The lethargy of soul is proof against all the facts we do not care to
look at. No immortal soldier ever accepted the nature of his destiny in
France till the moment when he saw his pal drop. And therefore I still
thought there was a chance that this cab was a misdirection. I had been
mistaken for another man. But promptly to the minute I was left at
Euston. Still, Euston was real enough to be not at all ominous. There can
be nothing in all this world less fay than the London and North Western
Railway and its officials. There is little in them to make anyone suspect
the subtle and transforming art of what is faery. So I fell asleep in
moderate confidence, and the wheels went around.
I don’t know how long they had been revolving, with many a jolt and bump
through the night, but I woke with a conviction of the need that day to
give attention to those old volumes in the cupboard ... if the mice were
really nesting there, as I was told.... Where was I? Odd! I could see
through a window the dark waste of a railway siding. By the look of it
this was the dead end of all railway tracks. Beyond this no man could go.
The dawn had barely glanced at it, because, I suppose, it was not going
to spoil good sunshine on such a place as that. It was littered with old
newspapers with dates that would be in the week before last. Nothing else
could be seen, except a wall the color of soot, which was high enough to
screen us from all that was lovely and of good report. Now, I thought,
my misdirection has been discovered. Here I am, shoved into a celestial
pigeonhole for lost souls, till there is time to find my right label and
post me back to my old volumes. It was then that a familiar appeared, in
a gold-braided uniform, and whispered craftily that this was Birkenhead.
How I got there I don’t know.
Outside it was drizzling. I was dubious about that, for I have noticed
that an ominous sign that I have been uprooted and am drifting again is
that I am in a strange place and that it is raining there.
A man came out of a dank wall and begged for the privilege of carrying
my two heavy bags. He could only have been evolved by the progressive
lines of a highly complex civilization. His mouth was a little open,
and perhaps it had not been shut since his last meal, some days before.
It was open and waiting for the next, and to save time in coughing. As
he was the only visible agent in the strange scheme which had got me to
Birkenhead, I invited him to try the luggage. At the word, he took off
the belt of his trousers. Why his trousers remained in their place is
known only to the powers which were getting me to the Moluccas because,
so far as I could see, the man had no stomach; which was lucky for
him, as it turned out, because he explained that his average fortune
was seven shillings a week, and that, take it by and large, Ypres was
as good as the commercial facilities of that fine port. We halved the
weight, and trudged off. I saw no signs anywhere of the Far East. All the
streets were alike; yet this fellow with me, who never looked up, but
stared at the pavement and breathed hard, seemed to have prior advice
as to what to do with me. He knew; for, turning a corner, I saw above
dingy roofs a tall funnel of a ship. It was the color of a genuine sky,
though its top was black, like the sky we had. From the mainmast head
of that hidden steamer the blue peter was flying. “Your ship,” coughed
the wraith shambling beside me. I was sure he knew. The whole affair was
foreordained.
Carefully observe what happened next! That ship had a name out of the
Iliad. I had never seen her before. The way to her was cumbered with
packages marked for Singapore, and places beyond which we forget after
we leave school. Nor could I make out what she was like, from the quay.
She was a mass in which white boats were mixed, and a length of black
wall, a blue smokestack, two men looking down from a rail, a flag, some
round windows with brass rims, a shout or two, a roar that stopped
when some cases checked in midair and swung on a pack-thread; a height
topped by brown derricks and ventilators. She could not be seen. There
was no beginning to her and no end. I went through a door in the upper
works of the structure, expecting to be thrown out. That place was
nothing to do with me. I could see and smell that. But a man whose smile
indicated that he had known me all my life met me in a passage, knew my
name, and invited me to follow him. What else could I do? I followed in
resignation. He took me to a room. It had been prepared for me. He went
to a drawer and handed me some letters whose senders clearly knew where
next I would be found. “If you want anything,” he said, “touch that
button”; and vanished.
Thereupon I surrendered. I sat on the couch and wondered who I was, why
all this had happened, how long it would last, what I should do about it,
and whether any man since the world began ever knew for certain why and
by what means his affairs were shaped for him. I found no answer to this,
though the ship hooted once in an insistent way. I took no notice of
that till, looking through my round window, I noticed that the shed just
outside—a shed which, after all, represented England—was stealing away
from me. The shed disappeared. Nothing could be seen then but two ropes,
and they were blithely dancing a hornpipe over some hidden joy.
