A little cluster gathered on this slope between camp and tidemark. The cluster grew till the limited area was black with men in calked boots and mackinaw clothing, men with unshaven stubble on their chins and strong calloused hands. They sat and stood there without the customary shouting and laughter. It seemed as if every man in the camp had been drawn to look silently down on the white yacht.
The Kowloon stretched her graceful length along the landing. Her paint was like virgin snow, and from stem to stern she glistened with brass and copper and varnished teak. On her forward deck two or three of her crew in spotless white ducks leaned on the rail, looking at the men ashore. Aft a gramophone exhaled the latest jazz. There were guests present, and now that the fog had gone with the sun, they were on deck, dipping and swaying and gyrating to the music.
Suddenly a man on the bank began to sing. A solitary voice, a rich baritone, it cut across the canned syncopation and lifted with the diapason of the rapids as a tonal background.
There was nothing strange in that. Men often sang there, soloists and impromptu quartettes. They sang to amuse themselves, or because they were happy, for any or all the reasons that move men to song. It was not the fact of the man singing. It was his song.
"Ye sons of freedom awake to glory.
Hark! Hark! What myriads bid you rise."
The third line came with a volume that burst the evening hush like the roll of drums. From a hundred-odd throats it poured in rhythmic unison, with a passionate earnestness, and something akin to a threat.
"Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary,
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
Behold their tears and hear their cries.
Shall hateful tyrants mischief breeding
With hireling hosts a ruffian band
Affright and desolate the land,
While truth and liberty lie bleeding?
To arms, to arms! Ye brave.
The avenging sword unsheathe.
March on. March on. All hearts resolved
On liberty ... or death!"
The last word struck like the blow of a ponderous hammer falling on muffled iron. Then silence,—as if it had been halted by some invisible conducting baton which had welded that impromptu chorus into a single harmonious whole to chant that old, old song of revolt against oppression.
Who that has ever heard a marching regiment sing the Marseillaise but knows the clang of its ending, like the snick of a breech-bolt or a great sword clashed home in its scabbard.
No one moved. No voices lifted in words or laughter. Rod, sitting with his chin in his palms, listened with a curious tension for a break in that sudden hush. The massed group on the bank remained immobile, very quiet, as if something profoundly sobering had come over them.