CHAPTER VII—THE MAN ON THE QUAY
It has always happened that the first steps of a boy from the glen have been to the quay. There the ships lie clumsily on their bulging sides in the ebb till the tar steams and blisters in the sun, or at the full they lift and fall heavily like a sigh for the ocean’s expanse as they feel themselves prisoners to the rings and pawls. Their chains jerk and ease upon the granite edges of the wall or twang tight across the quay so that the mariners and fishermen moving about their business on this stone-thrust to the sea must lift their clumping boots high to step across those tethers of romance. At a full tide one walking down the quay has beside him the dark aspiring bulwarks of the little but brave adventurers, their seams gazing to the heat, their carvel timbers striped by the ooze and brine of many oceans and the scum of ports. Upon their poops their den-fire chimneys breathe a faint blue reek; the iron of bilge-pump and pin is rust red; the companions are portals to smelling depths where the bunks are in a perpetual gloom and the seamen lie at night or in the heat of the day discontent with this period of no roaming and remembering the tumbling waters and the far-off harbours that must ever be more alluring than the harbours where we be. From the ivy of the church the little birds come chaffering and twittering among the shrouds, and the pigeon will perch upon a spar, so that the sea-gull, the far-searcher, must wonder as he passes on a slant of silent leathers at its daring thus to utilise the device of the outermost seas and the most vehement storms. And side by side with these, the adventurers, are the skiffs and smacks of the fishermen, drilled in rows, brought bow up, taut on their anchors with their lug-sails down on their masts to make deck tents for shelter from sun or rain. With those sturdy black gabbarls and barques and those bronze fishers, the bay from the quay to the walls of the Duke’s garden, in its season, stirs with life.
More than once when he had come to the town Gilian looked a little way off from the Cross upon this busy concourse in the bay and wished that he might venture on the quay, but the throng of tall, dark-shirted fishermen and seafarers frightened him so that he must stand aloof guessing at the nearer interest of the spectacle. Now that he was a town boy with whole days in which to muster courage, he spurred himself up to walk upon the quay at the first opportunity. It was the afternoon, the tide lapped high upon the slips and stairs, a heaving lazy roll of water so clear that the star-fish on the sandy bottom might plainly be seen through great depths. The gunnies of the ships o’ertopped by many feet the quay-wall and their chains rose slanting, tight from the rings. The fishermen and their boats were far down on Cowal after signs of herring; the bay was given up to barque and gabbart alone. For once a slumber seemed to lie upon the place for ordinary so throng and cheerful; the quay was Gilian’s alone as he stepped wonderingly upon it and turned an eye to the square ports open for an airing to the dens. In all the company of the ships thus swaying at the quay-side there was no sign of life beyond the smoke that rose from the stunted funnels. The boy’s fancy played among the masts like the birds from the ivy. These were the galleys of Inishtore, that rode upon the seven seas for a king’s son with a hauberk of gold. The spicy isles, the silver sands, the songs the graugach sang below the prows when the sea dashed—they came all into his vision of those little tarred hulks of commerce. He thought how fine it would be to set foot upon those decks and loose the fastenings, and drop down the sea-slope of the shepherds’ stories till he came upon Ibrisail, happy isle of play and laughter, where the sun never drops below the ocean’s marge.
In one of the vessels behind him, as he mused, a seaman noiselessly thrust his head out at a companion to look the hour upon the town’s clock, and the boy, pale, fair-haired, pondering, with eyes upon the shrouds of a gabbart, forced himself by his stillness and inaction upon the man’s notice. He was a little, stout, well-built man, with a face tanned by sunshine and salt air to the semblance of Spanish mahogany, with wide and searching eyes and long curled hair of the deepest black. His dress was singularly perjink, cut trim and tight from a blue cloth, the collar of a red shirt rolled over on the bosom, a pair of simple gold rings pierced the ears. As he looked at the boy, he was humming very softly to himself a Skye song, and he stopped in the midst of it with “So ‘iile, have you lost your ship?” A playful scamp was revealed in his smile.
Gilian turned round with a start of alarm, for he had been on some coracle of fancy, sailing upon magic seas, and thus to break upon his reverie with the high Gaelic of Skye was to plunge him in chilling waters.
“Thig an so—come here,” said the seaman, beckoning, setting an easy foot upon the deck.
