The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 30

A still tongue makes a wise head; an' there's a pollack on the end of your line.'

"The wind stuck in the north-west, and day after day the regal summer weather continued. I grew tired of hauling in pollack, and determined to have a try for the more exciting conger. The fun of this, as you know, does not begin till night-fall, and it was seven o'clock in the evening, or thereabouts, when we pushed off from the beach. By eight we had reached the best grounds and begun operations. An hour pa.s.sed, or a little more, and then Old Tom Udy asked when I thought of returning.

"'Why, bless the man,' said I, 'we've not had a bite yet!'

"He glanced at me furtively while he lit a pipe. 'I reckoned, maybe, you might have business ash.o.r.e, so to speak.'

"'What earthly business should I have in Polreen at this hour?'

"'Aw, well . . . you know best . . . no affair o' mine. 'Tis a dark night, too.'

"'All the better for conger, eh?'

"'So 'tis.' He seemed about to say more, but at that moment I felt a long pull on the line, and for an hour or two the conger kept us busy.

"It must have been a week later, at least (for the moon was drawing to the full), that I pulled up the blind of my sitting-room a little before mid-night, and, ravished by the beauty of the scene (for, I tell you, Polreen can be beautiful by moonlight), determined to stroll down to the beach and smoke my last pipe there before going to bed. The door of the inn was locked, no doubt; but, the house standing on the steep slope of the main street, I could step easily on to the edge of the water-barrel beneath my window and lower myself to the ground.

"I did so. Just as I touched solid earth I heard footsteps.

They paused suddenly, and, glancing up the moonlit road, I descried the gigantic figure of Wesley Truscott, the c.o.xswain of the lifeboat.

He must have seen me, for the light on the whitewashed front of the inn was almost as brilliant as day. But, whatever his business, he had no wish to meet me, for he dodged aside into the shadow of a porch, and after a few seconds I heard him tip-toeing up the hill again.

"I began to have my doubts about Polreen's primitive virtues.

Certainly the village, as it lay bathed in moonlight, its whitewashed terraces and glimmering roofs embowered in dark cl.u.s.ters of fuchsia and tamarisk, seemed to harbour nothing but peace and sleeping innocence.

An ebbing tide lapped the pebbles on the beach, each pebble distinct and glistening as the water left it. Far in the quiet offing the lights of a fishing-fleet twinkled like a line of jewels through the haze.

"Half-way down the beach I turned for a backward look at the village.

"Now the wall by the lifeboat house looks on the Cove. Its front is turned from the village and the village street, and can only be seen from the beach. You may imagine my surprise, then, as I turned and found myself face to face with a dozen tall men, standing there upright and silent.

"'Good Heavens!' I cried, 'what is the matter? What brings you all here at this time of night?'

"If I was surprised, they were obviously embarra.s.sed. They drew together a little, as if to avoid observation. But the moon shone full on the wall, affording them not a sc.r.a.p of shadow.

"For a moment no one answered. Then I heard mutterings, and, as I stepped up, one of the elder men, Archelaus Warne by name, was pushed forward.

"'We wasn' expectin' of you down here,' he stammered, after clearing his throat.

"'No reason why you should,' said I.

"'We done our best to keep out o' your way--never thinkin' you'd be after the boats,'--he nodded towards the boats drawn up on the beach at our feet.

"'I'm afraid I don't understand you in the least.'

"'Well, you see, 'tis a kind o' club.'

"'Indeed?' said I, not in the least enlightened.

"'Iss;' he turned to his companions. 'I s'pose I'd better tell en?'

They nodded gravely, and he resumed. 'You see, 'tis this way: ever since that burglary there's no resting for the women. My poor back is blue all over with the cloam my missus takes to bed. And ha'f a dozen times a night 'tis, '_Arch'laus, I'm sartin I hear some person movin'-- Arch'laus, fit an' take a light and have a look downstairs, that's a dear!_' An' these fellows'll tell 'ee 'tis every bit so bad with they.

'Tis right enough in the daytime, so long as the women got us 'ithin hail, but by night there's no peace nor rest.'

"One or two husbands corroborated.

"'Well, now--I think 'twas the third night after this affair happened-- I crep' downstairs for the fifth time or so just to ease the old woman's mind, and opens the door, when what do I see but Billy Polkinghorne here, sittin' on his own doorstep like a lost dog. 'Aw,' says I, 'so thee'rt feelin' of it, too!' 'Feelin' of it!' says he, 'durned if this isn' the awnly place I can get a wink o' sleep!' 'Come'st way long to Wall-end and tetch pipe,' says I. Tha's how it began. An' now, ever since Billy thought 'pon the plan of settin' someone, turn an'

turn, to watch your window, there's nothin' to hurry us. Why, only just as you came along, Billy was saying, 'Burglary!' he says, 'why, I han't been so happy in mind since the _Indian Queen_ came ash.o.r.e!''

