XL.
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 Provencal
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'epee.
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.
