And yet the books that gave us this splendid dominion, where are they now? In truth, I cannot say. Examination of recent boys’ books has convinced me that the old spirit is lacking, for if pirates are there, it is only as the hapless victims of horrible British crews with every virtue save that one which youth should cherish most, the revolutionary spirit. Who would be a midshipman when he might be a pirate? Yet all the books would have it so, and even Mr. Kenneth Grahame, who knows everything that is worth knowing, does not always take the right side in such matters. The grown-up books are equally unsatisfactory to the inquiring mind. “Treasure Island,” which is sometimes loosely referred to as if it were a horn-book for young pirates, hardly touches the main problems of pirate life at all. Stevenson’s consideration for “youth and the fond parient” made him leave out all oaths. No ships are taken, no lovely females captured, nobody walks the plank, and Captain John Silver, for all the maimed strength and masterfulness that Henley suggested to the author, falls lamentably short of what a pirate should be. Captain Teach, of the Sarah, in the “Master of Ballantrae,” is better, and there were the makings of a very good pirate captain in the master himself, but this section of the book is too short to supply our requirements. The book must be all pirates. Defoe’s “Captain Singleton” repents and is therefore disqualified, and Marryat’s “Pirate” is, as Stevenson said, “written in sand with a saltspoon.” Mr. Clark Russell, in one of his romances, ingeniously melts a pirate who has been frozen for a couple of centuries into life, but though he promises well at first, his is but a torpid ferocity, and ends, as it began, in words. Nor are the histories of the pirates more satisfying. Captain Johnson’s “History of Notorious Pirates” I have not seen, but any one who wishes to lose an illusion can read the trial of William Kidd and a few of his companions in the State trials of the year 1701. The captain of the Adventure Galley appears to have done little to merit the name of pirate beyond killing his gunner with a bucket, and the miserable results of his pilferings bear no relationship to the enormous hoard associated with his name in “The Gold Bug” of Poe, though there is certainly a familiar note in finding included among his captives a number of barrels of sugar-candy, which were divided in shares among the crew, the captain himself having forty shares. The Turkish pirates mentioned in “Purchas” cut a very poor figure. You can read there how four English youths overcame a prize crew of thirteen men who had been put in the ship Jacob. In a storm they slew the pirate captain, for with the handle of a pump “they gave him such a palt on the pate as made his brains forsake the possession of his head.” They then killed three of the other pirates with “cuttleaxes,” and brought the ship safely into Spain, “where they sold the nine Turkes for galley-slaves for a good summe of money, and as I thinke, a great deale more than they were worth.” Not thus would the chronicles have described the pirates who fought and caroused with such splendid devotion in my youth. To die beneath the handle of a pump is an unworthy end for a pirate captain. The “History of the Buccaneers of America,” written by a brother of Fanny Burney, a book which was the subject of one of Mr. Andrew Lang’s appreciative essays, is nearer the mark, for among other notable fellows mentioned therein is one François L’Olonnois, who put to death the whole crew of a Spanish ship, ninety men, by beheading them, performing himself the office of executioner. One of the gentlemen in this book turned buccaneer in order to pay his debts, while it is told of another that he shot one of his crew in church for behaving irreverently during Mass. Sir Henry Morgan and Richard Sawkins performed some pretty feats of piracy, but their main energies were concerned in the sacking of towns, and the whole book suffers from an unaccountable prejudice which the author displays against the brave and hard-working villains of whom he writes.
In truth, these real pirates are disappointing men to meet. They are usually lacking in fierceness and in fidelity to the pirate ideals of courage and faithfulness to their comrades, while the fine nobility of character which was never absent from those other pirates is unknown in the historical kind. Few, if any, of them merit the old Portuguese punishment for pirates, which consisted in hanging them from the yards of their own ship, and setting the latter to drift with the winds and waves without rudder or sails, an example for rogues and a source of considerable danger to honest mariners.
If that were a fitting end for great knaves, the meaner ruffians must be content with the pump-handle and the bucket.
It is hard if our hearts may not go out to those gloomy vessels, with their cargoes of gold and courage and rum, that sail, it seems, the mental seas of youth no more. Were they really bad for us, those sanguinary tussles, those star-lit nights of dissipation? A pinafore would wipe away a deal of blood, and the rum, though we might drink it boiling like Quilp, in no wise lessened our interest in home-made cake. But these regrets are of yesterday, and to-day I must draw what consolation I may from the kindly comment of Mr. Lang: “Alluring as the pirate’s profession is, we must not forget that it had a seamy side, and was by no means all rum and pieces-of-eight. And there is something repulsive to a generous nature in roasting men because they will not show you where to steal hogs.”
