CHAPTER VI
DAWN ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA
“Is it aslape I’ve been?” said Mr Button, suddenly awaking with a start.
He had shipped his oars just for a minute’s rest. He must have sleptfor hours, for now, behold! a warm, gentle wind was blowing, the moonwas shining, and the fog was gone.
“Is it dhraming I’ve been?” continued the awakened one. “Where am I atall, at all? O musha! sure, here I am. O wirra! wirra! I dreamt I’dgone aslape on the main-hatch and the ship was blown up with powther,and it’s all come true.”
“Mr Button!” came a small voice from the stern-sheets (Emmeline’s).
“What is it, honey?”
“Where are we now?”
“Sure, we’re afloat on the say, acushla; where else would we be?”
“Where’s uncle?”
“He’s beyant there in the long-boat—he’ll be afther us in a minit.”
“I want a drink.”
He filled a tin pannikin that was by the beaker of water, and gave hera drink. Then he took his pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket.
She almost immediately fell asleep again beside Dick, who had notstirred or moved; and the old sailor, standing up and steadyinghimself, cast his eyes round the horizon. Not a sign of sail or boatwas there on all the moonlit sea.
From the low elevation of an open boat one has a very small horizon,and in the vague world of moonlight somewhere round about it waspossible that the boats might be near enough to show up at daybreak.
But open boats a few miles apart may be separated by long leagues inthe course of a few hours. Nothing is more mysterious than the currentsof the sea.
The ocean is an ocean of rivers, some swiftly flowing, some slow, and aleague from where you are drifting at the rate of a mile an houranother boat may be drifting two.
A slight warm breeze was frosting the water, blending moonshine andstar shimmer; the ocean lay like a lake, yet the nearest mainland wasperhaps a thousand miles away.
The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts, but not longer thanthe thoughts of this old sailor man smoking his pipe under the stars.Thoughts as long as the world is round. Blazing bar rooms inCallao—harbours over whose oily surfaces the sampans slipped likewater-beetles—the lights of Macao—the docks of London. Scarcely evera sea picture, pure and simple, for why should an old seaman care tothink about the sea, where life is all into the fo’cs’le and out again,where one voyage blends and jumbles with another, where afterforty-five years of reefing topsails you can’t well remember off whichship it was Jack Rafferty fell overboard, or who it was killed who inthe fo’cs’le of what, though you can still see, as in a mirror darkly,the fight, and the bloody face over which a man is holding a kerosenelamp.
I doubt if Paddy Button could have told you the name of the first shiphe ever sailed in. If you had asked him, he would probably havereplied: “I disremimber; it was to the Baltic, and cruel cowld weather,and I was say-sick—till I near brought me boots up; and it was ‘O forould Ireland!’ I was cryin’ all the time, an’ the captin dhrummin meback with a rope’s end to the tune uv it—but the name of the hooker—Idisremimber—bad luck to her, whoever she was!”
So he sat smoking his pipe, whilst the candles of heaven burned abovehim, and calling to mind roaring drunken scenes and palm-shadowedharbours, and the men and the women he had known—such men and suchwomen! The derelicts of the earth and the ocean. Then he nodded off tosleep again, and when he awoke the moon had gone.
Now in the eastern sky might have been seen a pale fan of light, vagueas the wing of an ephemera. It vanished and changed back to darkness.
Presently, and almost at a stroke, a pencil of fire ruled a line alongthe eastern horizon, and the eastern sky became more beautiful than arose leaf plucked in May. The line of fire contracted into oneincreasing spot, the rim of the rising sun.
As the light increased the sky above became of a blue impossible toimagine unless seen, a wan blue, yet living and sparkling as if born ofthe impalpable dust of sapphires. Then the whole sea flashed like theharp of Apollo touched by the fingers of the god. The light was musicto the soul. It was day.
“Daddy!” suddenly cried Dick, sitting up in the sunlight and rubbinghis eyes with his open palms. “Where are we?”
