I
It was decided that someone must stand by the boat. There was an
uncertainty about the tide, and there might be a need to moor her
elsewhere. The other two members of the crew did not propose a gamble
to decide which one of the three of us should stay with her while the
other two went into the town. I was told off as watchman, at once and
unanimously, and it was clear that in this the rest of the crew knew
they were doing the orderly thing. Their decision was just. It was I
who was to be left. It is the lot of the irresolute to get left, though
sometimes the process is called the will of God. The boat, with me in
it, was abandoned. The two of us had to make the most of each other for
an indefinite time.
Perhaps the boat, being a boat of character and experience, had no
confidence in her protector, because after a spell of perfect quietude,
in which I thought she slept, without warning she began to butt the
quay wall impatiently. She was irritably awake. But I was not going
to begin by showing docile haste when a creature named _Brunhilda_
demanded my attention so insistently. Instead, I leisurely filled my
pipe and lit it, took half-a-dozen absent-minded draws at it, and then
went forward idly and lengthened the mooring-line. The boat fell asleep
again at once.
Our line was fast to a ring-bolt which possibly was in the old
stonework of that quay wall when the ships which moored there were
those that made of a voyage to America a new and grand adventure. That
ring-bolt was rust, chiefly. Its colour was deep and rich. With the sun
on it, the iron circle on its stem might have been a strange crimson
sea-flower pendent from the rock over the tide. A precipitous flight of
unequal steps ran from the top of the quay down its face to the water.
The steps continued under the water, but I don’t know how far. They
dissolved. Of the submerged steps I could not count below the sixth,
and even the fourth and fifth were dim in a submarine twilight. The
tread of the midway step, which was near my face and just below it, was
uncertain whether it ought to be above water or sunk. Sometimes, when
I looked that way, it was under a few inches of glass, but as I looked
the glass would become fluid and pour noiselessly from it. Once when
the glass covered it I noticed an olive-green crab was on the step,
set there, as it were in crystal. When he darted sideways it seemed
unnatural, and as if he were alive and free. It was when he moved that
I began to suspect that many affairs, an incessant but silent business
of life, were going on around me and under the boat.
The water was as still and clear as the air. It seemed but little
denser. It was only the apparition of water. It was tinted so faint a
beryl that I know when my fingers touched it only because it was cold,
and the air was hot. When first I glanced overside it was like peering
into nothing, or at least at something just substantial enough to
embody shadows. So I enjoyed the boat, which was tangible. The bleached
woodwork of the little craft had stored the sun’s heat. Perhaps,
though, it was full of the heat of past summers, even of the tropics,
and its curious smells were memories of many creeks and harbours. It
had been a ship’s boat. In its time it may have been moored to mangrove
roots. It had travelled far. I don’t know when I enjoyed a pipe so
much. The water was talking to itself under the boat. We were sunk
three fathoms below the top of the quay, out of sight of the world. I
could see nothing living but a scattered area of sea-birds resting on
the tide. One of the birds, detached from his fellows, a black-headed
gull, was so close that the pencilled lines of his plumage were plain.
He cocked an eye at me enquiringly. He came still closer, of his own
will or through the will of the tide--there was no telling--and we
stared frankly at each other; and I think I may believe he admitted
me as a member of whatever society he knows. Not a word was said, nor
a sign made, but something passed between us which gave everything
a value unfamiliar but, I am confident, more nearly a right value.
This made me uncertain as to what might happen next. I felt I was the
discoverer of this place. It was doubtful whether it had ever been seen
before. I had accidentally chanced upon its reality. As to those stone
steps, I had been up and down them often enough in other years, but I
had the feeling they were new to me this morning, that they turned to
me another and an unsuspected aspect. It was in such a moment that I
first saw the crab at my elbow, and when he darted sideways it was as
if he were moved by a secret impulse outside himself, the same power
which moved the gull towards me, and which pulled the water off the
step.
I looked overside to see whether this power were visible, and what
it was like. There were six feet of water between me and the wall,
and its surface was in the shadow of the boat; but the sunlight, at
the same time, passed under the keel of the boat, so between my craft
and the wall I could see to a surprising illuminated depth. The steps
that were submarine were hung with algæ; near the surface of the
water their fronds were individual and bright, but they descended and
faded into mystery and the half-seen. Some of the larger shapes far
below, whatever they were, seemed to be in ambush under the boat, and
what they were waiting for in a world so dim, removed, and strange, I
preferred not to consider, on a fine day. Those lurking forms, which
might have been nether darkness itself becoming arborescent wherever
sunlight could sink down to it and touch its unfashioned murk into
what was lifelike, were eternally patient and still, as confident as
things may be which wait in the place where we are told all life began.
Midway between the keel of the boat and that lower gloom a glittering
little cloud was suspensory. Each atom of it in turn caught a glint of
sunlight, and became for an instant an emerald point, a star in the
fathoms. But I was not the first to detect that shoal of embryonic
life. A pale arrow shot upwards from the shadows at the cloud, which
instantly dispersed. That quick sand-eel missed his shot.
That cloud was alive; the water and the dark forest below were
populated. The impulse which kept the water moving on and off the
step--by now it was using another step for its play, for the tide was
falling--continued to shoot flights of those silver arrows into the
upper transparency. They flew out of the shadows into the light and
were back again quicker than the eye could follow them; and as casually
as though they had known this sort of thing for æons, the morsels of
life suspended in the upper light parted and vanished, to let the
arrows through; then, as by magic, the glittering morsels reformed
their company in the same place. No number of darting arrows could
destroy their faith in whatever original word they once had been and
the quay wall a vitreous hemisphere, a foot across. It had a pattern of
violent hieroglyphics in the centre of its body. Its rim was flexible,
and in regular spasms it contracted and expanded, rolling the medusa
along. The creature darkened as it rolled into the shadow of the boat.
It sank under me and was suddenly illuminated, like a moon, as it
entered the radiance beneath. It was while watching it that I noticed
in the water some tinted gold.
There drifted into the space between the boat sparks which I was
ready to believe came of the quality of the sea itself, for I could
see the water was charged with a virtue of immense power. When the
jellyfish had gone I watched one of those glims, for it was not doused
at once, but merely changed its colour. It moved close to the boat.
The sparkling came from a globe of pure crystal, which was poised in
the current on two filaments. The scintillating globe, no larger than
a robin’s egg, floated along in abandon in the world below my boat,
sometimes bright in elfish emerald, and then changing to shimmering
topaz. Scores of these tiny lamps were burning below, now that my
eyes were opened and were sensible of them. They had been suddenly
filled, I suppose, by the power which pulsed the algæ, which had
turned the medusa into a bright planet, shot the arrows, opened my own
intelligence, and given sentience to the other atoms of drifting life.
The water was constellated with these little globes changing their
hues, and I remembered then that Barbellion once said a ctenophore in
sunlight was the most beautiful thing in the world....
There was a shout above me. The crew had returned. It demanded to know
whether I was tired of waiting.