The Girl

________________________________________________
Title:     The Girl
Author: Perceval Gibbon [More Titles by Gibbon]

The little mission hall showed to the shabby waterside street of Jersey City its humble face of brick and the modest invitation of its open door, from which at intervals there overflowed the sudden music of a harmonium within. Goodwin, ashore for the evening, with the empty hours of his leisure weighing on him like a burden, heard that music rise about him, as he moved along the saloon-dotted sidewalk, with something of the mild surprise of a swimmer who passes out of a cold into a warm current. For lack of anything better to do, he had been upon the point of returning to his ship, where she lay in her dock. He had not spoken to a soul since he had come ashore at sundown, and the simple music was like a friendly prompting. He hesitated a moment for he was not a frequenter of missions then turned in at the entrance of the hall.

The music of the harmonium and of the voices that sang with it seemed to swell at him as he pushed open the swing door and tiptoed in toward a back seat, careful to be noiseless. But there were heads that turned, none the less heads of tame sailors from the ships, for whose service the mission struggled to exist, and a few sleek faces of shore folk; and, on the low platform at the upper end of the hall, the black-coated, whiskered missioner who presided over the gathering craned his neck to look at the new-comer, without ceasing to sing with vigor. It was, in short, such a meeting as an idle sailor might drop in upon in any one of a hundred ports. Goodwin recognized the very atmosphere of it its pervading spirit of a mild and very honest geniality, the peculiar nasal tone of its harmonium, and the timidity of the singing. Standing in his place in the back row of seats, he was going on to identify it at further points, when he felt a touch on his arm.

"Eh?" he demanded under his breath, turning.

A tall girl was offering him a little red, paper-covered hymn-book, open at the hymn that was then being sung, her ungloved finger pointing him the very verse and line. He did not at once take it. She had come upon him surprisingly, and now, while he stared at her, he was finding her surprising in herself. Under the brim of her hat her face showed gentle and soft, with something of a special kindliness; and, because others were watching her, she had a little involuntary smile of embarrassment.

She glanced up at him shyly, and let her eyes fall before his. The finger with which she pointed him the place on the page seemed to Goodwin, whose hands were like hoofs for callousness and size, exquisite and pathetic in its pink slenderness. It was not merely that she was beautiful and feminine in that moment Goodwin could not have been positive that she was beautiful but a dim allurement, a charm made up of the grace of her bowed head, her timid gesture of proffering him the book, her nearness, and her fragile delicacy of texture, enhanced and heightened the surprise of her.

"Gosh!" breathed Goodwin, unthinking; then, "Thank you, miss," as he took the hymn-book from her.

She smiled once more, and went back to her place at the farther end of the row of seats in front of Goodwin's, where he could still see her. He found himself staring at her in a sort of perplexity; she had revealed herself to him with a suddenness that gave her a little the quality of an apparition. The bend of her head above her book brought to view, between the collar of her coat and her soft brown hair, a gleam of white nape that fascinated him; she was remote, ethereal, wondrously delicate and mysterious. He sprawled in his place, when the hymn was over, with an arm over the back of his seat, intent merely to see her and slake the appetite of his eyes.

"She's she's a looker, all right!" He had a need to make some comment upon this uplifting experience of his, and this was the best he could do.

He had come in late sailors' missions are used to late-comers and early-goers and it was not long before the simple service came to a close and the meeting began to break up. Goodwin took his cap and rose, watching the tall girl as she went forward to join a couple of older women. The black-coated man came down from the platform and made his way toward Goodwin, amiable intentions visibly alight in his whiskered face.

"Haven't seen you here before," he said at Goodwin's elbow. "What ship d'you belong to?"

Goodwin, recalled to himself, looked down into the kindly, narrow face of the missioner. He himself was tall, a long-limbed young man, with a serious, darkly tanned face in which the blue of the eyes showed up strongly; and in his bearing and the fashion of his address there was a touch of that arrogance which men acquire who earn their bread at the hourly hazard of their lives.

"Oh, I just dropped in," he said awkwardly. "I belong to th' Etna, lyin' in the dock down yonder."

The missioner smiled and nodded.

"Etna, eh? Ah, yes. Somebody was tellin' me about the Etna. A hard ship that's what you call her, eh?"

