Flood tide

Chapter The First

ONE character in literature has always commanded my sympathy. I feel that he has been gravely misjudged, criticized without cause, mocked without reason. I refer to Alnaschar, Fifth Brother of the Barber of Bagdad.

I first heard of Alnaschar from old Henry Rideout. I was four years old at the time, convalescent from typhoid. Henry came every day to amuse me while my father was away at the store. He spun me yarns of sea adventure, tales of China voyages, drawling sagas of runs ashore in distant ports. Finally he exhausted his store of personal experience and fell back on his reading, giving me queer and distorted versions of many things, from Shakespeare to yellow backed novels. And at last he came to the Arabian Nights and the Barber's tale of his brother.

"He was a middling queer cuss," said Henry, wrinkling his brow in an effort of memory. "And as near as I can mind it, this is the yarn. Seems that one day when trade was dull the barber got to bragging about his family in general and his brothers in particular — he had a sight of them, some bad and the rest worse. What happened to the rest of them I disremember, but this fifth brother of his was the prize one of the lot. After the barber's old man died — — "

"How did he die?" I asked, unwilling to miss any of the gory details.

"Kicked by a camel, I reckon," said Henry with ready invention. "But be that as it may, he passed on and the barber and his brothers divvied the plunder betwixt them. And with his share this Alnaschar laid in a stock of cheap glassware and crockery and such. Then he piled his junk in a basket that he'd stole somewhere and sat down in the square to wait for trade, instead of going out and drumming it up. Shows the kind of worthless feller he was. And whilst he was waiting for some poor innocent to come along and be fleeced, he starts to figure out how he's going to come out on his venture.

" 'This here glass,' says he, 'stood me a hundred drachmas. At a reasonable profit I'll get two hundred drachmas for it and buy some more truck. Then,' he says, 'I'll pass that off and have four hundred drachmas. A smart chap like me won't be any time at all in turning that over into four thousand. And before long, stands to reason that I'll have twelve thousand. Then maybe I'll branch out into the brass jewelry and glass cGamond trade. I'll have a trotter and a side-bar buggy and a house on High Street with a slate roof and a stone dog in the front yard, all very handsome. And pretty soon I'll have a hundred thousand drachmas. Easily,' he says. 'And that'll be enough,' says he. 'I'll lend it out on mortgages at a stiffish rate and retire.'

"And then he shakes out all sail and really starts to imagine things. 'I'll shine up to the mayor's daughter,' he plans. 'Maybe I'll even stand for deacon at the Orthodox Church and subscribe to foreign missions — not very heavy, but just enough to get the name of being pious and liberal. And if the mayor's daughter's got any sense at all, she'll be tickled to death to have me. But after we're spliced I'll show her who's skipper of the packet. I won't * look at her. No, sir. I'll kick and carry on and howl and raise Old Ned no matter what she does. Nothing is going to please me the least mite. She'll cook me a bang-up dinner, chicken and everything, but I'll stay out on the front porch and won't come in. She'll send the butler out, but I'll ship him back a'kiting. Then she'll dish up a tray real enticing and tote it out herself. I won't look at it. She'll beg me to eat. I'm danged if I will. She'll get down on her knees. And with that I'll give her a black look and raise my boot and kick that tray —

Here Henry paused for effect and filled his pipe with maddening deliberation.

"And what then?" I piped eagerly.

"Why, just what a body might expect," said Henry. "He kicked out and busted his basket fuU of truck all to smash. And everybody in town laughed at him and agreed that it served him right."

I was disappointed.

"And he didn't sell his glass?" I asked.

"He did not. Fact is, he got fined for littering up the road."

"Nor marry the mayor's daughter?"

"There wasn't any mayor's daughter," said Henry, refusing me the slightest ray of hope. "He just imagined that."

"Oh!" Somehow or other I saw nothing amusing in Alnaschar's downfall. "But what did he do then?"

"I don't remember, exactly," admitted Henry. "Most likely he went down to the coast and shipped out on a whaler. Most good-for-nothing chaps seems to end up that way."

In common with the rest of the elder generation of Whitehaven sailors, Henry considered all whalers scum of the earth.

After he had clumped away I meditated upon the case of Alnaschar. His treatment of the mythical mayor's daughter I admitted was scarcely the correct thing, but the rest of it, all his plans for wealth and position, that appealed to me immensely. I saw nothing wrong in that. I was sorry for Alnaschar, not because he had suffered financial ruin, but because he had imagined something and been disappointed.

