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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Junk, by H. M. Tomlinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Old Junk
+
+Author: H. M. Tomlinson
+
+Commentator: S. K. Ratcliffe
+
+Release Date: May 19, 2008 [EBook #25523]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD JUNK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Mark C. Orton, Linda McKeown and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OLD JUNK
+
+
+
+BY
+
+H. M. TOMLINSON
+
+
+
+FOREWORD BY S. K. RATCLIFFE
+
+
+
+NEW YORK ALFRED . A . KNOPF 1920
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+_Second Printing August, 1920_
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+_To
+
+C. H. G. H.
+
+Who saw with me so much of what is in this book_
+
+(_Killed in action in Artois, August 27th, 1918_)
+
+
+
+
+These stories of travel and chance have been selected from writings
+published in various periodicals between January 1907 and April 1918,
+and are arranged in order of time.
+
+
+
+
+Foreword
+
+
+_The author of_ OLD JUNK _has been called a legend. A colleague who
+during the later stages of the war visited the western front assured me
+that this was the right word by which to describe the memory left among
+officers and men, not so much by his work as a war correspondent, as by
+his original and fascinating character. A legend, too, he appears to be
+in the newspaper world of London: but there in a different sense, by
+reason of the singular contradiction between the human creature beloved
+of all his fellows and the remarkable productions of his pen._
+
+_The first thing to say about H. M. Tomlinson, the thing of which you
+become acutely aware on making his acquaintance, is that he is a
+Londoner. "Nearly a pure-blooded London Saxon" is his characterization
+of himself. And so it is. He could have sprung from no other stock. In
+person and speech, in the indefinable quality of the man, in the humour
+which continually tempers his tremendous seriousness, he belongs to
+London. Among the men of our time who have done creative writing I can
+think of no other about whom this can be so precisely stated._
+
+_It was in the opening years of the century that I first began to
+notice his work. His name was appearing in the columns of a London
+morning newspaper, since absorbed by the_ Daily News, _over articles
+which, if my memory is not at fault, were mainly concerned with the
+life of Thames side. They were written with extraordinary care. The man
+who did them had, clearly, no competitor in Fleet Street. And he
+furnishes a striking illustration of the chances and misfits of the
+journalistic life. When, after some years of absence in the Far East, I
+was able to fit a person to the writing which had so long attracted me,
+I found H. M. Tomlinson on the regular reporting staff of a great
+London newspaper. A man born for the creation of beauty in words was
+doing daily turn along with the humble chronicler of metropolitan
+trivialities._
+
+_A year or two before the war the quality of his mind and of his style
+was revealed in_ THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE--_a "narrative of the voyage of
+the tramp steamer_ Capella, _from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and
+thence two thousand miles along the forests of the Amazon and Madeira
+Rivers to the San Antonio Falls," returning by Barbados, Jamaica, and
+Tampa. Its author called it merely "an honest book of travel." It is
+that no doubt; but in a degree so eminent, one is tempted to say that
+an honest book of travel, when so conceived and executed, must surely
+count among the noblest works of the literary artist._
+
+_The great war provided almost unlimited work for men of letters, and
+not seldom work that was almost as far from their ordinary business as
+fighting itself. It carried Tomlinson into the guild of war
+correspondents. In the early months he represented the paper to which
+for some years he had been attached, the London_ Daily News. _Later,
+under the co-operative scheme which emerged from the restrictive policy
+adopted by all the belligerent governments, his dispatches came to be
+shared among a partnership which included the London_ Times--_as odd an
+arrangement for a man like Tomlinson as could well be imagined. It
+would be foolish to attempt an estimate of his correspondence from
+France. It was beautiful copy, but it was not war reporting. To those
+of us who knew him it remained a marvel how he could do it at all. But
+there was no marvel in the fact, attested by a notable variety of
+witnesses, of Tomlinson as an influence and a memory, persisting until
+the dispersal of the armies, as of one who was the friend of all, a
+sweet and fine spirit moving untouched amid the ruin and terror,
+expressing itself everywhere with perfect simplicity, and at times with
+a shattering candor._
+
+_From France he returned, midway in the war, to join the men who, under
+the Command of H. W. Massingham, make the editorial staff of the
+London_ Nation _the most brilliant company of journalists in the world.
+His hand may be traced week by week in many columns and especially, in
+alternate issues, on the page given up to the literary_ causerie.
+
+_To the readers of books Tomlinson is known at present by_ THE SEA
+AND THE JUNGLE _alone. The war, it may be, did something to retard
+its fame. But the time is coming when none will dispute its right to
+a place of exceptional honour among records of travel--alongside the
+very few which, during the two or three decades preceding the general
+overturn, had been added to the books of the great wayfaring
+companions. It is remarkably unlike all others, in its union of
+accurate chronicle with intimate self-revelation; and, although it is
+the sustained expression of a mood, it is extremely quotable. I choose
+as a single example this scene, from the description of the_ Capella's
+_first day on the Para River._
+
+    _There was seldom a sign of life but the infrequent snowy herons,
+    and those curious brown fowl, the ciganas. The sun was flaming on
+    the majestic assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by our
+    steamer, coiled over us in a lazy flux.... Sometimes we passed
+    single habitations on the water side. Ephemeral huts of palm-leaves
+    were forced down by the forest, which overhung them, to wade on
+    frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on the
+    jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with
+     no show of emotion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the
+    impenetrable foliage. I thought of the precarious tenure on earth
+    of these brown folk with some sadness, especially as the day was
+    going. The easy dominance of the wilderness, and man's intelligent
+    morsel of life resisting it, was made plain when we came suddenly
+    upon one of his little shacks secreted among the aqueous roots of a
+    great tree, cowering, as it were, between two of the giant's toes.
+    Those brown babies on the jetties never cheered us. They watched
+    us, serious and forlorn. Alongside their primitive huts were a few
+    rubber trees, which we knew by their scars. Late in the afternoon
+    we came to a large cavern in the base of the forest, a shadowy
+    place where at last we did see a gathering of the folk. A number of
+    little wooden crosses peeped above the floor in the hollow. The
+    sundering floods and the forest do not always keep these folk from
+    congregation, and the comfort of the last communion._
+
+_If the reader is also a writer, he will feel the challenge of that
+passage--its spiritual quality, its rhythm, its images. And he will
+know what gifts of mind, and what toil, have gone to its making._
+
+OLD JUNK _is not, in the same organic sense, a book. The sketches and
+essays of which it is composed are of different years and, as a glance
+will show, of a wide diversity of theme. The lover of the great book
+will be at home with the perfect picture of the dunes, as well as with
+the two brilliantly contrasted voyages; while none who can feel the
+touch of the interpreter will miss the beauty of the pieces that may be
+less highly wrought._
+
+_As to Tomlinson's future I would not venture a prediction.
+Conceivably, when the horror has become a memory that can be lived with
+and transfused, he may write one of the living books enshrining the
+experience of these last five years. But, just as likely he may not. I
+subscribe, in ending this rough note, to a judgment recently delivered
+by a fellow worker that among all the men writing in England today
+there is none known to us whose work reveals a more indubitable sense
+of the harmonies of imaginative prose._
+
+S. K. RATCLIFFE.
+
+_New York, Christmas, 1919._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                      PAGE
+
+FOREWORD BY S. K. RATCLIFFE                                    11
+
+    I. THE AFRICAN COAST                                       21
+
+   II. T HE CALL                                               47
+
+  III. OLD JUNK                                                58
+
+   IV. BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS                              65
+
+    V. TRANSFIGURATION                                         75
+
+   VI. THE PIT MOUTH                                           80
+
+  VII. INITIATION                                              86
+
+ VIII. THE ART OF WRITING                                      92
+
+   IX. A FIRST IMPRESSION                                     100
+
+    X. THE DERELICT                                           107
+
+   XI. THE VOYAGE OF THE _Mona_                               118
+
+  XII. THE LASCAR'S WALKING-STICK                             136
+
+ XIII. THE EXTRA HAND                                         144
+
+  XIV. THE SOU'-WESTER                                        152
+
+   XV. ON LEAVE                                               157
+
+  XVI. THE DUNES                                              165
+
+ XVII. BINDING A SPELL                                        174
+
+XVIII. A DIVISION ON THE MARCH                                179
+
+  XIX. HOLLY-HO!                                              185
+
+   XX. THE RUINS                                              195
+
+  XXI. LENT, 1918                                             201
+
+
+
+
+OLD JUNK
+
+
+
+
+I. The African Coast
+
+
+I
+
+She is the steamship _Celestine_, and she is but a little lady. The
+barometer has fallen, and the wind has risen to hunt the rain. I do not
+know where _Celestine_ is going, and, what is better, do not care. This
+is December and this is Algiers, and I am tired of white glare and
+dust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf. All
+day the sky was without a flaw, and the summer silence outside the
+town, where the dry road goes between hedges of arid prickly pears, was
+not reticence but vacuity. But I sail tonight, and so the barometer is
+falling, and I do not know where _Celestine_ will take me. I do not
+care where I go with one whose godparents looked at her and called her
+that.
+
+There is one place called Jidjelli we shall see, and there is another
+called Collo; and there are many others, whose names I shall never
+learn, tucked away in the folds of the North African hills where they
+come down to the sea between Algiers and Carthage. They will reveal
+themselves as I find my way to Tripoli of Barbary. I am bound for
+Tripoli, without any reason except that I like the name and admire
+_Celestine_, who is going part of the journey.
+
+But the barometer, wherever I am, seems to know when I embark. It
+falls. When I went aboard the wind was howling through the shipping in
+the harbour of Algiers. And again, _Celestine_ is French, and so we can
+do little more than smile at each other to make visible the friendship
+of our two great nations. A cable is clanking slowly, and sailors run
+and shout in great excitement, doing things I can see no reason for,
+because it is as dark and stormy as the forty days.
+
+Algiers is a formless cluster of lower stars, and presently those stars
+begin to revolve about us as though the wind really had got the sky
+loose. The _Celestine_ is turning her head for the sea. The stars then
+speed by our masts and funnel till the last is gone. Good-bye, Algiers!
+
+_Celestine_ begins to curtsy, and at last becomes somewhat hysterical.
+At night, in a high wind, she seems but a poor little body to be out
+alone, with me. Tripoli becomes more remote than I thought it to be in
+the early afternoon, when the French sailor talked to me in a cafe
+while he drank something so innocently pink that it could not account
+altogether for his vivacity and sudden open friendship for a shy alien.
+He wanted me to elope with _Celestine_. He wanted to show me his
+African shore, to see his true Mediterranean. I had travelled from
+Morocco to Algiers, and was tired of tourist trains, historic ruins,
+hotels, Arabs selling picture-postcards and worse, and girls dancing
+the dance of the Ouled-Nails to the privileged who had paid a few
+francs to see them do it. I had observed that tranquil sea; and in
+places, as at Oran, had seen in the distance terraces of coloured rock
+poised in enchantment between a blue ceiling and a floor of malachite.
+
+That sea is now on our port beam. It goes before an inshore gale, and
+lifts us high, turns us giddy with a sudden betrayal and descent; and
+does it again, and again. Africa has vanished. Where Algiers probably
+was there are but several frail stars far away in the dark that soar in
+a hurry, and then collapse into the deep and are doused.
+
+But here is le Capitaine. There is no need, of course, to be anxious
+for _Celestine_. If her master is not a sailor, then all the signs are
+wrong. He looks at me roguishly. Ah! His ship rolls. But the mistake,
+it is not his. What would I have? She was built in England. _Voila!_
+
+He is a little dark man, with quick, questioning eyes, and hair like a
+clothesbrush. His short alert hair, his raised and querulous eyebrows,
+his taut moustaches, and a bit of beard that hangs like a dagger from
+his under lip, give him the appearance of constant surprise and
+fretfulness. When he is talking to me he is embarrassingly playful--but
+I shall show him presently, with fair luck, that my inelastic Saxon
+putty can transmute itself, can also volatilise in abandonment to
+sparkling nonsense; yet not tonight--not tonight, monsieur. He is so
+gay and friendly to me whenever he sees me. But when one of the staff
+does that which is not down in the book, I become alarmed. Monsieur
+bangs the table till the cruet-stoppers leap out, and his eyes are
+unpleasant. Yes, he is the master. He rises, and shakes his forefinger
+at the unfortunate till his hand is a quivering haze and his speech a
+blast. "Ou--e--e--eh!" cries the skipper at last, when the unfortunate
+is on the run.
+
+He has an idea I cannot read the menu, so when an omelette is served he
+informs me, in case I should suppose it is a salad. He makes helpful
+farmyard noises. There is no mistaking eggs. There is no mistaking
+pork. But I think he has the wrong pantomime for the ship's beef,
+unless French horses have the same music as English cows. After the
+first dinner, I was indiscreet enough to refuse the cognac with the
+coffee. "Ah!" he chided, smiling with craft, and shaking a knowing
+finger at me. He could read my native weakness. I was discovered.
+"Viskee! You 'ave my viskee!" A dreadful doubt seized me, and I would
+have refused, but repressed my panic, and pretended he had found my
+heart.
+
+He rose, and shouted a peremptory order. A little private cabinet was
+opened. A curious bottle was produced, having a deadly label in red,
+white, and green. "Viskee!" cried the captain in exultation. (My God!)
+"Aha!" said the reader of my hidden desire, pouring out the tipple for
+which he imagines I am perishing in stoic British silence. "Viskee!" I
+drain off, with simulated delight, my large dose of methylated spirit.
+Not for worlds would I undeceive the good fellow, not if this were
+train-oil. He laughs aloud at our secret insular weakness. He knows it.
+But he is our very good friend.
+
+All is not finished with the whisky. Out comes the master's English
+Grammar, for he is wishful to know us better before I leave him. And he
+shall. To this Frenchman I determine to be nobler than I was made. I
+think I would teach him English all the way to Cochin-China. He writes
+in his notebook, very slowly, while his tongue comes out to look on, a
+sentence like this: "The nombres Francaise, they are most easy that the
+English language." Then I put him right; and then he rises, reaches his
+hands up to my shoulders, looks earnestly in my eyes, and la-las my
+National Anthem. It may please God not to let me look so foolish as I
+feel while I wait for the end of that tune; but I doubt that it does.
+
+
+II
+
+Early next morning we arrived at Bougie, to get an hour's peace with
+the arm of the harbour thrown about my poor _Celestine_. The deck of a
+Grimsby trawler discharging fish in the Humber on a wet December
+morning is no more desolating than was the look of _Celestine_ under
+the mountains of Bougie; and Bougie, if you have a memory for the
+coloured posters, is in the blue Mediterranean. But do I grumble? I do
+not. With all the world but slops, cold iron, and squalls of sleet, I
+prefer _Celestine_ to Algiers.
+
+Most likely you have never heard of the black Mediterranean. It is
+usual to go there in winter, and write about it with a date-palm in
+every paragraph, till you have got all the health and enjoyment there
+is in the satisfaction of telling others that while they are choosing
+cough cures you are under a sunshade on the coral strand. The truth is,
+the Middle Sea in December can be as ugly as the Dogger Bank. There
+were some Arab deck passengers on our coaster. One of them sat looking
+at a deck rivet as motionless as a fakir, and his face had the
+complexion of a half-ripe watermelon. His fellow-sufferers were only
+heaps of wet and dirty linen dumped in the lee alley-way. It was bad
+enough in a bunk, where you could brace your knees against the side,
+and keep moderately still till you dozed off, when naturally you were
+shot out sprawling into the lost drainage wandering on the erratic
+floor. What those Arabs suffered on deck I cannot tell you. I never
+went up to find out. At Bougie they seemed to have left it all to
+Allah, with the usual result. It was clear, from a glance at those
+piles of rags, that the Arab is no more native to Algeria than the
+Esquimaux. I was much nearer home than the Arabs. That shining coast
+which occasionally I had surprised from Oran, which seemed afloat on
+the sea, was no longer a vision of magic, the unsubstantial work of
+Iris, an illusionary cloud of coral, amber, and amethyst. It was the
+bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of
+granite under the wrack of the bleak north.
+
+As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for bright
+sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their
+white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between
+the styes. Their lissom and statuesque inhabitants become softened and
+bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamed
+to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well in
+sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle. They have not that
+equality with the storm which makes the Sussex beech and oak, heavily
+based and strong-armed, stand with a look of might and roar at the
+charges of the Channel gale. By this you will see that Bougie must wait
+until I call that way again. From the look of the sky, too, there is no
+doubt we are in for a spell of the kind of weather I never expected to
+meet in Africa. I was a stranger there, but I knew the language of
+those squadrons of dark clouds driving into the bay.
+
+The northern sky was full of their gloomy keels. There were intervals
+when the full expanse of Bougie Bay became visible, with its concourse
+of mountains crowded to the shore. At the base of the dark declivities
+the combers were bursting, and the spume towered on the gale like grey
+smoke. Out of the foam rose harsh rubble and screes to incline against
+broken precipices, and those stark walls were interrupted by mid-air
+slopes of grass which appeared ready to avalanche into the tumult
+below, but remained, livid areas of a dim mass which rose into dizzy
+pinnacles and domes, increasing the tumbling menace of the sky. A fleet
+of clouds of deep draught ran into Africa from the north; went aground
+on those crags, were wrecked and burst, their contents streaming from
+them and hiding the aerial reef on which they had struck. The land
+vanished, till only Bougie and its quay and the _Celestine_ remained,
+with one last detached fragment of mountain high over us. That, too,
+dissolved. There was only our steamer and the quay at last.
+
+I thought our master would not dare to put out from there, but he cared
+as little for the storm as for the steward. His last bales were no
+sooner in the lighters than he made for Jidjelli. But Jidjelli daunted
+even him. The nearer we got, the worse it looked. My own feeling was
+that the gathering seas had taken charge of our scallop, a cork in the
+surf, and were pitching her, helpless, towards terrible walls built of
+night out of a base of thunder and bursting waters. I gripped a rail,
+and saw a vague range of summits appear above the nearing walls and
+steadily develop towards distinction. Then the howling gale began to
+scream, the ceiling lowered and darkened, and merged with the rocks,
+reducing the world but to our _Celestine_ in the midst of near flashes
+of white in an uproar. When presently a little daylight came into chaos
+to give it shape again, there was an inch of hail on our deck, and the
+mountains had been changed to white marble. We saw a red light burn low
+in the place where Jidjelli ought to be, a signal that it was
+impossible to enter. Our skipper put about.
+
+That is all I know of Jidjelli, and all I wanted to know on such an
+evening. The sound of the surf on the rocks was better to hear when it
+was not so close. We followed that coast all night while I lay awake,
+shaking to the racing of the propeller; and I blessed the unknown
+engineers of the North Country who took forethought of nights of that
+kind when doing their best for _Celestine_; for, though bruised, I
+still loved her above Algiers and Timgad. She had character, she had
+set her course, and she was holding steadily to it, and did not pray
+the uncompassionate to change its face.
