The Breaking in of a Yachtsman's Wife

I

WE know every boat in our harbor, and we knew that the smart yawl must be cruising. We had left the Tar Baby at her mooring, and we rowed closer to the new boat. She was the Mary Ellen, about thirty-five feet over all, and beautifully appointed in every particular.

An awning was spread over the Mary Ellen’s cockpit, and under it sat a plump, gray-haired old lady, placidly darning a sock. From time to time she looked up to enjoy the lovely evening. From every direction we could see little sails making for the harbor like a flock of homing pigeons.

A gray-haired man came out of the cabin, and began to potter around the boat. He had a chamois in his hand, and he polished the brass fittings which prettily adorned his yacht. He was working, it was plain, because he enjoyed fussing over his boat, not because the brass needed polishing. Now and then he would stoop to coil a rope still more symmetrically, and as we passed them, somehow or other he dropped his chamois overboard, and we picked it up for him. So we pulled up alongside and chatted a moment, and the old lady got up and joined her husband, her half-darned sock in her hand. They asked us if we had been sailing, and we pointed out the Tar Baby, and asked them if they had ever seen an uglier boat. We were rather proud of the Tar Baby’s appearance, which was unique. She was a boat ugly beyond compare, unless, indeed, you except the Stingy. The Galloping Soup Tureen, a fresh water boat, is said to run the Tar Baby a near second. But our old couple were not to be outdone by the incomparable ugliness of our boat, for the old lady hastened to say, “ When we were first married we owned an old tub that would make that little black boat of yours look like a prize beauty. She was as high-sided as the thing Columbus came over in that they exhibited at the World’s Fair!”

“And about as quick in stays as a hencoop,” added the old gentleman.

“Her name was the Mary Ellen,” said the old lady. “Many a fine sail we had with her in spite of all. When I was young yachting was n’t heard of much ; we just went sailing.”

“This is the first boat I ever had built just to suit myself, and we named it after the old Mary Ellen,” interrupted the old gentleman, who was fairly bursting with pride over his lovely boat.

“And we’re taking our first cruise in her. We started at Staten Island, and we’re going round by New London to Become Bay.”

“Yes,” said the old gentleman. “My wife insisted on being towed through Hell Gate! Is n’t that, just like a woman ? ”

“Yes, indeed I did,” said the old lady with spirit, “I just have my heart set on this cruise!” And as we pulled away we could hear the old gentleman declare, “Why, I could take the Massachusetts through Hell Gate!”

I hope that when I am old I may sit in the cockpit of my own boat, and darn my husband’s socks while he potters round and polishes already spotless brass, and that I shall see the sun set over Long Island Sound, and with my old eyes watch the little yachts come home, as I have so often watched them when I was young. I would sit there while the little riding lights came out like erratic stars, and see other cabins light up with a golden glow as ours would presently do, and as we ate our supper, I, too, would like to squabble with my husband as to whether he could take the boat through Hell Gate or not. And I wondered if when that plump old lady first sailed on the old Mary Ellen she made as many mistakes as I did the first summer I was married and went sailing; for the breaking in of a yachtsman’s wife is no easy thing, and in my case it needed an enthusiast like Stanford.

II

Although I did not realize it, my breaking in began when we were engaged. Indeed, had I but known how to read the signs aright, I could have foretold much of my future life from an episode which occurred when Stanford and I were visiting friends near Boston.

Together, we made a pious pilgrimage to the last boat he had owned. Stanford had sold her to a friend who had married, and the poor old Israfil was rotting and drying herself out, hauled up at Nantasket.

Except in spring, when the boats are being put in the water, a boatyard is a sad place to me. In winter, the boats, clumsy and uncomfortable as all water fowl ashore, wait patiently for summer under their canvas coverings, their naked masts pointing at the cold sky, and huddle together like a flock of forlorn stormbound birds, hibernating in an alien country. But in midsummer a boatyard is even more desolate. Then it is depopulated, and there is left only a sad collection of undesirables: the boats which won’t sell; the boats whose owners have deserted them; boats of antiquated models, clumsy and appealing; smart boats built for speed that have somehow or other failed, and are good neither for cruising nor racing. Here and there among the general dinginess is a yacht that has been given a fresh coat of paint in the hope of bringing some buyer, and this smartness is more pathetic than the shabby genteelness of the other boats.

The ample space of the shaving-littered yard shows cruelly every fault of line and build. There is no hiding in a crowd now, as there was in winter. There they sit, poor things, and watch the endless procession of the boats on the ways, which come up one after another for a new coat of paint and presently sail away again. I should not like to be a boat that had to spend a summer in a shipyard. I should have to watch my companions of the winter overhauled one by one and see them, finally clothed in their white sails, go gladly away, while my spars remained bare. All summer long I should have to watch the boats at anchor and see them bend to the wind, while the sun was shrinking my timbers. And the boats which came back to be smartened up would say to me, —

“What ? Have n’t they put you in the water yet ?”

