The one thing that struck me most about him was his love of the sea. If he was ill, he said, it must be by the sea. It was a boyish love evidently which had never died out of his heart. It seemed to be his sole fondness and the only thing of which he spoke tenderly.
He was born, I found, at Salcombe, in Devonshire. At that place, as many know, the sea rushes in between two headlands and, pouring over rocky terraces and around sandy bays, flows by the little town and thence away up the estuary. At the last it creeps tamely among meadows and cornfields to the tottering quay at the foot of Kingsbridge.
On the estuary he had spent his early days, and here he and a boy after his own heart had made gracious acquaintance with the sea. When school was done the boys were ever busy among the creeks, playing at smugglers or at treasure seekers so long as the light lasted. Or they hung about the wharf, among the boats and the picturesque litter of the sea, where they recalled in ineffable colours the tales of pirates and the Spanish Main which they had read by the winter fire. The reality of the visions was made keener when they strutted about the deck of the poor semi-domestic coaling brig which leaned wearily against the harbour side or climbed over the bulwarks of the old schooner, which had been wrecked on the beach before they were born, with all the dash of buccaneers.
In their hearts they were both resolved to “follow the sea” but fate turned their footsteps elsewhere, for one became a mining engineer in the colonies and the other a clerk in a stockbroker’s office in London.
In spite of years of uncongenial work and of circumstances which took them far beyond the paradise of tides and salt winds the two boys, as men, ever kept green the memory of the romance-abounding sea. He who was to be a clerk became a pale-faced man who wore spectacles and whose back was bent from much stooping over books. I can think of him at his desk in the City on some day in June, gazing through a dingy window at a palisade of walls and roofs. The clerk’s pen is still, for the light on the chimney-pots has changed to a flood of sun upon the Devon cliffs, and the noise of the streets to the sound of waves tumbling among rocks or bubbling over pebbles. There are sea-gulls in the air, while far away a grey barque is blown along before the freshening breeze and the only roofs in view belong to the white cottages about the beach. Then comes the ring of a telephone bell and the dream vanishes.