The Sentimental Vikings Part 6

THE STORY OF THE OAR-CAPTAIN

This is the story of the Oar-Captain, that they used to tell to harps; and that, after, was made a saga of. The story is rough, like the natures of men, and full of storm of Nature and sea, as if a fury had run down the pages. But there are soft threads in its rough woof-I tell it just as the Oar-Captain told it.

The sun sank over the right-hand side of the ship-red, while the sky was cloudless. And the light breeze fell, just as the dusk came, and our brown sail trembled for a moment, and then sank back against the mast.

The men, laughing, leaned in a row along the bulwarks, while my lord paced up and down on the aft-deck. The steersman pulls in his oar, the ship swings idle, and soon the blue smoke ascends in a straight, fine line through the evening air from the open dish of black charcoal where they cook at the mast-foot.

It is evening, and soft clothes are spread about on the deck. Far away the sea stretches, till it fades into the glow of the almost dark sky; while on the other side, where no man looks, is dusk-darkness, cold, abandoned, the dead regions of what was morning. After a while, when the glory has quite faded out of the sky, the men murmur and slowly lie down on their clothes talking for a while. That gradually ceases, and we lie silent, while there comes faint creaking of cordage as the ship lazily swings. My lord has ceased pacing the aft-deck. We lie watching the stars come out.

Slowly they come, the eyes of other worlds. Lying close under the rail I see a little track of lights come from far away, till it seems they become scared and stop, and other lights come out behind them-a twinkling row, till they reach the bulwark over my head. Next me a man sighs in his sleep.

I lie thinking of the lands to the south, and of my lord. When I turn my head I can still see him in the gathering dark, where he leans dim by the black line of the steering-oar. Looking up my soul leaves the ship, and seeming to gaze down from the stars I feel very far away. Slowly they come, silent lights. I remember old sagas and faces-old faces--

It is morning. The fresh wind lifts the sail outward; the hair is blown in the men's faces; the water whispers and chuckles merrily under the side of the leaning ship. The thin ropes creak, the shields over the sides rattle and jerk. I and another swing on the steering-oar, and the men run along the decks with glad faces.

It is afternoon. The ship lies on her side; the flying water runs over as it goes by. Dark clouds have come out of the east, and are streaked from their low-lying bank in long streamers along the sky. The mast bends, the bows shoot the spray up into the winds, where it is whirled away before us. The water hisses; the wind moans and sings; and the ship is full of the rattle of the oars along the benches.

It is evening. The moving sky is as black as the water between the foam-streaks, by which we rush; through a vapour-veiled hole, dimly, the pale sun is going down. Men shout to each other in the dark, and the water splashes in waves along the benches. My lord gives orders for the sail to be rolled fast and that all men shall come off the fore-deck.

Morning. By the hazy light from far up in the heavens, I see our bare mast with the tangled bunch of ropes whipping forward from the top.

Broken oars swim in the water in the waist of the ship, and from outside, heard in the twilight, comes the sound of mermaids singing I think, answered by the dull roar of the mermen's sh.e.l.ls. I look around; before me are the men holding to anything that is firm on the after-deck, where my lord stands, looking forward. They are pale, and the glistening of their clothes shows in the misty light, that shows the foam hissing over the side of the ship.

So, all day we crouch, gnawing pieces of bran-bread, and holding fast to the sides of the ship.

Evening. The sun has gone out, and a roaring that sounds like the rushing of pine-trees falling, comes from the dark. The shields are gone, and the men laugh grimly thinking of death, when the seas rush over the flying bulwarks.

It is morning again, and the clouds rolling and flying in jagged flags in the wind, are broken at sunrise, and the wind sings now, not roars.

The ship shows, a bare-sided, dripping, unfamiliar thing beneath the morning light; full of wreckage and ropes, the sail lying, and the yard gone, the bunch of ropes at the top of the mast. The pale men that have ceased to laugh now, untie themselves from the bulwarks and creep stiffly forward to the food-chest. The sea rises in waves, but the still stiff breeze keeps them down and we ride on, plunging; our bare mast shakes in the wind.

That is how, when Lord Uffe stood on the seaweed-brown beach four days later, he was cried to over the side of a bare-masted ship as it rowed round the point along the rocky sh.o.r.e, and asked the name of the country.

Lord Uffe brought us up to the hall where his people ran to cook meat for us, and where we sat gladfully drinking the warm ale by the fire.

Then the great platters of meat came in seething, and we sat and ate, warming ourselves, while Lord Uffe talked to my lord at the end of the table-sitting by a great red-haired man that he ever glanced at kindly, but who with thoughtful eyes sat gazing as one seeing nothing.

