The Clearchus did not get off that day, and at six o’clock my father and I walked home together, my heart like lead. The evening passed somehow. We all went up to bed at nine, as we always did, while the bell on the Stone Church was ringing the curfew; but we might as well have stayed up for two or three hours longer, for I could not sleep, and I am sure that my mother could not. It had begun to rain, a dreary drizzle, before I finally fell asleep.

I was awakened to find my mother standing in my doorway. She was smiling, but she looked as if she had not slept well. It was already after six. I jumped up, slid into my clothes hastily, and joined the family at breakfast, but I could scarcely eat. I was glad when my father pushed back his plate and got up. I said good-bye simply enough to my brothers, and they said good-bye to me, but they did not get up. They did not even stop eating. My mother came to the door with us. Tears stood in her eyes, but she smiled as she gave me a long, close hug. I returned her hug and her kiss, but I was very near to tears and I could not speak, so I bolted out at the door into the rain after my father, and I waved my hand to her. That was another picture that I carried locked in my breast of my mother standing at the open door, in the dreary drizzle, looking after me and smiling. Mothers have a good deal to bear. I wonder that they stand it.

We did not get off until after ten o’clock. I was the first to see it—I mean the job wagon with its load of men and bundles. It was being driven on to the next wharf below—Central Wharf it was, although I did not know the wharves infallibly by name then. I called to my father, took up my bundle, and walked, rather slowly, I am afraid, around the head of the dock. The afternoon before I should have run. My father caught up with me at the head of the wharf.

The wagon was unloading about halfway down the wharf when we got there, and the men were taking out their bundles. Those bundles were of all sizes and all colors, but all were shapeless, a few in neat canvas bags, several in pillow-cases, and the others in gay flame-colored cloths, red and orange and a peculiar blue, but the predominating color was some shade of magenta. It is curious how fond those Western Islanders are of magenta. The men were grouping themselves, squatting on their bundles in the drizzle, or sitting on the rounded tops of the mooring-piles or on the stringpiece, or standing. I noticed only three of them: a great, gaunt, very black man, with thin hoops of gold in his ears, who stood impassively, his arms folded across his breast, and gazed at nothing and did not speak; a smaller man, also intensely black and with similar gold hoops in his ears, who sat atop of a pile and smiled and poured a steady stream of talk that I could not understand up to the first, and the gaunt man smiled now and then, showing a set of teeth that were sharp and of a dazzling whiteness; and a very old man, who I suppose was originally a white man, with fingers permanently bent, like talons, and very wrinkled face that looked like leather in texture and in color. He was sitting on the stringpiece, his neat canvas bag between his knees, and looking up at the two black men; and occasionally there would flit over his face a humorous smile, leaving the look of humor there. On the whole it was a quiet crowd, and merry enough, considering the weather. A man, who I found afterwards was the second mate, moved slowly around among the groups and finally stood still, holding converse with none and gazing out over the harbor.

The old man cast his humorous eye up at my father.

“Lovely morning,” he said.

My father laughed. “If you take it so,” he said, “it’s better. After all, what does the weather matter to an old sailorman like you?”

“Not a bit. I never let it make any difference to me. But the talk of these lads,” he said, waving a weatherbeaten hand, with its talon-fingers, at the two black men, “always makes me want to laugh. It sounds like monkey talk.”

“Don’t you understand it?”

He shook his head. “Not me. I never learned Portagee. I should die laughin’ if I tried. They had none in the navy in my day.”

My father was interested. “Have you been in the navy? I should have said merchant vessels, but I did n’t think of the navy.”

The old man nodded. “Oh, aye,” he said. “It was the navy until the war was over, and I was too old for that, and then the merchant service for a couple o’ years, and then whalin’. Whalin’’s easier. They don’t drive a vessel so. You were n’t goin’ on this ship?”

My father smiled, and laid his great arm across my shoulders.

“No, I’m not going, but—”

“The boy?” the old man interrupted. “Is he so? Well, can I be sort of lookin’ after him? I’d take him under my wing with pleasure, perhaps teach him a thing or two, and try to keep him out o’ trouble.”

My father was pleased, and accepted the old sailor’s offer; and he told him of his own experience in the navy, and they swapped yarns for half an hour. The old man had been a boatswain in the navy. He was only fifty-eight, he said. I don’t wonder he put it that way. The second mate had moved, and I looked up and saw the Helen Augusta, our largest tugboat, just about to make a landing at the end of the wharf.

I seized my father’s arm in a panic.

He smiled. There was something infinitely protective in my father’s smile.

“I’m going down with you, Timmie, and come back in the tug. It’s too wet to work, luckily, so it won’t make any difference to me, and I guess Cap’n Nelson ’ll let me go. Unless,” he added, looking at me suddenly, “you’d rather not have me. Perhaps you’d rather say good-bye here. If you would I’d understand it.”

I shook my head, and clung fast to his arm. I could not have spoken to save my life. The old sailor, my new friend, was rolling along beside us, his canvas bag over his shoulder and sticking out a foot or two fore and aft. He glanced at me and smiled, and we all trooped aboard the tug on to her upper deck, and the men filed down the ladder to a place where it was dry and warm.

We were about to follow them when we were hailed from the pilot house. We obeyed the beckoning finger, and in the pilot house we found Captain Nelson and the captain of the tugboat, a silent, sour-faced man whose name I cannot now remember, although it was then very familiar to me. Another man was leaning on the windowsill, his head outside, and one hand grasping a spoke of the wheel. He shouted some orders, pulled the bell, and we backed for a minute against a stern hawser. Then he pulled the bell once, and the chug of the engine stopped; before the water had stopped its swirling past the side he pulled the bell again, the engine chugged once more, and the bows turned faster toward the harbor. I was looking out at the wharves through a glass covered with little fine drops of mist, and I saw one of the men on the wharf lift the bight of heavy line over the top of the mooring-pile and drop it into the water as we began to go ahead. The man at the wheel pulled the jingle bell, and the engine chugged faster, and I could hear little familiar noises from the engine, as though it had settled down for a day’s work.

