American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
Bridge, after seeing them below, went forward to the windlass, with
his brain reeling as it had reeled on the forecastle deck of the
liner. The captain was the breezy person who had noticed him scrubbing
paint, the daughter the child that had come to him on lookout--whom he
still imagined as a child, but now grown to womanhood, and with the
same pure, clean-cut face, the same wealth of golden hair, and dark
wondering blue eyes--the living, breathing, matured, and perfected
image of the little girl that had gone to the angels twenty years
ago. He felt, as he supervised the weighing of the anchor, as he had
felt when this little girl had come forward to sing to the school,
the glorified sense of recognition, and, added to it, the uplift of
victory and achievement, the content that comes of long search and the
finding of the thing sought. He knew this woman, knew her well, though
she had not spoken a word. He knew her now as part of himself, that he
had missed, and found. And she was here, in the same ship with him! He
would see her daily!
But, as a matter of fact, he saw very little at first. He was a watch
officer, who slept part of each day; and a suspicious and peppery
father, with an eye out for good looks in an otherwise efficient and
valuable first mate, saw to it that she took her meals with him in his
own after cabin, and also that she took her daily exercise on deck
when Bridge was asleep and the ship in charge of the second mate, an
unbeauteous and beauty proof old sea dog. In the exercise of this
watchful function of fatherhood, the old man grew more and more peppery
in his manner toward Bridge and his crew, and finally took no pains
to conceal an actual dislike for the first mate, which no amount of
professional care and forethought on his part could offset.
And it was all wasted energy as far as Bridge was concerned, for a more
inoffensive and non-progressive lover never loved. Try as he might,
he could not bring himself to address her when they occasionally met,
unless she spoke to him first. She seemed to carry in her personality
an inhibition on his thought, speech, and action that prevented an
overture. And this continued until the ship had rounded the Cape of
Good Hope and sailed along the fortieth parallel to the vicinity of St.
Paul, by which time the father, having worried himself into insomnia,
was compelled to relax his vigilance by the physical necessity of
sleeping as long as he could, night or day, whenever sleep came to him,
and the daughter, intent upon matters far removed from love and lovers,
unconsciously placed herself in the way of a better acquaintance with
Bridge.
She came on deck alone one night in the first watch, when the ship was
tearing along before a quarterly breeze that she could barely carry
the kites under, and from the break of the poop watched Bridge on the
main deck giving the last orders toward the setting of a main royal
staysail; then, as he mounted the poop steps, she accosted him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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