To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
THE GOLDEN DOLPHIN, by J. Allan Dunn
I
Opportunity Knocks
Jim Lyman, wandering aimlessly down North Street, Foxfield, had it borne in upon him that jobs were hard to catch. The paper mills and the woolen mills and the big electric supplies factory that, taking advantage of cheap water power, had transformed Foxfield the village into Foxfield the city of fifty thousand, were either shut down or running half time with a greatly reduced number of employees. It seemed to Jim that the rest of these unemployed were standing on the curbings and lounging on the Common, parked wherever there were vacant spaces, their savings gone, their faces more or less disconsolate. Yet Jim Lyman had turned down a job no later than that morning.
It is true that he had regarded it almost as an insult, that he had found difficulty in gracing his refusal. Yet he was beginning to regret his rashness. He had a few dollars in his pocket but they were very few, and the high cost of living had not reduced on the same scale as the lowering average of wages. Most of the chaps standing about would have jumped at Jim’s offer, he reflected, provided they could have qualified.
The job was out at Winnesota Lake where the summer season for holiday makers from the big cities was in full swing. A man was wanted to help in the hiring and care of boats—a launch, rowboats and canoes—to help people get into them without upsetting or stepping through the bottoms, to shove out and haul in, to swab, to generally stand by and hang around a wharf in a bathing suit—for fifteen dollars a month and found; the findings meaning fair meals and an indifferent bunk at the mock-bungalow of the owner of the boathouse, and boating privileges. A soft snap to almost anyone out of a job, a vacation in itself, a chance for a good time with the city girls who were not averse to flirting with men of the “handsome brave life-saver” variety, but—
Jim Lyman was a sailor, a man who had served as second and first mate, who was qualified as a master mariner, who loved the sea and regarded a freshwater pond like Winnesota Lake much as a salmon would regard a bathtub. That comparison is not vigorous enough. To Jim the idea of the job on the placid lake, handling toy boats when his heart longed for a stiff breeze, big seas and a heeling vessel working into the wind’s eye, was a good deal like the offering to a lion tamer a position taking care of guinea pigs.
Beggars may not be choosers, but Jim would never be a beggar, and he had a strong belief in his own star or in the general fairness of Providence. All of which was a testimony to his good nature, his vitality and his good digestion, since he had just come through a severe pummeling at the hands of Fate: wrecked in the South Pacific; hungry, thirsty, blazing days in an open boat; despair; rescue; return to Panama aboard a smelly, inefficient ship inadequately run by Portuguese whose ideas of food were as limited as their larder; a chance to work his way back north and east as a handler on a fruit freighter, a brief visit at the New England home of the wrecked ship’s purser-steward, companion of his misfortunes, and then the long hunt and the ultimate conviction that a sailor man was out-of-date, obsolete, and not much to be desired; a job as a rigger in an emergency contract, two or three jobs painting flagpoles and straightening vanes, wandering inland the while, the supposed opportunity to get on as rigger again with a contractor in Foxfield, only to find the man with barely work enough to keep his oldest hands together on half time.
There was adventure for you—or misadventure—which Jim had suffered and taken as part of the day’s job, the risk that sharpened the edge of things. It was the tabasco sauce on life’s oyster to Jim, just an appetizer. One could get too much of it, but now—now life was as flat and stale as ditchwater or the placid green and blue reflecting wavelets of Lake Winnesota.
The ancient adages—and you will generally find them well based—depict Opportunity as Knocking at the Door and Adventure Waiting Around the Corner. Jim was fairly confident of the truth of the latter saying, he was beginning to doubt the verity of the former. Or else he was always out or asleep when the knock came. Even adventure seemed infinitely remote, despite his comparatively recent experience.
There are few of us—older than Jim, who was midway between twenty and thirty—who have much of life to look back to and remember, who have not had times when, swathed in the bonds of the commonplace, either complacent resentful or despondent, seemingly as fixed as an oyster to its rock-bed, the swift change of circumstance has not swept down upon us like a whirlwind from a clear sky and transported us to scenes and happenings we never dreamed of encountering. Opportunity and Adventure are sisters of the fates. Often the first, coming down the street hand in hand with the one who has opened the door to her knock, will turn the corner where Adventure lurks and the trio go on together, while Fortune smiles at another successful combination. So with Jim when he first saw clearly the gleaming emblem of the golden dolphin shining in the afternoon sun and felt that subtle quickening of spirit that we call presentment.
He turned from North Street, with its loafing tribute to slack times, and was strolling down a side avenue where elms met overhead in their June tracery of crisp green against the blue and gold of the sky. On either side he began to find the commercial district changing to the residential. He crossed the Winnetac River on its broad white-railed bridge and walked past old-time Colonial houses, not indicative of great wealth, but of vast comfort. There were lawns and lilacs, glimpses of more flowers at the back, robins listening-in for worms, grackles, and catbirds calling from the maples. It was a homey street and the sights and sounds and scents had their due effect upon Jim Lyman. Even as North Street had raised the ruff of his spirit in protest against the times, now it smoothed down like the ruff of a collie under the touch of a known and friendly hand.
Then he caught sight of the dolphin, ablaze in a direct shaft of sunlight, a heraldic dolphin, skillfully wrought in metal and nobly covered with burnished gold-leaf, not merely bronzed with baser metal.
It swung in a wrought iron frame—ungilded—that projected from a doorway with a Colonial Dutch hood. On either side the glazed-in porches showed old furniture, chairs, rockers, spinning wheels, rag rugs, warming pans, knockers, andirons—all of which confirmed the legend of the sign:
THE GOLDEN DOLPHIN ANTIQUES
K. Whiting, Prop.
Jim did not notice the lettering at first, he was too busy looking at the dolphin. In a way it was his totem, it was the symbol of the sea that he loved. Jim knew dolphins, the porpoises of the Pacific and their sharper-snouted cousins of the Atlantic, the acrobats of the ocean. He knew too the true dolphin, the dorado, with its protuberant forehead and long dorsal fin, the fish that really changes into exquisite degrees and blends of color as it dies upon the deck. The conventional form shown in the sign he knew also. He had seen it in ships’ decorations, on ancient charts that he had studied; once, at least, as the figurehead of a ship. It was as a figurehead he had last seen it.
He shifted his gaze from sign to porch-window. His pupils dilated, his lids narrowed. He pushed open the picket-gate and walked in a daze up the path toward the left-hand porch, walked as a hypnotic subject will, with gaze fixed on the object that has enchained the senses.
In the window was a background of old furnishings, enlivened here and there with bits of Oriental embroidery, lacquered trays, batiks, gleaming seashells. All these were subordinated—in the eyes of Jim—to the beautiful model of a ship, set on a low stand. The vessel was of exquisite design and its fashioning of rare artistry. The veriest landsman might see speed and buoyancy in the swelling streamlines of the hull, sweet as the contours of a bonito; the ambitious sheer of the stem, the curving counter, the rake of the four masts—the fore square-rigged, the others fore and aft. The model was complete with rigging and canvas, with boats slung in davits, skylights and awnings, miniature wheel, and binnacle;