Gilian went slowly forward, he was amazed and fascinated by this wondrous seaman come upon the stillness of the harbour without warning, a traveller so important yet so affable in his invitation. Black Duncan that day was in a good humour, for his owners had released him at last from his weeks of tethering to the quay and this dull town and he was to depart to-morrow with his cargo of timber. In a little he had Gilian’s history, and they were comrades. He took him round the deck and showed its simple furniture, then in the den he told him mariners’ tales of the sea.
A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel’s ribs, the bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, yet confirming every guess he had made in dreams of life upon the wave. A ceaseless sound of water came through the wood, of the tide glucking along the bows, surely to the mariner the sweetest of all sounds when he lies in benign weather moving home upon the sigh of God.
Black Duncan but wanted a good listener. He was not quite the world’s traveller he would have Gilian believe; but he had voyaged in many outlandish parts and a Skyeman’s memory is long and his is the isle where fancy riots. He made his simple ventures round the coast voyages terrible and unending. The bays, the water-mouths, the rocks, the bosky isles—he clothed them with delights, and made them float in the haze wherein a boy untravelled would envelop them.
“There’s a story I know.” said Gilian, “of a young son who went to a town where the king of Erin bides, and he found it full of music from end to end, every street humming with song.”
“Oh, lad, I have been there,” said the seaman, unabashed, his teeth very white in the brown of his smiling face. “You sail and sail in winds and drift in calms, and there is a place called Erin’s Eye and a mountain rock behind it, and then you come upon the town of the king’s daughter. It is a town reeling with music; some people without the ears would miss it, you and Black Duncan would be jigging to the sound of it. The world, ‘ille (and here’s the sailorman who has sailed the seven seas and knows its worst and best), is a very grand place to such as understand and allow. I was born with a caul as we say; I know that I’ll never drown, so that when winds crack I feel safe in the most staggering ship. I have gone into foreign ports in the dead of night, our hail for light but answered by Sir Echo, and we would be waiting for light, with the smell of flowers and trees about us, and—”
“That would be worth sailing for,” said Gilian, looking hard at the embers in the Carron stove.
“Or the beast of the wood might come roaring and bellowing to the shore.”
“That would be very frightsome,” said Gilian with a shiver. “I have made believe the hum of the bee in the heather at my ear as I lay on it in the summer was the roar of the wild beast a long way off; it was uncanny and I could make myself afraid of it, but when I liked it was the bee again and the heather was no higher than my knee.”
The seaman laughed till the den rang. He poked the fire and the flame thrust out and made the boy and the man and the timbers and bunks dance and shake in the world between light and shadow. “You are the sharpest boy ever I conversed with,” said he.
A run of the merriest, the sweetest, the most unconstrained laughter broke overhead like a bird’s song. They looked up and found the square of blue sky broken at the hatch by a girl’s head. A roguish face in a toss of brown hair, seen thus above them against the sky, seemed to Gilian the face of one of the fairies with which he had peopled the seaman’s isle.
“There you go!” cried Black Duncan, noway astonished. “Did I not tell you never to come on board without halloo?”
“I cried,” said the girl in a most pretty English that sounded all the sweeter beside the seaman’s broken and harsh accent in a language foreign to him. “I cried ‘O Duncan’ twice and you never heard, so I knew you were asleep in your dingy old den.” She swung herself down as she spoke and stood at the foot of the companion with the laugh renewed upon her lips, a gush of happy heart.
“Indeed, Miss Nan, and I was not sleeping at all,” said Black Duncan, standing up and facing her; “if I was sleeping would there be a boy with me here listening to the stories of the times when I was scouring the oceans and not between here and the Clyde in your father’s vessel?”
“Oh! a boy!” cried the girl, taken a little aback. “I did not know there was a boy.”
“And a glen boy, too,” said the seaman, speaking in a language wherein he knew himself more the equal of his master’s daughter. “I told him of Erin O and the music in its streets, and he does not make fun of my telling like you, Miss Nan, because he understands.”
The girl peered into the dark of the cabin at the face of Gilian that seemed unwontedly long and pallid in the half light, with eyes burning in sepulchral pits, repeating the flash of the embers. She was about his own age—at most no more than a month or two younger, but with a glance bold and assured that spoke of an early maturity.
“Oh! a Glen Aray boy,” said she. “I never much care for them. You would be telling him some of the tales there is no word of truth in.”
“The finest tales in the world are like that,” said Black Duncan.
She sat on the edge of a bunk and swung a little drab jean shoe.
The glamour of Black Duncan’s stories fled for Gilian before this presence like mist before a morning wind. So healthy, so ruddy, so abrupt, she was so much in the actual world that for him to be dreaming of others seemed a child’s weakness.
