of the Americas, but that was not my fault. I wished for the direct
approach, the figure of Liberty to rise, haughty and most calm, a noble
symbol, as we came in from overseas; then the wide portals; then New
York. But the erratic tracks of a tramp steamer go not as her voyagers
will. They have no control over her. She moves to an enigmatic will in
London. It happens, then, that she rarely shows a wonder of the world
any respect. She arrives like sudden rain, like wind from a new
quarter. She is as chance as the fall of a star. None knows the day nor
the hour. At the most inconvenient time she takes the wonder's visitors
to the back door.
We went, light ship from the South, to Barbados, for orders; and
because I wanted New York, for that was the way home, we were sent to
Tampa for phosphates. As to Tampa, its position on the globe is known
only to underwriters and shipbrokers; it is that sort of place. It is a
mere name, like Fernando de Noronha, or Key West, which one meets only
in the shipping news, idly wondering then what strange things the
seafarer would find if he went.
Late one night, down a main street of Tampa, there came, with the
deliberate movement of fate, a gigantic corridor train, looming as high
as a row of lighted villas, and drawn by the awful engine of a dream.
That train behaved there as trams do at home, presently stopping
alongside a footway.
Behind me was a little wooden shop. In front was the wall of a
carriage, having an entrance on the second storey, and a roof athwart
the meridian stars. One of its wheels was the nearest and most dominant
object in the night to me, a monstrous bright round resting on a muddy
newspaper in the road. It absorbed all the light from the little wooden
shop. Now, I had hunted throughout Tampa for its railway terminus,
fruitlessly; but here its train had found me, keeping me from crossing
the road.
"Where do I board this train for New York?" I asked. (I talked like a
fool, I know; it was like asking a casual wayfarer in East Ham whether
that by the kerb is the Moscow express. Yet what was I to do?) "Board
her right here," said the fellow, who was in his shirt sleeves.
Therefore I delivered myself, in blind faith, to the casual gods who
are apt to wake up and by a series of deft little miracles get things
done fitly in America when all seems lost and the traveller has even
bared his resigned neck to the stroke.
But I had not the least hope of seeing New York and a Cunarder; not
with such an unpropitious start as that. With an exit like Euston one
never doubts sure direction, and arrival at the precise spot at the
exact moment. You feel there it was arranged for in Genesis. The
officials cannot alter affairs. They are priests administering
inviolate rites, advancing matters fore-ordained by the unseen, and so
no more able to stay or speed this cosmic concern than the astronomer
who schedules the planets. The planets take their heavenly courses. But
I had never been to the United States before, did not know even the
names of their many gods, and New York was at the end of a great
journey; and the train for it stopped outside a tobacco shop in the
road, like a common tram.
There was another night when, with the usual unreason, the swift and
luxurious glide, lessening through easy gradations, ceased. I saw some
lights in the rain outside. How should I know it was New York? We had
even changed climates since we started. The passengers of my early days
in the train had passed away. There was nothing to show. More, I felt
no exultation--which should have been the first of warnings. Merely we
got to a railway station one night, and a negro insisted that I should
get out and stop out. This was N' Yark, he said.
It was night, I repeat; there was a row of cabs in a dolorous rain. I
saw a man in a shiny cape under the nearest lamp, and beyond him a
vista of reflections from vacant stones, which to me always, more than
bleak hills or the empty round of the sea, is desolation. There were no
spacious portals. There was no figure of Liberty, haughty but
welcoming. There was rain, and cabs that waited without hope. There was
exactly what you find at the end of a twopenny journey when your only
luggage is an evening paper, an umbrella, and that tired feeling. Not
knowing where to go, and little caring, I followed the crowd, and so
found myself in a large well-lighted hall. Having no business there--it
was a barren place--I pushed on, and came suddenly to the rim of the
world.
Before me was the immensity of dark celestial space in which wandered
hosts of uncharted stars; and below my feet was the abyss of old night.
