By Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
It was in a purple twilight of May that I first saw the lamp shining. For me, a child of seven, the voyage had been a tiring one: it seemed many hours since, with a ringing of bells, and hearts adventurously throbbing with the screw of our small steamboat, we had backed and swung, casting our wash in waves along the quay-walls, and so, after a pause during which we held our breath and drifted from the line of watching faces, had headed away for the great empty sky-line beyond which the islands lay. I knew that they lay yonder; for, the evening before, my father had led me up a tall hill and pointed them out to me— black specks in the red ball of the sun. But to-day, as hour after hour went by with the pant of the engines, the lift and slide of the Atlantic swell, the tonic wind humming against the stays, my eyes grew heavy, and at length my head dropped against my father’s shoulder. And then—to me it seemed the next instant—he woke me up and pointed towards the islands as they rose out of the indigo sea. At first they looked rather like low-lying clouds, but after a minute or two there was no mistaking them; for, as if they had just discovered us, they hung out lamp after lamp, some steady, some intermittent, but all of them gleaming yellow along the floor of the sea save one, a crimson light which hid and showed itself again northward of the rest. Crimson was my favourite colour in those days, and even as I dropped back into sleep I decided that I liked this lamp the best of all.
I awoke again to the sound of voices. We were passing a pilot-boat out there on the watch for ships. Her crew hailed us as we went by, and I saw their faces in the green radiance of our starboard light—gaunt, dark faces, altogether foreign. One of the men, the oldest, was bareheaded, with long grey locks, and wore a yellow neckcloth with his shirt open below it, and his naked chest showing. Their voices as they answered our skipper were clear and gay like the voices of children.
And, next, we were alongside a quay. Our seats, our bulwarks, even our decks, shone with dew. A crowd stood on the dim quay-edge and looked down on us, and chattered, but in soft voices. There was a policeman too, and I wondered how he came there. Above this shadowy moving crowd rode the stars I had known at home. I took my father’s hand. At the head of the gangway he stooped, hoisted me on his shoulders, and carried me up and up through narrow mysterious streets, around dark corners, past belated islanders hurrying down to the steamer; but always upward, until he pushed open a door and set me down blinking in a whitewashed bedroom lit by a couple of candles: and with that came sleep.
Happy days followed: blue and white days—days vaulted and floored with blue, flashing with white granite, with the rush of white water beneath the shadow of the leaning sail, with white cirrus clouds, with white wings of seabirds. It was the height of the nesting season, and the birds had brought us to the islands; my father with paint-box and camera—though, our time being short, he relied almost wholly on the latter. A naturalist, and by temper the gentlest of men, in his methods he was a born pioneer. You can hardly imagine how cumbrous and well-nigh hopeless a business it was in those days, not so long past, to pursue after wild life with a camera; but a thousand disheartening failures left him still grasping the inviolable shade, still confident that in photography, if it could only be given with rapidity and precision, lay the naturalist’s hope. Blurred negatives were all the spoil, and, sorry enough, we bore back after long days of tossing and climbing among the Outer Islands; but we had the reward of living among the birds. They filled our thoughts, our lives for the time:—great cormorants and northern divers, flitting red-legged oyster-catchers, shags spreading their wings to the wind and sun, sea-parrots, murrs, razor-bills, gannets questing by ones and twos—now poised, now dropping like plummets with a resounding splash; sandpipers and curlews dotting the beaches, and wading; tern, common gulls, herring-gulls, and kittiwakes, and, at nightfall, shearwaters popping from their holes and swimming and skimming around our boat as we headed for home. And then, the nests we discovered!—nay, the nests that at times we walked among, picking our steps like egg-dancers!—nests boldly planted on the bare rock ledges; nests snugly hidden among the clusters of blue thrift and the massed sea-pinks. They bloomed everywhere, these sea-pinks; sheet upon sheet of pale rose-colour, soon to show paler and fade before the rosy splendours of the mesembryanthemum. But the thrift had no rival to fear, condensing blue heaven and blue sea in the flower it lifted against both; and to lie prone and make a frame of it for some winding channel when the tide-rip flashed and tossed was to send the eye plunging into blue like an Eastern diver after pearls.
But when after sunset the blue deepened to violet, always in the heart of it glowed the crimson light upon Off Island. Night after night I watched it from my window, and wondered what manner of people they were who tended it, living out yonder on a rock where no grass grew, and in a roar of tide which the inhabitants of the greater islands heard on still days in the few inland valleys where it was possible to lose sight of the sea. I knew that thousands of puffins bred there, and we were to visit the rock some day; but, what with the tides and an all but ceaseless ground swell, our opportunity was long in coming, and Old Seth (our boatman) kept putting it off until I began to disbelieve in it altogether.
