The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 14

"Amusin' from first to last," agreed Captain John in his cordial way.

Says the collector slowly, "Well, tastes differ. You may be right, of course, but we'll begin at the beginning, and see how it works out.

First, then, at nine forty-five last night you showed an unauthorised light for the purpose of cheating the revenue. Cost of that caper, one hundred pounds."

"Be you talkin' of the rockets?"

"'Course I be."

"Well then, _I_ didn't fire them, nor anyone belongin' to the Cove.

I didn't set anyone to fire them, and they waren't fired to warn anybody. Let alone I have proof they was sent up by a Methody preacher to relieve his feelin's. You've known me too long, Roger Wearne, to think me fool enough to waste a whole future joy[3] over so simple a business as warnin' a boat."

"What are you tellin' me?"

"The truth, as I always do; and I advise you to believe it, or 'twon't be the first time you've seen too far into a brick wall."

Wearne knew well enough what Captain John meant. Just a year before he had paid a surprise visit to the Cove, ferreted out a locked shed and asked to be shown what was inside. The King refused. "It held nothing," he said, "but provisions for his brother Henry's vessel."

Of course Wearne couldn't believe this; a locked store in Prussia Cove was much too sure a thing. So first he argued, and then he broke the door open, and, sure enough, found innocent provisions inside just as he'd been promised. Next morning the shed was empty. "Didn' I warn 'ee," said John, "against breaking in that door and leaving my property exposed. Now I'll have to make 'ee pay for it;" and pay for it Wearne did.

"All I know," the captain went on, "is that a Methody preacher paid me a visit last night, with the objic (so far as I can make out, for things have been movin' so fast I hadn't time to question en as I wished) o'

teachin' me what was due to King George. In pursooance o' which--it being His Majesty's birthday--he took and fired a dozen rockets I keep on the off-chance of wantin' one of these days to signal the Custom House at Penzance. I own 'twas a funny thing to do, but folks takes their patriotism different. I daresay, now, _you_ didn't even remember 'twas His Majesty's birthday."

Wearne tried a fresh tack. "We'll take that yarn later on," he said.

"You can't deny a cargo was run this morning."

"We'll allow it for the moment. But that only proves that no boat was warned away."

"And when I sent a boat in to capture it, you deliberately opened fire; in other words, tried to murder me, His Majesty's representative."

"Tried to murder you? Look here." Captain John stepped to one of his still loaded guns and pointed it carefully at a plank floating out at the mouth of the Cove--a plank knocked by the cutter's guns out of Uncle Bill Leggo's 'taty patch, and now drifting out to sea on the first of the ebb. He pointed the gun carefully, let fly, and knocked the bit of wood to flinders. "That's what I do when I try," he said. "Why, bless 'ee, I was no more in earnest than _you_ were!"

This made Wearne blush for his marksmans.h.i.+p. "But _you'll_ have to prove that," he said.

"Why, damme," said John Carter, and fined himself another sixpence on the spot; "if you are so partic'ler, _get out there in the boat again, and I will_."

Well, the upshot was that after some palaver Wearne agreed to walk up to the captain's house and reckon the accounts between them. He had missed a pretty haul and been openly defied. On the other hand he hadn't a man hurt, and he knew the King's Government still owed John Carter for a lugger he had lent two years before to chase a French privateer lying off Ardevora. Carter had sent the lugger round at Wearne's particular request; she was short handed, and after a running fight of three or four hours the Frenchman put in a shot which sent her to the bottom and drowned fourteen hands. For this, as Wearne knew, he had never received proper compensation. I fancy the two came to an agreement to set one thing against another and call quits. At any rate, John was put to no further annoyance over that day's caper. As for the preacher, I'm told that no person in these parts ever set eyes on him again. And Ann Geen drove home that evening with her Phoby beside her. "I'm sorry to let 'ee go, my son," said John; "but 'twould never do for me to have your mother comin' over here too often. I've a great respect for all the Lemals; but on the female side they be too frolicsome for a steady-going trade like mine."

[1] Drinking-house.

[2] Huguenot's house.

[3] Feu de joie.

THE MAN WHO COULD HAVE TOLD.

It was ten o'clock--a sunny, gusty morning in early September--when H.M.S. _Berenice_, second-cla.s.s cruiser, left the Hamoaze and pushed slowly out into the Sound on her way to the China Seas.