I went outside to see what made them so gay. But the sky was still
drizzling. Those dancing ropes were aware of something hidden from me,
and I determined to find it. Our ship, which I have reported was a hero
of the Iliad, was athwart a great rectangle of water and in the midst of
her peers. They stood about her—and here I will declare that though a
ship is named after a warrior in a bronze helmet I am not going to call
her him—she was, then, in the midst of her peers: Shires, Clans, White
Stars, Halls, and her family Blue Funnels. It seemed to me she knew her
family tradition and her worth. There was such a stateliness about her,
so easy a dignity, and her commands were so peremptory and haughty, that
it was clear she had the idea that nothing afloat could deny her house
flag.
By the Bar Lightship some steamers we passed were making a fuss about the
weather. But our Trojan took no notice of it. I will even confess that
off the Isle of Man roast pork was conspicuous on the lunch card, and
that I knew of no reason why it should not be. With the dark obstinacy
of its northern character the spring pursued us south. The northwest
wind was bleak and sullen. The sun hid his face. We were alone in the
Western ocean on the second day. We had the wind and the desolation
to ourselves, except for a dozen lesser black-back gulls which were
following us because, perhaps, those waters were the same as all the
seas of the north, and so it did not matter to them where they were. The
surge mourned aloud, sometimes rising to a concluding and despairing
diapason. The blue jeans of the sailors busy on the exposed parts of the
ship quivered violently in the perishing cold. Once, I remembered, some
dauntless men pulled galleys westward through the Pillars for the first
time, and then turned northward toward the top of the world. How did
they find in that ocean the spirit to maintain a determined course? I do
not know. They must have been good men, and hard sailors. I will never
believe that the thought of more and easier shekels kept them facing the
gloom of those sweeping ranges of water and the bitter heartless wind.
It is a lie that men are never moved except by the hope of gain. It is
a miserable lie of the money-changers, and it is time to kick their
tables outside once more. Why, fellows even as stout as those earliest
navigators must have seen in dismay that their gods to whom they had
sacrificed would be helpless in seas that were beyond all known things,
where they could guess they had entered the realm of the powers of
darkness, and that the warmth of human and friendly hearts would go to
leeward with the spindrift, and hope could be abandoned. It was while
I was seeing this so plainly that a youth in uniform caught hold of
a stanchion and flung himself into the wind toward me. He handed me a
familiar yellow telegram. It was from home, praying a good voyage for us.
The sightless message had just been picked out of that gale and that sky.
I glanced beyond the telegraph messenger, and wondered if he had left his
bicycle round the corner.
The English spring gave up the hunt just beyond Finisterre. The sun, glad
of the chance, came out to look at us, and made a habit of a magnificent
appearance each day at the due hour. We found another wind. It allowed me
to loaf on the exposed forecastle head, watch the flying fish glance away
from the noisy snow of our bow wash, and listen to the lookout, standing
at the stem, answer the bridge when its bell gave the ship’s hour.
But Ternate seemed no nearer than it did at Birkenhead. It was still
an incredible fable, a jest by an old traveler which he tries on the
foolish. All the East I had seen so far was no more than three Chinamen
squatting on their hams on our after deck, chanting together while one
punched a hole in a paint keg and the others admired it; that, and a
smell of curry. Anyhow, it was a strong smell of curry.
One morning the lookout signaled land. It was a thin shadow over the port
bow. There was no other cloud in the sky. That shadow grew in height,
darkened, and closed in on us. Then the shadow of Africa approached our
other beam. Toward evening we passed between the Pillars. We may have
been no nearer to the Moluccas, but we had escaped from the darkness of
the north. That was certain at sunset, when we might have sailed off
the waters of earth and were elevated to a sea where there were no
soundings, and logs would be profane. We were not alone there. A felucca
was in the vacancy between us and the phantom of a high coast. Our own
yellow masts were columns of light. The foam at the bows was flushed with
hues never seen in water. And ahead of us, that sea we were to enter was
the smooth expanse of an unknown and lustrous element. It was brighter
than the sky. From the lower wall of a vault of saffron a purple veil
dropped to the rim of a vast mirror. I do not know what was hidden by
that veil. It was a dusky curtain circling the brightness and its folds
rested on the mirror. Down on a hatch below me some of our fellows
started a gramophone with a fox trot.