It came, though, at last, with a cloudless morning and a north-easterly breeze, brisk and steady, the clearest day in a fortnight of clear days. We were heading northward close-hauled through a sound dividing two of the greater islands—Old Seth at the tiller, my father tending the sheet, and I perched on the weather gunwale and peering over and down on the purple reefs we seemed to avoid so narrowly—when Seth lifted his voice in a shout, and then, with a word of warning, paid out sheet, brought the boat’s nose round and ran her in towards a silver-white beach on our left. As we downed sail, I saw a girl on the bank above the beach, leaning on a hoe and gazing at us over a low hedge of veronica.
Seth hailed her again, and she came running to the waterside. There she stood and eyed us shyly: a dark-haired girl, bare-headed, and with the dust of the potato-patch on her shoes and ankles.
“Any message for Reub Hicks, my dear? We’m bound over to Off Island.”
She hesitated, looking from Seth to us; and while she hesitated a flush mounted to her tanned face and deepened there.
“Come,” Old Seth coaxed her, “you needn’ be afeard to trust us with your little secrets.”
She seemed, at all events, to have made up her mind to trust us. From the pocket of her skirt she drew a tattered, paper-covered book, opened it, and was about to tear out a couple of pages, but paused.
“I’d like to send it,” said she; but still paused, and at length passed the open book to Seth.
“I see.” He nodded. “Seems a pity—don’t it?—to tear up good printed stuff. Tell ‘ee what,” he suggested: “you leave me take the book over as ‘tis, and this evenin’, if you’ll be waitin’ here, I’ll bring it back safe.”
She brightened at once. “That’ll do brave. Tell ‘en I hope he’s keepin’ well, and give my love to the others.”
“Right you are,” promised Seth cheerfully, pushing off.
“And don’t you forget!” she called after us.
Seth laughed. “That’s a very good girl, now,” he commented as he settled himself to the tiller again. “Must be a poor job courtin’ with a light-house man: not much walkin’ together for they. No harm, I s’pose, in your seem’ the maid’s book.” He handed it to my father, who shook his head.
“Aw,” went on Seth, guessing why he hesitated, “there’s no writin’ in it—only print.” He held the book open. It was a nautical almanack, and night by night the girl had pencilled out the hour of sunset. Night by night the first flash of the Off Island lamp carried her lover’s message to her, and, as Seth explained (but it needed no explanation), at that signal she blotted out yet one more of the days between her and the marriage day.
Off Island rose from the sea a sheer mass of granite, about a hundred and fifty feet in height, and all but inaccessible had it not been for a rock stair-way hewn out by the Brethren of the Trinity House. The keepers had spied our boat, and a tall young man stood on one of the lower steps to welcome us: not Reuben, but Reuben’s younger brother Sam. Reuben met us at the top of the staircase, where the puffins built so thickly that a false step would almost certainly send the foot crashing through the roof of one of their oddly shaped houses. He too was a tall youth; an inch or two taller, maybe, than his brother, whom we had left in charge of the boat. It would have puzzled you to guess their ages. Young they surely were, but much gazing in the face of the salt wind had creased the corners of their eyes, and their faces wore a beautiful gravity, as though they had been captured young and dedicated to some priestly service.
Reuben touched his cap, and, taking the book from Seth without a word, led us to the cottage, where his mother stood scouring a deal table: a little woman with dark eyes like beads, and thin grey hair tucked within a grey muslin cap. She had kilted her gown high and tucked up her sleeves, and looked to me, for all the world, like a doll on a penwiper. But her hands were busy continually; the small room shone and gleamed with her tireless cleansing and polishing; and in the midst of it her eyes sparkled with expectation of news from the outer world.
Seth understood her, and rattled at once into a recital of all the happenings on the islands: births, marriages, and deaths, sickness, courtship, and boat-building, the price of market-stuff, and the names of vessels newly arrived in the roads. But after a minute she turned from him to my father.
“’Tis all so narrow, sir—Seth’s news. I want to know what’s happenin’ in the world.”
Now, much was happening in those May weeks—much all over Europe, but much indeed in France, where Paris was passing through the sharp agonies of the Commune. The latest my father had to tell was almost a week old; but two days before we set sail for the islands the Versaillais troops had swept the boulevards, and every steamer had brought newspapers from the mainland. Mrs. Hicks’ eyes grew bigger and rounder as she listened; but she had listened a very short while before she cried—
“Father must hear this! He’s up polishin’ the lantern, sir. Begging your pardon, but he must hear you tell it; he must indeed.” With immense pride she added, “He was over to France, one time.”
