The Severn

He went to the window because it was the window that looked at everything, and he leaned out of it because he had told his son not to.

The night was very still. There was no wind at all. The town lay below him under the stars with its lights going out one by one, the State House dome white and silent in the middle of it, the streets running down from the circle like the spokes of a wheel, and at the end of the spokes, below the roofs, the water. If he leaned far enough out, with one hand on the sash and his white tie hanging, he could see a piece of it between the houses on Francis Street and the trees of the Academy: a long dark stretch of harbour with the lights of the City Dock along its near edge and, beyond, the river, very wide, and the stars in it.

There was nothing on the water.

He stayed there. He did not know why he stayed there. He knew where his son was not, and he had two ideas where his son was, and neither of them was a place he could go, in a white tie, at eleven o’clock at night, as the Governor-General, without its being seen. So he leaned out of the window of the best room in the house and looked at the piece of water he could see, and waited, the way he had waited on a great many nights for a great many reports, with his face perfectly still.

Somebody knocked.

“Come in.”

Bramwell came in. He was still in his dinner jacket from the Ball. He was carrying, in one hand, a leather case about the length of his forearm.

“Sir,” he said. “I have brought the glasses.”

Pershing turned his head. Bramwell opened the case. Inside, on green baize, lay a pair of field glasses, black and brass, very old, very fine, with a strap of worn leather; they had been made in Hamburg before the war, and Pershing had carried them from the Rio Grande to the Meuse and back, and they lived now in a drawer of the writing table at Government House in New Westminster, and he had not known that Bramwell had packed them.

“Clause three,” said Pershing. “Without glass.”

“Yes, sir. I know.” Bramwell held the case out. “You are not ruling, sir. You are looking for your son.”

Pershing considered his secretary, and the open case, and the glasses on their green baize.

Then he took the glasses.

---

At eleven minutes past eleven a boat came into the harbour from the river under bare poles.

He saw it first as an absence, a long low shape that blotted out the stars in the water as it moved across them. Then, through the glasses, he saw it whole: a skipjack, long and white, with her great raked mast and her sail furled on the boom and no lights at all, not a riding light, not a lantern in the cabin door, coming in very slowly on the last of the flood with four men at long sweeps, two on each side, pulling without a sound. He could not read the name on her stern. He did not need to.

She came in past the Academy wall, slowly, and past the mouth of Spa Creek, and turned, slowly, toward the City Dock, toward the head of the basin where the market was and the foot of Main Street, and as she turned, he saw a figure in her bows.

It was tall. It was in a white shirt-front that caught the starlight. It had its arms up, holding something, a rope.

He held the glasses very still.

The skipjack came into the basin of the City Dock and stopped, just short of the head of it, in the middle of the water, perhaps forty yards from the market wall, and the four men shipped their sweeps, and for a moment nothing happened at all. The dock was nearly empty now. There were a few people on the market wall, sitting with their legs over, a few lanterns still lit on the boats tied up along the sides, the fried oyster stall closed and dark. Nobody seemed to have noticed her.

Then something began to go up her mast.

It went up slowly, in jerks, on a rope, from the foot of the mast toward the top, a dark lumpy shape sitting in what Pershing recognised, after a moment, as a bosun’s chair, a plank on a sling, and he adjusted the focus of the glasses with his thumb and the shape became a short wide man in a black suit with his hat jammed down on his head with both hands, going up the mast of the Sister Rose into the dark, toward the top, sixty feet above the water, where, from the City Dock, you could see over the roof of Purnell the chandler’s, past the fish on his cupola, to two chimneys and, very possibly, beneath them, the porch of Government House.

And at the foot of the mast, hauling on the rope, hand over hand, his white shirt-front glowing, was his son.

“Sir,” said Bramwell quietly.

“I see him.”

Pershing did not move. He leaned out of the window with the glasses to his eyes and watched La Guardia go up the mast, a foot at a time, in the chair, with Warren hauling below and Captain Tyler beside him with his hand on the rope too, and the other three men standing by, and as the chair went higher he saw something else go up after it, on a second line, swinging gently: a bucket, a small one, with something in it that caught the light.

He knew what he would have to do if the chair reached the top. He would have to go down to the City Dock in his white tie and stand at the place. And the place was the top of the mast.

He had said he would.

“Sir,” said Bramwell. “Shall I send for a motor?”

“Not yet.”

The chair went up. Forty feet. Fifty. La Guardia was very small now, at the top of the mast, a dark lump against the stars with his hat on. The bucket on its line went up beside him. He reached out for it. He had it. He was holding it in his lap. And he turned, Pershing saw him turn, in the chair, slowly, to look up the hill over the chandlery toward Government House, toward the window where the Governor-General was leaning out in a white tie with a pair of German field glasses, and stopped, and stared, and then lifted one hand off the bucket and, very slowly, with enormous dignity, sixty feet above the City Dock in the dark, took off his hat.

Pershing lowered the glasses half an inch.

And a searchlight came on.