THE FLUTE-PLAYER
He used to play to me in the magic hour before bedtime, when, in the summer, the red sun threw long shadows across the lawn, and in winter the fire burned brighter and brighter in the hearth. This was the hour when all the interminable squabbles of the schoolroom were forgotten, and even the noisiest of us would hush his voice to listen drowsily to a fairy-tale, or to watch the palaces raise aloft their minarets, and crumble to dull red ash in the heart of the fire. It was then that I would see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Even in the most thrilling moments of fairy stories, when Cinderella lost her crystal slipper or Sister Ann saw the cloud of dust from the summit of Bluebeard’s tower, his shrill melodies would ring in my ears and quicken my sleepy senses with the desire to hear more of this enchanted music. I knew that it was real magic, but I did not find it strange, because as far as I knew I had heard it all my life. Perhaps he had played to me when I yet lay in my cradle, and watched the night-light winking on the nursery ceiling; but I did not try to remember whether this was so. I was content to accept my strange musician as a fact of my existence, and to feel a sense of loss on the rare evenings when he failed me. I did not know how to dance, but sometimes I would tap my feet on the floor in time to the music, till some one would tell me not to fidget. For no one else would either see him or hear him, which proved that it was real magic, and flattered my sense of possession. It was evident that he came for me alone.
The years passed, and in due course the imaginative graces of my childhood were destroyed by the boys of my own age at school. They compelled me to exchange a hundred star-roofed palaces, three distinct kingdoms of dreams, and my enchanted flute-player for a threadbare habit of mimicry that left me cold and unprotected from the winds in the large places of life. There was something at once pathetic and ridiculous in our childish efforts to imitate our elders, but as it seemed that our masters and grown-up relatives were in the conspiracy to make us materialistically wise before our time, a boy would have needed a rare force of character to linger with his childhood and refuse to ape the man. So, for a while, I saw my glad musician no more, though sometimes I thought I heard him playing far away, and the child within me was warmed and encouraged even while my new-found manhood was condemning the weakness. I knew now that no man worthy of the name was escorted through life by a fairy flute-player, and that dreamers and wool-gatherers invariably sank to be poets and musicians, persons who wear bowler-hats with frock-coats, have no crease in their trousers, and come to a bad end. Fortunately, all education that is repressive rather than stimulating is only skin-deep, and it was inevitable that sooner or later I should meet the flute-player again. One Saturday afternoon in high summer I avoided cricket and went for a long walk in the woods, moved by a spirit of revolt against all the traditions and conventions of boy-life; and presently, in a mossy clearing, all splashed and wetted by little pools of sunlight, I found him playing to an audience of two squirrels and a redstart. When he saw me he winked the eye that glittered over his parading fingers, as though he had left me only five minutes before, but I had not listened long before I realised that I must pay the price of my infidelity. It was the old music and the old magic, but try as I might I could not hear it so clearly as I had when I was a child. The continuity of my faith had been broken, and though he was willing to forgive, I myself could not forget those dark years of doubt and denial; and while I often met him in the days that followed, I never won back to the old childish intimacy. I sought his company eagerly and listened passionately to his piping, but I was conscious now that this was a strange thing, and sometimes when he saw by my eyes that I was moved by wonder rather than by the love of beauty, he would put his flute in his pocket and disappear. The world is an enchanted place only to the incurious and tranquil-minded.
Nevertheless, though like all boys I had been forced to discard my childish dreams before I had really finished with them, the lovely melodies of the flute-player served to enrich my latter years at school with much of the old enchantment. Often enough he would play to me at night during preparation, and I would spend my time in trying to set words to his tunes instead of doing my lessons. It was then that I regretted the lost years that had dulled my ear and prevented me from winning the inmost magic of his song, compared with which my verses seemed but the shadow of a shadow. Yet I saw that he was content with my efforts, and gradually made the discovery that while great achievement is granted to the fortunate, it is the fine effort that justifies a man to himself. What did it matter whether my songs were good or bad? They were the highest expression I could find for the rapture of beauty that had filled my heart as a child when I had been gifted to see life with clean and truthful eyes. For the songs the flute-player played to me were the great dreams of my childhood, the dreams that a wise man prolongs to the day of his death.
I do not hear him often now, for I have learnt my lesson, and though my hands tremble and my ear deceives me, I am by way of being a flute-player myself. This article, it is clear, is a child’s dream, and so have been, and will be, I hope, all the articles I shall ever write. What else should we write about? We have learnt a few long words since we grew up, and a few crimes, but no new virtues. That is why I like to get back to the nursery floor, and play with the old toys and think the old thoughts. We knew intuitively then a number of beautiful truths that circumstance appears to deny now, and we grown men are the poorer in consequence. It is folly to find life ugly when the flute lies within our reach and we can pipe ourselves back to the world of beauty with a song made of an old dream.
As for the flute-player, if I see him no more with wakeful eyes, I know that he is never very far away. Likely enough one of these wintry evenings, in the hour before bedtime, when the fire burns brighter and brighter in the hearth, I shall look up and see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Not many nights ago I heard some one playing the flute out in the street, and I went down and found a poor fellow blowing his heart out for rare sous. There was not much enchantment about him—he had been dismissed from a music-hall orchestra for drinking red wine to excess—but he was a real flute-player, and I could well imagine that such a man might be driven to intemperance by the failure to achieve those “unheard melodies” not to be detected by the sensual ear. To be a bad flute-player must be rather like being a bad poet, a joyous but sadly finite life. He was a sad dog, this earthly musician, and he frankly conceived the ideal state as a kind of communal Bodega where thirsty souls could find peace in satiety. I gave him fivepence to help him on his way, and left him to make doleful music in the night till he had enough money to supply his crimson dreams. But he ought not to have said that my flute-player was only an amateur.