Just behind me was a woman telling her husband that they had forgotten
Jimmy's boots, and couldn't go back now, for the ferry was just coming.
Jimmy's boots! Now, when you are a released soul, ascending the night,
and the earth below is a bright silver ball, not so very big, and some
other viewless soul behind you, still with thoughts absent on worldly
trifles, mutters concerning boots when in the Milky Way, you will know
how I felt. Here was the ultimate empty dark in which the sun could
never shine. The sun had not merely left the place. It had never been
there. It was a remote star, one of myriads in the constellations at
large, the definite groups which occulted in the void before me.
Looking at those swiftly moving systems, I watched for the flash of
impact; but no great light of collision broke. The groups of lights
passed and repassed noiselessly.
Then one constellation presently detached itself, and its orbit
evidently would intersect our foothold. It came nearer out of the
night, till I could see plainly that it appeared to be a long section
of a well-lighted street, say, like a length of Piccadilly. It
approached end-on to where I stood, and at last impinged. It actually
was a length of street, and I could continue my walk. The street
floated off again into the night, with me, Jimmy's father and mother,
and all of us, and the vans and motor-cars; and the other square end of
it soon joined a roadway on the opposite shore. The dark river was as
full of mobile lengths of bright roadway as Oxford Circus is of
motor-buses; and the fear of the unknown, as in the terrific dark of a
dream where flaming comets stream on undirected courses, numbed my
little mind. I had found New York.
I had found it. Its bulk was beyond the mind, its lights were falling
star systems, and its movements those of general cataclysm. I should
find no care for little human needs there. One cannot warm one's hands
against the flames of earthquake. There is no provision for men in the
welter, but dimly apprehended in the night, of blind and inhuman
powers.
Therefore, the hotel bedroom, when I got to it, surprised and steadied
me with its elaborate care for the body. But yet I was not certain.
Then I saw against the wall a dial, and reading a notice over it I
learned that by working the hands of this false clock correctly I could
procure anything, from an apple to the fire brigade. Now this was
carrying matters to the other extreme; and I had to suppress a desire
to laugh hysterically. I set the hands to a number; waited one minute;
then the door opened, and a waiter came in with a real tray, conveying
a glass and a bottle. So there was a method then in this general
madness after all. I tried to regard the wonder as indifferently as the
waiter's own cold and measuring eyes.
_March 1910._
X. The Derelict
In a tramp steamer, which was overloaded, and in midwinter, I had
crossed to America for the first time. What we experienced of the
western ocean during that passage gave me so much respect for it that
the prospect of the return journey, three thousand miles of those seas
between me and home, was already a dismal foreboding. The shipping
posters of New York, showing stately liners too lofty even to notice
the Atlantic, were arguments good enough for steerage passengers, who
do, I know, reckon a steamer's worth by the number of its funnels; but
the pictures did nothing to lessen my regard for that dark outer world
I knew. And having no experience of ships installed with racquet
courts, Parisian cafes, swimming baths, and pergolas, I was naturally
puzzled by the inconsequential behaviour of the first-class passengers
at the hotel. They were leaving by the liner which was to take me, and,
I gathered, were going to cross a bridge to England in the morning. Of
course, this might have been merely the innocent profanity of the
simple-minded.
Embarking at the quay next day, I could not see that our ship had
either a beginning or an end. There was a blank wall which ran out of
sight to the right and left. How far it went, and what it enclosed,
were beyond me. Hundreds of us in a slow procession mounted stairs to
the upper floor of a warehouse, and from thence a bridge led us to a
door in the wall half-way in its height. No funnels could be seen.
Looking straight up from the embarkation gangway, along what seemed the
parapet of the wall was a row of far-off indistinguishable faces
peering straight down at us. There was no evidence that this building
we were entering, of which the high black wall was a part, was not an
important and permanent feature of the city. It was in keeping with the
magnitude of New York's skyscrapers, which this planet's occasionally
non-irritant skin permits to stand there to afford man an apparent
reason to be gratified with his own capacity and daring.
