Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/110



INCE man first reared himself upright on his two legs and looked at the stars, the sea and the things of the sea have worked strange enchantments upon that inward part of him he calls his soul. I have known many men whom the sea has regenerated. Like the broom of the Almighty, sweeping away rottenness and filth, the salt wind sometimes blows clean the secret places of the soul. On the other hand, I have known many men whom the sea has cursed. Back to the land that spawned them it tosses them with queer, tormenting kinks in their souls, kinks destined never to be ironed out by anything save the impartial hand of death. But only once have I known the sea, or a thing that crept out of the sea, to steal the soul from the body of a man.

In a modest coast town, tucked unobtrusively away in the southeast corner of the map, Philip Sanborne and I grew up together. Our green apples, our marbles, our dreams and our lickings all lacked savor unless we shared them one with the other. First as a kid and later as a man, I admired Phil inordinately. He was easily the best man I have ever known. Not the pious sort of good, you understand: never went near a church, proclaimed his faults and hid his virtues, and in particularly lurid moments made use of a vocabulary as picturesque and colorful as that of any pirate who ever scoured the seven seas. But he was innately clean and selfless and square; he couldn't have been any other way even had he tried.

He was beautifully built, broad shouldered, narrow hipped, with hair of that attractive, glinting blondness that shines like precious metal in the sun. In appearance he might have been one of the blue-eyed heroes of the old Norse sagas, a hardy sea rover worshiper of Odin and the great god Thor come down from Valhalla; but, as a matter of fact, Phil was indifferent to the sea. Always clever with his hands, he built a squat, friendly little house that he adored and puttered over endlessly. He lined it with books and framed it with flowers; he cluttered it with quaint outlandish furniture carved in his leisure moments; he saturated it with pipe smoke and peopled it with the dreams that come to a man when he is young and a little lonely. Most of these dreams bore the quiet gray eyes and thoughtful face of the one girl in whom Phil ever evinced more than a passing interest—Mary McKee.

My wife and I were more than ordinarily fond of Mary and we were genuinely distressed when the years slipped by with nothing definite coming of their friendship. The pitiful truth was that Mary cared more than Phil. Hers was the steady, unswerving love of a woman, whose heart once given cannot be recalled at will. I