Goodwin nodded, and considered the face upturned toward his own innocent, benevolent, middle-aged, worn, too, with hopes and disappointments, yet unscarred by such bitter knowledge as men gained early aboard the Etna.

"We call her the 'Hell-packet,'" he answered seriously.

The missioner nodded, and his smile, though it flickered, survived.

"It's an ugly name," he said; "but maybe she deserves it. An' so you saw our door open and just stepped in? It's always open in the evenin's and on Sundays, an' we'll always be glad to see you. Now, I'd like to make you acquainted with one of our young ladies, so's you won't feel you're a stranger, eh? An' then maybe you'll come again."

"Oh, I dunno" began Goodwin, fidgeting.

But the missioner was already beckoning with a black-sleeved arm. His pale elderly face seemed to shine.

Goodwin turned, looked to see whom he summoned, and forthwith dropped his cap, so that he was bent double to pick it up when the young lady, the tall girl who had offered him the hymn-book, arrived. He came upright again face to face with her, abandoned by his faculties, a mere sop of embarrassment before the softness of her eyes and the smile of her lips.

The missioner's official voice brayed between them benevolently. Goodwin had a momentary sense that there was a sort of indecency in thus trumpeting forth the introduction; it should have been done solemnly, gracefully, like a ceremony.

"Miss James," said the missioner noisily, "here's a friend that's visitin' us for the first time. Now, I want you to persuade him to come again, an' tell him he'll be welcome just as often as he likes to come an' see us. His name's, er."

"Goodwin," replied the sailor awkwardly.

The missioner shook his hand warmly, putting eloquence into the shake. He cut it short to intercept a brace of seamen who were making for the door. Goodwin saw him bustle up and detain them with his greeting: "Haven't seen you here before. What ship d'you belong to?" Then he turned back to the girl.

"Do you belong to a ship?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered. "The Etna."

He had been eager to hear her speak. She had a voice with shadows in it, a violin voice. Goodwin, relishing it like an apt gift, could only tell himself that it fitted and completed that strange effect she had of remoteness and unreality.

"What was your last port?" she asked.

He told her, and she went on with her conventional string of questions to make talk, to carry out the missioner's purpose in summoning her. The danger of seafaring, the strangeness of life in ships, the charm of travel she went through the whole list, getting answers as conventional as her queries. He was watching her, taking pleasure in her quality and aspect; and at last he saw, with a small thrill, that she was watching him likewise.

If he had been a vainer man, he might have been aware that he, in his way, was as well worth looking at as she in hers. He was big and limber, in the full ripeness of his youth, sunburned and level-eyed. His life in ships had marked him as plainly as a branding-iron. There was present in him that air which men have, secret yet visible, who know familiarly the unchanging horizons, the strange dawns, the tempest-pregnant skies of the sea. For the girl he was as unaccountable as she for him.

"Say, Miss James," he asked suddenly, breaking in on her twentieth polite question, "d'you come to this joint, I mean, to this meetin' house every night?"

Her face seemed to shape itself naturally to a smile; she smiled now.

"I can't come every night," she answered; "but I come pretty often. I, I hope you'll come sometimes, now."

Goodwin discounted that; it was no more than the missioner had bidden her to say.

"Are you goin' to be here tomorrow?" he demanded.

Her mild, pretty face flushed faintly; the meaning of his question was palpable.

"Ye-es," she hesitated; "I expect I'll be coming to-morrow."

"That's all right, then," said Goodwin cheerfully. "An' I'll be along, too."

The elderly woman whom she had left at the missioner's summons was hovering patiently. Goodwin held out his hand.

"Good night, Miss James," he said.

She gave him her hand, and he took it within his own, enveloping its pale slenderness in his rope-roughened palm. He held it just long enough to make her raise her eyes and meet his; then he released her, and, avoiding the anti-climax of a further talk with the missioner, passed out of the hall to the dark and sparsely peopled street.

At a small saloon whose lights spilled themselves across his path, he got himself a glass of beer; he was feeling just such a thirst as a man knows after nervous and exacting labor. The blond, white-jacketed barman glanced at him curiously, marking perhaps something distraught and rapt in his demeanor. Goodwin, ignoring him, took his beer and leaned an elbow on the bar, looking round the place.