+
+
+III
+
+For more than a week we washed about in the surf of a high, dark coast
+towards Tunis. We might have been on the windward side of Ultima Thule.
+Supposing you could have been taken miraculously from your fogs and
+midday lamps of London, and put with me in the _Celestine_, and told
+that that sullen land looming through the murk could be yours, if you
+could guess its name, then you would have guessed nothing below the
+fortieth parallel.
+
+No matter; when you were told, you would have laughed at your loss. Now
+you understood why it was called the Dark Continent. It looked the home
+of slavery, murder, rhinoceroses, the Congo, war, human sacrifices, and
+gorillas. It had the forefront of the world of skulls and horrors,
+ultimatums, mining concessions, chains, and development. Its rulers
+would be throned on bone-heaps. You will say (of course you will say)
+that I saw Africa like that because I was weary of the place. Not at
+all. I was merely looking at it. The feeling had been growing on me
+since first I saw Africa at Oran, where I landed. The longer I stay,
+the more depressed I get.
+
+This has nothing to do with the storm. This African shadow does not
+chill you because you wish you were home, and home is far away. It does
+not come of your rare and lucky idleness, in which you have to do
+nothing but enjoy yourself; generally a sufficient reason for
+melancholy, though rarely so in my own case. No, Africa itself is the
+reason. There is an invisible emanation from its soil, the aura of evil
+in antiquity. You cannot see it, at first you are unaware it is there,
+and cannot know, therefore, what is the matter with you. This haunting
+premonition is different from mere wearying and boredom. It gets worse,
+the longer you stay; it goes deeper than sadness, it descends into a
+conviction of something that is without hope, that is bad in its
+nature, and unrepentant in its arrogant heart. When you have got so far
+down you have had time to discover what that is which has put you so
+low. The day may be radiant, the sky just what you had hoped to find in
+Africa, and the people in the market-place a lively and chromatic
+jangle; but the shadow of what we call inhumanity (when we are trying
+to persuade ourselves that humanity is something very different) chills
+and darkens the heart.
+
+Yet the common sky of North Africa might be the heaven of the first
+morning, innocent of knowledge that night is to come. It is not a hard
+blue roof; your sight is lost in the atmosphere which is azure. The sun
+more than shines; his beams ring on the rocks, and glance in colours
+from the hills. From a distance the flowers on a hill slope will pour
+down to the sea in such a torrent of hues that you might think the arch
+of the rainbow you saw there had collapsed in the sun and was now rills
+and cascades. The grove of palms holding their plumes above a white
+village might be delicate pencillings on the yellow sheet of desert.
+The heat is a balm. The shadows are stains of indigo on the roads and
+pale walls.
+
+
+IV
+
+One day we found Sfax. I went ashore at Sfax, interested in a name
+quite new to me. The guide-book did not even mention it; perhaps it was
+not worth while; no ruins, mummies, trams or hotels there, of course.
+Maybe it was only the name of a man, or a grass, or a sort of
+phosphate. Sfax! Well, anyhow, I had long wished for Africa, anywhere
+in Africa, and here I was, not eager to get home again, but not
+disinclined. What I had seen of it so far was a rather too frequented
+highway opposite the coast of Europe--a complementary establishment.
+Progress had macadamised it. Commerce and its wars had graded and
+uniformed and drilled its life. Its silent people marched in ranks, as
+it were, along mapped roads foredoomed, and its mills went round. Its
+life was expressed for export. It was on the way to Manchester and
+success. Of all the infernal uses to which a country can be put there
+is none like development. Let every good savage make incantation
+against it, or, if to some extent he has been developed, cross himself
+against the fructification of the evil. As for us whites, we are
+eternally damned, for we cannot escape the consequences of our past
+cleverness. The Devil has us on a complexity of strings, and some day
+will pull the whole lot tight. But Sfax! Had I escaped? Was there a
+chance?
+
+I found a city wall, a huge battlement, ancient and weathered, like an
+unscalable cliff, and going through its gate was entering the shadows
+of a cave. Out of the glare of the sun I went into the gloom of deep,
+narrow, and mysterious passages. The sun was only on the parapets and
+casements, which leaned towards each other confidentially, and left
+only a ragged line of light above. These alley-ways were crowded with
+camels, asses, and strange men. An understanding and sneering camel in
+a narrow passage will force you to take what chance there is of escape
+in desecrating a mosque, while Moslems watch you as the only Christian
+there, or of going under its slobbering mouth and splay feet. It does
+not care which.
+
+It was market-day for Sfax. There were little piles of vivid fruit
+beside white walls where a broad ray of sunlight found them. There were
+silversmiths at work, tent-makers, and the makers of camel harness. The
+tanners had laid skins for us to walk over. There were exotic smells. I
+went exploring the crooked turnings with an indifference which was
+studied. I was getting an interesting time, but was distinctly
+conscious of eyes, a ceaseless stream of eyes that floated by, watchful
+though making no sign. Several times I found myself jostled with some
+roughness. It occurred to me that I had heard on the ship that Sfax was
+the only town which had offered resistance to the French; its men have
+a fine reputation throughout Tunisia, which they do something now and
+then to maintain, in consequence. They certainly appeared a sturdy and
+virile lot. They were not listless, like the Arabs of Algeria, who have
+nothing to show for themselves but the haughty and aloof bearing of the
+proud but beaten.
+
+Having discovered that the enemy was vulnerable though strong, the men
+of Sfax go through the day now with the directed activity of those who
+once had got the worst of it, but have a hope of doing better next
+time. They gave me a lively and adventurous scene. They moved with
+silent and stealthy quickness. Their eyes glanced sideways from under
+their cowls. Their hands were hidden under their jibbahs. A few of them
+stared with the hate of the bereft. It is not possible to face
+everybody in a press which moves in all directions, and I was the only
+European who was there.
+
+Passing a mosque, where I noticed the Moslems had attempted, but had
+not completed, the obliteration of some representations of birds,--so
+the mosque was once, evidently, a place where other gods had been
+worshipped,--I hesitated, wishing to look closer into this curiosity,
+but recollected myself, and was passing on. An Arab in the turban of
+one who had been to Mecca was squatting cross-legged on the old marble
+pavement outside the mosque, and I just took in that he was a fine
+venerable fellow with an important beard, with a look of wisdom and
+experience in his steady glance from under the strong arches of his
+eyebrows that made me wish I knew Arabic, and could squat beside him,
+and gossip of the wide world. As I turned he said quietly, "Good day!"
+
+Now I thought perhaps I was bewitched, but turned and looked at him.
+"How are you?" he asked. At that moment, when his eyes looking upward
+had a smile of understanding mischief, and in such an alien city as
+Sfax, I was prepared to declare there is but one God and Mahomet is His
+prophet. For that sort of thing comes easy to me; and would have been
+quite true, as far as it went. Then I went back to him, and fearing
+that after all I might be addressing but the parrot which had already
+exhausted its vocabulary, I tried it on him: "Shall I take my boots off
+here, father, or may I sit down with you?"
+
+"Sit down," he said.
+
+He was a man of medicine. He sold there prophylactics against
+small-pox, adultery, blindness, the evil eye, sterility, or any other
+trouble which you thought threatened you. If a man feared for the
+faithfulness of his spouse, it seems Father the Hadj could secure it
+with a charm, and so allow him to spend the night elsewhere in perfect
+enjoyment and content. That is what the quiet old cynic told me, and
+invited me to inspect his display of amulets and fetishes, coloured
+glass tablets with Arabic inscriptions, and a deal of stuff which
+looked unreasonable to me, articles the holy man either could not or
+would not resolve into sense.
+
+His English, which he had learned as a shipping agent for the pilgrim
+traffic, soon reached its narrow limits, to my sorrow. When it left
+common objects and we wished to compare our world (for there is no
+doubt he was an experienced and understanding elder who knew to within
+a little what he might expect of his God and of his fellows), we were
+left smiling at each other, and had to guess the rest. Yet at least the
+bazaar could witness this good Moslem of age and admitted wisdom
+sitting opposite a dubious Christian in a companionable manner; and
+there was that testimony to my advantage. They even watched him draw
+his finger across his throat in serious and energetic pantomime, and
+saw me nod in grave appreciation, when he was trying to make me
+understand what was his sympathy for the Christian conquerors of Sfax.
+
+I went outside the landward gate of the city, and looked out over the
+level of brilliant sand which stretched out from there to Lake Tchad.
+What a voyage! What a lure! Perhaps there is no more perilous journey
+on earth than that, and if a traveller would vanish into the past, into
+such Oriental countries as the voyagers of Hakluyt saw with wonder,
+then to leave Sfax, and go across country to the Niger, would equal
+what once came of fooling with the arcana of the Djinn. Though, after
+all, one would like to emerge again, to tell the tale to the children;
+and the whole dubiety of it is in that last difficulty. It is almost
+certain the magic would be too powerful.
+
+About the bright yellow sea of the desert which came up to the high
+cliffs of the town, the squatting camels made dark hummocks. Strings of
+donkeys converged on the city gate bearing water-pots and baskets of
+charcoal. Sometimes a line of camels swayed outwards through the crowd,
+disappeared among the shrines, going south. Watching such a caravan go
+was the same as watching a ship leave port.
+
+By the wayside was a huckster. He banged a tomtom till he had gathered
+a crowd from the loose concourse of men who had come long journeys with
+esparto grass, or gums and ostrich plumes, and much else from the
+secret region inland. He was selling cotton shirts, and was an
+entertaining villain. By the corners of his mouth his humour was leery.
+He did not laugh, but his grimaces were funny. The variegated crowd and
+that huckster was too enticing, and forgetting I had not seen one of my
+own kind since leaving the ship, and that my face among those black and
+brown masks was as loud as the tomtom, I mingled my outrageous tourist
+tweeds with the graceful folds of the robes. The huckster kept glancing
+at me, and from grave side-long glances that crowd of men went to the
+extraordinary length of grim smiles. Suddenly I recognized the trick of
+that Arab cheapjack. It may be seen at work in Poplar, my native parish
+to which the ships come, when a curious and innocent Chinaman joins the
+group about the fluent quack in the market place.
+
+As soon as dignity permitted I passed on, and my dignity did not keep
+me waiting for any length of time.
+
+Uncertain, and not a little nervous, I wandered among some plantations
+of olives and false peppers, where the domes of the tombs floated like
+white bubbles on the foliage. Here an Arab beckoned to me, and told me
+he had been watching me for some time--for he was an English medical
+missionary in disguise--and warned me that these gardens and shrines
+were quite the wrong place to wander in alone. It appears that only a
+few days since the flame of insurrection flashed down the bazaar,
+licked up a few French soldiers who happened to be there, and had
+almost got a hold before the garrison appeared and doused it. He took
+me to his house, with its windows heavily barred, for there his
+predecessor had been murdered. (If this could happen at the
+starting-place for Lake Tchad, then let the idea go.)
+
+From the flat roof of the doctor's house I smelt the dung of ages,
+fought with legions of flies, and looked down on a large quadrangle of
+hay and stable muck, where camels had carefully folded themselves on
+the ground, and chewed reflectively, their eyes half closed; and large
+drowsy asses mechanically fanned their ears at the loathly swarms. The
+missionary surmised that the caravanserai below was the perfect
+reflection of one we had heard more about, which was once at Bethlehem.
+The square was enclosed with flat-roofed stables, and it being a busy
+time they were all occupied. The first one, immediately below us, was
+filled with a family of Kabyles, which consisted chiefly of a
+magnificent virago of a wife, tattooed, with a fine gold ring in her
+nostrils, who seemed to have a trying life with her mild and
+contemplative old husband. She had more children than one could count
+without giving the matter that close attention which might be
+misinterpreted. She cradled them in the manger every night. Loud as her
+voice was, though, I could almost hear the old man smile as he walked
+away from her. They had two contemptuous camels who never lifted an
+eyelid when she raised her voice to them, but chewed calmly on, with
+faces turned impassively towards the New Jerusalem of camels, where
+viragoes are not; and several resigned asses who appeared to have
+handed their souls back to their Maker, because souls are but extra
+trammels in this place of sorrow.
+
+Next door to them was a regular tenant who bred goats, and fed them out
+of British biscuit-tins. Beyond them the stable was occupied by a party
+of swarthy ruffians who had arrived with a cargo of esparto grass. In
+the far corner, a family, crowded out, had been living for weeks under
+a structure of horrible rags. Smoke, issuing from a dozen seams, gave
+their home the look of a smouldering manure heap.
+
+
+
+V
+
+You probably know there are place-names which, when whispered
+privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit east
+of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print without a
+thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are a motley lot,
+and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own lunacy in another
+phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port Royal,
+Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie River, Tripoli of
+Barbary. They are some of mine. Rome should be there, I know, and
+Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and that is all I can say
+about it.
+
+Why give reasons for our preferences? How often have our preferences
+any reason? Maybe some old scoundrel of an ancestor who made a fortune
+(all lost since) as a thief on the Spanish main, whispers Panama to me
+when my mind is tired. Others may make magic with Ostend, Biarritz, or
+Ancoats; and they are just as lucky as the man who obtains the spell by
+looking at the Dry Tortugas on the map.
+
+When I set out from Newport on this voyage, I did not expect to see
+Tripoli of Barbary. We have never considered the possibility that our
+favourite place-names really do stand for stones that have veritable
+shapes and smells under a sun which comes and goes daily. Nor was my
+steamer exactly the sort of craft which could, by the look of her, ever
+attain to the coast of Barbary. What would a steamer know about it? She
+would never fetch the landfall of a dream. I was not surprised,
+therefore, when she fetched Tripoli quite wrong; not the place at all
+for which I was looking on the southern horizon. But then, she was but
+taking crockery there, in crates; and crockery is less vulnerable, is
+rough freight, compared to a fancy. The crockery, however, got to its
+Tripoli quite safely.
+
+We anchored; and there was Tripoli, standing round a little bay, with
+its buildings, variously coloured, crowded to the west, and slender
+minarets standing as masts over the flat decks of the houses. I landed
+at a narrow water-gate, and the Turkish officials regarded me as though
+I had come to remove the country. When I wished to embark again, these
+curious people in uniform were even more serious than when I arrived.
+After a long hesitation, permission was given me niggardly to leave
+Tripoli, and my ship's boatmen pointed out the urgent need to supply a
+certain rowboat in the bay with that morsel of paper. To lose that tiny
+document would have a shocking result, for a warship was in the bay to
+support the rowboat. We passed that warship. Some day a hilarious
+traveller will tear his document into fragments, and that warship will
+fire at him, and sink. The system here, a mere tabulation of fear and
+suspicion, those reflexes of evildoers who have the best of reasons to
+be jealous of their neighbours, is protective exclusiveness in its
+perfect flower, and perhaps it would be better to be really dead than
+to live under it as a warm, law-abiding corpse.
+
+I should guess that, with a slight magnification to make the object
+plainer, there are three soldiers to each worker in North Africa. On
+from Oran the gaudy fellow in uniform has been very conspicuous, the
+most leisured and prosperous of the inhabitants, and one came
+unwillingly to the conclusion that it is more profitable to smoke
+cigarettes in a country than to grow corn in it. As for Tripoli, its
+uniformed protectors hide the protected; but perhaps its natives have
+learned how to live by killing one another. It is possible I have not
+divined the more subtle ways of God's providence.
+
+Tripoli, like other towns oh these shores, looks as though it were
+sloughing away. Where stones fall, there they lie. In the centre of the
+town is a marble triumphal arch in honour of Marcus Aurelius. Age would
+account for much of its ruin, but not all; yet it still stands cold,
+haughty, austere, though decrepit, in Tripolitan mud, with mean stucco
+and plaster buildings about it. The arch itself is filled in, and is
+used as a dwelling. Its tenant is a greengrocer, and the monument to
+Marcus Aurelius has an odour of garlic; but it need not be supposed
+that that was specially repugnant to me. How could the white marble of
+Marcus, to say nothing of a warmer philosophy no less austere, be
+acceptable to our senses unless translated, with a familiar odour of
+garlic, by modern greengrocers? I shall think more of Tripoli of
+Barbary in future, when looking back at it through a middle-aged pipe,
+when the chains have got me at last.
+
+_January 1907._
+
+
+
+
+II. The Call
+
+
+When the train left me at Clayton Station, the only passenger to
+alight, its hurried retreat down the long straight of converging
+metals, a rapidly diminishing cube, seemed to be measuring for me the
+isolation of the place. Clayton appeared to be two railway platforms
+and a row of elms across an empty road. After the last rumble of the
+train, which had the note of a distant cry of derision, there closed in
+the quiet of a place where affairs had not even begun. It was raining,
+there was a little luggage, I did not know the distance to the village,
+and the porter had disappeared. A defective gutter-spout overhead was
+the leaking conduit for all the sounds and movement of the countryside.
+
+Then I saw a boy humped into the shelter of a shrub which leaned over
+the station fence. He was reading. Before him was a hand-cart lettered
+"Humphrey Monk, Grocer and General Dealer, Clayton." The boy wore
+spectacles which, when he looked at me, magnified his eyes so that the
+lad seemed a luminous and disembodied stare. I saw only the projection
+of his enlarged gaze. He promised to take my luggage to Clayton. I
+walked through three miles of steady rain to the village, by a stretch
+of marshland so hushed by the nearness of the draining sky that the
+land might have been what it seemed at a little distance: merely a
+faint presentment of fields solvent in the wet. Its green melted into
+the outer grey at a short distance where rows of elms were smeared.
+There was nothing beyond.
+
+This old village of Clayton is five miles inland from Clayton-on-Sea,
+that new and popular resort hardened with asphalt and concrete, to
+which city folk retire for a change in the summer. During the winter
+months many of the shops of the big town are closed till summer brings
+the holiday-makers again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fill
+with street litter, old paper, and straws. The easterly winds cut the
+life out of the streets, the long ranks of automatic machines look out
+across the empty parade, and rust, and the lines of the pier-deck
+advance desolately far into the wind and grey sea, straight and
+uninterrupted. It is more than barren then, Clayton-on-Sea, for man has
+been there, builded busily and even ornately, loaded the town with
+structures for even his minor whims in idleness; and forsaken it all.
+So it will look on the Last Day. The advertisements clamour pills and
+hair-dye to a town which seems as if the Judgment Day has passed and
+left the husk of life. So I was driven to the original Clayton, the
+place which gave the name, the little inland village that did, when I
+found it, show some signs of welcome life. It was a clump of white
+cottages in a vague cloud of trees. It had some chimneys smoking, there
+was a man several fields away, and a dog sitting in a porch barked at
+me. Here was a little of the warmth of human contiguity.
