Martin Hyde | Page 5

as it had run from the heat
eighteen years before. I used to long for that icicle: it would have made
such fine bullets for my sling. I have said that Fish Lane, where my
uncle lived, was narrow. It was very narrow. The upper stories of the
houses opposite could be touched from my bed-room window with an
eight-foot fishing rod. If one leaned well out, one could see right into
their upper rooms. You could even hear the people talking in them.
At the back of the house there was a garden of potherbs. It sloped down
to the river-bank, where there were stairs to the water. The stairs were
covered in, so as to form a boat-house, in which (as I learned
afterwards) my uncle's skiffs were kept. You may be sure that I lost no
time in getting down to the water, after I had breakfasted with my uncle,
on the morning after my arrival.
A low stone parapet, topped by iron rails, shut off the garden from the
beach. Just beyond the parapet, within slingshot, as I soon proved, was
the famous Pool of London, full of ships of all sorts, some with flags
flying. The mild spring sun (it was early in April) made the sight
glorious. There must have been a hundred ships there, all marshalled in
ranks, at double-moorings, head to flood. Boats full of merchandise
were pulling to the wharves by the Custom House. Men were working
aloft on the yards, bending or unbending sails. In some ships the sails
hung loose, drying in the sun. In others, the men were singing out as
they walked round the capstan, hoisting goods from the hold. One of
the ships close to me was a beautiful little Spanish schooner, with her
name La Reina in big gold letters on her transom. She was evidently
one of those very fast fruit boats, from the Canary Islands, of which I
had heard the seamen at Oulton speak. She was discharging oranges
into a lighter, when I first saw her. The sweet, heavy smell of the
bruised peels scented the river for many yards.
I was looking at this schooner, wishing that I could pass an hour in her
hold, among those delicious boxes, when a bearded man came on deck

from her cabin. He looked at the shore, straight at myself as I thought,
raising his hand swiftly as though to beckon me to him. A boat pushed
out instantly, in answer to the hand, from the garden next to the one in
which I stood. The waterman, pulling to the schooner, talked with the
man for a moment, evidently settling the amount of his fare. After the
haggling, my gentleman climbed into the boat by a little rope-ladder at
the stern. Then the boatman pulled away upstream, going on the last of
the flood, within twenty yards of where I stood.
I had watched them idly, attracted, in the beginning, by that sudden
raising of the hand. But as they passed me, there came a sudden puff of
wind, strong enough to flurry the water into wrinkles. It lifted the
gentleman's hat, so that he saved it only by a violent snatch which made
the boat rock. As he jammed the hat down he broke or displaced some
string or clip near his ears. At any rate his beard came adrift on the side
nearest to me. The man was wearing a false beard. He remedied the
matter at once, very cleverly, so that I may have been the only witness;
but I saw that the boatman was in the man's secret, whatever it was. He
pulled hard on his starboard oar, bringing the boat partly across the
current, thus screening him from everybody except the workers in the
ships. It must have seemed to all who saw him that he was merely
pulling to another arch of London Bridge.
I was not sure of the man's face. It seemed handsome; that was all that I
could say of it. But I was fascinated by the mystery. I wondered why he
was wearing a false beard. I wondered what he was doing in the
schooner. I imagined all sorts of romantic plots in which he was taking
part. I watched his boat go through the Bridge with the feeling that I
was sharing in all sorts of adventures already. There was a fall of water
at the Bridge which made the river dangerous there even on a flood tide.
I could see that the waves there would be quite enough for such a boat
without the most tender handling. I watched to see how they would
pass through. Both men stood up, facing forwards, each taking an oar.
They worked her through, out of sight,