(1/3) Go Saddle the Sea (16 page)

Then he began to sing another song that I knew very well, "Hodge Told Sue."

"Hodge told Sue that he loved her as his life, And if she would be kind, he would make her his wife..."

This one was a catch, that is, the tune went round and round, so that different singers could come in, one after another, all singing the same tune, like men who jump into a cart as it rolls along the road; and all the different bits of the tune would mix together into a pleasing harmony.

As the street singer was but
one,
he sang the words, and played a second singer's part on his little fiddle, very cleverly, I thought.

I could not resist moving nearer to him and joining in.

"Hodge—Hodge—Hodge told Sue—"

Between us, we made quite a rousing sound of it, and quite a few passersby turned to look and listen. Several people laughed and clapped when we came, breathless, to a finishing point, and a few more coins were tossed into the hat.

Then the singer, with a smiling glance at me, struck into another ballad. This had words I did not know—

"Come my dearest, come my fairest,
Come my sweetest unto me
Will you wed with a poor sailor lad
Who has just returned from sea?"

but the tune was someway familiar to me, so I pulled out my pipe from my pocket, and began playing alongside of his singing. This, with the voice and the fiddle, went very well, and several people called out, "
Bravo!
" Also many children gathered—evidently it wis the hour when school ended, for most of them carried their books and slates—and stood staring with their fingers in their mouths.

His ballad finished, the singer broke into a lively Asturian country dance, and all the children began hopping and skipping about like so many grasshop
pers. I knew this one, too, for it was a tune the servants danced to at Villaverde, so I kept him company on my pipe, with a few extra flourishes, and presently not only the children but quite a few townsfolk as well were dancing gaily on the quay.

Now there nearly occurred a mishap which might have landed us in deep trouble.

The level of the water where the boats were moored was some twelve feet down below the quayside; this, as I discovered later, was due to the fact that the tide was low at that time. And the quay itself, as they mostly are, was littered with piles of nets, upturned boats, wicker pots for catching lobsters, iron mooring posts, and the offal where the vendors who sold fish from their boats had gutted and boned the catch for buyers.

Close to where I stood was a big, foul-smelling heap of these fish scraps, with gulls screaming down to it, and, as the crowd on the quay grew bigger and spread outward, a little child, dancing past, trod on some piece of fishy slime and slid, helpless, toward the edge of the dock. Had she fallen over she must infallibly have done herself severe injury, perhaps broken her neck, for the drop here was as much as fifteen feet, and onto jagged rocks below.

By the mercy of Providence I was close enough to save her; in spite of my sore foot I ran like a hare, grabbed her, and tossed her to safety on a pile of nets. But my own foot slipped in the offal and as my hands let go of her I fell headlong. My head crashed against
something hard, and the world went black about me; I knew no more.

W
HEN
I next regained consciousness, I was greatly surprised to find that I was not on the windy quayside, but lying in a bed.

I attempted to sit up, crying out anxiously, "My mule, my mule! I left her tied to a tree—"

"Be easy about your mule,
hijo,
" a woman's voice said. "She is cared for, don't fret. In front of her, at this very moment, she has the biggest rack of hay in Llanes, and some barley good enough to make broth for the King of Portugal!"

Reassured by this statement—which was made in the most cheerful, cordial voice imaginable—I lay back again, for indeed my head felt very hot and strange, as if it might split in half. I had struck it on one of those iron mooring pillars in falling, I afterward learned, and was considered lucky not to have dashed my brains out.

Then followed nine or ten days of fever and sickness, in which I tossed about, very wretched and half out of my mind, with a tongue like a bolster, and hands and feet that seemed separated from my body and quite beyond my control. Sometimes I thought that Father Tomás was beating me, for my back ached cruelly; sometimes that I was still in the terrible round hut being forced to drink poison. Even when my eyes were open I could not see with any distinctness, nor could I eat; the very thought of food sickened me; the
most I could do was swallow a little whey with wine in it, and the juice of lemons.

