Читать книгу The Gentleman - Alfred Ollivant - Страница 22

Clear of the harbour, the boy's hat blew overboard.

He tasted his lips, and found them salt.

Never at sea before, yet somehow it was all strangely familiar, and strangely dear.

The feel of the ship, alive beneath his feet; the lift, the plunge, the swaying rhythm of the bows; the roll of the masts against a patch of stars—there was music in them all; a music that stirred his heart; the music of inherited Memory.

The sea was in his blood; and his blood began to sing to it. Old voices from the Past, that Past which is still the Present, woke within him. Old memories, borne down the ages upon the dark river of race life, haunted him dimly. Old and terrible experiences—murders and mutinies; distresses on rafts; thirsts and screaming madnesses; naked men howling on hen-coops under waste skies, sea-birds wailing desolately overhead; great ships, man-forsaken, God-forgotten, wallowing blindly amid green mountains that flowed and foamed upon them—shadows in shoals, they rose, glimmered, and were gone in the twilight waters of returning consciousness.

Sea-wolves in beaked ships from the Baltic; pirate-adventurers who had sailed and sacked under the Conqueror; pioneers of new-found lands: blood of his blood, and brain of his brain, they lived again, roused from centuries of sleep by the stir and whiff and secret business of the dark waters.

The mystery of it thrilled the boy: the blind night, the moving waters, the wind in his hair, the crash of spray upon the deck—old friends all, he recognised them as such, and found them beautifully familiar.

He was flowing down the River of Eternal Life and one with it. He was: he had been: he always would be. There was no Death, no Time. Life was One and Everlasting.

His nostrils wide, renewing old impressions, he walked forward, proud and self-composed.

True son of the sea, yet he knew himself her master. She was his woman, to be loved and lorded over. He found himself brooding over her dark beauty with the stern pride of possession. Manhood was rushing in on him: its passions, its power, its splendid cruelties. He began to tingle to them.

They had not met, it seemed, to know each other, these two world-old friends, for half a generation. Now once more they came together, heart to heart, man to woman, loving faithfully as ever.