Further Adventures of a Yachtsman's Wife

WHEN I was a very young girl, and inclined, like most young people, to despise the beautiful commonplace things of daily life, and to find the path of the usual a dull place for my walks abroad, an old lady said to me, —

“My dear, do not underrate the value of the usual; its highway is a convenient road which leads one to a freedom of spirit; for blazing one’s own path through life is wasting one’s time on hard work when we might better have made use of the labor of others.”

And, indeed, I have found the path of the usual like a well-trodden road, perhaps not as interesting as cross-country traveling, but still a saver of time and trouble, and if on its even surface one has not so much joy of adventure, neither does one bark one’s shins or tear one’s clothes in scrambling over fences.

It is, for instance, so much against the usual for a woman to sail a boat as to seem almost against nature, and so I say no yachtsman’s wife should learn to sail; for no grown woman can learn to handle a boat and not be puffed up with pride.

When Stan and I were first married, I felt my way around among the conventions of his yachtsman’s world awkwardly enough. It was a long time before I learned enough so that, metaphorically speaking, I no longer ate with my knife; and though I learned to know the yachtsmen’s conventions by sight, they formed no part of me; rather did they seem like the meaningless etiquette of some outlandish people. However, all the lubberly mistakes I made were not, I now realize, so great a mistake as my learning to sail; for now I am in an independent position — a woman with a bank account of her own, as it were. But while a woman may have a bank account and a humble spirit at the same time, there is no such thing as sailing a boat meekly, for the very moment one is captain of only a sneak-box one becomes as arrogant and intolerant of advice as the Old Man of any smart oldtime clipper. In my own case, as you will see, much trouble came from this unfortunate and unnatural attitude of mind.

One may sin against the usual in a myriad of other ways than the one that I followed in leaving my “ woman’s sphere,” — which on a boat is keeping one’s mouth closed and seeing after the lunch; one may, for instance, like young Morris, be constantly fishing in the depth of one’s being for rare emotions, and, lacking these, one may sit off by one’s self and take one’s mind to pieces like a watch and fit it together again. Played alone, this is as harmless a game as solitaire, but when two play at it, it becomes a dangerous game of chance.

And to show that all this is true I will tell the story of two sails; and you will see how much better off we should all have been had every one of us followed the comfortable path of every day.

This story begins with Morris and Alison James, Phil Temple, Stan, and myself starting forth for a day of sailing. It was I who was taking the boat out. We floated down the endless harbor, borne rather by the ebbing tide than the little breath of wind, toward the shining Sound where white-sailed boats glided along like stately birds. Farther out toward the Long Island shore, sails were bending to stray breaths of wind, which here and there disturbed the shining blue mirror.

Stanford at last broke the silence which held us all with —

“ If you hold on that way much longer you’ll have us all up on the mud!”

I tranquilly held my boat on its course, — it was I who was sailing it.

“Did you hear what I say,” asked Stan, and there was a note of just anger in his voice.

“Yes,” I replied tranquilly and without defiance, “I heard you.” And I continued on my course with composure. One learns during a number of years of married life how to avoid annoying one’s husband, — one also learns how best to annoy him.

“Suit yourself,” came from Stan; and it was wonderful what a threat he made of his simple words,—weeks of lying on the mud were in them.

Outwardly unmoved, but with my heart beating a trifle faster, I continued my course toward the shallow water which hid the mud banks, concealing unplumbed depths of obstinacy under a restful, peaceful manner, — in fact, quite overdoing it, and in the end seeming hardly conscious of the tiller in my hand. But my indifference was a defiance, my tranquillity a challenge.

It was, you see, a breach of family etiquette for Stan to interfere with me; had he been at the tiller he might have deliberately wrecked the boat without my opening my mouth, so well am I drilled.

Stanford elaborately ignored me and my sailing. “Hang us up on the mud for all I care,” his attitude told me. At last, “Ready about,” says I, in a languid, indifferent tone, as if I had n’t judged the distance of the mud bank to an inch. The little boat turned on its heel, the rudder scraped the mud, leaving a turgid yellow streak on the blue water. I allowed myself no triumph. I merely continued to zigzag the endless harbor, giving the mud bank a kick on each tack, sitting aloof and superb at my tiller.