This first time that I visited a shipyard the forlornness struck me with double force; all the boats looked equally depressed and neglected to my inexperienced eye. So that when Stanford exclaimed, —

“Look at that, peach!” or, “Is n’t she a dream?” I was unresponsive.

Here and there men were at work, and Stanford stopped to chat with them. Of course I was n’t interested, and, being only engaged, I looked it.

Stanford turned to me reproachfully: “Of course you don’t understand, you can’t understand, how much it all means to me,” he said.

I did n’t deny it.

Suddenly he stopped! “There she is.” he exclaimed, with the light in his eyes of one who sees a dear old friend. “There’s the Israfil! ”

There squatted a fat old tub. She was nearly as broad as she was long, a patch had been let into her side, her mast was gray, and her dirty paint was scaling off in leprous patches. She did not even present an appearance of decorous old age; dirty and frowsy as she was, she had a jovial air, as if she had enjoyed life and did n’t give a hang in how disreputable a garb she passed her declining years. An air of austere decay lingered around some of the other boats, which even in their forlornness showed noble lines or signs of past grandeur. Not so the Israfil. Had she been a woman, she would have been round as a ball, worn no corsets, had a stubby red nose, and perhaps even smoked a pipe.

We managed to scramble aboard the disreputable old craft. I had ceased to exist as an individual in Stanford’s eyes ; I was merely a pair of ears to be talked into. Any one would have done as well. I realized this, and I resented it, for I was in that egotistical state of mind when I wished Stanford to think only of me.

“ Darned old craft! ” he said affectionately. “She always leaked, we never could make her tight; ” and he looked over to me for approval of this amiable trait of the Israfil.

We stumbled into the little cabin, which smelled damp and tarry.

“ Bully old place! ” said Stanford, with enthusiasm. “George! look at that, Margie, there’s the water bottle — the same old water bottle!’’

He talked as if he had discovered diamonds; all I could see was a tiresome old demijohn.

“Here’s the nail where I hung the clock. Look at those lockers; they’d never shut, and when they did, it took a chisel and hammer to open ’em. I kept, the marlin there.”

He thrust his hand in and brought out a smelly black ball of string. He gazed at the disgusting lump in ecstatic silence. I thought he was going to shed tears.

“Have you ever noticed how a familiar perfume will bring back things to you ? ” he said dreamily. “ How I love the tarry smell of marlin. Smell!” and he thrust the nasty bunch toward me.

“Did I ever tell you about the time we were nearly wrecked off Marblehead, and all the other fellows were seasick, and I had to hold the tiller all night in a driving rain? Wet ? Well I guess! Those were happy times!”

I sniffed.

“Oh, you can’t understand. Girls don’t know,” he said, half sadly, half contemptuously. I might have been his sister instead of his fiancée.

“ You don’t care for things, not really,” he repeated.

But I went on deck, leaving him in the snuffy, smelly cabin, looking at the old marlin, and musing over the happy days when he had been nearly drowned.

III

This was my first, glimpse of my husband as Orlando Furioso.

Ordinarily he was a man full of common sense, unconventional to a fault, broad-minded, and indeed, if he had an intolerance, it was for the prejudices of others. He had the faults of his virtues; for instance, he was disorderly in a large and open-handed way, and made fun of me for my old-fashioned ideas about good housekeeping. Oh, he sent my little old maidish ways flying like leaves before the wind, with his chaff. He was aided in this by our friend Phil Temple, who was constantly at the house.

And a different point of view came to me in the company of these two genial people, both unconventional, each full of tolerance for the other’s opinions, and each able to take a joke at his own expense.

I found myself in a new world, and most of the things that I had been taught to think mattered immensely really did not seem to matter at all. “The needless conventionalities of women ” was one of the things they talked most prettily about.

A woman requires much recuperative force and much adaptability, for at best her world is an unstable one, and mine, my new one,—and I was secretly proud of having adapted myself to Stan’s mode of thought so quickly,— was knocked to pieces in a boatyard in City Island, knocked to pieces by a sloop called Marianna, a Burgess model, twenty-eight feet over all, a twenty-foot water line. and drawing six feet eight inches of water.

In her my Orlando recognized his Angelica, and went mad about her at once.

“Look at that dream,” he exclaimed. “Lord, how I’d like that boat! ”

“Oh, come, Stan,” said Phil. “You don’t mean you ’d buy that brick church. Look at the house on her, man, it’s like an observatory!”

“I suppose what you like is a flush deck,” sneered my husband.

“Well, I should rather think I did,” said Phil with warmth. “I like a yacht that looks like a yacht, and not like a three-story office building. Hully Gee! look at that house!” The house was mahogany, very much in need of a scraping, but I saw nothing very queer about it.

“What’s the matter with it, Phil?” I asked, as much to keep Stanford from replying as anything else.

“Gee! isn’t, that like a girl?” said Phil with disgust. Stanford looked disgusted, too; they might disagree about the boat, but they were of one contemptuous mind about me.

