The charm of the Mediterranean dwells in the unforgettable flavour of my
early days, and to this hour this sea, upon which the Romans alone ruled
without dispute, has kept for me the fascination of youthful romance.
The very first Christmas night I ever spent away from land was employed
in running before a Gulf of Lions gale, which made the old ship groan in
every timber as she skipped before it over the short seas until we
brought her to, battered and out of breath, under the lee of Majorca,
where the smooth water was torn by fierce cat’s-paws under a very stormy
sky.
We—or, rather, they, for I had hardly had two glimpses of salt water in
my life till then—kept her standing off and on all that day, while I
listened for the first time with the curiosity of my tender years to the
song of the wind in a ship’s rigging. The monotonous and vibrating note
was destined to grow into the intimacy of the heart, pass into blood and
bone, accompany the thoughts and acts of two full decades, remain to
haunt like a reproach the peace of the quiet fireside, and enter into the
very texture of respectable dreams dreamed safely under a roof of rafters
and tiles. The wind was fair, but that day we ran no more.
The thing (I will not call her a ship twice in the same half-hour)
leaked. She leaked fully, generously, overflowingly, all over—like a
basket. I took an enthusiastic part in the excitement caused by that
last infirmity of noble ships, without concerning myself much with the
why or the wherefore. The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by
her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with
ennui at every seam. But at the time I did not know; I knew generally
very little, and least of all what I was doing in that _galère_.
I remember that, exactly as in the comedy of Molière, my uncle asked the
precise question in the very words—not of my confidential valet, however,
but across great distances of land, in a letter whose mocking but
indulgent turn ill concealed his almost paternal anxiety. I fancy I
tried to convey to him my (utterly unfounded) impression that the West
Indies awaited my coming. I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic
conviction—something in the nature of a call. But it was difficult to
state intelligibly the grounds of this belief to that man of rigorous
logic, if of infinite charity.
The truth must have been that, all unversed in the arts of the wily
Greek, the deceiver of gods, the lover of strange women, the evoker of
bloodthirsty shades, I yet longed for the beginning of my own obscure
Odyssey, which, as was proper for a modern, should unroll its wonders and
terrors beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The disdainful ocean did not
open wide to swallow up my audacity, though the ship, the ridiculous and
ancient _galère_ of my folly, the old, weary, disenchanted sugar-waggon,
seemed extremely disposed to open out and swallow up as much salt water
as she could hold. This, if less grandiose, would have been as final a
catastrophe.
But no catastrophe occurred. I lived to watch on a strange shore a black
and youthful Nausicaa, with a joyous train of attendant maidens, carrying
baskets of linen to a clear stream overhung by the heads of slender
palm-trees. The vivid colours of their draped raiment and the gold of
their earrings invested with a barbaric and regal magnificence their
figures, stepping out freely in a shower of broken sunshine. The
whiteness of their teeth was still more dazzling than the splendour of
jewels at their ears. The shaded side of the ravine gleamed with their
smiles. They were as unabashed as so many princesses, but, alas! not one
of them was the daughter of a jet-black sovereign. Such was my
abominable luck in being born by the mere hair’s breadth of twenty-five
centuries too late into a world where kings have been growing scarce with
scandalous rapidity, while the few who remain have adopted the
uninteresting manners and customs of simple millionaires. Obviously it
was a vain hope in 187– to see the ladies of a royal household walk in
chequered sunshine, with baskets of linen on their heads, to the banks of
a clear stream overhung by the starry fronds of palm-trees. It was a
vain hope. If I did not ask myself whether, limited by such discouraging
impossibilities, life were still worth living, it was only because I had
then before me several other pressing questions, some of which have
remained unanswered to this day. The resonant, laughing voices of these
gorgeous maidens scared away the multitude of humming-birds, whose
delicate wings wreathed with the mist of their vibration the tops of
flowering bushes.
No, they were not princesses. Their unrestrained laughter filling the
hot, fern-clad ravine had a soulless limpidity, as of wild, inhuman
dwellers in tropical woodlands. Following the example of certain prudent
travellers, I withdrew unseen—and returned, not much wiser, to the
Mediterranean, the sea of classic adventures.