Men, Women, and Boats | Page 5

tale, different from anything he ever wrote before.
Stephen thought I was the only person who could finish it, and he was
too ill for me to refuse. I don't know what to do about the matter, for I
never could work up another man's ideas. Even your vivid imagination
could hardly conjecture anything more ghastly than the dying man,
lying by an open window overlooking the English channel, relating in a
sepulchral whisper the comic situations of his humorous hero so that I
might take up the thread of his story.
"From the window beside which I write this I can see down in the
valley Ravensbrook House, where Crane used to live and where Harold
Frederic, he and I spent many a merry night together. When the
Romans occupied Britain, some of their legions, parched with thirst,
were wandering about these dry hills with the chance of finding water
or perishing. They watched the ravens, and so came to the stream
which rises under my place and flows past Stephen's former home;
hence the name, Ravensbrook.

"It seems a strange coincidence that the greatest modern writer on war
should set himself down where the greatest ancient warrior, Caesar,
probably stopped to quench his thirst.
"Stephen died at three in the morning, the same sinister hour which
carried away our friend Frederic nineteen months before. At midnight,
in Crane's fourteenth-century house in Sussex, we two tried to lure back
the ghost of Frederic into that house of ghosts, and to our company,
thinking that if reappearing were ever possible so strenuous a man as
Harold would somehow shoulder his way past the guards, but he made
no sign. I wonder if the less insistent Stephen will suggest some
ingenious method by which the two can pass the barrier. I can imagine
Harold cursing on the other side, and welcoming the more subtle
assistance of his finely fibred friend.
"I feel like the last of the Three Musketeers, the other two gone down
in their duel with Death. I am wondering if, within the next two years, I
also shall get the challenge. If so, I shall go to the competing ground
the more cheerfully that two such good fellows await the outcome on
the other side.
"Ever your friend,
"ROBERT BARR."
The last of the Three Musketeers is gone, now, although he outlived his
friends by some years. Robert Barr died in 1912. Perhaps they are still
debating a joint return.
There could be, perhaps, no better close for a paper on Stephen Crane
than the subjoined paragraph from a letter written by him to a
Rochester editor:--
"The one thing that deeply pleases me is the fact that men of sense
invariably believe me to be sincere. I know that my work does not
amount to a string of dried beans--I always calmly admit it--but I also
know that I do the best that is in me without regard to praise or blame.
When I was the mark for every humorist in the country, I went ahead;

and now when I am the mark for only fifty per cent of the humorists of
the country, I go ahead; for I understand that a man is born into the
world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his
vision--he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To
keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition."
VINCENT STARRETT.

THE OPEN BOAT
A Tale intended to be after the fact. Being the experience of four men
from the sunk steamer "Commodore"
I
None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and
were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves
were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white,
and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed
and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged
with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Many a man
ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the
sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall,
and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.
The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six
inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves
were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned
vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: "Gawd! That
was a narrow clip." As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward
over the broken sea.
The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes
raised himself