From Place to Place

by Irvin S. Cobb

The magic of it made all things to match in with the image: Thus, for example, the tall palms with their feather-duster tops, bending seaward, turned into broad elms standing in regular double rank, like Yankee militiamen on a muster day. And night times, when through his windows there came floating in the soft vowelsome voices of native fishermen paddling their canoes upon the lagoon and singing as they paddled, he felt himself translated many thousands of miles away to Wednesday evening prayer meeting in a squat, brick church with a wooden belfry rearing above its steep slated roof.

But in this last conjuring-up of a beloved scene there lay at the back of the trick more of reminiscence than imagination, since the airs the fishermen chanted were based, nearly all, upon Christian songs that the earlier missionaries had brought hither; the words might be Polynesian but the cadence that carried the words was likely to be the cadence of some pioneer hymnster.

And ever and always the vision had a certain delectable climax; a definite consummation most devoutly wished for. For its final upshot would be that Ethan Pratt would behold himself growing old in the peaceful safe harbour of South New Medford, anchored fast by his heartstrings to a small white cottage, all furbished and plenished within, all flowers and shrubs roundabout, with a kitchen garden at its back, and on beyond an orchard of whitewashed trees where buff cochins clucked beneath the ripening fruit, and on beyond this in turn a hay meadow stretching away toward rising foothills.

He saw himself working in the flowers and tilling the vegetable garden. He watched himself quitting this haven to walk a sedate way to worship of a Sunday morning. With his mind's eye he followed his own course in a buggy along a country road in the fall of the year when the maples had turned and the goldenrod spread its carpet of tawny glory across the fields. And invariably his companion in these simple homely comfortable employments was a little woman who wore gold-rimmed glasses and starchy print frocks.

Into the picture no third figure ever obtruded. With her alone he conceived of himself as walking side by side through all the remaining days of his life. For this mousy methodical little man had his great romance. Unsuspected and undetected, inside the commonplace cover of his body it burned with a clear and a steady flame. It had burned there, never flickering, never wavering, through all the days of his faring into far and foreign parts. Since childhood the two of them had been engaged. It was she who wrote him the letters that came, a fat sheaf of them, by every steamer; it was to her that he wrote in reply. It was for the sake of her and in the intention of making a home for her that through four years he had endured this imprisonment or this martyrdom or this whatever you may be pleased to call it, away off here on the opposite side of the world from her. She was saving and he was saving, both for a common purpose. Back there at home it cost her little to live, and out here it cost him less. In fact, it cost him almost nothing. Ninety per cent of his pay went into his share of the pool.

Within another year the requisite sum which this pair of canny prudent souls had set as their modest goal would be reached; and then he could bid an everlasting farewell to these hated islands and go sailing home—home to South New Medford and to Miss Hetty Stowe. And then she would surrender the place she had held for so long as the teacher of District School Number Four, to become Mrs. Ethan Allen Pratt, a wife honoured, a helpmate well-beloved.

So to him the coming of the steamer meant more than an orgy of drunken beachcombers and a bustle of life and activity upon the beach; it meant more than a thin-strained taste of contact with a distant world of white men and white men's ways; meant more, even, than letters and papers. To him it was a renewal of the nearing prospect of an eternal departure out of these lands. By the steamer's movements he marked off into spaced intervals the remaining period of his exile, he thought of the passage of time not in terms of days or weeks but in terms of two-month stretches. Six visits more of the ship, or possibly seven, and this drear life would come to an end and another life, the one of his hopes and plans, would begin.

For its next time of coming the boat was due on or about August the first. She failed to come on the first, but on the second, early in the morning, she came nosing into the lagoon. In a canoe with a brown man to paddle him Pratt put off for her. He was alongside by the time her anchor chains had rattled out, and the skipper with his own hands passed down to him a mail bag. He brought it ashore and from it took out his packet of letters and his sheaf of Daily Republicans. These he carried to his quarters.

First he read the letters, finding them many fewer in number than was usual. By his private system of chronological accounting there should have been one letter for every day from the eighteenth of March well on into May. But here were but a scant dozen instead of the expected fifty-odd. On the other hand there seemed to be a fairly complete file of the papers, except that about ten or twelve of the earlier-dated numbers were missing. By some freakishness in the handling of the post at this port or that a batch of the older papers and a larger batch of the newer letters had failed of ultimate delivery to the steamer; so he figured it. This thing had happened before, causing a vexatious break in his routine. Plainly it had happened again. Well, away out here off the beat of travel such upsettings must be endured.

He arranged the papers upon their proper shelf and in their proper order; then, as was his wont, he turned to the letters and read them one by one. To another they might have seemed stiff and precise in their language; almost formal, faintly breathing as they did the restrained affections of a woman no longer young and coming of a breed of women who almost from the cradle are by precept and example taught how to cloak the deeper and the more constant emotions beneath the ice skim of a ladylike reserve. But they satisfied their reader; they were as they always had been and as they always would be. His only complaint, mentally registered, was that the last one should bear the date of March twenty-ninth.