She marched us off to the lantern, up the winding stairway, up the ladder, and into the great glass cage, where stood an old man busily polishing the brass reflector.
“Father, here’s a gentleman come, with news from France!”
As the old man came forward with a fumbling step, my father drew a thick bundle from his coat pocket. “I’ve brought you some newspapers,” said he; “they will tell you more than I can.”
He held them out, but the wife interposed hurriedly. “Not to him, sir. Give them to Reuben, if you please, and thank you. But he, sir—he’s blind.”
I looked, as my father looked. A film covered both pupils of the old man’s eyes.
“He’ve been blind these seven years,” Reuben explained in a low voice. “Me and Sam are the regular keepers now; but the Board lets him live on here, and he’s terrible clever at polishing.”
“He knows the lamp so well as ever he did,” broke in the old woman; “the leastest little scratch, he don’t miss it. How he doesn’ break his poor neck is more’n I can tell; but he don’t—though ‘tis a sore trial.”
While they explained, the old man’s hand went out to caress the lamp, but stopped within an inch of the sparkling lenses.
“Iss,” said he musingly, “with this here cataract I misses a brave lot. There’s a lot to be seen up here, for a man with eyesight. Will ‘ee tell me, please sir, what’s the news from France? I was over there, one time.”
It turned out he had once paid a visit to one of the small Breton ports: Roscoff I think it was, and have a suspicion that smuggling lay at the bottom of the business there.
“Well now,” he commented as my father told something of his tale, “I wouldn’ have thought it of the Johnnies. They treated me very pleasant, and I speak of a man as I find en.” He turned his sightless eyes on the family he had brought up to think well of Frenchmen.
“They are different folk in Paris.”
“Iss, that’s a big place. Cherbourg’s a big place, too, they tell me. I came near going there, one time; but my travellin’s over. It do give a man something to think over, though. I wish my son here could have travelled a bit before settlin’ down.”
But Reuben, on the far side of the lantern, was turning the pages of the tattered almanack.
“Well-a-well!” said the old woman. “A body must be thankful for good sons, and mine be that. But I’d love to end my days settin’ in a window and watchin’ folks go by to church.”
It was past seven o’clock when we hoisted sail again, and as we drew near the greater islands a crimson flash shot out over the sea in our wake. On a dim beach ahead stood a girl waiting.
TWO BOYS.
By Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
I daresay they never saw, and perhaps never will see, one another. I met them on separate railway journeys, and the dates are divided by five years almost. One boy was travelling third-class, the other first. The age of each when I made his very slight acquaintance (with the one I did not even exchange a word) was about fourteen. Almost certainly their lives and their stories have no connection outside of my thoughts. But I think of them often, and together. They have grown up; the younger will be a man by this time; if I met them now, their altered faces would probably be quite strange to me. Yet the two boys remain my friends, and that is why I take leave to include them among these stories of my friends.
I.
The first boy (I never heard his name) was seated in the third-class smoking-carriage when I joined my train at Plymouth; seated beside his mother, an over-heated countrywoman in a state of subsiding fussiness. We had a good five minutes to wait, but, as such women always will, she had made a bolt for the first door within reach. Of course she found herself in a smoking compartment, and of course she disliked tobacco, but could not, although she made two false starts, make up her mind to change. She had dropped upon one of the middle seats and dragged her boy down into the next, thus leaving me the only vacant corner. The others were occupied by a couple of drovers and a middle-aged man with a newspaper, which he read column by column, advertisements and all, without raising his eyes for a moment.
The guard just outside the carriage door had his whistle to his lips, and his green flag lifted ready to wave, when the woman asked— “Can anyone tell me if this train goes to London?”
The drovers and I assured her that it did.
“It stops at Bristol, doesn’t it? My ticket is for Bristol.”
The train was in motion by this time. We set her mind at ease. She opened a limp basket (called a “frail” I believe), produced an apple and offered it to the boy. He shook his head.
He was a passably good-looking coltish boy, in a best suit which he had outgrown, and a hard black hat, the brim of which annoyed him when he leaned back. A binding of black braid advertised what it was meant to conceal—that the cuffs of his jacket had been lengthened; yet as he sat with his hands crossed in his lap he displayed a deal of wrist.
