By the bequest of an elder brother, I was left enough
money to see me through a small college in Ohio, and
to secure me four years in a medical school in the
East. Why I chose medicine I hardly know.
Possibly the career of a surgeon attracted the adventurous
element in me. Perhaps, coming of a family of
doctors, I merely followed the line of least resistance.
It may be, indirectly but inevitably, that I might
be on the yacht Ella on that terrible night of August
12, more than a year ago.
I got through somehow. I played quarterback
on the football team, and made some money coaching.
In summer I did whatever came to hand, from chartering
a sail-boat at a summer resort and taking passengers,
at so much a head, to checking up cucumbers in Indiana
for a Western pickle house.
I was practically alone. Commencement left me
with a diploma, a new dress-suit, an out-of-date medical
library, a box of surgical instruments of the same
date as the books, and an incipient case of typhoid
fever.
I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches
around the chest. Also, I had lived clean, and
worked and played hard. I got over the fever
finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but—alive.
Thanks to the college, my hospital care had cost nothing.
It was a good thing: I had just seven dollars
in the world.
The yacht Ella lay in the river not far from my hospital
windows. She was not a yacht when I first saw
her, nor at any time, technically, unless I use the
word in the broad sense of a pleasure-boat.
She was a two-master, and, when I saw her first, as
dirty and disreputable as are most coasting-vessels.
Her rejuvenation was the history of my convalescence.
On the day she stood forth in her first coat of white
paint, I exchanged my dressing-gown for clothing that,
however loosely it hung, was still clothing.
Her new sails marked my promotion to beefsteak, her
brass rails and awnings my first independent excursion
up and down the corridor outside my door, and, incidentally,
my return to a collar and tie.
The river shipping appealed to me, to my imagination,
clean washed by my illness and ready as a child’s
for new impressions: liners gliding down to the
bay and the open sea; shrewish, scolding tugs; dirty
but picturesque tramps. My enthusiasm amused
the nurses, whose ideas of adventure consisted of
little jaunts of exploration into the abdominal cavity,
and whose aseptic minds revolted at the sight of dirty
sails.
One day I pointed out to one of them an old schooner,
red and brown, with patched canvas spread, moving
swiftly down the river before a stiff breeze.
“Look at her!” I exclaimed. “There
goes adventure, mystery, romance! I should like
to be sailing on her.”
“You would have to boil the drinking-water,”
she replied dryly. “And the ship is probably
swarming with rats.”
