VII
Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on
political economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Would it be right? With my feet on the very shores of the sea
and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a
good-natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my
youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the last, too,
of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my
enchantress, like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance.
But I was not so callous or so stupid as not to recognize there
also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the
warning--because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to spoil
one's life?--arrested one's attention by its air of wise
profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la
belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole evening. I
tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion of
life as an enterprise that could be mi managed. But I left off
being thoughtful shortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted
by no ghosts of the past and by no visions of the future, I
walked down the quay of the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of
my friends. I knew where she would be waiting for her crew, in
the little bit of a canal behind the fort at the entrance of the
harbour. The deserted quays looked very white and dry in the
moonlight, and as if frostbound in the sharp air of that December
night. A prowler or two slunk by noiselessly; a custom-house
guard, soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced close under the
bowsprits of the long row of ships moored bows on opposite the
long, slightly curved, continuous flat wall of the tall houses
that seemed to be one immense abandoned building with innumerable
windows shuttered closely. Only here and there a small, dingy
cafe for sailors cast a yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the
flagstones. Passing by, one heard a deep murmur of voices
inside--nothing more. How quiet everything was at the end of the
quays on the last night on which I went out for a service cruise
as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! Not a footstep, except my
own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo of the usual revelry going
on in the narrow, unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my
ear--and suddenly, with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and
glass, the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey swung
around the corner of the dead wall which faces across the paved
road the characteristic angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. Three
horses trotted abreast, with the clatter of hoofs on the granite
setts, and the yellow, uproarious machine jolted violently behind
them, fantastic, lighted up, perfectly empty, and with the driver
apparently asleep on his swaying perch above that amazing racket.
I flattened myself against the wall and gasped. It was a stunning
experience. Then after staggering on a few paces in the shadow
of the fort, casting a darkness more intense than that of a
clouded night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern
standing on the quay, and became aware of muffled figures making
toward it from various directions. Pilots of the Third Company
hastening to embark. Too sleepy to be talkative, they step on
board in silence. But a few low grunts and an enormous yawn are
heard. Somebody even ejaculates: "Ah! Coquin de sort!" and sighs
wearily at his hard fate.
The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of
pilots at that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my
friend Solary (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep chested man
of forty, with a keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes.
He greets me by a low, hearty "He, l'ami. Comment va?" With his
clipped mustache and massive open face, energetic and at the same
time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen of the
southerner of the calm type. For there is such a type in which
the volatile southern passion is transmuted into solid force. He
is fair, but no one could mistake him for a man of the north even
by the dim gleam of the lantern standing on the quay. He is
worth a dozen of your ordinary Normans or Bretons, but then, in
the whole immense sweep of the Mediterranean shores, you could
not find half a dozen men of his stamp.
Standing by the tiller, he pulls out his watch from under a thick
jacket and bends his head over it in the light cast into the
boat. Time's up. His pleasant voice commands, in a quiet
undertone, "Larguez." A suddenly projected arm snatches the
lantern off the quay--and, warped along by a line at first, then
with the regular tug of four heavy sweeps in the bow, the big
half-decked boat full of men glides out of the black, breathless
shadow of the fort. The open water of the avant-port glitters
under the moon as if sown over with millions of sequins, and the
long white break water shines like a thick bar of solid silver.
With a quick rattle of blocks and one single silky swish, the
sail is filled by a little breeze keen enough to have come
straight down from the frozen moon, and the boat, after the
clatter of the hauled-in sweeps, seems to stand at rest,
surrounded by a mysterious whispering so faint and unearthly that
it may be the rustling of the brilliant, overpowering moon rays
breaking like a rain-shower upon the hard, smooth, shadowless
sea.
I may well remember that last night spent with the pilots of the
Third Company. I have known the spell of moonlight since, on
various seas and coasts--coasts of forests, of rocks, of sand
dunes--but no magic so perfect in its revelation of unsuspected
character, as though one were allowed to look upon the mystic
nature of material things. For hours I suppose no word was spoken
in that boat. The pilots, seated in two rows facing each other,
dozed, with their arms folded and their chins resting upon their
breasts. They displayed a great variety of caps: cloth, wool,
leather, peaks, ear-flaps, tassels, with a picturesque round
beret or two pulled down over the brows; and one grandfather,
with a shaved, bony face and a great beak of a nose, had a cloak
with a hood which made him look in our midst like a cowled monk
being carried off goodness knows where by that silent company of
seamen--quiet enough to be dead.
My fingers itched for the tiller, and in due course my friend,
the patron, surrendered it to me in the same spirit in which the
family coachman lets a boy hold the reins on an easy bit of road.
There was a great solitude around us; the islets ahead, Monte
Cristo and the Chateau daft in full light, seemed to float toward
us--so steady, so imperceptible was the progress of our boat.
"Keep her in the furrow of the moon," the patron directed me, in
a quiet murmur, sitting down ponderously in the stern-sheets and
reaching for his pipe.