His eyes took my liking at once; eyes of a good grey-black—or, shall I say, of a grey with fine glooms in it. They looked at you straight but without staring; neither furtively nor with embarrassment, nor curiously, nor again sleepily, but with that rare blend of candour and reserve which allowed you to see that he was thinking his own thoughts, and had no reason to be ashamed of them. Having taken stock of us, he gazed thoughtfully out of window. His mother sighed from time to time, and searched her basket to make sure that this, that, or the other trifle had not been left behind. The drovers conversed apart; the middle-aged man (who sat facing the engine) read away pertinaciously at his newspaper, which he kept folded small by reason of the strong southerly breeze playing in through the open window; and I divided my attention between the landscape and the map at the beginning of Stevenson’s Kidnapped—then barely a week old, a delight to be approached with trepidation.
So we were sitting when the train crawled over the metals beyond Teignmouth Station, gathered speed, and swung into full view of the open sea. As the first strong breath of it came rushing in at the window I heard a shuffle of feet. The boy had risen, and with his eyes was asking our leave to stand by the door. I drew in my knees to make way for him, and so, after a moment, did the middle-aged man. He did not thank us, but stepped past politely enough and stood with his hand on the leathern window-strap. I stared out of the little side window, wondering what had caught his attention.
And while I wondered, suddenly the child broke into song!
It was the queerest artless performance: it had no tune in it, no intelligible words—it was just a chant rising and falling as the surf at the base of the sea-wall boomed and tossed its spray on the wind fanning his face. And while he chanted, his serious eyes devoured the blue leagues right away to the horizon.
The drovers at the far end of the compartment turned their faces inward and grinned. The middle-aged man looked across at me behind the boy’s back with half a smile and resumed his reading. The mother laughed apologetically—
“’Tis his way. He won’t be so crazed for it in a few weeks’ time, I reckon. He’s goin’ up to Bristol to be bound apprentice to his uncle. His uncle’s master of a sailing ship.”
But the boy did not hear. There are four or five tunnels in the red sandstone between Teignmouth and Dawlish, and through these he sang on in a low repressed voice, which broke out high and clear and strong as we swept again into the large wind and sunshine. At Dawlish Station we drew up for a minute, and a porter on the up platform nodded to one of the drovers and asked, “What’s the matter with ‘ee, in there?” “Nothin’, nothin’; we’ve got a smokin’-concert on,” said the drover. Across the rails a group waiting for the down train stood and stared at the boy, whispered, and smiled; and I can still recall the fascinated gaze of a plump urchin of six as he gripped with one hand a wooden spade and with the other his mother’s skirt.
But the boy sang on heedless, and still sang on as we left Dawlish behind. There was no jubilation in his chant, but through it all there ran and rang out from time to time a note of high challenge. Perhaps I read too much in it, for in the heart of a boy many thoughts sing together before they come to birth,—and to the destinies we see so distinctly he marches through a haze, drawn onward by incommunicable yearnings. But as, unseen by him, I glanced up at his blown hair and eager parted lips, the chant seemed to grow articulate—
“O Sea, I am coming! O fate, waiting and waited for, I salute you! Friend or adversary, we meet to try each other: for your wonders I have eyes, for your trials a heart. Use me, for I am ready!”
As we turned inland and ran beside the shore of the Exe, his song died down and ceased. For a while he stood conning the river, the boats, the red cliffs and whitewashed towns on the farther bank; and so, as we came in sight of the cathedral towers, stepped back and dropped into his seat.
“Well now,” said his mother, “you be a funny boy!”
For a moment he did not seem to hear; then started and came out of his day-dream with a furious blush. I looked away.
II.
The second boy wore a well-cut Eton suit, and sat in the smoking compartment of a padded corridor carriage, with a silk-lined overcoat beside him and a silver-mounted suit-case in the rack above. He was not smoking, nor was he reading; but he sat on a great pile of papers and magazines, and stared straight in front of him—that is to say, straight at me.
His stare, though constant and unrelenting, was not in the least offensive—it had no curiosity in it: he had obviously been contemplating the cushions before I intruded, and since I had chosen to occupy his field of vision he contemplated me.
I had no speaking acquaintance with the boy; but he bore the features of his family, and his initials were on the suit-case above. So I knew him for the only son of a man who had once shown me civility, the youngest and least extravagantly wealthy of three rich brothers. Since one of these brothers had never married and now was not likely to, it lay beyond guessing what wealth the boy would inherit some day.
He was by no means ill-looking, and quite certainly no fool. His face carried the stamp of his father’s ability. It puzzled me what he could be doing with that pile of papers and magazines; or why, having burdened himself with them, he should choose to sit and stare instead of reading them. For his station lay but a twenty minutes’ run below mine, and it was impossible that in the time he could have glanced through the half of them.