A couple of Germans were playing a game at a table near the door. A man in the dumb-solemn stage of drunkenness stood regarding his empty glass with owlish fixity. It was all consistent with a certain manner and degree of life; it was commonplace, established in the order of things. In the same order were the dreary street without, and the Etna, loading at her wharf for the return voyage to San Francisco. Their boundaries were the limits of lives; one had but to cross them, to adventure beyond them, and all the world was different. A dozen steps had taken him from the sidewalk into the mission hall and the soft-glowing wonder of the girl; another dozen steps had replaced him on the sidewalk. It almost seemed as if a man might choose what world he would live in.

"Feelin' bad?" queried the barman softly; he could no longer contain his curiosity.

"Me!" exclaimed Goodwin. "No!"

"Well," said the barman apologetically Goodwin was a big and dangerous-looking young man "you're lookin' mighty queer, anyway." And he proceeded to wipe the bar industriously.

The Etna had left San Francisco with a crew of fourteen men before the mast, of whom twelve had been "Dutchmen." On her arrival in New York, these twelve had deserted forthwith, forfeiting the pay due to them rather than face the return voyage under the Etna's officers. There remained in her forecastle now only Goodwin and one other, an old seaman named Noble, a veteran who had followed the sea and shared the uncertain fate of ships since the days of single topsails.

Noble was seated on his battered chest when Goodwin unhooked the fo'c'sle door and entered. A globe-lamp that hung above him shed its light upon his silver head as he bent over his work of patching a pair of dungaree overalls, and he looked up in mild welcome of the other's return. His placidity, his venerable and friendly aspect, gave somehow to the bare forecastle, with its vacant bunks like empty coffin-shelves in a vault, an air of domesticity, the comfortable quality of a home. Save for brief intervals between voyages, in sailors' boarding-houses, such places had been "home" to Noble for fifty years.

Goodwin rehooked the door, and stood outside the globe-lamp's circle of dull light while he took off his coat. Old Noble, sail needle between his fingers, looked up from his work amiably.

"Well?" he queried. "Been havin' a hell of a good time uptown, eh?"

"That's so," retorted Goodwin shortly. "A hell of a time an' all."

The old man nodded and began to sew again, sailor fashion, thrusting the big needle with the leather "palm" which seamen use instead of a thimble. Goodwin, standing by his bunk, began to cut himself a fill for his pipe.

"Ain't been robbed, have ye?" inquired old Noble.

In his view, and according to his experience, a sailor with money on him ran peculiar risks when he went ashore. When Goodwin had been "shanghaied" in San Francisco drugged and carried on board unconscious while another man "signed on" for him and drew three months of his wages in advance those who shipped him had omitted to search him, and his money-belt was intact.

"Robbed? No!" answered Goodwin impatiently.

He lit his pipe, drawing strongly at the pungent ship's tobacco, and seated himself on the edge of the lower bunk, facing old Noble. The old man continued to sew, his hand moving rhythmically to and fro with the needle, his work spread conveniently in his lap. But for the rusty red of his tanned skin, he looked like a handsome and wise old woman.

"Jim," said Goodwin at last.

"Yes?" The old man did not look up.

"There wasn't nothin' doin' ashore there," said Goodwin. "I just went for a walk along the street, and then I well, there wasn't nothin' doin', ye see, so I went into a sort o' mission that there was."

"Eh?" Old Noble raised his head sharply and peered at him. "Ye ain't been an' got religion, Dan?"

"No, I haven't," answered Goodwin. "But say, Jim, I went into the place, and there was a girl there. She come over to loan me a hymn-book first of all, an' afterwards what ye laughin' at, blast ye?"

Old Noble had uttered no sound, but he had bent his head over his sewing and his broad shoulders were shaking. He lifted a face of elderly, cynical mirth.

"It ain't nothin', Dan," he protested. "It's just me thinkin' first ye'd bin robbed and then ye'd got religion; an' all the time it's just a girl ye've seen. Go on, Dan; how much did she get out of ye?"

"Stow that!" warned Goodwin. "She wasn't that kind. This one was say, Jim, if you was to see her just once, you'd know things ashore ain't all as bad as you fancy. Sort of soft, she was all tender and gentle and shining! Gosh, there ain't no words to put her in. I didn't know there was any girls like that."

