CHAPTER XXII
Upon the same Sunday afternoon, in a small port on the eastern Spanish seaboard, Giles Legard leant over the rail of a long, forlorn-looking, wooden jetty. Against the black piles which upheld it the sea heaved inwards in smooth ripples. Every now and then wisps of dark seaweed floated by, and up the sides of the piles the green slime gleamed in the hot sunshine. Keeping a precarious foothold on the slippery cross-beams with his bare, brown feet, a red-capped fisher boy plucked mussels, dropping them into a basket slung on his arm. The sea, hushed and bright, stretched past the jetty to the town, which rose in compact white tiers under the lee of a sandy waste of hills; on the hard line of the eastern horizon the dim haze of an island was visible.
A brig, with sails set, was sidling out of the harbour against a head wind. A row of fishermen and loafers, barelegged or booted, with swarthy faces, and blue clothing, came running down the jetty, stretching a tow-rope hove to them from the brig, and shouting in a babel of uncouth words. Legard, with his hands in his pockets, and his cap drawn over his eyes, turned his back against the rail, and watched them idly.
They strained on the rope, laughing and talking in a strange medley of words and dialects. Then, as if by consent, they ceased hauling, and paused in relaxed attitudes, shouting irrelevantly at the brig a jumble of foreign words. A bearded man, in a peaked cap, standing on the poop, put his hand to his mouth, and the hail came with a steady ring over the water, “Pūlley! Hāūley!”
The words had an inflection, as of a man speaking to children, a kind of compassionate superiority. The chain of men strained forward again upon the rope, and, with a clatter of feet and voices, went surging up the pier.
“Pulley! Hauley!” Words comprehended of every nation under the sun, words by the aid of which men make shift to go through the business of life. They struck a chord in Legard’s heart that had not sounded for many years. They roused in him a longing for action, and a feeling of pride, such as one has when one reads of some gallant feat done by a countryman. He watched the Union Jack stream out in the wind as the brig cleared the end of the jetty with a queer feeling, that made him shuffle his feet on the tarred boards, and swear softly to himself. Then he took out a cigar, and bit the end very hard, looking into the distance over the sea.
The men, broken up now into groups, lolled on the jetty sides, or lounged back up the pier talking and spitting. They looked at him as they passed, with dark eyes, curious or indifferent, and exchanged remarks in low voices. He was a strange bird to them; an English traveller did not often find his way to their town.
Gradually, under the brassy sun, the jetty resumed its look of desolation.
Giles took his cap off, and wiped his forehead. His face, which was tanned a deep sallow brown, had somewhat hardened and set; the features looked as if always held in a vice of constraint. There was no trace of the old languor in his eyes, they looked up clear and straight from under his brows, but they had a rather wistful expression, as if always seeking for something. His dark hair had grown very grey at the sides of his head and on his temples. In his thin flannel suit his tall figure looked lean to emaciation, but his muscles, from constant hard exercise, were like whipcord. He had that day returned to the town, whence he had started a month before on a restless wander through a wild part of Spain.
He replaced his cap, and began to pace uneasily up and down the jetty, stopping every now and then to take a long look under his hand towards the town. He muttered to himself at intervals. He had begun rather to have the habit of talking to himself—a habit which tells of much loneliness....