He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean. The narrow
strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was covered at high
tide by a shining film of water, at low tide with the cast-up offerings
of sea and shore. Logs yet green, and saplings washed away from inland
banks, battered fragments of wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken
into tiny rafts yet odorous with their lost freight, lay in long
successive curves,—the fringes and overlappings of the sea. At high
noon the shadow of a seagull's wing, or a sudden flurry and gray squall
of sandpipers, themselves but shadows, was all that broke the
monotonous glare of the level sands.
He had lived there alone for a twelvemonth. Although but a few miles
from a thriving settlement, during that time his retirement had never
been intruded upon, his seclusion remained unbroken. In any other
community he might have been the subject of rumor or criticism, but the
miners at Camp Rogue and the traders at Trinidad Head, themselves
individual and eccentric, were profoundly indifferent to all other
forms of eccentricity or heterodoxy that did not come in contact with
their own. And certainly there was no form of eccentricity less
aggressive than that of a hermit, had they chosen to give him that
appellation. But they did not even do that, probably from lack of
interest or perception. To the various traders who supplied his small
wants he was known as "Kernel," "Judge," and "Boss." To the general
public "The Man on the Beach" was considered a sufficiently
distinguishing title. His name, his occupation, rank, or antecedents,
nobody cared to inquire. Whether this arose from a fear of reciprocal
inquiry and interest, or from the profound indifference before referred
to, I cannot say.
He did not look like a hermit. A man yet young, erect, well-dressed,
clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half melancholy, half
cynical, was scarcely the conventional idea of a solitary. His
dwelling, a rude improvement on a fisherman's cabin, had all the severe
exterior simplicity of frontier architecture, but within it was
comfortable and wholesome. Three rooms—a kitchen, a living room, and
a bedroom—were all it contained.
He had lived there long enough to see the dull monotony of one season
lapse into the dull monotony of the other. The bleak northwest
trade-winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight and nights of
fog and silence. The warmer southwest trades had brought him clouds,
rain, and the transient glories of quick grasses and odorous beach
blossoms. But summer or winter, wet or dry season, on one side rose
always the sharply defined hills with their changeless background of
evergreens; on the other side stretched always the illimitable ocean as
sharply defined against the horizon, and as unchanging in its hue. The
onset of spring and autumn tides, some changes among his feathered
neighbors, the footprints of certain wild animals along the river's
bank, and the hanging out of party-colored signals from the wooded
hillside far inland, helped him to record the slow months. On summer
afternoons, when the sun sank behind a bank of fog that, moving
solemnly shoreward, at last encompassed him and blotted out sea and
sky, his isolation was complete. The damp gray sea that flowed above
and around and about him always seemed to shut out an intangible world
beyond, and to be the only real presence. The booming of breakers
scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a vague and
unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past forever. Every
morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he awoke, dazed and
bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense of oppression over,
he came to love at last this subtle spirit of oblivion; and at night,
when its cloudy wings were folded over his cabin, he would sit alone
with a sense of security he had never felt before. On such occasions
he was apt to leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for
what might not come to him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond?
Perhaps even SHE,—for this strange solitary was not insane nor
visionary. He was never in spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping
or waking, pacing the beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a
woman's face was always before him,—the face for whose sake and for
cause of whom he sat there alone. He saw it in the morning sunlight;
it was her white hands that were lifted from the crested breakers; it
was the rustling of her skirt when the sea wind swept through the beach
grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low voice when the long waves
sank and died among the sedge and rushes. She was as omnipresent as
sea and sky and level sand. Hence when the fog wiped them away, she
seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness. On one or two more
gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence of the fervid noonday
sun was still felt on the heated sands, the warm breath of the fog
touched his cheek as if it had been hers, and the tears started to his
eyes.