And, despite the passage of years, I am still sorry for

him.

Perhaps a fellow feeling influences me, for my story is that of an elder Alnaschar. I have been a dreamer, a successful dreamer in many ways, working in even humbler stuff than the "brass jewelry and glass diamond trade." I have built great things for the pleasure of building, sacrificed even greater things for my visions, tired of it all, and at last awakened to find the pavement of the market place glittering with the strewn fragments of my fortune. Yet I am not a failure. I have both succeeded and failed in a manner which puzzled me immensely. . . .

And for all this, for my failure and success, there is but one reason.

I am a dreamer.

Yet I dislike the term "dreamer." To my mind the dreamer is pale, with long fair hair, given to midnight maunderings and helpless abstraction from the affairs of the world. Through this book I have said much of dreams, but I have used the word for lack of a better. I have been no dreamer, but a futurist; futurists, and not dreamers, build bridges of moonbeams to distant goals. The dreamer dreams and accomplishes nothing ; the futurist, staring after to-morrow and trampling to-day under foot, builds where the dreamer is content to imagine.

Dreams are wholly disappointing, while even in abortive futurism there is a certain satisfaction. I have found it so ; I have even found satisfaction in looking back, through this book, on the time when yesterday was to-morrow. I have seen myself a child again, with dragons lurking among the tall, rank weeds of the neglected garden and ships vanishing beyond the Point on purple seas of romance; a boy, living in the borderland between childish dreams and the practical life about me ; a youth in college, oppressed, like all youth, with a new-born sense of the wasted effort and unrelated endeavor of life and planning to do away with it forever; a man — and yet a child in many ways — dreaming over business and persuading myself that business and not dreams was the attraction. I have seen myself during the last five years pursuing an illusory vision of happiness and at last coming home from the dark sea. Even now, in the autumn of life, I find that the falling leaves reveal far blue vistas, glimpses of unguessed country, unknown fields ... I am still a futurist. . . .

And now I start over again, only a little wiser than before. We futurists die many times and are reborn as often. My life work, the work of my old life, is ended. As a child I dreamed of a world without competition. I then intended to eliminate entirely the waste and injustice of competitive business ; I have succeeded in bringing the ultimate elimination of competition one-tenth of a second nearer in the march of eternity. With that I am content. How many of us accomplish even that much of our childish visions? . . .

We are all children, playing on the broad beach whose distances are veiled in mystery; playing, building, living our cloud-passages of joy and sorrow between the great sea whence we came and the dark forest into which we depart at the day's end. We work in sand, in the unstable sand worn from the foundations of the world by the slow marching years. We scratch the ground plans of immense structures ; palaces with driftwood turrets, seaweed gardens and stately walks edged with shining pebbles; smooth-patted mounds, honeycombed with tunnels and crowned with tufts of beach grass and dune flowers ; vast bridges spanning the slow streams meandering down from brackish pools. And, before night softens the mystery of the dark forest, perhaps we have built an outer court, a wall studded with shells and starfish, an abutment and half an arch of bridge; the rest is still a plan, still a dream. No matter ; there is always to-morrow — to-morrow we will build better and more wisely. And if the tide rises in the night, if the flood tide laps and crumbles our work even as we dust our hands and turn away in satisfaction — • there is still to-morrow. To-morrow and a smooth beach. .

Chapter The Second

THE first thing I can remember is being suspended by the heels over a half-hogshead, set under the eaves to catch the drip from the roof. My father had stirred the water until it was one great circling whirlpool, ropy, and black, and terrible, and had then held me over it — just to hear me howl, I imagine. He was a great deal of an overgrown boy in those days, although in later times he was grave enough. I think that my mother made a great to-do over it; I have a faint recollection of her rescuing me from a watery grave and scolding my father in mockvirago fashion.

"You might take some one your own size, you great brute," she said, and only the soft lifted curve of her cheek close to mine told me that she meant nothing serious. I'm not sure, but I think there was a sweet Irish tang to her low voice, the barest possible suggestion of a brogue.

My father must have threatened to treat her in the same manner, for she fled to the protecting door of the house, turned to make faces at him, and bore me indoors to be sustained and comforted with gingerbread men.

