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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Secret Harbour," Stewart Edward White crafts a compelling narrative set against the stunning backdrop of the Pacific Northwest. Combining vivid descriptive language with intricate character development, the novel immerses readers in the life of a solitary man navigating love, ambition, and the stark beauty of nature. With an exploration of human relationships and the quest for self-discovery, White deftly weaves elements of adventure and introspection, reflecting the Romantic literary tradition, which emphasizes the individual's emotional depth in harmony with the natural world. Stewart Edward White, a prominent early 20th-century American author, was deeply informed by his love for nature and outdoor life, as well as his experiences in the wilderness. His background as a successful writer, explorer, and advocate for conservation shaped his narrative style and thematic focus. White's firsthand engagements with the landscapes he described lent authenticity and emotional resonance to his storytelling, allowing readers to glimpse his profound connection to the environment and the human spirit. "Secret Harbour" is a must-read for admirers of classic literature and those who appreciate tales that balance adventure with philosophical inquiry. White's ability to evoke vivid imagery and evoke deep emotions invites readers to reflect on their own lives, making it a timeless exploration of identity in the face of nature's grandeur. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Secret Harbour
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the threshold between refuge and revelation, a hidden place tests the courage and conscience of those who draw near it. Secret Harbour invites readers into a world where privacy carries both promise and peril, asking how far one might go to protect what matters and what it costs to keep things concealed. Rather than relying on spectacle, the book’s power lies in the pressure of choices made under scrutiny and the quiet intensities that unfold when safety, belonging, and truth come into conflict. It is a story about boundaries—geographic, moral, and emotional—and how crossing them changes us.
Secret Harbour is a work of fiction by Stewart Edward White, an American author active in the first half of the twentieth century and widely known for narratives attentive to practical life and the natural world. While specific publication details can vary by edition, the novel sits comfortably within the period when White was a prominent voice in American popular fiction. Readers approaching the book can expect a story shaped by the traditions of adventure and character study, delivered with the restraint and clarity that marked much of his career. Its context is one of craftsmanship, observation, and measured drama.
The experience on offer is immersive yet intentionally controlled: a steady accumulation of incident, motive, and atmosphere that builds tension without forfeiting realism. White’s prose favors precision over ornament, guiding the reader through scenes and decisions with unhurried confidence. The narrative emphasizes cause and consequence rather than coincidence, and it invites attention to the texture of lived moments—work, weather, silence, and the small negotiations that reveal deeper loyalties. Without leaning on plot twists, the book achieves momentum through moral stakes, letting the pressures of circumstance expose character and the limits of certainty in a world that rarely announces its intentions.
At its core, Secret Harbour is concerned with secrecy and responsibility—who holds knowledge, who is excluded, and how the burdens of concealment reshape relationships. The idea of a harbor evokes sanctuary, yet sanctuary is never absolute; protection for one party may mean danger or loss for another. The novel explores that friction, considering duty to self versus duty to others and the costs of loyalty under stress. It also probes how place influences judgment: how we read signals, misread intentions, and learn to trust—or distrust—the ground beneath our feet. These questions pulse beneath the surface, shaping every choice.
White’s approach to character is unsentimental but humane, revealing people through action, skill, and the quiet logic of their decisions. He often allows the physical world to serve as a moral testing ground, where competence, patience, and self-discipline matter as much as conviction. Dialogue tends to be economical, leaving subtext to emerge from what characters attempt, endure, or refuse. This restraint gives the book a contemplative mood even in moments of urgency. By centering tangible details and observable behaviors, the narrative invites readers to participate as interpreters, weighing evidence and motive without the safety net of overt authorial guidance.
For contemporary readers, Secret Harbour resonates through its engagement with privacy, refuge, and the ethics of disclosure—questions that remain urgent in a world of surveillance, contested spaces, and fragile communities. The novel’s attention to judgment under uncertainty speaks to modern dilemmas: how to act when information is partial, when obligations compete, and when the consequences of speaking or staying silent are genuinely mixed. It also underscores resilience grounded in competence and mutual reliance, offering a counterpoint to spectacle-driven storytelling. What endures is the book’s insistence that integrity is forged not in grand declarations, but in a series of exacting, everyday choices.
