The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 38

He had long been aware of some serious limitations in his nurse: she could not, for instance, sail a boat, and her only knot was a "granny."

He never dreamed of despising her, being an affectionate boy; but more and more he went his own way without consulting her. Yet it was she who--unconsciously and quite as if it were nothing out of the way-- handed him the clue.

A flagstaff stood in the garden on a gra.s.sy platform, half-way down the cliff-side, and the boy at his earnest wish had been given charge of it.

On weekdays, as a rule he hoisted two flags--an ensign on the gaff, and a single code-flag at the mast-head; but on Sundays he usually ran up three or four, and with the help of the code-book spelt out some message to the harbour. Sometimes, too, if an old friend happened to take up her moorings at the red buoy below, he would have her code-letters hoisted to welcome her, or would greet and speed her with such signals as K.T.N., "Glad to see you," and B.R.D., or B.Q.R., meaning "Good-bye,"

"A pleasant pa.s.sage." Skippers fell into the habit of dipping their flags to him as they were towed out to sea, and a few amused themselves while at anchor by pulling out their bags of bunting and signalling humorous conversations, though their topmasts reached so near to the boy's platform that they might with less labour have talked through a speaking-trumpet.

One morning before Christmas six vessels lay below at the buoy, moored stem to stem in two tiers of three; and, after hoisting his signal (C.P.B.H. for "Christmas Eve"), he ran indoors with the news that all six were answering with bushes of holly at their topmast heads, while one--a Danish barquentine--had rove stronger halliards and carried a tall fir-tree at the main, its branches reaching many feet above her truck.

"Christmas is Christmas," said his nurse. "When I was young, at such times there wouldn't be a ship in the harbour without its talking-bush."

"What is a talking-bush?" the boy asked.

"And you pretend to be a sailor! Well, well--not to know what happens on Christmas night when the clocks strike twelve!"

The boy's eyes grew round. "Do--the--ships--talk?"

"Why, of course they do! For my part, I wonder what Billy teaches you."

Late that evening, when the household supposed him to be in bed, the boy crept down through the moonlit garden to the dinghy which Billy had left on its frape under the cliff. But for their riding-lights, the vessels at the buoy lay asleep. The crews of the foreigners had turned in; the _Nubian_, of Runcorn, had no soul on board but a night-watchman, now soundly dozing in the forecastle; and the _Touch-me-not_ was deserted.

The _Touch-me-not_ belonged to the port, and her skipper, Captain Tangye, looked after her in harbour when he had paid off all hands.

Usually he slept on board; but to-night, after tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his lamp, he had rowed ash.o.r.e to spend Christmas with his family--for which, since he owned a majority of the shares, no one was likely to blame him. He had even left the accommodation-ladder hanging over her side, to be handy for boarding her in the morning.

All this the boy had noted; and accordingly, having pushed across in the dinghy, he climbed the _Touch-me-not's_ ladder and dropped upon deck with a bundle of rugs and his father's greatcoat under his arm.

He looked about him and listened. There was no sound at all but the lap of tide between the ships, and the voice of a preacher travelling over the water from a shed far down the harbour, where the Salvation Army was holding a midnight service. Captain Tangye had snugged down his ship for the night: ropes were coiled, deckhouses padlocked, the spokes of the wheel covered against dew and frost. The boy found the slack of a stout hawser coiled beneath the taffrail--a circular fort into which he crept with his rugs, and nestled down warmly; and then for half an hour lay listening. But only the preacher's voice broke the silence of the harbour. On--on it went, rising and falling. . . .

Away in the little town the church clock chimed the quarter. "It must have missed striking the hour," thought the boy, and he peered over the edge of his shelter. The preacher's voice had ceased; but another was speaking, and close beside him.

"You'd be surprised," it said, "how simple one's pleasures grow with age. This is the twelfth Christmas I've spent at home, and I a.s.sure you I quite look forward to it: that's a confession, eh?--from one who has sailed under Nelson and smelt powder in his time." The boy knew that he must be listening to the _Touch-me-not_, whose keelson came from an old line-of-battle ship. "To be sure," the voice went on graciously, "a great deal depends on one's company."

