Chapter 8

A golden October when, for days, the sun shone and the beach was veiled with faintly coloured mists; when the crack of duck hunters’ guns came from over the bay; when the ocean advanced on the smoothly sanded shore in long and majestic curves, so that to stand upon the dunes and look at it was like looking down a flight of steps of boundless width ... The Atlantic made itself into a glittering staircase leading straight to the sun.

October! Driftwood was gathered from the beach for burning in the Biggles’s fireplace where it snapped and was consumed by the green and blue and parti-coloured flames. Before the singing and rainbow fire Mermaid often knelt at dusk. Mrs. Biggles would spread a slice of bread for her with jelly made from the beach plums gathered a month earlier. There is a wild-woodish, bitter-sweet flavour peculiar to beach plum jelly and preserves. Mermaid loved it. To taste it while dreaming before the magic fire was delicious beyond words.

October! It began to be sharp o’ nights. The men at the station rolled themselves in blankets, as they slept without sheets in an unheated attic. Only Mermaid had a regular bed with sheets and pillow cases and a gay comforter. Stormy days began, and long, wonderful evenings about the blazing stove in the station’s big room. Cap’n Smiley read aloud and told stories; the men asked questions and spun yarns. Mermaid, curled up in a corner, listened eagerly, hardly daring to speak lest the hour be noted and they pack her off to bed.

Wild stories, weird stories. Cap’n Smiley is speaking.

“Ah,” says the keeper. “There was that steamship which broke her machinery some way off here and could only move on reversed propellers. She backed all the way from here to Sandy Hook. And there was that ship with the cargo of salt. When she came ashore it salted the ocean; the water was a little brinier for days. And we got aboard as she lay on the bar at low tide, the sea having gone down. Not a soul. All swept overboard and lost. We peered down a hatch, then I went down all alone. I had an awful setback when, on my moving some sacks, out bobbed a dead man staring straight at me. Dead, and propped up in the salt. But the worst was the wreck of the Farallone. Some of you weren’t here then and as for you, Joe”—he addressed the youngest surfman—”you hadn’t been born. The Farallone. Yes.

“She came ashore on a night when you couldn’t see your upraised hand. She struck hard on the outer bar and broached to in the trough of the sea. It was freezing cold. We saw—nothing. Up there on the dunes we fired shot after shot, sending out line after line; pure guesswork. Finally one landed and was made fast. The crew began coming ashore. About a dozen trips of the buoy, I think. And from what we could learn the captain and the cook were left.