at sixteen mermaid was not adequately to be described by longfellow’s lines about the maiden
standing with reluctant feet
where the brook and river meet.
she was, without doubt, a girl still, despite her height of five feet two inches, despite the coiled beauty of her coppery hair and the wise young glance of her blue eyes. the three freckles about her nose, the dimples when she smiled, the faint colour in her cheeks, and the slender straightness of her body were wholly girlish; so was her general attitude toward older people. it was only when she was with certain boys slightly her seniors that a sort of womanliness seemed her predominant quality. the nature of this grown-up atmosphere varied. with guy vanton, who was twenty-two, mermaid would[147] have appeared to most onlookers to be rather sisterly. with tommy lupton, who was twenty, she was simply an attractive young person of the other sex. but in her attitude toward seventeen-to-eighteen-year-old richard hand the girl alternated the r?le of comrade and equal with that of motherly management. these variations were not a matter of ages but of personalities. they were determined by the fact that guy vanton, from a lonely boyhood, was developing into a lonely young man; that tommy lupton was perfectly normal and a healthy youth who was mermaid’s senior by an interval which, between a boy and a girl or a man and a woman, is without significance; by the further fact that dickie hand needed special treatment and looking after.
for dickie was a gifted boy who was always on a seesaw. he had his ups and downs of which his grasping old father was but seldom aware, and could have viewed with nothing but contempt. nor was dickie likely to get much good of his mother’s philosophy. all her life mrs. hand had supposed that everything was for the best; and this opiate of age is no drug to feed to youth. dickie, whose spirits were either aloft in the air or bumping the ground, could not play seesaw alone. mermaid recognized as much and seated herself on the other end of the plank. occasionally dickie would forget the equilibrium necessary and would make more or less horizontal advances toward her. to restore the[148] balance mermaid had to meet him halfway, but she seized the first opportunity to remind him that his place was at a distance.
at sixteen mermaid was halfway through high school at patchogue. the question of her future remained undecided. cap’n smiley, her dad, and his sister, keturah, quarrelled mildly about it. the keeper of the lone cove coast guard station did not like the notion of losing sight of his adopted daughter except for holidays. keturah thought the girl ought to go away to school.
“don’t be a fool, john,” she counselled the keeper. “the child will be home two months or more in summer. you won’t be on duty on the beach then, and we can all four—you and she and hosea and myself—be together. she’s got to have something in her life besides blue port, and she’s got to have something in her life besides those three boys. they’re all right as boys go,” she added in qualification, “but i don’t suppose you want her to stay here and spend her life as your daughter and my niece, the vanton boy’s sister, tommy lupton’s sweetheart, and dickie hand’s mother!”
“seems to me, keturah,” interjected her new husband, ho ha, “being all those things would be considerable.”
“it isn’t anything to be somebody,” his wife answered. “on the other hand, there’s a lot of tomfoolery in the[149] talk of ‘doing’ this and that. there’s no sense in doing anything unless it’s going to enable you to be somebody, and there’s no sense in being somebody unless it enables you to do something.”
“hold on, hold on,” protested ho ha. “you go too fast for me to follow you. i didn’t marry you for your philosophy.”
“well, you have to take my philosophy along with the rest,” said keturah, briskly. “i didn’t marry you to bake pancakes every morning of my life, but i guess i’ll have to.”
“there’s a lot of philosophy in pancakes,” asserted ho ha. “they go flip-flop, and that’s the way life goes.”
“that’s why these people who can turn somersaults gracefully always get along well, eh?” said cap’n smiley with a grin.
“to stick to the subject and not to the griddle,” resumed keturah, “the child ought to go away this fall. she likes chemistry and she likes cooking and she mixes all sorts of messes in both. i live in constant dread that she’ll serve me some good-tasting poison by accident or that the baked potatoes will explode. i don’t know anything about this scientific cookery you hear so much about, but mermaid might as well get what there is in it. they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, though i must say that the job of filling his stomach is about all a woman could be[150] expected to handle.” she looked at ho ha, a notable eater.
“well, then, i think she might spend this summer on the beach with me—with all of us,” amended cap’n smiley. “i’ll be there anyway this year. you and hosea and mermaid can take the biggles house, or something more sizable if you want; there’s plenty of little houses within a quarter of a mile of the station.”
mermaid, entering, had heard her dad’s suggestion and clapped her hands in applause.
“that’ll be splendid!” she cried. “captain vanton has taken a little bungalow, and guy is going to be over there; tommy lupton and dickie hand are going to spend august camping on the beach; so we’ll have company all summer!”
the three adults exchanged amused glances.
