IT was written that there, in the nursery of our navigating ancestors, I
should learn to walk in the ways of my craft and grow in the love of the
sea, blind as young love often is, but absorbing and disinterested as all
true love must be. I demanded nothing from it—not even adventure. In
this I showed, perhaps, more intuitive wisdom than high self-denial. No
adventure ever came to one for the asking. He who starts on a deliberate
quest of adventure goes forth but to gather dead-sea fruit, unless,
indeed, he be beloved of the gods and great amongst heroes, like that
most excellent cavalier Don Quixote de la Mancha. By us ordinary mortals
of a mediocre animus that is only too anxious to pass by wicked giants
for so many honest windmills, adventures are entertained like visiting
angels. They come upon our complacency unawares. As unbidden guests are
apt to do, they often come at inconvenient times. And we are glad to let
them go unrecognised, without any acknowledgment of so high a favour.
After many years, on looking back from the middle turn of life’s way at
the events of the past, which, like a friendly crowd, seem to gaze sadly
after us hastening towards the Cimmerian shore, we may see here and
there, in the gray throng, some figure glowing with a faint radiance, as
though it had caught all the light of our already crepuscular sky. And
by this glow we may recognise the faces of our true adventures, of the
once unbidden guests entertained unawares in our young days.
If the Mediterranean, the venerable (and sometimes atrociously
ill-tempered) nurse of all navigators, was to rock my youth, the
providing of the cradle necessary for that operation was entrusted by
Fate to the most casual assemblage of irresponsible young men (all,
however, older than myself) that, as if drunk with Provençal sunshine,
frittered life away in joyous levity on the model of Balzac’s “Histoire
des Treize” qualified by a dash of romance _de cape et d’épée_.
She who was my cradle in those years had been built on the River of
Savona by a famous builder of boats, was rigged in Corsica by another
good man, and was described on her papers as a ‘tartane’ of sixty tons.
In reality, she was a true balancelle, with two short masts raking
forward and two curved yards, each as long as her hull; a true child of
the Latin lake, with a spread of two enormous sails resembling the
pointed wings on a sea-bird’s slender body, and herself, like a bird
indeed, skimming rather than sailing the seas.
Her name was the _Tremolino_. How is this to be translated? The
_Quiverer_? What a name to give the pluckiest little craft that ever
dipped her sides in angry foam! I had felt her, it is true, trembling
for nights and days together under my feet, but it was with the
high-strung tenseness of her faithful courage. In her short, but
brilliant, career she has taught me nothing, but she has given me
everything. I owe to her the awakened love for the sea that, with the
quivering of her swift little body and the humming of the wind under the
foot of her lateen sails, stole into my heart with a sort of gentle
violence, and brought my imagination under its despotic sway. The
_Tremolino_! To this day I cannot utter or even write that name without
a strange tightening of the breast and the gasp of mingled delight and
dread of one’s first passionate experience.