richard hand had taken john vanton to a school in new jersey and had seen him settled there before going back to new york to prepare for a job in arizona. the western enterprise necessitated a long absence from his office in lower broadway, and made it improbable that he would be able to see the vantons for nearly a year. but late in october mary vanton got a letter from him in which he said:
things are in such shape here that i think i shall be able to run away for a couple of weeks at christmas time, and if you like i will go to the school and pick up john, who will be coming home about then for the holidays. i am going to[264] invite myself to come and stay with you part of the time i am east—the first part of it. after christmas i shall have to get back to the new york office and clean up some work there. may i come?
i do not suppose you have heard from guy, though i sincerely hope you may have. i made some inquiries in new york and did a little investigation by wire. through a friend in washington i had a search made of records of the federal employment bureaus in some of the cities and we found that under his own name he had been shipped on a british vessel, the sea wanderer, of liverpool, sailing from san francisco to leith, scotland. that was months ago.
the sea wanderer is an old ship, a squarerigger, and she went around cape horn. of course i inquired right away about her and learned that she arrived safely at leith after a passage of five months—not very swift, you see. i wasn’t able to find out what became of guy after that, but he reached scotland all right, for there was no trouble on the passage and no one was lost or died. he was paid off at the board of trade office in leith along with the rest of the crew.
he appears to have gone straight to san francisco from new york and to have shipped there on this passage before doing anything else. the time interval is too short to have allowed him to do anything else. it was not more than ten days, apparently, from the time he left new york to the day the sea wanderer sailed. the people at the federal employment bureau in san francisco have no recollection of him. they don’t recall anything he said nor what he looked like. he was just one of hundreds of others they deal with every day. the only actual identification, of course, lies in the[265] name, and it is highly improbable that the man who was shipped on the sea wanderer was some other guy vanton. i think that, in a way, you will be glad to know that he kept his own name. it makes him seem more like a fellow going about his proper business and not trying to hide or run away from something.
he wasn’t doing that, i feel sure. he was just going after something he hadn’t got. let’s hope he gets it and comes back safely with it.
john is a trump. i like that older boy of yours and suspect he’s got great stuff in him—not that it surprises me. as your boy i should be surprised if he hadn’t. i rather expected, though, that he would say something about his father, talk to me about him in some way, try to get my opinion or something of that sort. but he never opened his mouth on the subject. he’s self-contained without being conceited. he’ll get on well at school. and whatever befalls, when he gets a little older you are going to be able to have real reliance on him. he writes me regularly and seems to like the place and the fellows. i think he inherits your taste for chemistry, and as i’m a chemical engineer he thinks something of me on that account. in fact, when we’re alone together it’s pretty much a case of “talk shop” for me all the time. not that i mind that! i never knew before how interesting shop talk can be. and if i give him my confidence he won’t withhold his. i wonder, anyway, if a certain relation of friendliness and exchanged confidence and shared confidence doesn’t come rather easier between two people who aren’t joined by ties of blood. it has sometimes struck me, from what i’ve seen of other men and their sons,[266] that the very fact that a man is a boy’s father somehow makes it more difficult for him to come into a real confidential relation with the boy—at times, anyway. for even nowadays the father is more or less an embodiment of authority, more or less the sovereign, and intimacy with the sovereign is not particularly easy. since i have no real authority over john he is rather more inclined to listen to my advice and heed it. “if i were you” gets farther, lots of times, than “you must.” well, i won’t theorize about it; the fact is what matters, and the fact is what gives me immense pleasure and a sort of general gratitude that belongs to you and john and things in general.
i wish there were some way of finding out what guy did after reaching leith, but from the day when he left the sailors’ home there no trace of him appears. i have had the people at the sailors’ home questioned but he did not talk about his plans. they remember him there rather distinctly—not his personal appearance but the fact that he seemed to be a man of education and breeding. when he left he took his dunnage with him, which would make it seem probable that he intended to go to sea again. if so he may be on his way home now. i sincerely hope so. i not only hope he’ll come back, but i hope he’ll come back as speedily as possible and in his best estate, physically and mentally and spiritually.
tell me what the girls would most like for christmas presents. and if there is anything i can get for you on my way east let me know. john and i are planning to spend a day in new york buying some gifts. what would you like? i shall bring along a toy wireless outfit for guy, jr.
[267]mary vanton read this letter with attention. the news it contained of her husband stirred her profoundly. at first she wondered if the career of captain vanton had had anything to do with guy vanton going to sea; but after some reflection she concluded it had not. guy had always loved the sea, which was one of the reasons they had built the beach house she was living in. the sea had been a mutual bond between them—the sea and the beach. fully half of the verse he had from time to time written dealt with the ocean, and he and she had shared a certain interpretation of it, that the sea was the last, the irremovable, the perpetual frontier on which the race of men could renew themselves, renew their hardihood, exhibit their courage, their daring, their resourcefulness, their faith.
“the sea,” guy had once avowed, “is the only frontier that never vanishes and never recedes. men triumph over it: ‘a thousand fleets roll over thee in vain,’ and the same victory has to be won anew each time a ship sets sail. steam and wireless and all sorts of other inventions make sea travel safer and easier and swifter only in the long run, and in the case of the ‘thousand fleets’—in the case of any single voyage or any single ship the actual risks, the possible hardships, the prerequisite of latent courage and absolute devotion on the part of the men who sail her, remain exactly the same as when the phoenicians went forth in trading vessels and shuddered to go beyond the pillars of hercules,[268] into the dark, unknown ocean that rolled away to the end of the world.”
this, he had argued, and mary vanton agreed with him, constituted the real immortality of the sea and the undying freshness of its adventure. they both felt that there was something in their attitude that wasn’t a part of the ordinary landsman’s attitude toward deep water. both had been brought up in the tradition of tall ships and men who manned them. it showed in their outlook on life and their tastes in reading. joseph conrad was the passion of both. although they agreed in thinking his greatest novel to be not a sea tale at all—“nostromo”—they were of one mind respecting his finest story. together they picked “youth,” despite the apparent preponderance of critical opinion in favour of “heart of darkness.” perhaps this was because in their own lives they had their heart of darkness; and in guy’s case there must have been, in respect of “youth,” an inextinguishable yearning for something he could hardly be said ever to have enjoyed in his own strange and sad experience.
much of all this passed through mary vanton’s mind as she stood on the wide veranda of the beach house, alone. the water was now far too cold for bathing and the children had scattered to their own devices. it was a chilly, sunshiny, october day. hull down on the restless horizon mary could see a steamship moving almost imperceptibly westward. by nightfall[269] she would be at anchor off quarantine. that same night or the next morning her passengers would troop ashore and add themselves to new york’s millions. and even as she watched this liner creep along, not more rapidly than the minute hand of a watch, a thin plume of smoke on the eastern horizon announced the presence of another vessel. so they followed each other, day in and day out, going west, going east, seldom missing from the scene for an hour. more rarely you saw a great ship under full sail come up over the rim of the world, move past with curved white beauty, and then sink over the world’s rim again.
