Caleb West, Master Diver

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

All about the place—now in the pantry, now in the kitchen, now with a big dish, now with a pile of plates or a pitcher of milk—bustled Aunty Bell, with a smile of welcome and a cheery word for every one who came.

Nobody, of course, had come to breakfast,—that was seen from the way in which everybody insisted he had just dropped in for a moment out of the wet to see the captain, hearing he was home from the Ledge, and from the alacrity with which everybody, one after another, as the savory smells of fried fish and soft clams filled the room, forgot his good resolutions and drew up his chair to the hospitable board.

Most of them told the truth about wanting to see the captain. Since his sojourn among them, and without any effort of his own, he had filled the position of adviser, protector, and banker to half the people along the shore. He had fought Miss Peebles’s battle, when the school trustees wanted the girl from Norwich to have her place. He had recommended the tug captain to the towing company, and had coached him over-night to insure his getting a license in the morning. He had indorsed Caleb West’s note to make up the last payment on the cabin he had bought to put his young wife Betty in; and when the new furniture had come over from Westerly, he had sent two of his men to unload it, and had laid some of the carpets himself on a Saturday when Betty expected Caleb in from the Ledge, and wanted to have the house ready for his first Sunday at home.

When Mrs. Bell announced breakfast, Captain Joe, in his shirt-sleeves, took his seat at the head of the table, and with a hearty, welcoming wave of his hand invited everybody to sit down,—Carleton first, of course, he being the man of authority, and representing to the working-man that mysterious, intangible power known as the “government.”

The superintendent generally stopped in at the captain’s if the morning were stormy; it was nearer his lodgings than the farmhouse where he took his meals—and then breakfast at the captain’s cost nothing. He had come in on this particular day ostensibly to protest about the sloop’s having gone to the Ledge without a notification to him. He had begun by saying, with much bluster, that he didn’t know about the one stone that Caleb West was “reported” to have set; that nothing would be accepted unless he was satisfied, and nothing paid for by the department without his signature. But he ended in great good humor when the captain invited him to breakfast and placed him at his own right hand. Carleton liked little distinctions when made in his favor; he considered them due to his position.

The superintendent was a type of his class. His appointment at Shark Ledge Light had been secured through the efforts of a brother-in-law who was a custom-house inspector. Before his arrival at Keyport he had never seen a stone laid or a batch of concrete mixed. To this ignorance of the ordinary methods of construction was added an overpowering sense of his own importance coupled with the knowledge that the withholding of a certificate—the superintendent could choose his own time for giving it—might embarrass everybody connected with the work. He was not dishonest, however, and had no faults more serious than those of ignorance, self-importance, and conceit. This last broke out in his person: he wore a dyed mustache, a yellow diamond shirt-pin, and on Sundays patent leather shoes one size too small.

Captain Joe understood the superintendent thoroughly. “Ain’t it cur’us,” he would sometimes say, “that a man’s old’s him is willin’ ter set round all day knowin’ he don’t know nothin’, never larnin’, an’ yit allus afeard some un’ll find it out?” Then, as the helplessness of the man rose in his mind, he would add, “Well, poor critter, somebody’s got ter support him; guess the guv’ment’s th’ best paymaster fur him.”

When breakfast was over, the skipper of the Screamer dropped in to make his first visit, shaking the water from his oilskins as he entered.

“Pleased to meet yer, Mis’ Bell,” he said in his bluff, wholesome way, acknowledging the captain’s introduction to Mrs. Bell, then casting his eyes about for a seat, and finally taking an edge of a window-sill among the sou’westers.

“Give me your hat an’ coat, and do have breakfast, Captain Brandt,” said Mrs. Bell in a tone as hearty as if it were the first meal she had served that day.