“Papa, papa — the flag! The flag’s just THIS minnit gone up.”
“The flag! Papa’s this minnit gone up.”
The children came rushing in with the news, Lucie in her zeal to echo Cuffy bringing out her words the wrong way round. But HOW funny! Papa was fast asleep in his chair, and at first when he waked up couldn’t tell where he was. He called out quite loud: “Where am I? Where the dickens am I?” and looked as if he didn’t know them. But as soon as he did, he ran to the window. “Quite right! Splendid! So it is. — Now who saw it first?”
“Lucie,” said Cuffy stoutly; for he had seen first ALL the times; Luce never would, not if she was old as old. And so Lucie received the hotly coveted penny, her little face, with the fatly hanging cheeks that made almost a square of it, pink with pleasure. But also with embarrassment. Would God be VERY angry with Cuffy for tellin’ what wasn’t true? (She thought God must look just like Papa when he was cross.)
Papa scuttled about. Shouting.
“Mary! Where are you? The flag’s gone up. Quick! My greatcoat. My scarf.”
“Yes, yes, I’m coming. — But . . . why . . . you haven’t even got your boots on! Whatever have you been doing since breakfast?”
“Surely to goodness, I can call a little time my own? . . . for reading and study?”
“Oh, all right. But fancy you having to go out again to-day. With such a sea running! And when you got so wet yesterday.”
“It’s those second-hand oilskins. I told you I ought to have new ones. — Now where are my papers? — Oh, these confounded laces! They WOULD choose just this moment to break. It’s no good; I can’t stoop, it sends the blood to my head.”
“Here . . . put up your foot!” And going on her knees, Mary laced his boots. TILL she got him off! The fuss — the commotion!
Standing in the doorway Cuffy drank it all in. This WAS an exciting place to live. To have to rush like mad as soon as ever a flag went up. If only someday Papa would take him with him. To go down to the beach with Papa, and row off from the jetty — Papa’s own jetty! — and sit in the boat beside him, and be rowed out by Papa’s own sailors, to the big ship that was waiting for him. Waiting just for Papa. When he was a big man he’d be a doctor, too, and have a jetty and a boat of his own, and be rowed out to steamers and ships, and climb on board, and say if they were allowed to go to Melbourne. — But how FUNNY Papa was, since being here. When his voice got loud it sounded like as if he was going to scream. And then . . . he’d said he was busy . . . when he was really asleep. He believed Papa was afraid . . . of Mamma. Knew she’d be cross with him for going to sleep again directly after breakfast. It made him want to say: Oh, DON’T be afraid, Papa, big men never do be . . . only little children like Lucie. (Specially not one’s Papa.)
Slamming the driving-gate behind him — with such force that it missed the latch, and swinging out went to and fro like a pendulum — Mahony stepped on to the wide, sandy road, over which the golden-flowered capeweed had spread till only a narrow track in the centre remained free. It was half a mile to the beach, and he covered the ground at a jog-trot; for his fear of being late was on a par with his fear that he might fail to see the signal: either through a temporary absence of mind, or from having dozed off (the sea air was having an unholy effect upon him) at the wrong moment. Hence his bribe to the children to be on the look-out. — Now on, past neat, one-storeyed weatherboards, past Bank and church and hotels he hurried, breathing heavily, and with a watchful eye to his feet. For his left leg was decidedly stiffish; and, to spare it, his pace had to be a long, springing step with the right, followed by a shorter one with the left: a gait that had already earned him the nickname in Shortlands of “Old Dot-and-go-one.”
Taking the Bluff, with its paths, seats and vivid grass-carpet, in his stride, he scrambled down the loose sand of the cliff, through the young scrub and the ragged, storm-bent ti-trees, which were just bursting into pearly blossom. And the result of this hurry-scurry was that he got to the beach too soon: his men had only just begun to open up the boat-shed. Fool that he was! But it was always the same . . . and would be to-morrow, and the day after that: when his fears seized him, he was powerless against them. Having irritably snapped his fingers and urged on the crew with an impatient: “Come, come, my good men, a little more haste, if you please!” he retired to the jetty, where he paced to and fro.
But at last the boat was launched, the sailors had grasped their oars: he, too, might descend the steps and take his seat. — And now he knew that all the press and fluster of the past half-hour had been directed towards this one, exquisite moment: in which they drew out to ride the waves. Of the few pleasures left him, it was by far the keenest: he relived it in fancy many a night when his head lay safe on the pillow. To-day was a day, too, after his own heart. A high sea ran, and the light boat dived, and soared, and fell again, dancing like a cockleshell. The surface of the water was whipt by a wind that blew the foam from the wave-crests in cloudlets of steam or smoke. The salt spray was everywhere: in your eyes, your mouth, your hair. Overhead, between great bales of snowy cloud, the sky was gentian-blue; blue were the hills behind the nestling white huts of the quarantine station on the other side of the Bay; indigo-blue the waters below. Intoxicated by all this light and colour, at being one again with his beloved element, he could have thrown back his head and shouted for joy; have sent out cries to match the lovely commotion of wind and sea. But there was no question of thus letting himself go: he had perforce to remain as dumb as the men who rowed him. Above all, to remember to keep his eyes lowered. For the one drawback to his pleasure was that he was not alone. He had a crew of six before him, six pairs of strange eyes to meet; and every time he half-closed his own and expanded his nostrils, the better to drink in the savour of the briny, or, at an unusually deep dip, let fly a gleeful exclamation, they fixed him stonily, one and all. There was no escaping them, pinned to his seat as he was: nor any room for his own eyes . . . nowhere to rest them . . . except on the bottom of the boat. Only so could he maintain his privacy. — Eyes . . . human eyes. Eyes . . . SPIES, ferreting out one’s thoughts . . . watchdogs on the qui vive for one’s smallest movement . . . spiders, sitting over their fly-victims, ready to pounce. Eyes. Slits into the soul; through which you peered, as in a twopenny peepshow, at clandestine and unedifying happenings. A mortal’s outside the NE PLUS ULTRA of dignity and suavity . . . and then the eyes, disproving all. Oh! it ought not to be possible, so to see into another’s depths; it was indecent, obscene: had he not more than once, in a woman’s comely countenance, met eyes that were hot, angry, malignant? . . . unconscious betrayers of an unregenerate soul. None should outrage him in like fashion: he knew the trick and guarded against it, by keeping his own bent rigidly on the boards at his feet . . . on the boot-soles of the men in front of him. But smiles and chuckles were not so easily subdued: they would out . . . and out they came.
As the boat drew nearer the vessel that lay to, awaiting them, a new anxiety got the upper hand. Wrinkling his brows, he strained to see what was in store for him. Ha! he might have known it: another of those infernal rope ladders to be scaled. He trembled in advance. For you needed the agility of an ape to swing yourself from the tossing boat to the bottom rung of the ladder; the strength of a navvy to maintain your hold, once you were there, before starting on the precarious job of hoisting yourself, rung by rung, up the ship’s steep side. And to-day, with this wild sea running, it was worse than ever — was all the men could do to bring the boat close enough, yet not too close, alongside, for him to get a grip on the rope. The seat he stood on was slippery, his oilskins encumbered him: he made one attempt after another. Each time, before he had succeeded in jerki............