"'You see that P. and O. Johnny?' he said. 'Well, he knocked down that
kid'--indicating the boy in spectacles--'and took tuppence from him.'
"I thought a lot about the whole thing on the way home," said Hammond.
"I tell you the yarn for you to explain to the chaps who like to base
their beliefs on the sure ground of what they can understand."
XIII. The Extra Hand
Old George Galsworthy and I sat on the headland above the estuary,
looking into the vacancy which was the Atlantic on an entranced silver
evening. The sky was overcast. There was no wind, and no direct sun.
The light was refined and diffused through a thin veiling of pearl. Sea
and sky were one. As though they were suspended in space we saw a tug,
having a barque in tow, far but distinct, in the light of the bay, tiny
models of ebony set in a vast brightness. They were poised in the
illumination, and seemed to be motionless, but we knew they were moving
down on us. "Here she comes," said the seaman, "and a fine evening it
is for the end of her last voyage." Shipbreakers had bought that
barque. She was coming in to be destroyed.
The stillness of the world, and its lustre in which that fine black
shape was centred and was moving to her end, made me feel that
headlands, sea, and sky knew what was known to the two watchers on the
hill. She was condemned. The ship was central, and the regarding world
stood about her in silence. Sombre and stately she came, in the manner
of the tragic proud, superior to the compelling fussiness of little
men, making no resistance. The spring tide was near full. It had
flooded the marsh lands below us, but not with water, for those
irregular pools resplendent as mirrors were deeps of light. The
hedgerows were strips of the earth's rind remaining above a profound.
The light below the lines of black hedges was antipodean. The barque
moved in slowly. She did not go past the lighthouse, and past our hill,
into the harbour beyond, like a ship about the business of her life.
She turned into the shallows below us, and stood towards the foot of
the hill.
"She's altered a little," meditated Galsworthy. "They've shortened her
sticks, those Norwegians, and painted her their beastly mustard colour
and white. She's hogbacked, too. Well, she's old." The old man
continued his quiet meditation. He was really talking to himself, I
think, and I was listening to his thoughts.
"Look!" cried Galsworthy, suddenly rising, his hand gripping my
shoulder. The tug had cast off and was going about. The ship came right
on. There was an interval of time between her and the shore which was
breathless and prolonged.
"She's aground!" exclaimed the old man to himself, and the hand on my
shoulder gripped harder. He stood regarding her for some time. "She's
done," he said, and presently released me, sitting down beside me
again, still looking at her moodily, smoking his pipe. He was silent
for a time. Perhaps he had in his mind that he too had taken the
ground. It was sunset, and there she was, and there was he, and no more
sparkling morning tides out of port for them any more.
Presently he turned to me. "There's a queer story about her. She
carried an extra hand. I'll tell you. It's a queer yarn. She had one
man at a muster more than signed for her. At night, you couldn't get
into the rigging ahead of that chap. There you'd find him just too much
ahead of the first lad who had jumped at the call to be properly seen,
you know. You could see him, but you couldn't make him out. So the chap
behind him was in no hurry, after the first rush. Well, it made it
pretty hard for her old man to round up a crew. He had to find men who
didn't know her. Men in Poplar who didn't know her, those days, were
scarce. She was a London clipper and she carried a famous flag.
Everybody knew her but men who weren't sailors.
"Well, the boys said she had a bit of gibbet-post about her somewhere.
Ah! maybe. I don't know. Anyway, I say she was a fine clipper. I knew
her. She was the pick of the bunch, to my eye. But she was full of
trouble. I must say that. When she was launched she killed a man. First
she stuck on the ways, and then she went off all unexpected, like a
bird. That was always a trick of hers. You never knew her. And when she
was tired of headwinds, she'd find a dead calm. That was the kind of
ship she was. A skipper would look at her, and swear she was the ship
for him. The other chaps didn't understand her, he'd say. A ship like
that's sure to be good, he'd tell you. But when he'd got her she'd turn
his hair grey. She was that sort.
