THE MUFFLED SHIP

It was cold and grey, but the band on shore was playing, and the flags on shore were fluttering, and the long double-tiered wharf crowded with welcomers in each of its open gaps, when our great ship slowly drew alongside, packed with cheering, chattering crowds of khaki figures, letting go all the pent-up excitement of getting home from the war.  The air was full of songs and laughter, of cheers, and shouted questions, the hooting of the launches’ sirens, the fluttering flags and hands and handkerchiefs; and there were faces of old women, and of girls, intent, expectant, and the white gulls were floating against the grey sky, when our ship, listed slightly by those thousands of figures straining towards the land which had bred them, gently slurred up against the high wharf, and was made fast.

The landing went on till night had long fallen, and the band was gone.  At last the chatter, the words of command, the snatches of song, and that most favourite chorus:  “Me! and my girl!” died away, and the wharf was silent and the ship silent, and a wonderful clear dark beauty usurped the spaces of the sky.  By the light of the stars and a half moon the far harbour shores were just visible, the huddled buildings on the near shore, the spiring masts and feathery appanage of ropes on the moored ship, and one blood-red light above the black water.  The night had all that breathless beauty which steeps the soul in a quivering, quiet rapture....

Then it was that clearly, as if I had been a welcomer standing on land in one of the wharf gaps, I saw her come ­slow, slow, creeping up the narrow channel, in beside the wharf, a great grey silent ship.  At first I thought her utterly empty, deserted, possessed only by the thick coiled cables forward, the huge rusty anchors, the piled-up machinery of structure and funnel and mast, weird in the blue darkness.  A lantern on the wharf cast a bobbing golden gleam deep into the oily water at her side.  Gun-grey, perfectly mute, she ceased to move, coming to rest against the wharf.  And then, with a shiver, I saw that something clung round her, a grey film or emanation, which shifted and hovered, like the invisible wings of birds in a thick mist.  Gradually to my straining eyes that filmy emanation granulated, and became faces attached to grey filmy forms, thousands on thousands, and every face bent towards the shore, staring, as it seemed, through me, at all that was behind me.  Slowly, very slowly, I made them out ­faces of helmeted soldiers, bulky with the gear of battle, their arms outstretched, and the lips of every one opened, so that I expected to hear the sound of cheering; but no sound came.  Now I could see their eyes.  They seemed to beseech ­like the eyes of a little eager boy who asks his mother something she cannot tell him; and their outstretched hands seemed trying to reach her, lovingly, desperately trying to reach her!  And those opened lips, how terribly they seemed trying to speak!  “Mother!  Mother Canada!” As if I had heard, I knew they were saying ­those opened lips which could speak no more!  “Mother!  Mother Canada!  Home!  Home!...”

And then away down the wharf some one chanted:  “Me and my girl!” And, silent as she had come, the muffled ship vanished in all her length, with those grey forms and those mute faces; and I was standing again in the bows beside a huge hawser; below me the golden gleam bobbing deep in the oily water, and above me the cold start in beauty shining.