I was still looking out through the misty glass at the rapidly receding wharves, with the vessel that the riggers were not through with, the other that my father was working on hauled down, the stagings floating in the dock beside her; the lightship in the process of being hove down; the pens of sheathing and the rows of oil barrels; the tops of the wharves themselves, every foot of which I knew intimately. I wondered when I should next set foot on those familiar wharves; the picture blurred a little, and it was not the rain. But I was not quite fifteen, and I was going away on a voyage of four or five years. At fifteen, four or five years might as well be four or five Æons. Our turning had cut off my view of the wharves, and we had straightened out for the Clearchus, and the rain was coming dead ahead.

We were drawing alongside the Clearchus, and we made fast and the crew went over the side stolidly, although some of them seemed merry enough, and my old sailor took the whole thing as a joke. Then Captain Nelson went, and my father and I. By the time I had got on the deck of the ship the captain had gone aft and was talking with the mate.

I had never happened to be on the Clearchus before, and neither had I been on any whaler just starting on a voyage. Her deck was well cluttered with all sorts of stuff, which there had been no time to stow below, and no men to do it. Some of it was covered roughly with tarpaulins to keep it from the wet, and it was shoved into corners or littered the alleyways between the great brick try-works and the bulwarks. The deck itself—where it showed at all—was covered with a film of moisture, and seemed to have sweated just oil enough to make it very slippery.

The deck of an old whaler is full of odd structures. On almost all old whaleships there were two small deckhouses aft, one on either side, with the wheel and the cabin skylight between them; and on many ships this space was roofed over, giving the steersman protection in bad weather. This was the case on the Clearchus; and there was another structure just forward of this after house. This “gallows,” as it is called, was no more than a roof covering the booby-hatch—which led to the steerage; where the boat-steerers slept—supported on posts at the corners, the posts inclined sharply inward at the angle of the standing rigging. On the top of this roof were three spare whale-boats, bottom up. There was a third structure—merely a roof—just aft of the foremast, over the try-works. The galley was in the starboard side of the after house, which may strike some as a very queer place for it, but it was always so on a whaler. It was necessarily very small, taking up less than half of that side. The cabin stairs, or companion, were in the port side of the after house.

We took refuge under the gallows over the booby-hatch, from which point we had as clear a view of the deck as it was possible to have anywhere except from the scuppers. The deck was anything but clear, and the man at the wheel saw the great butts of the masts, the try-works, and other things of a more temporary nature, but little of the deck, and of the sea before the ship and of the sky above nothing at all. There was no need for him to see either. He had an unobstructed view of the compass.

The tug took us about twenty-five miles, but it seemed an unbearably short journey on that dull, rainy morning. The silence was broken only by the soft noise of the sea, and of the ship going through it, and by the creak and groan of the hawser on the bitts and of the yards in the slings as she rose and fell gently; and by the sound of the water dripping from the yards and rigging upon the deck, and now and then a voice. Altogether it was a silent, gray, dismal journey. Coils of rope hung from the belaying pins near me, and they swung regularly with the motion of the ship. I wished that they would stop. They did not, of course, except for a moment, regularly; then they began again.

The time was coming soon when the tug would cast off, and my father must go back. We got beyond Devil’s Bridge, with the Vineyard looming indistinctly, but scarcely visible, on our weather beam. The tug whistled, and Captain Nelson came to us.

“Well, Tim,” he said, “I guess you ’ll have to get ready. It’s too rough for the tug to come alongside, but I ’ll send you over in a boat. She’s dropping us now.”

My father said he was sorry to be so much trouble; and Captain Nelson said it was no matter, that it would be good practice for the crew. Then he looked at me, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Timmie,” he said gently, “you have n’t signed yet, and if you want to go back with your father I ’ll send you.”

I shook my head furiously. “No, thank you, sir,” I said. “I ’ll sail with you—if you want me—if you ’ll take me.”

How could I back out then? I should have been a laughing-stock for years, and I should never have a better chance. But I did want to go back with my father.

Captain Nelson smiled. “I ’ll take you, and you ’ll get over your homesickness when we get a sight of the sun. It’s a dismal day to start off.”

They cast off the hawser, and backed the main topsail, and the vessel lay there with the seas beating upon her while the tug came up abeam, and lay rolling. And they came and cast loose the very boat we were standing under, and the men tailed on to the falls, and the boat was lowered until it was level with the rail; and two of the crew tumbled in to look after the falls, and my father gave me one hug, and I clung to him for a moment.

“Good-bye, Timmie,” he whispered. “I ’ll give your love to your mother. Be a good boy, and do a little more than is expected of you. Be ready to do a man’s work when you are able, and let us be proud of you when you come home.”

The men began to slack away on the falls. I watched the men slide down the falls as the boat touched the water, my father among them; and the falls were unhooked quickly, two men holding her off from the side of the ship. Then they shoved off, the five long oars took the water, and they rowed to the tug, the whaleboat rising to the seas as lightly as a cork. And they drew alongside the tug, but did not stop, and my father stepped out upon the broad rail of the tug and down upon her deck, and turned to wave to me.

As the boat came back the tug started, with long blasts of her whistle as a message of farewell to us. My father still stood in the gangway, close to her house, and waved to me. I watched her as long as I could see her; a mite—a speck tossing on the heaving sea.