"Nor me," put in old Noble dryly. He inspected Goodwin with a shrewd and suspicious eye. For him, a citizen of the womanless seas, beauty, grace, femininity were no more than a merchandise. "Then, to put it straight, she didn't get yer money from ye?" he demanded.

"No, she didn't," retorted Goodwin. "Not a cent, is that plain enough? Ain't you ever known no women but the rotten ones, man?"

Noble shook his head.

"Then you don't know what you're talkin' about," said Goodwin. "This one it ain't no use tellin' you, Jim. I seen her, that's all; an' I'm goin' to quit. This sailorizin' game ain't the only game there is, an' I'm done with it."

"Ah!" The old man sat with both gnarled and labor-stained hands lying upon the unfinished work in his lap. The cynical, half-humorous expression faded from his thin, strong face. He frowned at the younger man consideringly, seriously.

"Then she did get something out o' ye," he said harshly. "You're talkin' like a fool, Dan. This old ship ain't no soft berth, I know; but then, you ain't no quitter, either. This girl's got ye goin'; ye want to watch out."

"Quitter!" Goodwin took him up hotly. They faced each other across the narrow fo'c'sle vehemently; their shadows sprawled on deck and bulkhead as they bent forward and drew back in the stress of talk. "When a man's shanghaied aboard a blasted hooker like this, with three months of his wages stolen before he gets the knockout drops out o' his head, is he a quitter when he takes his chance to leave her an' look for a white man's job?"

"Yes, he is," answered Noble. "You're a sailor, ain't you? Then stick by your ship."

"Oh, it ain't no use talkin' to you!" Goodwin rose to his feet. "You'd make out that a man 'u'd go to heaven for stickin' to his ship, even if he done forty murders. I'm goin' to quit, an' that's all there is to it."

Old Noble looked up at him where he stood. The old face, that had been mild and indulgent, was hardened to an angry contempt. He was old and strong, dexterous in all seamanlike arts, a being shaped for good and evil both by half a century of seafaring, of wrong and hardship, or danger and toil, of scant food and poor pay. Never in his life had he held back from a task because it was dangerous or difficult, nor sided with an officer against a man before the mast, nor deserted a ship. His code was simple and brief, but it was of iron.

"Well, quit, then," he said. "Quit like the Dutchmen! There's no one will stop ye."

"They better not," menaced Goodwin angrily.

He had been shanghaied, of course, without chest or bag, without even bedding, so that he had worked his way around the Horn in shoddy clothes and flimsy oilskins obtained from the ship's slop-chest. There was little that he had a mind to take ashore with him; it went quickly into a small enough bundle. While he turned out his bunk, old Noble sat watching him without moving, with judgment in his face, and sorrow. He was looking on at the death of a good seaman.

"Say, Jim!" Goodwin was ready; he stood with his bundle in his hand, his cap on his head. "You don't want to be a fool, now. I reckon we can shake hands, anyhow."

He felt himself loath to leave the old man in anger; he had for him both liking and respect. But Noble did not answer only continued for some moments to look him in the face, unsoftened, stern and grieved, then bent again above his sewing.

Goodwin withdrew the hand he had held out.

"Have it your own way," he said, and went forth from the forecastle, leaving the old man, with the lamplight silvering his sparse hair, at work upon the patched overalls. And, in that moment, not even the vision of the girl and his hope of the future could save him from a pang of sadness. It was as if he had, by his going, darkened a home.

Outside upon the deck he stayed to cast a glance about him. The big ship, beautiful as a work of art in her lines and proportions, showed vacant of life. A light glimmered from the galley door, where the decrepit watchman slumbered at his ease. There was nothing to detain him. The great yards, upon which he had fought down the sodden and frozen canvas in gales off the Horn, spread over him. She was fine, she was potent, with a claim upon a man's heart; and she was notorious for a floating, hell upon the seas. It was her character; she was famous for brutality to seamen, so that they deserted at the first opportunity and forfeited their wages. And Noble would have him loyal to her!

He swore at her shortly, and forced himself to cross the deck and climb over the rail to the wharf. The conduct of Noble was sore in his mind. But, as the earth of the shore gritted under his boots, that trouble departed from him. The world, after all, was wider than the decks of the Etna; and in it, an item in its wonder and complexity, there lived and smiled the girl.

