The Ship Dwellers Part 9

"You are from America," he said.

"Yes, we are from America."

"And do they use different ploughs there?"

He spoke the English of the colonies, and it seemed incredible that he should not know about these things. We broke it to him as gently as possible that we did not plough with a crooked stick in America, but with such ploughs as were used in England. However, that meant nothing to him, as he had never been off the island of Malta in his life. His name was Carina, he told us, and his parents and grandparents before him had been born on the island. Still, I think he must have had English or Irish pigment in that red hair of his. His English was perfect, though he spoke the Maltese, too, of course.

He became our guide as we went along, willing and generous with his information, though more interested, I thought, in the questions he modestly asked us, now and then. His whole environment--all his traditions--had been confined to that little sea-encircled s.p.a.ce of old, old town, and older, much older country.

He would like to come to America, he confessed, and I wondered, if some day he should steam up New York harbor and look upon that piled architecture, and then should step ash.o.r.e and find himself amidst its whirl of traffic, he would not be even more impressed by it than we were with his tiny forgotten island here to the south of Sicily.

We pa.s.sed little stations, now and then, with pretty stone and marble station-houses, but with no villages of any consequence, and came to Citta Vecchia, which the Arabs called Medina, formerly the capital of the island. It is a very ancient place, set upon a hill and bastioned round with walls that are too high to scale, and were once impregnable.

It has stood many an a.s.sault--many a long-protracted siege. To-day it is a place of crumbling ruins and deserted streets--a mediaeval dream.

It was raining when we got back to Valetta, and our faithful guide hurried us toward the boat-landing by a short way, for we were anxious to get home now. Every few yards we were a.s.sailed by hackmen and beggars, and by boatmen as soon as we reached the pier. He kept us intact, however, and got us into our own boat, received the rest of his fortune--enough to set him up for life, by Maltese standards--waved us good-bye, and we were being navigated across the wide, rainy waste toward our steamer, which seemed to fill one side of that little harbor.

What a joy to be on deck again and in the cosey cabin, drinking hot tea and talking over our adventures and purchases with our fellow-wanderers.

The ship is home, rest, comfort--a world apart. We are weighing anchor now, and working our course out of the bottle-neck, to sea. It is a narrow opening--a native pilot directs us through it and leaves the ship only at the gateway. Then we sail through and out into the darkening sky where a storm is gathering--the green billows catching the dusk purple on their tips, the gulls white as they breast the rising wind.

We gather on the after deck to say good-bye to Malta. Wall upon wall, terrace upon terrace it rises from the sea--heaped and piled back against the hills--as old, as quaint, as unchanged as it was a thousand years ago. Viewed in this spectral half-light it might be any one of the ancient cities. Ephesus, Antioch, Tyre--it suggests all those names, and we speak of these things in low voices, awed by the spectacle of gathering night and storm.

Then, as the picture fades, we return to the lighted cabins, where it is gay and cheerful and modern, while there in the dark behind, that old curious island life still goes on; those curious shut-in people are gathering in their houses; the day, with its cares, its worries, and its hopes is closing in on that tiny speck, set in that dark and lonely sea.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] There would seem to have been some sort of confusion of Malta with the city of Muscat. Perhaps the reader can figure out just what it was.

It had something to do with domestic pets, I believe.

XIV

A SUNDAY AT SEA

We are in cla.s.sic waters now. All this bleak Sunday we have been steaming over the Ionian Sea, crossed so long ago by Ulysses when he went exploring; crossed and recrossed a hundred times by the galleyed fleets of Rome. We have followed the exact course, perhaps, of those old triremes with their piled-up banks of oars, when they sailed away to conquer the East, also when they returned loaded down with captives and piled high with treasure.

A little while ago Cythera was on our port bow, the island where Aphrodite was born of wind and wave, and presently set out to make trouble among the human family. She and her son Cupid, who has always been too busy to grow up, have a good deal to answer for, and they are still at their mischief, and will be, no doubt, so long as men are brave and women fair.

However, they seemed to have overlooked this ship. There is only one love-affair discoverable, and even that is of such a mild academic variety that it is doubtful whether that tricksy jade Venus and her dimpled son had any concern in the matter. It is rather a case of Diana's hunting, I suspect, and not a love-affair at all.

I have mentioned that this is Sunday, but I acquired this knowledge from the calendar. One would never guess it from the aspect of this ship and its company. We made a pretty good attempt at Sabbath observance the first Sunday out, and we did something in that line a week later. But then we struck Genoa, where we lost the Promoter and took on this European influx of languages, and now Sunday is the same as Friday or Tuesday or any other day, and it would take an expert to tell the difference.

I do not blame it all to the Europeans. They are a good lot, I believe, some of them I am sure are, and we have taken to them amazingly. They did teach us a few new diversions, but we were ready for instruction and the Reprobates would have corrupted us anyhow, so it is no matter. The new-comers only stimulated our education and added variety to our progress. But they did make it bad for Sunday--the old-fashioned Sunday, such as we had the first week out.

Not that our "pilgrims" are a bad lot--not by any means. They do whoop it up pretty lively in the booze-bazaar now and then, and even a number of our American ladies have developed a weakness for that congenial corner of the ship. But everything is p. p., which is _Kurfurst_ for perfectly proper, and on this particular Sunday you could not sc.r.a.pe up enough real sin on this ship to interest Satan five minutes.