However, on the tenth day I began to mend, and felt very ashamed of my weakness. (Though it was later suggested by some that I
had
been given poison, up on the mountain, and that this had caused my illness.) Now, looking about me, I was able to see that I lay in a big, pleasant room with a great gabled window, outside of which gulls were flying and shrieking. I pushed myself up on one elbow so as to see better.

"
Ola!
Now you look more like the boy who saved our Conchita!" said the same cheerful voice that had reassured me about the mule. "And that is good, for she wishes to come and thank you herself. A moment, till I prop you on a pillow."

Abashed at not being able to help more, I suffered myself to be hoisted up, and found that I was wrapped in a fine linen shirt, much too big for me. The sheets, also, were very good cloth.

"Thank you, thank you, senora," I muttered. "I am sorry to be such a trouble."

"Never mind about that," she answered good-humoredly. "Trouble? Think of the trouble you have saved us! To replace Conchita, Father would have had to marry again!"

Not at all understanding her, I looked toward the door, where, now, to my great surprise, who should enter but the gloomy-faced smith. He did not look so gloomy, though; indeed his unshaven face wore a most friendly smile as he came up to the bedside and
gripped me by the hand, with a grip like that of his own tongs. On his other arm sat the little lass I had saved from falling, who could not have been more than three at the most; she stared at me with great wondering black eyes until her father set her down on the polished wood floor and urged her to thank the young señorito.

Then she performed a little curtsey and exclaimed. "
Muchas gracias, señor! Muchas, muchas gracias!
" after which, turning to her father, she exclaimed in a loud whisper, "Papa! He is exactly like a canary!"

"Conchita!" said my nurse. "That is not polite."

"No, but it is true! Is it not, Papa?"

My nurse laughed at that—a beautiful bubbling laugh—and I turned my head to smile at her, seeing her clearly for the first time. She was a big handsome girl with curly black hair drawn up at the back in a knot, from which ringlets fell; she wore a brown stuff bodice, quite low-necked, after the Madrid fashion, and a red petticoat; she was so like the little Conchita that at first I took her for the child's mother, and then, when she addressed the smith as "Father," realized that they were sisters. Their mother had recently died, I learned later.

"I am sorry to have been such a burden to your household, señor," I said feebly to the smith. "It is very kind of you to have taken me in."

"We would have done more than that for the one who saved our little wretch from tumbling off the dock," he said. The scowling look returned to his long
grizzled countenance. "If I have told that José Galdós
once,
about leaving his refuse there, I have told him twenty times! Anybody might have fallen and broken their leg, or their neck. However, now he heeds me at last. After my child might have died! But how are you now, lad, on the mend, eh? We'll have you downstairs tomorrow, eating man's food again, if my daughter Juana allows it?"

I said I hoped so, and my smiling nurse exclaimed, "We shall see!"

"And don't trouble your head about the mule," added the smith. "She is out in my yard, eating like a bishop's secretary. A fine beast, eh? But you had come a weary way, you and she; she was as lame as my grandmother. I have given her a fine new shoe, tightened up the rest, and rubbed her cut leg with brandy."

"Oh, how can I thank you, senor," I said, angry at my own weakness. "When I am better I will be glad to do any work that you ask."

His smile flashed again—his big handsome teeth were yellow as amber—and he said, "Don't trouble - your head about that,
hijo
—your friend is down in my shop at this moment, making himself so useful that I don't know how I shall be able to part with him."

"My friend—?"

A flood of warm gladness passed through me. Although I had not realized it, as I lay in bed slowly regaining my wits, all the time a kind of troubled anxiety had lain below my fevered stupor; I had felt a pain of loss which I could not understand; this, I now
perceived, was because I feared that the singer on the quay must long since have departed from Llanes and gone his ways. Who he was, what he was, what land he came from, I had no idea, not having exchanged two words with him; but the very instant I laid eyes on him he had aroused in me so great a warmth of liking that—strange and fanciful as it may seem—the belief that he had gone, that I would never see him again, had thrown me into the grip of such a sorrowful dismay as if my own brother had left me without saying good-bye.

And yet I had never had a brother!

"Why, yes—your friend the singer," said the smith. "He is as skillful with a hammer as if he had been bred up in a forge! And indeed he tells me that he learned blacksmith's work when he was a sailor in the British navy."