Approached in this light, Secret Harbour promises a reading experience that is reflective, quietly suspenseful, and rich in consequential detail. It rewards patience with a deepening sense of moral texture, encouraging readers to measure actions against principles and to notice how intentions shift when shelter feels scarce. Those who value lucid prose, grounded situations, and ethical complexity will find the novel’s restraint a source of strength. Rather than announcing its themes, it lets them accrue, inviting engagement long after the final page. In doing so, it exemplifies Stewart Edward White’s enduring capacity to marry clear-eyed storytelling with durable human questions.
Synopsis
Secret Harbour opens in a modest coastal town where maritime work shapes daily life and the rhythms of weather, tide, and trade set the pace. The story introduces a capable young protagonist drawn to the sea’s promise and the quiet, practical people who navigate it. Early chapters sketch the routines of boats, docks, and shoreline trails, showing how skill and observation govern survival. Rumors persist of a secluded inlet, difficult to find and treacherous to enter, that offers shelter and opportunity. The setting establishes a world where courage and restraint are equally valued, and where discovery can invite both risk and reward.
Guided by curiosity and a desire to prove competence, the protagonist learns the coast’s subtleties from experienced mentors—soundings, currents, kelp lines, and wind shifts that separate the prepared from the reckless. The narrative follows careful preparation rather than sudden leaps, emphasizing charts, equipment, and the quiet craft of seamanship. Tales of the hidden harbour surface in dockside talk, half folklore and half navigational puzzle. Each tidbit suggests a place that could change fortunes if approached with judgment. This phase builds knowledge, trust, and a sense that the sea’s secrets yield only to patience, shared effort, and a disciplined eye.
Explorations begin in cautious forays, tracing headlands and reef-studded channels. The novel lingers on practical challenges: setting a course under uncertain weather, reading shoreline features for clues, and measuring risk in shifting fog. Companionship forms under tested conditions, creating a small crew whose cooperation feels earned. Encounters with other watermen—fishermen, small traders, and seasonal crews—hint at overlapping interests and quiet rivalries along the coast. Each outing yields fragments of evidence: a distinctive rock mark, an unusual swell pattern, a sudden calm in the lee of a cliff. A map emerges, incomplete but increasingly persuasive.
The search for the secret anchorage intersects with broader pressures. Economic strains tighten, and some see opportunity in any refuge that promises access or concealment. Officials, meanwhile, stress rules intended to preserve safety and order. The protagonist senses the inlet’s potential as both sanctuary and leverage point, a place where lawful enterprise and illicit schemes might converge. Without naming culprits or outcomes, the narrative underscores a tension between expedience and principle. Practical questions dominate: who controls access, how to use a place without spoiling it, and what responsibilities come with knowledge that others do not possess.
A turning point arrives when weather closes in, and a routine passage becomes a test of preparation. The crew’s seamanship is measured against sleet, crosscurrents, and failing visibility. The secret harbour, once only hypothesis, appears less as a prize than a necessity, a margin of safety in a long, exposed run. Community ties strengthen as vessels coordinate signals, share bearings, and translate local lore into action. The narrative emphasizes teamwork over heroics: adjustments to sail and engine, watch rotations, and conservative choices that keep small craft intact. The inlet’s value as a real place, not a legend, becomes unmistakable.
With its existence effectively confirmed, attention shifts to the harbour’s implications. Competing aims surface—those who would exploit a concealed haven for quick advantage, those who prize it as a commons of last resort, and those tasked with upholding regulations. The protagonist faces layered decisions involving loyalty to crew, obligations to law, and respect for the coast that sustains everyone. The novel presents practical dilemmas rather than moral speeches: when to speak, whom to trust, and how to ensure safety without inviting a rush that would strip the harbour of its protective anonymity.
Events compress around a contested voyage and a fraught rendezvous, where the stakes are high but outcomes remain uncertain. A careful balance of observation and restraint governs the response. The narrative highlights process—confirming positions, safeguarding cargo and people, and documenting what can be stated without revealing too much. Communication becomes central: quiet agreements, coded signals, and a shared understanding that missteps at sea carry swift consequences. The deference to craft and chain-of-command aligns with the book’s steady tone, showing how competence can defuse risk while leaving unresolved the larger question of how the harbour should be used.
