There was no one on the quay. The street was deserted, but the lights within the cottages glowed warmly through red blinds here and there. The majority of windows were, however, secured with a shutter, screwed tight from within. The man trotted steadily up the street. He had an unmistakable air of discipline. It was only six o’clock, but night had closed in three hours ago. The coast-guard looked neither to one side nor the other, but ran on at the pace of one who had run far and knows that he cannot afford to lose his breath; for his night’s work was only begun.
The coast-guard station stands on the left-hand side of the street, a long, low house in a bare garden. In answer to the loud summons, a red-faced little man opened the door and let out into the night a smell of bloaters and tea—the smell that pervades all Farlingford at six o’clock in the evening.
“Something on the Inner Curlo Bank,” shouted the coast-guard in his face, and turning on his heel, he ran with the same slow, organised haste, leaving the red-faced man finishing a mouthful on the mat.
The next place of call was at River Andrew’s, the little low cottage with rounded corners, below the church.
“Come out o’ that,” said the coast-guard, with a contemptuous glance of snow-rimmed eyes at River Andrew’s comfortable tea-table. “Ring yer bell. Something on the Inner Curlo Bank.”
River Andrew had never hurried in his life, and like all his fellows, he looked upon coast-guards as amateurs mindful, as all amateurs are, of their clothes.
“A’m now going,” he answered, rising laboriously from his chair. The coast-guard glanced at his feet clad in the bright green carpet-slippers, dear to seafaring men. Then he turned to the side of the mantelpiece and took the church keys from the nail. For everybody knows where everybody else keeps his keys in Farlingford. He forgot to shut the door behind him, and River Andrew, pessimistically getting into his sea-boots, swore at his retreating back.
“Likely as not, he’ll getten howld o’ the wrong roup,” he muttered; though he knew that every boy in the village could point out the rope of “John Darby,” as that which had a piece of faded scarlet flannel twisted through the strands.
In a few minutes the man, who hastened slowly, gave the call, which every man in Farlingford answered with an emotionless, mechanical promptitude. From each fireside some tired worker reached out his hand toward his most precious possession, his sea-boots, as his forefathers had done before him for two hundred years at the sound of “John Darby.” The women crammed into the pockets of the men’s stiff oilskins a piece of bread, a half-filled bottle—knowing that, as often as not, their husbands must pass the night and half the next day on the beach, or out at sea, should the weather permit a launch through the surf.
There was no need of excitement, or even of comment. Did not “John Darby” call them from their firesides or their beds a dozen times every winter, to scramble out across the shingle? As often as not, there was nothing to be done but drag the dead bodies from the surf; but sometimes the dead revived—some fair-haired, mystic foreigner from the northern seas, who came to and said, “T’ank you,” and nothing else. And next day, rigged out in dry clothes and despatched toward Ipswich on the carrier’s cart, he would shake hands awkwardly with any standing near and bob his head and say “T’ank you” again, and go away, monosyllabic, mystic, never to be heard of more. But the ocean, as it is called at Farlingford, seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of such Titans to throw up on the rattling shingle winter after winter. And, after all, they were seafaring men, and therefore brothers. Farlingford turned out to a man, each seeking to be first across the river every time “John Darby” called them, as if he had never called them before.