Before the fogs came—for he arrived there in winter—he had found
surcease and rest in the steady glow of a lighthouse upon the little
promontory a league below his habitation. Even on the darkest nights,
and in the tumults of storm, it spoke to him of a patience that was
enduring and a steadfastness that was immutable. Later on he found a
certain dumb companionship in an uprooted tree, which, floating down
the river, had stranded hopelessly upon his beach, but in the evening
had again drifted away. Rowing across the estuary a day or two
afterward, he recognized the tree again from a "blaze" of the settler's
axe still upon its trunk. He was not surprised a week later to find
the same tree in the sands before his dwelling, or that the next
morning it should be again launched on its purposeless wanderings. And
so, impelled by wind or tide, but always haunting his seclusion, he
would meet it voyaging up the river at the flood, or see it tossing
among the breakers on the bar, but always with the confidence of its
returning sooner or later to an anchorage beside him. After the third
month of his self-imposed exile, he was forced into a more human
companionship, that was brief but regular. He was obliged to have
menial assistance. While he might have eaten his bread "in sorrow"
carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for him, the
occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity and
materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness that he
could not eat the meal he had himself prepared. He did not yet wish to
die, and when starvation or society seemed to be the only alternative,
he chose the latter. An Indian woman, so hideous as to scarcely
suggest humanity, at stated times performed for him these offices.
When she did not come, which was not infrequent, he did not eat.
Such was the mental and physical condition of the Man on the Beach on
the 1st of January, 1869.
It was a still, bright day, following a week of rain and wind. Low
down the horizon still lingered a few white flecks—the flying
squadrons of the storm—as vague as distant sails. Southward the
harbor bar whitened occasionally but lazily; even the turbulent Pacific
swell stretched its length wearily upon the shore. And toiling from
the settlement over the low sand dunes, a carriage at last halted half
a mile from the solitary's dwelling.
"I reckon ye'll hev to git out here," said the driver, pulling up to
breathe his panting horses. "Ye can't git any nigher."
There was a groan of execration from the interior of the vehicle, a
hysterical little shriek, and one or two shrill expressions of feminine
disapprobation, but the driver moved not. At last a masculine head
expostulated from the window: "Look here; you agreed to take us to the
house. Why, it's a mile away at least!"
"Thar, or tharabouts, I reckon," said the driver, coolly crossing his
legs on the box.
"It's no use talking; I can never walk through this sand and horrid
glare," said a female voice quickly and imperatively. Then,
apprehensively, "Well, of all the places!"
"Well, I never!"
"This DOES exceed everything."
"It's really TOO idiotic for anything."
It was noticeable that while the voices betrayed the difference of age
and sex, they bore a singular resemblance to each other, and a certain
querulousness of pitch that was dominant.
"I reckon I've gone about as fur as I allow to go with them hosses,"
continued the driver suggestively, "and as time's vallyble, ye'd better
unload."
"The wretch does not mean to leave us here alone?" said a female voice
in shrill indignation. "You'll wait for us, driver?" said a masculine
voice, confidently.
"How long?" asked the driver.
There was a hurried consultation within. The words "Might send us
packing!" "May take all night to get him to listen to reason," "Bother!
whole thing over in ten minutes," came from the window. The driver
meanwhile had settled himself back in his seat, and whistled in patient
contempt of a fashionable fare that didn't know its own mind nor
destination. Finally, the masculine head was thrust out, and, with a
certain potential air of judicially ending a difficulty, said:—
"You're to follow us slowly, and put up your horses in the stable or
barn until we want you."
An ironical laugh burst from the driver. "Oh, yes—in the stable or
barn—in course. But, my eyes sorter failin' me, mebbee, now, some ev
you younger folks will kindly pint out the stable or barn of the
Kernel's. Woa!—will ye?—woa! Give me a chance to pick out that
there barn or stable to put ye in!" This in arch confidence to the
horses, who had not moved.
Here the previous speaker, rotund, dignified, and elderly, alighted
indignantly, closely followed by the rest of the party, two ladies and
a gentleman. One of the ladies was past the age, but not the fashion,
of youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted figure and
well-bred bones artistically if not gracefully; the younger lady,
evidently her daughter, was crisp and pretty, and carried off the
aquiline nose and aristocratic emaciation of her mother with a certain
piquancy and a dash that was charming. The gentleman was young, thin,
with the family characteristics, but otherwise indistinctive.
