Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ And just within Skeleton Point where the pent channel widened suddenly, beginning there and extending its circumference past my lagoon, there swirled and circled ceaselessly—save for a brief hour at slack water—a huge back eddy, in which sailed around and around all the driftwood and flotsam spewed through Hell Gate or brought to its door by ebb and flood. Round in its circle the gray-green water swept, swifter and more swift, until at full run in or out it raced, and a hollow whirlpool spun in the center like a top. ”

“ Skeleton Point lies just at the entrance to one of the worst tidal passages on the whole North Pacific. The thirty-odd miles of the gulf’s width is pinched to a pair of half-mile narrows—one against Vancouver Island, one on the mainland side, where my camp stood. Through this pent channel the tides come and go with devilish ferocity. Woe to the small craft caught therein at the full run either way. Even the powerful coasters lie up for the slack of the tide, for few have power to buck that tide race, and if they run with it, the danger is little less. ”

“ About three weeks after Joe came to work for me, we sat at dinner one day. Low tide came at one-thirty—the end of a big flood. It had become my habit to watch those tides. The tremendous inrushings and outpourings fascinated me. And I, like other men, had seen strange and fearful things happen there. Once, indeed, the foolhardy skipper of a coastwise boat, with ninety lives under his hand, tried to buck through Hell Gate. He had a sixteen-knot-boat contempt for fast water, and a schedule of gulf ports to make. He fought tide and whirl and rip and eddy till he laid Skeleton Point abeam. ”

“ Broderick echoed, with a tinge of scorn in his voice. “The law of probabilities is all on your side. I wish I felt my chances as good. I wish that my chance of happiness had been half as good as yours. Would I throw up my hands and go wandering up and down the earth with pain and uncertainty and self-pity like thorns in my flesh? I should say not!”
“You don’t understand,” Joe answered somberly. “There’s some things a man can’t put into words. He can only feel them.”
“But I do understand,” Broderick insisted. “I’ve been through the mill. A man gets on the grid, and he can only squirm. ”

“ When you have had it, it’s something that no one and nothing can take away. Its impressions can’t be ironed out as you can iron the wrinkles out of a piece of cloth. It’s a bond between a man and a woman as long as their hearts beat. Do you suppose that the hundred and one associations of your life together meant nothing to your wife?”
“They didn’t seem to,” Joe answered sullenly. “She was sick of it all. She thought she saw happiness in another direction.”
“The reason for that you probably know better than I do,” Broderick said. “But if I loved a woman I’d take nothing for granted. ”

“ I squinted seaward and saw very near at hand the tide rips tumbling in a rising gulf swell.
“There’s only one chance for him on God’s green earth,” said I. “If he goes into those rips without steerageway—good night. If the back eddy catches him, we might heave him a line as she swings past. Come on!”
Past the mouth of the lagoon, a low cliff gave straight down on the eddy’s sweep, and I had often noticed that driftwood making its interminable round passed under the cliff. At the end of my cabin hung a coil of half-inch rope. ”

“ I came back to the coast in due time, and while I didn’t write, because I’m not much on correspondence, I did retain some very vivid impressions of Joe and Norma Galloway. I liked to think of them like a pair of birds in their nest, while I was knocking about in logging camps, with bolt cutters and all the roving, restless lot my way of life took me among. A man playing a lone hand finds his life full of bleak spots. He can’t dodge them. ”

“ Broderick went on. “He refuses to act. He won’t do anything. He says he has suffered till he’s numb. And I can’t make him see that she has suffered, too, is suffering yet, as he is. It’s pride. If I were in his place, I’d have no pride. I’d crawl on my hands and knees in the dust back to her if I could create for myself the longing she has for him. It isn’t worth while to be proud and aloof and miserable when all you have to do is reach out your hands for happiness. ”

“ One can talk and talk and never get anywhere. It’s deeds that count. He didn’t give her a chance. He never saw me, never even knew my name. I wasn’t looming a big figure before him to drive him insane with impotent jealousy. But when the big upheaval came, he effaced himself as absolutely as if he had been buried. He made no effort to learn how things went.
“And then”—Broderick bowed his head for a second—“then, after he was gone, and there was nothing to do but wait patiently a little while, get a divorce quietly, and marry me, she woke up. It wasn’t me she wanted. It was Joe. ”

“ Joe was a real man, sterling. If one may know a woman by her ordinary manner, then Norma rang as true as he did. And she was a beautiful woman, too; one of those tall, perfectly formed, radiant creatures that a man is proud to be seen walking down the street with. ”

“ Didn’t it ever occur to you that she might really miss you after those years of intimate living? That your clean sweep of everything might have made a gap in her life that nothing but you yourself could fill in again? ”

“ He swung the link on the rope’s end as a sling-shot thrower whirls his missile, and as the boat—now showing the name Grosbeak in bold white against her black bow—came abreast, he shot the line with a tremendous heave of his body. I could not have cast it as far by forty feet, I know. But the throw failed. It was scarce in a man’s arm to bridge the distance. The speed of the current helped to fool him besides. The line fell short, and to the rear.
“Haul in!” Joe panted. “Haul fast!” ”

“ When he’d made the complete renunciation, stepped out of her life for good and all, she found something lacking, a place that nobody else could fill, that she wanted him back, that her heart ached to have him back. Oh, you can’t ever tell anything about a woman. ”

“ I’ve lived in the open most of my life, doing things that take endurance and muscle, and he was physically a better man than I. But where he used to sparkle, to be full of the devil, now he would sit around quietly, always immersed in his own thoughts, an absent look stealing over his face if he were left long to himself. ”

“ Then, after a little, he asked the way to Ryder’s. I showed him, and he started out. I wanted him to wait an hour or so till I got my business transacted, but he seemed anxious to get on, and I didn’t urge my company upon him.
And I watched him hike off down an old skid road that led to Ryder’s camp at Skeleton Point, wondering. Naturally I wondered. When a man sloughs everything that makes life worth while and turns up at the hardest job on the Pacific coast with a different name, and something hard and bitter in his eyes, there’s something radically wrong. ”

“ For all you know, the very moment that you were gone and she was free to marry the other man, it may have dawned on her that she didn’t want to, that you filled a place in her life no one else could possibly fill. ”

“ The heart to buck up and make life give me those things I used to value is clean gone. I strewed that five thousand dear across the continent trying to make myself forget. But I didn’t. You can’t knife a man that way without leaving a sore wound. ”

“ So I moved to the corner, where only came the indistinguishable drone of their voices, wondering to myself if the devil that rises in men where a woman is concerned would presently set them at each other’s throats. ”

“ You haven’t given her or yourself a fair fighting chance. It’s one thing to act in a whirl of feeling. Things often look altogether different when you’ve dropped back to everyday living. You took your hurt and ran away and nursed it. You didn’t wait to see what happened after you’d done your part. You don’t know but she’s somewhere nursing a grief that overtook her the minute you took yourself beyond sight and hearing of her.”
“No chance,” Joe muttered. ”

“ And still—I’ve often wondered if I’m any different from other men; if the same thing comes to other men, and if they take it the same way?”
He looked up. Broderick was staring absently out over the tide race past Skeleton Point, and Joe met only my mildly questioning gaze. ”