Lot & Company
9781465675651
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
All would have happened differently for Bellair had he been drowsy as usual on this particular Sunday afternoon. The boarding-house was preparing for its nap; indeed already half enveloped, but there came to Bellair’s nostrils a smell of carpets that brought back his first passage up stairs five years before. The halls were filled with greys—dull tones that drove him forth at last. It was November, and the day didn’t know what to do next. Gusts of seasonable wind, wisps of sunshine, threats of rain, and everywhere Bellair’s old enemy—the terrifying Sabbath calm, without which the naked granite soul of New York would remain decently hid. Sundays had tortured him from the beginning. It was not so bad when the garment was on—the weave of millions. He walked east with an umbrella, thinking more than observing, crossed to Brooklyn and followed the water-front as closely as the complication of ferries, pier-systems and general shipping would permit. Finally he came to a wooden arch, marked Hatmos & Company, the gate of which was open. Entering, he heard the water slapping the piles beneath, his eyes held in fascination to an activity ahead. In the wonder of a dream, he realised that this was a sailing-ship putting forth. On her black stern, he read Jade of Adelaide printed in blue of worn pigment. A barkentine, her clipper-built hull of steel, her lines satisfying like the return of a friend after years. Along the water-line shone the bright edge of her copper sheathing; then a soft black line smooth as modelled clay where she muscled out for sea-worth, and covered her displacement in the daring beauty of contour. Still above was the shining brass of her row of ports on a ground of weathered grey, and the dull red of her rail. Over all, and that which quickened the ardour of Bellair’s soul, was the mystery of her wire rigging and folded cloths against the smoky horizon, exquisite as the frame of a butterfly to his fancy. His emotion is not to be explained; nor another high moment of his life which had to do with a flashing merchantman seen from the water-front at San Francisco—square-rigged throughout, a cloud of sail-cloth, her royals yet to be lifted, as she got underweigh. He knew that considerable canvas was still spread between California, Australia and the Islands, but what a well-kept if ancient maiden of the Jade’s species was doing here in New York harbour, A. D. Nineteen hundred and odd, was not disclosed to Bellair until afterward, and not clearly then. He knew her for a barkentine, and in the intensely personal appeal of the moment he was a bit sorry for the blend. To his eyes the schooner-rig of mizzen and main masts was not to be compared for beauty to the trisected fore. Still he reflected that square-rigged throughout, she would be crowded with crew to care for her, and that her concession to trade was at least not outright. Schooner, bark and brig—he seemed to know them first hand, not only from pictures and pages of print, though there had been many long evenings of half-dream with books before him—books that always pushed back impatiently through the years of upstart Steam into Nature’s own navigation, where Romance has put on her brave true form in the long perspective. Ships that really sailed were one of Bellair’s passions, like orchards and vined stone-work—all far from him apparently and out of the question—loved the more because of it.... He watched with rapt eyes now, estimated the Jade’s length at one-seventy-five and was debating her tonnage when a huge ox of a man appeared from the cabin (while the Jade slid farther out), waddled aft as if bare-footed, spoke to an officer there, and then held up two brown hairy, thick-fingered hands, palms extended to the pier—as if to push Brooklyn from him forever.... The officer’s voice just reached shore, but not his words. A Japanese woman appeared on the receding deck.
