that I must be neither a water-thief, nor policeman, nor a
doctor driving his carriage, nor a preacher in a carpeted pulpit, but a
seaman and sometime a ship-captain like Uncle Benson, which idea
became a hunger and thirst. But when I told my father of it, he looked
at me queerly, and told