---

It came from the mouth of the harbour, from a long low grey launch that had come in behind the skipjack without any lights and was now lying off the end of the City Dock with her engine idling, and it was a big searchlight, a naval one, and it went across the water like a sword and found the Sister Rose at once, and climbed her mast, and stopped at the top, and held there.

La Guardia sat at the top of the mast in the white glare with his hat in one hand and the bucket in the other and his face screwed up against the light, like a man in a photograph.

A voice came across the water through a megaphone. It was flat and careful and slightly nasal, and it carried with perfect clarity up the hill and over the roofs and in at the window of the best room in Government House.

“Federal officer. Sister Rose. Lower that man. You are in contravention of section three. Lower that man and stand by to be boarded.”

Down on the deck of the skipjack, Captain Tyler took his hand off the rope.

He said something to Warren. Pershing could not hear it. Warren let go too, and the bosun’s chair came down the mast of the Sister Rose very much faster than it had gone up, in a long smooth controlled drop that ended a foot above the deck, where three of the crew caught it, and La Guardia came out of it on to the deck with his hat still in his hand and the bucket still in the other, and was at once relieved of the bucket by Captain Tyler, who emptied it over the side.

The four men were at the sweeps.

The Sister Rose turned. She turned in her own length, all four sweeps going, the water white at her bows, away from the searchlight and the launch and the mouth of the harbour, and went off up the City Dock basin toward the market wall like a horse that has heard a gun; and the searchlight followed her; and the launch’s engine opened up with a roar that brought every window on Main Street up, and every head out of every window; and from somewhere on the far side of the basin, from among the boats tied up along the wall, came a third vessel, low and small and very fast, a rowing boat, a racing shell, borrowed, Pershing would learn later, from the boathouse of the Academy, with a single oarsman in it in a grey suit and rimless spectacles, rowing as if for his life, straight across the path of the launch.

---

The chase took eleven minutes, and the whole of Annapolis watched it.

It watched it from Main Street, which emptied on to the dock at the first roar of the launch’s engine, and from the windows, and from the market wall, and from the boats tied up along the sides of the basin, and from the Academy wall beyond, where the class of 1926 in their mess jackets came pouring out of the Yard from the Ball and lined the top of the sea wall in a long white row. It watched the Sister Rose go up the basin on her sweeps and turn at the head of it, by the market, and come down again on the other side, close in along the boats, with the launch behind her, too big to follow her in among the moorings, its searchlight swinging. It watched the racing shell come across the basin at an angle and cut in between the skipjack and the launch, so that the launch had to sheer off, with its engine screaming and its searchlight swinging wildly across the windows of Main Street and lighting up, for one instant, the face of the Governor-General’s private secretary at the window of the best room in Government House, a quarter of a mile away, holding a pair of opera glasses he had borrowed from Mrs Tull.

It watched the shell catch a crab, which is what oarsmen call it when an oar goes in at the wrong angle and will not come out, and stop dead, and the man in it go over backwards off his seat into the bottom of the boat with his legs in the air.

It watched the launch come round in a long curve and bear down on the skipjack again, and the skipjack go out of the basin past the end of the dock into the open harbour, and the launch follow, and the searchlight find her, and lose her, and find her again, out on the dark water, a long white shape with four sweeps going and a tall boy in a white shirt-front standing in her bows.

Pershing watched it through the glasses.

He watched it without moving. He leaned out of the window of the best room in the house with his elbows on the sill and the old German glasses to his eyes and followed his son across the harbour of Annapolis in a searchlight, with a federal launch behind him and a short wide Member of Parliament beside him holding on to the shrouds and shouting, and he did nothing at all. He did not send for the motor. He did not go down. He did not call out. There was nothing he could do that would not make it worse and nothing he could say that would not make it known, and he had spent five years learning that a man in his office who could do nothing must do it perfectly. So he did it. He stood at the window and watched, and his hands on the glasses were absolutely steady, and it was, he would think afterwards, lying awake, the hardest thing he did all weekend, and perhaps all year.

“Sir,” said Bramwell, beside him, very quietly, at the end of it.

“I see.”

The Sister Rose had turned for the dock.

She came back across the harbour on her sweeps, slowly now, not running, with the launch close behind her and its searchlight full on her and its engine down to a mutter, and she came into the City Dock basin and up it, past the boats, toward the head, toward the market wall, where perhaps four hundred people were now standing in a crowd along the edge, and she came alongside the wall, under the crowd, under the lamps, very gently, and stopped. And the launch came up behind her, and stopped. And the racing shell, which had been bailed out and rowed back across the basin by its oarsman with the expression of a man who will be writing a long report, came up beside the launch, and stopped.

Captain Tyler stood up on the deck of the Sister Rose.

He looked at the launch, and its searchlight, and Spratt standing in its bows with his megaphone. He looked at the four hundred people on the market wall above him. He looked, for a long moment, up the hill, over Purnell’s roof, at the chimneys. Then he turned to his crew and said something, and the three of them went down into the hold of the skipjack, under the hatch amidships, and came up again with a crate.

