The Bird in the Box

by Mary M. Mears

After this quaint speech, his spirit, which was the eternal youth within him, revived. Chuckling to himself, old David Beckett started on his homeward journey to Pemoquod Point on the Maine coast, a day's and a night's travel, by water and rail. His pilgrimage to Philadelphia, from every point of view but his own, had proved unsuccessful.

Five months before, David's son, Thomas Beckett, had disappeared from the Point and had gone to Philadelphia to work in the shipyards. Beyond the bald statement of this fact, which he left scrawled on the back of an envelope, young Thomas had never written a word home, though once he had sent a draft for a small sum of money. His was an impatient, gloomy spirit, easily depressed and easily excited. Life, indeed, either blazed in him like a devouring flame, or died down to a flicker which left him frozen and taciturn, with never a word on his thick, handsome lips, and no feeling in his heart, save, apparently, that of a fierce caged thing. In this mood when at home he had been wont to go about for weeks, leaving the care of the lobster pots entirely to his father, while he nursed his insensate wrath. Then, suddenly, the light would come. He would set about his work with savage joy, and with painful eagerness would read every book that came to his hand, from the Bible to a ten cent translation of a French novel. He would sing, he would lay plans. It was in this mood that he had gone to Philadelphia. When, however, his father followed him, bearing urgent news concerning the young fellow's wife, Thomas had again disappeared. Two weeks before, so old David learned, he had shipped as a sailor on an out-going vessel he had helped to build. But the father understood.

"I tell ye, Zary," he proclaimed the following evening in Old Harbour, as he clambered into the cart of his friend Zarah Patch, blandly ignoring the question in the other's face, "Philadelphy's changed since the days when I used to work in the car shops at t'other end of the town. There wa'n't any sech vessels built then. Double-turreted monitors and iron-clad battleships and cruisers that blaze with lights at night jest like floating hotels, all gilt furniture and white paint. Times has changed. Why some of them ships, when they was finished, they told me, would have as many as four engines apiece a-beatin' inside of 'em, to say nothin' of cylinders and twin-screws; and the fightin' ships would jest bristle with breach-loading rifles and Gatling guns. Think of the commotion they'll make when they're once finished, all them ships!" he concluded gleefully. "Yet there they stood, each in its stocks, quiet as lambs, helpless as babes unborn."

As David uttered the last words, Zarah gave him a sidelong glance, though he made no comment other than the sharp flap he gave the reins on the mare's back. He was not given to speech. Zarah owned a bit of ground on which he raised vegetables which he delivered to the summer hotel. He also carried what travellers there were from Old Harbour dock to Pemoquod. To-night David, the lobsterman, was his one passenger.

It was about seven o'clock of an evening in late summer, and across that bleak, barren bit of land the sun was just setting. As they drove along, it sparkled on the window panes of the houses and lit up the cross on the Catholic church; beyond the village it seemed to confine itself to the rocks by the wayside. It turned them a dull soft gold. A strong salt breeze was blowing.

Bony with boulders, the land reached like an eager arm into the sea, as if it would obtain somewhat. But beyond the dories of the lobstermen clinging close in shore and visible as the road ascended to a slight eminence, nothing told of any garnering whatsoever. On every side were wastes of long brownish grass, low shrubs and clumps of pines, that stood up stark by the roadside. Beneath the dark shade of the trees mushrooms and little clumps of shell were embedded in moss.

Of farms, strictly speaking, there were none, though the houses that revealed themselves occasionally as the road dipped and turned, had each its poor attempt at a garden. It was frankly a land of bleak striving, bordering closely on want, of roistering storms and sweet, enveloping fogs.

As David Beckett talked he raised his voice to a piping treble. Ships and the building of ships, this was his theme. And exalted beyond time and reality, he gave himself up to it, so that at last even Zarah was influenced. Its poetry began to work in his slower brain and his lips relaxed into a smile.

As the sun neared the horizon, the wind increased, and in every direction the shrubs bent before it with a writhing movement; and as far as the eye could see, an agitation ran through the coarse grass. From the sea came the steady moaning of the surf. It was as if the earth emitted heavy sighs; but for these two ancient men the burdens that weigh upon human life had ceased to exist.

The house before which they presently stopped was a gaunt frame structure with scarcely a trace of whitewash remaining upon its clapboards. Cold and exposed it turned its front door away from the road with New England reserve. A lilac bush grew under one of the windows. With every breath of wind it sawed against the sill. As David possessed himself of his carpet-bag and turned in at the gate with a wave of the hand, the sun, which until that moment had shone full upon this window, disappeared. Shadows and the old man entered the house together.