DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES(漂流)

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DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

DRIFT FROM TWO

SHORES

by BRET HARTE

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

THE MAN ON THE BEACH

He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean. The narrow

strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was covered at high tide

by a shining film of water, at low tide with the cast-up offerings of sea and

shore. Logs yet green, and saplings washed away from inland banks,

battered fragments of wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken into

tiny rafts yet odorous with their lost freight, lay in long successive curves,-

- the fringes and overlappings of the sea. At high noon the shadow of a

seagull's wing, or a sudden flurry and gray squall of sand- pipers,

themselves but shadows, was all that broke the monotonous glare of the

level sands.

He had lived there alone for a twelvemonth. Although but a few

miles from a thriving settlement, during that time his retirement had never

been intruded upon, his seclusion remained unbroken. In any other

community he might have been the subject of rumor or criticism, but the

miners at Camp Rogue and the traders at Trinidad Head, themselves

individual and eccentric, were profoundly indifferent to all other forms of

eccentricity or heterodoxy that did not come in contact with their own.

And certainly there was no form of eccentricity less aggressive than that of

a hermit, had they chosen to give him that appellation. But they did not

even do that, probably from lack of interest or perception. To the various

traders who supplied his small wants he was known as "Kernel," "Judge,"

and "Boss." To the general public "The Man on the Beach" was

considered a sufficiently distinguishing title. His name, his occupation,

rank, or antecedents, nobody cared to inquire. Whether this arose from a

fear of reciprocal inquiry and interest, or from the profound indifference

before referred to, I cannot say.

He did not look like a hermit. A man yet young, erect, well- dressed,

clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half melancholy, half cynical,

was scarcely the conventional idea of a solitary. His dwelling, a rude

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

improvement on a fisherman's cabin, had all the severe exterior simplicity

of frontier architecture, but within it was comfortable and wholesome.

Three rooms--a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom--were all it

contained.

He had lived there long enough to see the dull monotony of one season

lapse into the dull monotony of the other. The bleak northwest trade-

winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight and nights of fog and

silence. The warmer southwest trades had brought him clouds, rain, and

the transient glories of quick grasses and odorous beach blossoms. But

summer or winter, wet or dry season, on one side rose always the sharply

defined hills with their changeless background of evergreens; on the other

side stretched always the illimitable ocean as sharply defined against the

horizon, and as unchanging in its hue. The onset of spring and autumn

tides, some changes among his feathered neighbors, the footprints of

certain wild animals along the river's bank, and the hanging out of party-

colored signals from the wooded hillside far inland, helped him to record

the slow months. On summer afternoons, when the sun sank behind a

bank of fog that, moving solemnly shoreward, at last encompassed him

and blotted out sea and sky, his isolation was complete. The damp gray

sea that flowed above and around and about him always seemed to shut

out an intangible world beyond, and to be the only real presence. The

booming of breakers scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a

vague and unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past forever.

Every morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he awoke, dazed

and bewildered, as upon a new world. The first sense of oppression over,

he came to love at last this subtle spirit of oblivion; and at night, when its

cloudy wings were folded over his cabin, he would sit alone with a sense

of security he had never felt before. On such occasions he was apt to

leave his door open, and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to

him out of this vague, nebulous world beyond? Perhaps even SHE,--for

this strange solitary was not insane nor visionary. He was never in spirit

alone. For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the beach or

crouching over his driftwood fire, a woman's face was always before him,-

-the face for whose sake and for cause of whom he sat there alone. He

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

saw it in the morning sunlight; it was her white hands that were lifted from

the crested breakers; it was the rustling of her skirt when the sea wind

swept through the beach grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low

voice when the long waves sank and died among the sedge and rushes.

She was as omnipresent as sea and sky and level sand. Hence when the

fog wiped them away, she seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness.

On one or two more gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence of

the fervid noonday sun was still felt on the heated sands, the warm breath

of the fog touched his cheek as if it had been hers, and the tears started to

his eyes.

Before the fogs came--for he arrived there in winter--he had found

surcease and rest in the steady glow of a lighthouse upon the little

promontory a league below his habitation. Even on the darkest nights,

and in the tumults of storm, it spoke to him of a patience that was enduring

and a steadfastness that was immutable. Later on he found a certain dumb

companionship in an uprooted tree, which, floating down the river, had

stranded hopelessly upon his beach, but in the evening had again drifted

away. Rowing across the estuary a day or two afterward, he recognized

the tree again from a "blaze" of the settler's axe still upon its trunk. He

was not surprised a week later to find the same tree in the sands before his

dwelling, or that the next morning it should be again launched on its

purposeless wanderings. And so, impelled by wind or tide, but always

haunting his seclusion, he would meet it voyaging up the river at the flood,

or see it tossing among the breakers on the bar, but always with the

confidence of its returning sooner or later to an anchorage beside him.