But with the knowledge that this wall must be afloat there came no
sense of security when, going through that little opening in its
altitude, I found myself in a spacious decorated interior which hinted
nothing of a ship, for I was puzzled as to direction. My last ship
could be surveyed in two glances; she looked, and was, a comprehensible
ship, no more than a manageable handful for an able master. In that
ship you could see at once where you were and what to do. But in this
liner you could not see where you were, and would never know which way
to take unless you had a good memory. No understanding came to me in
that hall of a measured and shapely body, designed with a cunning
informed by ages of sea-lore to move buoyantly and surely among the
ranging seas, to balance delicately, a quick and sensitive being, to
every precarious slope, to recover a lost poise easily and with the
grace natural to a quick creature controlled by an alert mind.
There was no shape at all to this structure. I could see no line the
run of which gave me warrant that it was comprised in the rondure of a
ship. The lines were all of straight corridors, which, for all I knew,
might have ended blindly on open space, as streets which traverse a
city and are bare in vacancy beyond the dwellings. It was possible we
were encompassed by walls, but only one wall was visible. There we
idled, all strangers, and to remain strangers, in a large hall roofed
by a dome of coloured glass. Quite properly, palms stood beneath. There
were offices and doors everywhere. On a broad staircase a multitude of
us wandered aimlessly up and down. Each side of the stairway were
electric lifts, intermittent and brilliant apparitions. I began to
understand why the saloon passengers thought nothing of the voyage.
They were encountering nothing unfamiliar. They had but come to another
hotel for a few days.
I attempted to find my cabin, but failed. A uniformed guide took care
of me. But my cabin, curtained, upholstered, and warm, with mirrors and
plated ware, sunk somewhere deeply among carpeted and silent streets
down each of which the perspective of glow-lamps looked interminable,
left me still questioning. The long walk had given me a fear that I was
remote from important affairs which might be happening beyond. My
address was 323. The street door--I was down a side turning,
though--bore that number. A visitor could make no mistake, supposing he
could find the street and my side turning. That was it. There was a
very great deal in this place for everybody to remember, and most of us
were strangers. No doubt, however, we were afloat, if the lifebelts in
the rack meant anything. Yet the cabin, insulated from all noise, was
not soothing, but disturbing. I had been used to a ship in which you
could guess all that was happening even when in your bunk; a sensitive
and communicative ship.
A steward appeared at my door, a stranger out of nowhere, and asked
whether I had seen a bag not mine in the cabin. He might have been
created merely to put that question, for I never saw him again on the
voyage. This liner was a large province having irregular and shifting
bounds, permitting incontinent entrance and disappearance. All this
should have inspired me with an idea of our vastness and importance,
but it did not. I felt I was one of a multitude included in a nebulous
mass too vague to hold together unless we were constantly wary.
In the saloon there was the solid furniture of rare woods, the ornate
decorations, and the light and shadows making vague its limits and
giving it an appearance of immensity, to keep the mind from the thought
of our real circumstances. At dinner we had valentine music, dreamy
stuff to accord with the shaded lamps which displayed the tables in a
lower rosy light. It helped to extend the mysterious and romantic
shadows. The pale, disembodied masks of the waiters swam in the dusk
above the tinted light. I had for a companion a vivacious American lady
from the Middle West, and she looked round that prospect we had of an
expensive cafe, and said, "Well, but I am disappointed. Why, I've been
looking forward to seeing the ocean, you know. And it isn't here."
"Smooth passage," remarked a man on the other side. "No sea at all
worth mentioning." Actually, I know there was a heavy beam sea running
before a half-gale. I could guess the officer in charge somewhere on
the exposed roof might have another mind about it; but it made no
difference to us in our circle of rosy intimate light bound by those
vague shadows which were alive with ready servitude.
"And I've been reading _Captains Courageous_ with this voyage in view.