"Talking of powder," said the _Nubian_, creaking gently on her stern-moorings, "reminds me of a terrible adventure. My very first voyage was to the mouth of a river on the West Coast of Africa, where two native tribes were at war. Somehow, my owner--a scoundrelly fellow in the Midlands--had wind of the quarrel, and that the tribe nearest the coast needed gunpowder. We sailed from Cardiff with fifteen hundred barrels duly labelled, and the natives came out to meet us at the river-mouth and rafted them ash.o.r.e; but the barrels, if you will believe me, held nothing but sifted coal-dust. Off we went before the trick was discovered, and with six thousand pounds' worth of ivory in my hold.

But the worst villainy was to come; for my owner, pretending that he had opened up a profitable trade, and having his ivory to show for it, sold me to a London firm, who loaded me with real gunpowder and sent me out, six months later, to the same river, but with a new skipper and a different crew. The natives knew me at once, and came swarming out in canoes as soon as we dropped anchor. The captain, who of course suspected nothing, allowed them to crowd on board; and I declare that within five minutes they had clubbed him and every man of the crew and tossed their bodies to the sharks. Then they cut my hawsers and towed me over the river-bar; and, having landed a good half of my barrels, they built and lit a fire around them in derision. I can hear the explosion still; my poor upper-works have been crazy ever since.

It destroyed almost all the fighters of the tribe, who had formed a ring to dance around the fire. The rest fled inland, and I never saw them again, but lay abandoned for months as they had anch.o.r.ed me, between the ruined huts and a sandy spit alive with mosquitoes--until somehow a British tramp-steamer heard of me at one of the trading stations up the coast. She brought down a crew to man and work me home. But my owner could not pay the salvage; so the parties who owned the steamer-- a Runcorn firm--paid him fifty pounds and kept me for their services.

A surveyor examined me, and reported that I should never be fit for much: the explosion had shaken me to pieces. I might do for the coasting trade--that was all; and in that I've remained."

"Owners are rogues, for the most part," commented the Danish barquentine, rubbing against the _Touch-me-nots_ fender as if to nudge her. "There's the _Maria Stella Maris_ yonder can tell us a tale of the food they store us with. She went through a mutiny once, I've heard."

"I'd rather not talk of it," put in the Italian hastily, and a shudder ran through her timbers. "It's a dreadful recollection, and I have that by my mizzen-mast which all the holystone in the world can never scour."

"But I've had a mutiny, too!" said the Dutch galliot, with a voice of great importance; and this time the boy felt sure that the vessels nudged one another.

"It happened," the galliot went on, "between my skipper and his _vrauw_, who was to all purpose our mate, and as good a mate as ever I sailed with. But she would not believe the world was round. The skipper took a Dutch cheese and tried to explain things: he moved the cheese round, as it might be, from west to east, and argued and argued, until at last, being a persevering man, he did really persuade her, but it took a whole voyage, and by the time he succeeded we were near home again, and in the North Sea Ca.n.a.l. The moment she was convinced, what must the woman do but go ash.o.r.e to an aunt of hers who lived at Zaandam, and refuse to return on board, though her man went on his bended knees to her!

'I will not,' she said; 'and _that's_ flat, at any rate.' The poor man had to start afresh, undo every one of his arguments, and prove the earth flat again, before she would trust herself to travel. It cost us a week, but for my part I didn't grudge it. Your cliffs and deep-water harbours don't appeal to me. Give me a ca.n.a.l with windmills and summer-houses where you can look in on the families drinking tea as you sail by; give me, above all, a ca.n.a.l on Sundays, when the folks walk along the towing-path in their best clothes, and you feel as if you were going to church with them."

"Give me rather," said the Norwegian barque from Christiansund, "a fiord with forests running straight up to the snow mountains, and water so deep that no ship's anchor can reach it."

"I have seen most waters," the Dane announced calmly and proudly.

"As you see, I am very particular about my paint, for a ship ought to keep up her beauty and look as young as she can. But I have an ice-mark around my breast which is usually taken for a proof of experience, and as a philosopher I say that all waters are tolerable enough if one carries the talisman."

"But can a ship be beautiful?" and "What is the talisman?" asked the Italian and the _Nubian_ together.

"One at a time, please. My dear," she addressed the Italian, "the point is, that men, whom we serve, think us beautiful indeed.

It seems strange to us, who carry the thought of the forests we have left; and on warm days, when the sap awakes in us and tries to climb again, forgetting its weakness, we miss the green boughs and the moss at our feet and the birds overhead. But I have studied my reflection often enough in calm weather, and begin to see what men have in mind when they admire us."

