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Updated: June 29, 2025
After a short stop in the bay we moved on to Durban and as we came into the dock area we saw a little group on the quayside waiting to greet us. The central figure was "The Lady in White" as she came to be known. It was a nice warm welcome to South Africa. For our last night on board I was picked for guard duty. Why? Perhaps they thought that someone would run off with the ship.
She fancied she could hear his breathing. A wave of languid warmth overtook her, she seemed to lose touch with the ground under her feet; and when she felt him slip his hand under her arm she made no attempt to disengage herself from that grasp which closed upon her limb, insinuating and firm. He conducted her through the dangers of the quayside. Her sight was dim.
For a moment or two the sweating men ceased in their work, and stood wiping their faces or leaning against the dock wall, talking in low whispers. Cleek and Dollops stood at the quayside, listening to the water lapping against the iron girders, and straining their eyes to catch a last glimpse of the fleet of fishing boats. Of a sudden from out the blackness others appeared.
The port at which we disembarked was cheery and almost normal. One saw a lot of khaki mingling with sky-blue tiger-men of France. Apart from that one would scarcely have guessed that the greatest war in the world's history was raging not more than fifty miles away. I slept the night at a comfortable hotel on the quayside. There was no apparent shortage; I got everything that I required.
The Sea Rat, as soon as his hunger was somewhat assuaged, continued the history of his latest voyage, conducting his simple hearer from port to port of Spain, landing him at Lisbon, Oporto, and Bordeaux, introducing him to the pleasant harbours of Cornwall and Devon, and so up the Channel to that final quayside, where, landing after winds long contrary, storm-driven and weather-beaten, he had caught the first magical hints and heraldings of another Spring, and, fired by these, had sped on a long tramp inland, hungry for the experiment of life on some quiet farmstead, very far from the weary beating of any sea.
There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was still a rare sight in those parts a steamer. She was a side-wheeler, with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast, fore-and-aft on her mizzen.
Inside a small square harbour showed, but there was no room to round up properly and no time to lower sails. Davies just threw the kedge over, and it just got a grip in time to check our momentum and save our bowsprit from the quayside. A man threw us a rope and we brought up alongside, rather bewildered. 'Not more so than the natives, who seemed to think we had dropped from the sky.
Many of them stepped on the quayside of France for the first time after months of training, and I could tell those, sometimes, by the furtive look they gave at the crowded scene about them, and by a sudden glint in their eyes, a faint reflection of the emotion that was in them, because this was another stage on their adventure of war, and the drawbridge was down at last between them and the enemy.
Maybe too proud, too wilful, too full of pity. Signorino, you don’t know much about women. And you may learn something yet or you may not; but what you learn from her you will never forget.” “Not to be held,” I murmured; and she whom the quayside called Madame Léonore closed her outstretched hand before my face and opened it at once to show its emptiness in illustration of her expressed opinion.
But the master and Sylvia think that there never was such a one. 'I could show them a score as good as he down on the quayside. 'Well, laddie, keep a calm sough. Some folk like some folk and others don't. Wherever I am there'll allays be a welcome for thee.
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