“All right, Dicky, me son!” cried the old sailor, who had been standingup casting his eyes round in a vain endeavour to sight the boats. “Yourdaddy’s as safe as if he was in hivin; he’ll be wid us in a minit, an’bring another ship along with him. So you’re awake, are you, Em’line?”
Emmeline, sitting up in the old pilot coat, nodded in reply withoutspeaking. Another child might have supplemented Dick’s enquiries as toher uncle by questions of her own, but she did not.
Did she guess that there was some subterfuge in Mr Button’s answer, andthat things were different from what he was making them out to be? Whocan tell?
She was wearing an old cap of Dick’s, which Mrs Stannard in the hurryand confusion had popped on her head. It was pushed to one side, andshe made a quaint enough little figure as she sat up in the earlymorning brightness, dressed in the old salt-stained coat beside Dick,whose straw hat was somewhere in the bottom of the boat, and whoseauburn locks were blowing in the faint breeze.
“Hurroo!” cried Dick, looking around at the blue and sparkling water,and banging with a stretcher on the bottom of the boat. “I’m goin’ tobe a sailor, aren’t I, Paddy? You’ll let me sail the boat, won’t you,Paddy, an’ show me how to row?”
“Aisy does it,” said Paddy, taking hold of the child. “I haven’t asponge or towel, but I’ll just wash your face in salt wather and laveyou to dry in the sun.”
He filled the bailing tin with sea water.
“I don’t want to wash!” shouted Dick.
“Stick your face into the water in the tin,” commanded Paddy. “Youwouldn’t be going about the place with your face like a sut-bag, wouldyou?”
“Stick yours in!” commanded the other.
Mr Button did so, and made a hub-bubbling noise in the water; then helifted a wet and streaming face, and flung the contents of the bailingtin overboard.
“Now you’ve lost your chance,” said this arch nursery-strategist, “allthe water’s gone.”
“There’s more in the sea.”
“There’s no more to wash with, not till to-morrow—the fishes don’tallow it.”
“I want to wash,” grumbled Dick. “I want to stick my face in the tin,same’s you did; ’sides, Em hasn’t washed.”
“_I_ don’t mind,” murmured Emmeline.
“Well, thin,” said Mr Button, as if making a sudden resolve, “I’ll axthe sharks.” He leaned over the boat’s side, his face close to thesurface of the water. “Halloo there!” he shouted, and then bent hishead sideways to listen; the children also looked over the side, deeplyinterested.
“Halloo there! Are y’aslape— Oh, there y’are! Here’s a spalpeen with adhirty face, an’s wishful to wash it; may I take a bailin’ tin of— Oh,thank your ’arner, thank your ’arner—good day to you, and my respects.”
“What did the shark say, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline.
“He said: ‘Take a bar’l full, an’ welcome, Mister Button an’ it’swishful I am I had a drop of the crathur to offer you this finemarnin’.’ Thin he popped his head under his fin and went aslape agin;leastwise, I heard him snore.”
Emmeline nearly always “Mr Buttoned” her friend; sometimes she calledhim “Mr Paddy.” As for Dick, it was always “Paddy,” pure and simple.Children have etiquettes of their own.
It must often strike landsmen and landswomen that the most terribleexperience when cast away at sea in an open boat is the total absenceof privacy. It seems an outrage on decency on the part of Providence toherd people together so. But, whoever has gone through the experiencewill bear me out that in great moments of life like this the human mindenlarges, and things that would shock us ashore are as nothing outthere, face to face with eternity.
If so with grown-up people, how much more so with this old shell-backand his two charges?
And indeed Mr Button was a person who called a spade a spade, had nomore conventions than a walrus, and looked after his two charges justas a nursemaid might look after her charges, or a walrus after itsyoung.
There was a large bag of biscuits in the boat, and some tinnedstuff—mostly sardines.
I have known a sailor to open a box of sardines with a tin-tack. He wasin prison, the sardines had been smuggled into him, and he had nocan-opener. Only his genius and a tin-tack.
Paddy had a jack-knife, however, and in a marvellously short time a boxof sardines was opened, and placed on the stern-sheets beside somebiscuits.