"And the talisman?" asked the _Nubian_ again.

"The talisman? There is no one cure for useless regret, but each must choose his own. With me it is the thought of the child after whom I was christened. The day they launched me was her first birthday, and she a small thing held in the crook of her mother's arm: when the bottle swung against my stem the wine spurted, and some drops of it fell on her face.

The mother did not see me take the water--she was too busy wiping the drops away. But it was a successful launch, and I have brought the family luck, while she has brought them happiness. Because of it, and because our names are alike, her parents think of us together; and sometimes, when one begins to talk of 'Thekla,' the other will not know for a moment which of us is meant. They drink my health, too, on her birthday, which is the fourteenth of May; and you know King Solomon's verse for the fourteenth--'She is like the merchants' ships, she bringeth her food from afar.' This is what I have done while she was growing; for King Solomon wrote it for a wife, of course. But now I shall yield up my trust, for when I return she is to be married. She shall bind that verse upon her with a coral necklace I carry for my gift, and it shall dance on her white throat when her husband leads her out to open the wedding-ball."

"Since you are so fond of children," said the _Touch-me-not_, "tell me, what shall we do for the one I have on my deck? He is the small boy who signalled Christmas to us from the garden above; and he dreams of nothing but the sea, though his parents wish him to stick to his books and go to college."

The Dane did not answer for a moment. She was considering. "Wherever he goes," she said at length, "and whatever he does, he will find that to serve much is to renounce much. Let us show him that what is renounced may yet come back in beautiful thoughts."

And it seemed to the boy that, as she ceased, a star dropped out of the sky and poised itself above the fir-tree on her maintopmast; and that the bare mast beneath it put forth branches, while upon every branch, as it spread, a globe of fire dropped from the star, until a gigantic Christmas-tree soared from the deck away up to heaven. In the blaze of it the boy saw the miracle run from ship to ship--the timber bursting into leaf with the song of birds and the scent of tropical plants.

Across the avenue of teak which had been the _Nubian's_ bulwarks he saw the Dutchman's galley, now a summer-house set in parterres of tulips.

Beyond it the sails of the _Maria Stella Maris_, shaken from the yards, were piling themselves into snowy mountains, their foot-ropes and braces trailing down and breaking into leaves and cl.u.s.ters of the vine.

He heard the murmur of streams flowing, the hum of bees, the whetting of the scythes--even the stir of insects' wings among the gra.s.ses.

From truck to keelson the ships were wavering, dissolving part from part into remote but unforgotten hiding-places whence the mastering adventurer had torn them to bind and yoke them in service. Divine the service, but immortal also the longing to return! "But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pa.s.s thereby."

The boy heard the words; but before he understood them a hand was on his shoulder, and another voice speaking above him.

"G.o.d bless us! it's you, is it? Here's a nice tale to tell your father, I must say!" He opened his eyes, and above Captain Tangye's shoulder the branches faded, the lights died out, and the masts stood stripped and bare for service against the cold dawn.

THE KEEPERS OF THE LAMP.

It was in a purple twilight of May that I first saw the lamp shining.

For me, a child of seven, the voyage had been a tiring one: it seemed many hours since, with a ringing of bells, and hearts adventurously throbbing with the screw of our small steamboat, we had backed and swung, casting our wash in waves along the quay-walls, and so, after a pause during which we held our breath and drifted from the line of watching faces, had headed away for the great empty sky-line beyond which the islands lay. I knew that they lay yonder; for, the evening before, my father had led me up a tall hill and pointed them out to me-- black specks in the red ball of the sun. But to-day, as hour after hour went by with the pant of the engines, the lift and slide of the Atlantic swell, the tonic wind humming against the stays, my eyes grew heavy, and at length my head dropped against my father's shoulder. And then--to me it seemed the next instant--he woke me up and pointed towards the islands as they rose out of the indigo sea. At first they looked rather like low-lying clouds, but after a minute or two there was no mistaking them; for, as if they had just discovered _us_, they hung out lamp after lamp, some steady, some intermittent, but all of them gleaming yellow along the floor of the sea save one, a crimson light which hid and showed itself again northward of the rest. Crimson was my favourite colour in those days, and even as I dropped back into sleep I decided that I liked this lamp the best of all.