As we sat there, when our first hunger was done and men were beginning to stretch out their legs under the table, I looked about the hall. And there was something that seemed strange about it. For some time gazing, I could not see; then with a half-afraid feeling, a wonder, I saw that everything was old-the benches, the arms rusted on the walls-it was as if men had been dropped back three centuries. Even while I was yet wondering at this and looking curiously at the old-patterned arms on the walls-such as I had seen in the old halls we had stopped at in our sailing, kept from ancestors-the lord of the place, Lord Uffe-a short, stout, strong, old man, with kind face and a beard to his waist and eyes that shut in his laughter-rose, and standing with his hand on my lord's shoulder, spoke to him and to the table so that all might hear.

"Ye care to know," he said, smiling, "what country this may be. Then I will tell a story to you all-see that ye are comfortable-

"Four men's lifetimes ago if they were old men there was a ship blown off the coast while it bore a boat-load towards the south, from a burnt town in the hard north; searchers for new places. And for days a great wind blew them the same as it has blown you, till, in the night, no moon, they fell upon this place, the ship shocking onto the sands and falling in pieces, and some of the men killed. They sat in the hiding of the rocks till the sunrise, then with the strong wind blowing in their faces, they found their home, built it, and saved some things from out of the ship-they were my fathers. A pleasant country; we are content; no ships ever come; we are alone; we mow our easily-sown fields while our children grow about us; we cut timber in limitless forests-why should we leave it? The name of the place?" And he stood, his great beard falling on his chest, his eyes looking kind along the board to see if we wanted anything.

"We are lost in the seas," he said again. "Whether far or near, or north or south, no man knows; no ship ever comes; the forest begins behind us; nothing that shows sign of man's hand is washed to the sh.o.r.e; we are alone, lost and contented. Listen to the sound of the sea; we have never crossed it; no man has crossed it to us; we know not where it goes; or where we are."

The old man spoke grandly, but his kind eyes ever glanced along the table to see if we wanted anything.

We men drew long breaths, and I saw my lord draw down his brows, and tug the fair hair over his forehead. Some of us got up, and began to walk about.

Then in the midst of the silence my lord spoke hesitatingly.

"We thank my Lord Uffe for his kindness. What can we do-can we sail home-and where? Still, for the present, we thank my Lord Uffe for his kindness."

The old man, pulling his beard, stood, looking at my lord for a moment; then, a smile coming to his lips and showing in his eyes, he held out his hand and said, "Stay."

It was some days before we got the things out of the ship and the ship well hauled up on the beach. Then we looked about for a place for our houses; for we had decided to stay, at least for a while.

The land seemed good; the sand, broken with rocky points, stretched straight along the bright sea; and, protected from the sea-winds and storms by a line of oak forest left standing, lay fields now just green in the spring-time. Beyond these fields, fenced off from one another by little walls of stone, drew in the forest again, the colour of the light-green of a curling wave, and as limitless as the sea. In the edge of the forest, surrounded by a few of the great trees, the others being taken away, on a little rise in the ground, stood the old wooden hall of Lord Uffe, shaded by the green branches, or crossed by the patches of sunlight when they waved-the hall, a low building, old, with many pa.s.sages inside and far-away little rooms, and the one great dining-chamber; built very stoutly. Around, in the edge of the forest, were little houses of wood from which the smoke curled lazily up in the spring air, and about which ran children playing while their happy-faced mothers watched from the doorways. The sky was very blue, birds sang in the trees, and about the fields hopped little hares.

We decided to build our hall, not a large one, but enough for us, farther down the row of fields in a little point of great old trees that ran out a little way toward the cleared place. Here with our axes we hewed for many days, cutting great timbers and raising them upright along the sides of our house-floor. Then came dragging of logs through the forest and the laying them one on the other along the timbers for the walls of the house and the driving of wooden pins and hewing of doorways.

All this time we lived at the hall of Lord Uffe, except some of us who stayed in the houses round.

I lived at the hall. Thus I saw from the beginning, the trouble that came to us, and that brought storm and madness. Here, lost from all men, with the unknown sea between us and all things but the birds and woods and trees and waters and our little selves, was played a thing that was unchanged from the far places we had left, as though we had never left them.

While the fields grew greener, and the birds sang, and our house was growing nearer finishing, while Lord Uffe walked in the forest and our ship lay on the beach and our men ate in the hall, my lord, with his yellow hair, and his soft harping, made love to the daughter of Lord Uffe's dead brother, the betrothed of the friend of Lord Uffe, the great man who had sat in the hall silently when we found welcome there.