Miss James, who smiled so indescribably and asked so many questions about seafaring in the way of civil conversation, would probably have shown small interest in the adventures of a seaman in search of a lodging ashore. She would have smiled, of course, with her own little lift and fall of shy eyes, and been as intangible and desirable as ever; but one could never tell her of carrying a small bundle of underclothes from one obdurate door to another, unable to show money in any convincing amount because one's capital was in a belt under one's shirt. Othello told Desdemona of "antres vast and deserts idle," not of skeptical landladies. Goodwin felt all this intensely when, in the evening of the following day, having finally established himself in a room, he beheld her again in the mission. He beheld her first, indeed, as she entered the hall, he watching from the opposite side of the street. He had no intention of going in if she were not present. As it was, a swoop across the street and a little brisk maneuvering secured him a place next to her.

He had been a little at a loss all day; it was years since he had lived altogether apart from sailors and he had found himself lonely and depressed; but the sight of her sufficed to restore him. She gave him the welcome of a look, and a slow flush mounted on her face. The missioner was already preparing to open the service, and conversation was impossible. Nevertheless, as she turned over the pages of her hymn-book, Goodwin bent toward her.

"Didn't I say I'd be along?" he whispered, and saw her cheek move with her smile.

To be close to her, knowing her to be conscious of him, was in itself a gladness; but Goodwin was impatient for the end of the service. It was not his way to stand off and on before a thing he meant to do, and he wanted more talk with her, to get within her guard, to touch the girl who was screened behind the smile and dim sweetness and the polite questions of Miss James. He sat frowning through the latter part of the service, till the missioner, standing upright with tight-shut eyes, gave the closing benediction. Then, compellingly, he turned upon the girl.

"Say," he said, "let's get out o' this. I'd like to walk along with you and talk. Come on!"

Miss James looked at him with startled eyes. He was insistent.

"Aw, come on," he pressed. "That preacher'll be here in a minute if you don't, and we've had enough of him for one time. I tell you, I want to talk to you."

He rose, and by sheer force of urgency made her rise likewise. He got her as far as the door. "But" she began, hesitating there.

"Steady as ye go," bade Goodwin, and took her down the shallow steps to the sidewalk. "Now, which way is it to be?" he demanded suddenly.

She did not reply for a couple of moments. The light that issued from the hall showed her face as she stood and considered him doubtfully, a little uncertain of what was happening. Even in that half-obscurity of the long street, where she was seen as an attitude, a shape, she made her effect of a quiet, tender beauty. Then, at last, she smiled and turned and began to walk. Goodwin fell into step beside her, and the confusion of voices within the hall died down behind them.

"I had to make you come," said Goodwin presently. "I just had to. An' you don't want to be scared."

She glanced sideways at him, but said nothing.

"You ain't scared, are ye?" he asked.

"No," she replied.

The answer even the brevity of it fulfilled his understanding of her. He nodded to himself.

"I said I wanted to talk to ye," he went on; "an' I do. I want to talk to you a whole lot. But there ain't much I got to say. 'Ceptin', maybe, one thing. I'd like to know what your first name is. Oh, I ain't goin' to get fresh an' call you by it I reckon you know that. But thinkin' of you all day an' half the night, like I do, 'Miss James' don't come handy, ye see."

"Oh!" murmured the girl. It was plain that he had startled her a little.

"My first name is Mary," she answered.

"Ah!" said Goodwin, and repeated it again and again under his breath. "I might 'most ha' guessed it," he said. "It's well, it's a name that fits ye like a coat o' paint, Miss James, A clean, straight name, that is. Mary b'gosh, it was my mother's name."

"I'm glad you like it," said the girl, in her deep-toned, pleasant voice. "You know, Mr. Goodwin, it was a bit queer the way you made me come away from the hall."

"Ah, but that's not troublin' you," replied Goodwin quickly. "I reckon you know what's wrong wi' me, Miss James. I'm not askin' you for much yet; only to let me see you, when you go to that mission-joint, and talk to ye sometimes."

They were at an intersection of streets, where a few shops yet shone and surface-cars went by like blazing ships. There was a movement of folk about them; yet, by reason of what had passed between them, it seemed that they stood in a solitude of queer, strained feeling. The girl halted in the light of a shop-window.

"I get my car here," she said.

