Selima
There was a mystery about Captain Knox’s wife. Of course, everyone in Gull Harbor knew there had been a Mrs. Knox, but according to the best accounts no one had ever seen her. There were a few facts, however, upon which one could rely. Some thirty or forty years before, the captain, returning after a long voyage to the East, had announced himself a widower of recent bereavement. The existence of the captain’s spouse in Gull Harbor had begun, therefore, simultaneously with the knowledge of her decease.
A short time after the captain’s return, a neat gravestone was erected on the Knox farm, in the old burial lot, in which had already been laid to rest the bodies of the captain’s parents, two brothers, and an uncle. Upon the stone, by the captain’s order, was carved in plain lettering, “In memory of Selima, my beloved wife.”
The captain himself would often refer to her. “She was a pretty cretur, she was.” Beyond this, however, discussion of her was not tolerated in his presence.
By the time I came to know Gull Harbor, the captain’s seafaring career was over. The people of the village had long since recovered from the first excitement caused by the mystery of the captain and his wife, and conversation had drifted back into familiar channels of interest as to why Mel Hibbard’s sister had given up her flock of Plymouth Rocks, or speculations as to the color Mrs. Lovell, wife of the minister of the Adventist Church, would choose for her new front room carpet.
I had always felt a prejudice for the Maine coast and from the moment the Portland boat rounded the big rocky cove, I knew I should like Gull Harbor. There was a restful peace about the place peculiar to the seaboard of New England. The smell of low tide and drying codfish hung about the wharf. Almost immediately one felt at home.
I had not been two weeks in the town before I knew all that Gull Harbor had to tell about their distinguished captain. Didn’t I know Captain ’Thiel Knox, the man who commanded the first seven-masted schooner to sail the sea? Why, he had been to “Chiny” half a dozen times, and the Lord knows how many he has crossed the ocean. As a further mark of distinction he was the proud possessor of two long-haired cats which he had brought with him from Persia.
One day I happened to ask my landlady, Mrs. Simmons, an old resident and a noted gossip, if the captain was a widower, and then I learned of the mystery. “For it’s my opinion,” she added, after telling me the story, “that she was a Chiny woman, or mebbe a princess from Persy, though nobody’ll ever know. The captain he would never say a word; quiet’s a mouse on the subject. You oughter see him, Mr. Fitch. He’s real nice, and a great hand for company; all kinds, it don’t matter to him,” she finished in a tone which meant to include even the summer people.
A “fortnit” later (one can see how easily I slipped into the vernacular of the place), I was out sailing in a borrowed dory. It was a clear August morning; the sky, a healthy blue and cloudless; the tall spruce trees, interspersed here and there by a monumental pine, guarded the water’s edge.
By the time I had rounded the long point that lay between the harbor and the back bay beyond, a stiff breeze had sprung up. The churning blue stretched oceanward for miles, blotched by myriads of foamy white caps. The little dory rocked and twisted in the choppy waves. The sail, which was home-made, proved an easy victim of the wind, and I soon found to my dismay that I was drifting helplessly down the bay toward a stretch of shore that I had not yet visited. The boat moved rapidly. The trees along the shore were soon followed by a broad green field, which stretched up from a tiny harbor almost surrounded by a protecting arm of the sea toward which I was being driven. Gradually the water became shallower, and the wind reluctantly let me slip from its grasp. I was able to look about me. It was a very beautiful harbor.
Suddenly I was conscious of an old man in a dory, rowing towards me. He might have been Father Neptune risen fromthe depths of the ocean for all I knew. Without a word he pulled my dilapidated boat ashore. Safely landed, I thanked him. He was an old man with a long white beard. He had on a tarpaulin and looked like a sailor.
“Ay-es,” he said pleasantly, when he had moored the two boats to the wharf (he gave me no opportunity to assist him). “I thought you was a landlubber, the moment I set eyes on you. Ye can’t tack without a center-board,” he added with a smile, the first he had given me. I blushed feebly at my hopeless mistake.
“I thought,” I began weakly, but he didn’t wait for me to finish.