A final series of movements brings the strands together: an approach under marginal conditions, a meeting where competing claims are tested, and a return passage that seals immediate outcomes without closing the subject. The resolution is practical rather than theatrical, avoiding spectacle in favor of orderly actions that protect life and property. The harbour remains intact, its existence no longer speculation yet not broadly disclosed. Boundaries are drawn—informal, contingent, and grounded in the shared understanding of those who need the refuge and accept its limits. The story honors prudence as much as daring.
In closing, Secret Harbour affirms a consistent message: that mastery, cooperation, and restraint confer more durable advantage than force or secrecy alone. The book underscores the sea’s indifferent demands and the way communities adapt through skill and mutual accountability. The hidden inlet symbolizes both opportunity and responsibility—a resource to be respected, not consumed. Without revealing specific fates, the ending suggests continuity: crews will sail again, weather will shift, and the harbour’s protection endures because it is used with care. The narrative’s measured pace and practical focus leave a clear impression of earned confidence and guarded trust.
Historical Context
Stewart Edward White’s Secret Harbour is rooted in the small-harbor geography and social economy of the upper Great Lakes, evoking the dune-backed inlets and pine-fringed shorelines of Michigan and northern Lake Huron-Lake Michigan country in the 1920s and early 1930s. These were liminal places: former lumber ports turned mixed economies of fishing, lake trade, and seasonal tourism, where isolated coves and sandspits offered concealment from the open lake. The era’s technological changes—gasoline launches, radios, faster lake freighters—remade how people moved and traded. Yet the communities retained frontier habits of self-help and discretion, shaped by memories of the lumber boom and by new pressures of cross-border commerce, law enforcement, and clandestine traffic during Prohibition.
The most immediate historical framework is national Prohibition, instituted after ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment on 16 January 1919 and enforcement under the Volstead Act beginning 17 January 1920; it ended with the Twenty-First Amendment on 5 December 1933. On the Great Lakes, a vast informal economy arose along the short international boundary—at the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, the United States and Canada are only about a kilometer apart at points—enabling liquor to move from Ontario (notably Walkerville, home of Hiram Walker’s distillery) toward Michigan. Winter created an “ice bridge,” and smugglers used cars, sleds, and skiffs; in open water, lightless launches ran from Canadian shorelines to hidden American coves. Detroit’s Purple Gang, active roughly 1917–1932, taxed, organized, or protected portions of this traffic, while independent fishers and small-boat captains elsewhere on Lakes Huron and Michigan opportunistically moved cases into secluded harbors. The U.S. Coast Guard, created in 1915, fielded a “Dry Navy” to interdict these routes, stationing picket boats and patrols at Belle Isle (Detroit), St. Clair Flats, and throughout the straits and islands. Secret Harbour mirrors this contested littoral—its “secret” inlets and night passages echo the real tactics of muffled engines, rendezvous off points and reefs, and signaling by screened lanterns. The book’s harbor society—storekeepers, fishermen, wardens, deputies, and quiet patrons—refracts the social tensions Prohibition produced: divided loyalties, the moral gray zone between livelihood and law, and the quotidian logistics of concealment in places where every shoreline bend could mask a cache or a lookout.
Cross-border governance also shaped the milieu. The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 created the International Joint Commission (IJC) to manage shared waters and disputes, establishing a cooperative legal framework that overlapped with criminal enforcement. Canada’s liquor regime diverged: Ontario enacted the Ontario Temperance Act in 1916 and then repealed provincial prohibition in 1927, instituting regulated sales through the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). That legality on the Canadian side, juxtaposed with U.S. prohibition, fueled supply. Secret Harbour reflects these asymmetries in its depiction of ambiguous jurisdiction and local pragmatism, where residents understand both the letter of border law and the realities of a lake divided by an invisible line.
The late nineteenth-century Michigan lumber boom—and its collapse—cast a long shadow over Great Lakes harbors. From the 1860s through the 1890s, white pine logging centered on ports such as Muskegon and Manistee, with Michigan’s output peaking at over 5 billion board feet in 1889. By 1900 the cutover left tax-delinquent lands, shuttered mills, and depopulating waterfronts. The state began assembling public forest lands after 1908, and the Huron National Forest was established in 1909. Secret Harbour’s physical setting—abandoned booms, weathered wharves, second-growth scrub—draws from this history, suggesting how communities reinvented themselves after the lumber era, sometimes turning to marginal trades and covert lakework in the interstices of a faded industrial landscape.
