Captain Margaret

BY JOHN MASEFIELD Author of “The Everlasting Mercy,” “The Widow in the Bye Street,” etc.
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 All rights reserved
TO MY WIFE
“All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”
The short summer night was over; the stars were paling; there was a faint light above the hills. The flame in the ship’s lantern felt the day beginning. A cock in the hen-coop crowed, flapping his wings. The hour was full of mystery. Though it was still, it was full of the suggestion of noise. There was a rustle, a murmur, a sense of preparation. Already, in the farms ashore, the pails went clanking to the byres. Very faintly, from time to time, one heard the lowing of a cow, or the song of some fisherman, as he put out, in the twilight, to his lobster-pots, sculling with one oar.
Dew had fallen during the night. The decks of the Broken Heart , lying at anchor there, with the lantern burning at her peak, were wet with dew. Dew dripped from her running rigging; the gleam of wetness was upon her guns, upon her rails, upon the bell in the poop belfry. She seemed august, lying there in the twilight. Her sailors, asleep on her deck, in the shadow, below the break of the quarter-deck, were unlike earthly sleepers. The old boatswain, in the blue boat-cloak, standing at the gangway watching the dawn, was august, sphinx-like, symbolic. The two men who stood above him on the quarter-deck spoke quietly, in hushed voices, as though the hour awed them. Even the boy by the lantern, far aft, stood silently, moved by the beauty of the time. Over the water, by Salcombe, the fishers’ boats got under way for the sea. The noise of the halliards creaked, voices called in the dusk, blocks piped, coils of rope rattled on the planks. The flower of the day was slowly opening in the east, the rose of the day was bursting. It was the dim time, the holy time, the moment of beauty, which would soon pass, was even now passing, as the sea gleamed, brightening, lighting up into colour.