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The Sailorman
by
But when his voice became so appealing that it no longer was possible for any woman to resist it, Helen would exclaim excitedly: “Please excuse me for interrupting, but there is a large spider–” and the spell was gone.
One day she exclaimed: “Oh!” and Latimer patiently lowered the “Oxford Book of Verse,” and asked: “What is it, NOW?”
“I’m so sorry,” Helen said, “but I can’t help watching that Chapman boy; he’s only got one reef in, and the next time he jibs he’ll capsize, and he can’t swim, and he’ll drown. I told his mother only yesterday–“
“I haven’t the least interest in the Chapman boy,” said Latimer, “or in what you told his mother, or whether he drowns or not! I’m a drowning man myself!”
Helen shook her head firmly and reprovingly. “Men get over THAT kind of drowning,” she said.
“Not THIS kind of man doesn’t!” said Latimer. “And don’t tell me,” he cried indignantly, “that that’s ANOTHER thing they all say.”
“If one could only be sure!” sighed Helen. “If one could only be sure that you–that the right man would keep on caring after you marry him the way he says he cares before you marry him. If you could know that, it would help you a lot in making up your mind.”
“There is only one way to find that out,” said Latimer; “that is to marry him. I mean, of course,” he corrected hastily, “to marry me.”
One day, when on their way to the cliff at the end of the wood road, the man who makes the Nantucket sailor and peddles him passed through the village; and Latimer bought the sailorman and carried him to their hiding-place. There he fastened him to the lowest limb of one of the ancient pine-trees that helped to screen their hiding-place from the world. The limb reached out free of the other branches, and the wind caught the sailorman fairly and spun him like a dancing dervish. Then it tired of him, and went off to try to drown the Chapman boy, leaving the sailorman motionless with his arms outstretched, balancing in each hand a tiny oar and smiling happily.
“He has a friendly smile,” said Helen; “I think he likes us.”
“He is on guard,” Latimer explained. “I put him there to warn us if any one approaches, and when we are not here, he is to frighten away trespassers. Do you understand?” he demanded of the sailorman. “Your duty is to protect this beautiful lady. So long as I love her you must guard this place. It is a life sentence. You are always on watch. You never sleep. You are her slave. She says you have a friendly smile. She wrongs you. It is a beseeching, abject, worshipping smile. I am sure when I look at her mine is equally idiotic. In fact, we are in many ways alike. I also am her slave. I also am devoted only to her service. And I never sleep, at least not since I met her.”
From her throne among the pine needles Helen looked up at the sailorman and frowned.
“It is not a happy simile,” she objected. “For one thing, a sailorman has a sweetheart in every port.”
“Wait and see,” said Latimer.
“And,” continued the girl with some asperity, “if there is anything on earth that changes its mind as often as a weather-vane, that is less CERTAIN, less CONSTANT–“
“Constant?” Latimer laughed at her in open scorn. “You come back here,” he challenged, “months from now, years from now, when the winds have beaten him, and the sun blistered him, and the snow frozen him, and you will find him smiling at you just as he is now, just as confidently, proudly, joyously, devotedly. Because those who are your slaves, those who love YOU, cannot come to any harm; only if you disown them, only if you drive them away!”
The sailorman, delighted at such beautiful language, threw himself about in a delirium of joy. His arms spun in their sockets like Indian clubs, his oars flashed in the sun, and his eyes and lips were fixed in one blissful, long-drawn-out, unalterable smile.