“That’s just like one of your dry land yachtsmen,” Stan continued, taking up the thread of the argument. “Everything for looks! You don’t know what a decent boat is. You have n’t grasped the fact that on the Sound a yacht is intended to sail in and out as a parlor ornament, or part of a landscape garden effect. George! the boats I see around here make me sick. This boat’s got head room. That’s what one wants for a cruise — head room!”

“Head room be buttered!” replied Phil. “Buy a boat with a house like a grain elevator for all I care, but don’t expect me to sail with you.”

I looked on with amazement. “Take things lightly,” was one of my husband’s favorite maxims, and lie laughed contemptuously over women’s “strained and earnest ways” in discussing things.

I did some quick thinking, and the sum of my thinking was that this was a good time for me to keep quiet.

My breaking in had begun.

IV

In the eyes of the world I was still a bride, but I realized, as I hail realized that day in the Israfil’s cabin, that to Stanford I was merely some one to talk to about the beauties of his other love — and some one who was bound to be sympathetic or he would know the reason why.

For, of course, we had bought the Marianna. We could not afford her, it was folly, it was madness to buy her, and we committed the folly gloriously, without remorse, in spite of Phil, who prophesied gloomily that it would take “two, perhaps three hundred dollars to make that last year’s bird’s nest look like a boat,” and asked Stan scornfully why he did n’t go into the antiquity business. To my surprise Phil had moved out into the country soon after we did, in order to be able to fight more at his case with Stanford, and they fought hotly almost every night, their fists pounding the table. The fetish of freedom from prejudice was left, as definitely behind in the city as the diningroom furniture.

“Phil knows as much about boats as a purple ass,” Stanford informed me.

While Phil confided to me: “Queer, while Stan ’s such a clever chap, he can’t tell a canal-boat from a cup defender.”

I have noticed that all ordinary good yachtsmen hold the same opinion of one another’s knowledge of boats.

Between Stanford and myself also there was a great dispute.

As I look back on it, it seems fantastic and shadowy enough. It was a dispute possible only to the very young and ardent. But to-day I smile rather tenderly over the absurdities of Stanford and Margery with their silly quarrel.

For the hot enthusiasms of youth sometimes bear most enduring fruit, and but for this I might have been deprived all my life of the pleasure of pottering around my own boat.

Our dispute lasted all summer, and was in two parts. The first part as set forth by Stanford was: —

“You don’t really care for boats. You don’t really care for the Marianna.”

It. was a grotesque position for me, — for I was expected not only to approve that mv husband loved another, but I was even expected to love my rival as he did, which I set myself to do with might and main. In my exasperation I told Phil one day,—

“Women in a harem have a hard time of it.”

“ I suppose they do,” said Phil uncomprehendingly.

But a light gleamed, in the eye of young Morris, who boarded in our impossible boarding place in New Rochelle, and I saw I was understood, which is a comfort when one is in the midst of such a strange rivalry as I was.

Morris was one of those God’s fools who go through life hampered by too much insight and too little sincerity, and whom other men call Ass or Wit according to their own intelligence.

To prove how dearly I loved her I begged to be allowed to help get the Marianna in the water, and I went with the men to City Island, and was allowed first the privilege of sand-papering, next the joy of scraping varnish, and lastly the ecstasy of painting. Stan acted as if he were doing me a great favor to let me work on the boat at all, and I realize now that he was. Most men would have left their wives at home. At the time I did n’t appreciate my blessings. I worked on grimly, with blistered hands and aching back, and I looked with a certain sour cynicism that only youth knows upon Stan’s evident joy in the growing of his Marianna.

I had not yet obtained my reward.

The next day I went out alone to City Island to work on the boat. I was going to show Stan whether I cared or not!

It was the rush season, and the owner of the shipyard could put none of his own men to work, and we had with difficulty secured a ship’s carpenter. He was a long, lean, and gentle one.

“I dunno as I ever seen a girl work on a boat before,” he volunteered. Then after a moment, “I dunno as there’s any good reason why they should n’t,” he decided, with that tolerance which makes all things possible in America.

The shipyard was full of all sorts of cheerful noises: planes hummed —hammers clanged. There was the hiss of the burning off of paint, and the cheerful slap, slap of the fat paint brushes on the sides of boats. While above it all rose the shrill whine of sharpening files and the loud cry of scrapers against hard varnish. The air was full of pleasant smells, of new wood, of paint and varnish.

I do not know how it was, but a spirit of the place took hold of me and there fell from me the dogged feeling of “do or die.” And it was with enthusiasm that I followed Jameson’s instructions. I began to scrape the bottom of the Marianna.

He was a nice fellow to work with, silent ,for the most part, as a tree, and when he spoke no words of David Harum wisdom fell from his honest lips. Rather, harmless pieces of gossip like: —

“ My folks just getting over the measles. M’ sister May she’s had ’em three times.”

We lunched together in the shadow of a boat.

Groups of other people sat around eating their lunches, and the men of the yard passed by to say,“Gettin’ to be quite a ship’s carpenter, ain’t ye?”