"One voyage she was six weeks beating to westward round Cape Horn. We
had a bad time. I'd never seen such seas. We could do no good there. It
was a voyage and a half. She lost the second mate overboard, and she
lost gear. So the old man put back to the Plate. And, of course, all
her crowd deserted, to a man. They said they wanted to see their homes
again before they died. They said there was something wrong about that
ship, and they left all their truck aboard, and made themselves scarce.
The old man scraped up a new crowd. They came aboard at dusk, one day,
and they stared about them. 'Look, sir,' said one of them, 'what's that
up there? What's that figgerhead in y'r main to'gallan' cross-tree?' I
was the mate, you know. I talked to that chap. He learned something
about getting the booze out of him before he came aboard. He got a move
on.
"We were over four months making 'Frisco that voyage, and she the
sailer she was. Why, she's logged thirteen knots. But she could get
nothing right, not for long. She was like those fine-looking women men
can't live without, and can't live with. She'd break a man's heart.
When we got back to Blackwall we heard she was sold to foreigners ...
but there she is now, come home to die. I bet old Yeo don't care much
about her troubles, though. He'll break her up, troubles and all, and
she's for firewood ... there you are, my dear, there you are ... but
you should have seen her at Blackwall, in the old days ... what's the
East India Dock Road like, these times?"
The next day, at low water, I stood beneath her, and watched a cascade
pouring incessantly from a patched wound in her side, for she had been
in collision, and that was why she was condemned. She was careened,
like a slain thing, and with the dank rocks and weeds about, and that
monotonous pour from her wound, she might have been a venerable sea
monster from which the life was draining. Yeo hailed me from above, and
up the lively rope ladder I went. She had a Norwegian name, but that
was not her name. All Poplar knew her once. There she was born. She was
one of ours. That stone arch of John Company, the entrance to the East
India Dock, once framed her picture, and her topmasts looked down to
the Dock Road, when she was at home. I could believe Galsworthy. She
was not so empty as she seemed. She had a freight, and Yeo did not know
it. Poplar and the days of the clippers! I knew she was invisibly
peopled. Of course she was haunted.
The shipwrecker and I went about her canted decks, groped through dark
recesses where it might have been the rats we heard, and peered into
the sonorous shades of the empty cargo spaces. In the cabins we puzzled
over those relics left by her last crew, which, without their
associations, seemed to have no reason in them. There was a mocking
silence in the cabins. What sort of men were they who were familiar
with these doors? And before the northmen had her, and she was English,
trim, and flew skysails and studding-sails, and carried lady
passengers, who were the Poplar boys that laughed and yarned here? She
was more mine than Yeo's. Let him claim her timber. All the rich
freight of her past was mine. I was the intimate of every ghost she
had.
We sat in a cabin which had been her skipper's. There was a litter on
the floor of old newspapers and documents, receipts for harbour dues,
the captain's copies of bills of lading, store lists, and some
picture-postcards from the old man's family. A lump of indurated
plum-duff, like a geological specimen, was on the table. There was a
slant of sunshine through a square port window, and it rested on a
decayed suit of oilskins. We sat silent, the shipbreaker having
finished estimating to me, with enthusiasm, what she had of copper. He
was now waiting for his men to return to work. They were going to take
the masts out of her. But I was wondering what I could do to lay that
ghost of my old shipping parish which this craft had conjured in my
mind. And as we both sat there, looking at nothing, we heard, at the
end of the alley-way, a door stealthily latch.
Yeo sprang to his feet at once, staring and listening. He looked at me,
surprised and puzzled. "Of all the----" he began, and stopped. He took
his seat again. "Why, of course," he said. "She's settling. That's what
it is. She's settling. But my men, the fools, will have it there's some
one pottering about this ship."
_May 1909._
XIV. The Sou'-Wester
The trees of the Embankment Gardens were nearly stripped of their
leaves, and were tossing widely. Shutting the eyes, you could think you
heard the sweep of deep-water seas with strident crests. The greater
buildings, like St. Paul's, might have been promontories looming in a
driving murk. The low sky was dark and riven, and was falling headlong.
