The Brassbounder Part 24

No; I didn't suppose he would, looking at the clean, well-fed cut of him, and thinking of the lean, hungry devils who had sailed with me.

"Naw! Ah wouldna go in them if ye wa.s.s t' gif me thirrty pounss a munss! Coaffins, Ah caall them! Aye, coaffins, that iss what they are!"

Coffin! I thought of a ship staggering hard-pressed to windward of a ledge of cruel rocks, the breakers shrieking for a prey, and the old grey-haired Master of her slapping the rail and shouting, "Up t'it, m'

beauty! T' windward, ye b.i.t.c.h!"

"Aye, coaffins," he repeated. "That iss what they are!"

I had no answer--he was a steamboat man, and would not have understood.

EPILOGUE

"1910"

Into a little-used dock s.p.a.ce remote from harbour traffic she is put aside--out of date and duty, surging at her rusted moorings when the dock gates are swung apart and laden steamships pa.s.s out on the road she may no longer travel. The days pa.s.s--the weeks--the months; the tide ebbs, and comes again; fair winds carry but trailing smoke-wrack to the rim of a far horizon; head winds blow the sea mist in on her--but she lies unheeding. Idle, unkempt, neglected; and the haughty figurehead of her is turned from the open sea.

Black with the grime of belching factories, the great yards, that could yet spread broad sails to the breeze, swing idly on untended braces, trusses creaking a note of protest, sheet and lift chains clanking dismally against the mast. Stout purchase blocks that once _chirrped_ in chorus to a seaman's chantey stand stiffened with disuse; idle rags of fluttering sailcloth mar the tracery of spar and cordage; in every listless rope, every disordered ratline, she flies a signal of distress--a pennant of neglect.

Her decks, enc.u.mbered with harbour gear and tackle, are given over to the rude hands of the longsh.o.r.eman; a lumber yard for harbour refuse, a dumping ground for the ashes of the bustling dock tugs. On the hatch covers of her empty holds planks and stages are thrown aside, left as when the last of the cargo was dragged from her; hoist ropes, frayed and chafed to feather edges, swing from the yardarms; broken cargo slings lie rotting in a mess of grain refuse. The work is done. There is not a labourer's pay in her; the stevedores are gone ash.o.r.e.

Though yet staunch and seaworthy, she stands condemned by modern conditions: conditions that call for a haste she could never show, for a burthen that she could never carry. But a short time, and her owners (grown weary of waiting a chance charter at even the shadow of a freight) may turn their thumbs down, and the old barque pa.s.s to her doom. In happy case, she may yet remain afloat--a sheer hulk, drowsing the tides away in some remote harbour, coal-hulking for her steam-pressed successor.

And of her crew, the men who manned and steered her? Scattered afar on seven seas, learning a new way of seafaring; turning the grip that had held to a life aloft to the heft of a coalman's shovel, the deft fingers that had fashioned a wondrous plan of stay and shroud to the touch of winch valve and lever. Only an old man remains, a warden, in keeping with the lowly state of his once trim barque. Too old (conservative, may be) to start sea life anew, he has come to shipkeeping--a not unpleasant way of life for an aged mariner, so that he can sit on the hatch on fine nights, with a neighbourly dock policeman or Customs watcher and talk of the sea as only he knows it.

And when his gossip has risen to go the rounds, what links to the chain of memory may he not forge, casting his old eyes aloft to the gaunt spars and their burden of useless sail? Who knows what kindly ghosts of bygone shipmates walk with him in the night watches, when the dock lies silent and the flickering harbour lights are shimmering, reflected in a broad expanse?

THE END