I felt as if I had come home. There was nothing whatever remarkable about any of it. But the charm of the whole thing was upon me. I loved the big masts spiring above me, and the multitude of boats sitting there so patiently during their overhauling, — when if they had any spirit at all they must have longed to be gone on the gay Sound water ; and it flattered me to feel that I was a part of this world of people who made boats — though all I was doing was sand-papering.

So Jameson and I worked side by side. I must have been far more of a hindrance than a help, though he, kind man, never showed it, and he prepared me for what was to be my final initiation. He painted a water line, and handed me the pot of red copper paint.

“Now swat it on good and thick, and see that you get it in all the nail holes,” he advised, and then it was I was won over once and for all. And to this day there is nothing I like so well as to stand in the shady side of a boat, and to hear the peaceful slap, slap of my big paint brush. I might get tired of it if I did it every day, and the boats I painted were not my own boats. But when I hear people talk of the joy of gardening I smile to myself because I know that those are feeble pleasures compared with that of seeing one’s boat grow bright under one’s hands.

No one who has not worked on his own boat will understand this; but there is a certain happiness of working with your own hands over things you love that is deeper than other joys. Women know it oftener than men,— I speak now of the men and women we call educated,— for women work with loving care over their houses and their flowers and their children. Artists know it, of course, but they call it by different and high-sounding names, though I don’t believe they always did. But whether it is housework well done, or cooking, or making a statue, or slapping paint on a boat, it is all fundamentally the same, though I would rather work on a boat.

So my first lesson was of silence, and my next the joy of work.

But Stanford was not satisfied with my enthusiasm.

“You ’re doing this because you ’re fond of me, not of the Marianna,” was the name of the second part of the quarrel.

V

So my breaking in was begun in a curiously roundabout way. I knew the deep joy of covering spaces with bright fresh paint; I had learned the charm of a shipyard, before I knew anything about boats. I was “fond of sailing,” of course, but there is an abysmal gap between that and Stanford’s all-consuming passion for boats. I was to hear more of this, and that hearing began on our first sail on the Marianna.

We were scarcely under way when Stan, having handed the tiller to Phil,

—who had condescended to come with us on the “brick church,”— went below to get the official broom, and swept the deck.

“This boat is a sty — a regular sty,” he said.

I have said before that he was disorderly in a genial way, forever guying me for my New England conscientiousness in keeping my house clean, and here he was sweeping off a deck which was speckless.

He sat down at last in the cockpit and looked around anxiously; from time to time he got up and pounced on a bit of shaving, a string, a mote of dust; these he cast wrathfully overboard. He made me think of a New England housekeeper waiting for the Sewing Society. The day was warm, but Stanford kept bustling around the boat, and at last he disappeared into the cabin.

“I’ve got to get something like order into this place,” he announced, “I can’t stand a cabin like this;” and we heard him fussing with dishes, rattling around pans — in a word, working hard. Presently he reëmerged, red in the face and lugging the cushions with him.

“ I told that son of a lobster-pot to beat these cushions thoroughly,” he said, “I don’t think he touched them. I’ll hustle his lazy carcass when I catch him! See here!” and he smote the cushion with his fist. A light cloud of dust arose. He took his knife and gravely cut the handle from the broom, and on the Sunday afternoon air was heard the steady thump, thump, thump of a stick on a mattress. Then he tried to brush the dust off the cushions, but the mutilated broom was too large and unwieldy.

After this he rested awhile with some serenity, but his face clouded. “I can’t stand it,” he exclaimed. “I thought I should be able to, but I can’t. Look at those fittings! Meg, you ’re a shark about brass, could n’t you get it cleaned somehow— you’ve got lots of time.” Mind you, this was the man who could n’t bear to see his wife wash a teacup.

He took out his pen and a card and wrote eagerly, then he handed the card to me, “There’s nothing in this boat to work with,” he said. “Meg, don’t forget, will you, to put this card in your clothes and get these few little things to-morrow. Oh!” he went on, in despair,“there’s no use sweeping, the Marianna’s filthier than an oyster boat. I ’ve got to swab the deck off.”

Thereupon he dipped a bucket of water and got busy with the sawed-off broom. I looked over the list he had put in my hand ; it read : —

1 broom.

1 whisk broom.

3 cakes salt water soap.

1 papier maché bucket.

1 scrubbing brush.

2 dust rags or whatever you call’em.

2 floor rags for swabbing, like Anne uses on the floors.

1 large chamois bigger than the dinky one we have for silver.

1 jar or box or what you can get of best brass polish.

Cotton waste is good for rubbing.

Cloths and brushes for brass.

1 wicker thing like the one Anne whacks the rugs with.

1 gallon spar varnish (best quality).

3 sheets coarse sand-paper.

3sheets fine sand-paper.

1 large scraper.

1 3-cornered scraper.

1 flat scraper.

1 first-class file.

1 ball marlin.

“I’ve got to have one or two of the things we need,” explained Stan.