"'Watch my window? Why the--' And then, as light broke on me, 'Look here,' I said, 'you don't mean to tell me you've been suspecting _me_ of the burglary all this time!'

"'You musn' think,' said Archelaus Warne, 'that we bear any gridge.'"

"Well," the Judge concluded, "as I told you, the thief was apprehended a week or two later, and my innocence established. But, oddly enough, some thirty years after I had to try a case at the a.s.sizes here, in which Archelaus Warne (very old and infirm) appeared as a witness, I recognised him at once, and, when I sent for him afterwards and inquired after my friends at Polreen, his first words were, 'There now--I wasn'

so far wrong, after all! I knawed you must be mixed up with these things, wan way or 'nother.'"

CONCERNING ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM.

Let those who know my affection for Troy consider what my feelings were, the other day, when on my return from a brief jaunt to London I alighted at the railway station amid all the tokens of a severe and general catastrophe. The porter who opened the door for me had a bandaged head.

George the 'bus driver carried his right arm in a sling, but professed himself able to guide his vehicle through our tortuous streets left-handed. I had declined the offer, and was putting some sympathetic question, when a procession came by. Four children of serious demeanour conveyed a groaning comrade on a stretcher, while a couple more limped after in approved splints. I stopped them, of course. The rearmost sufferer--who wore on his shin-bone a wicker trellis of the sort used for covering flower-plots, and a tourniquet, contrived with a pebble and a handkerchief, about his femoral artery-- informed me that it was a case of First Aid to the Injured, which he was rendering at some risk to his own (compound) fracture.

"It's wonderful," said George, with a grin, "what crazes the youngsters will pick up."

Thereupon the truth came out. It appeared that during my absence a member of the Ambulance a.s.sociation of St. John of Jerusalem had descended upon the town with a course of lectures, and the town had taken up the novelty with its usual spirit.

I said a course of lectures; but in Troy we are nothing if not thoroughgoing, and by this time (so George informed me) three courses were in full swing. The railway servants and jetty-men (our instructor's earliest pupils) had arrived at restoring animation to the apparently drowned; while a mixed cla.s.s, drawn from the townsfolk generally, were learning to bandage, and the members of our Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation had attended but two lectures and still dallied with the wonders of the human frame.

George told me all about it on our way through the town--for I had consented to be driven on condition that he removed his arm from the sling, and he could not deny this to an old friend (as I make free to call myself). Besides, he was bursting to talk. To be sure, he slipped it back for a few moments as we breasted the hill beyond the post-office and his horses dropped to a walk. I fancy that he glanced at me apologetically; but since there was comparatively little danger hereabouts I thought it more delicate to look the other way.

"And the Chamber of Commerce has not protested?" I asked.

We call it the "Chamber of Commerce" for euphony's sake. It is in fact an a.s.sociation which keeps an eye upon the Parish Council, Harbour Board, and Great Western Railway, and incites these bodies to make our town more attractive to visitors. It consists mainly of lodging-house keepers, and has this summer prevailed on the Railway Company to issue cheap Sat.u.r.day market tickets to Plymouth--a boon which the visitor will soon learn (if we may take our own experience as a test) to rank high among the minor comforts of life.

No; the Chamber of Commerce had not protested. And yet it occurred to me more than once during the next few days that strangers attracted to Troy by its reputation as a health resort must have marvelled as they walked our streets, where cases of sunstroke, frost-bite, snake-bite, and incipient croup challenged their pity at every corner. The very babies took their first steps in splints, and when they tumbled were examined by their older playmates, and p.r.o.nounced to be suffering from apoplexy or alcoholic poisoning, as fancy happened to suggest.

I believe that a single instruction in the a.s.sociation's Handbook-- carefully italicised there, I must admit--alone saved our rising generation. It ran: "_Unless perfectly sure that the patient is intoxicated, do not give the emetic_."

To be sure, we left these extravagances to the children. But childhood, after all, is a relative term, and in Troy we pa.s.s through it to sober age by nice gradations; which take time. Already a foreign sailor who had committed the double imprudence of drinking heavily at the Crown and Anchor, and falling asleep afterwards on the foresh.o.r.e while waiting for his boat, was complaining vigorously, through his Vice-Consul, of the varieties of treatment practised upon his insensible body; and only the difficulty of tracing five Esmarch bandages in a town where five hundred had been sold in a fortnight averted a prosecution. I was even prepared for a visit from Sir Felix Felix-Williams, our worthy Squire, who seldom misses an opportunity of turning our local enthusiasms to account, and sometimes does me the honour to enlist my help; but scarcely for the turn his suggestions took.

"You are, of course, interested in this movement?" he began.

"I have to be, seeing that I live in the midst of it."

"You have joined the Ambulance Cla.s.s, I hear."

"Do you think I would neglect a precaution so obvious? Until their enthusiasm abates, I certainly shall range myself among the First-Aiders rather than the Injured."

"My idea was, to strike while the iron is hot."