Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine Read Online Free Page A

timbers and beams of some heavy, sea-soaked wood. Packing-crates as tall as a man and sealed with barnacles. Barrels and barrels of angular fixtures made of some once-fashionable metal. Coils of cable, rope. Nuts. Bolts. Screws. For days this went on. The polished diving-bell, glowing like the sun, bursting up through the waves, and Unguentine flinging open the hatch and hauling in by hand and by winch ropes to which were attached, floated and pontooned, his latest finds, soon breaking surface and shedding seawaters; then he would lash it all to the side of the barge, go under again. At night, weary and sopping wet, he would clamber stiffly on board with a basket of deep-sea clams tucked under his arm, bolt down his dinner, fall asleep at the pilot wheel.
    When Unguentine had collected enough odds and ends to make our barge resemble one of those protected corners of a beach, or a cove, where the sea-currents unload all their trash and run, construction began. He hewed, planed, sawed, mitred the sea-seasoned lengths of hickory and ash and oak into an astounding series of struts, no two alike, which, one moonlit night while I was in bed with a fever, he slung over the barge in the form of a great dome, well over three stories high and clearing even the tops of the tallest of his forty trees, then Elizabeth and the Poplar Agnes. I awoke, staggered from my bed at dawn to see him way up there on the top of this spider’s web of a thing, pounding in the last and topmost wooden peg, sledge-hammer raised high over his head, his bare toes scarcely gripping the wide-spanned struts, so high in the sky. Keystone to what now? I sighed. Shall we all be covered with canvas and no longer even see the sea? The sky? Cooling winds? Hot breezes? Gone forever too? No, thank God. Soon with crowbar and hammer he was prying open the packing-crates and sliding out sheets of high-impact glass made in some city I once loved; he cut and trimmed them, laid and puttied them into their casements which opened and closed like wings all over the dome, then spent days rigging the windows up, hundreds in all, to a system of ropes and pulleys and counterweights by which each and every pane might be opened to any degree by turning a crank in the pilot-house, with only one hand. Thus the light remained with us, the breezes, but a sunlight now refracted by crystalline glass, faintly watery, aquatic, with subtle auras, and inside the dome as the light grew dim towards the end of the day, all my flowers would multiply in mirror in the sky, stars suddenly come near to ring the image of my little face up there, staring rapt and wondrous as all the windows slowly tilted and sealed shut; into night and our silent, dark aquarium.
    My work increased with the dome, for there were windows to wash inside and out, their opening angles to be adjusted according to current light, temperature and humidity readings four times daily when it was summer outside, twice when winter, but my happiness was such that I could not complain; indeed, there was no time. And my joy at seeing Unguentine so content. A smile, I knew, was fixed beneath his fine-spun beard which concealed his mouth like a yellow window-shade. He no longer had to worry about those fierce winds which could blow down the whole of his stand of trees in a single gust, the labour of propping them back up one by one, the nursing of their torn roots with vitamins, limbing the shattered branches. Now in the secrecy before dawn he would mount the scaffolding and paste a little note of encouragement to the glass, way up high, sometimes on the inside of the panes, sometimes outside, often cleverly both, and I would scrape them off. Later in the morning as I might be polishing the last and uppermost of the panes outside, he would scramble up the side with the aid of a rope—often leaving footprints on my freshly cleaned glass—and stretch out on top of the dome and doze in the sun, binoculars rising and falling on his bare