I read the list and made up my mind that there was a summer’s work before me, compared with which house cleaning would be a rest-cure. I was not far wrong.

For a while all was peaceful. We all know the happiness that we can have only on a little boat close down to the bosom of the waters, a little boat that one is sailing oneself, that belongs to oneself alone. I understood once and for all why Stanford would have nothing of a renterl boat. Phil and Stan no longer bickered. Phil lazily held the tiller. Stan was curled up somewhere before the mast, and I, after the manner of girls, dabbled my hand in the water on the leeward side. (I have since learned not to do tins. It is a thing that irritates one’s men immensely, I don’t know why.)

Other boats passed us, — yawls, sloops, cat-boats, vulgar, puffing launches with a lot of brawling, yelling fishermen on board, and little launches shining and trim, with the burgee of some smart yacht club fluttering at their masts, and occasionally we rocked in the wake of some great steam yacht where people sat under awnings. I for one didn’t envy them: they were not sailing, they knew none of the intimate joys of scraping and painting their own boats, and if they had committed extravagances as we had, it was not because of a great and dignified passion, but for some unworthy motive like the desire to shine. So I philosophized to myself, when suddenly the peace was broken by a cry, the cry of the man badly hurt. I sprang to my feet, Phil gripped the tiller.

“The jib sheet’s adrift,” Stan exclaimed. The jib sheet, which had been neatly coiled, had, after the unprincipled manner of ropes, become uncoiled, and sure enough was adrift. Any yachtsman of my husband’s kind will understand his horror, but I barely knew a sheet from a halyard, and all my eyes saw was three or four feet of rope trailing rather untidily behind us. The sheet was fast to the cleats, and it seemed no great catastrophe to me. But Phil threw the tiller into my hand and hastily hauled the offending sheet inboard, while Stanford, the unconventional, the man who did n’t care a hoot for his neighbors’ opinions, lamented:

“God knows how long that thing has been going on! The whole Sound may have seen us! We’ll be the laughingstock of every little fresh water yacht dub if we keep on this way! Great heavens, with two of you back there, I should think you could keep all the rigging from going adrift! ”

“I was sailing the boat,” replied Phil shortly. One could see that he felt ashamed, and also that he felt that the bulk of the responsibility rested on me. (I have since found that most things that happened aboard were my fault.)

So that very first afternoon it dawned on me that the world of yachtsmen is a little world which has its own conventions, its own etiquette. Conventions, too, which are rigid, and which may not be broken.

Take the matter of making a mooring, for instance. In the world I found myself in, to miss a mooring was little short of a disgrace. And Stan, who would have smiled cheerfully if a whole dinner party had gone wrong, would have wept tears of rage, I believe, if he had missed his mooring. And that afternoon, too, I realized, what I had only vaguely suspected before, that to all intents and purposes I might as well have had two husbands to adapt my disposition to. How far his nature was changed once he got aboard a boat I can explain best by this little anecdote.

We came in one night after dark and picked our way daintily among the great company of boats moored in the New Rochelle harbor. I stood forward almost on the bowsprit and happily located the two harbor buoys. Now any one who knows this populous harbor knows that it takes nice sailing to come in against the wind on a black night, especially at low tide. We slipped close under the stern of one of the cup defenders anchored far out, past big sea-going schooner yachts, racing sloops, and yawls, moved in and out among all the small fry, the many cat boats, and sneak-boxes, and made our mooring with great neatness. Then every one hurried to put up the sails. Stan was forward lying flat on his tummy on the bowsprit putting up the jib, and sang out to me for more stops. So I stepped on what I thought was the bowsprit shrouds to hand him one. I had stepped off into nothingness, walked the plank neatly into the Sound, and as the water closed over my head I heard Stanford say,—

“HELL! ”

I was aboard in a moment, and as Stanford put out a hand to help me he said to Phil, “Is n’t that like a girl ?” and Phil replied gloomily: “ It’s lucky it’s night; ” while little Morris threw their point of view into relief, with his “Oh, I hope you’re not hurt, Mrs. Dayton.”

VI

I have talked as if I were a young woman possessed of a great deal of tact, and who learned her various lessons with exemplary swiftness. Rut this is not true, I made plenty of mistakes, argued unnecessarily, asked foolish questions, and from first to last I have been quite as unable to share Stanford’s sensitiveness about what people could say. I know how he feels, and I respect his prejudices — sometimes. But they seem as quaint tome as my housewifely anxieties seem to him.

For instance, that first year I did things he has never ceased to shudder over. The Marianna was a wet boat, and if there was any wind at all it was better to sail in one’s bathing-suit. Now, I was never quite so happy as when I got into a certain disreputable and faded bathing-suit of mine, and every yachtsman who likes to see his boat and his women folk look smart will understand how poor Stanford must have suffered when I tell you that I used to insist on sitting down in the bowsprit shrouds with the waves breaking over me.