+
+When night came, and the village was but a few chance and unrelated
+lights, there was the choice between my bedroom and the taproom of the
+inn where I lodged. In the bedroom, crowning a chest of drawers, was a
+large Bible, and on the wall just above was a glass case of shabby
+sea-birds, their eyes so placed that they appeared to be looking up
+from Holy Writ with a look of such fatuous rapture that one's idea of
+immortality became associated with bodies dusty, stuffed, and wired.
+(Oh, the wind and the rain!) Yet there was left the bar-parlour; and
+there, usually, was a dim lamp showing but a table with assorted empty
+mugs, a bar with bottles and a mirror, but nobody to serve, and a
+picture of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes.
+
+There was but one other light in Clayton which showed sanctuary after
+dark for the stranger. It was in Mr. Monk's shop. His shop at least had
+its strange interests in its revelation of the diverse needs of
+civilized homes, for Mr. Monk sold everything likely to be wanted
+urgently enough by his neighbours to make a journey to greater Clayton
+prohibitive. In one corner of his shop a young lady was caged, for it
+was also the post office. The interior of the store was confused with
+boxes, barrels, bags, and barricades of smaller tins and jars, with
+alleys for sidelong progress between them. I do not think any order
+ever embarrassed Mr. Monk. Without hesitation he would turn, sure of
+his intricate world, from babies' dummies to kerosene. There were cards
+hanging from the rafters bearing briar pipes, bottles of lotion for the
+hair of schoolchildren, samples of sauce, and stationery.
+
+His shop had its own native smell. It was of coffee, spices, rock-oil,
+cheese, bundles of wood, biscuits, and jute bags, and yet was none of
+these things, for their separate flavours were so blended by old
+association that they made one indivisible smell, peculiar, but not
+unpleasant, when you were used to it. I found Mr. Monk's barrel of soda
+quite a cherishable seat on a dull night, for the grocer's lamp was
+then the centre of a very dark world. Around it and beyond was only the
+blackness and silence of vacuity. And the grocer himself, if not busy,
+would give me his casual and valuable advice on the minor frailties of
+the human, and they seemed as engaging and confusing in their
+directness as a child's; for Mr. Monk was large and bland, with a pale,
+puffy, and unsmiling face, and only betrayed his irony with a slow wink
+when he was sure you were not deceived. He knew much about the gentry
+around, those bored and weary youths in check coats, riding breeches,
+and large pipes, and the young ladies in pale homespun costumes who had
+rude and familiar words to all they judged were their equals, and were
+accompanied invariably by Aberdeen terriers.
+
+One evening I spoke to Mr. Monk of his boy. The boy, I said, seemed a
+strange little fellow. Mr. Monk, in his soiled, white apron, turned on
+me, and said nothing at first, but tapped his bald head solemnly.
+"Can't make him out," he said. "I think this is where it is"--and
+pressed a fat thumb against his head again. "But you have to put up
+with any boy you can get here." He sighed. "The bright kids go. Clear
+out. There's nothing fer 'em here but farm labour an' the poor rate. I
+don't know how the farmers about here could make a do of it if we
+didn't pay rates to keep their labourers from dying off. My boys get
+fed up. Off they go, 'nd I doan' blame 'em. One of 'em's in a racin'
+stable now, doin' well. Another's got a potman's job London somewhere.
+Doin' well. But the kid I've got now, he'll stop. No ginger in that
+boy. Can't see anything five minutes off, either. Must be under his
+nose, and your finger shouting at it. He's got a cloudy mind. Yet he's
+clever, in his way. There's the door-mat of the shop. As soon as any
+one puts a foot on that mat, the clock in my kitchen strikes two. All
+his fake. But he does rile the customers. Silly young fool. If there's
+two parcels to deliver, it's the wrong one gets first chance."
+
+In a land where discovery had not gone beyond the blacksmith's forge
+and the arable fields, a native boy who had turned a door-mat into a
+watchdog was an interesting possibility. There the boy was at that
+moment, stepping off his responsive mat, ill-clad, the red nose of his
+meagre face almost as evident as his magnified stare of surprised
+inquiry, and his mouth open. Mr. Monk chaffed him. I spoke with some
+seriousness to him, but he was shy, and gave no answer except some
+throat noises. Yet presently he ceased to rub a boot up and down one
+leg, and became articulate. He mumbled that he knew the telegraph
+instrument too. ("Oho!" said Mr. Monk, looking interested. "You do, do
+yer? What about learning not to leave Mrs. Brown's parcel at Mrs.
+Pipkin's?") Had I ever been to London, the boy asked, his big eyes full
+on my face. Had I ever seen a Marconi station? I talked to him, perhaps
+unwisely, of some of the greater affairs. He said nothing. His mouth
+remained open and his stare full-orbed.
+
+There was one grey, still Sunday when it was not raining, the grey sky
+being exhausted, and I met the grocer's boy a little distance from the
+village, sitting on a fence, reading. The boy closed his book when he
+saw me, but not before I had noticed that the volume was open at a page
+showing one of those highly technical diagrams of involved machinery
+which only the elect may read. I took the book--it was a manual of
+civil engineering--and asked questions with some humility; for before
+the man who understands the manipulating of metals and can make living
+servants for himself out of pipes, wheels, and valves, I stand as would
+a primitive or an innocent and confiding girl before the magician who
+interprets for them oracles. With the confidence of long familiarity
+and the faint hauteur of shyness he explained some of the diagrams in
+which, at that moment, he was interested.
+
+We talked of them, and of Clayton; for I wished to know how this
+grocer's boy, who went about masked with a mouth open a little
+fatuously, an insignificant face, goggles, and a hand-truck, himself of
+no account in a flat and unremarkable place aside from the press of
+life's affairs, had discovered there were hills to which he could lift
+his eyes after those humiliating interviews with Mr. Monk concerning
+the wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means by
+which news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popular
+halfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed to
+Clayton to be all aeroplanes, musical-comedy girls, dog shows, and Mr.
+Lloyd George. The grocer's boy got his tongue free at last, and talked.
+He was halt and obscure, but I thought I saw a mind beating against the
+elms and stones of the village, and repelled by the concrete, asphalt,
+and lodging-houses of the seaside place. But I am impressionable, too.
+It may have been my fancy. What the boy finished with was: "There's no
+chance here. You never hear of anything."
+
+You never heard of anything. That countryside really looked remote
+enough from the centre of affairs, from the place where men,
+undistracted by the news and pictures of the halfpenny illustrated
+Press, were getting work done. Clayton was deaf and dumb. Some miles
+away the smoke of the London train was streaming across the dim fields
+like a comet. We both stood watching that comet going sure and bright
+to its destiny, leaving Clayton behind, regardless of us, and as though
+all we there were nothing worth. We were outside the pull of life's
+spinning hub. Beyond and remote from us things would be happening; but
+no voice or pulse of life could vibrate us, merged as we were within
+the inelastic silence of Clayton.
+
+We walked back to the village, and the boy said good-night, passing
+through a white gate to a cottage unseen at that late hour of the
+evening. Near midnight I left my stuffed birds, with their fixed and
+upturned gaze, and went into the open, where above the shapeless lumps
+of massive dark of Clayton the stars were detaching their arrows, for
+the night was clear and frosty at last. Sirius, pulsing and
+resplendent, seemed nearer and more vital than anything in the village.
+
+I walked as far as the white gate of the cottage where I had left Mr.
+Monk's boy; and there he was again, to my surprise, at that hour. He
+came forward. At first he appeared to be agitated; but as he talked
+brokenly I saw he was exalted. He was no grocer's boy then. The lad
+half dragged me, finding I did not understand him, towards his home. We
+went round to the back of the sleeping cottage, and found a little
+shed. On a bench in that shed a candle was burning in a ginger-beer
+bottle. By the candle was a structure meaningless to me, having nothing
+of which I could make a guess. It was fragmentary and idle, the
+building which a child makes of household utensils, naming it anything
+to its fancy. There were old jam-pots, brass door-knobs, squares of
+india-rubber, an electric bell, glass rods, cotton reels, and thin
+wires which ran up to the roof out of sight.
+
+"Listen!" said the grocer's boy imperatively, holding up a finger. I
+remained intent and suspicious, wondering. Nothing happened. I was
+turning to ask the lad why I should listen, for the shed was very
+still, and then I saw the hammer of the bell lift itself, as though
+alive. Some erratic and faint tinkling began. "That's my wireless,"
+said the grocer's boy, his eyes extraordinarily bright. "I've only just
+finished it. Who is calling us?"
+
+
+
+
+III. Old Junk
+
+
+Business had brought the two of us to an inn on the West Coast, and all
+its windows opened on a wide harbour, hill-enclosed. Only small
+coasting craft were there, mostly ketches; but we had topsail schooners
+also and barquantines, those ascending and aerial rigs that would be
+flamboyant but for the transverse spars of the foremast, giving one who
+scans them the proper apprehension of stability and poise.
+
+To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her moorings and with sails
+furled, her slender poles upspringing from the bright plane of a
+brimming harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight as the
+rediscovery, when idling with a book, of a favourite lyric. That when
+she is at anchor; but to see her, all canvas set for light summer airs,
+at exactly that distance where defects and harshness in her apparel
+dissolve, but not so far away but the white feathers at her throat are
+plain, is to exult in the knowledge that man once reached such
+greatness that he imagined and created a thing which was consonant with
+the stateliness of the slow ranging of great billows, and the soaring
+density of white cumulus clouds, and with the brightness and compelling
+mystery of the far horizon at sundown.
+
+Some mornings, when breakfast-time came with the top of the tide, we
+could look down on the plan of a deck beneath, with its appurtenances
+and junk, casks, houses, pumps, and winches, rope and spare spars,
+binnacle and wheel, perhaps a boat, the regular deck seams curving and
+persisting under all. An old collier ketch she might be, with a name
+perhaps as romantic as the _Mary Ann_; for the owners of these little
+vessels delight to honour their lady relatives.
+
+Away in mid-stream the _Mary Ann_ would seem but a trivial affair, no
+match for the immensities about her, diminished by the vistas of shores
+and beaches, and the hills. But seen close under our window you
+understood why her men would match her, and think it no hardihood, with
+gales and the assaults of ponderous seas. Her many timbers, so well
+wrought as to appear, at a distance, a delicate and frail shape, are
+really heavy. Even in so small a craft as a ketch they are massive
+enough to surprise you into wondering at the cunning of shipwrights,
+those artists who take gross lumps of intractable timber and metal, and
+compel them to subtle mouldings and soft grace, to an image which we
+know means life that moves in rhythmic loveliness.
+
+Talk of the art of book and picture making! There is an old fellow I
+met in this village who will take the ruins of a small forest, take
+pine boles, metal, cordage, and canvas, and without plans, but from the
+ideal in his eye, build you the kind of lithe and dainty schooner that,
+with the cadences of her sheer and moulding, and the soaring of her
+masts, would keep you by her side all day in harbour; build you the
+kind of girded, braced, and immaculate vessel, sound at every point,
+tuned and sweet to a precision that in a violin would make a musician
+flush with inspiration, a ship to ride, lissom and light, the uplifted
+western ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and the
+drive of hurricane. She will ride out of the storm afterwards, none to
+applaud her, over the mobile hills travelling express, the rags of her
+sails triumphant pennants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from her
+deck.
+
+He, that modest old man, can create such a being as that; and I have
+heard visitors to this village, leisured and cultured folk, whose own
+creative abilities amount to no more than the arranging of some
+decorative art in strata of merit, talk down to the old fellow who can
+think out a vessel like that after supper, and go out after breakfast
+to direct the laying of her keel--talk down to him, kindly enough, of
+course, and smilingly, as a "working man."
+
+I told you there were two of us, at this inn. We met at meals. I think
+he was a commercial traveller. A tall young fellow, strongly built, a
+pleasure to look at; carefully dressed, intelligent, with hard and
+clear grey eyes. He had a ruddy but fastidious complexion, though he
+was, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift
+in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could
+come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He
+had no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on a
+hot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feel
+an ineffective, delicate, and inferior being.
+
+He would bang out to business, after breakfast and a breezy chat with
+me; and I lapsed, a lazy and shameless idler, into the window, to
+wonder among the models outside, the fascinating curves of ships and
+boats, as satisfying and as personal to me as music I know, as the lilt
+of ballads and all that minor rhythm which wheels within the enclosing
+harmonies and balance of stars and suns in their orbits. Those forms of
+ships and boats are as satisfying as the lines which make the strength
+and swiftness of salmon and dolphins, and the ease of the flight of
+birds with great pinions; and, in a new schooner which passed this
+window, on her first voyage to sea--a tall and slender ship, a being so
+radiant in the sun as to look an evanescent and immaterial vision--as
+inspiring and awful as the remoteness of a spiritual and lovely woman.
+
+"I can't make out what you see in those craft," said my companion one
+morning. "They're mostly ancient tubs, and at the most they only muck
+about the coast. Now a P. & O. or a Cunarder! That's something to look
+at." He was looking down at me, and there was a trace of contempt in
+his smile.
+
+He was right in a way. I felt rebuked and embarrassed, and could not
+explain to him. These were the common objects of the Channel after all,
+old and weather-broken, sea wagons from the Cowes point of view, source
+of alarm and wonder to passengers on fine liners when they sight them
+beating stubbornly against dirty winter weather, and hanging on to the
+storm. Why should they take my interest more than battleships and
+Cunarders? Yet I could potter about an ancient hooker or a tramp
+steamer all day, when I wouldn't cross a quay to a great battleship. I
+like the pungent smells of these old craft, just as I inhale the health
+and odour of fir woods. I love their men, those genuine mariners, the
+right diviners of sky, coast, and tides, who know exactly what their
+craft will do in any combination of circumstances as well as you know
+the pockets of your old coat; men who can handle a stiff and cranky
+lump of patched timbers and antique gear as artfully as others would
+the clever length of hollow steel with its powerful twin screws.
+
+But when my slightly contemptuous companion spoke I had no answer, felt
+out of date and dull, a fogey and an idle man. I had no answer
+ready--none that would have satisfied this brisk young man, none that
+would not have seemed remote and trivial to him.
+
+He left me. Some other visitor had left behind Stevenson's _Ebb Tide_,
+and trying to think out an excuse that would quiet the qualms I began
+to feel for this idle preference of mine for old junk, I began picking
+out the passages I liked. And then I came on these words of Attwater's
+(though Stevenson, for certain, is speaking for himself): "Junk ...
+only old junk!... Nothing so affecting as ships. The ruins of an empire
+would leave me frigid, when a bit of an old rail that an old shellback
+had leaned on in the middle watch would bring me up all standing."
+
+
+
+
+IV. Bed-Books and Night-Lights
+
+
+The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There
+was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The
+nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a
+shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its
+white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released
+shadows. Black spectres danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh
+air, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my
+little friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into
+the solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
+
+They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean?
+It cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It
+would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish
+comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That
+pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night,
+in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a
+sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on
+the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into
+distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all
+our verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to
+know of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle
+for me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly
+suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are
+conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate
+the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as
+they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its
+illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The
+light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
+limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper
+beside the only worshipper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can
+compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a
+living heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone,
+holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous
+spectres stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness
+of the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood
+instantly and founder us in original gloom.
+
+The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in
+torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a
+moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The
+shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks
+at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy
+of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a
+golden lily on a silver stem!
+
+"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I
+nearly replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife;
+but that is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea
+was that the bed-book is a soporific, and for that reason she even
+advocated the reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute
+act. Certainly you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You
+would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not
+only unshriven, but in the act of guilt.
+
+What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or
+a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are
+no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have
+named are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess
+at times they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as
+ours, their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my
+part, they are too big for bedfellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my
+feeble and restricted glim, following (in pyjamas) the statuesque
+figure of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere
+pity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after
+midnight! Let those go who like it.
+
+As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all,
+including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid
+tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismatic
+spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball
+below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that.
+It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime
+on fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By
+breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should
+all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once
+the pillow is nicely set.
+
+For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain
+attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of
+the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we
+are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with
+such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple
+of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte
+to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run,
+for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time
+when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great
+Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us
+have not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about
+literature as there is about theology.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It
+is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly
+right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning
+fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness,
+anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally
+clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only
+the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The
+late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make
+transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest
+beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential
+affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions
+because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in
+the heavens where duty, honour, witty arguments, controversial logic on
+great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in
+the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then
+certainly smiles at cleverness.
+
+For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white
+and lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare
+of illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and star-like, as a clear and
+lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have
+gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that
+place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those
+sentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable
+and sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed
+because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them
+lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident
+diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has
+watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret
+debate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of
+the evil they have created.
+
+That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the
+intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the
+Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our
+contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a
+misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select
+intimacy of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of
+mankind, not at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and
+terrible nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but how it
+is that after such a wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we
+insist on doing, and our reasons for doing them, and what happens after
+we have done them, men do not change. It does seem impossible that
+society could remain unaltered, after the surprise its appearance
+should have caused it as it saw its face in that ruthless mirror. We
+point instead to the fact that Swift lost his mind in the end. Well,
+that is not a matter for surprise.
+
+Such books, and France's _Isle of Penguins_, are not disturbing as
+bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it
+with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts
+engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to
+hand in the bookshelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one
+has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as
+possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and
+_Tristram Shandy_ is sure to be found in the sun.
+
+But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost
+every night for months with Doughty in the _Arabia Deserta_. He is a
+craggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one
+gets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
+thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders of
+Doughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and the
+shins broken, and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce
+sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adam
+himself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takes
+time--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned
+from a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on the
+Red Sea coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with the
+world you used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of
+no other test.
+
+Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with his
+boys nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated that
+habit of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no
+reason that he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased to hear about.
+He thought of the future when he read the Bible; I read it for the
+past. The familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its
+wonderful well-remembered stories of things long past,--like that of
+Esther, one of the best in English,--the eloquent anger of the prophets
+for the people then who looked as though they were alive, but were
+really dead at heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think of
+it, it is our home and solace that we want in a bed-book.
+
+
+
+
+V. Transfiguration
+
+
+There it is, thirty miles wide between the horns of the land, a bay
+opening north-west upon the Atlantic, with a small island in the midst
+of the expanse, a heap of sundered granite lying upon the horizon like
+a faint sunken cloud, like the floating body of a whale, like an area
+of opalescent haze, like an inexplicable brightness at sea when no
+island can be seen. The apparition of that island depends upon the
+favour of the sun. The island is only a ghost there, sometimes
+invisible, sometimes but an alluring and immaterial fragment of the
+coast we see far over the sea in dreams; a vision of sanctuary, of the
+place we shall never reach, a frail mirage of land then, a roseous spot
+which is not set in the sea, but floats there only while the thought of
+a haven of peace and secure verities is still in the mind, and while
+the longing eye projects it on the horizon.