I have but one other remembrance of my mother. I had heard some one tell how the Lord "walked in the garden, in the cool of the day," and had stolen down one spring morning to look for His footprints under the lilacs and syringas in the garden behind the house. The grass was still drenched with dew, my feet were soon chilled and the hem of my night-shirt in a sadly bedraggled state. I found no footprints save those of the nocturnal snail and must have set up a most lusty wailing, for my mother came out with a tartan shawl over her shoulders and two long, shining braids of hair down her back. She tucked me in bed again, promising to help me in my search, later in the day. She must have died soon after that ; I myself was near death with typhoid for a long time — a matter of drains, I think, and not the result of this early morning expedition. I know that when I came downstairs again, a weak, scraggly shadow of a boy, she was gone. I missed her, but only vaguely ; her loss was obscured by the fact that upon coming downstairs again I graduated from kilts to trousers and became a man.

These two fragmentary memories stand without background, absolutely unconnected with anything else in my experience. They seem now part of another existence, connected with my present life only by shadowy links. I retain a faint impression of my convalescence, and being propped up with cushions on a broad window ledge looking out over the straggling garden and the street and the house roofs lower down on the hill. I seem to recall the view from this window as it appeared to me then; a low swung arch of the horse chestnut tree before the house framed a flawed blue sea and brown rocks and occasional white sails passing and repassing in slow contradance. I remember exploring the house as I grew stronger, investigating the mysteries of lilac clumps and gnarled apple trees and the shingled henhouse with the yard before it grown up to a jungle of prickly weeds. And clearest of all, and peculiar to this early period, I recall the constant procession of serving girls who came, abode their hour, and passed on out of my knowledge.

They came and went — not servant girls in the modern sense, but girls who came in to cook and to clean up the house, spinsters who poked into bureau drawers while my father was away at the store and who called me "poor little fellow," thereby winning my contempt. This was before the days of the modern cook-girl with her Scandinavian accent, songs of the Fatherland and rudimentary ideas on the construction of apple pie. Among the train there was one old lady who sticks out in my memory for her uncanny knack of turning everything into Irish stew, a dish which my father heartily detested. Despite this failing she remained longer than any of the others, long enough, at any rate, to impress herself upon my memory. Perhaps the fact that she had the rare gift of silence had something to do with my father's toleration of her weird culinary performances.

But she left us, finally; they all left on one excuse or another. Their departure was usually the signal for rejoicing on both sides.

"Now, by Joe, we'll have some regular grub," my father would say.

And we would — for a while. My father was a good cook — he made a chowder which lingers yet as a bright spot in my gustatory memories — but he invariably tired of it after a week or so. I usually anticipated him by becoming tired of washing dishes and sweeping floors — both very sketchy performances on my part. Our meals usually degenerated into bread and milk, supplemented by canned goods from the store. Sooner or later the time would come when my father, after rattling about for a time in the kitchen, appeared in the doorway in disgust.

"Which is it, son, beans or roast chicken with all the fixings?" he would ask.

I cast my vote for chicken.

"Good. But we'll have to go down to the Province House to get that," he would say. "I don't believe that beans with blue mold on them are healthy, anyway."

The next day we would have a new girl. The first day of the new regime was always marked by a vigorous house cleaning — my assertions that I had cleaned house the day before being wantonly disregarded. Surprising the places they would dig dust and dirt from — places where I would never have thought of looking. Usually, too, they pried apart my carefully stacked dishes and gave them all a thorough washing, perhaps desiring to avoid unpleasant discoveries later.

I recovered from typhoid, and, at the age of four, became a partner in my father's business. He kept a store, a combination grocery-clothing-hardware store down on Front Street, just back from the wharves. It was altogether a very wonderful store; not the least wonderful feature of it was the weather beaten sign over the door — JOHN COFFIN, in great fat capitals. This was my father's name and mine also.

We would go down the hill together, my father and I, my feet drumming along between the heavier bass beats of his stride, the clean morning air from the sea coming in cool gusts against our faces, here and there a gray plume of smoke rising from the chimneys and the occasional scream of gulls from the harbor breaking the silence. On very calm mornings we could hear the rattle of blocks and creak of rigging and sometimes catch stray snatches of conversation from the distant boats, or hear the thump of rowlocks as some hake fisher brought his catch to the wharf. It was all strange and wonderful and clean, this being abroad while the rest of the world was still abed. Long after this I came across the phrase "Das Morgenuhr hat Geld ins Mund" in some textbook or other and the words brought it all back to me; the calm broken only by our clattering footsteps and the glint of the strong morning sun on my father's heavy black beard as I gazed up at him. Sometimes he met my glance and smiled down on me, but usually his gaze was fixed on the sails of the fishing fleet, far beyond the light house on the morning sea.

