Chapter 6

For the birthday party they had Mrs. Biggles and her Henry as guests, and a great cake made by Ho Ha from a recipe supplied by Mrs. Biggles. It carried seven candles—one for each of Mermaid’s years and one, the same ones, to be sure, for each of her seven uncles. Dad, as Cap’n Smiley desired her to call him, blew them all out with one vasty breath, whereat Mrs. Biggles cried out that this was Mermaid’s privilege. But the little girl could not extinguish her seven candles all at once any more than she could kiss her seven uncles collectively, so she gave individual attention to each candle and each uncle. Mrs. Biggles must have a kiss, too, and returned it several times over; and became so excited that she kissed her Henry in his and the public eye, but then, as she observed, his whiskers left her hardly any other region and her surroundings left her hardly any other choice. There was much jesting and even a drinking of healths in some cider Mrs. Biggles’s Henry had contributed, the chief toast being Cap’n Smiley’s “to my seven surfmen and one surfwoman” with a pinch of Mermaid’s soft pink cheek.

Spring swept into summer; the green meadows were set off by great blooms of pink marsh mallow; the sun, shining down vertically on the white sand of the beach, caused a brilliant glare that changed, at the horizons, to a blue haze of heat. White-sailed boats moved over the five-mile width of Great South Bay, taking to and fro men in white trousers and gaily-clad women and children who might wish to spend a day at the tavern to the westward of the station, a place of ragtime music, clicking billiard balls, “shore” dinners, and home-prepared lunches. The clean sand was daily littered with empty shoeboxes and crumpled paper napkins by these family groups who picnicked between dips in the surf. Except for a few inevitable “fine swimmers” they clung, laughing and shrieking, to a line of rope tethered to a barrel just beyond the break of the waves.

With the children of these beach parties Mermaid could play the day long and sometimes did; many of the visitors were summer residents of the south shore of Long Island, but not many of them had heard the little girl’s story; if they gave her any thought they accepted her as a child of one of the Coast Guardsmen. Strollers who came to the station to look at the apparatus of life saving—the breeches buoy, the life car which travelled to and from a distressed ship and the shore, the surf boat resting on its truck, and ready to be hauled laboriously through a mile or more of sand, the gun—these people would see Mermaid, but never think to ask her history. Why should they, indeed, even suppose she had one? And in telling of wrecks along the beach Cap’n Smiley generally omitted any mention of one; if he was asked about the time the Mermaid came ashore he would answer quite willingly, but a specific question was necessary to elicit the most romantic and still mysterious part of that story.