Chapter 14

It seems to me that all my life I have had memories of old boats. One of my earliest recollections is of _Old Ironsides_, in the Charlestown Navy Yard, dismantled and decked over, but saved from destruction by Dr. Holmes's poem. What thrilling visions it awoke to climb aboard her and tread her decks! Acres of spinnaker and topgallants broke out aloft, cannon boomed, smoke rolled, "grape and canister" flew through the air, chain shot came hurtling, and the Stars and Stripes waved through it all, triumphant. The white ironclads out in the channel (for in those days they were white) evoked no such visions. Another memory is of a childhood trip to New Bedford and a long walk for hours by the water front, out on green and rotting piers where chunky, square-rigged whalers, green and rotting, too, were moored alongside. The life of the whaler was in those days something infinitely fascinating to us boys. We read of the chase, the hurling of the harpoon, the mad ride over the waves towed by the plunging monster. And here were the very ships which had taken the brave whalers to the hunting grounds, here on their decks were some of the whale boats which had been towed over the churned and blood-flecked sea! Why should they be green and rotting now? They produced upon me an impression of infinite sadness. It seemed as if a great hand had suddenly wiped a romantic bloom off my vision of the world.

But it was not long after that I knew the romance of a launching. It was at Kennebunkport in Maine. All summer the ship yards on either side of the river, close to the little town and under the very shadow of the white meeting house steeple, had rung with the blows of axe and hammer. The great ribs rose into place, the sheathing went on, the decks were laid, the masts stepped; finally the first rigging was adjusted. After the workmen left in the late afternoon, we boys swarmed over the ships--three-masters, smelling deliciously of new wood and caulking, and played we were sailors. When the rope ladders were finally in place, we raced up and down them, sitting in the crow's nest on a line with the church weather vane, and pretending to reef the sails. It was an event when the ships were launched. The tide was at the flood, gay canoes filled the stream along both banks, hundreds of people massed on the shore. A little girl stood in the bow with a bottle of wine on a string. An engine tooted, cables creaked, and down the greased way slid the ship, with a dip and a heave when she hit the water that made big waves on either side and set the canoes to rocking madly, while the crowd cheered and shouted. After the launching, the schooners were towed out to sea, and down the coast, to be fitted elsewhere. We boys followed them in canoes as far as the breakwater, and watched them disappear. Soon their sails would be set, and they would join the white adventurers out there on the world rim.

Where are they now, I wonder? Are they still buffeting the seas, or do they lie moored and outmoded beside some green wharf, their days of usefulness over? I remember hoping, as I watched them pass out to sea, that they would not share the fate of the unknown craft which lay buried in the sands a mile down the coast. It was said that she came ashore in the "Great Storm" of 1814 (or thereabouts). Nothing was left of her in our day but her sturdy ribs, which thrust up a few feet above the sand, outlining her shape, and were only visible at low water. On a stormy day, when the seas were high, I used to stand at the head of the beach and try to picture how she drove up on the shore, shuddering deliciously as each great wave came pounding down on all that was left of her oaken frame. When I read in the newspaper of a wreck I thought of her, and I think of her to this day on such occasions, thrusting up black and dripping ribs above the wet sands at low water, or vanishing beneath the pounding foam of the breakers.

If you take the shore line train from Boston to New York, you pass through a sleepy old town in Connecticut where a spur track with rusty rails runs out to the wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel steamers which once plied the Sound. It served somebody's purpose or pocket better to discontinue the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of work in the ship yards close by, the old town passed into a state of salty somnolence. The harbour is glassy and still, opening out to the blue waters of the Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves, where once the gang planks shook with the tread of feet and the rumble of baggage trucks. Many a time, as the train paused at the station, I have watched the black stacks for some hint of smoke, hoping against hope that I should see the old ship move, and turn, and go about her rightful seafaring. But it was never to be. There were only ghosts in engine room and pilot house. Like the abandoned dwelling on the upland road to Monterey, these steamers were mute witnesses to a vanished order. But always as the train pulled out from the station I sat on the rear platform and watched the white town and the white steamers and the glassy harbour slip backward into the haze--and it seemed as if that haze was the gentle breath of oblivion.

I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water and the sight of sails. Yet sometimes there comes over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as the lust for salt which stampedes the reindeer of the north. I must gaze on the unbroken world-rim, I must feel the sting of spray, I must hear the rhythmic crash and roar of breakers and watch the sea-weed rise and fall where the green waves lift against the rocks. Once in so often I must ride those waves with cleated sheet and tugging tiller, and hear the soft hissing song of the water on the rail. And "my day of mercy" is not complete till I have seen some old boat, her seafaring done, heeled over on the beach or amid the fragrant sedges, a mute and wistful witness to the romance of the deep, the blue and restless deep where man has adventured in craft his hands have made since the earliest sun of history, and whereon he will adventure, ardently and insecure, till the last syllable of recorded time.

ZEPPELINITIS[26]

PHILIP LITTELL

[Footnote 26: Reprinted by permission from _Books and Things_, by Philip Littell. Copyright 1919, by Harcourt, Brace and Howe, Inc.]

