Harold Titus

“ Lars stared dumbly at his plate.
“His talk is wasted wind,” he growled. “It does not make him a good worker; it will not feed a woman. I am a good fisherman. I will give her a good home.”
“Tell her about it, then! Tell the same thing in sixty ways!” his mother shrilled, old eyes dancing. “You think all the time of work and sleep; you are unthinking about the things that make girls' hearts light; you are always long-faced, like a sick old man. You should laugh and joke and be silly!”
“Foolishness won't put bread in our bellies,” he scoffed.
“No, but it'll put Sigrid's babies in your cradle. ”

“ And all through that wild night with its death he clung to the wheel with a queer, detached hopelessness depressing him, making him somehow heedless of the fact that life might last no longer than the next moment! Life should be the only thing that really' mattered. But values had changed so strangely!
Then Tim Bell went overboard, and he was alone, crying the girl's name into the freezing weather! ”

“ The tug captain, who had followed, stammering unheard entreaties, gave up and ran for the doctor, whimpering that the Dane was crazy from his fight with the lake.
A watchmaker, glass in one eye, looked up, startled by the apparition that fell against his door and burst it open, crushing his weight upon the little show-case and jamming it back against the shelves, penning him behind it. The blue eyes that laboriously sought and clung to his were fired with the light seen in the eyes of men who are crazed by one idea, whose mentality is consumed with its intensity. ”

“ Four were to sail; one was Tim Bell. He, too, had some one to wave a special good-by—Sigrid.
“See,” Lars's mother whispered, poking his shins with her stick, “she watches you while she talks to him! Say something pretty to make her remember you; bring her a present from the city. Her tongue is for him, but her eyes are for you—and a girl's heart is in her eyes.” ”

“ Then, as he strained against the wheel to hold the distressed schooner on what he hoped was her course, his slippery footing gave and he floundered heavily to regain uprightness and keep his stiff hands in control of the reluctant steering-rig.
Bell made no response; Lars added nothing.
Each time the Elsa, caught off her poise, failed to rise to the heave of the lake and shoved her ugly snout into the swift gray seas, she came up more slowly, for the ice accumulated that fast. ”

“ He was still laughing, sagged against the wheel, when they came alongside, the bang of the tug's motor sharp above the storm; and he was crying when they carried him into their deck-house and made fast to his boat and gathered headway toward the buildings banked on the slope that rose from the shore.
They tried to make him tell how many he had lost; they told him he had beaten the worst gale the Lakes had ever known; they told him his schooner, his cargo, were safe, they told him he had done it alone—what no man could have done alone. ”

“ To the island daughter that fact epitomized the spirit of life on the bluff; any clock was a luxury; this clock was so dainty, so beautiful that to possess it was quite beyond belief; yet the girl whose it was did not value it enough to keep the gold hands turning.
Sigrid told Lars of it and he shrugged his shoulders, saying: “I have never had a clock. She is foolish to have that kind.” ”

“ He did not think of his slim chance of life, of the improbability of being able to pull the Elsa through, nor of the island village back somewhere in the lake; he was seeing again the light of eager anticipation in a girl's face as she gazed into Tim Bell's beady eyes when he promised with bravado to grant the useless, precious trifle for which he had encouraged her to wish. Most men, had they confronted the situation Lars had faced through those months, would have put her from their minds long ago ”

“ The big Dane's glances never frightened her the way this man's did; but his talk did not thrill her, either. Tim Bell's attentions came somewhere near answering the yearning set in her heart by her knowledge of luxuries and of the young lover's constant concern for the lawyer's daughter; unnecessary, yet so precious!
Lars was slow to comprehend. His mother saw, though, and warned him curtly.
“But why?” he asked, surprised into accented speech. “He is little and weak; he's not a good fisherman, even!”
His old mother laughed deprecatingly and answered in their tongue:
“She has got notions. ”

“ Can't you see? All she wants is some of his foolishness from you and she'll come running. Don't wait too long!”
But Lars did not believe his mother. She was so old that she talked to herself. Anyhow, no such explanation could be warranted, for each time he saw Tim and Sigrid together, he noticed that the girl, seeing him, talked the harder, became the more attentive to the man who had supplanted him.
The big Dane went about his work with a wretched spirit. The hurt in his breast grew worse instead of curing with time. Now and then he envied Tim Bell consciously. ”

“ His horizon of thought shut down at food, shelter, and, now, Sigrid. Some latent bitterness was roused by ideas of useless luxuries, of words, or actions, or material things that were not needed, that did not bear directly on the problem of existence.
And to annoy him further, one of the articles in the lawyer's house which demanded a growing interest from Sigrid was a clock on the dressing-table of his eldest daughter's boudoir. Clocks on Petit Blanc were rare. The few in the village were either old-country timepieces or rackety, unreliable alarm-clocks. ”

“ She's nothing to stop the wedding only she doesn't like the bridegroom! Haven't you seen her, for weeks and weeks, following you with her eyes? Listening for your voice? Expecting you back beside her every evening? ”

“ That was the first time any of the islanders had been employed as house servants for the people who escaped heat and found quiet on Petit Blanc; their help had always been brought from the city. Consequently the inner workings of the homes on the bluff would have been mysteries had the island people been curious. They were not curious. That is, such a condition prevailed until Sigrid went to work for the lawyer.
The girl returned to the village and her waiting Lars, that first evening, with a strange volubility. ”

“ Then Lars found himself winding his arms in the wheel to stay on deck and felt the schooner righting drunkenly, and in a queer, detached way took up the fight for his life and the schooner's life and the safety of the cargo which meant so much to the fishing people back there on Petit Blanc; and as he let his weight fall on the slippery spokes he called aloud the name of the girl: “Sigrid! ... Sig ...” ”