Nothing could keep me from the shrouds, neither command, nor sadness, nor anger. It was the height of happiness to me, and what unsettled Stan was that Phil used to come too. So did young Morris, who always sailed with us, and whose high spirits altogether demoralized me, taking my mind off the serious work of being a yachtsman’s helpmeet.

“You can’t race this old steamer chair, anyhow, Stan,” Phil would argue. “So what do you care ?” when poor Stanford would complain that we made her down at the head, and that everything on the Sound was passing us.

Then Stanford would plead with me. “It isn’t done, you know,” he would argue. “Do you ever see the wives of other men sitting in the bowsprit shrouds ? You know you don’t. In all my experience I have never seen any woman sitting where you are now!”

“Try and get rid of unnecessary conventionalities. You don’t know how life will broaden out when you do,” I quoted flippantly, for I was sore at being guyed so much about having walked into the water that night; for when Phil and Stanford got over being shocked at me, they made one of those stupid family jokes out of it, and trotted it out before every one whom we took sailing.

On the other hand, I did work over the Marianna with a devotion that was pathetic. Oh, the long, hot days I spent on my hands and knees on her deck, with the hot sun beating down on me, and how jealously I watched the honest Swede whose duty it was to dry the Marianna’s sails and to swab the vile harbor mud off the Marianna’s lovely white sides! and so I hope that for this devotion the recording angel will wipe from his book the record of my rebellious legs dangling overboard, Stimson’s yawl or no, and that before my life is over I shall have expiated the sins of a girl in a faded and disreputable bathing-suit, who sat brazenly in the bowsprit shrouds in the face of all the yachts on Long Island Sound.

I was very stupid about learning to sail. I learned to know the ropes quickly enough, and to execute any given order with commendable swiftness, but I am afraid that first summer I did not understand very much what it was all about.

It was all I could do to adapt myself to this new Stanford who ordered me about so peremptorily, and was filled with such contempt for one’s colossal ignorance, that it made it difficult to ask him questions; and I must confess that my heart beat hard with apprehension every time I was given an order, for fear I should not do it right, and that, rebellious as I was about my own amusement, I feared Stanford on the boat as much as any little cabin boy feared “The Old Man.” I snatched a fearful joy in executing orders quickly, and for the rest I shared the pleasure that only those who love sailing in small boats can ever know.

VII

Stanford took his sailing rather hard. He continued to bustle and fuss and tinker, and on calm days, when we would all be lying in the shadow of the big sail, he would always want to hoist the topsail, a cranky cross-grained sail as ever was, whose halyards never worked; and he would have to shin up the mast before it would set properly.

I had a personal enmity for that topsail, and a well-founded one, for it had a cussedness I have never seen equalled in a human being.

Meantime no extravagant wife ever made more demands on her husband’s pockets than did the Marianna. Now she called for a compass and again for smarter riding lights. Not content with having her decks scraped, she was always having herself hauled up and painted, complaining about that harbor mud. But she overreached herself, as so many young women of her kind have done before her, did the beautiful Marianna, for by the end of the season our purse was empty, and with bleeding hearts we realized that we would have to sell her. We have learned since that she was always an unprincipled boat, bleeding her owners. Her first owner stole her plans, and money to have her built, and afterwards she was owned successively by two young men who borrowed to pay for her. She lay up for two years in City Island, when she seduced my husband, and bled us to the last penny, and even then ungratefully made us realize that we had not given her all the luxuries to which she was accustomed.

We sold her at a loss to some fresh water yachtsmen who took her to a lake. I hope in her old age she may have found an owner well to do, who, if he does not love her madly as she was loved in her youth, will keep her decently, keep her spars and deck bright, give her new suits of sails when she needs them, and do over her cabin, which we never could afford to touch.

So the mighty were fallen, and we went sorrowfully into the country next summer without a boat.

In front of our house were a number of little boats, and among them one we learned was for sale. I had gotten over all surprise so far as Stan and boots were concerned. So I was not astonished when I heard him say to the owner, a stolid Swede,—

“She’s a centre-board boat, of course. A keel boat in these wafers is no good.’’

“Sure she’s centre-board. A fine boat, I sell her to you for seventy-five dollars,” the owner said, and lumbered heavily away.

The fine boat was a little jib and mainsail boat. Open, broad, and squat. She curtsied perpetually up and down on the water like a polite little old lady, and she was of the vintage of about 1830.

But she was a boat, and homely and slow as she was, Stan ardently desired her. It was most unfaithful of him, for she was the exact opposite of the Marianna. After he had been two weeks by the water his desire for smart boats vanished. What he wanted was a boat to sail in, any kind of a scow, he did n’t, care what, he asserted, so long as it had a tiller and a sail.

After two weeks the Swede loomed up in the dust.

“I sell her to you for fifty,” he said sullenly.

I had seen him walking with a masterful looking woman, while he pushed a baby carriage. Now being a yachtsman’s wife does more than make a woman silent and industrious, it makes her crafty and suspicious and keen at a bargain.

“Doesn’t your wife like sailing?” I asked innocently.