Isn't this the month when the forties roar? I want to hear them roar,
just once, you know, and as gently as any sucking dove." We all
laughed. "We can't even tell we're in a ship."
She began to discuss Kipling's book. "There's some fine seas in that.
Have you read it? But I'd like to know where that ocean is he pretends
to have seen. I do believe the realists are no more reliable than the
romanticists. Here we are a thousand miles out, and none of us has seen
the sea yet. Tell me, does not a realist have to magnify his awful
billows just to get them into his reader's view?"
I murmured something feeble and sociable. I saw then why sailors never
talk directly of the sea. I, for instance, could not find my key at
that moment--it was in another pocket somewhere--so I had no iron to
touch. Talking largely of the sea is something like the knowing talk of
young men about women; and what is a simple sailor man that he should
open his mouth on mysteries?
Only on the liner's boat-deck, where you could watch her four funnels
against the sky, could you see to what extent the liner was rolling.
The arc seemed to be considerable then, but slowly described. But the
roll made little difference to the promenaders below. Sometimes they
walked a short distance on the edges of their boots, leaning over as
they did so, and swerving from the straight, as though they had turned
giddy. The shadows formed by the weak sunlight moved slowly out of
ambush across the white deck, but often moved indecisively, as though
uncertain of a need to go; and then slowly went into hiding again. The
sea whirling and leaping past was far below our wall side. It was like
peering dizzily over a precipice when watching those green and white
cataracts.
The passengers, wrapped and comfortable on the lee deck, chatted as
blithely as at a garden-party, while the band played medleys of
national airs to suit our varied complexions. The stewards came round
with loaded trays. A diminutive and wrinkled dame in costly furs
frowned through her golden spectacles at her book, while her maid sat
attentively by. An American actress was the centre of an eager group of
grinning young men; she was unseen, but her voice was distinct. The two
Vanderbilts took their brisk constitutional among us as though the
liner had but two real passengers though many invisible nobodies. The
children, who had not ceased laughing and playing since we left New
York, waited for the slope of the deck to reach its greatest, and then
ran down towards the bulwarks precipitously. The children, happy and
innocent, completed for us the feeling of comfortable indifference and
security which we found when we saw there was more ship than ocean. The
liner's deck canted slowly to leeward, went over more and more, beyond
what it had done yet, and a pretty little girl with dark curls riotous
from under her red tam-o'-shanter, ran down, and brought up against us
violently with both hands, laughing heartily. We laughed too. Looking
seawards, I saw receding the broad green hill, snow-capped, which had
lifted us and let us down. The sea was getting up.
Near sunset, when the billows were mounting express along our run,
sometimes to leap and snatch at our upper structure, and were rocking
us with some ease, there was a commotion forward. Books and shawls went
anywhere as the passengers ran. Something strange was to be seen upon
the waters.
It looked like a big log out there ahead, over the starboard bow. It
was not easy to make out. The light was failing. We overhauled it
rapidly, and it began to shape as a ship's boat. "Oh, it's gone,"
exclaimed some one then. But the forlorn object lifted high again, and
sank once more. Whenever it was glimpsed it was set in a patch of foam.
That flotsam, whatever it was, was of man. As we watched it intently,
and before it was quite plain, we knew intuitively that hope was not
there, that we were watching something past its doom. It drew abeam,
and we saw what it was, a derelict sailing ship, mastless and awash.
The alien wilderness was around us now, and we saw a sky that was
overcast and driven, and seas that were uplifted, which had grown
incredibly huge, swift, and perilous, and they had colder and more
sombre hues.
The derelict was a schooner, a lifeless and soddened hulk, so heavy and
uncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured back
and forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for the
assaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, and
plunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in the
indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It
mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a
dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now
do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew
open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the
dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a
great comber ran at her, as if it had but just spied her, and thought
she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we
heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, on a summit in
desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the
accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.
I turned, and there beside me was the lady who had wanted to find the
sea. She was gazing at the place where the wreck was last seen, her
eyes fixed, her mouth a little open in awe and horror.