I only tell this episode to show the dangers of a wife’s learning to sail, and how exasperating, headstrong, and self-confident this perilous knowledge makes a woman. I tell it, too, because what young Morris said about it so well illustrates his attitude toward us.

He turned to Alison James and said,

“ Are n’t they as heavenly as I said they were ? Is n’t it a pity that we can’t in decency call in a writer and have him put them in a book ? ” At which Alison turned her long, narrow eyes to Morris, nodding comprehendingly. So Morris, by his question and Alison’s mute answer, had turned himself into a spectator and us into a show. Phil Temple bristled like a turkey gobbler.

“Oh, don’t mind the decencies,” he sputtered. “ Call in your writer. You can’t make us any more notorious than we are, sailing in this freak boat. Was n’t it ugly enough without painting it to look like a poster ? I feel as if I were sailing in an advertisement for some breakfast food!”

It was an open boat, and its lines were as graceful as those of a washtub, which in many respects it resembled; it was as high-sided as one, and was prevented from being as circular mainly by a snubby bowsprit on the one hand, and an enormous rudder on the other. This rudder was so out of proportion, and was shipped so high, that the boat’s name, which was painted in large yellow letters, was cut in two, with the result that on one side of the rudder one read VASEand on the other -LINE. The boat was only sixteen feet over all, and had a jib and mainsail of a mellow golden hue such as one seldom sees this side of the Mediterranean, and it was wonderfully conspicuous among the flock of white-sailed yachts which flit over the Sound. This conspicuous canvas was only Stan’s way of letting the whole Sound know that if he had to sail in a boat of so antiquated a model it was only as a joke. As a matter of fact, we had come home from Italy, as every one else does, poor, and it was for us the Vaseline or nothing.

So the poor old craft which had sedately bobbed up and down at her mooring week-days, and gone on fishing excursions Sundays quite as sedately (as if, indeed, these excursions were a sort of sailboat’s church), for a matter of over thirty years, had been done over in this extraordinary fashion.

She had been a boat much cherished by her simple-hearted owners, not one of whom had had the heart to change the name which had been given to her in her youth; for when we found her, BEA was painted on one side of the stern, and UTY on the other.

Old boats, as well as old houses, have each one its peculiar atmosphere, and Beauty spoke eloquently of the simpler yachting manners of an earlier day. She had artless tales to tell me of long fishing parties where one really caught fish, of jolly family sailing parties where one carried huge lunch baskets bursting with homely, substantial food. In short, she was as honest, simple, elderly a boat as ever you saw. There was something as indecent in snatching her out of the obscurity of her little unfrequented cove on the Connecticut shore and making her the Sound Harlequin, as there would be in pulling an old lady out of her rocker on her back piazza and setting her pirouetting in a circus ring.

Not a shade of Phil’s disapproval escaped the analytical eye of Morris. The whole morning had seemed to his perverse sense of humor a delicious comedy. Stanford and I and our boats have always seemed to Morris, as he said to Alison James, “heavenly,” and in all the many years he has sailed with us he has never had any one with whom he could share his esoteric chuckles. Now he looked over to Alison for a responsive gleam, but Alison was talking to me with her pretty volubility. She was saying,—

“I think it was such a picturesque idea. I’ve always loved boats with bright-colored sails, — in pictures, I mean; I never saw one! — And the name is so quaint: the Vaseline ! How did you happen to think of that name, Mrs. Dayton?”

“It came to me,” I replied, a malicious eye on Morris. Very well I knew that Morris had brought Alison James that he might experience the subtle joys of watching the effect we produced on her. He had not bargained for the effect she might produce on us. He had wanted Alison to share with him his secret knowledge of how droll we are; and now, as the wind freshened and we slipped evenly along, she burst out in exultation over the joys of sailing; her words tumbled over each other in soft eagerness. She gave the impression of bridging over some conversational gap, of trying in the face of difficulties to put every one at ease; and Morris, who thought he made “insight” a profession, had not the keenness to see that it was herself whom Alison was trying to put at ease.