These, with some water and Emmeline’s Tangerine orange, which sheproduced and added to the common store, formed the feast, and they fellto.
When they had finished, the remains were put carefully away, andthey proceeded to step the tiny mast.
The sailor, when the mast was in its place, stood for a moment restinghis hand on it, and gazing around him over the vast and voiceless blue.
The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday,and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: thehappiest thing in colour—sparkling, vague, newborn—the blue of heavenand youth.
“What are you looking for, Paddy?” asked Dick.
“Say-gulls,” replied the prevaricator; then to himself: “Not a sight ora sound of them! Musha! musha! which way will I steer—north, south,aist, or west? It’s all wan, for if I steer to the aist, they may be inthe west; and if I steer to the west, they may be in the aist; and Ican’t steer to the west, for I’d be steering right in the wind’s eye.Aist it is; I’ll make a soldier’s wind of it, and thrust to chance.”
He set the sail and came aft with the sheet. Then he shifted therudder, lit a pipe, leaned luxuriously back and gave the bellying sailto the gentle breeze.
It was part of his profession, part of his nature, that, steering,maybe, straight towards death by starvation and thirst, he was asunconcerned as if he were taking the children for a summer’s sail. Hisimagination dealt little with the future; almost entirely influenced byhis immediate surroundings, it could conjure up no fears from the scenenow before it. The children were the same.
Never was there a happier starting, more joy in a little boat. Duringbreakfast the seaman had given his charges to understand that if Dickdid not meet his father and Emmeline her uncle in a “while or two,” itwas because he had gone on board a ship, and he’d be along presently.The terror of their position was as deeply veiled from them as eternityis veiled from you or me.
The Pacific was still bound by one of those glacial calms that can onlyoccur when the sea has been free from storms for a vast extent of itssurface, for a hurricane down by the Horn will send its swell anddisturbance beyond the Marquesas. De Bois in his table of amplitudespoints out that more than half the sea disturbances at any given spaceare caused, not by the wind, but by storms at a great distance.
But the sleep of the Pacific is only apparent. This placid lake, overwhich the dinghy was pursuing the running ripple, was heaving to animperceptible swell and breaking on the shores of the Low Archipelago,and the Marquesas in foam and thunder.
Emmeline’s rag-doll was a shocking affair from a hygienic or artisticstandpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms;yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged thisfilthy and nearly formless thing. It was a fetish.
She sat nursing it on one side of the helmsman, whilst Dick, on theother side, hung his nose over the water, on the look-out for fish.
“Why do you smoke, Mr Button?” asked Emmeline, who had been watchingher friend for some time in silence.
“To aise me thrubbles,” replied Paddy.
He was leaning back with one eye shut and the other fixed on the luffof the sail. He was in his element: nothing to do but steer and smoke,warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze. A landsman would have beenhalf demented in his condition, many a sailor would have been taciturnand surly, on the look-out for sails, and alternately damning his souland praying to his God. Paddy smoked.
“Whoop!” cried Dick. “Look, Paddy!”
An albicore a few cables lengths to port had taken a flying leap fromthe flashing sea, turned a complete somersault and vanished.
“It’s an albicore takin’ a buck lep. Hundreds I’ve seen before this;he’s bein’ chased.”
“What’s chasing him, Paddy?”
“What’s chasin’ him?—why, what else but the gibly-gobly-ums!”
Before Dick could enquire as to the personal appearance and habits ofthe latter, a shoal of silver arrow heads passed the boat and flitteredinto the water with a hissing sound.
“Thim’s flyin’ fish. What are you sayin’—fish can’t fly! Where’s theeyes in your head?”
“Are the gibblyums chasing them too?” asked Emmeline fearfully.
“No; ’tis the Billy balloos that’s afther thim. Don’t be axin’ me anymore questions now, or I’ll be tellin’ you lies in a minit.”
Emmeline, it will be remembered, had brought a small parcel with herdone up in a little shawl; it was under the boat seat, and every nowand then she would stoop down to see if it were safe.