Much reading of interviews with returning travellers who had almost seen Zeppelins over London, and of wireless messages from other travellers who had come even nearer seeing the great sight, had made me, I suppose, morbidly desirous of escape from a city where other such travellers were presumably at large. However that may be, when Mrs. Watkin asked me to spend Sunday at her place in the country, I broke an old habit and said I'd go. When last I had visited her house she worshipped success in the arts, and her recipe was to have a few successes to talk and a lot of us unsuccessful persons to listen. At that time her æsthetic was easy to understand. "Every great statue," she said, "is set up in a public place. Every great picture brings a high price. Every great book has a large sale. That is what greatness in art means." Her own brand of talk was not in conflict with what she would have called her then creed. She never said a thing was very black. She never said it was as black as the ace of spades. She always said it was as black as the proverbial ace of spades. Once I ventured to insinuate that perhaps it would be more nobly new to say "as black as the proverbial ace of proverbial spades," but the suggestion left her at peace with her custom. Well, when I got to her house last week, and had a chance to scrutinize the others, they did not look as if she had chosen them after any particular pattern.

Dinner, however, soon enabled us all to guess the model from which Mrs. Watkin had striven to copy her occasion. I was greatly relishing the conversation of my left-hand neighbor, a large-eyed, wondering-eyed woman, who said little and seemed never to have heard any of the things I usually say when dining out, and who I dare swear would have looked gratefully surprised had I confided to her my discovery that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Before we were far gone with food the attention of this tactful person was torn from me by our hostess, whose voice was heard above the other voices: "Oh, Mr. Slicer, do tell us your experience. I want _all_ our friends to hear it." Mr. Slicer, identifiable by the throat-clearing look which suffused his bleached, conservative face, was not deaf to her appeal. He had just returned from London, where he had been at the time of the Zeppelin raid, and although he had not himself been so fortunate as to see a Zeppelin, but had merely been a modest witness of the sporting fortitude with which London endured that visitation, the Zeppelin-in-chief had actually been visible to the brother of his daughter's governess. "At the noise of guns," said Mr. Slicer, "we all left the restaurant where we were dining, Mrs. Humphry Ward, George Moore, Asquith, Miss Pankhurst and I, and walked, not ran, into the street, where it was the work of a moment for me to climb a lamp-post, whence I obtained a nearer view of what was going on overhead. Nothing there but blackness." Instinctively I glanced at Mrs. Watkin, upon whose lips the passage of words like "as the proverbial ace of spades" was clearly to be seen. "Of course," Mr. Slicer went on, "I couldn't indefinitely hold my coign of vantage, which I relinquished in favor of Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom at her laughing request George Moore and I gave a leg up. She remained there a few moments, one foot on my shoulder and one on Sir Edward Carson's--she is not a light woman--and then we helped her down, Asquith and I. When I got back to my lodgings in Half-Moon Street I found that the governess's brother, who had been lucky enough to see a Zeppelin, had gone home. I shall not soon forget my experience." This narrative was wonderful to my left-hand neighbor. It made her feel as if she had really been there and seen it all with her own eyes.

Mr. Mullinger, who was the next speaker on Mrs. Watkin's list, and who had returned from Europe on the same boat with Mr. Slicer, had had a different experience. On the evening of the raid he was in a box at the theatre where Guitry, who had run over from Paris, was appearing in the little rôle of _Phèdre_, when the noise of firing was heard above the alexandrines of Racine. "With great presence of mind," so Mr. Mullinger told us, "Guitry came down stage, right, and said in quizzical tone to us: '_Eh bien, chère petite folle et vieux marcheur_, just run up to the roof, will you please, and tell us what it's all about, don't you know.' The Princess and I stood up and answered in the same tone, 'Right-o, _mon vieux_,' and were aboard the lift in no time. From the roof we could see nothing, and as it was raining and we had no umbrellas, we of course didn't stay. When we got back I stepped to the front of the box and said: 'The Princess and Mr. Mullinger beg to report that on the roof it is raining rain.' The words were nothing, if you like, but I spoke them just like that, with a twinkle in my eye, and perhaps it was that twinkle which reassured the house and started a roar of laughter. The performance went on as if nothing remarkable had happened. Wonderfully poised, the English." And this narrative, too, was so fortunate as to satisfy my left-hand neighbor. It made her feel as if she had been there herself, and heard all these wonderful things with her own ears.

After that, until near the end of dinner, it was all Zeppelins, and I hope I convey to everyone within sound of my voice something of my own patriotic pride in a country whose natives when abroad among foreigners consort so freely and easily with the greatest of these. No discordant note was heard until the very finish, when young Puttins, who as everybody knows has not been further from New York than Asbury Park all summer, told us that on the night of the raid he too had been in London, where his only club was the Athenæum. When the alarm was given he was in the Athenæum pool with Mr. Hall Caine, in whose company it has for years been his custom to take a good-night swim. "Imagine my alarm," young Puttins continued, "when I saw emerging from the surface of the waters, and not five yards away from the person of my revered master, a slender object which I at once recognized as a miniature periscope. I shouted to my companion. In vain. Too late. A slim fountain spurted fountain-high above the pool, a dull report was heard, and the next instant Mr. Hall Caine had turned turtle and was sinking rapidly by the bow. When dressed I hastened to notify the authorities. The pool was drained by noon of the next day but one. We found nothing except, near the bottom of the pool, the commencement of a tunnel large enough for the ingress and egress of one of those tiny submersibles the credit for inventing which neither Mr. Henry Ford nor Professor Parker ever tires of giving the other. I have since had reason to believe that not one swimming-pool in Great Britain is secure against visits from these miniature pests. Indeed, I may say, without naming any names," ... but at this moment Mrs. Watkin interrupted young Puttins by taking the ladies away. She looked black as the proverbial.

October, 1915.

End of Project Gutenberg's Modern American Prose Selections, by Various