Industrial Detroit’s explosive growth created demand—and opportunity—that radiated across the region. Ford’s moving assembly line debuted at Highland Park in 1913; by 1930 Detroit’s population reached approximately 1.57 million. The metropolitan thirst for liquor, combined with organized distribution networks, made nearby waterways strategic corridors. The Purple Gang mediated flows through the Detroit-Windsor funnel, while peripheral routes along Lake Huron’s shore and through the Straits of Mackinac supplied smaller markets. Secret Harbour mirrors this economic geography by situating a quiet port within reach of urban demand yet buffered by distance and difficult water, where a few fast launches and discreet warehouses could convert isolation into advantage.
The expansion and professionalization of maritime law enforcement marked the period. The U.S. Coast Guard, formed in 1915 from the Revenue Cutter Service and Life-Saving Service, received an enforcement mandate during Prohibition. Beginning in 1924–1925, the service deployed 75-foot “six-bitter” picket boats and equipped stations around the Lakes with radio communications and faster interceptors. Lifesaving stations at strategic points, including Belle Isle and the St. Clair Flats, doubled as interdiction nodes. Secret Harbour captures the cat-and-mouse texture of this modernization: watch schedules, code calls, and the narrowed margins for clandestine trade as technology—searchlights, engines, and radio—tilted advantage toward the state.
Immigration and nativism also frame the harbor world. The Emergency Quota Act (1921) and Immigration Act (1924) restricted arrivals, while the 1920s saw strong Ku Klux Klan activity in Michigan, targeting Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Yet many Great Lakes fishing and small-boat communities were Scandinavian, Polish, or Finnish, with cooperative nets of kin and craft. These ethnic economies and their frictions with nativist politics underlie the novel’s social textures: crews speaking multiple languages, parishes and lodges dividing loyalties, and a wary relationship with officials that blurs civic belonging when livelihoods intersect with enforcement and prejudice.
As social and political critique, Secret Harbour exposes the contradictions of an era that criminalized everyday demand while relying on marginal communities to police and supply it. The narrative portrays how Prohibition empowered organized crime and expanded federal policing, yet punished small actors caught between subsistence and statute. It interrogates border formalities that made neighbors into smugglers and turned technology into surveillance of the poor. By anchoring characters in a post-lumber economy scarred by depletion, it indicts extractive cycles—first forests, then covert trade—and reveals class divides, ethnic scapegoating, and legal hypocrisies that transformed a working harbor into a stage for contested sovereignty.
Secret Harbour
CHAPTER I
For the first time since his marriage Marshall found himself again in Vancouver[1] and again strolling idly down the backbone of the peninsula on which that fortunate city is situated. As was the case two years before, the day was crisp with early spring. Coal Harbour[2] gleamed blue on one side, and on the other the wide waters of English Bay twinkled under a singing breeze. Lion Peak rose high and snow clad across the way, and the masts of tall ships. Even the same birds, apparently, made the same cheerful remarks to him from the shrubbery of the tiny park through which his steps led him.
But, he reflected, the situation had most considerably altered since that former occasion. Then he had been sick to the death of a profound indifference; unable either to live or to die with any satisfaction to himself; at loose ends with the universe; with no future, with no past that he cared to remember, and the present gray. Now he was happily married to a woman whose possibilities, he felt, would suffice for the explorations of several lifetimes; each of his days rose with a song of invitation; and each seemed to reveal to him new energies of which he would never have believed himself capable. The beginning of the change, of the cure of his spirit, had taken place in this city; indeed, as he looked about him, he told himself it must have been on this very street. Yes; yonder was the square brick house where he had first met that queer, humorous, wise human entity who had called himself the Healer of Souls[3], and who had led him forth into the series of adventures that had culminated in a complete cure and an equally complete wife. After which the magician had disappeared for foreign parts, leaving his sister and her husband to the manifold devices possible to youth and wealth.
