THE LAST OF A BRITISH SEAMAN
I
The dawn-wind blowing chilly on the boy's skin roused him.
All night he had slept like a child far from the world and its
terrible distresses. The weary body had brought peace to the worn
mind. The two had merged in sleep, neither demanding aught of the
other except to feed and to refresh.
He was coming to himself with a sore throat and a shiver.
His bed was hard; the bed-clothes had slipped off. He tried to pull
them round him. His groping hand found nothing but impossible lumps,
and stuff that trickled between his fingers. Why was he naked? where
was his night-shirt? and what was this small hard thing he clutched in
his hand?
With a puzzled frown he opened his eyes.
Overhead rose a dim white wall, a thin curtain swaying before it. At
first he took it for the white-washed wall of his attic at home, the
lace-curtains at the head of the bed blowing in the wind. Then a
slow-winged shadow, passing between him and the ceiling with puling
cry, startled him to the truth.
The memories surged back on him. He knew.
That white wall sheer above him was the cliff; that swaying curtain
was the mist; that passing shadow a sea-bird. The hard something he
was clutching so jealously was the scent-bottle; this still thing at
his side was--
The thought stabbed him awake. He sat up with a start.
About him drifted a white and waving mist. It shrouded him, chilly as
a winding-sheet. There was no shore, no sea--only a hiss and rustle in
the silence; and this still thing at his feet.
"Sir!" he gasped.
The still thing did not answer him.
The body leapt to his feet. He was alone; alone for ever in a blank
universe where nothing was--but the still thing!
A sodden heap of clothes caught his eye. Last night; he had doffed
them, dripping as they were, and slept naked beside _that,_ his
head pillowed on a chalk boulder. The huddle of clothes, sprawling
there so unconcerned, comforted him. _They_ weren't afraid:
_they_ took it calmly enough. Hang it! he was as good a man as
they.
And after all the old man was dead; and so long as he stayed dead the
boy didn't mind. It was the chance of his coming to life again, of his
stirring, winking an eye-lid, speaking, that he feared.
At length he dared to look at the old man's face. A sand-fly was
crawling on his nose. The boy sighed. He wasn't quite alone then: the
fly was there, and the fly was alive. His courage returned to him with
a leap. He flicked the fly off with joyful indignation. They knew no
reverence, these beastly little beasts! The old man lay upon his back, a
rusty stream running down his white shorts. The salt had dried in
scurfy ridges on hair and face. His head had slipped off Kit's coat;
the little tail of neat-tied hair peeped from beneath; the eyes, wide-
open, stared skyward.
Kit closed them; and the action cost him more than all his valours of
the day before. Almost he expected to hear the old man's harsh voice--
"Now then!"
The deed done, it seemed to the boy as if his action had eased the
dead man. The look of strain on the set and yellowing face passed. The
old man was tired: he had done with the world; he would shut his eyes
for ever on it. The kind wrinkles, deep-puckered about his mouth,
seemed to gather into a smile.
Lying there with set mouth, and stubborn chin, in death, as in life,
he was old Ding-dong still.
II
Kit could not bury the old man: he had no tools. He could not stay
with him: time pressed. What he could, he did with the tenderness of a
woman, and the respect of a midshipman for the bravest of the brave.
He arranged the body orderly, straightening the legs and pulling down
the coat.
As he did so, he felt something bulky in the flaps. He looked. It was
a little old leather-bound New Testament, sea-soaked; and between the
leaves of it the Articles of War.
The book fell open at the fly-leaf. On it three names were written,
each in a different hand.
_Horatio Nelson,
Christopher Caryll,
William Harding._
A bracket bound the three, and opposite the bracket, in the same hand
as the first name, the words,
_England and Duty_.
The date was a week before St. Vincent.
The fly-leaf turned. On the back of it, in the great vague hand of a
peasant-woman, rheumatic-ridden,
_bili from mother
Xmas_ 1755
_be a good boy_.
Kit read the inscription with full throat. In his chest, awaiting him
at the Bridge at Newhaven, there was such another book, with such
another inscription, from such another mother--given him the night
before his setting out on his life's voyage, she sitting on his bed
with rather a rainy smile.
The old man had left him that little sea-worn book with his last
breath; but he could not take it, perhaps the last gift from mother to
son. It had seen the old man through his life; in it were to be found
the Fighting Instructions which had led him on through fifty years of
battle to the last great Victory; in death the two should not be
divided.
He laid the book on the old man's breast, and his sword beside him, as
he remembered his mother had done when Uncle Jacko Gordon died.
What more could he do?
It seemed an ill thing to desert the old man; to leave him alone among
the sea-birds. Yet he must.
Putting his arm round the other, he raised his head; then thrust a
boulder between the dead man's shoulders to prop him.
A moment he knelt beside the old Commander with closed eyes. Then he
bent and kissed the chill forehead.
"Good-bye, sir," he said in breaking voice, and rising to his feet
saluted.
III
Old Ding-dong was left alone: his back against the white cliffs for
which he had lived and died; his head with a skyward cock; his gaze
seaward to where, when the mists rose with the morning, he would see
the Colours of his Country waving above those waters that he, and his
peers, had made hers for ever.
The old man asked no more.
Tired now, he wished to be alone with his sword, his Bible, and his
memories.