_April 1910._
XI. The Voyage of the _Mona_
There was the _Mona_, Yeo's boat, below the quay wall; but I could not
see her owner. The unequal stones of that wall have the weathered
appearance of a natural outcrop of rock, for they were matured by the
traffic of ships when America was a new yarn among sailors. They are
the very stones one would choose to hear speak. Yet the light of early
morning in that spacious estuary was so young and tenuous that you
could suppose this heavy planet had not yet known the stains of night
and evil; and the _Mona_, it must be remembered, is white without and
egg-blue within. Such were the reflections she made, lively at anchor
on the swirls of a flood-tide bright enough for the sea-bottom to have
been luminous, that I felt I must find Yeo. The white houses of the
village, with shining faces, were looking out to sea.
Another man, a visitor from the cities of the plains, was gazing down
with appreciation at the _Mona_. There was that to his credit. His
young wife, slight and sad, and in the dress of the promenade of a
London park, was with him. She was not looking on the quickness of the
lucent tide, but at the end of a parasol, which was idly marking the
grits. I had seen the couple about the village for a week. He was big,
ruddy, middle-aged, and lusty. His neck ran straight up into his round
head, and its stiff prickles glittered like short ends of brass wire.
It was easy to guess of him, without knowing him and therefore
unfairly, that, if his wife actually confessed to him that she loved
another man, he would not have believed her; because how was it
possible for her to do that, he being what he was? His aggressive face,
and his air of confident possession, the unconscious immodesty of the
man because of his important success at some unimportant thing or
other, seemed an offence in the ancient tranquillity of that place,
where poor men acknowledged only the sea, the sun, and the winds.
I found Yeo at the end of the quay, where round the corner to seaward
open out the dunes of the opposite shore of the estuary, faint with
distance and their own pallor, and ending in the slender stalk of a
lighthouse, always quivering at the vastness of what confronts it. Yeo
was sitting on a bollard, rubbing tobacco between his palms. I told him
this was the sort of morning to get the _Mona_ out. He carefully poured
the grains into the bowl of his pipe, stoppered it, glanced slowly
about the brightness of the river mouth, and shook his head. This was a
great surprise, and anybody who did not know Yeo would have questioned
him. But it was certain he knew his business. There is not a more
deceptive and difficult stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeo
was born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in the
breeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The
soft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of a
body to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; but
when he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark and
leathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and wise, and must be
addressed with care and not as most men. He rarely smiles when a
foolish word is spoken or when he is contradicted boldly by the
innocent. He spits at his feet and contemplates the sea, as though he
had heard nothing.
The visitor came up, followed reluctantly by his wife. "Are you Yeo?
How are you, Yeo? What about a sail? I want you to take us round to
Pebblecombe."
That village is over the bar and across the bay. Yeo looked at the man,
and shook his head.
"Why not?" asked the visitor sharply, as though he were addressing the
reluctance of the driver of his own car.
The sailor pointed a stern finger seawards, to where the bar is shown
in charts, but where all we could make out was the flashing of
inconstant white lines.
"Well?" questioned the man, who glanced out there perfunctorily. "What
of it?"
"Look at it," mildly insisted the sailor, speaking for the first time.
"Isn't the sea like a wall?" The man's wife, who was regarding Yeo's
placid face with melancholy attention, turned to her husband and placed
a hand of nervous deprecation on his arm. He did not look at her.
"Oh, of course, if you don't want to go, if you don't want to go...."
said the visitor, shaking his head as though at rubbish, and rising
several times on his toes. "Perhaps you've a better job," he added,
with an unpleasant smile.
"I'm ready to go if you are, sir," said Yeo, "but I shall have to take
my friend with me." The sailor nodded my way.
The man did not look at me. I was not there to him. He gave an
impatient jerk to his head. "Ready to go? Of course I'm ready to go! Of
course. Why do you suppose I asked?"