CHAPTER VI PLAYING SUBMARINE

“Ils ne l’aurout plus,
Jamais! Jamais!”

Sesooā drove her boat’s nose on to the bar to the tune of the old Frenchwoman’s triumphant chant of defiance to the invaders, who had wrecked her dwelling, but would never have it again! Never, never!

The Camp Fire Girl was flinging it now as a merry challenge to the seals, the big, spotted harbor-seals, treating them as invaders--where they were more at home than she was--and disputing with them the right of possession of the milky sand-bar at low tide.

It was a teeming settlement, at low water, that Ipswich Bar--a long, white street fringed by wavy greenery of billows, which had risen miraculously out of the bay, thronged by a motley multitude of gulls, herons, wee sandpipers, petrels, strutting to and fro, exchanging now and again a squawky greeting, hobnobbing with brother or cousin, or coolly ignoring one of another tribe, occasionally parting with a fish to a young one--a dazzling, bewildering Great White Way of birds.

And the flippered, bulky harbor-seals--the marbled seals--in their spotted hair-coats, lay around upon the sands, a whole herd of them, like lazy merchants who, tired of displaying their wares, had reclined, to bask in the sun.

Ploughing the waves to this White Way came another settler, which a certain old sea-dog, Captain Andy Davis, friend of the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, called alternately, with briny disrespect, “a loose old wagon” or an “old red settler,”--in plain English, a broad, flat-bottomed, ruddy-painted camp-boat, impossible to capsize.

This “settler,” bobbing over the green tide, gave the strange effect, somewhat, of a portly, waddling, ruddy old duck which had ambitiously adopted a cygnet. For towed in her wake came a silvery something, graceful as a young swan--a light birch-bark shell, a fifteen-foot canoe whose bark skin shone like satin--with a delicate decoration of ferns, where the outer layer of bark had been scraped away into a pattern, at each tapering end.

The red mother-settler had aboard a cargo--a precious cargo of girlhood--of which one shifting item done up in a bathing-suit, crowned by a red silk handkerchief wound around a curly head, leaned over the stern of the mother-skiff, in rapt admiration of that feather-weight canoe.

“I believe--really believe--that I could have paddled over here to the bar from our beach in her!” burst sanguinely from the lips of that flesh-and-blood item, Lilia Kemp, otherwise Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl. “Even if a green comber had capsized her, I could have righted her again and scrambled in. I could do it, fully dressed, let alone to say in a bathing-suit.”

“Which means you could undress in the water, right her, and get aboard!” corrected an older girl, of shading, twinkling eyelashes between which hovered a firefly glance like a glow-worm playing through an amber fringe of grasses. “Well!--well, I shouldn’t mind a premature ducking myself,” she ran on, her lithe body rhythmically swaying to one of the red oars which she was wielding. “Perhaps--who knows--we may get it, too, if the seals regard us as invaders! Ginger! will you look at them--a whole herd, thirty at least, out of water, sunning themselves on the sands!”

“Oh! we see them, Sara.” It was a general responsive chorus in half a dozen gay young voices. “Goody! I never, never, came so near to a seal--a mustached man-fish--before! We’re going to have the frolic of our lives!” from one in piping solo. “And the birds--birds--birds! Ever see anything like them? Fishing, strutting, squabbling, holding a Peace Conference!”

“No! I never saw anything like them before. Nor you, either! There’s nothing to equal the wild life on the Ipswich Bar, at low tide, nearer than the bird reservation on Three Arch Rocks, off the Oregon Coast; that’s what I heard a great naturalist say!... And, oh! see--see! there are some of my cousins, the great herons, just gobbling up everything in sight,” trilled Olive Deering--Blue Heron--in a shrill treble of excitement which, winging right out of her, fluttered on to the bar, to greet those feathered fisher-folk, her cousins.

“Of course, the Arch Rocks, being a reservation, go a long way beyond anything we could see here, for the teeming multitudes of their bird-life--the grandeur of their nested arches,” she added softly, her dark eyes alight, her breast rising and falling, light as a cork, upon a pure, primitive flame of being, typified by the red tongue of flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem, with crossed logs and pearly smoke, embroidered upon the bosom of her glossy bathing-suit.

It was one of those outdoor moments when, as she had told Lieutenant Davenport, there seemed to be but an illumined fag-end of her real self left in the five feet nine of red-crowned girlish form perched airily, now, upon the side of the red-skinned settler.

