The Dutch Wife by Eric P. McCormack

he’s old and it’s so far away.” He felt this was surely reasonable.
    But she just shook her head. “Go to him,” she said. “He once told me that if ever I needed him, he’d come. Remind him of that if you have to. Ask him to come back with you. Tell him I need him now.”
    That was that. There was no more to be said.
    Thomas, accordingly, consulted once more with Jeggard, made travel arrangements and packed his bag. Two days later he set out for one of the most distant corners of the world.
    – 4 –
    THOMAS VANDERLINDEN, who’d always been an enthusiastic mental traveller, was not at all keen on real travelling. “People’s lives would be much simpler if they never left their own houses”: that was what one of his favourite authors had written, and Thomas agreed with him. Yet here he was, on a journey to the other side of the earth, in spite of everything.
    To begin with, it wasn’t too bad. The train west was comfortable enough for a few days, in spite of the smell of stale smoke in his little compartment. The Great Lakes were pleasing to view. The prairies were indeed flat. The mountains, when they appeared, were impressive enough to begin with, but after a while monotonous as bookcase after bookcase full of the same flashy book. They actually made Thomas nostalgic for the prairies, made him feel perhaps there might have been some deeper significance to all that flatness if he’d only had the mental toughness to penetrate it.
    None too soon, the train steamed into Vancouver. The oppressive bulk of the mountains made the city seem to Thomas like a precarious heap of rubble ready to slide into the deep. The rain was constant, the people scuttling between buildings like beetles with carapaces of umbrellas.
    He had to stay there three days, but he didn’t go out much. He spent most of each day in the damp bedroom of his small hotel by the docks, sitting by the window. The frame was warped, the white paint peeling. He alternated reading with watching the rusty freighters anchored out in the harbour, small boats coming from them like animals being born. Each night, the rain seemed to get heavier. The sound of it lashing against the window made his sleep uneasy. The old grandfather clock in the hotel lobby would strike midnight as though from another world.
    The rain stopped on the third morning, just after he boarded the ship to Hawaii. He was apprehensive about the journey, never having travelled by ship before and having been warned it was the season of storms. But for the entire crossing, the weather remained benevolent: the sun shone all day, the stars dazzled at night, the steamer was as stable as the train had been.
    But pleasantness, he knew, never lasts.
    The ship arrived at Honolulu and he looked forward to a few days of finding his land legs again. He discovered he had no time to spare: he must go immediately to another dock. He went there and boarded the Innisfree, the monthly schooner to the Motamua Archipelago. Her Captain, anxious-looking and Irish, had been waiting for his arrival. Thomas had been on board only an hour when the sails were raised and she was underway.
    In the tiniest of cabins, lying in a narrow bunk with a board siding that was clearly meant to prevent the occupant from tumbling out, he soon felt ill at ease. It was like being in the belly of some unhappy monster, the timbers groaned so noisily. The schooner was already so responsive to winds and waves, he didn’t want to think about how it would do in a storm.
    These things were going through his mind as the vessel passed into deep waters. The regular ocean swell brought on his first bout of seasickness.
    THOMAS VANDERLINDEN KEPT TO HIMSELF as much as the size of the Innisfree would permit. Aside from the Captain and a half-dozen crew who made up the various watches, there were four passengers. Thomas presumed they were typical of the kinds of people who made such journeys.
    He got to know the Berkleys first. They were a