He was a happy boy, for he lived beside a harbour, and just below the
last bend where the river swept out of steep woodlands into view of the
sea. A half-ruined castle, with a battery of antiquated guns, still
made-believe to protect the entrance to the harbour, and looked across
it upon a ridge of rocks surmounted by a wooden cross, which the Trinity
pilots kept in repair. Between the cross and the fort, for as long as
he could remember, a procession of ships had come sailing in to anchor
by the great red buoy immediately beneath his nursery window.
They belonged to all nations, and hailed from all imaginable ports; and
from the day his nurse had first stood him upon a chair to watch them,
these had been the great interest of his life. He soon came to know
them all--French brigs and _chasse-marees_, Russian fore-and-afters,
Dutch billyboys, galliots from the East coast, and Thames hay-barges
with vanes and wind-boards. He could tell you why the Italians were
deep in the keel, why the Danes were manned by youngsters, and why these
youngsters deserted, although their skippers looked, and indeed were,
such good-natured fellows; what food the French crews hunted in the
seaweed under the cliff, and when the Baltic traders would be driven
southward by the ice. Once acquainted with a vessel, he would recognise
her at any distance, though by what signs he could no more tell than we
why we recognise a friend.
On his seventh birthday he was given a sailing boat, on condition that
he learned to read; but, although he kept by the bargain honestly, at
the end of a month he handled her better than he was likely to handle
his book in a year. He had a companion and instructor, of course--
a pensioner who had left the Navy to become in turn fisherman,
yachtsman, able seaman on board a dozen sailing vessels, and now
yachtsman again. His name was Billy, and he taught the boy many
mysteries, from the tying of knots to the reading of weather-signs;
how to beach a boat, how to take a conger off the hook, how to gaff a
cuttle and avoid its ink. . . . In return the boy gave him his heart,
and even something like worship.
One fine day, as they tacked to and fro a mile and more from the
harbour's mouth, whiffing for mackerel, the boy looked up from his seat
by the tiller. "I say, Billy, did you speak?"
Billy, seated on the thwart and leaning with both arms on the weather
gunwale, turned his head lazily. "Not a word this half-hour," he
answered.
"Well now, I thought not; but somebody, or something--spoke just now."
The boy blushed, for Billy was looking at him quizzically. "It's not
the first time I've heard it, either," he went on; "sometimes it sounds
right astern, and sometimes close beside me."
"What does it say?" asked Billy, re-lighting his pipe.
"I don't know that it _says_ anything, and yet it seems to speak out
quite clearly. Five or six times I've heard it, and usually on smooth
days like this, when the wind's steady."
Billy nodded. "That's right, sonny; I've heard it scores of times.
And they say. . . . But, there, I don't believe a word of it."
"What do they say?"
"They say that 'tis the voice of drowned men down below, and that they
hail their names whenever a boat passes."
The boy stared at the water. He knew it for a floor through which he
let down his trammels and crab-pots into wonderland--a twilight with
forests and meadows of its own, in which all the marvels of all the
fairy-books were possible; but the terror of it had never clouded his
delight.
"Nonsense, Billy; the voice I hear is always quite cheerful and
friendly--not a bit like a dead man's."
"I tell what I'm told," answered Billy, and the subject dropped.
But the boy did not cease thinking about the voice; and some time after
he came, as it seemed, upon a clue. His father had set him to read
Shakespeare; and, taking down the first of twelve volumes from the
shelf, he began upon the first play, _The Tempest_. He was prepared to
yawn, but the first scene flung open a door to him, and he stepped into
a new world, a childish Ferdinand roaming an Isle of Voices.
He resigned Miranda to the grown-up prince, for whom (as he saw at a
glance, being wise in the ways of story-books) she was eminently fitted.
It was in Ariel, perched with harp upon the shrouds of the king's ship,
that he recognised the unseen familiar of his own voyaging. "O spirit,
be my friend--speak to me often!" As children will, he gave Prospero's
island a local habitation in the tangled cliff-garden, tethered Caliban
in the tool-shed, and watched the white surf far withdrawn, or listened
to its murmur between the lordly boles of the red-currant bushes.
For the first time he became aware of some limitations in Billy.
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 grassy 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 passage." 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!"