With one accord they all faced directly toward the spot indicated by
the driver's whip. Nothing but the bare, bleak, rectangular outlines
of the cabin of the Man on the Beach met their eyes. All else was a
desolate expanse, unrelieved by any structure higher than the tussocks
of scant beach grass that clothed it. They were so utterly helpless
that the driver's derisive laughter gave way at last to good humor and
suggestion. "Look yer," he said finally, "I don't know ez it's your
fault you don't know this kentry ez well ez you do Yurup; so I'll drag
this yer team over to Robinson's on the river, give the horses a bite,
and then meander down this yer ridge, and wait for ye. Ye'll see me
from the Kernel's." And without waiting for a reply, he swung his
horses' heads toward the river, and rolled away.
The same querulous protest that had come from the windows arose from
the group, but vainly. Then followed accusations and recrimination.
"It's YOUR fault; you might have written, and had him meet us at the
settlement." "You wanted to take him by surprise!" "I didn't. You
know if I'd written that we were coming, he'd have taken good care to
run away from us." "Yes, to some more inaccessible place." "There can
be none worse than this," etc., etc. But it was so clearly evident
that nothing was to be done but to go forward, that even in the midst
of their wrangling they straggled on in Indian file toward the distant
cabin, sinking ankle-deep in the yielding sand, punctuating their
verbal altercation with sighs, and only abating it at a scream from the
elder lady.
"Where's Maria?"
"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so
incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a
ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.
It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general
conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla, after
scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain, came to
grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but savage. As
they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on
her cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and
lisped:—
"You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English
shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in
their Sunday clothes!"
Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine
feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea
breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and
shore. A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from the lagoon,
arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended legs, in
obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder lady felt the
justice of her gentle daughter's criticism, and retaliated with simple
directness:—
"Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half off
your head, and your shoes—in Heaven's name, Maria! what HAVE you done
with your shoes?"
Maria had exhibited a slim stockinged foot from under her skirt. It was
scarcely three fingers broad, with an arch as patrician as her nose.
"Somewhere between here and the carriage," she answered; "Dick can run
back and find it, while he is looking for your brooch, mamma. Dick's
so obliging."
The robust voice of Dick thundered, but the wasted figure of Dick
feebly ploughed its way back, and returned with the missing buskin.
"I may as well carry them in my hand like the market girls at Saumur,
for we have got to wade soon," said Miss Maria, sinking her own terrors
in the delightful contemplation of the horror in her parent's face, as
she pointed to a shining film of water slowly deepening in a narrow
swale in the sands between them and the cabin.
"It's the tide," said the elder gentleman. "If we intend to go on we
must hasten; permit me, my dear madam," and before she could reply he
had lifted the astounded matron in his arms, and made gallantly for the
ford. The gentle Maria cast an ominous eye on her brother, who, with
manifest reluctance, performed for her the same office. But that acute
young lady kept her eyes upon the preceding figure of the elder
gentleman, and seeing him suddenly and mysteriously disappear to his
armpits, unhesitatingly threw herself from her brother's protecting
arms,—an action which instantly precipitated him into the water,—and
paddled hastily to the opposite bank, where she eventually assisted in
pulling the elderly gentleman out of the hollow into which he had
fallen, and in rescuing her mother, who floated helplessly on the
surface, upheld by her skirts, like a gigantic and variegated
water-lily. Dick followed with a single gaiter. In another minute they
were safe on the opposite bank.
The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick
mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman,
whose florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity seemed
to have been washed away, accounted for both by saying he thought it
was a quicksand.
"It might have been," said a quiet voice behind them; "you should have
followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary."
They turned instantly at the voice. It was that of the Man on the
Beach. They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one, the
single exclamation, "James!" The elder gentleman said "Mr. North,"
and, with a slight resumption of his former dignity, buttoned his coat
over his damp shirt front.