+
+The sun sets behind the island. On a clear day, at sundown, the island
+behaves so much like a lump of separated earth, a piece of the black
+world we know, that I can believe it is land, something to be found on
+the map, a place where I could get ashore, after toil and adventures.
+At sundown a low yellow planet marks its hiding-place.
+
+If the island in the bay is usually but a coloured thought in the mind,
+a phantom and an unattainable refuge by day, and a star by night, the
+real coast which stretches seaward to it, marching on either hand into
+the blue, confident and tall, is hardly more material, except by the
+stones of my outlook. The near rocks are of indubitable earth.
+
+Beyond them the coloured fabric of the bay becomes diaphanous, and I
+can but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for in
+it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them
+seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from
+their places and stream inland as torn flimsies and gossamer.
+
+It is the sublimation of earth. Our own shining globe floats with the
+others in a sea of light. Here in the bay on a September morning, if
+our world till then had been without life and voice, with this shine
+that is an impalpable dust of gold, the quickened air, and the seas
+moving as though joyous in the first dawn, Eros and Aurora would have
+known the moment, and a child would have been born.
+
+None but the transcendent and mounting qualities of our elements, and
+the generative day which makes the surf dazzling, and draws the
+passionate azure of the bugloss from hot and arid sand, and makes the
+blobs of sea-jelly in the pools expand like flowers, and ripens the
+clouds, nothing but the indestructible essence of life, life uplifted
+and dominant, shows now in this world of the bay.
+
+Below the high moors which enclose the bay, those distant sleepy
+uplands where the keels of the cumulus clouds are grounded, there are
+saline meadows, lush and warm, where ditches serpentine between
+barriers of meadowsweet, briers and fat grasses. Nearer to the sea the
+levels are of moist sand covered with a close matting of thyme, and
+herbage as close and resilient as moss, levels that are not green, like
+fields, but golden, and of a texture that reflects the light, so that
+these plains seem to have their own brightness.
+
+The sea plains finish in the sandhills. In this desert you may press a
+hand into the body of earth, and feel its heat and pulse. The west wind
+pours among the dunes, a warm and heavy torrent. There is no need to
+make a miracle of the appearance of life on our earth. Life was at the
+happy incidence of the potent elements on such a strand as this.
+Aphrodite was no myth. Our mother here gave birth to her.
+
+The sea is kept from the dunes by a high ridge of blue water-worn
+pebbles, and beyond the pebbles at low water is the wet strand over
+which she came wading to give the earth children in her own likeness.
+The Boy and Miss Muffet beside me are no surprise. They are proper to
+the place. The salt water and the sand are still on their brown limbs,
+and in the Boy's serious eyes and Miss Muffet's smile there is
+something outside my knowledge; but I know that in the depth of that
+mystery is security and content.
+
+There is a fear I have, though, when they trip it over the solid and
+unquestionable stones, and leave the stones to fly off into the wind
+down that shining entrance to the deep. For the strand has no
+substance. Their feet move over a void in which far down I see another
+sky than ours. They go where I doubt that I can follow. I cannot leave
+my hold upon the rocks and enter the place to which their late and
+aerial spirits are native. It is plain the earth is not a solid body.
+As their bodies, moving over the bright vacuity, grow unsubstantial and
+elfin with distance, and they approach that line where the surf
+glimmers athwart the radiant void, I have a sudden fear that they may
+vanish quite, and only their laughter come at me mockingly from the
+near invisible air. They will have gone back to their own place.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Pit Mouth
+
+
+There was Great Barr, idle, still, and quiet. Through the Birmingham
+suburbs, out into the raw, bleak winter roads between the hedges, quite
+beyond the big town smoking with its enterprising labours, one
+approached the village of calamity with some awe and diffidence. You
+felt you were intruding; that you were a mere gross interloper, coming
+through curiosity, that was not excused by the compunction you felt, to
+see the appearance of a place that had tragedy in nearly all its homes.
+Young men streamed by on bicycles in the same direction, groups were
+hurrying there on foot.
+
+The road rose in a mound to let the railway under, and beyond the far
+dip was the village, an almost amorphous group of mean red dwellings
+stuck on ragged fields about the dominant colliery buildings. Three
+high, slim chimneys were leisurely pouring smoke from the grotesque
+black skeleton structures above the pits. The road ran by the boundary,
+and was packed with people, all gazing absorbed and quiet into the
+grounds of the colliery; they were stacked up the hedge banks, and the
+walls and trees were loaded with boys.
+
+A few empty motor-cars of the colliery directors stood about. A
+carriage-horse champed its bit, and the still watchers turned at once
+to that intrusive sound. Around us, a lucid winter landscape (for it
+had been raining) ran to the distant encompassing hills which lifted
+like low ramparts of cobalt and amethyst to a sky of luminous saffron
+and ice-green, across which leaden clouds were moving. The country had
+that hard, coldly radiant appearance which always impresses a sad man
+as this world's frank expression of its alien disregard; this world not
+his, on which he has happened, and must endure with his trouble for a
+brief time.
+
+As I went through the press of people to the colliery gates, the women
+in shawls turned to me, first with annoyance that their watching should
+be disturbed, and then with some dull interest. My assured claim to
+admittance probably made them think I was the bearer of new help
+outside their little knowledge; and they willingly made room for me to
+pass. I felt exactly like the interfering fraud I was. What would I not
+have given then to be made, for a brief hour, a nameless
+miracle-worker.
+
+In the colliery itself was the same seeming apathy. There was nothing
+to show in that yard, black with soddened cinders and ash muck, where
+the new red-brick engine-houses stood, that somewhere half a mile
+beneath our feet were thirty men, their only exit to the outer world
+barred by a subterranean fire. Nothing showed of the fire but a whitish
+smoke from a ventilating shaft; and a stranger would not know what that
+signified. But the women did. Wet with the rain showers, they had been
+standing watching that smoke all night, and were watching it still, for
+its unceasing pour to diminish. Constant and unrelenting, it streamed
+steadily upward, as though it drew its volume from central fires that
+would never cease.
+
+The doors of the office were thrown open, and three figures emerged.
+They broke into the listlessness of that dreary place, where nothing
+seemed to be going on, with a sudden real purpose, fast but unhurried,
+and moved towards the shaft. Three Yorkshire rescue experts--one of
+them to die later--with the Hamstead manager explaining the path they
+should follow below with eager seriousness. "Figures of fun"! They had
+muzzles on their mouths and noses, goggles on their eyes, fantastic
+helms, and queer cylinders and bags slung about them. As they went up
+the slope of wet ash, quick and full of purpose, their comical gear and
+coarse dress became suddenly transfigured; and the silent crowd cheered
+emotionally that little party of forlorn hope.
+
+They entered the cage, and down they went. Still it was difficult for
+me to think that we were fronting tragedy, for no danger showed. An
+hour and more passed in nervous and dismal waiting. There was a signal.
+Some men ran to the pit-head carrying hot bricks and blankets. The
+doctors took off their coats, and arranged bottles and tinkling
+apparatus on chairs stuck in the mud. The air smelt of iodoform. A
+cloth was laid on the ground from the shaft to the engine-house, and
+stretchers were placed handy. The women, some carrying infants, broke
+rank. That quickly up-running rope was bringing the first news. The
+rope stopped running and the cage appeared. Only the rescue party came
+out, one carrying a moribund cat. They knew nothing; and the
+white-faced women, with hardly repressed hysteria, took again their
+places by the engine-house. So we passed that day, watching the place
+from which came nothing but disappointment. Occasionally a child, too
+young to know it was adding to its mother's grief, would wail
+querulously. There came a time when I and all there knew that to go
+down that shaft was to meet with death. The increasing exhaustion and
+pouring sweat of the returning rescue parties showed that. Yet the
+miners who were not selected to go down were angry; they violently
+abused the favouritism of the officials who would not let all risk
+their lives.
+
+I have a new regard for my fellows since Great Barr. About you and me
+there are men like that. There is nothing to distinguish them. They
+show no signs of greatness. They have common talk. They have coarse
+ways. They walk with an ugly lurch. Their eyes are not eager. They are
+not polite. Their clothes are dirty. They live in cheap houses on cheap
+food. They call you "sir." They are the great unwashed, the mutable
+many, the common people. The common people! Greatness is as common as
+that. There are not enough honours and decorations to go round. Talk of
+the soldier! _Vale_ to Welsby of Normanton! He was a common miner. He
+is dead. His fellows were in danger, their wives were white-faced and
+their children were crying, and he buckled on his harness and went to
+the assault with no more thought for self than great men have in a
+great cause; and he is dead. I saw him go to his death. I wish I could
+tell you of Welsby of Normanton.
+
+I left that place where the star-shine was showing the grim skeleton of
+the shaft-work overhead in the night, and where men moved about below
+in the indeterminate dark like dismal gnomes. There was a woman whose
+cry, when Welsby died, was like a challenge.
+
+Next morning, in Great Barr, some blinds were down, the street was
+empty. Children, who could see no reason about them why their fathers
+should not return as usual, were playing foot-ball by the tiny church.
+A group of women were still gazing at the grotesque ribs and legs of
+the pit-head staging as though it were a monster without ruth.
+
+_November 1907._
+
+
+
+
+VII. Initiation
+
+
+As to what the Boy will become, that is still with his stars; and
+though once we thought he was much impressed by the dignity of the man
+controlling a road roller, for it seemed it would be well to be that
+slow herald in front with a little red flag, he has shown but the
+faintest regard for the offices of policeman, engine-driver, and
+soldier. It is clear there is but one good thing left for his choice,
+and so the house is littered with drawings of ships. There has been
+some advance from that early affair of black angles which, without
+explanation, might have stood for anything, but was meant for a cutter.
+Now, in a manner which a careless visitor could think was the hauteur
+of an artist who is too sure of himself to care what you think of his
+work, but is really acute shyness, he will present you at short notice
+with a sketch in colours of a topsail schooner beating off a lee shore,
+if your variety of beard does not rouse his suspicion. As art, such
+paintings have their faults; but as delineations of that sort of ship
+they have technical exactitude not common even in the studios.
+
+In fact, he has found an old manual of seamanship, and the
+illustrations get more attention than some people give to Biblical
+subjects. During vacant afternoons there is an uncanny calm in the
+house, a silence which makes people think they have forgotten something
+important; but it is only that the Boy is absent with the argonauts. He
+is in tow of Argo, as it were, one of its heroes, surging astern in a
+large easy-chair, viewing golden landfalls that are still under their
+early spell in seas that ships have never sailed. There are no such
+voyages in later life, none with quite that glamour, for we have tried
+and know. Lucky Boy, sailing the greatest voyage of his life!
+Occasionally, when a real ship is home again, and some one calls to see
+if we still live there, the Boy is allowed to go to bed late, and there
+he sits and fills his mind.
+
+"And what," said this deponent one evening, "about taking His Nibs with
+me?" (There was some sea to be crossed.) Most certainly not! Well--!
+still--! Would he be all right? But as he got to hear about this it was
+hardly so certainly not as it seemed. There are times when he can
+concentrate on a subject with awful pertinacity, though the occasions
+are infrequent. This was one, however. He went. I knew he would
+go--when he heard about it.
+
+A day came when we were at the railway station, and he was to cross the
+sea for the first time. He was quite collected. His quiet eye
+enumerated the baggage in one careless side-glance which detected there
+was a strap undone and that a walking-stick was missing. In all that
+crowded tumult converging on the stroke of the hour his seemed to be
+the only apart and impassive face, and I began to think he was
+indifferent; he merely looked at the cover of one magazine, and then
+turned to the window and observed the world leaping past with the
+detachment of a small immortal who was watching man's fleeting affairs.
+Nothing to do with him.
+
+Once he caught my intent eye--for I thought he was a trifle pale--and
+then he passed a radiant wink, and one of his dangling legs began to
+swing as though that were the sole limb to be joyful. An hour later,
+his face still to the glass, he was shaking with internal mirth. I
+asked him to let me share it with him. "Did you see that old man at the
+station when the train was starting?" he whispered. "He couldn't find
+the carriage where his things were--he was running up and down without
+a hat. Perhaps he was left behind." What do man's misfortune's matter
+to the gods who live for ever?
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+Through sections of the quayside sheds he caught sight of near funnels,
+businesslike with smoke, and a row of ports. It was then I had to tell
+him there was plenty of time. "Two funnels," I heard him say in
+surprise, and there is no doubt at that moment some of the importance
+of the occasion was reflected on myself. That extra funnel told him, I
+hope, I was doing this business in no meagre spirit. None of your
+single-funnel ships for our affairs. At the quay end of the gangway he
+stopped me, interrupting the whole concourse to do so. "Where's that
+other bag?" he demanded severely. I was annoyed--like the people who
+were following us--but I had to admire him all the same. At his age no
+doubt it may be demanded that a ship be put about for a bag left
+behind. When this childish egoism is maintained well into life, large
+fortunes may be made. It is, perhaps, the only way. As soon as a man
+can relate his personal affairs to those of the world, and understands
+how unimportant he really is, from that moment he becomes a failure.
+Some men never do it, and thus succeed. Therefore I allowed the Boy to
+lead me aboard, and so secured a good berth at once, to the envy of
+those who were unaided by a child. Already I was informed that, after
+due inspection, the steamer had plenty of boats, "so it won't matter if
+we sink." In five minutes we had discovered the companions to
+everywhere on that ship, and were, I believe, the only passengers who
+could find our way about her before she left port.
+
+But a glance seaward, and a word with an officer, gave me a thought or
+two, and I broke off the Boy's interesting conversation with a fatherly
+French quartermaster to take him where he could at least begin with
+some food. "What a lark if there's a storm," laughed His Nibs, removing
+a sandwich to say so. The fiddles were on the tables. We were off.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+The ship gave a lurch, a ham leaped to the floor, some plates crashed,
+and then the row of ports alongside us were darkened by the run of a
+wave. The Boy made an exclamation partly stifled, and looked at me
+quickly. I did not look at him, but went on with the food. He stopped
+eating, and remained with his gaze fixed on the ports, gripping his
+chair whenever they went dark. He said nothing about it, but he must
+have been thinking pretty hard. "I suppose this is a strong ship, isn't
+it?" he questioned once.
+
+As we were about to emerge into the open, the wet, deserted deck fell
+away, and a grey wave which looked as aged as death, its white hair
+streaming in the wind, suddenly reared over the ship's side, as though
+looking for us, and then fled phantom-like, with dire cries. The Boy
+shrank back for a moment, horrified, but then moved on. I think I heard
+him sigh. It was no summer sea. The dark bales of rain were speeding up
+from the south-west, low over waters which looked just what the sea
+really is.
+
+I am glad he saw it like that. He hung on in a shelter with a
+needlessly tight grip, and there was something of consternation in his
+eye. But I enjoyed the cry of surprise he gave once when we were
+getting used to it. A schooner passed us, quite close, a midget which
+fairly danced over the running hills, lifting her bows and soaring
+upwards, light as a bird, and settling in the hollows amid a white
+cloud. "Isn't she brave!" said the Boy.
+
+_December 1910._
+
+
+
+
+VIII. The Art of Writing
+
+
+Whether I placed the writing-pad on my knees in a great chair, or on
+the table, or on the floor, nothing happened to it. I can only say that
+that morning the paper was full of vile hairs, which the pen kept
+getting into its mouth--enough to ruin the goodwill of any pen. Yet all
+the circumstances of the room seemed luckily placed for work to flow
+with ease; but there was some mysterious and inimical obstruction. The
+fire was bright and lively, the familiar objects about the table
+appeared to be in their right place. Again I examined the gods of the
+table to be sure one had not by mischance broken the magic circle and
+interrupted the current of favour for me. They were rightly
+orientated--that comic pebble paper-weight Miss Muffet found on the
+beach of a distant holiday, the chrysanthemums which were fresh from
+that very autumn morning, stuck in the blue vase which must have got
+its colour in the Gulf Stream; and the rusty machete blade from Peru,
+and the earthenware monkey squatting meekly in his shadowy niche,
+holding the time in his hands. The time was going on, too.
+
+I tried all the tricks I knew for getting under way, but the pen
+continued to do nothing but draw idle faces and pick up hairs, which it
+held firmly in its teeth. Then the second telegram was brought to me.
+"What about Balkan article?" it asked, and finished with a studied
+insult, after the manner of the editor-kind, whose assurance that the
+function of the universe is only fulfilled when they have published the
+fact makes them behave as would Jove with a thick-headed immortal.
+"These Balkan atrocities will never cease," I said, dropping the
+telegram into the fire.
+
+Had I possessed but one of those intelligent manuals which instruct the
+innocent in the art, not only of writing, but of writing so well that a
+very disappointed and world-weary editor rejoices when he sees the
+manuscript, puts his thumbs up and calls for wine, I would have
+consulted it. (I should be glad to hear if there is such a book, with a
+potent remedy for just common dulness--the usual opaque, gummous, slow,
+thick, or fat head.) As for me, I have nothing but a cheap dictionary,
+and that I could not find. I raised my voice, calling down the hollow,
+dusty, and unfurnished spaces of my mind, summoning my servants, my
+carefully chosen but lazy and wilful staff of words, to my immediate
+aid. But there was no answer; only the cobwebs moved there, though I
+thought I heard a faint buzzing, which might have been a blow-fly. No
+doubt my staff--small blame to them--were dreaming somewhere in the
+sun, dispersed over several seas and continents.
+
+Well, a suburb of a big town, and such jobs as I find for them to do,
+are grey enough for them in winter. I have no doubt some were nooning
+it in Algiers, and others were prospecting the South Seas, flattering
+themselves, with gross vanity, how well they could serve me there, if
+only I would give them a chance with those coloured and lonely islands;
+and others were in the cabins of ships far from any land, gossiping
+about old times; and these last idle words, it is my experience, are
+the most stubborn of the lot, usually ignoring all my efforts to get
+them home again and to business. I could call and rage as I chose, or
+entreat them, showing them the urgency of my need. But only a useless
+and indefinite article came along, as he usually does, hours and hours
+before the arrival of a lusty word which could throw about the
+suggestions quicker than they may be picked up and examined.
+
+Very well. There was nothing for it but to fill another pipe, and dwell
+with some dismay upon such things as, for instance, the way one's light
+grows smoky with age. Is there a manual which will help a man to keep
+his light shining brightly--supposing he has a light to keep? But if he
+has but the cheapest of transient glims, good and bright enough for its
+narrow purpose, is it any wonder it burns foul, seeing what business
+usually it gets to illuminate in these exciting and hurried times. What
+work! I think it would make rebels of the most quiet, unadventurous,
+and simple-featured troop of words that ever a man gathered about him
+for the plain domestic duties to employ them regularly, for example, in
+sweeping up into neat columns such litter as the House of Commons
+makes. It would numb the original heart of the bonniest set of words
+that rightly used would have made some people happy--sterilize them,
+make them anaemic and pasty-faced, so that they would disturb the peace
+of mind of all compassionate men who looked upon them. That my own
+staff of words refused my summons....
