Part 10 (2/2)
No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow of the hood. He kept it up for a long time with intense enjoyment. Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused. But when his hilarity had exhausted itself, he made a professional remark in a self-a.s.sertive but quavering voice:
”Can't expect much work on a night like this.”
No one took it up. It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy splendour and spiritual stillness. We would have to glide idly to and fro, keeping our station within the appointed bearings, and, unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the dawn, we would land before sunrise on a small islet that, within two miles of us, shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to ”break a crust and take a pull at the wine bottle.” I was familiar with the procedure. The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant, capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth amenity of the cla.s.sic sea when in a gentle mood. The crust broken and the mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no more than that with this abstemious race--the pilots would pa.s.s the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped fingers. One or two misanthropists would sit apart, perched on boulders like manlike sea-fowl of solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip scandalously in little gesticulating knots; and there would be perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with the long, bra.s.s tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with brandis.h.i.+ng and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a short turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boatful of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer for the old Phoenician port, dominated, watched over from the ridge of a dust-gray, arid hill by the red-and-white striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
All this came to pa.s.s as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very recent experience. But also something not foreseen by me did happen, something which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots. It was on this occasion that my hand touched, for the first time, the side of an English s.h.i.+p.
No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little draught got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and gla.s.sy with a clean, colourless light. I t was while we were all ash.o.r.e on the islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope, a black speck like an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to her water-line and came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles an hour.
She was a big, high-cla.s.s cargo-steamer of a type that is to be met on the sea no more--black hull, with low, white superstructures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of yards on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel--steam steering-gear was not a matter of course in these days--and with them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets, ruddy-faced, m.u.f.fled up, with peak caps--I suppose all her officers. There are s.h.i.+ps I have met more than once and known well by sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that s.h.i.+p seen once so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold, pale sunrise I have not forgotten. How could I--the first English s.h.i.+p on whose side I ever laid my hand! The name--I read it letter by letter on the bow--was James Westoll. Not very romantic, you will say. The name of a very considerable, well-known, and universally respected North country s.h.i.+p-owner, I believe. James Westoll! What better name could an honourable hard-working s.h.i.+p have? To me the very grouping of the letters is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her floating motionless and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere purity of the light.
We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to put the pilot on board while our boat, fanned by the faint air which had attended us all through the night, went on gliding gently past the black, glistening length of the s.h.i.+p. A few strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English--the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friends.h.i.+ps, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions--of my very dreams! And if (after being thus fas.h.i.+oned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not claim it aloud as my own, then, at any rate, the speech of my children. Thus small events grow memorable by the pa.s.sage of time. As to the quality of the address itself I cannot say it was very striking. Too short for eloquence and devoid of all charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the three words ”Look out there!” growled out huskily above my head.
It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy double chin) in a blue woollen s.h.i.+rt and roomy breeches pulled up very high, even to the level of his breastbone, by a pair of braces quite exposed to public view. As where he stood there was no bulwark, but only a rail and stanchions, I was able to take in at a glance the whole of his voluminous person from his feet to the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat like an absurd f.l.a.n.g.ed cone on his big head. The grotesque and ma.s.sive aspect of that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much. My course of reading, of dreaming, and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea brother of that sort. I never met again a figure in the least like his except in the ill.u.s.trations to Mr. W. W. Jacobs's most entertaining tales of barges and coasters; but the inspired talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun at poor, innocent sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its felicitous invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth, was not yet. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet. I fancy that, at most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had achieved at that early date.
Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have been prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise. The object of his concise address was to call my attention to a rope which he incontinently flung down for me to catch. I caught it, though it was not really necessary, the s.h.i.+p having no way on her by that time. Then everything went on very swiftly. The dinghy came with a slight b.u.mp against the steamer's side; the pilot, grabbing for the rope ladder, had scrambled half-way up before I knew that our task of boarding was done; the harsh, m.u.f.fled clanging of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear through the iron plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to ”shove off--push hard”; and when I bore against the smooth flank of the first English s.h.i.+p I ever touched in my life, I felt it already throbbing under my open palm.
Her head swung a little to the west, pointing toward the miniature lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there, hardly distinguishable against the land. The dinghy danced a squashy, splashy jig in the wash of the wake; and, turning in my seat, I followed the James Westoll with my eyes. Before she had gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag, as the harbour regulations prescribe for arriving and departing s.h.i.+ps. I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the flag staff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing the drab and gray ma.s.ses of that southern land, the livid islets, the sea of pale, gla.s.sy blue under the pale, gla.s.sy sky of that cold sunrise, it was, as far as the eye could reach, the only spot of ardent colour--flame-like, intense, and presently as minute as the tiny red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire kindles in the clear heart of a globe of crystal. The Red Ensign--the symbolic, protecting, warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof over my head.
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