But I liked the look of it. Here, plainly, was the end of the halcyon
days,--good-bye to the sun,--but I felt, for a reason I could not
remember and did not try to recall, pleased and satisfied with this
gale and its wrack. The clouds seemed curiously familiar. I had seen
them before somewhere; they were reminding me of a lucky but forgotten
occasion of the past. Whatever it was, no doubt it was better than
anything likely to happen today. It was something good in an old world
we have lost. But it was something of that old world, like an old book
which reads the same today; or an old friend surviving, who would help
to make endurable the years to come. I need not try to remember it. I
had got it, whatever it was, and that was all the assurance of its
wealth I wanted. Then from the river came a call, deep, prolonged, and
melancholy....
So that was it! No wonder the low clouds driving, and the wind in the
trees, worked that in my mind. The tide was near full. There was a
steamer moving in the Pool. She was outward bound.
Outward bound! I saw again the black buildings of a Welsh coaling port
at evening, and a vague steamer (but no liner, that was plain enough,
no liner), and two men beside me, who were going out with me in her,
watching her. She was little more than a shadow with a port light. She
gave a deep, shuddering warning. She was off. We had been for a last
run round the town. We were to board her in the outer lock. The wind
was whining in the telegraph-wires. It was hazing the pools of rain,
which were bright and bleak with the last of a brazen yellow sunset.
"Happy days!" said one of us. "Who wouldn't sell that little farm?...
Now we're in for it. It will be the devil of an old, tough night."
(Where this night is that friend? Mine-sweeping? Patrolling? Or is
he---- But I hope not. He was a good fellow and a sailor.)
We were better off than we knew then, though then we thought it would
be hard luck for a dog. Our thoughts turned to the snug indoor places
of the lighted town behind us; for in the small hours we should be
plunging off Hartland; with the Wolf to come, and the Bay after that;
and the glass falling. But youth did know it was young, and that this
night, wild and forbidding, and the old _Sirius_ rolling away into it,
would look fine when seen through tobacco smoke in the years to come.
For the light we saw at sea never fades. It survives our voyaging. It
shines into the mind and abides there. We watched the horizon
steadfastly for lands we did not know. The sun came up each day to a
world that was not the same, no matter how it looked. At night we
changed our stars. We heard nothing but the wind and the waves, and the
quiet voice of a shipmate yarning with his pipe in his mouth. The
elements could interrupt us, but not the world. Not a gull of that was
left.
And somehow the beginning of a voyage seemed to be always in westerly
weather, at the beginning of winter. The English land to me is a
twilight coast with clouds like iron above it poised in a windy light
of aquamarine, and a sunset of lucid saffron. Against that western
light, bright, bare, and penetrating as the ruthless judgment of
impersonal divinity, the polished waves mount, outlined as hard as jet,
and move towards us. The ship's prow rises to cut out segments of the
west; falls into the dark hollows of waves. The wind pours over us, an
icy and ponderable flood, and is increasing. Where England has sunk in
the dark one clear eye, like a yellow planet, comes out to watch us.
One thinks of the sea now as something gone, like the old world. There
once a voyager was sundered from insistent trifles. He was with simple,
elemental things that have been since time began, and he had to meet
them with what skill he had, the wind for his friend and adversary, the
sun his clock, the stars for counsel, and the varying wilderness his
hope and his doubt. But the cruel misery of man did not intrude. He was
free from that. All men at sea were his fellows, whatever their
language, an ancient fraternity whose bond was a common but unspoken
knowledge of a hidden but imminent fate. They could be strangers
ashore, but not at sea.
But that is gone now. The sea is poisoned with a deadly sorrow not its
own, which man has put there. The spaciousness of the great vault above
the round of waters is soiled by the gibbering anxieties of a thousand
gossipers of evil, which the ship catches in its wires, to darken the
night of its little company with surmises of distant malignity and woe.
