The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Sir Frederick Treves

Author:Sir Frederick Treves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Story, Biography
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1923-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

VI

A SEA LOVER

VI

A SEA LOVER

THE MAN I would tell about was a mining engineer some forty and odd years of age. Most of his active life had been spent in Africa, whence he had returned home to England with some gnawing illness and with the shadow of death upon him. He was tall and gaunt. The tropical sun had tanned his face an unwholesome brown, while the fever-laden wind of the swamp had blanched the colour from his hair. He was a tired-looking man who gave one the idea that he had been long sleepless. He was taciturn, for he had lived much alone and, but for a sister, had no relatives and few friends. For many years he had wandered to and fro surveying and prospecting, and when he turned to look back upon the trail of his life there was little to see but the ever-stretching track, the file of black porters, the solitary camp.

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.