Something had happened. I switched on the reading lamp at the head of the
bunk and looked at my watch. Four in the morning! I could have sworn that
the noise which had roused me was the herald of eclipse and overthrow.
But had I heard anything? My cabin appeared to be a private seclusion in
the hush at the end of time and chance. Had the ship stopped? There was
no movement. She might have been in harbor. Yet when I rested against the
bulkhead I could hear the many tiny mysterious voices speaking everywhere
in the ship: twitters, ticks and tacks, rumbles—a clang, a guggle—a
purring and a humming, but all reduced and far. She was going slow.
Just as I switched off the light the monstrous sound came again, a long
shuddering bellow.
Fog! Well, we were nearing home and it was meet that I should have an
early notice that I had come to the end of the islands, the beaches,
and the forests. As for islands, I had seen as many as would make an
archipelago of myths, islands suitable for all the fables. Only a few
days ago I came out on deck at sunrise by chance, and we were steaming by
Giardino, and Etna was over us. That was the very hour to pass through
the Strait of Messina. We went close to Stromboli, which was vexed with
heavy gusts of smoke, and the Lipari Islands were strung out beyond
in the Mediterranean weather of the legends. Ah, what a chance man
had in that sea, once he had got beyond the worst of his fears and his
stone implements! And at least five times in the long story of his life
there, after he learned to make bronze, he seemed well on the way to an
intellectual light that was equal to the sunshine at his porch. To look
at those lambent shores above that plain of malachite was to see the
clear invitation to him. How could he remain in darkness? There were the
very colors and the radiance to transmute the muddy residue of his mind.
Yet each time that he was near to full achievement his house fell on
him; perhaps because he met the eye of Jove with arrogance, and perhaps
because his pride had made him careless. The sunset of that day when we
passed through the Tyrrhenian Sea was like a pæan to the renown of man;
and so all we latter-day witnesses of Heaven’s tribute to man’s long
effort retired to the saloon, where there was a concert; and an elderly
Scotch passenger, to whom probably not a secret of the visible universe
is unrevealed, and not many of the secrets of God, sang to us something
about the banks of Loch Lomond; or rather, he stated the case for the low
road, and for the high, spectacles on the end of his nose, face slightly
lifted to keep them there and to get a good sight of his notebook, as
though this were evidence and we were in a police court.
There was the siren again! Evidently there was some distance still to
go to the everlasting light. It was shuddering and bellowing when the
prompt little steward came in with the morning tea just after six. That
moment when the tray is put beside you, and the lamp is doused because
now you can see by the light of another day, always seemed to me to be
of miraculous and pleasant significance, as though not one of us can be
forgotten, but in our due time, out of the fog of the vast and impersonal
world not us, will come the knock at our door (come in!) just as if,
after all our doubting derision, the hairs of the head of each of us
really had been numbered.
We ought to have been off Ushant, but from the deck there was no telling
where we were. The air was bleak, the decks were wet, and there was no
horizon. I climbed to the captain’s bridge—by command, brought by the
captain’s messenger; nothing less could induce me to venture there—and
the master’s gray parrot, on seeing me, gave his confusing imitation of
the bo’sun’s pipe, and then in a gruff voice condemned my eyes because I
am a farmer and no sailor. The fog had thinned a little to weatherward,
but in the east it lay in banks and gave a vista of many horizons, and
all of them false. One looked that way, and got the impression that
Europe was mislaid. Yet, no; the master said that during the night he
received three cross-bearings by wireless, and that, in spite of my
dubiety, we were in soundings and fifty miles south of the Lizard. We
should be off Portland in the early afternoon.
There was a rumor, when we were at lunch, that the Start was in sight.
But a retired naval surgeon was telling me about Peking at that moment.
I am not sure that I listened attentively to the news that England was
in view. I did not get up. Then presently it struck me that something
had happened of more interest to me even than the nearness of Devon. I
mean the fact that I did not get up to see it. This so puzzled me that I
attended in but a polite way to the doctor’s further words on China. What
had happened?
Look here—I admonished myself—when you’ve been nearing this particular
island on other voyages you’ve stayed on deck till near sunrise so that
you might see the first English light. What’s the matter now? You know
you don’t want this lunch.
It was clear that I was returning on this voyage a man who was, in some
way, different from the earlier traveler, and I am not sure that I liked
this new character; but I will say for him that he himself was genuinely
puzzled about it, and that he had no other feeling; in fact, he had no
feeling at all, except that he was deeply and comfortably glad to be
near home again. What, then, I exclaimed to myself, is not England home?
What’s the difference?
You may be talking with a friend in a house where the mirrors are queerly
placed, and you know your surprise when you see the reflection of some
one you think you know, and which a steadier glance tells you is indeed
an aspect of yourself you have not seen before. I caught now a glimpse
of a man who did not want to go up and look at the Start. I could make
nothing of him. I had a sight, as it were, of but the back of his head.
He said diffidently that all he wanted was to see a familiar gate again,
and the forms of the shrubs about it, and those who would most certainly
have that gate open before he reached it. He explained that that gate
happened to be in England, and not in Ternate; a distinction, I warned
him, that was outrageous. No, he said. It would have been outrageous ten
years ago, but that he was not responsible for what had come into those
years. The world had been turning round and going on. Our little star
was now in a different region of the sky. He was merely carried with it
and must accept the new phenomena whether he liked them or not. Ternate
might be home; and he quoted from one of his odd books: “Why should I be
lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
This new mark in his life so disturbed him that he felt he dare not
reveal it to the English doctor who was returning home after some years
in China and Japan. When both of them reached the deck the Start was
far astern and was all but dissolved in a murk. In overcoats and wraps
the passengers watched the approach of the ship to Portland; a gray sky
and a forbidding coast which enlarged its gloom and made its frown more
ominous till Portland hung over the ship, as though it were a giant that
was not really very interested in the morsel of life that had crept to
its feet. We gazed at it in silence. “Is that the prison on the top of
it?” presently asked the naval surgeon. “Come into the smoke room out of
it,” said he. “Will it never change? That is what it looked like when I
lolloped under it in a destroyer, hunting for periscopes. Where’s that
steward?”
This was more than I could stand. I knew what the doctor meant. But at
times we want more than a mere fellowship in a murk. Were we still only
at the end of an era? Had the new day not yet come?
We got under way again, and night fell on the coast and sank at last over
all the waters. Leaning on the bulwarks and gazing landward, I could
just make out a deeper shadow athwart the seas of night, formless under
the faint glimmer in the meridian. It had no bounds. It was immense and
intangible. Looking at it, I felt an awakening of understanding. I felt
the inward glow of a new and deep desire. I cannot tell you what that
shadow was, for, though transcendently it was there, it was dim and
mysterious, almost beyond vision; England! That shadow was the indenture
on the very stars of an old grandeur, the memory impressed on night
itself, blurred but indelible, of an ancient renown. It was the emanation
of an idea too great for us to know; the dimmering through the gloom to
me in my isolation and misgiving of wonderful things almost forgotten,
of the dreams and exaltations of splendid youth, of the fidelity of
comrades, of noble achievements, of our long-past intimate sorrows, of
precious things unspoken but understood, of our dead. No. Not even old
night could hide that presence. It was indefinable, majestic, severe, and
still. And it may have been resigned and communing, its age-long work
done, in the fall of a darkness which it knew to be ultimate. Or it may
have been retired within the night, dominant on its seas, making no sign,
knowing the supreme test of all its labors was at hand, vigilant but
composed, waiting for another morning to dawn in the hearts of men, when
there should be light to build the City of God.
THE END