VI
SUPPER BEER
(1914)
1
With the turn of the tide the wind backed and swept a wet mist in from the sea. During the day promenaders had thronged the stone pier that partly encircled the deserted harbour; townspeople for the most part—stolid, sombre-clad folk, taking their constitutionals soberly, as if they formed part of some inflexible schedule that regulated their lives. In the afternoons a sprinkling of infantrymen from the fort intermingled with them; loose-limbed young conscripts in grey uniforms, with heads too small for their bodies—a phenomenon partly accounted for by the zeal of the garrison barber, and partly by the size of their grotesque boots.
Now, however, as the evening set in with every promise of dirty weather, the promenaders turned in pairs towards the town. The angler who had been fishing in the shelter of the stone beacon slowly wound in his lines, gathered together his paraphernalia, and departed also. A watchman, carrying a short ladder over his shoulder, came and examined the automatic revolving gear of the lantern, and after polishing the reflector, briskly returned to the town, taking his ladder with him.
With the exception of a solitary figure pacing backwards and forwards under the lee of the rough wall, the pier was soon deserted. But this figure's constitutional appeared to partake of the nature of a vigil, for every few minutes he paused and stared seaward into the mist through a pair of binoculars.
His face, as much of it as was visible above the collar of his ulster, was that of an elderly man, thin and aristocratic-looking. When not gazing out to sea, he contemplated his slow-pacing feet with mild, thoughtful blue eyes through rimless pince-nez. One cheek-bone was ornamented by a duelling-sabre scar.
Half an hour passed, while the spray drifted over the sea-wall and collected under-foot in shallow pools that alternately mirrored the waning light and darkened as a fresh gust of wind hurled itself in from the North Sea. Out at the entrance to the harbour a solitary gull faced the wind with steady beats of its powerful wings, calling with querulous persistency. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there along the deserted sea-front when the watcher at the pier-head lowered his glasses, hastily wiped the lenses, and raised them again to his eyes. Then he made a guttural observation in an undertone.
Out of the grey smudge of sea and sky a small vessel suddenly became an object distinct, making for the mouth of the harbour: a short, squat craft, with high bows and a tall raking funnel set far aft. To judge by the derricks topped up to her mainmast she had every appearance of being a trawler; yet for a trawler returning in the height of the fishing season she gave evidence of very empty holds by the buoyancy of her movements. She carried no lights, though the dusk was now settling fast.