Goodwin stopped, facing her. She looked up at the tense seriousness of his young, set face, hard and strong, with the wind-tan coloring it. She was kindly, eager to handle him tactfully, and possibly a little warmed by his sincerity and admiration. To him she seemed the sum of all that was desirable, pathetic, and stirring in womanhood.

"No," she said; "that's not much to ask. I'll be glad to meet you at the mission, Mr. Goodwin, and maybe we can talk, too, sometimes. And when you go away again, when your ship sails."

"Eh?" Goodwin's exclamation interrupted her. "Goin' away? Why, Miss James, I ain't goin' away. That was all fixed up last night. I've quit goin' to sea."

She stared at him, with parted lips.

"You don't understand," said Goodwin gently. "I knew, just as soon as I seen you, that I wasn't going away no more. I went down an' fetched my dunnage ashore right off."

She continued to stare. "Not going away?" she repeated.

Goodwin shook his head, smiling. He did not in the least understand the embarrassment of a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly the object of a romantic and undesired sacrifice.

A street-car jarred to a halt beside them. The girl made a queer little gesture, as if in fear.

"My car!" she flustered indistinctly, and, turning suddenly, ran from him towards it, taking refuge in its ordinariness against Goodwin and all the strangeness with which he seemed to assail her.

He, smiling fatuously on the curb, saw it carry her off, swaying and grinding. "Mary," he repeated. "Mary!"

Following his purpose, within the next few days he found himself employment as one of a gang of riggers at work on a great German four-masted barque which had been dismasted in a squall off Fire Island. In the daytime he dealt with spars and gear, such stuff as he knew familiarly, in the company of men like himself. Each evening found him, washed and appareled, at the mission, furnishing a decorous bass undertone to the hymns, looked on with approval by the missioner and his helpers. Commonly he got himself a seat next to Miss James; but he could not again contrive a walk with her along the still street to the lighted corner where she ran to catch her car. There seemed always to be a pair of voluminous elderly matrons in attendance upon her, to daunt and chill him. She herself was unchanged; her soft, beneficent radiance, her elusive, coy charm, all her maddening quality of delicacy and shrinking beauty, uplifted him still.

"Say," he always whispered, as he let himself down beside her, "are we goin' to have a talk tonight?"

And she would shake her averted head hurriedly, and afterwards the iron-clad matrons would close in on her and make her inaccessible. And, in the end, he would go off to get a drink in a saloon before going back to his room, baffled and discontented.

There were three evenings running on which she did not come to the mission at all. On the fourth Goodwin was there before her. He looked at her steadily as she came to her place.

"I want to talk to you to-night," he said, varying his formula, as she sat down.

She gave him a swift, uncertain glance.

"Got to," he added gravely. "It's a case, an' I just got to."

"What about?" she asked, with a touch of resentment that was new in her.

"I guess you know," he answered quietly, and hitched nearer to her along the bench to make room for a new-comer who was thrusting in beside him. He turned perfunctorily to see who it might be. It was old Noble.

"Friends!" grated the voice of the missioner. "Let us begin by singing hymn number seventy-nine: 'Pull for the shore, sailor; pull for the shore!'"

The noise of the harmonium drowned the rustling of hymn-book pages. Noble's elbow drove against Goodwin's.

"Found ye!" rumbled the old man. "Say, come on out where I can talk to ye. We're sailin' in the mornin'."

"Hush!" whispered Goodwin. "I can't come out. What d'you want?"

The little congregation rose to its feet for the singing of the hymn. Old Noble, rising with them, leaned forward and peered past Goodwin at the girl. His keen old face inspected her inscrutably for a while.

"That's her, I reckon," he said to Goodwin in a windy whisper. "Well, I'm not sayin' nothin'. Come on out."

"I can't, I tell ye," breathed Goodwin. "Don't you go startin' anything here, now! Say what ye got to say, an' be done with it."

Old Noble scowled. About him the simple hymn rose and fell in its measured cadences. Among the honest folk who sang it there was none more venerable and seemly than he. His head was white with the sober snow of years; by contrast with his elderly gravity, the young vividness and force of Goodwin seemed violent and crude.

"I won't start nothin'," whispered Noble harshly. "Don't be afeared. I bin lookin' for ye, Dan; I want ye to have a chanst. We're sailin' in the mornin', an', Dan, we're short-handed three hands short, we are!"