There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely down
upon them. If they had intended to impress him by any suggestion of a
gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their own persons, they
had failed, and they knew it. Keenly alive as they had always been to
external prepossession, they felt that they looked forlorn and
ludicrous, and that the situation lay in his hands. The elderly lady
again burst into tears of genuine distress, Maria colored over her
cheek-bones, and Dick stared at the ground in sullen disquiet.
"You had better get up," said the Man on the Beach, after a moment's
thought, "and come up to the cabin. I cannot offer you a change of
garments, but you can dry them by the fire."
They all rose together, and again said in chorus, "James!" but this
time with an evident effort to recall some speech or action previously
resolved upon and committed to memory. The elder lady got so far as to
clasp her hands and add, "You have not forgotten us—James, oh,
James!"; the younger gentleman to attempt a brusque "Why, Jim, old
boy," that ended in querulous incoherence; the young lady to cast a
half-searching, half-coquettish look at him; and the old gentleman to
begin, "Our desire, Mr. North"—but the effort was futile. Mr. James
North, standing before them with folded arms, looked from the one to
the other.
"I have not thought much of you for a twelvemonth," he said, quietly,
"but I have not forgotten you. Come!"
He led the way a few steps in advance, they following silently. In
this brief interview they felt he had resumed the old dominance and
independence, against which they had rebelled; more than that, in this
half failure of their first concerted action they had changed their
querulous bickerings to a sullen distrust of each other, and walked
moodily apart as they followed James North into his house. A fire
blazed brightly on the hearth; a few extra seats were quickly
extemporized from boxes and chests, and the elder lady, with the skirt
of her dress folded over her knees,—looking not unlike an exceedingly
overdressed jointed doll,—dried her flounces and her tears together.
Miss Maria took in the scant appointments of the house in one single
glance, and then fixed her eyes upon James North, who, the least
concerned of the party, stood before them, grave and patiently
expectant.
"Well," began the elder lady in a high key, "after all this worry and
trouble you have given us, James, haven't you anything to say? Do you
know—have you the least idea what you are doing? what egregious folly
you are committing? what everybody is saying? Eh? Heavens and
earth!—do you know who I am?"
"You are my father's brother's widow, Aunt Mary," returned James,
quietly. "If I am committing any folly it only concerns myself; if I
cared for what people said I should not be here; if I loved society
enough to appreciate its good report I should stay with it."
"But they say you have run away from society to pine alone for a
worthless creature—a woman who has used you, as she has used and
thrown away others—a—"
"A woman," chimed in Dick, who had thrown himself on James's bed while
his patent leathers were drying, "a woman that all the fellers know
never intended"—here, however, he met James North's eye, and muttering
something about "whole thing being too idiotic to talk about," relapsed
into silence.
"You know," continued Mrs. North, "that while we and all our set shut
our eyes to your very obvious relations with that woman, and while I
myself often spoke of it to others as a simple flirtation, and averted
a scandal for your sake, and when the climax was reached, and she
herself gave you an opportunity to sever your relations, and nobody
need have been wiser—and she'd have had all the blame—and it's only
what she's accustomed to—you—you! you, James North!—you must
nonsensically go, and, by this extravagant piece of idiocy and
sentimental tomfoolery, let everybody see how serious the whole affair
was, and how deep it hurt you! and here in this awful place,
alone—where you're half drowned to get to it and are willing to be
wholly drowned to get away! Oh, don't talk to me! I won't hear
it—it's just too idiotic for anything!"
The subject of this outburst neither spoke nor moved a single muscle.
"Your aunt, Mr. North, speaks excitedly," said the elder gentleman;
"yet I think she does not overestimate the unfortunate position in
which your odd fancy places you. I know nothing of the reasons that
have impelled you to this step; I only know that the popular opinion is
that the cause is utterly inadequate. You are still young, with a
future before you. I need not say how your present conduct may imperil
that. If you expected to achieve any good—even to your own
satisfaction—but this conduct—"
"Yes—if there was anything to be gained by it!" broke in Mrs. North.