Marshall crossed the street. He knew that the square brick house had been only a temporary abode; in fact, rented for the week; but his sentimental interest in it was strong. As he drew nearer he could mark no alteration. It was one of those houses ageless with commonplace. Its picket fence, its bit of lawn, its hydrangeas and geraniums, its brick squareness, its cupola atop, its wooden veranda, its prim lace curtains had not changed, would never change until the whole fabric should be overwhelmed by a commercial expansion that, in this quiet street, could not take place for many years. Even the corner where the Healer of Souls had displayed his fantastic business plate was now furnished with a similar brass sign; probably, Marshall supposed, of dressmaking or millinery, or some kindred respectable calling. Nothing was changed. It might have been two years agone.
Then, abruptly, he stopped short, his eyes starting from his head. He shut the said eyes tight: then opened them again to see if they insisted on the same report. They did. There was no doubt of it. The sign was of brass; it had been recently and sedulously polished; its lettering was unmistakable.
X. ANAXAGORAS HEALER OF SOULS
was the inscription it carried.
Marshall stood, electrified. It was unbelievable! He pushed open the gate, strode to the door, jerked at the old-fashioned bell-pull. Apparently the same maid admitted him to the same interior, ushered him into the same banal, commonplace "parlour." She took his card and disappeared. It seemed to him that her manner, even, was that of two years ago. She seemed to be suppressing an amusement for the sake of that rigid propriety appropriate to well-trained maids. The same echo of a closing door. The same breathless silence should have been broken by the ticking of the ormolu clock[8], which, however, continued fatuously to believe that it was twenty-one minutes past ten. These things could not be! They were of the past. Their elements had been long scattered. The house, after its week's tenancy, should have passed into other hands which must somewhere have left their impress. The maid should have quitted domestic service to sell things in some shop in Granville Street. Somebody should have wound or repaired the ormolu clock or chucked it disgustedly into an ash bin. A vanished episode that should live only in memory seemed to have been reconstructed from the invisible where memories dwell. An absurd wave of panic swept through the young man. He was seized with a sudden impulse to escape, to rush forth to assure himself that the Spindrift[9][5] actually lay at anchor in Coal Harbour; that Betsy existed and was aboard her; that the last two years were realities, and that he was not in very truth and in actual body back in that other May morning.
The maid reappeared. Marshall arose and followed her to the same small consulting room at the back with the blue walls and the blue glass in the windows and the flat-topped desk and the two chairs. He seated himself in one of the latter and stared at the ornamental door opposite. After an interval of waiting he felt impelled to address the emptiness; and, strangely enough, after he had done so, he realized that he had used about the same words as before.
"I'm sufficiently impressed," he said. "Come in." Then he added, on his own account, "Don't be absurd, Sid. Explain yourself."
But he obtained no response. With a shrug he settled back to wait. The eerie feeling was passing. Another of his brother-in-law's eccentricities! Useless to try to force the issue.
At the end of five minutes the ornamental door opened to admit a young man clad in the white of a hospital surgeon. He entered briskly and, ignoring Marshall's eager start of welcome, seated himself on the opposite side of the desk.
"Sit down, Mr. Marshall," he commanded, authoritatively. "I am pleased to see you here again."
"What in the world are you doing here?" cried Marshall. "I thought you were in India!"
"I recently returned."
"But what in the world is all this flummery? And how are you, anyway? And why didn't you let us know? Betsy is here. We have the Spindrift down in the harbour. She'll be crazy to see you!"
But the Healer of Souls did not abate his extreme formality.
"I am, of course, aware of those facts," said he. "But let us first of all attend to the matter of this consultation." He drew a pad of paper toward him and poised his pencil.
"Good Lord, Sid, drop it!" cried Marshall, vexed. "I'm not consulting you. There's nothing the matter with me."
X. Anaxagoras[4] listened impersonally and made a note on his pad.
"Ah!" he remarked, cryptically. "And then?"
"And then, what?" demanded Marshall. "Come, be human."
"You have stated that you are unaware of the fact that you require treatment," stated the Healer of Souls. "Then what, in your mind, is the reason for consulting me?"
Marshall surveyed him disgustedly.
"Well," he remarked at last, with elaborate sarcasm, "as you happen to be my brother-in-law, not to speak of being what I consider a pretty good friend; and as I haven't seen you for two years; and as I find you here when you're supposed to be consorting with Mahatmas[6] somewhere in the Himalayas, I naturally came in to clasp your manly hand and invite you to have a drink. Then, too, you have a sister with whom, as far as I know, you are still on terms, and whom, also, you have not seen for two years. Anything significant and pathological in that?—You old idiot!" he added.