It was this way. One day, when the noon held all the fields in stillness and the little singing things were silent in the gra.s.s, I walked-for the day was too warm to work in the mid-day-slowly, along one of the forest paths, just shut off from the glare of the sun in the open by a screen of trees whose leaves hung still in the silence. Then, far before me, I saw at the end of the path two figures, and stopped, I do not know why.

I saw who the figures were-my own lord and Hilda, the betrothed of his friend.

They were coming toward me, but their heads were bent down, and they did not yet see me. I waited; though they walked slowly it seemed but a moment till they were close to me; they were walking in silence. I know not why, but I turned softly and went back, they not seeing me. As I went back the silence oppressed me and I wanted the sound of the crickets in the gra.s.s.

When I came into the hall that night for my meat, and looked up at the end of the table where she sat by the great man, I sat down in the shadow and was ashamed, for I saw it all.

Perhaps it was that we were new and strange, or perhaps it was my lord's harping, and songs, and gentle ways, that took the maiden's liking-she to whom the world was a legend. The people about her were rough; she, in her simple dress, had learnt from the delicate flowers and things of the woods where she had lived, to find them so perhaps. But when I looked up from the shadow and caught the gleam of my lord's eyes as they met hers, looking across the forms of Lord Uffe who had welcomed us, and her betrothed, in this old hall; where below, sat our men and Lord Uffe's together, all their hands hard from the work on great timbers-I grew sick.

I have no heart for this part of the tale; let me go on to the ending.

For many days I stayed by our unfinished hall where the men were busy thatching the roof and making the fireplace and windows; it was almost done. At last one night I trod wearily up for my meat at Lord Uffe's, while the air felt heavy and the occasional thunder that had rumbled far away all day, growled in the west, as the sun sank. I came into the hall when they were all seated, and without looking up at the end of the table sat myself down silent, while the man next to me growled like the thunder as he shoved me the meat-dish.

After dinner they called on my lord for a song. He took down his harp from where it hung on the back of his chair, and striking it three times-I remember all these small things-bent his head for a moment as if listening. Then turning, and facing down the hall, he lifts his head; and, playing softly, his voice rings out in a love song, that brings the tears into the eyes of the women by the fire in a moment. As it rises, it wakes even us men-what was that? Only thunder. The song goes on. It speaks of love and despair, softly, but with a strange tenderness in the notes that makes each man apply it to himself. The sorrowful notes droop through the hall to the running music of the strings-he turns toward the figure in white behind him-What a roar of thunder!-the song goes on.

It speaks of division and of sorrow, and love unknown; it speaks of the tenderness of love that is hid, of longing. A crash and volley of thunder just overhead, and the hall is lit up for a moment by the lightning-it is gone and the fire shines out again.

My lord is standing facing her; he leans forward, his eyes on hers, and plays softly, his voice falling low. We bend forward to listen. He is singing of love and its fulfilment; he sings of love, and the tenderness of it. Slowly the words fall, his head is bent forward and his eyes gaze into hers. Slowly she rises from her place, slowly she comes toward him, her head raised, her eyes on his, slowly she sinks at his feet-the notes fall-low--

Crash and roar! and a dying-away of the tumult into a distant roll while the hall is lit up for a moment by the lightning. The light flickers on the walls, showing the still raised harp, the kneeling figure, the men half-risen from their places. It is gone, and the fire that has died down glows feebly.

As I awake from the waking sleep I hear voices raised angrily, and in the dusk see two figures, one tall, risen by the bench at the end of the table. Someone throws a log on the smouldering fire and the sparks fly up. In a moment it is light.

I hear a voice shouting, "Dost thou love this man?"

And Lord Uffe's voice raised in remonstrance; and from the white figure now standing leaning against my lord comes a low voice saying something we cannot hear.

Then there is more tumult that gradually thins down to a single voice speaking, and Lord Uffe's words are heard as the silence falls. "Before thou cam'st we were content; but thou hast brought the noises of the world with thee, and broken peace. Thou cam'st to us out of the storm; go back into the storm, my guest!"

Slowly my lord went down the hall, we behind him. Turning my head-I was the only man who turned-I saw the white figure on its knees again by the bench, its head hidden. Our host stood, his hand out towards us; away by the fireplace a face shone over a huge black form on whose hair the firelight played. I wish I could forget that face!

As we pa.s.sed in silence through the door the thunder roared and died away.