The pilot station in weather like this was only a mile or two to
the westward of the islets; and presently, as we approached the
spot, the boat we were going to relieve swam into our view
suddenly, on her way home, cutting black and sinister into the
wake of the moon under a sable wing, while to them our sail must
have been a vision of white and dazzling radiance. Without
altering the course a hair's breadth we slipped by each other
within an oar's length. A drawling, sardonic hail came out of
her. Instantly, as if by magic, our dozing pilots got on their
feet in a body. An incredible babel of bantering shouts burst
out, a jocular, passionate, voluble chatter, which lasted till
the boats were stern to stern, theirs all bright now, and, with a
shining sail to our eyes, we turned all black to their vision,
and drew away from them under a sable wing. That extraordinary
uproar died away almost as suddenly as it had begun; first one
had enough of it and sat down, then another, then three or four
together; and when all had left off with mutters and growling
half-laughs the sound of hearty chuckling became audible,
persistent, unnoticed. The cowled grandfather was very much
entertained somewhere within his hood.
He had not joined in the shouting of jokes, neither had he moved
the least bit. He had remained quietly in his place against the
foot of the mast. I had been given to understand long before
that he had the rating of a second-class able seaman (matelot
leger) in the fleet which sailed from Toulon for the conquest of
Algeria in the year of grace 1830. And, indeed, I had seen and
examined one of the buttons of his old brown, patched coat, the
only brass button of the miscellaneous lot, flat and thin, with
the words Equipages de ligne engraved on it. That sort of
button, I believe, went out with the last of the French Bourbons.
"I preserved it from the time of my navy service," he explained,
nodding rapidly his frail, vulture-like head. It was not very
likely that he had picked up that relic in the street. He looked
certainly old enough to have fought at Trafalgar--or, at any
rate, to have played his little part there as a powder monkey.
Shortly after we had been introduced he had informed me in a
Franco-Provencal jargon, mumbling tremulously with his toothless
jaws, that when he was a "shaver no higher than that" he had seen
the Emperor Napoleon returning from Elba. It was at night, he
narrated vaguely, without animation, at a spot between Frejus and
Antibes, in the open country. A big fire had been lit at the
side of the cross-roads. The population from several villages
had collected there, old and young--down to the very children in
arms, because the women had refused to stay at home. Tall
soldiers wearing high, hairy caps stood in a circle, facing the
people silently, and their stern eyes and big mustaches were
enough to make everybody keep at a distance. He, "being an
impudent little shaver," wriggled out of the crowd, creeping on
his hands and knees as near as he dared to the grenadiers' legs,
and peeping through discovered, standing perfectly still in the
light of the fire, "a little fat fellow in a three-cornered hat,
buttoned up in a long straight coat, with a big, pale face
inclined on one shoulder, looking something like a priest. His
hands were clasped behind his back. . . . It appears that this
was the Emperor," the ancient commented, with a faint sigh. He
was staring from the ground with all his might, when "my poor
father," who had been searching for his boy frantically every
where, pounced upon him and hauled him away by the ear.
The tale seems an authentic recollection. He related it to me
many times, using the very same words. The grandfather honoured
me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection. Extremes
touch. He was the oldest member by a long way in that company,
and I was, if I may say so, its temporarily adopted baby. He had
been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember;
thirty--forty years. He did not seem certain himself, but it
could be found out, he suggested, in the archives of the
Pilot-office. He had been pensioned off years before, but he
went out from force of habit; and, as my friend the patron of the
company once confided to me in a whisper, "the old chap did no
harm. He was not in the way." They treated him with rough
deference. One and another would address some insignificant
remark to him now and again, but nobody really took any notice of
what he had to say. He had survived his strength, his
usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long, green, worsted
stockings pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of
woollen nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his
feet. Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a
dozen hands would be extended to help him on board, but afterward
he was left pretty much to his own thoughts. Of course he never
did any work, except, perhaps, to cast off some rope when hailed,
"He, l'Ancien! let go the halyards there, at your hand"--or some
such request of an easy kind.
No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow
of the hood. He kept it up for a long time with intense
enjoyment. Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of
mind which is easily amused. But when his hilarity had exhausted
itself, he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but
quavering voice:
"Can't expect much work on a night like this."
No one took it up. It was a mere truism. Nothing under canvas
could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy
splendour and spiritual stillness. We would have to glide idly
to and fro, keeping our station within the appointed bearings,
and, unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the dawn, we would land
before sunrise on a small islet that, within two miles of us,
shone like a lump of frozen moonlight, to "break a crust and take
a pull at the wine bottle." I was familiar with the procedure.
The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,
capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth
amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood. The crust
broken and the mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no
more than that with this abstemious race--the pilots would pass
the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and
blowing into their nipped fingers. One or two misanthropists
would sit apart, perched on boulders like manlike sea-fowl of
solitary habits; the sociably disposed would gossip scandalously
in little gesticulating knots; and there would be perpetually one
or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with the
long, brass tube of the telescope, a heavy, murderous-looking
piece of collective property, everlastingly changing hands with
brandishing and levelling movements. Then about noon (it was a
short turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours)
another boatful of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer
for the old Phoenician port, dominated, watched over from the
ridge of a dust-gray, arid hill by the red-and-white striped pile
of the Notre Dame de la Garde.