“Won’t you come into the house for a bit?” he asked kindly. “You’re wet through, ain’t ye?” And he led the way to the little low shingled structure, fronted by a long porch upon which sat a large Persian cat, the handsomest I had ever seen.
“Thar, thar, Daisy bird, you’ve had enough pettin’ for one day,” as he brushed her gently aside, adding, as he noticed my admiration, “Got another, better lookin’ of the two, in the kitching. Won’t ye come in?”
“You’re not Captain Knox, are you?” I asked.
“Right you be! Salathiel Knox, captain, retired you call it, don’t ye?” and he smiled again.
While my clothes were drying, we sat around the fire and talked, the captain still in his tarpaulin, while I languished in a richly figured rug which he had produced from a locked cupboard in the kitchen. “Bought it in Singapore twenty-four years ago,” he added by way of dismissal of my compunction at wearing so valuable a possession. The captain smoked mildly while I told him who I was, making few comments, but when I tried to lead the conversation around to his own life he proved a poor subject for questioning. As Mrs. Simmons said to me afterwards, “The captain can talk when he’s a mind to, but land sakes, when he ain’t, it’s no use.”
The captain did remark, as I was leaving, that although he lived alone he wasn’t a bachelor; his wife, he said, was dead. “She was a pretty creatur, she was,” he added, half regretfully, as he laid down his pipe.
On my way home, my path led not far from the burial lot. I found the stone without difficulty and read the inscription.
The following summer, soon after we arrived, I paid my second visit to the Knox farm. I found the captain sitting on his porch, smoking. He didn’t remember me at first; but suddenly he burst out with, “Wall, I swan! You’re the young man that was tryin’ to tack in a dory without a center-board. I remember you, o’ course. Pretty good stuff, eh,” he added, “to tackle such a wind when you knew next to nothin’ o’ the sea. You’d make a good one, I’ll warrant.”
After that I often went to see him. He became quite loquacious at times and recounted some of his adventures. Always I expected he would run up against the mystery, but he never did. Few women were to be found in his stories.
One day I was surprised to see the captain at my door, seated in a new motor car. He had come to take me for a drive. I looked the machine over carefully.
“How does she go?” I asked.
“She sets all right,” he replied, cheerfully, “but she’s a bit wide in the stern.”
As we drove off together, he seemed in the best of spirits, although he admitted he was a “little nervous navigatin’ the new craft.”
On the way back, the captain became confidential. His story this time was concerned chiefly with a long sickness he had had in the Far East, and his romantic experience with a Malay girl. “She was a ripper, she was,” he added by way of comment.
“What was her name?” I inquired, with suppressed excitement, but he was intent upon turning a corner and did not answer. The next moment we were at the door of my house. He waved me good-bye as he disappeared around a bend in the road.
“Another opportunity lost,” I thought, as I walked up the path.
“It’s the Malay girl, Selima, I’ll be bound. That’s the mystery, Mr. Fitch. Didn’t he tell you she was a great beauty, all done up in rings and jewels?”
“Yes,” I answered absently.
This conversation took place about a week after my drive with the captain, while Mrs. Simmons was removing the breakfast dishes. I was reading the paper in the next room and did not like to be interrupted.
“I never heard him tell that story,” she continued, raising her voice above the clatter of the dishes. “He has taken you into his confidence, Mr. Fitch.”
“Then I fear I have more woefully betrayed it,” I replied without looking up.
Later I took a walk to the post office. The thought of the mystery, although I would have hesitated to acknowledge it even to myself, was making me positively uncomfortable.
“Was she really the Malay girl, after all?” I pictured the captain, young and handsome, walking up to the altar of a Buddhist temple with a Malay princess, dazzling with rings and jewels, leaning on his arm, her pale skin—no, the Malays were brown. I cursed my superior knowledge. Perhaps their princesses were not so dark. But my vision had faded; I was gazing at the floor of the Gull Harbor post office.
I took the road back which led by the captain’s. There was no sign of anyone as I passed. I wandered up by the burial lot. I wondered if Malay princesses were ever named Selima. On the way home I passed the captain. He waved to me pleasantly, as he rattled by.