Again Anaxagoras made notes.
"I must ask you some questions," he announced, briskly, when he had finished. "Please reply as accurately as possible."
Marshall looked at him with affectionate amusement; then shrugged his shoulders.
"Shoot," said he, resignedly. Useless to combat Sid in one of his freakish moods. Might as well play up.
"No trace of the old trouble?"
"Eh?"
"The soul-numbness; the complete indifference. Feel a normal interest in life? Look forward to the future? Fully alive?"
Marshall laughed.
"Oh, that! No trouble in that respect! As you pointed out once, Betsy is capable of supplying that to a dead man; and I'm far from dead. Why, Sid——"
X. Anaxagoras cut him short.
"The treatment in that respect seems to be permanently successful. Happy?"
"As a clam!"
"Well, what are you going to do with it?"
"What?" asked Marshall, blankly.
"Your happiness; your aliveness."
"I don't believe I get you."
"What are your plans for a future?"
"We're cruising up the coast toward Alaska[10]."
"And then, after that?"
"No plans."
"Does that satisfy you as a prospect?"
"There's always plenty to do," rejoined Marshall, slowly.
"And after that?"
"I—I hadn't thought."
"You have wealth; you have energy; you have happiness. Are you going to allow them to devour each other?"
Marshall's air of amusement had faded; but the struggle against taking a serious attitude toward an absurdity resulted in a suppressed irritation. Nevertheless, a door that had been closed seemed to have opened, disclosing new things.
"Shall you continue to be happy in that?"
X. Anaxagoras allowed a pause.
"And then what?" he repeated.
The young man did not reply.
"Business?"
"It does not interest me. I have sufficient money. There are enough people making things."
"Art? Literature? Music?"
"I have no taste or knowledge."
"Philanthropy? Politics?"
Marshall made a gesture of distaste.
"The pursuit of knowledge?"
"I'm a regular bonehead and you know it!" cried the young man, resentfully.
X. Anaxagoras leaned back in his chair.
"The case, as you see, is sufficiently serious," he enunciated, crisply. "Unused tools tarnish, rust, and dec[1q]ay. You have wealth, energy, and happiness. They are worth preserving. Your soul is not in disorder as it was before, but it soon will be. Preventive therapeutics are wiser than cures. Your position is dangerous. You have done well to seek this consultation at just this time."
"But I tell you I did not seek it!" rejoined Marshall, with a return of his exasperation. "It was pure chance!"
"In the web of life, if one looks deeply enough, there is no pure chance. A hunger of the spirit orients it unerringly toward its need[3q], can we but recognize that fact." He arose. "Wait one minute," he abruptly finished, and disappeared through the ornamental door.
He was gone, not one minute, but five. At the end of that period he reappeared. He was now tweed-clad and carried a suitcase. His professional manner had vanished with his white hospital clothes.
"Hiyu tillicum!" he cried, clasping his visitor's hand. "That's Chinook[7] 'for heap big friend.' How are you, anyway? And how have you been? And is Betsy flourishing? Have you room for me aboard the Spindrift?"
He led the way through the hall. Marshall, bewildered by this sudden change, followed him. At the front door he turned the key and pocketed it.
"Just a moment." He halted Marshall.
From his coat pocket he produced a screwdriver with which he proceeded carefully to detach the brass sign from the corner of the house. He tucked it under his arm and picked up the suitcase.
"All ready!" he cried, cheerfully.
"But—but——" stammered Marshall, waving his hand feebly at the house.
"Oh, that's all right. I just rented it for three days. The maid was only in for the day. All finished."
"But——" repeated Marshall, inanely.
"I knew you'd be along," said X. Anaxagoras.
CHAPTER II
They strolled together down toward Granville Street in search of a taxi, X. Anaxagoras chatting cheerfully upon diverse but utterly irrelevant topics, Marshall nearly silent when he found he could pin his volatile companion down to nothing profitable in the way of personal information. The Healer of Souls seemed to discover of supreme interest and importance such subjects as liquor control; why in thunder there should be a bounty on the killing of eagles; how ling cod can swallow rock cod whole, spines and all; whether a senator or a representative is the lowest form of wit. He appeared to deem there could be no merit in discoursing on whence he had come and why; and what he was going to do about it; or in the exchange of any other personal gossip that should absorb those two years separated.
