THE SOUTHERN CROSS
"Wake up! Wake up! If you want to see the Southern Cross, wake up and
come on deck!" And we remember how long we had been waiting for those
wonderful stars, and how Daddy, who many nights slept on deck, had told
us that he often saw them, and how we had, night after night, vowed we
would make the effort to awaken at two in the morning, and how, each
night, we had slept along, too tired with the wonder days to move an
inch until bugle-call.
But here comes this far-off voice again calling us from the Northland of
dreams, and it seems to be saying, "This is your last chance. By
to-morrow (whenever that uncertainty comes!) the stars will have rolled
away, or you will have sailed along, and there will be no Southern
Cross, and you may as well not have come away down here to the Spanish
Main at all if you miss seeing it,"--and then we wake a bit more, and
the figure in the doorway stands there with "come" on his face, and
"wake up!" on his lips, and we try to think how sorry we shall be if we
do not see the Southern Cross. And then the door closes with a rather
contemptuous click, and we land in the middle of the floor, aroused by
the disappearance of the figure in pajamas and by our somewhat
reawakened sense of duty.
Throwing on light wrappers, the little girls stumble along after me to
where our man stands leaning against the rail, his face turned skyward.
"There it is--see? Right in the south, directly opposite the Great Bear
that sunk below the northern horizon two hours ago. One star down quite
low, near the horizon, and one almost in a straight line above, and one
at either side equal distances apart, like an old four-cornered kite.
You must imagine the cross. But it's hardly what it's cracked up to be!"
And we blink at the stars, and they blink at us, and we feel strangely
unreal and turned about.
What in all the world has the Southern Cross to do with the nineteenth
century? It belongs to Blackbeard, and the great procession of pirates
and roving buccaneers who swept these seas in tall-sparred, black-hulled
craft, some hundreds of years ago. One or the other of us is out of
place. The only consistent part of the night is, that, while our eyes
are searching for the four luminous dots in the Southern Cross, our ship
is plunging on toward Jamaica, that one-time Mecca of the bandit rover
of the sea. There he found safe harbour and friends in the same
profession; there it was that the hoards of Spanish gold and plate and
all conceivable sorts of plunder, taken from the hapless merchantmen,
were bought and sold and gambled away. But, without the accompaniment of
roystering pirates and swaggering buccaneers, the Southern Cross seems
out of joint. Jamaica may do as she is, but, as we look out across the
scurrying waters, there's a malicious twinkle to the top star in the
Southern Cross and that makes us all the more determined to give it an
opportunity to renew old acquaintance. We'll have a pirate--we must have
a pirate, if not a real one, bloody and black and altogether
fascinating, we must conjure one by magic! Pirates there must be! So, to
pacify our insatiable desire to resuscitate the ghostly heroes of the
long-dead past, the Spanish Student offers a yarn.
Four bells of the second night watch rings out, and "All's well!" floats
above our heads, and the witching hour of two in the morning brings the
proper flavour to the story. We cuddle down on some stray ship chairs,
and the story begins:
"Once upon a time--"
"Oh, dear! Is it to be a 'once upon a time' story, Dad? Then it won't be
real," breaks in the Wee One.
"Yes, it is real, Chick; at least, so far as I know. But you must not
interrupt me again. If you do, I might forget, and then the Cross up
there would put out its lights and go to bed."
"No, Dad, I'll be good."
"Well, once upon a time, there was a doughty old French Corsair, who was
one of the most daring pirates on the Spanish Main. Morals were in a
topsyturvy state in those days, and in none were they more
wrong-side-to than in this famous old Frenchman. He had a long, low,
topsail schooner, painted black, with sharp clipper stem, clean flush
decks and tall and raking masts, and--"
"I know all about him, Dad. He had a black beard, and he used to braid
it in lots of pigtails, and tie it with ribbons," says Wee One, again.