All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my
very recent experience. But also something not foreseen by me
did happen, something which causes me to remember my last outing
with the pilots. It was on this occasion that my hand touched,
for the first time, the side of an English ship.
No fresh breeze had come with the dawn, only the steady little
draught got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became
bright and glassy with a clean, colourless light. I t was while
we were all ashore on the islet that a steamer was picked up by
the telescope, a black speck like an insect posed on the hard
edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to her water-line and
came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke
slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and
headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles
an hour.
She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be
met on the sea no more--black hull, with low, white
superstructures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of
yards on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel--steam
steering-gear was not a matter of course in these days--and with
them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets,
ruddy-faced, muffled up, with peak caps--I suppose all her
officers. There are ships I have met more than once and known
well by sight whose names I have forgotten; but the name of that
ship seen once so many years ago in the clear flush of a cold,
pale sunrise I have not forgotten. How could I--the first
English ship on whose side I ever laid my hand! The name--I read
it letter by letter on the bow--was James Westoll. Not very
romantic, you will say. The name of a very considerable,
well-known, and universally respected North country ship-owner, I
believe. James Westoll! What better name could an honourable
hard-working ship have? To me the very grouping of the letters
is alive with the romantic feeling of her reality as I saw her
floating motionless and borrowing an ideal grace from the austere
purity of the light.
We were then very near her and, on a sudden impulse, I
volunteered to pull bow in the dinghy which shoved off at once to
put the pilot on board while our boat, fanned by the faint air
which had attended us all through the night, went on gliding
gently past the black, glistening length of the ship. A few
strokes brought us alongside, and it was then that, for the very
first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English--the
speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of
the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and
of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of
remembered emotions--of my very dreams! And if (after being thus
fashioned by it in that part of me which cannot decay) I dare not
claim it aloud as my own, then, at any rate, the speech of my
children. Thus small events grow memorable by the passage of
time. As to the quality of the address itself I cannot say it
was very striking. Too short for eloquence and devoid of all
charm of tone, it consisted precisely of the three words "Look
out there!" growled out huskily above my head.
It proceeded from a big fat fellow (he had an obtrusive, hairy
double chin) in a blue woollen shirt and roomy breeches pulled up
very high, even to the level of his breastbone, by a pair of
braces quite exposed to public view. As where he stood there was
no bulwark, but only a rail and stanchions, I was able to take in
at a glance the whole of his voluminous person from his feet to
the high crown of his soft black hat, which sat like an absurd
flanged cone on his big head. The grotesque and massive aspect
of that deck hand (I suppose he was that--very likely the
lamp-trimmer) surprised me very much. My course of reading, of
dreaming, and longing for the sea had not prepared me for a sea
brother of that sort. I never met again a figure in the least
like his except in the illustrations to Mr. W. W. Jacobs's most
entertaining tales of barges and coasters; but the inspired
talent of Mr. Jacobs for poking endless fun at poor, innocent
sailors in a prose which, however extravagant in its felicitous
invention, is always artistically adjusted to observed truth, was
not yet. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs himself was not yet. I fancy that,
at most, if he had made his nurse laugh it was about all he had
achieved at that early date.
Therefore, I repeat, other disabilities apart, I could not have
been prepared for the sight of that husky old porpoise. The
object of his concise address was to call my attention to a rope
which he incontinently flung down for me to catch. I caught it,
though it was not really necessary, the ship having no way on her
by that time. Then everything went on very swiftly. The dinghy
came with a slight bump against the steamer's side; the pilot,
grabbing for the rope ladder, had scrambled half-way up before I
knew that our task of boarding was done; the harsh, muffled
clanging of the engine-room telegraph struck my ear through the
iron plate; my companion in the dinghy was urging me to "shove
off--push hard"; and when I bore against the smooth flank of the
first English ship I ever touched in my life, I felt it already
throbbing under my open palm.
Her head swung a little to the west, pointing toward the
miniature lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there,
hardly distinguishable against the land. The dinghy danced a
squashy, splashy jig in the wash of the wake; and, turning in my
seat, I followed the James Westoll with my eyes. Before she had
gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag, as the harbour
regulations prescribe for arriving and departing ships. I saw it
suddenly flicker and stream out on the flag staff. The Red
Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing the drab
and gray masses of that southern land, the livid islets, the sea
of pale, glassy blue under the pale, glassy sky of that cold
sunrise, it was, as far as the eye could reach, the only spot of
ardent colour--flame-like, intense, and presently as minute as
the tiny red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire
kindles in the clear heart of a globe of crystal. The Red
Ensign--the symbolic, protecting, warm bit of bunting flung wide
upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof
over my head.