+
+But what was it I said I wanted them for just now? I gazed round the
+walls upon the portraits of the great writers of the past, hoping for
+inspiration. Useless! Upon Emerson's face there was a faint smile of
+most infuriating benevolence. Lamb--but I am getting tired of his
+smirk, which might be of irony or kindness. He would look savage enough
+today, hearing his constantly returning Dissertation on Roast Pig thump
+the door-mat four times a week; for that, he can be assured, is the way
+editors would treat it now, and without even preliminary consultations
+with lady typist-secretaries. Of the whole gallery of the great I felt
+there was not one worth his wall room. They are pious frauds. This
+inspiration business is played out. I have never had the worth of the
+frames out of those portraits.... Ah, the Balkans. That was it. And of
+all the flat, interminable Arctic wastes of bleak wickedness and frozen
+error that ever a shivering writer had to traverse....
+
+My head was in my hands, and I was trying to get daylight and direction
+into the affair with my eyes shut, when I felt a slight touch on my
+arm. "I'm sorry we're in your way. Are you praying? Look who's here."
+
+I looked. It was Miss Muffet who spoke. She shook the gold out of her
+eyes and regarded me steadily. Well she knew she had no right there,
+for all her look of confident and tender solicitude. The Boy, who is a
+little older (and already knows enough to place the responsibility for
+intrusion on his sister with her innocent eyes and imperturbable calm
+and golden hair), stood a little in the background, pretending to be
+engrossed with a magnet, as though he were unaware that he was really
+present. Curls hopped about on one leg frankly, knowing that the others
+would be blamed for any naughtiness of hers. Her radiant impudence
+never needs any apology. What a plague of inconsequential violators of
+any necessary peace! When would my lucky words come now?
+
+The Boy probably saw a red light somewhere. "Haven't you finished uncle
+we thought you had has a topsail schooner got two or three masts I saw
+a fine little engine up in the town today and an aeroplane it was only
+seventeen shillings do you think that is too much?"
+
+"I am learning the sailors' hornpipe at school," said Miss Muffet,
+slowly and calmly; "you watch my feet. Do I dance it nicely?"
+
+I watched her feet. Now it is but fair to say that when Miss Muffet
+dances across a room there is no international crisis in all this world
+which would distract any man's frank admiration. When Miss Muffet steps
+it on a sunny day, her hair being what it is, and her little feet in
+her strap shoes being such as they are, then your mood dances in
+accord, and your thoughts swing in light and rhythmic harmony. I got
+up. And Curls, who is one of those who must mount stairs laboriously,
+secure to the rails--she has black eyes only the bright light of which
+is seen through her mane--she reached up for my hand, for she cannot
+imitate her sister's hornpipe without holding on.
+
+Miss Muffet reached a corner of the room, and swung round, light as a
+fairy, her hands on her hips, and said, "What do you think of that?"
+Some of my lucky words instantly returned. I suppose it was more to
+their mind. But I had nothing to give them to do. They could just stand
+around and look on now, for when Curls seriously imitates her sister,
+and then laughs heartily at her own absurd failure, because her feet
+are irresponsible, that is the time when you have nothing to do, and
+would not do anything if it had to be done....
+
+What time it was the next interruption came--it was another telegram--I
+don't know. Time had been obliterated. But then it began to flow again;
+though not with a viscid and heavy measure. And when I took up my light
+and ready pen, there, standing at eager attention, was all my staff,
+waiting the call. What had happened to bring them all back? If the
+writers of literary manuals will explain that secret to me, I should
+acquire true wealth.
+
+
+
+
+IX. A First Impression
+
+
+Certainly it was an inconsiderate way of approaching the greatest city
+of the Americas, but that was not my fault. I wished for the direct
+approach, the figure of Liberty to rise, haughty and most calm, a noble
+symbol, as we came in from overseas; then the wide portals; then New
+York. But the erratic tracks of a tramp steamer go not as her voyagers
+will. They have no control over her. She moves to an enigmatic will in
+London. It happens, then, that she rarely shows a wonder of the world
+any respect. She arrives like sudden rain, like wind from a new
+quarter. She is as chance as the fall of a star. None knows the day nor
+the hour. At the most inconvenient time she takes the wonder's visitors
+to the back door.
+
+We went, light ship from the South, to Barbados, for orders; and
+because I wanted New York, for that was the way home, we were sent to
+Tampa for phosphates. As to Tampa, its position on the globe is known
+only to underwriters and shipbrokers; it is that sort of place. It is a
+mere name, like Fernando de Noronha, or Key West, which one meets only
+in the shipping news, idly wondering then what strange things the
+seafarer would find if he went.
+
+Late one night, down a main street of Tampa, there came, with the
+deliberate movement of fate, a gigantic corridor train, looming as high
+as a row of lighted villas, and drawn by the awful engine of a dream.
+That train behaved there as trams do at home, presently stopping
+alongside a footway.
+
+Behind me was a little wooden shop. In front was the wall of a
+carriage, having an entrance on the second storey, and a roof athwart
+the meridian stars. One of its wheels was the nearest and most dominant
+object in the night to me, a monstrous bright round resting on a muddy
+newspaper in the road. It absorbed all the light from the little wooden
+shop. Now, I had hunted throughout Tampa for its railway terminus,
+fruitlessly; but here its train had found me, keeping me from crossing
+the road.
+
+"Where do I board this train for New York?" I asked. (I talked like a
+fool, I know; it was like asking a casual wayfarer in East Ham whether
+that by the kerb is the Moscow express. Yet what was I to do?) "Board
+her right here," said the fellow, who was in his shirt sleeves.
+Therefore I delivered myself, in blind faith, to the casual gods who
+are apt to wake up and by a series of deft little miracles get things
+done fitly in America when all seems lost and the traveller has even
+bared his resigned neck to the stroke.
+
+But I had not the least hope of seeing New York and a Cunarder; not
+with such an unpropitious start as that. With an exit like Euston one
+never doubts sure direction, and arrival at the precise spot at the
+exact moment. You feel there it was arranged for in Genesis. The
+officials cannot alter affairs. They are priests administering
+inviolate rites, advancing matters fore-ordained by the unseen, and so
+no more able to stay or speed this cosmic concern than the astronomer
+who schedules the planets. The planets take their heavenly courses. But
+I had never been to the United States before, did not know even the
+names of their many gods, and New York was at the end of a great
+journey; and the train for it stopped outside a tobacco shop in the
+road, like a common tram.
+
+There was another night when, with the usual unreason, the swift and
+luxurious glide, lessening through easy gradations, ceased. I saw some
+lights in the rain outside. How should I know it was New York? We had
+even changed climates since we started. The passengers of my early days
+in the train had passed away. There was nothing to show. More, I felt
+no exultation--which should have been the first of warnings. Merely we
+got to a railway station one night, and a negro insisted that I should
+get out and stop out. This was N' Yark, he said.
+
+It was night, I repeat; there was a row of cabs in a dolorous rain. I
+saw a man in a shiny cape under the nearest lamp, and beyond him a
+vista of reflections from vacant stones, which to me always, more than
+bleak hills or the empty round of the sea, is desolation. There were no
+spacious portals. There was no figure of Liberty, haughty but
+welcoming. There was rain, and cabs that waited without hope. There was
+exactly what you find at the end of a twopenny journey when your only
+luggage is an evening paper, an umbrella, and that tired feeling. Not
+knowing where to go, and little caring, I followed the crowd, and so
+found myself in a large well-lighted hall. Having no business there--it
+was a barren place--I pushed on, and came suddenly to the rim of the
+world.
+
+Before me was the immensity of dark celestial space in which wandered
+hosts of uncharted stars; and below my feet was the abyss of old night.
+Just behind me was a woman telling her husband that they had forgotten
+Jimmy's boots, and couldn't go back now, for the ferry was just coming.
+
+Jimmy's boots! Now, when you are a released soul, ascending the night,
+and the earth below is a bright silver ball, not so very big, and some
+other viewless soul behind you, still with thoughts absent on worldly
+trifles, mutters concerning boots when in the Milky Way, you will know
+how I felt. Here was the ultimate empty dark in which the sun could
+never shine. The sun had not merely left the place. It had never been
+there. It was a remote star, one of myriads in the constellations at
+large, the definite groups which occulted in the void before me.
+Looking at those swiftly moving systems, I watched for the flash of
+impact; but no great light of collision broke. The groups of lights
+passed and repassed noiselessly.
+
+Then one constellation presently detached itself, and its orbit
+evidently would intersect our foothold. It came nearer out of the
+night, till I could see plainly that it appeared to be a long section
+of a well-lighted street, say, like a length of Piccadilly. It
+approached end-on to where I stood, and at last impinged. It actually
+was a length of street, and I could continue my walk. The street
+floated off again into the night, with me, Jimmy's father and mother,
+and all of us, and the vans and motor-cars; and the other square end of
+it soon joined a roadway on the opposite shore. The dark river was as
+full of mobile lengths of bright roadway as Oxford Circus is of
+motor-buses; and the fear of the unknown, as in the terrific dark of a
+dream where flaming comets stream on undirected courses, numbed my
+little mind. I had found New York.
+
+I had found it. Its bulk was beyond the mind, its lights were falling
+star systems, and its movements those of general cataclysm. I should
+find no care for little human needs there. One cannot warm one's hands
+against the flames of earthquake. There is no provision for men in the
+welter, but dimly apprehended in the night, of blind and inhuman
+powers.
+
+Therefore, the hotel bedroom, when I got to it, surprised and steadied
+me with its elaborate care for the body. But yet I was not certain.
+Then I saw against the wall a dial, and reading a notice over it I
+learned that by working the hands of this false clock correctly I could
+procure anything, from an apple to the fire brigade. Now this was
+carrying matters to the other extreme; and I had to suppress a desire
+to laugh hysterically. I set the hands to a number; waited one minute;
+then the door opened, and a waiter came in with a real tray, conveying
+a glass and a bottle. So there was a method then in this general
+madness after all. I tried to regard the wonder as indifferently as the
+waiter's own cold and measuring eyes.
+
+_March 1910._
+
+
+
+
+X. The Derelict
+
+
+In a tramp steamer, which was overloaded, and in midwinter, I had
+crossed to America for the first time. What we experienced of the
+western ocean during that passage gave me so much respect for it that
+the prospect of the return journey, three thousand miles of those seas
+between me and home, was already a dismal foreboding. The shipping
+posters of New York, showing stately liners too lofty even to notice
+the Atlantic, were arguments good enough for steerage passengers, who
+do, I know, reckon a steamer's worth by the number of its funnels; but
+the pictures did nothing to lessen my regard for that dark outer world
+I knew. And having no experience of ships installed with racquet
+courts, Parisian cafes, swimming baths, and pergolas, I was naturally
+puzzled by the inconsequential behaviour of the first-class passengers
+at the hotel. They were leaving by the liner which was to take me, and,
+I gathered, were going to cross a bridge to England in the morning. Of
+course, this might have been merely the innocent profanity of the
+simple-minded.
+
+Embarking at the quay next day, I could not see that our ship had
+either a beginning or an end. There was a blank wall which ran out of
+sight to the right and left. How far it went, and what it enclosed,
+were beyond me. Hundreds of us in a slow procession mounted stairs to
+the upper floor of a warehouse, and from thence a bridge led us to a
+door in the wall half-way in its height. No funnels could be seen.
+Looking straight up from the embarkation gangway, along what seemed the
+parapet of the wall was a row of far-off indistinguishable faces
+peering straight down at us. There was no evidence that this building
+we were entering, of which the high black wall was a part, was not an
+important and permanent feature of the city. It was in keeping with the
+magnitude of New York's skyscrapers, which this planet's occasionally
+non-irritant skin permits to stand there to afford man an apparent
+reason to be gratified with his own capacity and daring.
+
+But with the knowledge that this wall must be afloat there came no
+sense of security when, going through that little opening in its
+altitude, I found myself in a spacious decorated interior which hinted
+nothing of a ship, for I was puzzled as to direction. My last ship
+could be surveyed in two glances; she looked, and was, a comprehensible
+ship, no more than a manageable handful for an able master. In that
+ship you could see at once where you were and what to do. But in this
+liner you could not see where you were, and would never know which way
+to take unless you had a good memory. No understanding came to me in
+that hall of a measured and shapely body, designed with a cunning
+informed by ages of sea-lore to move buoyantly and surely among the
+ranging seas, to balance delicately, a quick and sensitive being, to
+every precarious slope, to recover a lost poise easily and with the
+grace natural to a quick creature controlled by an alert mind.
+
+There was no shape at all to this structure. I could see no line the
+run of which gave me warrant that it was comprised in the rondure of a
+ship. The lines were all of straight corridors, which, for all I knew,
+might have ended blindly on open space, as streets which traverse a
+city and are bare in vacancy beyond the dwellings. It was possible we
+were encompassed by walls, but only one wall was visible. There we
+idled, all strangers, and to remain strangers, in a large hall roofed
+by a dome of coloured glass. Quite properly, palms stood beneath. There
+were offices and doors everywhere. On a broad staircase a multitude of
+us wandered aimlessly up and down. Each side of the stairway were
+electric lifts, intermittent and brilliant apparitions. I began to
+understand why the saloon passengers thought nothing of the voyage.
+They were encountering nothing unfamiliar. They had but come to another
+hotel for a few days.
+
+I attempted to find my cabin, but failed. A uniformed guide took care
+of me. But my cabin, curtained, upholstered, and warm, with mirrors and
+plated ware, sunk somewhere deeply among carpeted and silent streets
+down each of which the perspective of glow-lamps looked interminable,
+left me still questioning. The long walk had given me a fear that I was
+remote from important affairs which might be happening beyond. My
+address was 323. The street door--I was down a side turning,
+though--bore that number. A visitor could make no mistake, supposing he
+could find the street and my side turning. That was it. There was a
+very great deal in this place for everybody to remember, and most of us
+were strangers. No doubt, however, we were afloat, if the lifebelts in
+the rack meant anything. Yet the cabin, insulated from all noise, was
+not soothing, but disturbing. I had been used to a ship in which you
+could guess all that was happening even when in your bunk; a sensitive
+and communicative ship.
+
+A steward appeared at my door, a stranger out of nowhere, and asked
+whether I had seen a bag not mine in the cabin. He might have been
+created merely to put that question, for I never saw him again on the
+voyage. This liner was a large province having irregular and shifting
+bounds, permitting incontinent entrance and disappearance. All this
+should have inspired me with an idea of our vastness and importance,
+but it did not. I felt I was one of a multitude included in a nebulous
+mass too vague to hold together unless we were constantly wary.
+
+In the saloon there was the solid furniture of rare woods, the ornate
+decorations, and the light and shadows making vague its limits and
+giving it an appearance of immensity, to keep the mind from the thought
+of our real circumstances. At dinner we had valentine music, dreamy
+stuff to accord with the shaded lamps which displayed the tables in a
+lower rosy light. It helped to extend the mysterious and romantic
+shadows. The pale, disembodied masks of the waiters swam in the dusk
+above the tinted light. I had for a companion a vivacious American lady
+from the Middle West, and she looked round that prospect we had of an
+expensive cafe, and said, "Well, but I am disappointed. Why, I've been
+looking forward to seeing the ocean, you know. And it isn't here."
+
+"Smooth passage," remarked a man on the other side. "No sea at all
+worth mentioning." Actually, I know there was a heavy beam sea running
+before a half-gale. I could guess the officer in charge somewhere on
+the exposed roof might have another mind about it; but it made no
+difference to us in our circle of rosy intimate light bound by those
+vague shadows which were alive with ready servitude.
+
+"And I've been reading _Captains Courageous_ with this voyage in view.
+Isn't this the month when the forties roar? I want to hear them roar,
+just once, you know, and as gently as any sucking dove." We all
+laughed. "We can't even tell we're in a ship."
+
+She began to discuss Kipling's book. "There's some fine seas in that.
+Have you read it? But I'd like to know where that ocean is he pretends
+to have seen. I do believe the realists are no more reliable than the
+romanticists. Here we are a thousand miles out, and none of us has seen
+the sea yet. Tell me, does not a realist have to magnify his awful
+billows just to get them into his reader's view?"
+
+I murmured something feeble and sociable. I saw then why sailors never
+talk directly of the sea. I, for instance, could not find my key at
+that moment--it was in another pocket somewhere--so I had no iron to
+touch. Talking largely of the sea is something like the knowing talk of
+young men about women; and what is a simple sailor man that he should
+open his mouth on mysteries?
+
+Only on the liner's boat-deck, where you could watch her four funnels
+against the sky, could you see to what extent the liner was rolling.
+The arc seemed to be considerable then, but slowly described. But the
+roll made little difference to the promenaders below. Sometimes they
+walked a short distance on the edges of their boots, leaning over as
+they did so, and swerving from the straight, as though they had turned
+giddy. The shadows formed by the weak sunlight moved slowly out of
+ambush across the white deck, but often moved indecisively, as though
+uncertain of a need to go; and then slowly went into hiding again. The
+sea whirling and leaping past was far below our wall side. It was like
+peering dizzily over a precipice when watching those green and white
+cataracts.
+
+The passengers, wrapped and comfortable on the lee deck, chatted as
+blithely as at a garden-party, while the band played medleys of
+national airs to suit our varied complexions. The stewards came round
+with loaded trays. A diminutive and wrinkled dame in costly furs
+frowned through her golden spectacles at her book, while her maid sat
+attentively by. An American actress was the centre of an eager group of
+grinning young men; she was unseen, but her voice was distinct. The two
+Vanderbilts took their brisk constitutional among us as though the
+liner had but two real passengers though many invisible nobodies. The
+children, who had not ceased laughing and playing since we left New
+York, waited for the slope of the deck to reach its greatest, and then
+ran down towards the bulwarks precipitously. The children, happy and
+innocent, completed for us the feeling of comfortable indifference and
+security which we found when we saw there was more ship than ocean. The
+liner's deck canted slowly to leeward, went over more and more, beyond
+what it had done yet, and a pretty little girl with dark curls riotous
+from under her red tam-o'-shanter, ran down, and brought up against us
+violently with both hands, laughing heartily. We laughed too. Looking
+seawards, I saw receding the broad green hill, snow-capped, which had
+lifted us and let us down. The sea was getting up.
+
+Near sunset, when the billows were mounting express along our run,
+sometimes to leap and snatch at our upper structure, and were rocking
+us with some ease, there was a commotion forward. Books and shawls went
+anywhere as the passengers ran. Something strange was to be seen upon
+the waters.