I for one was sorry for her (and it is no new thing for me to feel sorry for my guests). There she was, dumped down with a hostess who, puffed up with pride, ostentatiously sailed the boat; then there was Morris, who expected some wonderful appreciation of her, but what, she did n’t exactly know. So, obscurely aware that she had missed the right “tone,” — and how particular Morris was about tone,—she continued to give out appreciations of the Sound. She did it charmingly, being one of the few women to whom superlatives are becoming.

Morris looked at her with sternness. This was not the way he had expected her to take either sailing or us.

“Let’s go out in front of the mast, Alison,” he suggested.

Poor Alison’s gayety died. The bubbling flow of her enthusiasms subsided like a dying geyser, but as she stepped to the other side of the sail,

“You are quick with your blame,” said she to Morris, and reproach and pride were in her dark eyes. She was the type of girl that makes other women seem colorless ; but he was n’t to be softened by any mere prettiness, — what he demanded was “insight; ” and I heard him reply in his soft voice,—

“I have said nothing,” thus metaphorically shutting the door in Alison’s face. And I hastily changed the course of the boat, putting the sail between us and them.

On our side of the sail all was not harmony, nor did our lack of what Morris calls “ oneness ” express itself in subtleties.

Phil had preserved his gloom intact in spite of the lovely day, and he now opened fire on Stan by remarking, in his honest, outspoken way, —

“ Do you know what this boat of yours makes me think of ? It makes me think of a piece of antique furniture enameled white, with the claws gilded. The matter with you is you’ve lost your standards. You’re too impressionable. Gad! I ought to be glad you did n’t come back wearing a beret and a mile of red sash around your stomach.”

“I don’t see what there is so wrong about this boat.” A first faint note of uneasiness showed itself in Stan’s voice.

“I like its looks,” said I; “and I don’t see, if one wants to, why one should n’t paint the mast of one’s own boat like a barber’s pole.”

“ I suppose you don’t! ” Phil answered wearily, looking across at Stan, who returned his look. It was evident to me that I had somehow been “just like a girl” again, and again, as often before, the sense of the inferiority of women brought together the two old friends.

There is nothing more treacherous than a little boat for giving away secrets. On one tack the people forward are shut away from their companions as if by a partition; then let the boat come about, and a whispering gallery is a better place for confidences. So from time to time Alison’s voice would be wafted to me, — and I could no more help hearing than if she had been seated next me. So I caught things like, —

“ I suppose this is one of the phases we must all go through. We must be patient with each other; ” or, “after all, what we call ‘ engagements ’ are the results of such an artificial condition that they naturally conduce to the hypercritical state of mind you and I find ourselves in;” and again, “It’s uncomfortable, but it’s interesting. Oh, how all this should make us understand!”

Then Morris; “You’ve missed the whole point, my dear girl—forgive me if I say you don’t understand.” His voice came to me cool and superior, as superior as the voice of a husband teaching one to sail. After all, “insight” and “understanding” and the game of analysis were the boats of Alison and Morris, — a game which they played with the deadly seriousness of children, just as Stan and I used to play at sailing; and the games one plays in this whole-souled fashion often seem to one more important than the real business of life. Quarreling over such games makes very little difference after one is married, though before it often leads to trouble; and I wished that I had a church and a parson handy and could take Alison and Morris, and marry them off, and let them play the game of buying the furniture for their house, and then afterwards let them up and analyze each other’s souls, and welcome.

We had got well to the middle of the Sound when the wind treacherously forsook us, the boat slid along like some gayly painted beetle, slowly and more slowly, and at last the mainsail gave a discouraged flap, as if to say, “I can do no more,” and Alison’s voice came clearly to the cockpit;—

“The question to me is, if we really cared, would we, do you think, pick It to pieces this way ? Do you think if we felt, really felt, we could talk so much ?”

