The Somerset reporter. [volume] (Skowhegan, Me.) 1868-1909, 1901-06-06
A SEA CHANGE.
%
1t Was Occasioned by a
Small Boy.
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.
He sat on the lower deck his black
ened hands clasped about his drawn up
knees and his head dropping upon his
barred and grimy breast. Beneath his
lowering brows he looked out toward
the sea at the purple, white trimmed
rollers. at the innocent blue sky, at the
far horizon forever unreachable, for
ever fair, yet changing In beauty by
day from a clear lavender line to a
gray and misty shore. from mountains
of gold and red to the alaDaster walls
of sea girt palaces.
He frowned at the sea and sky, for
the glare of the furnaces was still be-
fore his eyes. Though the spicy sea
smell of the blue figure was in his nos
trils, and the blasts of hot air still en-
veloped him. Now he turned his head
impatlently and glanced at the upper
deck, where the few passengers the
steamship carried were sitting, talking
and reading at their ease. 1t was so in
life. Some were always floating easily
on at the expense of others. He felt a
dull rage to think that he should be be-
low looking up at them. 1t was his
own fault Once he might have made
his life different thing, but now his
place was fixed. He could never grow
away from it.
He lounged to the rail and looked
down at the waves climbing coura-
geously upward, only to fall again, as
If to mock life's vain endeavors. How
cool and soothing the water would
seem to his overheated brain and body
There was sheer upon his hard lined
face as he looked again toward the up
per deck. What did any life amount
to, theirs as we'll as his? Yet how they
would lament If they thought it all
would soon come to an end!
Then his eye was caught by the fig
ure of small boy with upturned face
and hands in his pockets standing be-
side a man. And suddenly the ship
and sea faded from his eyes, and he
saw another boy In a big, tapping
straw hat and brown overalls, with
bare feet, coming down a still, dusty
road that wound in dull complacency
between blackberry and strawberry
vines, apple trees and wild cherry
bushes. The boy climbed to the bound
airy, half fence, half stone wall, of the
orchard and felt sudden twinge in his
toe as he pushed his bare feet through
the long bush grass and stumbled on a
red striped apple. He sat again on the
fiat stone step without the kitchen
door, and his mother came up behind
him with a blue and white cracked cup
full of sweet milk and dropped warm
doughnut into his upturned hand.
LOOK out; It's hotm he could hear her
say, and 1t aroused him with Q start.
He looked down at the old trousers and
filthy shirt. They seemed to contain a
more than physical, a moral. contami-
nation. That country boy had come to
this. From the peaceful sameness Of
that quiet life to the ugly monotony Of
this, earning a mean living by the
meanest of labor and spending those
earnings for not merely mean. for de-
basing, objects.
The last time he had been in America
he had gone to sailors bethel and
had thought that after this voyage he
would go away into some faraway
country place and do better, where
fields were green and living might be
wrested from earth, not fire. But at
Liverpool good resolves went with the
earnings. Evidently this was what he
was born for, ten days of misery-he
could not get used to the furnaces-a
week of what some men called pleas
ure and then the furnaces again. And
so it would go ON until He turned
again and looked down on the waves.
How easy it would be! There would
be one stoker the less, and it would
give him distinction for the first-no,
the second-time In his life. The first
time had been when he left his country
home to make his fortune. He had
made 1t well He sneered again, that
bitterest of sneers, at oneself. Then he
stern and leaned against the rail at the
back and looked down at the water
swirling In a widening, roughened
path from the beating of the screw. 1t
was pale blue. with filmy ruffies Of
white and here and there fold of deli