+
+It looked like a big log out there ahead, over the starboard bow. It
+was not easy to make out. The light was failing. We overhauled it
+rapidly, and it began to shape as a ship's boat. "Oh, it's gone,"
+exclaimed some one then. But the forlorn object lifted high again, and
+sank once more. Whenever it was glimpsed it was set in a patch of foam.
+
+That flotsam, whatever it was, was of man. As we watched it intently,
+and before it was quite plain, we knew intuitively that hope was not
+there, that we were watching something past its doom. It drew abeam,
+and we saw what it was, a derelict sailing ship, mastless and awash.
+The alien wilderness was around us now, and we saw a sky that was
+overcast and driven, and seas that were uplifted, which had grown
+incredibly huge, swift, and perilous, and they had colder and more
+sombre hues.
+
+The derelict was a schooner, a lifeless and soddened hulk, so heavy and
+uncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured back
+and forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for the
+assaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, and
+plunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in the
+indifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. It
+mocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her a
+dignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could now
+do. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew
+open under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the
+dead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a
+great comber ran at her, as if it had but just spied her, and thought
+she was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we
+heard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, on a summit in
+desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, the
+accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.
+
+I turned, and there beside me was the lady who had wanted to find the
+sea. She was gazing at the place where the wreck was last seen, her
+eyes fixed, her mouth a little open in awe and horror.
+
+_April 1910._
+
+
+
+
+XI. The Voyage of the _Mona_
+
+
+There was the _Mona_, Yeo's boat, below the quay wall; but I could not
+see her owner. The unequal stones of that wall have the weathered
+appearance of a natural outcrop of rock, for they were matured by the
+traffic of ships when America was a new yarn among sailors. They are
+the very stones one would choose to hear speak. Yet the light of early
+morning in that spacious estuary was so young and tenuous that you
+could suppose this heavy planet had not yet known the stains of night
+and evil; and the _Mona_, it must be remembered, is white without and
+egg-blue within. Such were the reflections she made, lively at anchor
+on the swirls of a flood-tide bright enough for the sea-bottom to have
+been luminous, that I felt I must find Yeo. The white houses of the
+village, with shining faces, were looking out to sea.
+
+Another man, a visitor from the cities of the plains, was gazing down
+with appreciation at the _Mona_. There was that to his credit. His
+young wife, slight and sad, and in the dress of the promenade of a
+London park, was with him. She was not looking on the quickness of the
+lucent tide, but at the end of a parasol, which was idly marking the
+grits. I had seen the couple about the village for a week. He was big,
+ruddy, middle-aged, and lusty. His neck ran straight up into his round
+head, and its stiff prickles glittered like short ends of brass wire.
+It was easy to guess of him, without knowing him and therefore
+unfairly, that, if his wife actually confessed to him that she loved
+another man, he would not have believed her; because how was it
+possible for her to do that, he being what he was? His aggressive face,
+and his air of confident possession, the unconscious immodesty of the
+man because of his important success at some unimportant thing or
+other, seemed an offence in the ancient tranquillity of that place,
+where poor men acknowledged only the sea, the sun, and the winds.
+
+I found Yeo at the end of the quay, where round the corner to seaward
+open out the dunes of the opposite shore of the estuary, faint with
+distance and their own pallor, and ending in the slender stalk of a
+lighthouse, always quivering at the vastness of what confronts it. Yeo
+was sitting on a bollard, rubbing tobacco between his palms. I told him
+this was the sort of morning to get the _Mona_ out. He carefully poured
+the grains into the bowl of his pipe, stoppered it, glanced slowly
+about the brightness of the river mouth, and shook his head. This was a
+great surprise, and anybody who did not know Yeo would have questioned
+him. But it was certain he knew his business. There is not a more
+deceptive and difficult stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeo
+was born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in the
+breeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. The
+soft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of a
+body to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; but
+when he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark and
+leathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and wise, and must be
+addressed with care and not as most men. He rarely smiles when a
+foolish word is spoken or when he is contradicted boldly by the
+innocent. He spits at his feet and contemplates the sea, as though he
+had heard nothing.
+
+The visitor came up, followed reluctantly by his wife. "Are you Yeo?
+How are you, Yeo? What about a sail? I want you to take us round to
+Pebblecombe."
+
+That village is over the bar and across the bay. Yeo looked at the man,
+and shook his head.
+
+"Why not?" asked the visitor sharply, as though he were addressing the
+reluctance of the driver of his own car.
+
+The sailor pointed a stern finger seawards, to where the bar is shown
+in charts, but where all we could make out was the flashing of
+inconstant white lines.
+
+"Well?" questioned the man, who glanced out there perfunctorily. "What
+of it?"
+
+"Look at it," mildly insisted the sailor, speaking for the first time.
+"Isn't the sea like a wall?" The man's wife, who was regarding Yeo's
+placid face with melancholy attention, turned to her husband and placed
+a hand of nervous deprecation on his arm. He did not look at her.
+
+"Oh, of course, if you don't want to go, if you don't want to go...."
+said the visitor, shaking his head as though at rubbish, and rising
+several times on his toes. "Perhaps you've a better job," he added,
+with an unpleasant smile.
+
+"I'm ready to go if you are, sir," said Yeo, "but I shall have to take
+my friend with me." The sailor nodded my way.
+
+The man did not look at me. I was not there to him. He gave an
+impatient jerk to his head. "Ready to go? Of course I'm ready to go! Of
+course. Why do you suppose I asked?"
+
+Yeo went indoors, came out with a bundle of tarpaulins for us, and
+began moving with deliberation along to the _Mona_. Something was said
+by the woman behind us, but so quietly I did not catch it. Her husband
+made confident noises of amusement, and replied in French that it was
+always the way with these local folk--always the way. The result, I
+gathered, of a slow life, though that was hardly the way he put it.
+Nothing in it, she could be sure. These difficulties were made to raise
+the price. The morning was beautiful. Still, if she did not want to go
+... if she did not want to go. And his tone was that perhaps she would
+be as absurd as that. I heard no more, and both followed us.
+
+I got out to the _Mona_, cast off her stern mooring, got in the anchor,
+and the pull on that brought us to the stone steps of the
+landing-stage. While I made the seats ready for the voyagers and handed
+them in, Yeo took two reefs in the lug-sail (an act which seemed, I
+must say, with what wind we felt there, to be carrying his prescience
+to bold lengths) and hauled the sail to its place. I went forward to
+lower the centre keel as he came aft with the sheet in his hand. The
+_Mona_ sidled away, stood out, and then reached for the distant
+sandhills. The village diminished and concentrated under its hill.
+
+When clear of the shelter of the hill, on the lee foot of which the
+village shelters from the westerly winds, the _Mona_ went over suddenly
+in a gust which put her gunwale in the wash and kept it there. The
+dipper came adrift and rattled over. Yeo eased her a bit, and his
+uncanny eyes never shifted from their fixed scrutiny ahead. Our
+passenger laughed aloud, for his wife had grasped him at the unexpected
+movement and the noise. "That's nothing," he assured her. "This is
+fine."
+
+We cleared the shallows and were in the channel where the weight of the
+incoming tide raced and climbed. The _Mona's_ light bows, meeting the
+tide, danced ecstatically, sending over us showers which caught in the
+foot of the sail. The weather in the open was bright and hard, and the
+sun lost a little of its warmth in the wind, which was north of west.
+The dunes, which had been evanescent through distance in the wind and
+light, grew material and great. The combers, breaking diagonally along
+that forsaken beach, had something ominous to say of the bar. Even I
+knew that, and turned to look ahead. Out there, across and above the
+burnished sea, a regular series of long shadowy walls were forming.
+They advanced slowly, grew darker, and grew higher; then in their
+parapets appeared arcs of white, and at once, where those lines of
+sombre shadows had been, there were plunging strata of white clouds.
+Other dark bands advanced from seaward continuously. There was a tremor
+and sound as of the shock and roll of far thunder.
+
+We went about again, steering for the first outward mark of the
+fairway, the Mullet Buoy. Only the last house of the village was now
+looking at us remotely, a tiny white cube which frequently sank, on its
+precarious ledge of earth, beneath an intervening upheaval of the
+waters. The sea was superior now, as we saw the world from our little
+boat. The waters moved in from the outer with the ease of certain
+conquest, and the foundering shores vanished under each uplifted send
+of the ocean. We rounded the buoy. I could see the tide holding it down
+aslant with heavy strands of water, stretched and taut. About we went
+again for the lifeboat-house.
+
+There was no doubt of it now. We should be baling soon. Yeo, with one
+brown paw on the sheet and the other on the tiller, had not moved, nor
+even, so he looked, blinked the strange, unfrowning eyes peering from
+under the brim of his hat. The _Mona_ came on an even keel by the
+lifeboat-house, shook her wing for a moment as though in delight, and
+was off again dancing for the Mid Buoy. She was a live, responsive, and
+happy bird. "Now, Yeo," said the passenger beside the sailor, beaming
+in proper enjoyment of this quick and radiant experience. "Didn't I
+tell you so? What's the matter with this?"
+
+There was nothing the matter with that. The sea was blue and white. The
+frail coast, now far away, was of green and gold. The sky was the
+assurance of continued good. Our boat was buoyant energy. That bay,
+when in its uplifted and sparkling mood, with the extent of its liberty
+and the coloured promise of its romantic adventure, has no hint at all
+of the startling suddenness of its shadow, that presage of its complex
+and impersonal malice.
+
+Yeo turned the big features of his impassive face to his passenger,
+looked at him as he would at a wilful and ill-mannered child, and said,
+"In five minutes we shall be round the Mid Buoy. Better go back. If you
+want to go back, say so now. Soon you won't be able to. We may be kept
+out. If we are, don't blame me."
+
+"Oh, go on, you," the man said, smiling indulgently. He was not going
+to relinquish the fine gift of this splendid time.
+
+Yeo put his pipe in his mouth and resumed his stare outwards. He said
+no more. On we went, skimming over inflowing ridges with exhilarating
+undulations, light as a sandpiper. It was really right to call that a
+glorious morning. I heard the curlews fluting among the stones of the
+Morte Bank, which must then have been almost awash; but I did not look
+that way, for the nearing view of the big seas breaking ahead of us
+fixed my mind with the first intentness of anxiety. Though near the top
+of the flood, the fairway could not be made out. What from the distance
+had appeared orderly ranks of surf had become a convulsive wilderness
+of foam, piled and dazzling, the incontinent smother of a heavy ground
+swell; for after all, though the wind needed watching, it was nothing
+much. The _Mona_ danced on towards the anxious place. Except the
+distant hills there was no shore. Our hills were of water now we neared
+the bar. They appeared ahead with surprising suddenness, came straight
+at us as though they had been looking for us, and the discovery made
+them eager; and then, when the head of the living mass was looking over
+our boat, it swung under us.
+
+We were beyond the bar before we knew it. There were a few minutes
+when, on either hand of the _Mona_, but not near enough to be more than
+an arresting spectacle, ponderous glassy billows ceaselessly arose,
+projected wonderful curves of translucent parapets which threw shadows
+ahead of their deliberate advance, lost their delicate poise, and
+became plunging fields of blinding and hissing snow. We sped past them
+and were at sea. Yeo's knowledge of his work gives him more than the
+dexterity which overcomes difficulties as it meets them; it gives him
+the prescience to avoid them.
+
+The steady breeze carried away from us the noise of that great tumult
+on the bar, and here was a sunny quietude where we heard nothing but
+the wing of the _Mona_ when it fluttered. The last of the land was the
+Bar Buoy, weltering and tolling erratically its melancholy bell in its
+huge red cage. That dropped astern. The _Mona_, as though she had been
+exuberant with joy at the promise of release, had come out with whoops
+and a fuss, but, being outside, settled down to enjoy liberty in quiet
+content. The little lady with us, for the first time, appeared not
+sorry to be there. The boat was dry. The scoured thwarts were even hot
+to the touch. Our lady held the brim of her big straw hat, looking out
+over the slow rhythm of the heavy but unbroken seas, the deep
+suspirations of the ocean, and there was even a smile on her delicate
+face. She crouched forward no longer, and did not show that timid
+hesitation between her fear of sudden ugly water, when she would have
+inclined to her husband's side, and her evident nervousness also of her
+mate. She sat erect, enjoying the slow uplift and descent of the boat
+with a responsive body. She gazed over-side into the transparent deeps,
+where large jellyfish were shining like sunken moons. I got out my
+pipe. This suggested something to our other passenger, and he got out
+his. He fumbled out his pouch and filled up. He then regarded the
+loaded pipe thoughtfully, but presently put it away, and leaned
+forward, gazing at the bottom of the boat. I caught Yeo's eye in a very
+solemn wink.
+
+The _Mona_, lost in the waste, coursed without apparent purpose.
+Sometimes for a drowsy while we headed into the great light shining
+from all the Atlantic which stretched before us to America; and again
+we turned to the coast, which was low and far beyond mounting seas. By
+watching one mark ashore, a grey blur which was really the tower of a
+familiar village church, it was clear Yeo was not making Pebblecombe
+with any ease. I glanced at him, and he shook his head. He then nodded
+it towards the western headland of the bay.
+
+That was almost veiled by a dark curtain, though not long before the
+partitioned fields and colours of its upper slopes were clear as a
+mosaic; so insidiously, to the uninitiated, do the moods of this bay
+change. Our lady was at this moment bending solicitously towards her
+husband, whose head was in his hands. But he shook her off, turning
+away with a face not quite so proud as it had been, for its complexion
+had become that of a green canary's. He had acquired an expression of
+holiness, contemplative and sorrowful. The western coast had
+disappeared in the murk. "Better have something to eat now," said Yeo,
+"while there's a chance."
+
+The lady, after a hesitating glance at her husband, who made no sign,
+his face being hidden in his arms, got out the luncheon-basket. He
+looked up once with a face full of misery and reproach, and said,
+forgetting the past with boldness, "Don't you think we'd better be
+getting back? It's looking very dark over there."
+
+Yeo munched with calm for a while, swallowed, and then remarked, while
+conning the headland, "It'll be darker yet, and then we shan't go back,
+because we can't."
+
+The _Mona_ continuously soared upwards on the hills and sank again,
+often trembling now, for the impact of the seas was sharper. The man
+got into the bottom of the boat and groaned.
+
+Light clouds, the feathery growth of the threatening obscurity which
+had hidden the western land, first spread to dim the light of the sun,
+then grew thick and dark overhead too, leaving us, after one ray that
+sought us out again and at once died, in a chill gloom. The glassy seas
+at once became opaque and bleak. Their surface was roughened with
+gusts. The delicate colours of the world, its hopeful spaciousness, its
+dancing light, the high blue vault, abruptly changed to the dim, cold,
+restricted outlook of age. We waited.
+
+As Yeo luffed the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of wind
+and white rain, pressing us into the sea. The _Mona_ made ineffective
+leaps, trying to get release from her imprisonment, but only succeeded
+in pouring water over the inert figure lying on the bottom boards. In a
+spasm of fear he sprang up and began to scramble wildly towards his
+wife, who in her nervousness was gripping the gunwale, but was facing
+the affair silently and pluckily. "Keep still there!" peremptorily
+ordered the sailor; and the man bundled down without a word, like a
+dog, an abject heap of wet rags.
+
+The first weight of the squall was released. The _Mona_ eased. But the
+rain set in with steadiness and definition. Nothing was in sight but
+the waves shaping in the murk and passing us, and the blurred outline
+of a ketch labouring under reduced canvas to leeward. The bundle on the
+boat's floor sat up painfully and glanced over the gunwale. He made no
+attempt to disguise his complete defeat by our circumstances. He saw
+the ketch, saw she was bigger, and humbly and loudly implored Yeo to
+put him aboard. He did not look at his wife. His misery was in full
+possession of him. When near to the ketch we saw something was wrong
+with a flag she was flying. We got round to her lee quarter and hailed
+the three muffled figures on her deck.
+
+"Can we come aboard?" roared Yeo.
+
+One of the figures came to the ship's side and leaned over. "All
+right," we heard, "if you don't mind sailing with a corpse."
+
+Yeo put it to his passengers. The woman said nothing. Her pale face,
+pitifully tiny and appealing within a sailor's tarpaulin hat, showed an
+innocent mind startled by the brutality of a world she did not know,
+but a mind controlled and alert. You could guess she expected nothing
+now but the worst, and had been schooling herself to face it. Her
+husband, when he knew what was on that ship, repudiated the vessel with
+horror. Yet we had no sooner fallen slightly away than he looked up
+again, was reminded once more that she stood so much higher than our
+boat, and cried, "Yes, yes!"
+
+The two craft imperceptibly approached, as by gravitation. The men of
+the ketch saw we had changed our minds, and made ready to receive us.
+On one noisy uplift of a wave we got the lady inboard. Waiting another
+opportunity, floundering about below the black wall of the ship,
+presently it came, and we shoved over just anyhow the helpless bulk of
+the man. He disappeared within the ship like a shapeless sack, and
+bumped like one. When I got over, I saw the _Mona's_ mast, which was
+thrusting and falling by the side of the ketch, making wild
+oscillations and eccentrics, suddenly vanish; and then appeared Yeo,
+who carried a tow-line aft and made fast.
+
+The skipper of the ketch had been drowned, we were told. They were
+bringing his body home. The helmsman indicated a form lashed in a
+sail-cloth to the hatch. They were standing on and off, waiting to get
+it over the bar. Yeo they knew so well that hardly any words passed
+between them. They were glad to put the piloting in his hands. He took
+the wheel of the _Judy of Padstow_.
+
+The substantial deck of the _Judy_ was a great relief after the dizzy
+gyrations of the aerial _Mona_; and our lady, with a half-glance at
+what on the hatch was so grimly indifferent to all that could happen
+now, even smiled again, perhaps with a new sense of safety. She saw her
+husband settled in a place not too wet, and got about the venerable
+boards of the _Judy_, looking at the old gear with curiosity, glancing,
+with her head dropped back, into the dark intricacy of rigging upheld
+by the ponderous mainmast as it swayed back and forth. Every time the
+men went hurriedly trampling to some point of the running gear she
+watched what they were at. For hours we beat about, in a great noise of
+waters, waiting for that opportunity at the entrance to home and
+comfort. Once Yeo took us as far towards the vague mist of surf as the
+dismal tolling of the Bar Buoy, but evidently did not like the look of
+it, and stood out again.
+
+At last, having decided, he shouted orders, there was a burst of
+activity, and we headed for the bad place. Soon we should know.
+
+The _Judy_ began to plunge alarmingly. The incoming rollers at times
+swept her along with a rush, and Yeo had his hands full. Her bowsprit
+yawned, rose and fell hurriedly, the _Judy's_ unsteady dexter pointing
+in nervous excitement at what was ahead of her. But Yeo held her to it,
+though those heavy following seas so demoralized the _Judy_ that it was
+clear it was all Yeo could do to keep her to her course. Columns of
+spray exploded ahead, driving in on us like shot.