As we approached the store my father fished the great key from his pocket and dangled it from his finger as he went along. We clumped over the loose-boarded walk in front and he opened and swung back the old door. A swirl of spicy odors marbled with stray whiffs of coffee and cinnamon greeted us, the cat came stretching and mewing forth from the back of the store — usually followed by a sprawling and staggering legion of offspring — and the day's work was begun.

I spent the greater part of these days in playing about the store-room in the rear, conducting exploring expeditions among the litter of bales and boxes and making a general nuisance of myself. There was a thin stream of customers in the store most of the day, women with market-baskets— a vanished race now — and fishermen whose garments smelt most strongly of their calling and who wore rubber boots and flannel shirts however hot and dry the weather. These last were my chief delight ; they were a weather beaten race of men, loud voiced and terrible chewers of tobacco. They would demand of my father "where that young sculpin was at," and, running me to earth despite my shrieks of simulated terror, would ride me about the store on their shoulder, my head close to the blackened hand-hewn beams among the fly blown lamps and swinging oilskins. Once — red letter day! — one of them presented me with a miniature brig, carved from bone and the whole cunningly encased in a bottle smelling faintly and mysteriously like the donor's breath.

Perhaps I am beginning my search for causes at too early a date, but surely these first years of my life must have had a great effect on what came after. I must have had a strong propensity for imagination to begin with and this early part of my life strengthened it. My principal occupation then, as it has been since, was imagining things. Curiosity was my chief characteristic ; a curiosity always gratified by my father. Whatever theory of education he had consisted of answering my questions as well as he could, never answering me quite as completely as I desired, but always leaving a little tag of uncompleteness as an inspiration to further questionings. As my questions broadened in scope he developed a certain quality of metaphor and simile which served admirably to link things together and bring new matters within my horizon.

I had no trouble in finding material for inquiry about the store. China, for instance; somehow I had built up an image of China as a land of blue and yellow, with many-skirted pagodas and blue arched bridges and fishermen on the banks of impossibly zigzag streams, probably deriving my inspiration from an incomplete set of cracked crockery at home. Then I found a connection between the tea chests at the store and the set of crockery at home and took the matter to my father for solution.

"I'm not up on China," he confessed, and drummed reflectively on the counter. "My voyages were mostly to European ports, you know. Suppose we let it wait over awhile; guess the Eternal Kingdom won't change while we wait."

That night, by some strange chance, old Henry Rideout came clumping up to the house with his twisted foot, a tight rolled chart beneath his arm. He and my father cleared the table of its litter of books and tobacco ash and went over the chart together, I kneeling on a chair between them and following Henry's stubby finger with breathless interest.

And for weeks after that I kept a sharp lookout over the harbor for opium pirates and junks with paper sails and great staring eyes on either side of the bow.

There was another result of this manner of living. I became selfish, not intentionally but inevitably. Both at home and at the store I had everything I asked for ; such a thing as an unattainable desire failed to enter into my calculations. In the scheme of things I came first, with the rest of the world a bad second.

In truth, there was no rest of the world. Most of my days were lonely; I knew no children of my own age and was quite content to build my air castles and conduct voyages of discovery among the inexhaustible mysteries of the store. Once I fell asleep in a dim cave far in the rear of the shed, and was awakened by my father calling to me through the darkness. He carried me home that night, my head nodding drowsily over his shoulder.

"Golly," I said sleepily, "working in a store is hard work, isn't it, Dad?"

And he agreed quite gravely that it was.

in

It was soon after this, I think, that I discovered that there were other stores beside my father's.

I must have made this discovery on my first excursion into the town; I cannot remember straying from the streets between our house and the store before this. I had become tired of playing about the store and must have wandered through the front door and down the street while my father was busy elsewhere.

I went along, peering into back yards and front yards through palings and getting myself thoroughly lost after a while. Then, with startling abruptness, I came out into the Square and discovered other stores. My world rocked on its foundations.

Even the towering grandeur of the Town Hall, directly across from me, failed to hold my attention in the face of this discovery. I gaped at these other stores ; they resembled my father's in a distant fashion ; there were counters inside with boxes canted against them; people came out bearing bundles. ... A horrible suspicion entered my mind. Was this China? I knew that I had come a long way. Perhaps.

As I looked about for pigtails and pagodas a familiar figure crossed the street — the man who had presented me with the carved brig. He stared at me and then approached.

"Ain't you lost, so far from home?" he inquired genially.

That settled it ; China was far from home and this was China. And this man would probably shanghai me and make me work my passage home before the mast. I decided to return overland, and, without answering his hail, I turned and ran back the way I had come as fast as my legs would carry me.

