Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 42, 26 October 1922, Page 5

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER XlV.—(Continued.) It does not come to blows, however, for now a curious thing happens. A sudden chill and dumbness fall upon the never-never-shall-be-slavers. It seems that their foolish cheers prevented them from understanding the situation. Far from the sticky little Yankee tugboat accepting the repulse, it has been all the while lurching closer and closer alongside, and horror .upon horrors’ head! —after much confusion and darksome colloquy, the indomitable sea-dog on the bridge who, but a moment ago, seemed ready to brave the battle and the breeze for another thousand years rather than disappoint the patriots of the hurricane deck, is actually throwing, a rope to the small stranger. The frozen truth is that the whoops of victory of the loyal poker-players, after the Captain’s shout of no surrender, drowned the answer of the provoking wretches on board the tugboat, which was that they had the Medical Officer of Health on board, with an United States’ permit authorising them to pick the two Irish rebel envoys out of Captain McMickan’s passenger-list, and then bid a calm good-night to the remainder. And there was no alternative for the old sea-dog, but a surrender at discretion, if he did not want one of the shore batteries to find him out the next morning with a United States roundshot. He growls, he storms, he does the needful -with all imaginable surliness he does it. The rope is cast. The Medical Officer of Health is on board. All is still uncertainty in the" 1 darkness. An exultant whisper runs around among the players of poker; it is for an Ameri can millionaire on board the tug has really come out. “Flapdoodle!” observes the American bird-of-freedom beside me. “Do you think , any man in his proper wits would come out on a night like this for money? No, sir, they’ve come out for you, and they’re going to have you—- / bet your bottom dollar!” ' ’ Ought. I to go? We are reckoned to be some thirty miles from Brooklyn Bridge, in a harbor thronged with

mighty shipping here, there and everywhere, invisible a few yards away in their shrouds of dead and clammy mist, the very dirges from their foghorns all but inaudible. I am afraid that, apart from the unsportsmanship of leaving comrades! in misfortune in, the lurch, and steaming away in triumph, I should unhesitatingly have preferred, to turn into* bed and wiat until the fog rolled by, only for that unlucky shout of exultation; “You shan’t get him!” from the hurricane deck. To make them eat their words became for the moment the one thing that made life worth „ living. . I verily believe that if that tug were fated to wander into the night to the end of my days, with no other provisions except clammy condensed fog on board, I should joyfully embark for the satisfaction of teaching the patriot pokermen that all the arrangements of the universe are not necessarily dictated by a growl from the British lion. But there is no making sure what is happening amidst the hurry-scurrying and the confusion of Babel at the steerage gangway. I am told the Medical Officer of Health is descending the wooden ladder placed loosely against the great shipside to the tug. The vessels seem to be about to part company. Bewilderment reigns on board the tug. The scoffs arid jeers of the poker party recommence. There is nothing for it but to shout, and I shout over the side: “My name is William O’Brien. Do the people on board want me?” There came an answer in which all the wild , yearning passion of the Irish exiles’ hearts — the pentup emotion of three days’ -indomitable groping in the fog spoke out. “Do you wish me to land to-night?” Another roll of thunder from the tug. “Then I shall go,” and I am ashamed to say the old Adam within me could nor refrain from chortling: “if it was only to spite some cowardly creatures here on board.” Another outbreak of snorts and goans of disappointment from the hurricane deck sounds now as feebly as a foghorn amidst the roar from the tugboat and from the Irish emigrants who are by this time crowding around with clenched fists and brows of thunder, not knowing precisely what has'been going on, but divining it was an occasion anyhow when clenched fists might come' in handy. There is but a moment to clamber on the ladder which - is swaying in a. dizzy sort of way, to and from the ship’s side with the heaving of the sea. Somebody attempts to drag me back. There is a moment’s pause, and a confused conflict of voices in my ear. Fortunately, the delay is only for a moment, the nest I am rapidly swinging down the rungs of the ladder. Not a .whit too rapidly, for while there are still five or six rungs to be descended, the hawser connecting the tug with its. huge neighbor snaps with a whirr, an angry swell sends the little craft lurching far apart, the ladder loses its grip on the Umbria, and ladder and self Come tumbling down at a run. Had my weight been on it a, few rungs higher up, this narrative would end here, or rather would never have been begun. As it is, massive General O’Beirne, with the agile instinct of the practised Indian fighter, is at the bottom'of the ladder and unerringly “fields me out,” so to say, in his brawny arms. “Had some miscreant cut the rope?” is now the angry thesis among the bronzed and rugged sol-dier-men who press' around in the half-light. I never harbored a thought so injurious to human natureeven the human nature of a Briton’s “Kazoo Band”' in the sulks. one the less it is a comfort to hear it established on the verdict of General O’Beirne’s prompt drumhead ‘ courtmartial on, the subject, that the rope was severed at a point closer to the tug than to the Umbria, and that its strands were doubtless wrenched asunder by the violence of the sea, and not by the gash of a-knife. Our friends have permits, to bring off Kilbride and Bishop Ireland as well, but we have now been flung far by the tossing sea, and it is hopeless to re-establish communications. We can only , hear a wild tumult of cheers, groans, and conflicting national anthems, raging along the decks of the Umbria, while with volleys of IrishAmerican war-yells we bid good-bye to the monster 'liner.

as to a nightmare as high as a mountain swallowed up in the belly of a still higher nightmare of solid fog. In the topsy-turvey little cabin of the J. E. Walker,, men with burly forms and fierce moustaches—old comrades of death and hardship—gather • around for the inevitable citizens' address and solemn reply, the while, the boat's mad motions toss a few of the weaker vessels into sea-sickness, and

send other weary vigil keepers fast asleep, and the reporters who never sleep, nor, sicken, pin me into a corner for my “impressions.” ■ Surely, more affecting than any address ever penned by human hand -was it to learn how my gallant friends had spent their three days and two nights circumnavigating the fog in search of the Umbria at instant peril of their lives, groping in this direction and in that, hailing the.,wrong ships, hornblowing to distraction, in hourly danger of some mortal collision, and never giving up until at long last their wild halloo was answered from the Umbria—and all in order that a messenger from Ireland, bound on a hazardous mission, might get up, like a prince, a tide in-advance of common men! (To be continued.)