From the Hoe, on a gra.s.sy slope below the great hotel, John Gilbart watched her as she thrust her long white side into view between Devil's Point and the wooded slopes of Mount Edgc.u.mbe; watched her as she stole past Drake's Island and headed up the Asia pa.s.sage. She kept little more than steerage way, threading her path among anch.o.r.ed yachts gay with bunting, and now and then politely slowing in the crowd of smaller craft under sail. For it was regatta morning. The tall club flagstaff behind and above Gilbart's head wore its full code of signals, with blue ensign on the gaff and blue burgee at the topmast head, and fluttered them intermittently as the nor'westerly breeze broke down in flaws over the leads of the club-house. Below him half a dozen small boys with bundles of programmes came skirmis.h.i.+ng up the hill through the spa.r.s.e groups of onlookers. Off the promenade pier, where the excursion steamers b.u.mped and reeked and blew their sirens, the committee-s.h.i.+p lay moored in a moving swarm of rowboats, dingies, and steam-launches. She flew her B signal as yet, but the seconds were drawing on toward the five-minute gun; and beyond, on the ruffled Sound, nine or ten yachts were manoeuvring and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g their canvas; two forty-raters dodging and playing through the opening stage of their duel for the start; four or five twenties taking matters easy as yet; all with jackyards hoisted.

To the eastward a couple of belated twenties came creeping out from their anchorage in Cattewater.

All this Gilbart's gaze took in; with the stately merchantmen riding beyond the throng, and the low breakwater three miles away, and the blue horizon beyond all. Out of that blue from time to time came the low, jarring vibration which told of an unseen gunboat at practice; and from time to time a puff of white smoke from the Picklecombe battery held him listening for its louder boom. But he returned always to the _Berenice_ moving away up the Asia pa.s.sage, so cautiously that between whiles she seemed to be drifting; but always moving, with the smoke blown level from her buff-coloured funnels, with clean white sides and clean white ensign, and here and there a sparkle of sunlight on rail or gun-breech or torpedo-tube. She was bound on a three-years' cruise; and Gilbart, who happened to know this and was besides something of a sentimentalist, detected pathos in this departure on a festival morning. It seemed to him--as she swung round her stern and his quick eye caught the glint of her gilded name with the muzzle of her six-inch gun on the platform above, foreshortened in the middle of its white screen like a bull's-eye in a target--it seemed to him that this holiday throng took little heed of the three hundred odd men so silently going forth to do England's work and fight her battles. On her deck yesterday afternoon he had shaken hands and parted with a friend, a stoker on board, and had seen some pitiful good-byes. His friend Casey, to be sure, was unmarried--an un-amiable man with a cynical tongue--with no one to regret him and no disposition to make a fuss over a three-years' exile. But at the head of the s.h.i.+p's ladder Gilbart had pa.s.sed through a group of red-eyed women, one or two with babies at the breast. It was not a pretty sight: one poor creature had abandoned herself completely, and rocked to and fro holding on by the bulwarks and bellowing aloud. This and a vision of dirty wet handkerchiefs haunted him like a physical sickness.

Gilbart considered himself an Imperialist, read his newspaper religiously, and had shown great loyalty as secretary of a local sub-committee at the time of the Queen's Jubilee, in collecting subscriptions among the dockyardsmen. Habitually he felt a lump in his throat when he spoke of the Flag. His calling--that of lay-a.s.sistant and auxiliary preacher (at a pinch) to a dockyard Mission--perhaps encouraged this surface emotion; but by nature he was one of those who need to make a fuss to feel they are properly patriotic. To his thinking every yacht in the Sound should have dipped her flag to the _Berenice_.

Surely even a salute of guns would not have been too much. But no: that is the way England dismisses her sons, without so much as a cheer!

He felt ashamed of this cold send-off; ashamed for his countrymen.

"What do they know or care?" he asked himself, fastening his scorn on the backs of an unconscious group of country-people who had raced one another uphill from an excursion steamer and halted panting and laughing half-way up the slope. It irritated him the more when he thought of Casey's pale, derisive face. He and Casey had often argued about patriotism; or rather he had done the arguing while Casey sneered.

Casey was a stoker, and knew how fuel should be applied.

Casey made no pretence to love England. Gilbart never quite knew why he tolerated him. But so it was: they had met in the reading-room of a Sailors' Home, and had somehow struck up an acquaintance, even a sort of unacknowledged friends.h.i.+p. Their common love of books may have helped; for Casey--Heaven knew where or how--had picked up an education far above Gilbart's, and amazing in a common stoker. Also he wore some baffling, attractive mystery behind his reserve. Once or twice-- certainly not half a dozen times--he had at a casual word pulled open for an instant the doors of his heart and given Gilbart a sensation of looking into a furnace, into white-hot depths, sudden and frightening.

But what chiefly won him was the knowledge that in some perverse, involuntary and quite inexplicable way he was liked by this sullen fellow, who had no other friend and sought none. He knew the liking to be there as surely as he knew it to be shy and sullen, curt in expression, contemptuous of itself. Had he ever troubled to examine himself honestly, Gilbart must have acknowledged himself Casey's inferior in all but amiability; and Casey no doubt knew this. But in friends.h.i.+p as in love there is usually one who likes and one who suffers himself to be liked, and the positions are not allotted by merit.

Gilbart--a self-deceiver all his life--had accepted the compliment complacently enough.