After the third month of his self-imposed exile, he was forced into a more

human companionship, that was brief but regular. He was obliged to

have menial assistance. While he might have eaten his bread "in sorrow"

carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for him, the

occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity and

materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness that he could

not eat the meal he had himself prepared. He did not yet wish to die, and

when starvation or society seemed to be the only alternative, he chose the

latter. An Indian woman, so hideous as to scarcely suggest humanity, at

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

stated times performed for him these offices. When she did not come,

which was not infrequent, he did not eat.

Such was the mental and physical condition of the Man on the Beach

on the 1st of January, 1869.

It was a still, bright day, following a week of rain and wind. Low

down the horizon still lingered a few white flecks--the flying squadrons of

the storm--as vague as distant sails. Southward the harbor bar whitened

occasionally but lazily; even the turbulent Pacific swell stretched its length

wearily upon the shore. And toiling from the settlement over the low

sand dunes, a carriage at last halted half a mile from the solitary's

dwelling.

"I reckon ye'll hev to git out here," said the driver, pulling up to

breathe his panting horses. "Ye can't git any nigher."

There was a groan of execration from the interior of the vehicle, a

hysterical little shriek, and one or two shrill expressions of feminine

disapprobation, but the driver moved not. At last a masculine head

expostulated from the window: "Look here; you agreed to take us to the

house. Why, it's a mile away at least!"

"Thar, or tharabouts, I reckon," said the driver, coolly crossing his legs

on the box.

"It's no use talking; I can never walk through this sand and horrid

glare," said a female voice quickly and imperatively. Then,

apprehensively, "Well, of all the places!"

"Well, I never!"

"This DOES exceed everything."

"It's really TOO idiotic for anything."

It was noticeable that while the voices betrayed the difference of age

and sex, they bore a singular resemblance to each other, and a certain

querulousness of pitch that was dominant.

"I reckon I've gone about as fur as I allow to go with them hosses,"

continued the driver suggestively, "and as time's vallyble, ye'd better

unload."

"The wretch does not mean to leave us here alone?" said a female

voice in shrill indignation. "You'll wait for us, driver?" said a masculine

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

voice, confidently.

"How long?" asked the driver.

There was a hurried consultation within. The words "Might send us

packing!" "May take all night to get him to listen to reason," "Bother!

whole thing over in ten minutes," came from the window. The driver

meanwhile had settled himself back in his seat, and whistled in patient

contempt of a fashionable fare that didn't know its own mind nor

destination. Finally, the masculine head was thrust out, and, with a

certain potential air of judicially ending a difficulty, said:--

"You're to follow us slowly, and put up your horses in the stable or

barn until we want you."

An ironical laugh burst from the driver. "Oh, yes--in the stable or

barn--in course. But, my eyes sorter failin' me, mebbee, now, some ev

you younger folks will kindly pint out the stable or barn of the Kernel's.

Woa!--will ye?--woa! Give me a chance to pick out that there barn or

stable to put ye in!" This in arch confidence to the horses, who had not

moved.

Here the previous speaker, rotund, dignified, and elderly, alighted

indignantly, closely followed by the rest of the party, two ladies and a

gentleman. One of the ladies was past the age, but not the fashion, of

youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted figure and well-bred

bones artistically if not gracefully; the younger lady, evidently her

daughter, was crisp and pretty, and carried off the aquiline nose and

aristocratic emaciation of her mother with a certain piquancy and a dash

that was charming. The gentleman was young, thin, with the family

characteristics, but otherwise indistinctive.

With one accord they all faced directly toward the spot indicated by

the driver's whip. Nothing but the bare, bleak, rectangular outlines of the

cabin of the Man on the Beach met their eyes. All else was a desolate

expanse, unrelieved by any structure higher than the tussocks of scant

beach grass that clothed it. They were so utterly helpless that the driver's

derisive laughter gave way at last to good humor and suggestion. "Look

yer," he said finally, "I don't know ez it's your fault you don't know this

kentry ez well ez you do Yurup; so I'll drag this yer team over to

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

Robinson's on the river, give the horses a bite, and then meander down this

yer ridge, and wait for ye. Ye'll see me from the Kernel's." And without

waiting for a reply, he swung his horses' heads toward the river, and rolled

away.

The same querulous protest that had come from the windows arose

from the group, but vainly. Then followed accusations and recrimination.

