The first afternoon at sea seems long: every face is strange, and it
seems as though in so vast a crowd none will ever become familiar,
although one of the miracles of sea-life is the way in which the blurred
crowd resolves itself into individual units, each of which has its
character and significance. And if we are really to know and understand
and not merely to hear with our ears the tale of what happened to the
greatest ship in the world, we must first prepare and soak our minds in
her atmosphere, and take in imagination that very voyage which began so
happily on this April day. At the end of the afternoon came the coast of
France, and Cherbourg--a sunset memory of a long breakwater, a distant
cliff crowned with a white building, a fussing of tugs and hasty
transference of passengers and mails; and finally the lighthouse showing
a golden star against the sunset, when the great ship's head was turned
to the red west, and the muffled and murmuring song of the engines was
taken up again. Perhaps our traveller, bent upon more discoveries, dined
that night not in the saloon, but in the restaurant, and, following the
illuminated electric signs that pointed the way along the numerous
streets and roads of the ship, found his way aft to the Café-Restaurant;
where instead of stewards were French waiters and a _maître d'hotel_
from Paris, and all the perfection of that perfect and expensive service
which condescends to give you a meal for something under a five-pound
note; where, surrounded by Louis Seize panelling of fawn-coloured
walnut, you may on this April evening eat your plovers' eggs and
strawberries, and drink your 1900 Clicquot, and that in perfect oblivion
of the surrounding sea. Afterwards, perhaps, a stroll on the deck amid
groups of people, not swathed in pea-jackets or oilskins, but attired as
though for the opera; and all the time, in an atmosphere golden with
light, and musical with low-talking voices and the yearning strains of a
waltz, driving five-and-twenty miles an hour westward, with the black
night and the sea all about us. And then to bed, not in a bunk in a
cabin but in a bedstead in a quiet room with a telephone through which
to speak to any one of two thousand people, and a message handed in
before you go to sleep that someone wrote in New York since you rose
from the dinner-table.
The next morning the scene at Cherbourg was repeated, with the fair
green shores of Cork Harbour instead of the cliffs of France for its
setting; and then quietly, without fuss, in the early afternoon of
Thursday, out round the green point, beyond the headland, and the great
ship has steadied on her course and on the long sea-road at last. How
worn it is! How seamed and furrowed and printed with the track-lines of
journeys innumerable; how changing, and yet how unchanged--the road that
leads to Archangel or Sicily, to Ceylon or to the frozen Pole; the old
road that leads to the ruined gateways of Phoenicia, of Venice, of Tyre;
the new road that leads to new lives and new lands; the dustless road,
the long road that all must travel who in body or in spirit would really
discover a new world. And travel on it as you may for tens of thousands
of miles, you come back to it always with the same sense of expectation,
never wholly disappointed; and always with the same certainty that you
will find at the turn or corner of the road, either some new thing or
the renewal of something old.
There is no human experience in which the phenomena of small varieties
within one large monotony are so clearly exemplified as in a sea-voyage.
The dreary beginnings of docks, of baggage, and soiled harbour water;
the quite hopeless confusion of strange faces--faces entirely collective,
comprising a mere crowd; the busy highway of the Channel, sunlit or dim
with mist or rain, or lighted and bright at night like the main street
of a city; the last outpost, the Lizard, with its high gray cliffs,
green-roofed, with tiny homesteads perched on the ridge; or Ushant, that
tall monitory tower upstanding on the melancholy misty flats; or the
solitary Fastnet, lonely, ultimate and watching--these form the familiar
overture to the subsequent isolation and vacancy of the long road
itself. There are the same day and night of disturbance, the vacant
places at table, the prone figures, swathed and motionless in
deck-chairs, the morning of brilliant sunshine, when the light that
streams into the cabins has a vernal strangeness and wonder for
town-dimmed eyes; the gradual emergence of new faces and doubtful
staggering back of the demoralized to the blessed freshness of the upper
air; the tentative formation of groups and experimental alliances, the
rapid disintegration of these and re-formation on entirely new lines;
and then that miracle of unending interest and wonder, that the faces
that were only the blurred material of a crowd begin one by one to
emerge from the background and detach themselves from the mass, to take
on identity, individuality, character, till what was a crowd of
uninteresting, unidentified humanity becomes a collection of individual
persons with whom one's destinies for the time are strangely and
unaccountably bound up; among whom one may have acquaintances, friends,
or perhaps enemies; who for the inside of a week are all one's world of
men and women.
There are few alterative agents so powerful and sure in their working as
latitude and longitude; and as we slide across new degrees, habit,
association, custom, and ideas slip one by one imperceptibly away from
us; we come really into a new world, and if we had no hearts and no
memories we should soon become different people. But the heart lives its
own life, spinning gossamer threads that float away astern across time
and space, joining us invisibly to that which made and fashioned us, and
to which we hope to return.