The _Berenice_ cleared the crowd and quickened her speed as the five-minute gun puffed out from the committee-s.h.i.+p and the Blue Peter ran up the halyards in the smoke. Gilbart turned his attention upon the two big yachts and followed their movements until the starting-gun was fired; saw them haul up and plunge over the line so close together that the crews might have shaken hands; watched them as they fluttered out their spinnakers for the run to the eastern mark, for all the world like two great white moths floating side by side swiftly but with no show of hurry. When he returned to the cruiser she was far away, almost off the western end of the breakwater--gone, so far as he was concerned and whoever else might be watching her from the sh.o.r.e; the parting over, the threads torn and snapped, her crew face to face now with the long voyage.

He drew a long breath, and was aware for the first time of a woman standing about twenty yards on his left behind a group of chattering holiday-makers. He saw at a glance that she did not belong to them, but was gazing after the _Berenice_; a forlorn, tearless figure, with a handkerchief crumpled up into a ball in her hand. Affability was a part of Gilbart's profession, and besides, he hated to see a woman suffer.

He edged toward her and lifted his hat.

"I hope," said he, "these persons are not annoying you? They don't understand, of course. I, too, have a friend on the _Berenice_."

The woman looked at him as though she heard but could not for the moment grasp what he said. She tightened her grip on the handkerchief and kept her lips firmly compressed.

Gilbart saw that, though tearless, her eyes wore traces of tears--no redness, but some swelling of the lids, with dark semicircles underneath.

"To them," he went on, nodding toward the holiday-keepers, "it's only regatta day. To them she's only a pa.s.sing s.h.i.+p helping to make up the pretty scene. They know nothing of the gallant hearts she carries or the sore ones she leaves behind. If they knew, I wonder if they'd care?

The ordinary Anglo-Saxon has so little imagination!"

She was staring at him now, and at length seemed to understand.

But with understanding there grew in her eyes a look of anger, almost of repugnance. "Oh, please go away!" she said.

He lifted his hat and obeyed; indeed, he walked off to the farthest end of the Hoe. He was hurt. He had a thin-skinned vanity, and hated to look small even before a stranger. That snub poisoned his morning, and although he looked at the yachts, his mind ran all the time upon the encounter. To be sure he had brought it upon himself, but he preferred to consider that he had meant kindly--had obviously meant kindly.

He tried to invent a retort,--a gentle, dignified retort which would have touched her to a regret for her injustice--nothing more.

Perhaps it was not yet too late to return and convey his protest under a delicate apology; or perhaps the mere sight of him, casually pa.s.sing, might move her to make amends. He even strolled back some way with this idea, but she had disappeared.

The _Berenice_ had vanished too; around Penlee Point no doubt.

He remembered the field-gla.s.ses slung in a case by his hip and was fumbling with the leather strap when a drop of rain fell on his hand, the herald of a smart shower. A dark squall came whistling down the Hamoaze; and standing there in the fringe of it he saw it strike and spread itself out like a fan over the open Sound at his feet, blotting the sparkle out of the water, while some of the small boats heeled to it and others ran up into the wind and lay shaking. It was over in five minutes, and the sun broke out again before the rain ceased falling; but Gilbart decided that there was more to follow. He had not come out to keep holiday, and an unfinished ma.n.u.script waited for him in his lodgings--an address on True Manliness, to be delivered two evenings hence in the Mission Room to lads under eighteen. Though he delivered them without ma.n.u.script, Gilbart always prepared his addresses carefully and kept the fair copies in his desk. He lived in hope of being reported some day, and then--who could say but a book might be called for?

His lodgings lay midway down a long, dreary street of small houses, each with a small yard at the back, each built of brick and stuccoed, all as like as peas, all inhabited by dockyardsmen or the families of gunners, artificers, and petty officers in the navy. Prospect Place was its deceptive name, and it ran parallel with three precisely similar thoroughfares--Grafton Place, Alderney Place, and Belvedere Avenue.

These four--with a cross-street, where the Mission Room stood facing a p.a.w.nbroker's--comprised Gilbart's field of labour.

He reached home a little after twelve, ate his dinner, and fell to work on his ma.n.u.script. By half-past three he had finished all but the peroration. Gilbart prided himself on his perorations; and knowing from experience that it helped him to ideas and phrases he caught up his hat and went out for a walk.

During that walk he did indeed catch and fix the needed sentences.

But, as it happened, he was never afterward able to recall one of them.

All he remembered was that much rain must have fallen; for the pavements which had been dry in the morning were glistening, and the roadways muddy and with standing puddles. On his way homeward each of these puddles reflected the cold, pure light of the dying day, until Prospect Place might have been a street in the New Jerusalem, paved with jasper, beryl, and chrysoprase. So much he remembered, and also that his feet must have taken him back to the Hoe, where the crowd was thicker and the regatta drawing to an end--a few yachts only left to creep home under a greenish sky, out of which the wind was fast dying. He had paused somewhere to listen to a band: he could give no further account to himself.