+
+"Look out!" cried Yeo. I looked. Astern was a grey hill, high over us,
+fast overtaking us, the white turmoil of its summit already streaming
+down its long slope. It accelerated, as if it could see it would soon
+be too late. It nearly was, but not quite. A cataract roared over the
+poop, and Yeo vanished. The _Judy_, in a panic, made an attempt at a
+move which would have been fatal then; but she was checked and her head
+steadied. I could do nothing but hold the lady firm and grasp a pin in
+its rail. The flood swept us, brawling round the gear, foundering the
+hatch. For a moment I thought it was a case, and saw nothing but
+maniacal water. Then the foam subsided to clear torrents which flung
+about violently with the ship's movement. The men were in the rigging.
+Yeo was rigid at the wheel, his eyes on the future. I could not see the
+other passenger till his wife screamed, and then I saw him. Two figures
+rolled in a flood that was pouring to the canting of the deck, and one
+of them desperately clutched at the other for aid. But the other was
+the dead skipper, washed from his place on the hatch.
+
+We were over the bar again, and the deck became level. But it remained
+the bottom of a shallow well in which floated with indifference the
+one-time master of the _Judy_, face downwards, and who presently
+stranded amidships. Our passenger reclined on the vacated hatch, his
+eyes wide with childish and unspoken terror, and fixed on his wife,
+whose ministering hands he fumbled for as does a child for his mother's
+when he wakes at night after a dream of evil.
+
+
+
+
+XII. The Lascar's Walking-Stick
+
+
+The big face of Limehouse Church clock stared through the window at us.
+It is rather a senseless face, because it is so full of cracks that you
+can find any hour in it you do not want, especially when in a hurry.
+But nobody with a life that had not wide areas of waste leisure in it
+would ever visit Hammond now, where he lives in a tenement building, in
+a room which overlooks the roofs and railway arches of Limehouse. Just
+outside his window the tower of the church is rather too large and too
+close.
+
+Hammond has rooms in the tenement which are above the rest of the
+street. He surmounts many layers of dense humanity. The house is not
+the usual model dwelling. Once it knew better days. Once it was the
+residence of a shipowner, in the days when the London docks were full
+of clippers, and shipowners husbanded their own ships and liked to live
+near their work. The house has a broad and noble staircase, having a
+carved handrail as wide as a span; but much of the old and carved
+interior woodwork of the house is missing--firewood sometimes runs
+short there--and the rest is buried under years of paint and dirt.
+
+Hammond never knows how many people share the house with him. "I've
+tried to find out, but the next day one of 'em has died and two more
+are born." It is such a hive that most of Hammond's friends gave up
+visiting him after discovering in what place he had secluded himself;
+but there he stays with his books and his camera, his pubs and his
+lightermen, Jews, Chinamen, sailors, and dock-labourers. Occasionally a
+missionary from the studios of Hempstead or Chelsea goes down to sort
+out Hammond from his surroundings, and to look him over for damage,
+when found.
+
+"Did I ever tell you about Jabberjee?" Hammond asked me that afternoon.
+
+No, he hadn't. Some of Hammond's work, which he had been showing me,
+was scattered over the floor, and he stepped among the litter and came
+and looked through the window with me. "A funny thing happened to me
+here," he said, "the other evening. A pal of mine died. The bills which
+advertise for the recovery of his body--you can see 'em in any pub
+about here--call him Joseph Cherry, commonly called Ginger. He was a
+lighterman, you know. There was a sing-song for the benefit of his wife
+and kids round at the George and Dragon, and I was going.
+
+"On my way I stopped to look in at my favourite pawnshop. Do you know
+the country about here? Well, you have to mind your eye. You never know
+what will turn up. I never knew such a place. Not all of Limehouse gets
+into the Directory, not by a lot. It is bound on the east by China, on
+the north by Greenland, on the south by Cape Horn, and on the west by
+London Bridge.
+
+"The main road near here is the foreshore of London. There's no doubt
+the sea beats on it--unless you are only a Chelsea chap, with your eyes
+bunged up with paint. All sorts of things drift along. All sorts of
+wreckage. It's like finding a cocoanut or a palm hole stranded in a
+Cornish cove. The stories I hear--one of you writer fellers ought to
+come and stay here, only I suppose you are too busy writing about
+things that really matter. You are like the bright youths in the art
+schools, drawing plaster casts till they don't know life when they see
+it.
+
+"Well, about this pawnshop. It's a sort of pocket--you know those
+places on the beach where a lot of flotsam strands--oceanic
+treasure-trove. I suppose the currents, for some reason sailors could
+explain, eddy round this pawnshop and leave things there. That pawnshop
+is the luckiest corner along our beach, and I stopped to turn over the
+sea litter.
+
+"Of course, there was a lot of chronometers, and on top of a pile of
+'em was a carved cocoanut. South Sea Islands, I suppose. Full of
+curious involuted lines--a mist of lines--with a face peering through
+the mist, if you looked close enough. Rows of cheap watches hung on
+their chains, and there was a lot of second-hand meerschaum pipes, and
+a walrus tusk, carved about a little. What took my eye was an old
+Chinese bowl, because inside it was a little jade idol--a fearful
+little wretch, with mother-o'-pearl eyes. It would squat in your
+thoughts like a toad, that idol--eh, where does Jabberjee come in?
+Well, here he comes.
+
+"I didn't know he was coming at all, you understand. I shouldn't have
+jumped more if the idol had winked at me.
+
+"There stood Jabberjee. I didn't know that was his name, though. He was
+christened Jabberjee after the trouble, by a learned Limehouse
+schoolboy, who wore spectacles. Do I make myself clear?"
+
+I murmured that I was a little dense, but time might carry out
+improvements. Hammond was talking on, though, without looking at me.
+"There the Lascar was. Lots of 'em about here, you know. He was the
+usual bundle of bones and blue cotton rags, and his gunny bags flapped
+on his stick legs like banners. He looked as uncertain as a
+candle-flame in a draught. Perhaps he was sixteen. I dunno. Maybe he
+was sixty. You can't tell these Johnnies. He had a shaven cranium, and
+his tight scalp might have been slipped over the bony bosses of his
+head with a shoehorn.
+
+"I don't know what he was saying. He cringed, and said something very
+quickly; I thought he was speaking of something he had concealed on his
+person. Smuggled goods, likely. Tobacco.
+
+"Looking over his shoulder, wishing he would go away, I saw a policeman
+in the dusk at the opposite corner, with his eye on us.
+
+"Then I could see something was concealed under the Lascar's flimsies.
+He seemed trying to keep it quiet. He kept on talking, and I couldn't
+make out what he was driving at. I was looking at his clothes,
+wondering what the deuce he had concealed there. At last something came
+out of his rags. Talk about making you jump! It really did look like
+the head of a snake. It was, too, but attached to a walking-stick--sort
+of handle. A scaly head it was, in some shiny material. Its eyes were
+like a pair of rubies. They picked up the light somehow, and glittered.
+
+"Now listen. I looked up then into the Lascar's face. I was surprised
+to find he was taller. Much taller. He put his face forward and down,
+so that I wanted to step back.
+
+"He had an ugly look. He was smiling; the sweep was smiling, as though
+he knew he was a lot cleverer than I. Another thing. The place was
+suddenly quiet, and the houses and shops seemed to have fallen far
+back. The pavement was wider.
+
+"There was something else, I noticed. The bobby had left the street
+corner, and was walking our way. The curious thing was, though, the
+more he walked the farther off he got, as though the road was being
+stretched under his feet.
+
+"Mind you, I was still awake and critical. You know there is a
+substratum of your mind which is critical, when you are dreaming,
+standing looking on outside you, like a spectator.
+
+"Then the stick touched my hand. I shouted. I must have yelled jolly
+loud, I think. I couldn't help it. That horrible thing seemed to
+wriggle in my fingers.
+
+"It was the shout which brought the crowd. There was the policeman. I
+can't make out how he got there. 'Now, what's your little game?' he
+said. That brought the buildings up with a rush, and broke the road
+into the usual clatter.
+
+"It was all quite simple. There was nothing in it then out of the
+ordinary. Just a usual Lascar, very frightened, waving a cheap cane
+with a handle like a snake's head. Then another policeman came up in a
+hurry, and pushed through the crowd. The crowd was on my side, maudlin
+and sympathetic. They knew all about it. The coolie had tried to stab
+me. An eager young lady in an apron asked a boy in front--he had just
+forced through--what was the matter. He knew all about it.
+
+"'The Indian tried to bite the copper.'
+
+"'Tried to bite him?'
+
+"'Not 'arf he didn't.'
+
+"The Hindoo was now nearly hysterical, and the kiddies were picking up
+his language fast. 'Now then, old Jabberjee,' said one nipper in
+spectacles. The crowd was laughing, and surging towards the police. I
+managed to edge out of it.
+
+"'What's the trouble?' I asked a carman.
+
+"'You see that P. and O. Johnny?' he said. 'Well, he knocked down that
+kid'--indicating the boy in spectacles--'and took tuppence from him.'
+
+"I thought a lot about the whole thing on the way home," said Hammond.
+"I tell you the yarn for you to explain to the chaps who like to base
+their beliefs on the sure ground of what they can understand."
+
+
+
+
+XIII. The Extra Hand
+
+
+Old George Galsworthy and I sat on the headland above the estuary,
+looking into the vacancy which was the Atlantic on an entranced silver
+evening. The sky was overcast. There was no wind, and no direct sun.
+The light was refined and diffused through a thin veiling of pearl. Sea
+and sky were one. As though they were suspended in space we saw a tug,
+having a barque in tow, far but distinct, in the light of the bay, tiny
+models of ebony set in a vast brightness. They were poised in the
+illumination, and seemed to be motionless, but we knew they were moving
+down on us. "Here she comes," said the seaman, "and a fine evening it
+is for the end of her last voyage." Shipbreakers had bought that
+barque. She was coming in to be destroyed.
+
+The stillness of the world, and its lustre in which that fine black
+shape was centred and was moving to her end, made me feel that
+headlands, sea, and sky knew what was known to the two watchers on the
+hill. She was condemned. The ship was central, and the regarding world
+stood about her in silence. Sombre and stately she came, in the manner
+of the tragic proud, superior to the compelling fussiness of little
+men, making no resistance. The spring tide was near full. It had
+flooded the marsh lands below us, but not with water, for those
+irregular pools resplendent as mirrors were deeps of light. The
+hedgerows were strips of the earth's rind remaining above a profound.
+The light below the lines of black hedges was antipodean. The barque
+moved in slowly. She did not go past the lighthouse, and past our hill,
+into the harbour beyond, like a ship about the business of her life.
+She turned into the shallows below us, and stood towards the foot of
+the hill.
+
+"She's altered a little," meditated Galsworthy. "They've shortened her
+sticks, those Norwegians, and painted her their beastly mustard colour
+and white. She's hogbacked, too. Well, she's old." The old man
+continued his quiet meditation. He was really talking to himself, I
+think, and I was listening to his thoughts.
+
+"Look!" cried Galsworthy, suddenly rising, his hand gripping my
+shoulder. The tug had cast off and was going about. The ship came right
+on. There was an interval of time between her and the shore which was
+breathless and prolonged.
+
+"She's aground!" exclaimed the old man to himself, and the hand on my
+shoulder gripped harder. He stood regarding her for some time. "She's
+done," he said, and presently released me, sitting down beside me
+again, still looking at her moodily, smoking his pipe. He was silent
+for a time. Perhaps he had in his mind that he too had taken the
+ground. It was sunset, and there she was, and there was he, and no more
+sparkling morning tides out of port for them any more.
+
+Presently he turned to me. "There's a queer story about her. She
+carried an extra hand. I'll tell you. It's a queer yarn. She had one
+man at a muster more than signed for her. At night, you couldn't get
+into the rigging ahead of that chap. There you'd find him just too much
+ahead of the first lad who had jumped at the call to be properly seen,
+you know. You could see him, but you couldn't make him out. So the chap
+behind him was in no hurry, after the first rush. Well, it made it
+pretty hard for her old man to round up a crew. He had to find men who
+didn't know her. Men in Poplar who didn't know her, those days, were
+scarce. She was a London clipper and she carried a famous flag.
+Everybody knew her but men who weren't sailors.
+
+"Well, the boys said she had a bit of gibbet-post about her somewhere.
+Ah! maybe. I don't know. Anyway, I say she was a fine clipper. I knew
+her. She was the pick of the bunch, to my eye. But she was full of
+trouble. I must say that. When she was launched she killed a man. First
+she stuck on the ways, and then she went off all unexpected, like a
+bird. That was always a trick of hers. You never knew her. And when she
+was tired of headwinds, she'd find a dead calm. That was the kind of
+ship she was. A skipper would look at her, and swear she was the ship
+for him. The other chaps didn't understand her, he'd say. A ship like
+that's sure to be good, he'd tell you. But when he'd got her she'd turn
+his hair grey. She was that sort.
+
+"One voyage she was six weeks beating to westward round Cape Horn. We
+had a bad time. I'd never seen such seas. We could do no good there. It
+was a voyage and a half. She lost the second mate overboard, and she
+lost gear. So the old man put back to the Plate. And, of course, all
+her crowd deserted, to a man. They said they wanted to see their homes
+again before they died. They said there was something wrong about that
+ship, and they left all their truck aboard, and made themselves scarce.
+The old man scraped up a new crowd. They came aboard at dusk, one day,
+and they stared about them. 'Look, sir,' said one of them, 'what's that
+up there? What's that figgerhead in y'r main to'gallan' cross-tree?' I
+was the mate, you know. I talked to that chap. He learned something
+about getting the booze out of him before he came aboard. He got a move
+on.
+
+"We were over four months making 'Frisco that voyage, and she the
+sailer she was. Why, she's logged thirteen knots. But she could get
+nothing right, not for long. She was like those fine-looking women men
+can't live without, and can't live with. She'd break a man's heart.
+When we got back to Blackwall we heard she was sold to foreigners ...
+but there she is now, come home to die. I bet old Yeo don't care much
+about her troubles, though. He'll break her up, troubles and all, and
+she's for firewood ... there you are, my dear, there you are ... but
+you should have seen her at Blackwall, in the old days ... what's the
+East India Dock Road like, these times?"
+
+The next day, at low water, I stood beneath her, and watched a cascade
+pouring incessantly from a patched wound in her side, for she had been
+in collision, and that was why she was condemned. She was careened,
+like a slain thing, and with the dank rocks and weeds about, and that
+monotonous pour from her wound, she might have been a venerable sea
+monster from which the life was draining. Yeo hailed me from above, and
+up the lively rope ladder I went. She had a Norwegian name, but that
+was not her name. All Poplar knew her once. There she was born. She was
+one of ours. That stone arch of John Company, the entrance to the East
+India Dock, once framed her picture, and her topmasts looked down to
+the Dock Road, when she was at home. I could believe Galsworthy. She
+was not so empty as she seemed. She had a freight, and Yeo did not know
+it. Poplar and the days of the clippers! I knew she was invisibly
+peopled. Of course she was haunted.
+
+The shipwrecker and I went about her canted decks, groped through dark
+recesses where it might have been the rats we heard, and peered into
+the sonorous shades of the empty cargo spaces. In the cabins we puzzled
+over those relics left by her last crew, which, without their
+associations, seemed to have no reason in them. There was a mocking
+silence in the cabins. What sort of men were they who were familiar
+with these doors? And before the northmen had her, and she was English,
+trim, and flew skysails and studding-sails, and carried lady
+passengers, who were the Poplar boys that laughed and yarned here? She
+was more mine than Yeo's. Let him claim her timber. All the rich
+freight of her past was mine. I was the intimate of every ghost she
+had.
+
+We sat in a cabin which had been her skipper's. There was a litter on
+the floor of old newspapers and documents, receipts for harbour dues,
+the captain's copies of bills of lading, store lists, and some
+picture-postcards from the old man's family. A lump of indurated
+plum-duff, like a geological specimen, was on the table. There was a
+slant of sunshine through a square port window, and it rested on a
+decayed suit of oilskins. We sat silent, the shipbreaker having
+finished estimating to me, with enthusiasm, what she had of copper. He
+was now waiting for his men to return to work. They were going to take
+the masts out of her. But I was wondering what I could do to lay that
+ghost of my old shipping parish which this craft had conjured in my
+mind. And as we both sat there, looking at nothing, we heard, at the
+end of the alley-way, a door stealthily latch.
+
+Yeo sprang to his feet at once, staring and listening. He looked at me,
+surprised and puzzled. "Of all the----" he began, and stopped. He took
+his seat again. "Why, of course," he said. "She's settling. That's what
+it is. She's settling. But my men, the fools, will have it there's some
+one pottering about this ship."
+
+_May 1909._
+
+
+
+
+XIV. The Sou'-Wester
+
+
+The trees of the Embankment Gardens were nearly stripped of their
+leaves, and were tossing widely. Shutting the eyes, you could think you
+heard the sweep of deep-water seas with strident crests. The greater
+buildings, like St. Paul's, might have been promontories looming in a
+driving murk. The low sky was dark and riven, and was falling headlong.
+But I liked the look of it. Here, plainly, was the end of the halcyon
+days,--good-bye to the sun,--but I felt, for a reason I could not
+remember and did not try to recall, pleased and satisfied with this
+gale and its wrack. The clouds seemed curiously familiar. I had seen
+them before somewhere; they were reminding me of a lucky but forgotten
+occasion of the past. Whatever it was, no doubt it was better than
+anything likely to happen today. It was something good in an old world
+we have lost. But it was something of that old world, like an old book
+which reads the same today; or an old friend surviving, who would help
+to make endurable the years to come. I need not try to remember it. I
+had got it, whatever it was, and that was all the assurance of its
+wealth I wanted. Then from the river came a call, deep, prolonged, and
+melancholy....
+
+So that was it! No wonder the low clouds driving, and the wind in the
+trees, worked that in my mind. The tide was near full. There was a
+steamer moving in the Pool. She was outward bound.
+
+Outward bound! I saw again the black buildings of a Welsh coaling port
+at evening, and a vague steamer (but no liner, that was plain enough,
+no liner), and two men beside me, who were going out with me in her,
+watching her. She was little more than a shadow with a port light. She
+gave a deep, shuddering warning. She was off. We had been for a last
+run round the town. We were to board her in the outer lock. The wind
+was whining in the telegraph-wires. It was hazing the pools of rain,
+which were bright and bleak with the last of a brazen yellow sunset.
+"Happy days!" said one of us. "Who wouldn't sell that little farm?...
+Now we're in for it. It will be the devil of an old, tough night."
+(Where this night is that friend? Mine-sweeping? Patrolling? Or is
+he---- But I hope not. He was a good fellow and a sailor.)