It is something to retain a little of the light of the days at sea
which have passed. They too had their glooms, but they came of the
dignity of advancing storms, and the fear which great seas put in men
who held a resolute course nevertheless, knowing that their weird was
one which good seamen have faced since first the unknown beyond the
land was dared; faith, courage, and the loyalty of comrades, which all
the waters of the world cannot drown. But the heart of man, which will
face the worst the elements can do, sickens at the thought of the
perverse and inexplicable cruelty of his fellows.
_October 1917._
XV. On Leave
Coming out of Victoria Station into the stir of London again, on leave
from Flanders, must give as near the sensation of being thrust suddenly
into life from the beyond and the dead as mortal man may expect to
know. It is a surprising and providential wakening into a world which
long ago went dark. That world is strangely loud, bright, and alive.
Plainly it did not stop when, somehow, it vanished once upon a time.
There its vivid circulation moves, and the buses are so usual, the
people so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs so
startlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubt
that he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform must
surely mean something, and its stains something more!
And there can be no doubt about it, as you stand there a trifle dizzy
in London once more. You really have come back from another world; and
you have the curious idea that you may be invisible in this old world.
In a sense you know you are unseen. These people will never know what
you know. There they gossip in the hall, and leisurely survey the
bookstall, and they would never guess it, but you have just returned
from hell. What could they say if you told them? They would be
embarrassed, polite, forbearing, kindly, and smiling, and they would
mention the matter afterwards as a queer adventure with a poor devil
who was evidently a little over-wrought; shell shock, of course.
Beastly thing, shell shock. Seems to affect the nerves.
They would not understand. They will never understand. What is the use
of standing in veritable daylight, and telling the living, who have
never been dead, of the other place?
I know now how Rip Van Winkle felt about it. But his was a minor
trouble. All he lost was some years. He had not changed, except that
his beard was longer. But the man who comes back from the line has lost
more than years. He has lost his original self. People failed to
recognize Rip because they did not know his beard. Our friends do
recognize us when they greet us on our return from the front, but they
do not know us because we are not the men they remember. They are the
same as ever; but when they address us, they talk to a mind which is
not there, though the eyes betray nothing of the difference. They talk
to those who have come back to life to see them again, but who cannot
tell them what has happened, and dare not try.
Between that old self and the man they see, there is an abyss of dread.
He has passed through it. To them the war is official _communiques_,
the amplifying dispatches of war correspondents, the silence of absent
friends in danger, the shock of a telegram, and rather interesting
food-rationing. They think it is the same war which the leave-man
knows. He will tell them all about it, and they will learn the truth at
last.
All about it! If an apparition of the battle-line in eruption were to
form over London, over Paris, over Berlin, a sinister mirage, near,
unfading, and admonitory, with spectral figures moving in its reflected
fires and its gloom, and the echoes of their cries were heard, and
murmurs of convulsive shocks, and the wind over the roofs brought
ghostly and abominable smells into our streets; and if that were to
haunt us by day and night, a phantom from which there was no escape, to
remain till the sins of Europe were expiated, we should soon forget
politics and arguments, and be in sackcloth and ashes, positive no
longer, but down on our knees before Heaven in awe at this revelation
of social guilt, asking simply what we must do to be saved.
Your revival at home, when on leave, is full of wonderful commonplaces,
especially now, with summer ripening. The yellow-hammer is heard on the
telegraph wire, and the voices of children in the wood, and the dust of
white English country roads is smelled at evening. All that is a
delight which is miraculous in its intensity. But it is very lonesome
and far. It is curious to feel that you are really there, delighting in
the vividness of this recollection of the past, and yet balked by the
knowledge that you are, nevertheless, outside this world of home,
though it looks and smells and sounds so close; and that you may never
enter it again. It is like the landscape in a mirror, the luminous
projection of what is behind you. But you are not there. It is
recognized, but viewed now apart and aloof, a chance glimpse at the
secure and enduring place from which you came, vouchsafed to one who
must soon return to the secret darkness in his mind.