"Is he English? What is his name?" I asked. I was becoming tired now; my tongue seemed to thicken and clog; my words came slowly.

"English, yes; his name is Sam—Sam Pollard," said the smith, giving it the Spanish
l
sound, Pol-yard.

"Twelve o'clock!" proclaimed Asistenta from the canopy of my bed—which was a massive oaken four-poster—and little Conchita gave a shriek of laughter, dancing about the floor.

"Oh, that bird!" exclaimed Juana. "She has frightened me out of my wits, times without number! Run along, Father, and take Conchita with you; it is time to give our guest a
merienda.
"

Suddenly I realized that I was hungry; after days when the very thought of food filled me with disgust, I longed for something savory. Juana, as if guessing this, brought me a basin brimming with the most appetizing fish broth, the best I ever tasted, and a big crusty piece of fresh bread. After eating, I slept, and when I woke again, I discovered with great delight that the English singer, Sam Pollard, was sitting on a stool by my bed.

"Well, lad!" he said, and a smile broke out like a lighthouse ray from his ugly, cheerful face. "Eh, lad, you surely did me a good turn there! I thought at first that we were like to be cast in jail for causing a disturbance on the quay—but Senor Colomas, our friend downstairs, is a great man in the town, it seems, and thanks to his gratitude for your saving his little Conchita, you and I are in clover. I'm treated like royalty wherever I go!" He chuckled comfortably. "Which I little deserve! You'd best hurry up and get better so that you can come down and claim your own glory."

"Señor Colomas—is that the smith's name?—said that you are working in his forge?"

"Why, yes—seeing him so well disposed—I made bold to ask if he needed help. And it turned out he did. I'd picked up a knowledge of smiths work—"

"And you are English," I said in that language.

He burst into a roar of cheerful laughter. "I might 'a guessed, wi' that yaller crop, that you weren't a Spaniard!" he replied in the same tongue. "I' fact, I did think it, when you joined in my songs so nimble! But
what's an English lad o' your age doing wandering about Asturias, speaking the lingo like a native?"

"My father was an English captain—he died in General Moore's army. I myself have never been to England—but it is my wish to go there, to find his family."

"Well, lord 'a mercy! Who'd a thought it? Where do your kinsfolk live, then?"

"I believe ... in the town of Bath."

"Bath—aye, aye." He nodded. "I know of it. A fine town, 'tis. That's in the West Country—not too far from my parts."

"Where do you come from, then, Señor Pollard?"

"Sam, Sam, lad—or Sammy. No ceremony betwixt shipmates! I come from Cornwall—Fowey town. 'Tis but a little place. Ye'll not have heard of it. 'Tis proper pretty, though." He sighed.

"Why are
you
in Spain, Sam?"

He sighed again. "Well, lad—that's a long tale."

"I should greatly enjoy to hear it," I said.

"Would 'ee truly? Well, if it 'ud pass the time for 'ee, while ee be obliged to lie abed—I'll tell it."

So Sam told me his tale.

And as I lay in Señor Colomas' comfortable bed, listening to what had happened to Sam Pollard in the course of his twenty years, I discovered that my life, lonely and dreary as I had thought it, had been all sunshine, cakes, and kisses compared with what had befallen this cheerful, ugly fellow.

He had lived with his mother and father and elder brother on a little farm near the port of Fowey in Cornwall. But the brother, when he was sixteen, had been taken off by the press gang, to go to sea and fight against the French.

(Bob had told me about the press gang, who went ashore from navy ships and seized by force any strong, likely-looking man they saw, unless he was rich enough to buy himself off; I thought it sounded a most wicked practice.)

Then, when he was thirteen, Sam himself, who was a stout, well-grown boy, had been taken likewise.

"That were the trouble of living nigh to the port, ye see," he explained. "The lads as lived inland didn't fare so badly. O' course, by the time they took me, Boney was nigh beat, but still they wanted lads for the transport ships to Spain and to France ... There warn't the danger for me, though, that there had been for my poor brother Jarge; he were killed at Trafalgar."