Part 31 (2/2)

At last, soon after noon, Hogarth, with a considerable following, was seen ascending the steps, on his arm the Queen of the Ceremony--a little Bavarian Grafin, famous for her face: he, princely now with that cosmopolitan polish picked up in Courts, bending above her with laughter, making her laugh also, as they paced up. And at once the invited, including the Board of Verification, entered the hull upon a tour of sight-seeing, conducted by a manager of the contractors.

Already the set-up wedges had raised the _Boodah_ from her keel-block, and left her resting on the great braced ground-ways; and now down to the sea's brink the greasers were busy, prodigals in tallow, while, within, the seven hundred trooped from spectacle to spectacle, like a tourist group guided through the Louvre.

An hour, and they anew appeared on the roof, trooping toward that bal.u.s.trade that faced the sea: upon which the throngs felt the impending of the event, and intently watched. But there seemed no hurry, Hogarth all gay chatter, anon lowering the lids a moment, as he looked over the water; till suddenly hundreds of gla.s.ses detected a champagne-bottle with ribbons in the christener's hand; and the consciousness of the moment come moved the hosts when Hogarth, even as he chatted, disengaged a flag, and let it fall: it was a signal; down it fluttered; and instantly, down there, bustle broke loose, as the call ”Saw-off!” went forth, and the saws set flurriedly to fret through the timbers which bind groundways to slidingways.

”_Now?_” whispered Hogarth at the christener's ear: and, even as he spoke, the voice of a noising arose and droned from Spezzia, its hills, its villages, and its sea; the _Boodah_, only half-liberated, strained in travail; crashed from her bands; slipped down the greased gradient--plunged--and, gathering momentous way, went wading deep, deeper--like Behemoth run mad--amid a wrath of froths and a brawling of waters, into the sea.

There, deep-planted, she stretched: on the surface appeared a reef of steel; and the stirred-up water slapped vapidly upon those flanks, like waters upon the Norway wall.

x.x.xIII

REEFS OF STEEL

Nothing was ever so scrutinized as the movements of the _Boodah_ during the next two months.

One morning three weeks after her launch three steamers took her in tow, with progress so slow, that at nightfall they were still visible from land; but the next morning had vanished.

Two days later they were met on the Genoa-Leghorn _route_, six steamers then towing the _Boodah_, their course S. by W.

Again and again it was met, that funeral of the sea: the p.r.o.ne, tearing steamers, the reluctant bulk. Sometimes a captain's gla.s.s might make out a few men lost on the roof like men on a raft, smoking, seated, leaning over a bal.u.s.trade.

Southward and westward it swam. On the seventh day there arrived at Ajaccio from Ma.r.s.eilles twenty-five bluejackets; and these, in a hired _speronare_, put to sea, and joined the _Boodah_ twenty miles from the coast.

Thenceforth, a smoke would be seen at a point of the roof, indicating that she, too, was steaming: for it was known that she had a screw and a rudder; and so closely was she observed, that her now added rate could be fixed--two to three knots a day.

She must therefore have some small engines about 4,000 H. P.: and since their _motif_ could only be one thing, resistance to ocean currents, this meant that the _Boodah_ was intended to rest always in one spot: a startling conclusion.

Occasionally a Surveying Service wars.h.i.+p would peep above the horizon, watching her.

As she pa.s.sed through the Straits, seventy-five English blue-jackets put out from Trafalgar, and joined her.

With such reports pa.s.sed the weeks. Occasionally five or six coal-s.h.i.+ps would be seen about the _Boodah_; her number of tug-s.h.i.+ps might be as low as two; sometimes nine, ten.

At night she made a fine display, and homeward-bound boats from Cape Horn, from Pernambuco, Para, Madeira, spoke highly of her two revolving-drum lighthouses: for these, from opposite corners of the roof, at the rate of a revolution per minute, poured into s.p.a.ce two s.h.i.+mmering comets, like Calais and the Eddystone--rapt spinning-dervishes of the sea that hold far converse with the dark, till morning. And between these two ran a festoon of electric lanterns, j.a.panese and Moorish, cut in ogives; and festoons of coloured moons drooped round the bal.u.s.trades, so that the blaze and complexity of it presented to s.h.i.+ps a spectacle of speckled mystery, fresh to the sea.

After five weeks a hundred and seventeen blue-jackets put out from Portsmouth in a chartered barque and joined her, she still in tow, making now about N. by W.

But by the time this news reached Europe the eyes of Europe were no longer given up to the _Boodah_: for _another Boodah_, called the _Truth_, was a-tow through the North Channel from Belfast; and she had not reached the Mull of Cantire, when a third was launched at San Francisco, so that the interest of the islands became complicated.

What would they do? What could they? Compared with this question, the riddle of the Sphinx was simple, the supposition that they were going to batter coast-walls in the S. Pacific being hardly now tenable. The _Boodah_ finally came to rest some miles North of lat. 50 and East of long. 20: and there--just on the northern rim of the Gulf Stream where it divides, part toward Ireland, and part toward Africa--she remained, precisely in the middle of the trade-route between Europe and Boston, New York, Halifax: a _route_ covered for fifty miles--twenty-five north, twenty-five south--by her 19.5-inch guns.

It is impossible to describe with how wild a heart, or thrilling a boding, the world heard this thing: eight days later the International Conference of Maritime Nations met at The Hague.

But nothing happened--or the opposite of what was feared: for, as months pa.s.sed, the _Boodah_, planted there in the ocean, rapidly became the recognized gathering-point of the fas.h.i.+on and gaiety of Europe, thither flocking the socially ambitious and the ”arrived” together, and to have been invited to those revels of taste and elegance became a superiority.

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