He had been staring at me, or through me, maybe for half an hour, when our train slowed down and came to a standstill above the steep valley between Bodmin Road and Doublebois. After a couple of minutes’ wait, the boy rose and went to the window in the corridor to see what was happening; and I took this opportunity to glance across at the papers scattered on the vacant seat. They included three or four sixpenny and threepenny magazines; a large illustrated paper (Black and White, I think); half a dozen penny weeklies—Tit-bits, Answers, Pearson’s Weekly, Cassell’s Saturday Journal; I forget what others: halfpenny papers in a heap—all kinds of Cuts, Snippets, Siftings, Echoes, Snapshots, and Side-lights; Pars about People, Christian Sweepings, Our Happy Fireside, and The Masher. Many lay face downward, coyly hiding their titles but disclosing such headlines as “Facts about the Flag,” “Books which have influenced the Bishop of London,” “He gave ‘em Fits!” “Our Unique Competition,” “Mr. Cecil Rhodes: a Powerful Personality,” “What becomes of old Stage Scenery.”
In the midst of my survey the train began to move forward again, and the boy came back to his seat.
“It’s only some platelayers on the viaduct,” he explained. “They held up their flag against us. I suppose they were just finishing a job.”
“Nasty place to leave the rails,” said I, glancing over the parapet upon the green tree-tops fifty feet below us.”
“I was thinking that,” said he, and a queer tremor in his young voice made me glance at him sharply. Then suddenly I understood—or thought I did.
“You, at any rate, are pretty well insured,” said I.
“Twenty thousand pounds, and a little over: the coupons cost four and twopence altogether, and then at the end of the journey you can use up all the reading.”
“Wonderful!” I kept a serious face. “And I suppose all this time you’ve been staring at me, amazed by the recklessness of your elders.”
He flushed slightly. “Have I been staring? I beg your pardon, I’m sure: it’s a trick I have. I begin thinking of things, and then—”
“Thinking, I suppose, of how it would feel to be in a collision, or what it would be like to leap such a parapet as that and find ourselves dropping—dropping—into space? But you shouldn’t, really. It isn’t healthy in a boy like you: and if you’ll listen to one who has known what nerves are, it may too easily grow to mean something worse.”
“But it isn’t that—exactly,” he protested; “though of course all that comes into it. I’m not a—a funk, sir! I was thinking more of the —of what would come afterwards, you know.”
“Oh dear!” I groaned to myself. “It’s worse than ever: here’s a little prig worrying about his soul. I shouldn’t advise you to trouble about that, either,” I said aloud.
“But I don’t trouble about it.” He hesitated, and stumbled into a burst of confidence. “You see, I’m no good at games—athletics and that sort of thing—”
Again he stopped, and I nodded to encourage him.
“And I’m no swell at schoolwork, either. I went to school late, and after home it all seems so young—if you understand?”
I thought I did. With his polite grown-up manner I could understand his isolation among the urchins, the masters, and all the interests of an ordinary school.
“But my father—you know him, don’t you?—he’s disappointed about it. He’d like me to bring home prizes or cups. I don’t think he’d mind what it was, so long as he could be proud about it. Of course he never says anything: but a fellow gets to know.”
“I daresay you’re right,” I said. “But what has this to do with insuring yourself for twenty thousand pounds?”
“Well, you see, I’m to go into the Bank some day: and I expect my father thinks I shall be just as big a duffer at that. I know he does. But I’m not, if he’d only trust me a bit. So now if we were to smash up—collide, go off the rails, run over a bridge, or something of that sort—just think how he’d feel when he found out I’d cleared twenty thousand by it!”
“So that’s what you were picturing to yourself?”
He nodded. “That, and the smash, and all. I kept saying, ‘Now—if it comes this moment?’ And I wondered a little how it would take you suddenly: whether you’d start up or fall forward—and if you would say anything.”
“You are a cheerful companion!”
He grinned politely. “And afterwards—just before the train stopped I had a splendid idea. I began making my will. You see, I know something about investments. I read about them every day.”
“In the Boy’s Own Paper?”
“We take in the Standard in our school library, and I have it all to myself unless there’s a war on. I’ve heard my father say often that it’s a very reliable paper, and so it is, for I’ve tried it for two years now. So if I left a will telling just how the twenty thousand ought to be invested, it would open my father’s eyes more than ever.”
“My dear sir,” said I, “don’t be in a hurry. Serve out your time among the barbarians at school, and I’ll promise you in time your father’s respectful astonishment.”
These were my two boys; and you may wonder why I always think of them together. I do, though: and, what is more, I find that together they help to explain to me my country’s greatness.