“I was in the town with uncle,” she said, “and I heard you were sailing away to-morrow, and I thought I would come and say good-bye.”
She spoke as prettily in her Gaelic as in her English.
“Ah, mo run,” said the seaman, putting out his arms as to embrace her, “am not I pleased that you should have Black Duncan in your mind so much as to come and say ‘fair wind to your sail’?”
“And you’ll bring me the beads next time?” she said hastily.
“That will I,” said he, smiling; “but you must sing me a song now or I might forget them.”
“Oh, I’ll sing if——.” She paused and looked doubtfully at Gilian, who was still open-mouthed at her breezy vehemence.
“Never mind the boy,” said the seaman, stretching himself to enjoy the music at his ease; “if you make it ‘The Rover’ he will understand.”
The afternoon was speeding. The sun had passed the trees that round the Tolbooth walls and a beam from his majesty came boldly into the den by the companion. It struck a slanting passage on the floor and revealed the figure of a girl at her ease dangling her feet upon a water anker with her hair a flood of spate-brown fallen back upon its fastening band. And the boy saw her again as it were quite differently from before, still the robust woman-child, but rich, ripe, blooded at the plump inviting lip, warm at the throbbing neck. About her hung a searching odour that overcame the common and vulgar odours of the ship, its bilge, its tar, its oak-bark tan, its herring scale, an odour he knew of woods in the wet spring weather. It made him think of short grasses and the dewdrop glittering in the wet leaf; then the sky shone blue against a tremble of airy leaf. The birch, the birch, he had it! And having it he knew the secret of the odour. She had already the woman’s trick of washing her hair in the young birch brewings.
“I will sing ‘The Rover’ and I will sing ‘The Man with the Coat of Green,’” said she, with the generosity of one with many gifts. And she started upon her ditty. She had a voice that as yet was only in its making; it was but a promise of the future splendour, yet to Gilian, the hearer, it brought a new and potent joy. With ‘The Rover’ he lived in the woods, and set foot upon foreign wharves; ‘The Man with the Coat of Green’ had his company upon the morning adventures in the islands of fairydom. It was then, as in after years she was the woman serious, when her own songs moved her, with her dalliance and indifference gone. A tear trembled at her eyes at the trials of the folk she sang.
“You sing—you sing—you sing like the wind in the trees,” said the seaman, stirred to unaccustomed passion. The little cabin, when she was done, seemed to shrink from the limitless width of the world to the narrowness of a cell, and Gilian sat stunned. He had followed her song in a rapture she had seen and delighted in for all the apparent surrender of her emotion; she saw now the depth to which she had touched him, and was greatly pleased with this conquest of her art. Clearly he was no common Glen Aray boy, so she sang one or two more songs to show the variety of her budget, and the tears he could not restrain were her sweetest triumph. At last, “I must be going,” said she. “Good-bye, Duncan, and do not be forgetting my beads.” Then she dashed on deck, waiting no answer to that or to the friendly nod of parting to Gilian.
“Now isn’t she a wonder?” asked the seaman, amused, astonished, proud. “Did you ever hear singing like it?”
“I never did,” said Gilian.
“Ah, she is almost as fine as a piper!” said the seaman. “She comes down here every time I am at the quay and she will be singing here till the timbers strain themselves to listen.”
“I like her very much,” said Gilian.
“Of course you do,” the seaman cried, with a thump of his hard hand on the edge of his bunk, “and would it not be very curious indeed if you did not like her? I have heard women sing in many places—bold ones in Amsterdam, and the shy dancers of Bermuda, but never her equal, and she only a child. How she does it is the beat of me.”
“I know,” said Gilian, reddening a little to say so much to the seaman, but emboldened by the shadows he sat among. “The birds sing that way and the winds and the tide, because they have the feeling of it and they must. And when she sings she is ‘The Rover,’ or she is ‘The Man with the Green Coat.’”
“Indeed, and it is very easy too when you explain,” said the seaman, whether in earnest or in fun the boy could not make out “She is the strange one anyway, and they say General Turner, who’s her father and the man this ship belongs to, is not knowing very well what to make of her. What is the matter with you?” For the boy’s face was crimson as he looked up the quay after the girl from the deck where now they stood.
“Oh,” said Gilian, “I was just wondering if that would be the family the Paymaster is not friendly with.”
The seaman laughed. “That same!” said he. “And are you in the family feud too? If that is so you’ll hear little of Miss Nan’s songs, I’m thinking, and that is the folly of feuds. If I was you I would say nothing about the Jean, and the lass who sang in her.”