The Ship and the Man

Sailing from Baltic Port, one of a crew of four in another man’s ship, I came to the far end of the Dagorort Peninsula, and there had an experience which I cannot refrain from putting in this book, so full it was of the romance of those rarely visited waters.

We had anchored half a mile from the shore off the place that is called Ermuiste, which means “the terrible,” for it is a place of many wrecks, a rocky point open to the widest sweep of the winds across the Baltic Sea. We had not dared to go nearer, and I was glad we had not, for, as I rowed ashore in the little boat, I passed many rocks awash and saw others a foot or two under water. There were dark purple clouds rising over the sea to the N.W., wind was coming, and we were impatient to be off again, to find shelter, or at least to put some miles of sea between us and that notorious coast. But there was still sunlight on the rocky shore and on the dark pinewoods that ran down almost to the water’s edge and on the little wooden pierhead, unmarked on the chart, which, seen through binoculars, had tempted us to run in and look for information and supplies. Beyond the pierhead was a little stretch of beach where I meant to land. But, looking over my shoulder as I pulled in, bobbing over the waves in my little boat, I could see none of the things that a pierhead usually promises. There was no watchman’s hut on the pier, no smoke above the trees, no cottages, no loafers, no fishermen, no sign of any kind of life. And then, coming nearer, I saw that the pier was in ruins. Much of its planking had gone, great beams were leaning perilously over from it, and here and there masses of it had actually fallen into the water. I wished to waste no time, and was on the point of turning and pulling back to the ship, when I saw something else more promising than the pier. Just within the forest that stretched down to the beach, almost hidden by the tall pines, was the great golden body of an unfinished ship. Where a ship was building, there, surely, must be men, and I rowed in confidently past the ruined pier, slipped off my shoes, rolled up my trousers and, jumping overboard, pulled the little boat through shallow water and up on a narrow strip of small pebbles.

Then, walking up into the shadow of the trees, I came to the ship, the upper part of which, far above my head, was glowing in the splashes of sunshine that came through the tops of the pines which brushed the sides of the ship as they waved in the gathering wind. There was not a man to be seen, or a but for men, nor was there sound of hammers or any of the usual accompaniments of shipbuilding. But for the ruined pier and that golden hull in the shadows among those tall trees, the coast might have been that of an undiscovered island. And then I began to notice one or two things about the ship herself which seemed a little odd. She was a very large ship to be building on that bit of coast, where there is no real harbour and the most ambitious launches are those of the twenty-foot fishing-boats which a man builds during the winter to earn his living in the summer months. She seemed even larger than she was, as ships do on land, shut in there among the trees that pressed about her as if they had grown up round her. And her lines were not those of a new ship. There was something a little old-fashioned about them, as though she were an unfinished masterpiece of an older period. A few schooners of her type survive today among those “laibas” that carry timber and potatoes round the Estonian coast, and they outsail those modern ships in which an obstreperous motor, tucked away in the stern, makes up for the want of the love and thought that went into the lines of the older vessels. And then I saw that I was wrong in thinking that she had been newly planked. The upper planking was new, certainly, ruddy gold where the sun caught it, but lower down her hull was weathered. Only the topmost planks had been freshly put on, and as the eye descended from them it passed imperceptibly from a new to an old piece of shipbuilding. The keel, laid on great stones, was joined to them by moss. There was lichen upon it, and on the foot of the sternpost was a large, bright cluster of scarlet toadstools.

Just then I found a narrow, lightly worn track running from the ship farther into the forest. I walked along it, and only a few score yards away, but quite invisible from the shore, I came out of the silence and the trees into a small clearing and a loud noise of grasshoppers. There was a tiny hayfield, not bigger than a small suburban garden, a cornfield, perhaps three times the size, and an old log cabin with a deep thatched roof, an outhouse or two, a dovecot and pigeons fluttering about it.

The pigeons fluttered and murmured, but no dog barked and no one answered when I knocked at the low door of the hut. I knocked again, and then, doubtfully, tried the wooden latch, opened it and walked in. A very little light came through the small windows, heavily overhung by the deep thatch. The hut was divided into two rooms. In the first were a couple of spinning-wheels, one very old, black with age, the other quite new, a precise copy of it, the two contrasting like the upper planking and the keel of that still unfinished ship. There was also a narrow wooden bed, a great oak chest and a wooden stool, all made as if to last forever. A few very clean cooking-things were on the stove, and fishing-lines and nets were hanging from wooden pegs on the walls. The second room held no furniture but a bench and a big handloom for weaving. There was some grand strong canvas being made upon it, and, as I looked at it, I guessed suddenly that here were being made the sails for the ship.

Without knowing why, I hurried out of the cabin into the sunshine. Leaning on the gate into the cornfield, as if he had been there all the time, an old man stood watching me. He had steel-grey curly hair and very dark blue eyes. The skin of his face was clear walnut. He might have been any age from fifty to a hundred. His clothes were of some strong homespun cloth, probably made on the loom where he was making the sails. The shoes on his bare brown feet were of woven string with soles of thick rope. With his arrival the whole place seemed to have sprung to life. He was accompanied by three sheep, and two pigs snuffled in the ground close by. A dog, impassive as its master, lay beside the gate, half opening his eyes, as if he had been waked from sleep.

Somehow I could make no apology for having gone into his cottage. I asked him where to land eastwards along the coast and for the nearest anchorage sheltered from the northwest. He told me what I wanted gravely, and with a curious air of taking his words one by one out of a lumber-room and dusting them before use. I tried to get eggs and butter from him, but he said he had no eggs and never made more butter than he needed. I should get some from the forester at Palli or at Luidja, near the anchorage. I asked him about the pier. Once upon a time there had been people here and timber traffic?

“Yes, but that was a long time ago, and the people have all gone away.”

“Was it then that you began building the ship?”

“Yes; that was when I began building the ship.”

His dark-blue eyes, watching me, but indifferent as the sea itself, invited no more questions. I turned back by the path under the great ship so many times larger than his cottage, and found myself oddly hurried as I pushed our little boat into the water and rowed away. I could just catch the sunlight splashes on the body of the ship among the trees. Would she ever be finished? And what then? What had he planned as he worked at her year after year? Would he die before his dream came true, or before he knew that the dreaming was the better part of it?

But the sunlight faded and the wind had freshened, and for a time I thought no more about him, for we had enough to do with our own ship.