I awoke again to the sound of voices. We were pa.s.sing a pilot-boat out there on the watch for ships. Her crew hailed us as we went by, and I saw their faces in the green radiance of our starboard light--gaunt, dark faces, altogether foreign. One of the men, the oldest, was bareheaded, with long grey locks, and wore a yellow neckcloth with his shirt open below it, and his naked chest showing. Their voices as they answered our skipper were clear and gay like the voices of children.

And, next, we were alongside a quay. Our seats, our bulwarks, even our decks, shone with dew. A crowd stood on the dim quay-edge and looked down on us, and chattered, but in soft voices. There was a policeman too, and I wondered how _he_ came there. Above this shadowy moving crowd rode the stars I had known at home. I took my father's hand. At the head of the gangway he stooped, hoisted me on his shoulders, and carried me up and up through narrow mysterious streets, around dark corners, past belated islanders hurrying down to the steamer; but always upward, until he pushed open a door and set me down blinking in a whitewashed bedroom lit by a couple of candles: and with that came sleep.

Happy days followed: blue and white days--days vaulted and floored with blue, flashing with white granite, with the rush of white water beneath the shadow of the leaning sail, with white cirrus clouds, with white wings of seabirds. It was the height of the nesting season, and the birds had brought us to the islands; my father with paint-box and camera--though, our time being short, he relied almost wholly on the latter. A naturalist, and by temper the gentlest of men, in his methods he was a born pioneer. You can hardly imagine how c.u.mbrous and well-nigh hopeless a business it was in those days, not so long past, to pursue after wild life with a camera; but a thousand disheartening failures left him still grasping the inviolable shade, still confident that in photography, if it could only be given with rapidity and precision, lay the naturalist's hope. Blurred negatives were all the spoil, and, sorry enough, we bore back after long days of tossing and climbing among the Outer Islands; but we had the reward of living among the birds. They filled our thoughts, our lives for the time:--great cormorants and northern divers, flitting red-legged oyster-catchers, s.h.a.gs spreading their wings to the wind and sun, sea-parrots, murrs, razor-bills, gannets questing by ones and twos--now poised, now dropping like plummets with a resounding splash; sandpipers and curlews dotting the beaches, and wading; tern, common gulls, herring-gulls, and kittiwakes, and, at nightfall, shearwaters popping from their holes and swimming and skimming around our boat as we headed for home. And then, the nests we discovered!--nay, the nests that at times we walked among, picking our steps like egg-dancers!--nests boldly planted on the bare rock ledges; nests snugly hidden among the cl.u.s.ters of blue thrift and the ma.s.sed sea-pinks. They bloomed everywhere, these sea-pinks; sheet upon sheet of pale rose-colour, soon to show paler and fade before the rosy splendours of the mesembryanthemum. But the thrift had no rival to fear, condensing blue heaven and blue sea in the flower it lifted against both; and to lie p.r.o.ne and make a frame of it for some winding channel when the tide-rip flashed and tossed was to send the eye plunging into blue like an Eastern diver after pearls.

But when after sunset the blue deepened to violet, always in the heart of it glowed the crimson light upon Off Island. Night after night I watched it from my window, and wondered what manner of people they were who tended it, living out yonder on a rock where no gra.s.s grew, and in a roar of tide which the inhabitants of the greater islands heard on still days in the few inland valleys where it was possible to lose sight of the sea. I knew that thousands of puffins bred there, and we were to visit the rock some day; but, what with the tides and an all but ceaseless ground swell, our opportunity was long in coming, and Old Seth (our boatman) kept putting it off until I began to disbelieve in it altogether.

It came, though, at last, with a cloudless morning and a north-easterly breeze, brisk and steady, the clearest day in a fortnight of clear days.

We were heading northward close-hauled through a sound dividing two of the greater islands--Old Seth at the tiller, my father tending the sheet, and I perched on the weather gunwale and peering over and down on the purple reefs we seemed to avoid so narrowly--when Seth lifted his voice in a shout, and then, with a word of warning, paid out sheet, brought the boat's nose round and ran her in towards a silver-white beach on our left. As we downed sail, I saw a girl on the bank above the beach, leaning on a hoe and gazing at us over a low hedge of veronica.

Seth hailed her again, and she came running to the waterside. There she stood and eyed us shyly: a dark-haired girl, bare-headed, and with the dust of the potato-patch on her shoes and ankles.

"Any message for Reub Hicks, my dear? We'm bound over to Off Island."

She hesitated, looking from Seth to us; and while she hesitated a flush mounted to her tanned face and deepened there.