This is how it happened [said my friend Harborough].
I’m a novelist, as you know, but if I hadn’t had to take to writing I’d
have been a rolling stone by profession and by inclination. In my more
philosophic moods I perceive that, really, it was sheer luck ... this
occurrence about which you’ve asked me to tell you. I should never have
made a success of any other trade but authorship. I’d have starved;
instead I’m rather well off, as things go. But still——
You understand I was by way of being a bit venturesome, as a young man.
I did a certain amount of journalism, from time to time, but my secret
hopes were set on all that is implied in that specious phrase, “seeing
the world.” I wanted to see the world.
Keeping this object in view I shipped on a tramp steamer, with whose
captain I had struck up an acquaintanceship. Nominally I was the purser,
actually I was the Captain’s guest. Cargo boats such as the S.S.
_Peterhof_ do not employ a purser.
No need to narrate the history of that voyage nor dwell upon the trivial
particulars of our life on board. Suffice it to say that in mid-Atlantic
our engines had a break-down. The _Peterhof_ came to a standstill.
If it has ever happened to you during a big voyage you will know that
there is something portentous about the cessation of a steamer’s
machinery in mid-ocean. To be becalmed on a sailing ship may be boring:
to be becalmed—if such an expression can be used—on a steamer is almost
too queer to be boring. Day and night the engines have throbbed until
their throbbing has penetrated into your very marrow, and when the
throbbing abruptly dies you are sensible of a shock. When the _Peterhof_
halted I ran up on deck as speedily as though we had had a collision. I
saw, all round, nothing but sea, sea, sea, and it was far more amazing
than if I had beheld an island or an iceberg or a raft of shipwrecked
mariners, or any of the other picturesque phenomena which my fertile
fancy had hastened to invent as an explanation for our stoppage.
The _Peterhof’s_ engines were antiquated, break-downs had occurred
before, and our two engineers, I learnt, would be able to effect a
repair. Twenty-four hours’ labour would set us going again—it turned out
to be only a slightly over-optimistic prophecy—and meanwhile, we were
free to admire, as best we might, the somewhat monotonous beauties of
the Atlantic.
There was not a breath of wind; the sun blazed from a cloudless sky; as
long as the _Peterhof_ had been in motion we had considered the
temperature fairly cool, but now that her motion was arrested the heat
became very noticeable. The sea was, in a sense, absolutely smooth; but
its smoothness did not imply flatness, any more than the smoothness of a
carpet’s pile implies flatness if the carpet is being shaken. On the
contrary, the _Peterhof_ was rolling upon the undulations of a heavy
ground-swell. The surface of that ground-swell was without a wrinkle,
polished and glossy like lacquer; but its hills and its dales were
gigantically high and deep; far higher and far deeper than I had
realised until the engines relinquished their task of propelling us
athwart them. Now, lying helpless upon the water, we swooped up to a
glazed summit, swooped down to the bottom of a satiny gulf, swooped up
again and down again, in a splendid, even oscillation—and (this was what
seemed so extraordinary to a landsman)—in absolute silence. It was
uncanny. Those fabulous billows never broke. There was not even a hiss
of foam against the side of the steamer. The _Peterhof_ just tobogganned
down one stupendous gradient and up the next as though she had been
sliding on oil.
The thing fascinated me. I stood by the rail, revelling in this
prodigous sea-saw, and only gradually did it dawn upon me that we were
not really rushing down one slant and up the next, we were only being
lifted up and down vertically.
This discovery sounds foolish, but I can’t tell you how it excited me. I
got an empty biscuit tin from the steward and threw it into the sea, as
far as I could, and then watched it floating. You’d have said that that
biscuit tin would have been drawn away by the strength of the swell, or
else dashed against the _Peterhof’s_ side; instead it simply sat there
at exactly the spot where it had fallen; and an hour after I had thrown
it into the water it had shifted, perhaps, only six or eight inches
nearer the steamer.