“No, what for I stay behind mit der baby, she say ? So she kicks, I sell der boat.”

I went to see Mrs. Larsen next day.

“How much you afford to give for dat boat ? ” she asked.

“Thirty-five dollars,” I told her.

“Larsen he comes for der money tonight,”she said, and shut her mouth like a trap.

And Larsen came sullenly and pocketed his thirty-five dollars. Poor man, I felt like a thief. He had spent all his Sundays and his spare time painting and caulking the old lady and making her neat and tight. But Mrs. Larsen was not of the stuff of which yachtsmen’s wives are made.

That summer I learned a good deal about sailing. I went out every day with a boy who found himself near, and then for the first time I began to have the madness for boats on my own account, for though I had been proud of the Marianna, I never loved her, and secretly I was jealous.

We painted the old boat black, and named her the Tar baby, which must have shocked her no end, for I’m sure her first name way back years ago must have been Belinda or Seraphina.

We sailed in her for years and at last gave her away, still staunch, and only a trifle leaky, to an ungrateful friend who renamed her the White Elephant. I learn that late in life she developed the bad habit of dragging her anchor, and is spending her declining years under the name of Anxiety.

VIII

One of my most frequent duties was the getting ready for company. The looking after the details of lunch, ice, and the like, is for a yachtsman’s wife what the cares of her house are for the wife of an ordinary husband who has no fads.

It makes very little difference to a yachtsman whether his wife ever learns to sail a boat well or not. What matters to him more than he knows is his wife’s ability to deal with guests. If it had not been for guests, indeed, my duties would have been simple enough. I would only have had to learn to obey quickly and to keep from talking too much. But the people who go out sailing with one complicate matters enormously.

Most people naturally hate small boat sailing, while they imagine that they love it dearly.

And if one owns a boat there is nothing more inevitable than that one will ask one’s friends out over Sunday for a sail.

I do not think that it has even yet occurred to Stanford’s innocent mind that he is not doing the greatest favor in the world to his unfortunate friends when he asks them out.

There are a few people who really “like sailing,” and who yet have no desire to own a boat, and no talent for learning to sail a boat themselves. Young Morris was one of these. He sailed with us for years as regularly as Phil Temple, and was never anything but unfailingly lubberly.

On the other hand, he was a perfect guest on a boat. He had a lofty disregard of the weather. He could sit in the shadow of the sail for hours, and analyze his soul. He did not care how long he was becalmed, for he had his soul always with him, and he could always speculate about Phil’s or Stan’s or mine if his own bored him.

Of course Phil and Stan thought he was an ass, although they were fond of him, but he was an immense comfort to me. I thought it showed, too, an immense amount of individuality, that hecould “go sailing” so much and not know one rope from another. He never even learned to tell which way the wind was coming from, and you can imagine what contempt that exposed him to in the eyes of my two friends. Stan worked over him for months trying to explain the theory of sailing. He would draw little diagrams, which Morris would look at soulfully with his beautiful brown eyes. Afterwards he would tell me quite shamelessly that he had not understood a word of what Stan was saying, but that he liked to hear him talk.

Morris had quite a little to do with my breaking in, in a negative way. He kept me from being too humble-minded the first years, while I was getting, so to speak, bridle-wise. Later he was a great help with refractory guests.

The reason so many people are anxious to go out in little boats is the false idea literature gives of the pleasures of sailing. I often read luscious descriptions of bounding through the water, with delightful scenery all about, that would mislead anybody.

You imagine yourself sitting at ease, a delicious little breeze wafting you along, a lovely day, neither too hot, nor too cold, and the wind with you both ways.

Now my experience is that when sailing in a little boat like the Tar Baby there is always too much something for somebody. It is very apt to fall a flat calm in the Sound warm Sunday afternoons. It is also apt to breeze up fresh, and over goes your little boat on her ear, and the whole company has to sit up to windward, shifting themselves like a lot of ballast when one comes about. One is apt also to get wet on days like this, and what with dodging the boom, and getting soaked, and sitting in unwonted and uncomfortable positions, or else broiling for long hours under a pitiless sun miles away from home and supper, I am sure I don’t see the pleasure there can be for people in a casual sail.

There is no such thing as liking just a part of sailing; one must like it all, take it as it comes, and above all have a great amount of patience, and no love of getting back to meals on time.

The people who like to sail only under happy circumstances would do well to stay at home. Days of perfection are so few. Yet it is just, such people who usually come out of town expecting to have a good time. I have witnessed trying and pathetic sights among our poor guests. I have seen girls, yes, and men too, grip the seat with tight, nervous lingers as puff after puff knocked us down. It has come to the point when we have had to put them ashore, though this has happened only once or twice.

I have seen one poor man turn a lovely green, while Stan was proving to Phil that the Tar Baby was quick in stays, by running up as close as possible to those treacherous green rocks off Portchester shore, and then coming about. They kept up this childish proceeding half the afternoon, while young Morris watched the nervous gentleman with brown, speculative eyes, saving,—

“Sooner or later, you know, they’ll fetch a rock. You can’t swim, can you, Jones ? well, we’ll have time to get you out an oar to hang on to.”