"Now, Toddlekins, what did I say? I shall certainly bundle you off to
bed. No, it wasn't Blackbeard, but it was a pirate just as fierce and
fully as bad mannered. This old fellow had been rampaging around here,
there, and everywhere, all about this Caribbean Sea and along the
Spanish Main, in search of ships and gold and prisoners, and
occasionally even food, and in fact anything of value he might come
across; when not very far from where we are now--yes, just about this
latitude, it was, but a few leagues more to the west--by the light of
the stars--yes, by the light of this very Southern Cross, he makes out
the land, and soon after spies a tidy, prosperous little village handy
to the shore of a palm-fringed inlet. Like the provident pirate that he
was, he at once decides that he is both hungry and thirsty and that his
lusty followers are short of rations. Here is a likely port from which
to supply.
"So off goes a long-boat filled with his precious cutthroats, carrying a
pressing invitation to the village priest and some of his friends to
come aboard. The fat priest is routed out and escorted to the waiting
boat; he understands his mission, he has seen such men before. So,
taking along a few chosen friends, he makes the best of a bad business
and is rowed off to the ship in short order. The citizens, meanwhile,
are requisitioned for all sorts of food and drink, and the priest and
his friends have a jolly time of it as hostages. But as his wit grows
with the wine it occurs to our Corsair that, with a priest aboard, Holy
Church should have due reverence, and roars out his imperative
suggestion that mass would be in order. An altar is rigged up on the
quarter-deck, holy vestments and vessels are quickly brought from the
village church, and the ship's crew are summoned to assemble and warned
to take hearty part in the service. In place of music, broadsides are
ordered fired from the pirate's cannon after the _Credo_, after the
_Elevation_, and after the _Benediction_. At the _Elevation of the
Host_, the captain finds occasion to reprove a sailor for lack of
reverence. But at a second offence from the same trifler, out comes his
cutlass--a swift, shining circle follows the Corsair's blade, and off
flies the still grinning head and the blood spirts high from the jumping
trunk. The poor priest is startled, but the captain reassures him with
kind words, for, says he, it is only his duty and always his pleasure to
protect the sanctity of holy things; he would do the same thing
again--and a thousand times!--to any one who was disrespectful to the
Holy Sacrament. For why is there a great God above and his Holy Church
on earth except to be honoured? Then the service continues as if nothing
had happened and again comes the whine of the Latin chants and the
thunder of the reverent guns.
"After mass, the body is heaved overboard and no burial rites are said,
for who shall try to save a heretic's soul? The priest is put ashore
with many a smile and oath and many a pious crossing, and our Corsair
and his pack of thieves go their way, having paid their respects to
Holy Church."
"Oh, Dad!" says Toddlekins, "that was lovely; is it true? Tell us
another! Just one more! Don't you remember about Captain Kidd?
"'My name was Captain Kidd, as I sailed, as I sailed,
My name was Robert Kidd, as I sailed.
My name was Robert Kidd,
God's laws I did forbid,
And wickedly I did, as I sailed.'
"Don't you remember the other verses? You used to sing them to us on the
yacht before we ever thought of seeing the real Southern Cross."
And just as the indulgent parent begins to waver, and the little girls
are sure they have won another story, down--down--down--drops a big
star, the foot of the Cross, millions of miles away, and the three
lonely wanderers still hanging low in the heavens reach out their great
shadowy arms in ghostly warning to those unthinking children of Adam who
defy time and sleep and all things reasonable, just for the sake of a
few old memories of a very questionable past.
Then those three deserted stars quiver and shiver and hide behind the
wandering company of torch-bearers, and silently disappear, and a tired
moon gives a vague uncertainty to sea and air.
In spite of the early morning mystery, all our efforts to reinstate the
French Corsair, the black-hulled phantom, and the headless sailor, fail.
The decks of the ship are damp and empty and long. The ungainly deck
chairs are locked together in gruesome lines like monstrous grasshoppers
dying in winrows, and the great engines below beat and throb, and the
water rolls past us in giant breathings, full of the sighs of dead men
lying fathoms deep beneath our keel, and the stars sink lower and lower,
and we are hurrying on toward the morning. Our eyes are still longing
for sleep, and the little girls flutter down below, and we two after
them. In the morning, after some strange dreams, we lie at anchor off
the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.