“I will go to see him to-night,” I said to myself. It was after nine when I reached his house. The captain was still up. He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, a long-haired cat on either side. He seemed glad to see me. We sat and smoked. The logs crackled cheerfully. They reminded me somehow of my host. An hour flew by; conversation was gradually relaxing into silent contemplation. Suddenly I burst forth:
“Captain,” I said, desperately, “you remember the Malay woman you told me of the other day. Was her name Selima?”
For a moment I was afraid I had offended him. All of a sudden he began to laugh. Little by little his merriment increased, until his whole powerful frame was shaking. He trembled so that his glasses bobbed up and down on his nose like a cork. His chair creaked. Even his beard looked merry.
“Selima! Selima!” and he went off into another gale. Then, seeing my doubtful expression, he tried to pull himself together. “Selima! Selima! She was a pretty creetur’, she was,” and he laughed again. I was forced to join with him; his humor was catching.
“I know what’s a-worrying you,” he said. “It’s the mystery. There never was a boarder within twelve miles of this town whom they haven’t filled up with the story of my mysterious weddin’. They’re half curious themselves, though the Lord knows they’d oughter have more sense. Selima!” He laughed, the tears filling his eyes as he began again. “Selima! There never was any sech person! To think I have fooled this town for fifty years! It’s too much. I laugh about it nights.” Again catching my strained face, “Still curious?” he inquired with a twinkle.
“I’ll tell ye, but you mustn’t spoil my joke. D’ye understand? I guess I can trust ye,” he added confidentially, and settling himself in his chair he began.
“It’s not a long story,” he said, glancing at his watch. “About forty years ago, or mebbe more, when I was perhaps half as old as I am now, I lived here alone, when I warn’t on the water, which warn’t very much. It was close on to September, only a day or two or mebbe three before I was to sail from ‘Porchmouth’. She was a five-master, a beauty ef there ever was a handsome vessel.” The captain paused as if to recall her more vividly. “Gullnair was her name, brand new that year. Wall, it was a day or two before I was to sail, as I was tellin’ ye. I was out here in the pasture right over yonder by the old spring”—he pointed with a sailor’s thumb—“I had been gatherin’ berries and after a bit I lay down under a tree. I had been lobsterin’ all mornin’ and was tired. When I woke up I heard two women talkin’. They’re both dead now, but in their day they wuz the gol-durndest busybodies that ever I heard tell on. They was berryin’ and talkin’—about me, would you believe it? Speculatin’ as to why a nice lookin’ man (I hadn’t sech a bad complexion in those days,” added the captain reflectively as he rubbed his hand over his rough face)—“they was a wonderin’ why I didn’t get married. Was it because I had a hidden life? Did the girls object to my swearin’? Was I—the Lord preserve us, what didn’tthey say? They came to the conclusion that I didn’t marry because no one would have me. I could have strangled them both at that. I was hot headed in those days.” All the fun had faded from the captain’s face.
“After they went away,” he continued, “I began to think it over. At first I cal’lated I had better get married right away. There were a dozen of ’em hereabouts that very minute who would have taken me with a whoop. I had always tried to steer clear of the women heretofore. Second thoughts, thinks I, why not let the matter go driftin’ for awhile, anyway? So I did. But all the time that I was at sea it bothered me. On the home’ard voyage we struck a bad storm and the Gullnair went to the bottom after a brave fight, sir, after a brave fight! Most of the crew was drownded. I was saved by a miracle. Never mind about that now! Wall, sir, after I was picked up—she was a freighter bound for New York, as luck would have it—there come to me a big idea.
“When I got home I let them know I was a widower, married while I was away. Of course they understood she had been drownded on the ship. I wore a black band on my arm for a time. Seein’ as there as warn’t no suspicions in the wind, ‘I’ll make a full job of it,’ I says to myself. ‘I’ll set up a stone in the burial lot to her memory’. And that’s what I did. Wall, they come to write the inscription; I told them the words, but when they asked me for the name, I said kind o’ flustered like, ‘Selima’. It was the first one that popped into my head. That’s all.” The captain smiled, turning his gaze into the fire.
“Then you weren’t ever in love?” I said, with the faintest inflection in my voice.
The captain blew out a great puff of smoke, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and smiled.
MYLES WHITING.