Then the idle boom swung, creaking mournfully, to some little swell, and disclosed Morris, his head in his hands.

“I don’t know, Alison,” he said; “I don’t know.” It was evident that Tragedy was passing over. I might as reasonably have asked Stan in our early days, whether, if he really cared for me, he would have sailed so much; but people always give speech undue importance, and refuse to realize that certain kinds of conversation are to be classed with golf or chess or any other absorbing but insignificant pastime. However, I tried to drown Alison out by chaffing Phil Temple, but her voice had a thrilling quality which rose above our chatter when the poor child wailed,—

“It’s you who can’t feel! It’s you who’ve killed It for me. You’ve analyzed It to death, you’ve talked It to death!” — and I could stand it no longer, and called my two guests away from their tragic little sport.

The difference between men and women in such matters is that men down deep in their hearts know that a game is a game, while women don’t. So Morris, having played his game, ignored it, which, to poor Alison, proved his heartlessness.

Meanwhile the day grew hotter and more hot, the waters gave back the reflection of the sun like a piece of polished metal, and still not a breath of wind; the Sound was dotted with the white sails of motionless boats.

There are some people whose worst natures are brought forth by the idle waiting in an idle boat. There are others whose impatience brings them to the verge of suicide. A day of calm in a small boat on a hot day can break up friendships; and people who are not congenial become homicidal when they are shut up together in so confined a space, with nothing to take their minds from one another’s defects.

In this case it was Alison who suffered, and I who suffered vicariously through her. Poor child! there was no way of getting from us, no chance of a solitude where she could luxuriously nurse her disillusionment, which was, of course, what she wanted to do, as was only natural and right for one of her age and condition.

At last she asked, “How much longer do you think it will be, Mr. Temple, before the wind comes up ? ” which brought a swift glance of displeasure from Morris, for this is one of the questions no woman may ask when sailing; and I was glad enough of a diversion, though it caused discomfort to Stan.

From all parts of the Sound on a Sunday afternoon you may hear the throbbing of motor boats. When there is a calm there are more motors than ever. They love to run up and down, past the becalmed yachts, puff-puffing and chugchugging insolently to call attention to the fact that they are not becalmed; they prattle insistently and noisily to the still, bored boats of a motor’s independence of wind and tide. On the whole, I know of no more offensive being than a motor boat in a flat calm.

I had noticed that a number of launches had passed near us but as they were polite, well-bred private boats, I did not realize, until one went out of its course, made toward us, and off again, that our yellow sail had aroused the curiosity of the Sound. But this was not the end. For a long time I had been aware of a snorting and panting, of a sobbing and groaning, as of a boat in great pain, for the noise of a motor carries a great distance. Then I located the noise, the snorts grew louder, and there bore down on us a motor boat the like of which I never saw. It was a degraded old hulk of a low-lived fishing boat; it towered up shapeless and uncouth; and from what looked like the discarded stovepipe of a kitchen stove there was vomited forth smoke; and as the thing ran toward us we watched it silently, until Phil Temple said, with conviction,—

“The owner’s mother made that in a bad dream. She made it of tin cans.”

Aboard this indecent craft were a half dozen men; one trailed his feet, boots and all, in the water. They were all drunk, as one must needs be to trust one’s self to such a nightmare motor, which shrieked and sobbed to the whole Sound that her end was near.

Yet it was from this boat that we were to learn what the Sound thought of us, and what it thought was not complimentary. It was conveyed to us by the medium of derisive whoops and yells, as the homemade motor boat circled around us, panting and strangling, getting ready for the final snort which should burst her tank, and send the dishonored hulk and all aboard to the bottom of the Sound.

