Wide Courses | Page 2

He'd heard of me, he said, and would I examine his yacht--the Rameses that was--to see if any damage had been done--she'd grounded comin' in by Romer Shoal the day before. There'd be too much delay to put her in dry dock, and he wanted to sail soon's could be--if she was sound--on her regular winter West India cruise. 'Twas in January, a fine clear day, and I said, all right, I'd send my oldest boy down and look at her. My oldest boy--but you know him? Aye, a grand lad. Both grand lads. Modelled off their mother, the pair of them. If I'd only a daughter like her ... the woman she was! A wife for a seafarin' man. "Watch and watch I've stood wi' ye," she said, goin'--"watch and watch, but I'm no good to see the lights nor to grip the wheel longer. The sight's gone and the strength, Matt. Watchmate, bunkmate, and shipmate I've been to ye, but ye're in smooth water now ... and no longer ye'll need me." A daughter to stand by you she'd be. All my money I'd give for one such.
And while he was in the office She came in. "Ah-h!" he said--and then, "Your daughter, captain?" I said, "No--my wife," maybe o'er-proudly. I was not ashamed of my years, for it's not years but age--leastwise so I'd always held--that sets a man back. Those lads of twenty-five or thirty, I could wear them down like chalk whetstones. Maybe she heard--I don't know; but she didn't let on she did. My proud days those were--my office in the big building by the Battery. You remember? Aye, a grand place--the name in fine letters on the door, and on the window the picture of my big wreckin'-tug, the best-geared afloat and cost the most--a sailor's fortune just in her--yes--and I'd named it for Her. And 'twas to that same office I used often to come straight from my rough seawork. She used to come there to take me to drive. Me, who'd been a castaway sailor-boy--but I could afford all these things then. I could afford anything She wanted. And She wanted the fine office, and so it was fitted up with fine desks and clerks, though it wasn't what the clerks put in their account-books that kept my business goin'. There were those who said that I'd pay the price some day for tryin' to carry so many things in my head, but small heed I paid to them--and 'twasn't in those days my memory dimmed.
There was but little damage to the yacht's bottom--a small matter to find that out--though the skipper he carried was no master of craft. So many of them like that, too. To face the sea like men is not what they're after, not to take winter or summer as it comes, rough or smooth--no--but always the smooth water and soft winds. But he did not sail for the West Indies that day, nor that week, nor winter--something'd gone wrong with the machinery. No concern of mine that. There were those who said later--but that was when my head begun to trouble me--as it does now sometimes, as I said. There was a time, when Sarah was alive, before we had even the old ship's cabin on the end of the old dock by way of an office, when I carried my business in a wallet in my breast pocket--that is, what we didn't carry in our heads--but the mother of those two lads, she was with me then. That's long ago.
A most interestin' man he was. As I say, he made no West India cruise that winter--the machinery kept gettin' out of order--but he made a few trips with me--wreckin' trips--for I still looked after the big jobs myself. There were those who used to say that if I'd only learned to stand by and look on long enough to train a good man to take my place in the deep divin', that I'd be goin' yet. Maybe so, but maybe, too, they didn't know it all. I'd yet to meet a man who would do my work half as well as I could myself--never but one, and she was a woman and could do her part better--Sarah, my first wife, and her kind aren't livin' now.
He was not so soft, this yacht man, as I used to think. He stood the rough winter trips with me well. I learned to like him--rarely. I could talk to him about the work, and he'd try to understand--as so few of his kind would. He understood better after he'd been some trips with me, and I came to love him--almost. When I was away on those trips, my wife would be at home--until the time her aunt took