He got it. Lying in San Francisco Bay was the British ship _Sea
Wanderer_, of Liverpool, a vessel of 2,000 tons, old and rather
disreputable in appearance, ready to carry such cargo as she could
get and make a precarious profit for her owners. Soon she would be
scrapped. That is, if she did not go to pieces first.
And yet despite the clumsiness of her outline, with all her sail set,
she was a beauty, a perfect swan of a ship; a swan with a streaked and
dark and dirty breast and body. She had loaded with grain at Port Costa
and now lay anchored in midstream waiting to get a crew. The skipper,
a Welshman of Cardiff, had a charter to fulfil and was rapidly growing
frantic. He was shipping anything and anybody who offered. He took a
sharp look at Guy Vanton, noted the fact that here was a man no longer
young, noted the further fact that this man no longer young was a
person of intelligence and education, found out that Guy had had no sea
experience, cursed a little, computed wages, remembered that Guy would
be so many added pounds of beef on a rope and took him.
The passage was from San Francisco to Leith in Scotland. In the course
of it Guy put on fifteen pounds and came to a clear understanding with
himself and at least one man of the crew.
They fought, he and this other man, in the waist, surrounded by a
ring of seamen whose sympathy was entirely against Guy and with the
Scotchman, named Macpherson. Macpherson was about ten pounds heavier
than Guy but made the mistake of clinching. Whereupon Guy turned the
fight into a wrestling match and threw his opponent. Macpherson’s head
striking on an iron butt, there was no more battle in him that day. Nor
did he challenge Guy in the rest of the passage.
Guy’s understanding with himself was as forcible and as fortuitous. It
was gained, as such comprehensions are, in loneliness and in struggle.
He got some of it on the ship’s yards, striving with half-frozen
fingers to clutch the wet and stiffened sail. He got some more of
it as he lay at night in the tropics on the hatch, looking up at
a star-sprinkled and gently rocking sky. He got most of it in the
spectacle of his fellows, a race of men dedicated to the achievement
of a common purpose for no real or visible reward. Certainly they did
not sail the seas for the sake of the few dollars it put in their
pockets. They could live more comfortably ashore in the easeful jails
for vagrants--“with running water and everything,” as one of them put
it. They were where they were for the sake of doing something together.
They would sail that ship from port to port. They would sail her
along a trackless path across the eternal frontier of the ocean in a
voyage without precedent. Every ship, it came home to Guy Vanton, is
a _Santa Maria_; every sailor a Columbus. If they failed, they failed
gallantly; if they succeeded, they succeeded in an enterprise bigger
than themselves.
And they did succeed. At night, under the glare of the arc-lights,
alongside a stone quay at Leith they stood, a patient little group up
forward, and heard the mate, standing on the fo’c’s’le head, address
them with the immemorial benediction of the sea, four words:
“That’ll do ye, men.”
A straggling cheer went up and they turned to the shore.
X
Guy Vanton saw now what he had never seen before, what he had come
more than 15,000 miles to see: that the world of men and women is a
fellowship into which all are admitted in such degree as they care to
enter and on such terms as they make for themselves.
Without any subtleties he perceived that the past could bind him only
in so far as he allowed it to do so. It was not his father who proposed
him for fellowship in the community of men and women, nor could his
father withhold that fellowship from him.
Nor his mother, nor anything that they had done or left undone. With
the birth of every mortal a new and clean page is turned in human
history.
Every man writes his own page. What had he written? And he was getting
out of middle age. There was not so much more time left to write. Not
so much space.
He would go home to her whom he should never have left; to her whose
page opened facing his; to her, the mother of his children, whom he had
left to teach them, unaided by him, how to write on the clean, white
page.
Together they would work out something better than themselves. What is
written, lives on. What they wrote would stand as a record, for better
or worse, after they were through inscribing it. The thing was--it must
be done together.
He wandered about Edinburgh for a week and then shipped for New York
from Liverpool. This was in early winter.