"It's YOUR fault; you might have written, and had him meet us at the

settlement." "You wanted to take him by surprise!" "I didn't. You

know if I'd written that we were coming, he'd have taken good care to run

away from us." "Yes, to some more inaccessible place." "There can be

none worse than this," etc., etc. But it was so clearly evident that nothing

was to be done but to go forward, that even in the midst of their wrangling

they straggled on in Indian file toward the distant cabin, sinking ankle-

deep in the yielding sand, punctuating their verbal altercation with sighs,

and only abating it at a scream from the elder lady.

"Where's Maria?"

"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so

incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a ventriloquistic

contribution by somebody else.

It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general

conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla, after

scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain, came to grief

on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but savage. As they

plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on her

cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and lisped:--

"You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English

shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in

their Sunday clothes!"

Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine

feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea

breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and

shore. A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from the lagoon,

arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended legs, in obvious

burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder lady felt the justice of her

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

gentle daughter's criticism, and retaliated with simple directness:--

"Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half off

your head, and your shoes--in Heaven's name, Maria! what HAVE you

done with your shoes?"

Maria had exhibited a slim stockinged foot from under her skirt. It was

scarcely three fingers broad, with an arch as patrician as her nose.

"Somewhere between here and the carriage," she answered; "Dick can run

back and find it, while he is looking for your brooch, mamma. Dick's so

obliging."

The robust voice of Dick thundered, but the wasted figure of Dick

feebly ploughed its way back, and returned with the missing buskin.

"I may as well carry them in my hand like the market girls at Saumur,

for we have got to wade soon," said Miss Maria, sinking her own terrors in

the delightful contemplation of the horror in her parent's face, as she

pointed to a shining film of water slowly deepening in a narrow swale in

the sands between them and the cabin.

"It's the tide," said the elder gentleman. "If we intend to go on we

must hasten; permit me, my dear madam," and before she could reply he

had lifted the astounded matron in his arms, and made gallantly for the

ford. The gentle Maria cast an ominous eye on her brother, who, with

manifest reluctance, performed for her the same office. But that acute

young lady kept her eyes upon the preceding figure of the elder gentleman,

and seeing him suddenly and mysteriously disappear to his armpits,

unhesitatingly threw herself from her brother's protecting arms,--an action

which instantly precipitated him into the water,--and paddled hastily to the

opposite bank, where she eventually assisted in pulling the elderly

gentleman out of the hollow into which he had fallen, and in rescuing her

mother, who floated helplessly on the surface, upheld by her skirts, like a

gigantic and variegated water-lily. Dick followed with a single gaiter. In

another minute they were safe on the opposite bank.

The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick

mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman, whose

florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity seemed to have

been washed away, accounted for both by saying he thought it was a

DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

quicksand.

"It might have been," said a quiet voice behind them; "you should have

followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary."

They turned instantly at the voice. It was that of the Man on the

Beach. They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one, the

single exclamation, "James!" The elder gentleman said "Mr. North," and,

with a slight resumption of his former dignity, buttoned his coat over his

damp shirt front.

There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely

down upon them. If they had intended to impress him by any suggestion

of a gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their own persons, they

had failed, and they knew it. Keenly alive as they had always been to

external prepossession, they felt that they looked forlorn and ludicrous,

and that the situation lay in his hands. The elderly lady again burst into

tears of genuine distress, Maria colored over her cheek-bones, and Dick

stared at the ground in sullen disquiet.

"You had better get up," said the Man on the Beach, after a moment's

thought, "and come up to the cabin. I cannot offer you a change of

garments, but you can dry them by the fire."

They all rose together, and again said in chorus, "James!" but this time

with an evident effort to recall some speech or action previously resolved

upon and committed to memory. The elder lady got so far as to clasp her

hands and add, "You have not forgotten us--James, oh, James!"; the

younger gentleman to attempt a brusque "Why, Jim, old boy," that ended

in querulous incoherence; the young lady to cast a half-searching, half-

coquettish look at him; and the old gentleman to begin, "Our desire, Mr.

North"--but the effort was futile. Mr. James North, standing before them

with folded arms, looked from the one to the other.

"I have not thought much of you for a twelvemonth," he said, quietly,

"but I have not forgotten you. Come!"

He led the way a few steps in advance, they following silently. In

this brief interview they felt he had resumed the old dominance and

independence, against which they had rebelled; more than that, in this half

failure of their first concerted action they had changed their querulous

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DRIFTFROMTWOSHORES1DRIFTFROMTWOSHORESbyBRETHARTEDRIFTFROMTWOSHORES2DRIFTFROMTWOSHORES3THEMANONTHEBEACHIHelivedbesideariverthatemptiedintoagreatocean.Thenarrowstripoflandthatlaybetweenhimandtheestuarywascoveredathightidebyashiningfilmofwater,atlowtidewiththecast-upofferingsofseaandshore.Logsyetgreen,...

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