"Betsy will be surprised to see you," Marshall made a last attempt as they stepped into the taxi.
"Oh, not so very," X. Anaxagoras replied, easily.
They drove around the beautiful curve of Coal Harbour and through the natural lawns and giant cedars of Stanley Park until they had reached the quarters of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club. Here they stood for a moment on the elevated platform before descending the incline to the floats. At the latter lay a long file of power cruisers of all sizes. Beyond, each at its mooring, rode dozens of said yachts—schooners, yawls, sloops—all trim and white and shipshape. They swung in double rows as though drilled, answering the vagrant suggestions of the breeze that hummed over the trees from the gulf. On the floats and on the decks of some of the craft were young men in the most smeared of white dungarees happily doing the small and puttery things the amateur sailorman loves.
Out beyond the orderly rows of resident yachts lay a schooner longer than the rest. She, too, gleamed a dazzling white. Her spars twinkled in the sun as the wavelets twinkled below her; brasswork heliographed; the standing and running rigging stood taut as bowstrings; even at this distance it was evident that the canvas sail covers had been drawn and laced smooth and tight with a loving care, and that such gadgets as the handropes on the gangway overside and the covered rails of the after deck had been freshly whitened. Altogether a craft to delight the yachtsman's eye.
X. Anaxagoras lingered over her details. Astern floated the ensign; the truck on the foremast flew a burgee, on the mainmast a device which was evidently the owner's private signal. At the main starboard spreader had been hoisted a small square blue flag, indicating the owner's absence. All was as correct as a New Yorker going to church.
"The Spindrift" said Marshall, who had been watching his companion with pride. "Seagoing. A hundred horse power auxiliary."
"She's a pretty craft," agreed the Healer of Souls.
Marshall produced a whistle from his pocket which he blew shrilly thrice. Three white figures almost instantly appeared, dropped into a small boat tethered at the end of the mooring boom. One took its place at the stern. The other two seized long oars which they simultaneously raised to a perpendicular; and then, as one man, dropped into the water.
"True nautical precision," commented X. Anaxagoras.
Marshall nodded in satisfaction, and the slight trace of anxiety with which he had watched these proceedings faded from his eyes.
"Two of my men were trained in the navy," said he. "These fellows know the proper thing when they see it." He nodded toward the dungaree-clad Royal members.
They descended the incline to the float, against which the boat made a smart landing. X. Anaxagoras searched in his pockets and finally produced a bundle of claim checks. From these he selected one.
"I wonder if your quartermaster, or bos'n, or chief steward, or chief hereditary manipulator of the royal washtub, or whatever you call him there in the stern sheets could see to getting this steamer trunk down for me. It's all I want. The rest of my plunder can stay in storage."
The faces of the three men remained wooden.
"Here, Benton; see to it," commanded Marshall, crisply.
He took the man's place in the stern sheets at the tiller lines. X. Anaxagoras seated himself alongside. The boat flew back across the frosted silver of the bay toward the Spindrift.
At the yacht two more white-clad figures first caught the boat's bow with a boathook, then steadied her while the passengers disembarked, then stood at attention while the latter ascended the short companion. At the instant Marshall's feet touched the deck the little blue absence flag fluttered down from the starboard spreader.
"Congratulations," murmured X. Anaxagoras. "Never seen it done better, even on the stage."
He glanced up and down the deck. It was a beautiful cream colour from scrubbing and holystoning. The coils of the standing rigging were laid down Bristol fashion.
"Even to the single modest pearl in the cravat," murmured X. Anaxagoras, cryptically.
Marshall had advanced eagerly to the companionway down which he was calling.
"Betsy! Betsy! Come on deck! We have a visitor!"
He stood aside, dramatically, to give full scope to the expected surprise. A young woman appeared. She was a slender, vivid-looking, and daintily built creature dressed all in white, with a mop of bobbed hair glowing with bronze glints, wide-apart humorous black eyes, and a whimsical mouth. She glanced toward X. Anaxagoras.
"Why, hullo, Sid," said she, calmly. "Where did you pop from? Are you visiting or just calling?"
She threw her arms around him with a quick pressure that belied the casual tone of her greeting and kissed him.
"I thought I'd visit awhile, if you'll invite me."
She appeared to consider for a minute.
