For some time Dan had gathered that his father’s stay ashore was
conditioned by the time his money lasted. More than once he could have
gone out on a coaster, but he preferred to remain on land, spending what
he had. He went a great deal to the port taverns, but since that first
afternoon Dan had never seen him drunk. He liked the society of other
sailormen ashore, and often brought a couple with him to spend the
evening at Greville Row, to the friendly delight of Mr. Gain.
He still talked a great deal about Dan’s joining him at sea. He disliked
his son’s work on the ’bus, and it made him angry to think of him at a
disadvantage when compared with Christopher. He insisted that Thomas
Helier should not stand as a barrier between his father and a new life.
“There’s three sets of people as I know ud look after him--Mr. and Mrs.
Gain here--your sister-in-law Emmie--or that Harman girl. There’s no use
pretending you’re such an extra-special father that he’d miss you at his
age. It ain’t as if you were going on long voyages--you’d be seeing him
every now and again--he wouldn’t forget you like some.”
Dan shook his head.
“It isn’t only him. What should I do on board ship? I don’t see myself
as an A.B.”
“You could come along as cook. My Lord, Dan! But you cook better than
any of the sons of Germans we had on the _Yorkshire Crown_ or on the
_Rebecca Rose_. A good cook is everybody’s friend--you’d have a
first-class time in the galley.”
Dan was touched by his father’s anxiety to have him with him, but he
would not even discuss the matter. The land held him, though he knew not
quite by what claims.
At the end of August Tom Sheather went off for a week to see a pal at
Middlesbrough. This man had been skipper of the Geordie which Tom had
first sailed in. He was now skipper of the _White King_ which had put
into Middlesbrough for repairs, and he invited Tom to come and spend a
few days with him and his wife, who let lodgings in the town.
Dan missed his father, who had always been good company, and had filled
up with talk and tales many hours that might have been disturbing if
spent alone. Now he had to spend his free time as best he could, and
became a devoted father to Thomas Helier, whom he took to the beach on
Wednesday afternoons. Here he would lie dozing in the sunshine that
warmed the shingle and danced on the little waves that the breeze
whipped up on the languid August tide. Thomas Helier sometimes slept in
a shawl, sometimes lay lively and garrulous, expressing his approval of
the sunshine and the sea. He had a little spade, which he used at his
tender age for purposes of destruction rather than construction, and
with which he would beat his father when he was too drowsy for good
company. He would sprawl over him, too, tugging at his hair, and pulling
the carefully brushed and oiled forelock into disarray: “Dadda,” he
would cry--“lady.”
His infant experience was full of ladies who had befriended him and
Daniel in moments of difficulty or embarrassment. He could not think
that one would ever pass without stopping to speak to them, or to put on
the sock and shoe he had kicked off, or to pick up his woolly ball which
had rolled away. “Lady!” he shrieked and welcomed--and Dan continued his
encounters with motherly minded females whose efficient sentiment ran
over at the sight of the young father and his son.
But in the evening hours, when Thomas Helier was put to bed by all the
rules of the Babies’ Welfare, there could be no society either of baby
or ladies on the beach. Dan could not bear the stuffiness of the Gains’
sitting-room, for the August evening was not yet dark, and he would feel
drawn into the twilight, into the streets that still moved with life.
Newhaven was not like Lewes after dusk--there was none of the evening
coma of the market town, when the beasts have been driven home, and the
Fords and gigs are away, and in the public-house sits only the
auctioneer, resting after his raucous day. Newhaven streets were full of
seamen, from the Geordies and other coasters, sometimes among them
strangers from the Baltic or the north-west coast of France. The cinemas
and the public-houses were full of them and their girls, and the
pavements echoed with their tread, and the dusk was hoarse with the
murmur of their voices and stinging with the smell of their pipes.
Dan went most often to the bridge. Here he would stand and look down
into the basin of the Ouse, spreading towards Sleepers Hole. The masts
of the ships stood like the lances of a great army between him and the
pink edge of the sky. Among them he could see the smoke-stacks--red and
yellow, black and white--and here and there the powerful lines of a
crane. There were the ships that went up and down the Channel, and
across it to the French ports, or to the Norman isles he knew so
well--or turned the Lizard, or wandered up past Deal and Chatham and the
flat isles of Kent into the London river. Leaning there on the bridge he
would brood over all that his father had told him of the strange country
of the sea--of the life on board the ships, with its gaiety and its
quarrelling and its cleanliness, of the expanse which he knew only as
the Channel, but which to his father was a chartered country of roads
and names like the country of the downs--Elphick’s Tree, and Kinsman’s
Nab, and the Horse of Willingdon, and the sea-downs of Le Colbert and Le
Varne right out towards France, with Les Ridens, or Boulogne Middle.
Sometimes as he looked towards the lances of the coaster-army he felt
that he, too, would like to go with them out to the new country of the
English waters, leaving behind him the land that was so unfriendly, with
all its perplexities and cares. The ghost of Belle Shackford would not
come out to him walking upon the water. He still felt that he could not
leave his son, or break any of the ties that held him to land, but for
the first time he had heard the sea call.