THE MAN FROM BUFFALO
The patrol boats had been buffeting their way all night against wind and weather, and before daybreak the long line had lost its order. It was broken up now into little wandering loops and sections, busily comparing notes by Morse flashes and wireless. Last evening the Morning Glory, a converted yacht of American ownership, had been working with forty British trawlers; and her owner, Matthew Hudson, who had obtained permission to go out with her on this trip, had watched with admiration the way in which they strung themselves over twenty miles of confused sea, keeping their exact distances till nightfall. This morning, as he lurched in gleaming oilskins up and down the monkey house—irreverent name for his canvas-screened bridge—he could see only three of his companions—the Dusty Miller, the Christmas Day and the Betsey Barton.
They were all having a lively time. They swooped like herring gulls into the broad troughs of the swell, where the black water looked like liquid marble with white veins of foam in it. Morning-colored rainbows dripped from their bows as they rose again through the green sunlit crests. But the Morning Glory was the brightest and the liveliest of them all. The seas had been washing her decks all night. Little pools of color shone in the wet, crumpled oilskins of the crew, and the tarpaulin that covered the gun in her bow gleamed like a cloak dropped there by the Angel of the Dawn.
When like the morning mist in early day
Rose from the foam the daughter of the sea——
Matthew Hudson quoted to himself. He was full of poetry this morning while he waited for his breakfast; and the radiant aspect of the weapon in the bow reminded him of something else—if the smell of the frying bacon would not blow his way and distract his mind—something about "celestial armories." Was it Tennyson or Milton who had written it? There was a passage about guns in "Paradise Lost." He must look it up.
Like many Americans, Matthew Hudson was quicker to perceive the true romance of the Old Country than many of its own inhabitants. He had been particularly interested in the names of the British trawlers. "It's like seeing Shakespeare's Sonnets or Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry going out to fight," he had written to his son, who had just left Princeton to join the Mosquito Fleet; and the youngster had replied with a sonnet of his own.
Matthew Hudson had carried it about with him and read it to English statesmen, greatly to their embarrassment—most of them looked as if they were receiving a proposal of marriage—and he had found a huge secret joy in their embarrassment, which, as he said, "tickled him to death." But he murmured the verses to himself now, with paternal pride, thinking that the boy had really gone to the heart of the matter:
Out of Old England's inmost heart they go,
A little fleet of ships, whose every name—
Daffodil, Sea Lark, Rose, and Surf, and Snow—
Burns in this blackness like an altar flame.
Out of her past they sail, three thousand strong—
The people's fleet, that never knew its worth;
And every name is a broken phrase of song
To some remembered loveliness on earth.
There's Barbara Cowie, Comely Bank and May,
Christened at home, in worlds of dawn and dew.
There's Ruth, and Kindly Light, and Robin Gray,
With Mizpah. May that simple prayer come true!