"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 trimming his lamp, he had
rowed ashore 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 assure 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 ashore; 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 anchored 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 Canal. The moment she was convinced, what must the woman do
but go ashore 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 canal with windmills and
summer-houses where you can look in on the families drinking tea as you
sail by; give me, above all, a canal 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 clusters 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 grasses.
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 pass
thereby."
The boy heard the words; but before he understood them a hand was on his
shoulder, and another voice speaking above him.
"God 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.