A project was forming in my mind. I looked at the water. It was a
peculiar, vitreous green, closer under the steamer, was transparent to
the depth of many feet. Beneath my shoe-soles the poop was hot; over
side, the sea looked inexpressibly inviting. And on a sudden I turned to
the drowsing Captain and exclaimed: “I want to bathe.”
“To _bathe_?” The Captain gazed at me.
“Why not?”
The Captain yawned out some lethargic suggestion to the effect that to
bathe would be dangerous because of the depth—as though I’d be more apt
to drown in three miles of water than in three fathoms.
Seafaring people are odd in that way—I don’t mean in their ignorance of
swimming, though, to be sure, the average sailor is seldom a swimmer.
They’re so—how shall I express it?—so unenterprising. In the midst of
adventure and romance they are stirred by no recognition either of the
adventures or the romantic.
I was a city-bred youngster, who had never been out of hail of the
homeland before, and I possessed more enterprise in my little finger
than that far-travelled Captain had in the whole of his weather-worn,
hulking lump of a carcass. I wanted to bathe. I wanted to bathe in the
mid-Atlantic. I had learnt to bathe in the public swimming-bath near my
old school, and now I wanted to try a swimming-bath three miles deep and
tilting continuously at an angle of I don’t know how many degrees. The
notion was gorgeous.
“I can swim,” I said. “You needn’t be afraid.”
“But the waves’ll sweep you away.”
“There aren’t any waves. Watch this biscuit tin. The top of the
Atlantic, at this moment, is like a string which is being twanged. The
vibrations are a hundred yards across, or more, and they look as though
they were travelling along the string; I suppose they are travelling
along the string; but a fly sitting on the string doesn’t travel along
with the vibrations, it only travels up and down. If I go in to bathe I
shan’t be swept away.”
The Captain hadn’t thought of it in that light. He tried to argue—but my
biscuit tin answered his argument. And eventually he allowed me to have
the ladder lowered; I stripped, descended the ladder, and launched
myself into the sea.
I struck out, to get clear of the ship, then ceased swimming and looked
around me. The sea was coldish, but not unendurable—and anyhow I was too
much in love with my situation to bother about that. Behind me the
_Peterhof_ towered, like a cliff; I had never realised, before, how big
a five-thousand-ton vessel looks from the water. At her rail I could see
a cluster of the crew, watching me; the Captain on the poop. From
somewhere in the interior of the ship came the sound of hammering—the
engineers at work—and I noticed that this sound reached me more clearly
now than when I was on board.
But if the _Peterhof_ appeared strange, from the water, how much
stranger was the view in the opposite direction! Or rather, the absence
of view!
The ground-swell had looked formidable when I was on the _Peterhof’s_
deck; here its aspect was terrific. The crystalline slope in which I was
cradled seemed to reach the sky; yet, without having climbed it, I
immediately found myself, instead of looking up the slope, looking down
it—down an oblique abyss of gleaming profundity. I seemed to fall and
fall and fall; nevertheless, there was no spasm of nausea; although I
was falling I was supported, sensuously, in my fall ... and I never
reached the finish of the fall; it merged, imperceptibly, into an
ascent; and a moment later I was surveying a fresh trough of glassiness,
or else gazing audaciously downward, downward on to the deck of the
_Peterhof_.
It was overwhelming. Never in all my life have I attained to a rapture
comparable with that bathe in mid-Atlantic. I knew, even at the time,
that it would be unforgettable. I had aspired to be able to say that I
had swum in water three miles deep ... oh, never mind what vain boast I
had promised myself. Boasting was forgotten. I was experiencing. I was
surrendered to an ecstasy, an enchantment, a glee, beyond expression
grandiose and delicious. I lolled in the pellucid water, not troubling
to swim. I let myself go, in those dizzy soarings and sinkings; I
abandoned myself to this vast and beautiful force; I felt at once
infinitely little and infinitely great.
The whole adventure was half terrifying and half ... well, comfortable.