It was a wooden crate, about the size of a small coffin, heavy, with rope handles. They carried it to the rail. Four hundred people on the market wall held their breath. In the bows of the launch Spratt lowered his megaphone. In the racing shell Voss stood up, which nobody should do in a racing shell.

The crew of the Sister Rose lifted the crate to the rail and tipped it over the side into the City Dock.

It went in with a tremendous splash and sank at once, and came up again, and floated, low in the water, and Spratt’s launch nosed forward, and Spratt leaned out over the bow with a boathook, and hooked it, and the launch’s crew hauled it aboard, streaming, and set it on the deck in the searchlight, and Spratt knelt down beside it with a jemmy and prised up the lid.

There was a long pause.

Then Spratt stood up, slowly, holding something in his hand, and turned, and held it up in the full glare of his own searchlight, so that the four hundred people on the market wall and the class of 1926 on the Academy sea wall and the Governor-General at his window a quarter of a mile away could all see it perfectly clearly.

It was an oyster.

“June oysters,” said Captain Tyler, in his soft old voice, into the silence, and it carried across the whole of the basin. “Thin and milky. Not very nice.” He paused. “Told you, Mr Spratt. Told you last night. Vinegar and oysters.”

---

The market wall broke.

It broke the way Dahlgren Hall had broken that afternoon, all at once, laughing and cheering and shouting, and on the Academy sea wall the class of 1926 threw its caps into the air for the second time that day, mess caps this time, and some of them went into the river. And in the middle of it Pershing saw, through the glasses, the racing shell come alongside the launch, and Voss stand up in it again, swaying, and lean across and put his hand on Spratt’s shoulder, and say something that Pershing could not hear and did not need to.

“He is arresting him,” said Bramwell.

“Yes.”

“For what, sir, do you suppose?”

“I expect,” said Pershing, “for endangering a federal officer with a launch,” and lowered the glasses, and closed them, and gave them back to Bramwell, who put them in their case on the green baize and fastened the strap.

“Shall I send for the motor now, sir?”

“No,” said Pershing. “I shall walk.”

---

He walked down to the City Dock in his white tie. The crowd made a lane for him again, and closed behind him, and went quiet as he passed, and started up again behind him; and he came to the edge of the market wall above the Sister Rose, where she lay alongside with her lanterns lit now, and the launch behind her with its searchlight off, and Spratt sitting in the bows of the launch with Voss’s hand still on his shoulder and an expression of perfect resignation.

Captain Tyler looked up at him from the deck and nodded once.

“Evening,” he said.

“Good evening, Captain.”

“Nothing served,” said Captain Tyler. “Thought you’d want to know. Not within sight nor out of it. The gentleman held the bucket, but nobody handed it him. It come up on a line. And it was water.”

“Water?”

“Smith Island water. Out of the cask.” The old man’s beard moved very slightly in the corner. “We’re Methodists.”

La Guardia was sitting on the cabin roof with his hat on his knee and his collar gone and his black suit soaked down one side from the spray, and he looked up at the Governor-General on the wall with an expression of complete, exhausted, unrepentant happiness.

“General,” he said. “Did you see me?”

“Governor-General. I saw you.”

“I could see the house. From the top. Over the chandler’s. I could see it plain as day, the porch and the flag and the light in the window.” He shook his head slowly. “I could see you in it.”

“I know.”

“I took my hat off.”

“I know.”

And then Warren came up out of the hold.

He came up the ladder from the hatch amidships with a crate of oysters in his arms, because somebody had to bring them up and he had been asked, and he was in his white tie still, what was left of it, and his evening trousers soaked to the knee and his shirt-front grey with tar and his neck, above the collar, a dreadful raw red in the lantern light; and his feet were bare. He set the crate down on the deck and straightened up and saw his father on the wall above him, and stood quite still.

The crowd on the market wall went very quiet.

Pershing looked down at his son. His son looked up at him. Neither of them said anything for what felt to Pershing like a long time and was perhaps four seconds.

“Did you hand it to him?” Pershing said at last.

“No, sir.” Warren’s voice was quite steady. “I was holding the line. Mr La Guardia said a boy couldn’t serve. He said if I was going to come I had to haul and not hand. He made me promise.” He paused. “It was water anyway.”

Pershing looked at La Guardia. La Guardia, on the cabin roof, looked back at him and spread his hands, very slightly.

“Come up,” said Pershing to his son.

Warren came up. He climbed from the deck of the Sister Rose to the top of the market wall by the iron ladder set into the stone, barefoot, carefully, and stood on the wall in front of his father in front of four hundred people, and Pershing took off his own tailcoat, which was the only thing he had, and put it round his son’s shoulders, over the burn, without a word, and turned, and they walked up Main Street together in the dark toward Church Circle and the house, with the crowd on the dock silent behind them, and then, as they reached the corner, not silent at all.