"If you ever thought she'd come back!—but that kind of woman don't.
They must have change. Why"—began Dick suddenly, and as suddenly
lying down again.
"Is this all you have come to say?" asked James North, after a moment's
patient silence, looking from one to the other.
"All?" screamed Mrs. North; "is it not enough?"
"Not to change my mind nor my residence at present," replied North,
coolly.
"Do you mean to continue this folly all your life?"
"And have a coroner's inquest, and advertisements and all the facts in
the papers?"
"And have HER read the melancholy details, and know that you were
faithful and she was not?"
This last shot was from the gentle Maria, who bit her lips as it
glanced from the immovable man.
"I believe there is nothing more to say," continued North, quietly. "I
am willing to believe your intentions are as worthy as your zeal. Let
us say no more," he added, with grave weariness; "the tide is rising,
and your coachman is signaling you from the bank."
There was no mistaking the unshaken positiveness of the man, which was
all the more noticeable from its gentle but utter indifference to the
wishes of the party. He turned his back upon them as they gathered
hurriedly around the elder gentleman, while the words, "He cannot be in
his right mind," "It's your duty to do it," "It's sheer insanity,"
"Look at his eye!" all fell unconsciously upon his ear.
"One word more, Mr. North," said the elder gentleman, a little
portentously, to conceal an evident embarrassment. "It may be that
your conduct might suggest to minds more practical than your own the
existence of some aberration of the intellect—some temporary
mania—that might force your best friends into a quasi-legal attitude
of—"
"Declaring me insane," interrupted James North, with the slight
impatience of a man more anxious to end a prolix interview than to
combat an argument. "I think differently. As my aunt's lawyer, you
know that within the last year I have deeded most of my property to her
and her family. I cannot believe that so shrewd an adviser as Mr.
Edmund Carter would ever permit proceedings that would invalidate that
conveyance."
Maria burst into a laugh of such wicked gratification that James North,
for the first time, raised his eyes with something of interest to her
face. She colored under them, but returned his glance with another
like a bayonet flash. The party slowly moved toward the door, James
North following.
"Then this is your final answer?" asked Mrs. North, stopping
imperiously on the threshold.
"I beg your pardon?" queried North, half abstractedly.
"Your final answer?"
"Oh, certainly."
Mrs. North flounced away a dozen rods in rage. This was unfortunate
for North. It gave them the final attack in detail. Dick began: "Come
along! You know you can advertise for her with a personal down there
and the old woman wouldn't object as long as you were careful and put
in an appearance now and then!"
As Dick limped away, Mr. Carter thought, in confidence, that the whole
matter—even to suit Mr. North's sensitive nature—might be settled
there. "SHE evidently expects you to return. My opinion is that she
never left San Francisco. You can't tell anything about these women."
With this last sentence on his indifferent ear, James North seemed to
be left free. Maria had rejoined her mother; but as they crossed the
ford, and an intervening sand-hill hid the others from sight, that
piquant young lady suddenly appeared on the hill and stood before him.
"And you're not coming back?" she said directly.
"No."
"Never?"
"I cannot say."
"Tell me! what is there about some women to make men love them so?"
"Love," replied North, quietly.
"No, it cannot be—it is not THAT!"
North looked over the hill and round the hill, and looked bored.
"Oh, I'm going now. But one moment, Jem! I didn't want to come. They
dragged me here. Good-by."
She raised a burning face and eyes to his. He leaned forward and
imprinted the perfunctory cousinly kiss of the period upon her cheek.
"Not that way," she said angrily, clutching his wrists with her long,
thin fingers; "you shan't kiss me in that way, James North."
With the faintest, ghost-like passing of a twinkle in the corners of
his sad eyes, he touched his lips to hers. With the contact, she
caught him round the neck, pressed her burning lips and face to his
forehead, his cheeks, the very curves of his chin and throat, and—with
a laugh was gone.
