第47章

The tale seems an authentic recollection.He related it to me many times,using the very same words.The grandfather honoured me by a special and somewhat embarrassing predilection.Extremes touch.He was the oldest member by a long way in that company,and I was,if I may say so,its temporarily adopted baby.He had been a pilot longer than any man in the boat could remember;thirty--forty years.He did not seem certain himself,but it could be found out,he suggested,in the archives of the Pilot-office.He had been pensioned off years before,but he went out from force of habit;and,as my friend the patron of the company once confided to me in a whisper,"the old chap did no harm.He was not in the way."They treated him with rough deference.One and another would address some insignificant remark to him now and again,but nobody really took any notice of what he had to say.He had survived his strength,his usefulness,his very wisdom.He wore long,green,worsted stockings pulled up above the knee over his trousers,a sort of woollen nightcap on his hairless cranium,and wooden clogs on his feet.Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant.Half a dozen hands would be extended to help him on board,but afterward he was left pretty much to his own thoughts.Of course he never did any work,except,perhaps,to cast off some rope when hailed,"He,l'Ancien!let go the halyards there,at your hand"--or some such request of an easy kind.

No one took notice in any way of the chuckling within the shadow of the hood.He kept it up for a long time with intense enjoyment.Obviously he had preserved intact the innocence of mind which is easily amused.But when his hilarity had exhausted itself,he made a professional remark in a self-assertive but quavering voice:

"Can't expect much work on a night like this."

No one took it up.It was a mere truism.Nothing under canvas could be expected to make a port on such an idle night of dreamy splendour and spiritual stillness.We would have to glide idly to and fro,keeping our station within the appointed bearings,and,unless a fresh breeze sprang up with the dawn,we would land before sunrise on a small islet that,within two miles of us,shone like a lump of frozen moonlight,to "break a crust and take a pull at the wine bottle."I was familiar with the procedure.

The stout boat emptied of her crowd would nestle her buoyant,capable side against the very rock--such is the perfectly smooth amenity of the classic sea when in a gentle mood.The crust broken and the mouthful of wine swallowed--it was literally no more than that with this abstemious race--the pilots would pass the time stamping their feet on the slabs of sea-salted stone and blowing into their nipped fingers.One or two misanthropists would sit apart,perched on boulders like manlike sea-fowl of solitary habits;the sociably disposed would gossip scandalously in little gesticulating knots;and there would be perpetually one or another of my hosts taking aim at the empty horizon with the long,brass tube of the telescope,a heavy,murderous-looking piece of collective property,everlastingly changing hands with brandishing and levelling movements.Then about noon (it was a short turn of duty--the long turn lasted twenty-four hours) another boatful of pilots would relieve us--and we should steer for the old Phoenician port,dominated,watched over from the ridge of a dust-gray,arid hill by the red-and-white striped pile of the Notre Dame de la Garde.

All this came to pass as I had foreseen in the fullness of my very recent experience.But also something not foreseen by me did happen,something which causes me to remember my last outing with the pilots.It was on this occasion that my hand touched,for the first time,the side of an English ship.

No fresh breeze had come with the dawn,only the steady little draught got a more keen edge on it as the eastern sky became bright and glassy with a clean,colourless light.I t was while we were all ashore on the islet that a steamer was picked up by the telescope,a black speck like an insect posed on the hard edge of the offing.She emerged rapidly to her water-line and came on steadily,a slim hull with a long streak of smoke slanting away from the rising sun.We embarked in a hurry,and headed the boat out for our prey,but we hardly moved three miles an hour.