Gardena High School - El Arador Yearbook (Gardena, CA)

“Kindred FIRST PRIZE STORY One can never think of her apart from the sea — and I, who knew her well, can never smell the salt tang of the ocean or hear waves beating upon the shore, but her memory, sharp and poignant, grips my heart. She was quite glorious when I knew her first. At any rate, I thought her glorious. She lived in a small fishing town in New England. Her father, a person one never saw, was first mate on a whaling vessel, and her mother was a nonentity. She had quantities of brothers and sisters, younger than she, who were also nonentities. Her name was Seena Owen. My uncle, a scientific man, had rented a cottajfe in this village, rather removed from any super-abundance of human- ity, to study crabs and jelly-fish and sea-things for another of his ponderous, and uninteresting scientific volumes. I was fourteen at the time, and my kindly, be-spectacied and ab- sent-minded uncle, who had taken a fancy to me, asked to have me accompany him. I was eager to do so; 1 wnuld undoubtedly have a good time, if only by reason of his ab- sent-mindedness. Boys of fourteen can usually find a variety of things to do when their sole guardian is an absent-minded, kindly, be-spectacled scientific man. When I first saw Seena Owen I considered her beautiful. I rather compliment myself on my daring originality in this, for every one else in the village thought her very unpreposs- essing in appearance. She was tall, she was lank, and she was divinely graceful. She carried herself like a queen, but all un- consciously. Her hair was a pale, light color, very long, and she usually wore it unbound, flowing down her back. I thought of sea-weed. Her eyes were a clear, translucent green, sea- colored. Her face was sullen, brooding. There was a curious, intense aliveness about her, a white flame burning behind her eyes. I noticed her first when I accompanied my uncle on a little walk down the beach, in search of sea flora and fauna. We were about three miles from the village. Seena was there, standing on the sand, the sea wind whipping her dress back, blowing her hair. Her queer green eyes, unsheltered from the sun and wind, gazed off across the unquiet waters. She Has beautiful thus-1 stopped short to look at her. She should have been a figure carved on the prow of some gallant sea-going vessel—a Viking ship. I had an uncanny feeling that that was what she had been once. She was perfectly oblivious of us, and my uncle was oblivious of her He would have thought noth- ing of seeing a sea-nymph, or a mermaid, or Ai^hrodite aris- ing from the waves. We went quietly past, behind her, but while my uncle was searching for sea life, I stole back concealed among the sand dunes, and watched her. She was still as I had seen her first, still gazing out to sea. I wished passionately at that moment ”