"Can I invite you? You see I have to stop and think about these things so as not to make any horrible mistakes. It's terrible to make mistakes aboard a yacht, much more terrible than on shore. But now I remember: he's the supreme boss only when we are under way. When we're at anchor I can be boss. So I can invite you. I do."
"Don't be absurd!" ejaculated Marshall.
"It isn't absurd," she protested. "You've no idea"—she turned again to her brother. "You can have no idea. The poor little Kittiwake could give you no idea. 'Downstairs' or 'up on the roof,' instead of 'out back,' meaning astern. Such things are nothing, a mere nothing, to the mistakes possible in this maritime monarchy. It's a real yacht, Sid. It has been very difficult for me, but I am progressing. There's a certain unfittableness of my mind when it comes to the sort of a maritime monarchy that obtains aboard a real yacht. I'm always trying to wear tan shoes in a ballroom."
"Don't be silly," Marshall varied his admonition.
"Oh, I'm trying not to be; indeed I am!" she protested, humbly. "Even now I'm uncertain. Isn't there some sort of flag we should hoist now we have a visitor? or do we shoot the little brass cannon? There must be something: there always is something."
Marshall laughed in spite of himself.
"In case of a visitor you splice the main brace," he reminded her.
"Well, I know what that is!" she said, gratefully, and withdrew her head down the companionway in which she had been standing.
The men followed her into the cabin. It was, however, more like a room than a cabin. At one end was a practicable fireplace in which apparently glowed a genuine fire.
"It's warm and it's cheerful"—she followed X. Anaxagoras's eye—"but it's a fake. It burns electricity."
Fresh and dainty cretonne curtains shaped the ports into windows. Easy chairs fronted the fire. Books stood on racked shelves. Bright sofa cushions strewed the transoms. In whatever direction one looked one was impressed anew with the feeling of a small but cheerful room in some bungalow by the sea.
"Aren't we comfy!" she cried.
"It isn't exactly a yacht's cabin, of course——" began Marshall, almost as though in apology.
"Yachts' cabins," broke in Betsy, swiftly, "have a choice of two sorts of curtains—if any. One is a ribbed, heavy, dingy stuff; and the other is a ribbeder, heavier, dingier stuff. The other furnishings are substantial and solid affairs designed by the original male yachtsman. He was a man of practical mind, devoid of imagination, and devoid of æsthetic values. He was, I will admit, ingenious. He had to be. You know," she confided to her brother, "this isn't like the Kittiwake."
"So I observe," agreed X. Anaxagoras, drily, seating himself in one of the comfortable chairs.
"No; the Kittiwake bobs around sometimes; but this one, when she's sailing, lives on a slant. Sometimes on one side; sometimes on the other. It's like living on the slope of a roof. So everything is fixed so it won't slide off. It's very ingenious; but it's not always pretty."
"If she had her own way she'd probably have window boxes outside the portholes," grumbled Marshall.
"It would be pretty," agreed Betsy, thoughtfully. "But don't be alarmed, darling. You can have the outside all your own way. In fact, you have the right, you know, to have everything your own way. When we're on the high seas, anyhow. You've no idea!" She turned again to her brother. "There's a book up there that tells about it. He is a Master, you see; and when he's three miles offshore he can bury people, and hang people, and put them in irons, and marry people, and no one dares say him nay. I don't know whether he can divorce people: I'll look it up."
"You've developed into a regular chatterbox," was X. Anaxagoras's fraternal remark.
"Effervescence due to repression. When you're at sea, you've got to be nautical and single-minded and efficient. You don't talk; you bark. It's all 'squads right' and 'squads left' and 'by the right, fours, march'! No, that's not it: it's the other thing. 'Belay there!' and 'ready about,' and 'haul in the jib sheet.' If it wasn't for Rogg I'd believe they were all wound up at night with keys, like the ship's clock. Yachting, as it should be done, is serious, let me tell you."
"Who's Rogg?" asked Anaxagoras.
"You'll see him: he's our one weak spot, the blot on our perfect escutcheon. He's untamable nautically. But I've something in common with Rogg. He's a great comfort to me in my lonely and exalted state. He and I have the same perverted sense of humour."
"He's the stupidest man aboard," stated Marshall, half disgustedly. "I keep him because he's so good-natured."