The rest, the main part, had become one with the joyful feather-folk, the spotted mammals sunning themselves, with the blue of the sky above, the dazzling flower of foam on the bonnet of the green old whistling tide, off on a holiday from the shore--and with a Father Presence in all, scarce veiled, so radiantly apprehended at the moment that faith was almost sight.

She came to herself with a backward glance at a twilight balcony, at a young soldier who had, in feeling, come nearer to God since he volunteered--came to her transfigured self in time to hear that officer’s little flame of a sister gaily protesting: “Bah! Three Arch Rocks! Who craves for Oregon? This is good enough for us. Now--now--now comes the shock, as the soldiers say; now, for finding out how near those seals will let us get to them, before they take to the water! Hitherto they’ve had the bar all to themselves, except for the birds. But:
“‘Ils ne l’aurout plus,
Jamais! Jamais!’

“We’re out for possession, too, this summer!... Oh, mercy! Here they come, stampeding--flopping. Oh, sit tight, girls; if they strike the boat, they may----”

“They can’t capsize us!” burst explosively from sister lips. “The old settler----”

She was a settler, a sturdy one, that camp skiff. She rocked and wallowed, but settled down, as in a nest, in the green hubbub of tide and foam stirred up by the wildly startled plunging-off of thirty sportive young seals, which, striking the water with the heavy splashes of men bathers, swam deliriously around in all directions, whipping the eddies with their active flippers, amid a low tornado of broken exclamations from the girls.

“Oh, mercy! Look! Aren’t their dark heads just like those of a lot of boys, swimming round? And did you--did you see them when they made a dash for the water?”

“They were so quick that you couldn’t see them!”

“Yes, I did! They--they floundered off the bar with the funniest kangaroo roll, half-upright, their little fore-flippers in the air--like puppies’ paws--swinging the hind parts of their bodies first to one side, then--then to the other--the queerest teeter! Oh! I’ll never forget it!... Never!”

Olive’s own voice “teetered” upon the protests that softly lashed the sunshine around the boat, breaking in upon the general medley of her companions’ excitement.

As she perched upon the ruddy rim of the old red settler, her arm was about the shoulders of the adopted Camp Fire Sister, little Flamina, whose Green Leaf was a perfect quiver leaf now, the night-black pupils of her eyes--big dilated--shining through their jetty lashes, like radium in the dark.

“Ah, Madonna! How I am excita’! Vitello marina! De bigga seal! I no see such bigga sealla on shore of Napoli--me!” she cried, her childish mind traveling back by a?rial route--the sisterly arm about her made it a rainbowed route--from the lonely wildness of the Ipswich Sand-bar to the sunny beauty of her native shores on the blue bay of Naples as she had occasionally beheld them.

“Ha! Justa looka!” panted Flamina again, liquidly musical as a little spring brook, hugging her excitement passionately, within locked arms, to the breast of her small pea-green sweater. “De bigges’ seal ees no mova--heem stay on sand--rolla ova! Ah! Brava! Brava!”

“Brava, indeed! Did you ever see such bravado?” It was Sesooā’s low, laughing outburst. “Three of them--four--aren’t stirring--not making a break for the water at all! Ginger! we must be within thirty yards of them now. The Big Four lying up there, high an’ dry, on the ridge of the sloping bar! And--and one of them a monster! Perfect ‘whale,’ as the boys would say! Oh-h! will you look at his fangs--long yellow fangs--and his mustache twinkling with brine!

“And the round, brown spots all over him! See him roll over on his side and grin, as if he dared--dared us to come nearer! Mercy! Hasn’t he a half-human kind of face! I’m afraid; he looks like a man-fish, a--monster!”

Little Owl--Lilla--was crouching, hands clasped, in the red stern of the old settler, as the words tumbled forth through her parted lips. Behind her, rocking upon the eddies, was the fern-decked, birch canoe.

“Sara! Sara Davenport! you’re too daring! He--they--might attack us. Let’s row off and land at a little distance, upon another part of the bar! Upon my word! he does look ugly--wicked. I--I’m ‘creepy’ all over--positively. He seems bent on holding the fort--the sand-bar!” Arline’s voice shook upon a moist rainbow of excitement.

“Yes, they’ve had it all to themselves too long, but:
“‘Ils ne l’aurout plus...!’”

