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Updated: May 16, 2025
Dropping the sail, and leaving Krok in charge, Uncle George and I pulled in the small boat to the channel into which his cave opened. It was still awash, but we could not wait. We dragged the boat up onto the shingle just showing at the head of the chasm, then wading out up to our shoulders to the leaning slab, we pulled down the rock screen and crawled into the tunnel.
I do not think a word was spoken all the way. Krok held the lantern for my mother's feet. Uncle George walked close behind her, and at times before her, in the descent, and helped her down, and so we came at last to the shingle and crunched over it to the boat.
I was eighteen, tall and strong, and, thanks to my grandfather and Krok, a capable seaman, so far as the limited opportunities of our little Island permitted, and the rest would come easily, for all their teaching had given me a capacity to learn. That first parting from home and my mother and grandfather and Krok was a terrible wrench, full as I was of the wonderful world I was going out to see.
There, in the mythical legendary past of Bohemia had dwelt the shadowy Libuscha, daughter of Krok, wife of King Premysl, foundress of Prague, who, when wearied of her lovers, was accustomed to toss them from those heights into the river.
But Uncle George had no doubts about it. Krok, too, recognised him." "Krok did? Ah then " and he nodded slow acceptance of the unwelcome fact. Before I was through with the telling of my story, and signing it, and swearing to it before various authorities, I was heartily sick of the whole matter, and wished, as indeed I had good reason, that I had never sailed with John Ozanne in the Swallow.
Krok nodded, and he was probably thinking of my mother, for his fist clenched and he shook it bitterly at the unconscious man. Then he knelt again, and looked at his wound, and shook his head. "It was I shot him, not knowing who he was. And so I must save his life, or have his blood on my hands." From Krok's grim face I judged that the latter would have been most to his mind.
For Krok could hear and understand all that was said to him, even in our Island tongue which was not native to him, but he had no speech. The story ran that he had been picked off a piece of wreckage, somewhere off the North African coast, by the ship in which my grandfather made his last voyage, very many years ago.
And presently Uncle George bent down and with his hand lifted the moustache back from the dead man's mouth, and my mother gazed into the dark face and said quietly, "It is he," then she seized my grandfather's arm suddenly and turned away. They were stumbling over the rough stones when Krok ran after them with the lantern and came back in the dark.
But the things that stand out now most clearly in my memory are the homecomings and the partings and all they meant to me, but more especially the homecomings the eager looking forward from the moment our bows pointed homewards; the joy of seeing my mother and grandfather and dear old Krok and George Hamon Uncle George by adoption, failing that closer relationship which Providence had denied him sympathetic listener to all our childish troubles and kindly rescuer from endless scrapes; the biting intensity of longing to meet Carette again, and to find out how things were with her and how things were between us, a longing that taught me the meaning of heartache.
"It is like Krok," she whispered, and the word was said. It was all as like Krok not the outside man, but the inner Krok, dumb and powerful, silently doing his appointed work as anything that could be imagined. "Yes," I said. "It is like Krok. It is very wonderful running like that all through, the ages since the cave was made anyway very wonderful."
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