The home folk do not know this, and may not be told--I mean they may
not be told why it is so. The youngster who is home on leave, though he
may not have reasoned it out, knows that what he wants to say, often
prompted by indignation, cannot be said. He feels intuitively that this
is beyond his power to express. Besides, if he were to begin, where
would he end? He cannot trust himself. What would happen if he
uncovered, in a sunny and innocent breakfast-room, the horror he knows?
If he spoke out? His people would not understand him. They would think
he was mad. They would be sorry, dammit. Sorry for him! Why, he is not
sorry for himself. He can stand it now he knows what it is like. He can
stand it--if they can. And he realizes they can stand it, and are
merely anxious about his welfare, the welfare which does not trouble
him in the least, for he has looked into the depth of evil, and for him
the earth has changed; and he rather despises it. He has seen all he
wants to see of it. Let it go, dammit. If they don't mind the change,
and don't kick, why should he? What a hell of a world to be born into;
and once it did look so jolly good, too! He is shy, cheery, but
inexorably silent on what he knows. Some old fool said to him once, "It
must be pretty bad out there?" Pretty bad! What a lark!
But for his senior, who also knows, though the feeling is the same, the
nature of the combative adult male is less shy, and not merely
negatively contemptuous, but aggressive. It is difficult for him to
endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special
revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it,
has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think
there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical
arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He
feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and
impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He
understands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected from
his world that was, and that now he cannot come near them. Yet though
he knows it, they do not. The greatest evil of war--this is what
staggers you when you come home, feeling you know the worst of it--is
the unconscious indifference to war's obscene blasphemy against life of
the men and women who have the assurance that they will never be called
on to experience it. Out there, comrades in a common and unlightened
affliction shake a fist humorously at the disregarding stars, and mock
them. Let the Fates do their worst. The sooner it is over, the better;
and, while waiting, they will take it out of Old Jerry. He is the only
one out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their world
and die, so they must take it out of somebody. Therefore Jerry "gets it
in the neck." Men under the irrefragable compulsion of a common spell,
who are selected for sacrifice in the fervour of a general obsession,
but who are cooly awake to the unreason which locks the minds of their
fellows, will burst into fury at the bond they feel. The obvious
obstruction is the obstinate "blighter" with a machine-gun in front of
them. At least, they are free to "strafe" him.
But what is the matter with London? The men on leave, when they meet
each other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion of
their confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they would
sooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than at
home. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish the
day for them, they will be with those who understand, with comrades who
rarely discuss the war except obliquely and with quiet and bitter
jesting. Seeing the world has gone wrong, how much better and easier it
is to take the likelihood of extinction with men who have the same
mental disgust as your own, and can endure it till they die, but who,
while they live in the same torment with you, have the unspoken but
certain conviction that Europe is a decadent old beast eating her young
with insatiable appetite, than to sit in sunny breakfast-rooms with the
newspaper maps and positive arguments of the unsaved!
_Autumn 1917._
XVI. The Dunes
The dunes are in another world. They are two miles across the uncertain
and hazardous tide races of the estuary. The folk of the village never
go over. The dunes are nothing. They are the horizon. They are only
seen in idleness, or when the weather is scanned, or an incoming ship
is marked. The dunes are but a pallid phantom of land so delicately
golden that it is surprising to find it constant. The faint glow of
that dilated shore, quavering just above the sea, the sea intensely
blue and positive, might wreathe and vanish at any moment in the pour
of wind from the Atlantic, whose endless strength easily bears in and
over us vast involuted continents of white cloud. The dunes tremble in
the broad flood of wind, light, and sea, diaphanous and fading, always
on the limit of vision, the point of disappearing, but are established.
They are soundless, immaterial, and far, like a pleasing and personal
illusion, a luminous dream of lasting tranquillity in a better but an
unapproachable place, and the thought of crossing to them never
suggests anything so obvious as a boat. They look like no coast that
could be reached.