Or, “Did you feel her scrape that time? she’s a rather old boat, and may come to pieces any minute.”

Such days it was my duty to divert the sufferer as best I could, for even Morris went back on me. There were other times when girls got very scared, and were ashamed to own up, when I had to make myself unpopular with the men by insisting on going home. I learned to recognize seasickness in its earliest moments, and made some excuse for a landing.

The hardest thing of all is to keep up the courage and spirits of a party in the face of a flat calm. The sun beats down on you pitilessly. The skin of the girls’ noses slowly burns to a crisp and at last peels off. A painful magenta streak divides the neck just above the collar. There is nothing on earth to do but sit still, and after a while you get so talked out that you feel that never so long as you live will you have anything to say to one another again. You get sung out, too. And after that there remains hopeless boredom, deadly patience. That is what happens when you are becalmed, if the hostess has not her wits about her. There are some people, do what one likes, who simply cannot live through a calm without agony.

A calm is so antagonistic, anyway, to the American temperament that it is very little short of madness to ask untried people on the water when a calm may be awaiting them.

Bored, seasick, frightened, nervous, uncomfortable, when one asks people sailing one runs the risk of making them any of these things.

I am the one who has suffered vicariously through the suffering of our victims, and the older I grow, the more I desire to pass my days happily on the water without the anguish of others to trouble me. I would like to have my chosen friends about me. But by preference I would hear Stan and Phil Temple wrangle, while young Morris loafs in the shadow of the sail and digs deep into the depths of his soul.

We have owned several boats since the day of the fat Tar Baby, which I loved better than any other boat, for women are pathetically constant. I have sailed boats in many different harbors. We have never yet bought a boat that Stanford was uncertain we would make money on. We have never had a boat that we have not lost hopelessly with. There are men who make money from both boats and horses. I think they must be too clever to be very happy. I am sure they cannot be as nice as the idealist, who is let in for it every time, and who never learns the art of letting other people in.

My chief care has been in keeping Stanford from buying any kind of a boat that presented itself in moments when life seemed to him to stop unless he could own something with sails, and that at once. I have seen him, on the verge of bankruptcy, negotiating for a venerable thirty-foot cat down on Peconic Bay, a notorious boat which all the harbor knew carried a lee helm.

I have sat on the shores of the Mediterranean holding my breath while Stanford bargained for a boat built on a model fashionable 20 B. c., a boat with a lateen sail hooked casually to the mast; a boat without keel or centre-board, which refused utterly to come about inside of fifteen minutes, and whose owner rowed around when tacking. I have shut my eyes, while the angel of the Lord passed along and spared me and Stanford. I do not talk at these times. I only keep quiet and trust that some luck will hold back Stanford’s hand.

These are the things I fear, and for every year that passes that sees Stan clear from buying Noah’s Ark, I give thanks. He is sure to pass through a crisis at least once in two years.

I have talked a good deal with the wives of other yachtsmen, and each has his own private mania. Now it is racing, again it is the mania for specklessness which makes the master of the boat follow his guests around and insultingly rub off any bit of brass or woodwork they have touched. This is a form of madness especially hard to bear. There are others who carry to an extreme the yachtsman’s etiquette I have spoken of before. While the young yachtsmen do crazy, foolhardy things in keeping on all the canvas during a storm, and in other ways trying to get themselves drowned.

I have had a comparatively easy time of it, since I was well broken in, for Stanford’s sudden and violent passion for some derelict does not come often. On the other hand, my life is made pleasant by my own little fad, which is the love of fussing around my boat. This is a very ordinary form of the yachtsman’s madness, and you have only to go to any harbor or boatyard to see a number of harmless and gentle creatures busy with paint pot and scraper.

As I look over the various summers of my married life, I see myself constantly at work upon some boat. Sometimes I see myself under a boat painting away, a pot of copper paint beside me. I smell again the smell of spar varnish as I put the finishing touches on a dinghy. I see pictures of a certain sail maker’s attic full of mounds of billowy white sails, among which there are always a lot of kittens playing. I used to go there for new sails and to urge that they should be made promptly.

But oftenest I see myself in a dinghy rowing out of the interminable Sound harbors, to hoist sails after the rain, and then making another long trip to take them down again.

I have loved it all,— I have even snatched a fearful joy from the moments when Stan has threatened to buy some impossible boat. I hope that time which lops off one of our pleasures after another will leave me my pleasure in my boats, so that a shipyard will seem to me always as pleasant a place as it does to-day. And that I shall love to sail in whatever weather, and have always a tranquil patience in a calm.

I like to think that I shall be like the old lady on the Mary Ellen, — and that I shall sit placid in the cockpit of my boat, while the sun sets over Long Island Sound, while Phil and Stan quarrel as to which could best take the Massachusetts through Hell Gate.