His words came and went under cover of the hymn.

"Men won't ship aboard of her; she's got a bad name," the whisper continued. "She's full o' Dutchmen an' Dagoes again. It's goin' to be the hell of a passage an' the Horn in August, too. Come on an' stand yer share of it, Dan."

Goodwin glared down indignantly at the old rusty-red face beside him.

"You're crazy," he said shortly.

"Ye ain't comin'?"

For answer Goodwin only shrugged. It sufficed. With no further word Noble turned away and walked forth on heavy feet from the hall. There followed him to the street, as if in derision, the refrain of that landsman's hymn: "Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the shore!"

"Now!" said Goodwin, when at last the missioner had closed the service with his blessing.

The girl was nervous; plainly, she would have been glad to refuse. But Goodwin was in earnest, and, unwillingly enough, she surrendered to the compulsion of his will and went out with him. Outside upon the sidewalk she spoke angrily.

"I don't like the way you act," she said, and her voice had tears in it. "You think a person's got."

Goodwin interrupted. "I don't think nothin'," he said. "I got to find out. An' I can't find out while we're hustlin' to the corner. Come down towards the docks. You're all right with me; an' I got to find out."

He did not even touch her arm, but she went with him.

"Find out what?" she asked uncertainly, as they crossed the street.

"Come on," he answered. "We'll talk by an' by."

He took her down a dark side way which led them to the water-front. Wharves where work was going on roared and shone. The masts and spars of ships rose stark against the sky. Beyond, the river was dotted with lights against the luminous horizon of Manhattan. He slackened his pace. At his side the silent girl trembled and sulked.

"Kid," said Goodwin, "there's one of us two that hasn't made good. Which is it?"

A jib-boom slanted across a wall over their heads. They were alone among sleeping ships.

"I don't know what you mean," answered the girl. "You say you've got to talk to me, and you act--." She stopped.

"You don't know what I mean?" repeated Goodwin. "I'll have to tell you, then."

They had come to a pause under the jib-boom of the silent ship. She waited for him to go on, servile to the still mastery of his mien.

"That night the night I come to the mission for the first time," went on Goodwin, "when you loaned me the book, I quit my ship to keep close to you. That ain't nothin'; the ship was a terror, anyway. But I seen you, and, girl, I couldn't get you out o' my head. You was all right the next night, when I went along with you to your car; it wasn't just because the missionary feller set you at me, neither. What's gone wrong with me since?"

He asked the question mildly, with a tone of gentle and reasonable inquiry.

"I haven't said anything was wrong with you," Answered the girl sullenly. "I don't have to answer your questions, anyway."

"I reckon you do these questions," said Goodwin. "What is it, now? Am I different to what you reckoned I was, or what? I never set up to be anythin' but just plain man. Tell me what I'm shy of. Are you scared you'll have to to marry me?"

"Oh!" The girl shrank away from him.

"That's it, is it? Well, you don't need to be." His voice was bitter. "I'd never ha' dared to ask you before, an' now I wouldn't, anyway. See? But I know, all the same, if I wasn't just a blasted sailor if I was a storekeeper or a rich man I c'd have ye. Why, damme, I c'd have ye anyway!"

She had backed before him; and now she was against the wall, uttering a small moan of protest.

"I could," he repeated. "You know it. I'd only to go chasin' you, an' in the end you'd give in. You're pretty; you got a shine on you that fools a man. But you're a quitter a quitter! See? An' now you can come away from that wall an' I'll see you back on the street."

He was very lofty and erect in the meager light, rather a superb figure, if the girl had had eyes for it. But she, to all seeming, was dazed. He went in silence at her side till they reached the street and saw that the open door of the mission still showed lights.

"There ye are," said Goodwin, halting.

The girl hesitated, looking back and forth. It was wonderful how her suggestion of soft beauty persisted. She was abashed, stricken, humiliated upon the dark street; and still she was lovely. She moved away and paused.

"Good night!" said her faintly ringing voice, and she passed towards the mission.

"Yes, it's me!" said Goodwin, answering the dumb surprise of old Noble as he entered the fo'c'sle of the Etna. "An' you want to shut your head. See?"

[The end]
Perceval Gibbon's short story: The Girl

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN