N hour after I had hired the Kathie C. an errand called me "'way up along." On the board-walk two miles from home I met Captain Amos Mayo.
"Well, well!" he greeted me, "so I hear you've hired the Kathie C. to go cruisin' down to Buzzard's Bay, to the Vineyard Sound Island. I always did hold with visitin' islands by sea! Might 's well take the steam-cars to a port and be done with it, 's go by steamboat. I wouldn't want to visit other folks' harbors except by sea."
I think it was a subconscious understanding that islands should always be visited by sea which had made the poring over charts and the stimulating Coast Pilot our favorite indoor sport.
For years these plans were unattainable dreams. We live in Provincetown on the end of Cape Cod, which thrusts itself out to sea nearly eighty miles. Arm and fist, the cape has been called, with a finger of sand to make our broad harbor for us.
We lived remote, a dour, harborless coast on whose length lie the bones of vessels—they call it the graveyard of the Atlantic—separating us from the Vineyard Sound and our sister towns. When the Cape Cod Canal joined our bay to Buzzard's Bay as with a silver wire, it made New Bedford our neighbor, Nantucket and Edgartown accessible, and our cruise became a reality.
When we weighed anchor the shadow of a sudden storm was still over us. There had been men lost—how many we didn't know as yet. Now the bay rested. It was pale as polished silver mirroring a distant sky.
We pounded past the silent fishing fleet, rounded Long Point, and Province-town played her conjuror's trick which to the end makes one feel the victim of mirage.
One moment you are in a populous harbor tongued with gray wharves, the low-lying houses trooping like gray sheep into the sea; pass the lighthouse, and a desolate sand-dune is all that remains, the remote resting-place of gulls.
As we passed Wood End Light a seiner appeared under our lee. In the early morning the men's faces shone like bronze, and their red boots, the brown swirl of their nets, and their black boats showed violent against the intense pallor of the sea. There was something fatalistic in their aspect as they stood among their nets. They seemed unchanged from those men of ancient days who went out to put forth their nets for fish.
"Hello, Tony!" one of them hailed our captain. "We was just telephoning you from Wood End to tell Gerald to bring us gas."
We dropped them astern, two of them sitting in the cross-tree of their sloop watching for the ripple of schooling fish to flush with a darker blue the shining surface of the water, spots of black against the sky's lofty pallor.
My eyes went over the homely details of my vessel with pride. The Kathie C. was my first command. She is no pleasure craft, and makes her living floundering in Hyannis winters.
I had cruised often enough, but always in the capacity of an afterthought, a meek creature of protective coloring, who cherished in her heart the stern maxim that on a boat a woman should neither be seen nor heard; there on sufferance, sentenced to hard labor, performing the duties of able seaman, cook, and cabin-boy, and also doing my trick at the wheel when the going was uninteresting.
The boats on which I had cruised had had yachtish pretensions, and the usual pretension of a small boat of this kind is speed. They tend to be narrow, their spaces are cut up, while the Kathie C. has a cockpit the size of a small back yard. She is indeed everything a yacht of her size—thirty-eight feet is her overall—would not have been, leisurely and comfortable, built as she was for space and weather. Instead of beauty there was a quality in her so downright and honest that my heart warmed to her. Beside the boats I had known she seemed a jolly sea tramp. Here there would be none of the yachtsman's pretentious punctilio—the smaller the yacht the more insistent the punctilio—that had darkened former cruises for me.
We surrendered ourselves to the peace that only a small boat can give one, not caring where we went, knowing only that our port was Adventure, our thoughts as fluid as the sea.
The captain spoke. What he wanted was that water should be heated for him. To this his wife responded with the idle good nature of a woman whose tasks were done, that, so far as she knew, he was not paralyzed and he would find the kettle on the stove.
Never had I heard the captain of any vessel thwarted, partaking, as captains do, of the sanctity of absolute rule.
I waited. Nothing happened. The heavens did not fall clattering. The captain stared—but his wife was lost in pleasant contemplations. He turned, perplexed, to the cabin. I watched him, another illusion shattered.