Caleb West, Master Diver

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

CHAPTER IX—WHAT THE BUTCHER SAW

Caleb sat on the deck of the Screamer on her homeward run, his face turned toward Keyport Light, beyond which his little cabin lay. His eyes glistened, and there came a choking in his throat as he thought of meeting Betty. He could even feel her hand slipped into his, and could hear the very tones of her cheery welcome, when she met him at the gate and they walked together up the garden path to the porch.

Most of the men who had stood to the watch-tackles in the rolling surf sat beside him on the sloop. Those who were still wet, including Sanford, had gone below into the cabin, out of the cutting wind. Those who, like Caleb, had changed their clothes, sat on the after deck. Captain Joe, against Sanford’s earnest protest, had remained on the Ledge for the night. He wanted, he said, to see how the derricks would stand the coming storm.

It had been a busy month for the diver. Since the explosion he had been almost constantly in his rubber dress, working not only his regular four hours under water,—all that an ordinary man could stand,—but taking another’s place for an hour or two when some piece of submarine work at the Ledge required his more skillful eye and hand. He had set some fifty or more of the big enrockment blocks in thirty feet of water, each block being lowered into position by the Screamer’s boom, and he had prepared the anchor sockets in which to step the four great derricks. Twice he had been swept from his hold by the racing current, and once his helmet had struck a projecting rock with such force that he was deaf for days. His hands, too, had begun to blister from the salt water and hot sun. Betty, on his last Sunday at home, had split up one of her own little gloves for plasters, and tried to heal his blisters with some salve. But it had not done his bruises much good, he thought, as he probed with his stub of a thumb the deeper cracks in his tough, leathery palms.

Now that the men were convalescent he gloried more and more in his wife’s energy and capacity. To relieve a wounded man, serve him night and day, and by skill, tenderness, and self-sacrifice get him once more well and sound and on his legs, able to do a day’s work and earn a day’s pay,—this, to Caleb, was something to be proud of and to glory in. But for her nursing, he would often say, poor Billy would now be among the tombstones on the hill back of Keyport Light.

Caleb’s estimate of Betty’s efforts was not exaggerated. Her patient had been the most severely injured, and her task had therefore been longer and more severe. The cut on Lacey’s cheek and frontal bone, dividing his eyebrow like a sabre slash, had been deep and ugly and slow to heal; and the bruise on his back had developed into a wound that in its progress had sapped his youthful strength. He had been her patient from the first, and she had never neglected him an hour since the fatal night when she helped the doctor wind his bandages. When on the third day fever set in, she had taken her seat by his bedside until the delirium had passed. Mrs. Bell and Miss Peebles, the schoolmistress, had relieved each other in the care of the other wounded men,—all of them, strange to say, were single men, and all of them away from home.

Betty would go to her own cabin for an hour each day, but as soon as her work was done she would pull down the shades, lock the house door, and, with a sunbonnet on her head and some little delicacy in her hand, hurry down the shore road again to the warehouse hospital. This had been the first real responsibility of her life, the first time in which anything had been expected of her apart from the endless cooking of three meals a day, and the washing up and sweeping out that followed.

There were no more lonely hours for her now. A new tenderness, too, had been aroused in her nature because of the helplessness of the boy whose feeble, hot fingers clutched her own. The love which this curly-headed young rigger had once avowed for her when there were strength and ruggedness in every sinew of his body, when his red lips were parted over the white teeth and his eyes shone with pride, had been quite forgotten as she watched by his bed. It was this helplessness of his which was ever present in her mind, his suffering. She realized that the prostrate young fellow before her was dependent on her for his very life and sustenance, as a child might have been. It was for her he waited in the morning, refusing to touch his breakfast until she gave it to him,—unable at first, reluctant afterward. It was for her last touch on his pillow that he waited at night before he went to sleep. It was she alone who brought the smiles to his face, or inspired him with a courage he had almost lost when the pain racked him and he thought he might never be able to do a day’s work again.

The long confinement had left its mark on Lacey. He was a mere outline of himself the first day he was able to sit in the sunshine at the warehouse door. His hands were white, and his face was bleached. When he gained a little strength, Captain Joe gave him light duties about the wharf, the doctor refusing to let him go to the Ledge. But even after he was walking about, Betty felt him still under her care, and prepared dainty dishes for him. When she took them to him, she saw, with a strange sinking of her heart, that he gained but slowly, and was still weak and ill enough to need a woman’s care.

The story of her nursing and of the doctor’s constant tribute to her skill was well known, and Caleb, usually so reticent, would talk of it again and again. Most of the men liked to humor his pride in her, for Betty’s blithesome, cheery nature made her a favorite wherever she was known.