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There was tremendous conviction in her voice, as though she were defending herself from some silent accusation. "But it isn't the same. It isn't. It can't be. Besides, I want to fly with her." The ripples in the cove grew to little waves, to big waves, to combers. The women talked and the children played. Honey-Boy and Peterkin waded out to their shoulders, dipped, and pretended to swim back.
They ran through Vilna, on through flat stretches of Courland to Libau, where they saw the sea. They sat and stared at it for a whole day, talking little but watching it with wide, wondering eyes. And they stared at the great ships that came rocking in from distant ports, their sides gray with the salt from the big combers which they had battled with. No wonder this America of ours is big.
"That," she said, "is a subject I'm not well posted on, but it seems to me that if other folks only adopted Harry Wyllard's simple plan, there would be considerably less need for organized charity." During the next two days before a moderate gale the Scarrowmania shouldered her way westwards through the big, white-topped combers that rolled down upon her under a lowering sky.
"I allow that Combers have had for many generations a sort of acquisitive cunning, for all we possess has come to us by exceedingly prudent marriages. They have also I am an exception here the gift of not saying very much, which certainly has an impressive effect, even when it arises from not having very much to say.
By this we had shaken off the unwelcome convoy of the coast-line, and, having had a thrilling minute or two running the gauntlet of the great combers of the southwest bar, we were at last really out to sea, making our dash under a good sailing breeze, with the engine going, too, across the Tongue of Ocean.
They raced along, like scarves of vapour, so low that you might have thought of touching them if you stood on tiptoe. If he went to Westminster Hall to find Judge Combers, he would get his belly well filled, but his back wet to the bone. At the corner of the next hedge was the wicket gate of old Master Grocer Badge.
Often while I swam, clinging to the board and struggling with the waves for its possession, I saw in the emerald water curling above me the shadowy shapes of large fish, carried on the crests of the combers, transfigured clearly against the sky, fins and heads and tails outlined with light. Once in smoother water we waited for the proper moment, counting the foam-crests as they passed.
A few minutes later they drove past the end of it into a broad lane of water. The wind was suddenly cut off; the combers fell away; and the sloop crept slowly up the inlet, which wound, green and placid, among the hills, with long ranks of firs dropping steeply to the edge of the water.
The tide went down the beach, the typhoon whirled its raging center off to sea, and the tropic moon shone out, lighting up, between the beach and barrier reef, a heaving stretch of oily lagoon on which appeared and disappeared hundreds of shark-fins quickly darting, and, out on the barrier reef, perched high, yet still pounded by the ocean combers raised by the storm, a fragment of ship's stern with a stump of mizzenmast.
When late in the afternoon Carroll fixed their position by the bearing of a peak on the island, he pointed out the small progress they had made. The sloop was then plunging close-hauled through the vicious slate-green combers, and thin showers of spray flew all over her. "The luck's been dead against us ever since we began this search," he commented. "Do you believe in that kind of foolishness?"
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