EPILOGUE
"1910"
Into a little-used dock space remote from harbour traffic she is putaside--out of date and duty, surging at her rusted moorings when thedock gates are swung apart and laden steamships pass out on the roadshe may no longer travel. The days pass--the weeks--the months; thetide ebbs, and comes again; fair winds carry but trailing smoke-wrackto the rim of a far horizon; head winds blow the sea mist in onher--but she lies unheeding. Idle, unkempt, neglected; and the haughtyfigurehead of her is turned from the open sea.
Black with the grime of belching factories, the great yards, that couldyet spread broad sails to the breeze, swing idly on untended braces,trusses creaking a note of protest, sheet and lift chains clankingdismally against the mast. Stout purchase blocks that once _chirrped_in chorus to a seaman's chantey stand stiffened with disuse; idle ragsof fluttering sailcloth mar the tracery of spar and cordage; in everylistless rope, every disordered ratline, she flies a signal ofdistress--a pennant of neglect.
Her decks, encumbered with harbour gear and tackle, are given over tothe rude hands of the longshoreman; a lumber yard for harbour refuse, adumping ground for the ashes of the bustling dock tugs. On the hatchcovers of her empty holds planks and stages are thrown aside, left aswhen the last of the cargo was dragged from her; hoist ropes, frayedand chafed to feather edges, swing from the yardarms; broken cargoslings lie rotting in a mess of grain refuse. The work is done. Thereis not a labourer's pay in her; the stevedores are gone ashore.
Though yet staunch and seaworthy, she stands condemned by modernconditions: conditions that call for a haste she could never show, fora burthen that she could never carry. But a short time, and her owners(grown weary of waiting a chance charter at even the shadow of afreight) may turn their thumbs down, and the old barque pass to herdoom. In happy case, she may yet remain afloat--a sheer hulk, drowsingthe tides away in some remote harbour, coal-hulking for hersteam-pressed successor.
And of her crew, the men who manned and steered her? Scattered afar onseven seas, learning a new way of seafaring; turning the grip that hadheld to a life aloft to the heft of a coalman's shovel, the deftfingers that had fashioned a wondrous plan of stay and shroud to thetouch of winch valve and lever. Only an old man remains, a warden, inkeeping with the lowly state of his once trim barque. Too old(conservative, may be) to start sea life anew, he has come toshipkeeping--a not unpleasant way of life for an aged mariner, so thathe can sit on the hatch on fine nights, with a neighbourly dockpoliceman or Customs watcher and talk of the sea as only he knows it.And when his gossip has risen to go the rounds, what links to the chainof memory may he not forge, casting his old eyes aloft to the gauntspars and their burden of useless sail? Who knows what kindly ghostsof bygone shipmates walk with him in the night watches, when the docklies silent and the flickering harbour lights are shimmering, reflectedin a broad expanse?
THE END
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