We had sinned against the law of the usual; and in the yachting world there is no greater crime; for the world of boats the world over permits no unconventionality, and the same spirit which forbids centreboards to the boats of the mistralswept Mediterranean because there have never been centreboards there, also forbids orange sails on the Sound for the same reason; and I was heartily glad when the wind at last arose and took us home, away from a critical and inquisitive world. Phil Temple and Morris were as merry as crickets, but as we alighted at the wharf, and the setting sun turned Alison James’s scorched face an even deeper crimson, Morris regarded his onetime fiancée with anxiety.

“Poor child,” said he, “you’re shockingly burned. I’m afraid your nose will peel, Alison. Let me see your hands; why, they’re all purple and swollen!” Thus may even a man with insight say the hopelessly wrong thing.

Alison led the way, throwing over her shoulder to Morris, — and she ignored his last remark, — “We may as well look the situation in the face — I don’t believe in half measures; ” and that Morris replied, “What situation?” showed Alison how light-minded he was.

Between the first and second cruise of the Vaseline there was an interval of two weeks. Stan and I were preoccupied,for Stan had a boat on his hands in which nothing would have induced him to sail, while my conscience was burdened with a broken engagement, for Morris had been made to understand that there was a situation. When he saw that Alison had thrown him over, and for no good reason that he could see, he became touchingly miserable, and finally blurted out at me, like any ordinary boy, a despairing, “Oh, I don’t understand girls, anyway;” which was for Morris an immense comedown. What made the situation poignant was that Alison told me she could never marry any one who did not understand her, which was only her way of saying that she would not stand Morris giving himself the airs of a superior male being. I do not blame any unmarried girl for feeling this way. Such actions are unnatural and unfitting for all men but brothers and husbands. She showed plenty of spirit, too, for she refused to see Morris alone. He wanted “to explain,” he said, while Alison said there was nothing to explain; and so for two weeks I served as a medium of communication between them, being as it were a species of human telephone.

During these two weeks you will please fancy Stanford sneaking off to a little deserted boatyard every spare moment he had, where he with his own hands slapped three coats of white paint upon the fat black sides of the Vaseline, and painted out her name.

When a little fat white boat, with no name and white sails, gracefully and modestly bobbed and curtsied at the mooring where the bedizened Vaseline had formerly lain, I professed myself not only pleased, but surprised. I like to tell this. I do not want you to think that I am always tactless and arrogant, especially as what I now have to relate shows how out of perspective one may get if one quits the paths of every day; for if I had not learned to sail a boat, I am sure that I never should have proposed sailing to a place we had lived in two summers before, to collect certain articles that we had stored there in a barn.

“A baby carriage might be a very uncomfortable thing in a boat,” Stan objected, “if there was any wind at all. “Besides, it will look so queer.”

“The Vaseline,” I told him, “is so fat and high-sided that no one will notice it, anyway.”

Of course I see now how preposterous it was, but like most preposterous things it seemed at the moment not only reasonable, but thrifty. I was quite proud of myself for thinking of it.

I felt more vainglorious than any old skipper when we started off on the second cruise of the Vaseline, for I was not only going to have my own way, but I was doing a kindness to others; carrying Alison along to take her mind off her unengaged state, which by this time was beginning to depress her. As we bore down on the wharf I saw young Morris, arrayed in conspicuously white clothes. Stan remarked, in tones too off-hand to be natural, —

“Morris was lunching over here, and I told him we’d pick him up.” It is not women only who hasten along the hands of the matrimonial clock.

Together we set forth after the baby carriage. In the dusk of the barn it loomed larger than I thought a baby carriage could. It was covered with thick dust, as were the fly-screens, the two pails, and the box which I had not told Stan about. Spiders had found it an alluring place for the weaving of heavy webs; the hammock also was degraded, noisome, mildewed.

“See here, Meg,” Stanford began sternly, “the Vaseline, after all, is n’t a moving van.”

But a rage for those things possessed me; they were mine, and I needed them.

“How else,” I argued, “shall we get them home ? I could buy them for what it would cost to cart them.”

Like a man, “Buy others,” he suggested.

