This Mortal Coil | Page 8

with profound pride that she couldn't capsize in the worst storm that ever blew out of an English sky, even if she tried to. She drew no more than three feet of water at a pinch; and though it was scarcely true, as Relf had averred, that a heavy dew was sufficient to float her, she could at least go anywhere that a man could wade up to his knees without fear of wetting his tucked-up breeches. This made her a capital boat for a marine artist to go about sketching in; for Relf could lay her alongside a wreck on shallow sands, or run her up a narrow creek after picturesque waterfowl, or approach the riskiest shore to the very edge of the cliffs, without any reference to the state of the tide, or the probable depth of the surrounding channel.
"If she grounds," the artist said enthusiastically, expatiating on her merits to his new passenger, "you see it doesn't really matter twopence; for the next high tide'll set her afloat again within six hours. She's a great opportunist: she knows well that all things come to him who can wait. The 'Mud-Turtle' positively revels in mud; she lies flat on it as on her native, heath, and stays patiently without one word of reproach for the moon's attraction to come in its round to her ultimate rescue."
The yawl's accommodation was opportunist too: though excellent in kind, it was limited in quantity, and by no means unduly luxurious in quality. Her deck was calculated on the most utilitarian principles just big enough for two persons to sketch abreast; her cabin contained three wooden bunks, with their appropriate complement of rugs and blankets; and a small and primitive open stove devoted to the service of the ship's cookery, took up almost all the vacant space in the center of the well, leaving hardly room for the self-sacrificing volunteer who undertook the functions of purveyor and bottle-washer to turn about in. But the lockers were amply stored with fresh bread, tinned meats, and other simple necessaries for a week's cruise; while food for the mind existed on a small shelf at the stern in the crude shape of the "Coaster's Companion," the Sailing Directions issued by Authority of the Honorable Brethren of the Trinity House, and the charts of the Thames, constructed from the latest official surveys of her Majesty's Board of Admiralty. Thus equipped and accoutered Warren Relf was accustomed to live an outdoor life for weeks together with his one like-minded chum and Companion; and if the spray was sometimes rather moist, and the yellow fog rather thick and slabby, and the early mornings rather chill and raw, and the German Ocean rather loppy and aggressive on the digestive faculties, yet the good dose of fresh air, the delicious salty feeling of the free breeze, and the perpetual sense of ease and lightness that comes with yachting, were more than enough fully to atone to an enthusiastic marine artist for all these petty passing inconveniences.
As for Hugh Massinger, a confirmed landsman, the first few hours' sail down the crowded Thames appeared to him at the outset a perfect phantasmagoria of evervarying perils and assorted terrors. He composed his soul to instant death from the very beginning. Not, indeed, that he minded one bit for that: the poet dearly loved danger, as he loved all other forms of sensation and excitement: they were food for the Muse; and the Muse, like Blanche Amory, is apt to exclaim, "II me faut des emo- But the manifold novel forms of enterprise as the lumbering little yawl made her way clumsily among the great East-Indiamen and big ocean-going steamers, darting boldly now athwart the very bows of a huge Monarch-hner, insinuating herself now with delicate precision between the broadsides of two heavy Rochester barges, and just escaping collision now with some laden collier from Cardiff or Newcastle, were too complicated and too ever-pressing at the first blush for Massinger fully to take in their meaning at a single glance.
The tidal Thames is the Cheapside of the ocean, a mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and by land. It's all very well going down the river on the Antwerp packet or the outward-bound Xew-Zealander; you steam then at your ease along the broad unencumbered central channel, with serene confidence that a duly qualified pilot stands at your helm, and that everybody else will gladly give way to you, for the sake of saving their own bacon. But it's quite another matter to thread your way tortuously through that thronged and bustling highway of the shipping interest in a center-board yawl of seventeen tons registered burden, manned by a single marine artist and an amateur passenger of uncertain seamanship. Hugh Massinger was at