Even the Reprobates are not entirely abandoned, and only three different parties have been removed from their table in the dining-saloon by request--request of the parties, that is--said parties being accustomed to the simpler life--pleasant diversions of the home circle, as it were--and not to the sparkle and the flow of good-fellowship on the high seas, with the _bon mot_ of the Horse-Doctor, the repartee of the Colonel, and the placid expletive of the Apostle which the rest of us are depraved enough to adore.

The Apostle, by-the-way, is going to Jerusalem. He has been there before, which he does not offer as a reason for going again, for he found no comfort there, and he is unable to furnish the Doctor with a sane reason why any one should ever want to go there, even once. I suspect that when the sale of tickets for the side trips began the Apostle, in his innocence, feared that there might not be enough to go around, and thought that he had better secure one in case of accident. I suspect this from his manner of urging the Doctor to secure one for himself.

"You'll be too late, if you're not careful," he said. "You'd better go right up and get your ticket now."

The Doctor was not alarmed. "Don't worry, Joe," he said. "You're booked for Jerusalem, all right enough. I'll get mine when I decide to go."

"But suppose you decide to go after the party is made up?"

The Doctor stroked his chin. "h.e.l.l-of-a-note if I can't go ash.o.r.e and buy a ticket for Jerusalem," he said, which had not occurred to the Apostle, who immediately remembered that he didn't want to go to Jerusalem anyway, had never wanted to go, and had vowed, before, he would never go again.

However, he will go, because the Colonel is going; and the Colonel is going because, as the Doctor still insists, he made his money by publishing Bibles without reading them, which I think doubtful--not doubtful that he did not read them, but that he is going to the Holy Land in consequence. I think he is going because he knows the Apostle is going--and the Doctor, and the game of piquet. Those are reasons enough for the Colonel. He is ready at a moment's notice to follow that combination around the world.

But if we no longer have services on these sea Sundays we have other features. The Music-Master plays for us, if encouraged, and he gave us a lecture this afternoon. It was on ancient music, or art, or archaeology, I am not sure which. I listened attentively and I am pretty sure it was one of those things. He is a delightful old soul and his German is the best I ever heard. If I could have about ten years' steady practice, twelve hours a day, I think I could understand some of it.

The "Widow" entertains us too. She belongs to the Genoa contingent, and is one of those European polyglots who speak every continental language and make a fair attempt at English. It is her navete and unfailing good-nature that divert us. She approached one of our American ladies who wears black.

"You a widow, not?" she said.

"Oh no, I am not a widow."

"Ah, then mebbe you yus' divorce, like me."

We get along well with the Europeans. Our captain tells us he has never seen the nations mix more harmoniously, which means that we are a good lot, altogether, which is fortunate enough.

But I am p.r.o.ne to run on about the ship and our travellers and forget graver things; I ought to be writing about Greece, I suppose, and of the wonders we are going to see, to-morrow, in Athens. I would do it, only I haven't read the guide-book yet, and then I have a notion that Greece has been done before. The old _Quaker City_ was quarantined and did not land her people in Greece (except two parties who went by night), and the "Innocents" furnishes only that fine description of the Acropolis by moonlight.

But a good many other excursionists have landed there, and most of them have told about it, in one way and another. Now it is my turn, but I shall wait. I have already waited a long time for Athens-- I do not need to begin the story just yet. Instead I have come out here on deck to look across to Peloponnesus, which has risen out of the sea, a long gray sh.o.r.e, our first sight of the mainland where heroes battled and mythology was born.

I expected the sh.o.r.es of Greece would look like that--bleak, barren, and forbidding. I don't know why, but that was my thought--perhaps because the nation itself has lost the glory of its ancient days. The Music-Master is looking at it too. It means more to him than to most of us, I imagine. As he looks over to that gray sh.o.r.e he is seeing in his vision a land where there was once a Golden Age, when the groves sang with Orpheus and the reeds with Pan, while nymphs sported in hidden pools or tripped lightly in the dappled shade.

To-morrow he will go mad, I think, for we shall anchor at Athens, in the Bay of Phaleron.

XV

A PORT OF MISSING DREAMS

There were low voices on the deck, just outside my port-hole. I realized that it was morning then; also that the light was coming in and that we were lying at anchor. I was up by that time. It was just at the first sunrising, and the stretch of water between the ship and the sh.o.r.e had turned a pinkish hue. Beyond it were some buildings, and above the buildings, catching the first glint of day on its structured heights, rose a stately hill.

The Amiable Girl (I have mentioned her before, I believe) and a companion were leaning over the ship's rail, trying to distinguish outlines, blended in the vague morning light. The Amiable Girl was peering through a binocular, and I caught the words "Parthenon" and "Caryatides"; then to her companion, "Take the gla.s.s."

Which the other girl did, and, after gazing steadily for a moment, said:

"Yes! Oh yes, indeed-- I can see them now, quite distinctly!"

And then, even with my naked eye, I could make out certain details of that historic summit we have travelled so far to see. Three miles away, perhaps, the Acropolis arose directly in front of us--its columned crown beginning to glow and burn in answer to the old, old friend that has awakened it to glory, morning after morning, century after century, for a full twenty-three hundred years.