“Buy others,” I shrilled, “when I have already perfectly good ones!” By sheer force of will and obstinacy, such as the best of wives sometimes show, I overcame his better judgment. I had come for that baby carriage, for those fly-screens, those two pails, and the hammock, and even though old, dirty, and mildewed, they were mine, and I wanted them. I could not bear to go away and leave them, I had to have them, — and more than anything, I wanted my own way.

And poor Stan realized, as every husband from the first husband of all has realized, first or last, that this was a moment when the obstinacy of woman is a dynamic force; and with grumbling and muttering he gave way before it.

He seized the baby carriage and the hammock. Phil followed with two flyscreens; he held the dirty things far from him protestingly; Morris took to his white bosom the box, while Alison possessed herself of the pails. I, the skipper of the Vaseline, followed this procession, selfsatisfied, clean, and unburdened.

Now, however, I quite agree with Stan that a small boat is no place for a perambulator, nor for fly-screens, for that matter, and I began to agree with him the moment we were in the boat. Unaccountably that baby carriage seemed to have grown in size by the time we got it aboard. It took up all the room there was, and the fly-screens took up the rest. Morris, with a smile of perfect content, helped Alison in, and she smiled back at him. This time Morris had no need to ask Alison if we were not “heavenly; ” she could see for herself, for this time we were being heavenly with a vengeance. We arranged ourselves in the space left by my belongings; as we got under way a rude little boy in a sneak-box jeered us. I found that it made a great difference to me whose fault it was that the Vaseline was jeered. The wind had shifted and freshened; the little boat lay far over on her fat side, while little choppy waves hit her “plop” on her fat bosom, at which she would stop indignantly, like a plump old lady who is splashed by a cable car.

Meanwhile the baby carriage changed from an inanimate to an animate object. It charged down on Stan’s shins, it made frantic dashes at the centreboard trunk. We hung on to it, but it got away from us. Not one of us but had a tussle with it. Boats which passed near us derided our struggles.

Finally Stan growled, “ Hang on to this infernal machine, Margery, will you ? You know more about such things than I do.”

Silently I relinquished the tiller, and applied myself to the pacification of the ramping perambulator. I was no longer the skipper of the Vaseline. I was Stanford Dayton’s wife, who had for a moment forgotten the old adage that there is a place for everything, and that everything should be in its place; who for a moment had strayed from the beaten paths, and who was now being punished for it corporally by an indignant baby carriage. I had brought about an unnatural meeting, and was reaping the fruits of it by knocks and bruises, — it is well to keep boats and baby carriages apart in this world. Meantime Morris made gentle, ineffectual efforts to pacify the flyscreens. Soon he arose, and said with decision, “Alison, come with me, this is no place for us; ” and as they made their way to the damp deck, he turned and waved a graceful adieu to the screens.

“Good-by, my friends,” he said to them; “I leave you in possession of the field.” And I realized as never before just what it was about Morris that on occasion so irritated Stan and Phil.

Phil meantime sat apart, courteous and aloof. He could not join with his usual friendly fashion in this family quarrel; he could only feign indifference; when the baby carriage rapped him smartly he grew almost apologetic, as if by moving his legs out of the way he admitted that there was a baby carriage, and thus intruded unduly on our domestic affairs.

It was at this moment that I began to understand the meaning of the yachtsman’s etiquette. When other boats smiled derisively at our abominable freight, I realized why moorings should be picked up in a certain way; why it is essential that ropes should be coiled in such and such a manner; for etiquette is merely the usual formalized, the ritual of the easiest way. And in abiding by the many rules custom lays down for us one attains, as my old friend said, a freedom of spirit, — one also avoids making one’s self ridiculous. I confessed that a boat is no place for a baby carriage, and that, the world over, a man should be the skipper of his craft.

But I was not the only penitent. As I clung with aching arms to the burden I had laid on us all, and as we turned in our harbor, the shifting sail disclosed Alison and Morris on the wet deck. They held one another’s hands, and there was nothing cryptic in the way Morris cried to us joyously, —

“We ’re engaged again! I’ve explained everything to Alison, — I’ve explained that I was wrong from the first.”