Was it that a New England seal disliked to hear himself challenged in the defiant chant which an old Frenchwoman had flung after retreating Germans--to have his reign upon the milk-white bar--the heaven of the low-water sands--disputed? Or was it that, after all, his grinning pep was only surface spice--that whatever savage courage still remained in him for battles with his own tribe, had been reduced by persecution to arrant cowardice in man’s direction, was not proof against the slow, complacent advance, inch by inch, onto the bar, of an old red, wooden settler, vibrant from stem to stern with the quivers and gasps of a dozen wildly excited girls?

Whatever the reason--perhaps the sands on which his blubbery brain had rested alone knew--whatever the reason, swiftly, suddenly, he threw the switch, as it were, the lightning-switch, when the nosing old camp-boat was only twenty yards from him, signaling to the three other big seals, the ladies of his family, his marbled wives.

Lightning-like, they responded, making a kangaroo dash for the water--led by their grinning lord--so quick that in the sunlight their briny, oily hair-coats seemed phosphorescent.

But it was a day when strange, covert methods of warfare were in vogue.

Perhaps, even lying out at low tide upon the dry sands of the Ipswich Bar, the big, brooding old dog-seal had seen strange fish-like structures--gray and black--rising afar off from ocean’s depths, and from them had taken a hint.

At all events, no U-boat, yet, ever equalled the surprising swiftness with which he played submarine--took it upon himself to play submarine.

Whether it was blind fear or baffled fury, creaming to blunder, in that old blubber-head of his, he dove right under the boat, instead of dodging by it!

Giving way before the red settler, he bumped against her flat bottom, and hoisted her right out of the water--her delicate cygnet chick, the birch canoe, too!

An easy matter for him, for he weighed a full three hundred pounds or so, and made nothing of the leviathan feat of hoisting a cargo of girls tumultuously out of one element into another--the spray-shot, spray-curdled air!

The old wooden settler clucked and rocked dizzily, fiery red in the face and mad as an old wet hen. But she could not hold on to her chicks--or at least she could hold to but very few of them!

Out of her they shot on all sides! The green tide around her suddenly bloomed with flower-like girlish heads done up in red silk handkerchiefs.

The air was streaked with a curdled foam of sputtering cries: “The seal! That big seal! Where--is--he? Dove r-right un-der--us! Played submarine, he did!... Tchu! tchu! tchu! C’est la Guerre! Guerre, with a vengeance--yes!... Oh! Where do we go from here, girls--where do we go-o from here?”

“You deserve to go to ‘Davy Jones’ from here, for letting a big seal bounce you out! Great Neptune! haven’t you a grain more sense than that, after all the forty-one tricks I’ve taught you? Eh-h?”

It was a loud voice, whooping like a klaxon, that came suddenly ringing over the swirling tide, seconded by a sound of oars. “D’you ask where the seal is? Well! there he goes, swimming off--beating it to win’ard, vowing by his ancestors, back to the tadpoles, that he’ll never have anything to do with girls again--after landing you all in the surf off the old bar. An’ each an’ every one o’ you as wet as a sea-mouse--a feathered sea-mouse! Dear, dear! ’Bout time you had a convoy, I reckon!”

“‘Convoy’! Captain Andy! Captain Andy Davis! Well! it’s no wonder a big seal b-bounced us all out--got the better of us; you’ve been neglecting us s-shamefully.” It was Blue Heron’s voice babbling through brine as Olive’s geranium-like head rose from the greenery of a water-hill.

“Panky doodle! Have I, indeed? Want me to tow your old red settler of a boat on to the sands? She’s drifting off. The rest of you can swim, I reckon. Good! In the water, anyhow, you behave as well as you look--an’ that’s saying a lot!”

“Hurrah! Is it now? So--so you’re thinking better of sending us to--Davy Jones--right off, eh?” Sesooā’s little flame of laughter shot back over her shoulder, as, striking out boldly, she swam for the dry sands of the long bar--the dazzling Great White Way of birds--her companions following, Olive towing the foreign-born little sister, who was hampered by having drawn the rough pea-green sweater, for warmth, over her bathing-suit.

A dozen laughing nymphs they were, landing in madcap mood at the heart of the frolic of the wild life on the bar.

Behind them, in charge of their ruddy old skiff and the tossed canoe, came their friend and body-guard of former camping seasons, Captain Andrew Davis, master mariner of Gloucester, whose massive figure was still a tower of strength, and the light of his eye undimmed, at seventy-two!