He shouted after me, but I only ran the faster. Up streets and down streets I ran. Finally, by some miracle, I found the familiar door of the store. I shot in, panting and sobbing.

My father took the news calmly enough, after he had succeeded in making out what I was trying to tell him. Finally he understood that I had found other stores — he disillusioned me on the China part of it. But that made it worse. Other stores in town! "Damnable" was not part of my vocabulary then, but that was the way I felt about it. He heard me through with the utmost patience.

"I know," he said, when I had finished. "I've known about Adams and Bridges, and Patch Brothers and all those other fellows for a long time. But I didn't want to bother you about it. You see, Whitehaven is a pretty big town now and there's more trade than one store could handle. And if this was the only store in town I could put prices as high as I liked, and folks would either have to buy of me or go without."

This argument impressed me as eminently fair, and I considered it as best I could.

"And if some one else ran the only store in town they might raise the prices of things, too," I suggested.

"That's just it," he agreed. "You've hit it first shot. We act as a check on one another, you see. You can't get along without competition. ... By the way, Lucy said something about making some sugar cookies this afternoon. You don't know a healthy young lad with an appetite, do you?"

So ended my first lesson in economics. Lucy, our cook pro tern, was the possessor of a famous recipe for cookies, handed doAvn from her grandmother's time, and I hurried away up the hill to assure her that her cookies would never gather mold while I had my health and appetite.

That afternoon I stuffed the front of my blouse with cookies and climbed to my favorite perch in one of the apple trees — the cookies suffered in the ascent, I remember, and the fragments sifted down into my boots, making me feel like an early Christian doing penance — and sat down to reason out the matter as best I could with my limited knowledge of the world. But this knowledge was so limited that I made a sad botch of it; the only definite conclusion I made was that my father was a man of unparalleled generosity in allowing this state of affairs to continue. After all, these other stores appeared to me highly unnecessary.

But I didn't tell my father what I thought. He brought up the subject again that evening, as we sat together in the living room after supper. He went into the matter rather thoroughly, elaborated his views on the necessity of competition and proved his case to his own satisfaction and my own bewilderment. I clung to my original doubt with a new found stubbornness ; it was the first time that I had thought for myself and the first time that I had disagreed with my father's opinions. I enjoyed the sensation.

Competition impressed my youthful mind as something eminently unfair and wasteful. I still have that impression, changed somewhat, and with the direct sense of personal injury gone from it, but still much the same. I had imagined a world with our store as the center; abruptly I discovered a world in which the store was merely a satellite of a very minor planet indeed. It hurt.

Before I went to bed that night I planned to do away with competition entirely and forever — to abolish it by decree when I attained wisdom and manhood.

We often talked together in the evening in this manner — or rather my father talked and I made valiant efforts to follow him. Sometimes he read to me and sometimes talked ; and once or twice I remember his breaking off in the midst of a story and picking up his book again. I have always thought that he did this to avoid bringing in my mother's name, for he never trusted himself to speak of her. I learned her maiden name and her age from the stone in the old graveyard, but that is all I know of her.

It is quite likely that I discovered Whitehaven by degrees, the unwelcome companion of boys older than myself. But, looking back, I seem to find myself cast into it all at once. I must have been eight years old at the time.

I carried a torch, as I remember this sudden discovery ; an evil smelling, oil dripping, flaring and guttering contraption. The stick rests in the waistband of my trousers and produces an anticipatory Thanksgiving effect. I march at the elbow of a stout man with a shining big mouthed horn looped over his shoulder in a glorified blanket roll. He scowls, puffs and produces the melodious oompah-oompah part of a soul-stirring music which marches with me. He pauses and gasps for breath; with the pause his face returns to human form. He reaches out a hand and pulls me down to earth.

"You hold that torch where I can see my sheets," he commands gruffly. "What d'you think you are — the whole peerade?"

"Yessir," I answer eagerly.

He scowls doubtfully, then suddenly purses his lips and shatters the air again with his two notes up and down the scale. I hold the torch closer, to the immediate peril of his eyebrows. But he seems satisfied and I surely am.

The music crashes to a superb finale; the staccato beat of a drum emerges from the ambush of sound; the resplendent uniform beside me empties its horn and clamps on a fresh sheet of music as we march. From one side of his mouth he informs his neighbor, a tall man with an equally resplendent uniform, that these hills sure raise hell with a man's wind. The tall man agrees that he is hooting right. I treasure their utterances.