Perched on the crown of one of those flawless ridges I felt, as I
toppled over, that I must either be smashed to pieces at the end of the
plunge or engulfed in some horrid undertow. But I knew that nothing of
the sort would happen. Quietly I paddled with my arms and feet; almost
contemptuously I gave myself to the puissant and colossal rhythm which
swayed me as high as a cathedral at every swing and then gently rocked
me down as deep as a valley. I tell you, the sensation was sublime ...
and I hadn’t even got my hair wet!
I remembered, in the middle of my bliss, this perfectly incongruous fact
that I hadn’t got my hair wet, and I prepared to “duck.” But at that
moment I heard a shout from the deck of the _Peterhof_.
I turned in the water, and saw that the Captain was gesticulating to me,
but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The crew were shouting also, and
one of them had got a coil of rope over his arm and seemed to be making
ready to throw it. What did they mean?
Stupidly, in the tingling ardour and gusto of my enjoyment, I didn’t
make out, for a minute, what they were driving at; it occurred to me
that they had taken it into their heads that because I wasn’t swimming I
had got cramp. I signalled cheerily to them, to reassure them; but they
did not cease shouting ... and then, as I turned again, a little, in the
water, I knew....
Near the skyline rim of the superb mountain-range upon which I was
commencing to rise I saw, shadowy in the translucent green, an
unmistakable shape—the shape of a great fish: a shark. Its fin cut the
surface like a knife. For one instant I stared, and in that instant I
observed, with a vivid clearness, all manner of minute details—the
burnished sheen on the water, the glistening tautness of its lofty
skyline, the sapphire blue of the sky itself, and, most lucidly of all,
the silhouette of the shark. Every movement of the shark was now plain
to me; and it was moving, there was no doubt of it: a trail of bubbles
streamed from its flank and a tiny streak of froth fluttered behind the
fin. The shark was not passive, in the element, as I was; it was monarch
of the waves, it could drive through them with the precision of a
torpedo. I had invaded a realm which I had no business to invade ... and
its guardian was come to punish me.
An astonishingly coherent train of reflections such as these whirled
round my brain. They must have occupied a fraction of a second. I know
that, at all events, I struck out for the _Peterhof_ without any
apparent pause. My arms and legs worked frantically; I swum as I had
never swum before. I hurled myself through the water.
Fortunately I had gone only a very short distance from the foot of the
steamer’s ladder. It seemed remote enough, though, I can tell you! My
eyes were bursting out of their sockets, but I could dimly see the
Captain leaning on the rail and shouting, and some of the men running
down the ladder to receive me. Then the rope was flung. It splashed
across me. I grasped it. I dug my nails into it. I clung to it with a
grip so fierce that I felt as though I was crushing it. Simultaneously
the men at the other end of the rope began pulling, and I was jerked
through the water in a lather of spray which swirled round my shoulders.
My arms and head were above the water, I was being dragged so fast up
the steamer’s side. I could still see the Captain, vaguely, confusedly.
His mouth was open, his hands were waving. But I wasn’t interested in
him, I was only interested in what was pursuing behind me. Gad! That was
an awful moment. I dream of it, sometimes, even now: the disgusting,
obscene terror of that dash for safety ... and I wake sweating with the
horror of it.
* * * * *
Harborough paused.
“And how did your adventure end?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I lost consciousness. But I kept tight on to the rope.
They hauled me on board ... they told me afterwards that I hadn’t even
got my hair wet ... but ...” he hesitated.
“I’d had my experience—a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Dash it!” he
laughed. “It was almost worth it, I swear ... and I’m making money, now,
as a novelist, whereas if I’d continued my life of rolling stone I’d
certainly have arrived in prison or the poorhouse. Yes, I suppose that
every disaster has its compensations.
“But I confess I didn’t think so when I awoke on board the _Peterhof_—we
were plug-plugging onwards again by that time—and found that I’d got
only one leg.”