+
+We were better off than we knew then, though then we thought it would
+be hard luck for a dog. Our thoughts turned to the snug indoor places
+of the lighted town behind us; for in the small hours we should be
+plunging off Hartland; with the Wolf to come, and the Bay after that;
+and the glass falling. But youth did know it was young, and that this
+night, wild and forbidding, and the old _Sirius_ rolling away into it,
+would look fine when seen through tobacco smoke in the years to come.
+
+For the light we saw at sea never fades. It survives our voyaging. It
+shines into the mind and abides there. We watched the horizon
+steadfastly for lands we did not know. The sun came up each day to a
+world that was not the same, no matter how it looked. At night we
+changed our stars. We heard nothing but the wind and the waves, and the
+quiet voice of a shipmate yarning with his pipe in his mouth. The
+elements could interrupt us, but not the world. Not a gull of that was
+left.
+
+And somehow the beginning of a voyage seemed to be always in westerly
+weather, at the beginning of winter. The English land to me is a
+twilight coast with clouds like iron above it poised in a windy light
+of aquamarine, and a sunset of lucid saffron. Against that western
+light, bright, bare, and penetrating as the ruthless judgment of
+impersonal divinity, the polished waves mount, outlined as hard as jet,
+and move towards us. The ship's prow rises to cut out segments of the
+west; falls into the dark hollows of waves. The wind pours over us, an
+icy and ponderable flood, and is increasing. Where England has sunk in
+the dark one clear eye, like a yellow planet, comes out to watch us.
+
+One thinks of the sea now as something gone, like the old world. There
+once a voyager was sundered from insistent trifles. He was with simple,
+elemental things that have been since time began, and he had to meet
+them with what skill he had, the wind for his friend and adversary, the
+sun his clock, the stars for counsel, and the varying wilderness his
+hope and his doubt. But the cruel misery of man did not intrude. He was
+free from that. All men at sea were his fellows, whatever their
+language, an ancient fraternity whose bond was a common but unspoken
+knowledge of a hidden but imminent fate. They could be strangers
+ashore, but not at sea.
+
+But that is gone now. The sea is poisoned with a deadly sorrow not its
+own, which man has put there. The spaciousness of the great vault above
+the round of waters is soiled by the gibbering anxieties of a thousand
+gossipers of evil, which the ship catches in its wires, to darken the
+night of its little company with surmises of distant malignity and woe.
+It is something to retain a little of the light of the days at sea
+which have passed. They too had their glooms, but they came of the
+dignity of advancing storms, and the fear which great seas put in men
+who held a resolute course nevertheless, knowing that their weird was
+one which good seamen have faced since first the unknown beyond the
+land was dared; faith, courage, and the loyalty of comrades, which all
+the waters of the world cannot drown. But the heart of man, which will
+face the worst the elements can do, sickens at the thought of the
+perverse and inexplicable cruelty of his fellows.
+
+_October 1917._
+
+
+
+
+XV. On Leave
+
+
+Coming out of Victoria Station into the stir of London again, on leave
+from Flanders, must give as near the sensation of being thrust suddenly
+into life from the beyond and the dead as mortal man may expect to
+know. It is a surprising and providential wakening into a world which
+long ago went dark. That world is strangely loud, bright, and alive.
+Plainly it did not stop when, somehow, it vanished once upon a time.
+There its vivid circulation moves, and the buses are so usual, the
+people so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs so
+startlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubt
+that he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform must
+surely mean something, and its stains something more!
+
+And there can be no doubt about it, as you stand there a trifle dizzy
+in London once more. You really have come back from another world; and
+you have the curious idea that you may be invisible in this old world.
+In a sense you know you are unseen. These people will never know what
+you know. There they gossip in the hall, and leisurely survey the
+bookstall, and they would never guess it, but you have just returned
+from hell. What could they say if you told them? They would be
+embarrassed, polite, forbearing, kindly, and smiling, and they would
+mention the matter afterwards as a queer adventure with a poor devil
+who was evidently a little over-wrought; shell shock, of course.
+Beastly thing, shell shock. Seems to affect the nerves.
+
+They would not understand. They will never understand. What is the use
+of standing in veritable daylight, and telling the living, who have
+never been dead, of the other place?
+
+I know now how Rip Van Winkle felt about it. But his was a minor
+trouble. All he lost was some years. He had not changed, except that
+his beard was longer. But the man who comes back from the line has lost
+more than years. He has lost his original self. People failed to
+recognize Rip because they did not know his beard. Our friends do
+recognize us when they greet us on our return from the front, but they
+do not know us because we are not the men they remember. They are the
+same as ever; but when they address us, they talk to a mind which is
+not there, though the eyes betray nothing of the difference. They talk
+to those who have come back to life to see them again, but who cannot
+tell them what has happened, and dare not try.
+
+Between that old self and the man they see, there is an abyss of dread.
+He has passed through it. To them the war is official _communiques_,
+the amplifying dispatches of war correspondents, the silence of absent
+friends in danger, the shock of a telegram, and rather interesting
+food-rationing. They think it is the same war which the leave-man
+knows. He will tell them all about it, and they will learn the truth at
+last.
+
+All about it! If an apparition of the battle-line in eruption were to
+form over London, over Paris, over Berlin, a sinister mirage, near,
+unfading, and admonitory, with spectral figures moving in its reflected
+fires and its gloom, and the echoes of their cries were heard, and
+murmurs of convulsive shocks, and the wind over the roofs brought
+ghostly and abominable smells into our streets; and if that were to
+haunt us by day and night, a phantom from which there was no escape, to
+remain till the sins of Europe were expiated, we should soon forget
+politics and arguments, and be in sackcloth and ashes, positive no
+longer, but down on our knees before Heaven in awe at this revelation
+of social guilt, asking simply what we must do to be saved.
+
+Your revival at home, when on leave, is full of wonderful commonplaces,
+especially now, with summer ripening. The yellow-hammer is heard on the
+telegraph wire, and the voices of children in the wood, and the dust of
+white English country roads is smelled at evening. All that is a
+delight which is miraculous in its intensity. But it is very lonesome
+and far. It is curious to feel that you are really there, delighting in
+the vividness of this recollection of the past, and yet balked by the
+knowledge that you are, nevertheless, outside this world of home,
+though it looks and smells and sounds so close; and that you may never
+enter it again. It is like the landscape in a mirror, the luminous
+projection of what is behind you. But you are not there. It is
+recognized, but viewed now apart and aloof, a chance glimpse at the
+secure and enduring place from which you came, vouchsafed to one who
+must soon return to the secret darkness in his mind.
+
+The home folk do not know this, and may not be told--I mean they may
+not be told why it is so. The youngster who is home on leave, though he
+may not have reasoned it out, knows that what he wants to say, often
+prompted by indignation, cannot be said. He feels intuitively that this
+is beyond his power to express. Besides, if he were to begin, where
+would he end? He cannot trust himself. What would happen if he
+uncovered, in a sunny and innocent breakfast-room, the horror he knows?
+If he spoke out? His people would not understand him. They would think
+he was mad. They would be sorry, dammit. Sorry for him! Why, he is not
+sorry for himself. He can stand it now he knows what it is like. He can
+stand it--if they can. And he realizes they can stand it, and are
+merely anxious about his welfare, the welfare which does not trouble
+him in the least, for he has looked into the depth of evil, and for him
+the earth has changed; and he rather despises it. He has seen all he
+wants to see of it. Let it go, dammit. If they don't mind the change,
+and don't kick, why should he? What a hell of a world to be born into;
+and once it did look so jolly good, too! He is shy, cheery, but
+inexorably silent on what he knows. Some old fool said to him once, "It
+must be pretty bad out there?" Pretty bad! What a lark!
+
+But for his senior, who also knows, though the feeling is the same, the
+nature of the combative adult male is less shy, and not merely
+negatively contemptuous, but aggressive. It is difficult for him to
+endure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of special
+revelation of the war they have not seen, when he, who has been in it,
+has contradictory minds about it. They are so assured that they think
+there can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematical
+arguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. He
+feels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak and
+impalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. He
+understands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected from
+his world that was, and that now he cannot come near them. Yet though
+he knows it, they do not. The greatest evil of war--this is what
+staggers you when you come home, feeling you know the worst of it--is
+the unconscious indifference to war's obscene blasphemy against life of
+the men and women who have the assurance that they will never be called
+on to experience it. Out there, comrades in a common and unlightened
+affliction shake a fist humorously at the disregarding stars, and mock
+them. Let the Fates do their worst. The sooner it is over, the better;
+and, while waiting, they will take it out of Old Jerry. He is the only
+one out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their world
+and die, so they must take it out of somebody. Therefore Jerry "gets it
+in the neck." Men under the irrefragable compulsion of a common spell,
+who are selected for sacrifice in the fervour of a general obsession,
+but who are cooly awake to the unreason which locks the minds of their
+fellows, will burst into fury at the bond they feel. The obvious
+obstruction is the obstinate "blighter" with a machine-gun in front of
+them. At least, they are free to "strafe" him.
+
+But what is the matter with London? The men on leave, when they meet
+each other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion of
+their confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they would
+sooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than at
+home. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish the
+day for them, they will be with those who understand, with comrades who
+rarely discuss the war except obliquely and with quiet and bitter
+jesting. Seeing the world has gone wrong, how much better and easier it
+is to take the likelihood of extinction with men who have the same
+mental disgust as your own, and can endure it till they die, but who,
+while they live in the same torment with you, have the unspoken but
+certain conviction that Europe is a decadent old beast eating her young
+with insatiable appetite, than to sit in sunny breakfast-rooms with the
+newspaper maps and positive arguments of the unsaved!
+
+_Autumn 1917._
+
+
+
+
+XVI. The Dunes
+
+
+The dunes are in another world. They are two miles across the uncertain
+and hazardous tide races of the estuary. The folk of the village never
+go over. The dunes are nothing. They are the horizon. They are only
+seen in idleness, or when the weather is scanned, or an incoming ship
+is marked. The dunes are but a pallid phantom of land so delicately
+golden that it is surprising to find it constant. The faint glow of
+that dilated shore, quavering just above the sea, the sea intensely
+blue and positive, might wreathe and vanish at any moment in the pour
+of wind from the Atlantic, whose endless strength easily bears in and
+over us vast involuted continents of white cloud. The dunes tremble in
+the broad flood of wind, light, and sea, diaphanous and fading, always
+on the limit of vision, the point of disappearing, but are established.
+They are soundless, immaterial, and far, like a pleasing and personal
+illusion, a luminous dream of lasting tranquillity in a better but an
+unapproachable place, and the thought of crossing to them never
+suggests anything so obvious as a boat. They look like no coast that
+could be reached.
+
+It was a perverse tide on a windless day which drifted me over. The
+green mounds of water were flawless, with shadows of mysteries in their
+clear deeps. The boat and the tide were murmuring to each other
+secretly. The boat's thwarts were hot and dry in the sun. The serene
+immensity of the sky, the warmth and dryness of the boat's timbers, the
+deep and translucent waters, and the coast so low and indistinct that
+the silent flashing of the combers there might have been on nothing
+substantial, were all timeless, and could have been but a thought and a
+desire; they were like a memorable morning in a Floridan cay
+miraculously returned. The boat did not move; the shore approached,
+revealed itself. It was something granted on a lucky day. This country
+would not be on the map.
+
+I landed on a broad margin of sand which the tide had just left. It was
+filmed with water. It was a mirror in which the sky was inverted. When
+a breath of air passed over that polished surface it was as though the
+earth were a shining bubble which then nearly burst. To dare that
+foothold might precipitate the intruder on ancient magic to cloudland
+floating miles beneath the feet. But I had had the propriety to go
+barefooted, and had lightened my mind before beginning the voyage. Here
+I felt I was breaking into what was still only the first day, for man
+had never measured this place with his countless interruptions of
+darkness. I don't know whether that mirror had ever been darkened till
+I put my foot in it. After the news I had heard on the quay that
+morning before starting out, news just arrived from London, the dunes
+were an unexpected assurance that the earth has an integrity and purity
+of its own, a quality which even man cannot irreparably soil; that it
+maintains a pristine health and bloom invulnerable to the best our
+heroic and intelligent activities can accomplish, and could easily
+survive our extinction, and even forget it once supported us.
+
+I found an empty bottle among the dry litter and drift above the
+tide-mark, sole relic, as far as could be seen there, of man. No
+message was in the bottle. The black bottle itself was forlornly the
+message, but it lay there unregarded by the bright immemorial genius of
+that coast. Yet it settled one doubt. This was not a land which had
+never known man. It had merely forgotten it had known him. He had been
+there, but whatever difference he had made was of the same significance
+now as the dry bladder-wrack, the mummied gull near by, and the
+bleached shells. The next tide probably would hide the memento for
+ever. At the time this did not seem an unhappy thought, though the
+relic had been our last witness, so enduring was the tenuous brightness
+of the place, the shrine of our particular star, the visible aura of
+earth. We rarely see it. It is something to be reminded it is not lost;
+that we cannot, whatever else we can do, put out a celestial light.
+
+Above the steep beach a dry flat opened out, reached only by gales and
+the highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot and
+deep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles and
+mussel shells. It looked too arid to support life, but sea-rocket with
+fleshy emerald stems and lilac flowers was scattered about. Nothing
+moved in the waste but an impulsive small butterfly, blue as a fragment
+of sky. The silence of the desert was that of a dream, but when
+listening to the quiet, a murmur which had been below hearing was
+imagined. The dunes were quivering with the intensity of some latent
+energy, and it might have been that one heard, or else it was the
+remembrance held by that strand of a storm which had passed, or it
+might have been the ardent shafts of the sun. At the landward end of
+the waste, by the foot of the dunes, was an old beam of a ship, harsh
+with barnacles, its bolt-holes stopped with dust. A spinous shrub grew
+to one side of it. A solitary wasp, a slender creature in black and
+gold, quick and emotional, had made a cabin of one of the holes in the
+timber. For some reason that fragment of a barque was more eloquent of
+travel, and the work of seamen gone, than any of the craft moored at
+the quay I left that morning. I smoked a pipe on that timber--for all I
+knew, not for the first time--and did not feel at all lonely, nor that
+voyages for the discovery of fairer times were finished.
+
+Now the dunes were close they appeared surprisingly high, and were
+formed, not like hills, but like the high Alps. They had the peaks and
+declivities of mountains. Their colour was of old ivory, and the long
+marram grass which grew on them sparsely was as fine as green hair. The
+hollowed slope before me was so pale, spacious, and immaculate that
+there was an instinctive hesitation about taking it. A dark ghost began
+slowly to traverse it with outspread arms, a shade so distinct on that
+virgin surface that not till the gull, whose shadow it was, had gone
+inland, following its shadow over the high yellow ridge, did I know
+that I had not been looking at the personality. But the surface had
+been darkened, and I could overcome my hesitation.
+
+From the ridge, the country of the dunes opened inland with the
+enlarged likeness of a lunar landscape surveyed in a telescope. It
+merely appeared to be near. The sand-hills, with their acute outlines,
+and their shadows flung rigidly from their peaks across the pallor of
+their slopes, were the apparition of inviolable seclusion. They could
+have been waiting upon an event secret from our knowledge, larger than
+the measure of our experience; so they had still the aspect of a
+strange world, not only infinitely remote, but superior with a greater
+destiny. They were old, greatly older than the ancient village across
+the water. Ships left the village and went by them to sea gay with the
+bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and
+when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea
+moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same,
+vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and
+import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all on
+the same day.
+
+Only when resting on a knoll of one of the slopes, where the shadows of
+a tuft of marram grass above my head lay as thin black wire on the
+sand, were the dunes caught in part of their secret. There was no
+sound. I heard the outer world from which I had come only as the
+whistle of a curlew. It was far away now. To this place, the news I had
+heard on the quay that morning would have sounded the same as Waterloo,
+which was yesterday, or the Armada, which was the same day--wasn't
+it?--or the day before, or as the whistle of a curlew. Here we were
+outside time. Then I thought I heard a faint whisper, but when I looked
+round nothing had altered. The shadows of the grass formed a fixed
+metallic design on the sand. But I heard the whisper again, and with a
+side glance caught the dune stealthily on the move.
+
+It was alive. When you were not attentive, some of its grains would
+start furtively, pour in increasing mobility fanwise, and rest
+instantly when looked at. This hill was fluid, and circulated. It
+preserved an outline that was fixed through the years, a known, named,
+and charted locality, only to those to whom one map would serve a
+lifetime. But it was really unknown. It was on its way. Like the ships
+that were passing, it also was passing. It was only taking its own
+time.
+
+Secluded within the inner ranges were little valleys, where, for a
+while, the dunes had ceased to travel, and were at leisure. I got into
+a hollow which had a floor of hoary lichen, with bronze hummocks of
+moss. In this moment of pause it had assumed a look of what we call
+antiquity. The valley was not abundant with vegetation, but enamelled
+and jewelled. A more concentrated, hectic, and volatile essence sent up
+stalks, blades, and sprays, with that direction and restraint which
+perfection needs. More than in a likelier and fecund spot, in this
+valley the ichor showed the ardour and flush of its early vitality.
+Even now it could shape like this, and give these dyes! Chosen by an
+earth astringent and tonic, the forms were few and personal. Here you
+should see to what influences our planet is still subject. The shapes
+in that valley were more than coloured; they were rare jets of light,
+emerald, orange, blue, and scarlet. Life burned with an original force,
+a steady virtue. What is "good news"? It depends on the sort of
+evidence for which we look.
+
+Just showing in the drift on the seaward side of the valley were some
+worked stones and a little brickwork. When the sandhill paused, it had
+almost covered a building where man once worshipped. I could find
+nobody afterwards who remembered the church, or had even heard of it.
+Yet the doom of this temple, prolonged in its approach but inevitable,
+to those to whom the altar once had seemed as indestructible as hope,
+must on a day have struck the men who saw at last their temple's end
+was near as a hint, vague but glacial, of the transience of all their
+affairs.
+
+But what were their affairs? We should have to know them before we
+could regret the dry sand which buried them. The valley looked very
+well as it was. It showed no sign of failure. Over one of the stones of
+the forgotten altar was a casual weed which stood like a sign of
+success and continuance. It was as indecipherable as the stone, but the
+blue of its flowers, still and deep as rapture, surprising and
+satisfying as an unexpected revelation of good, would have been better
+worth reading for a knowledge of the heart from which could be drawn
+the temper and intensity of that faith.
+
+_August 1917._
+
+
+
+
+XVII. Binding a Spell
+
+
+You may never have addressed a meeting of the public, but you have long
+cherished a vision of a figure (well known to your private mirror)
+standing where it overlooks an intent and silent multitude to which it
+communicates with apt and fluent words those things not seen by mortal
+eyes, the dream of a world not ours.... You know what I mean. (Loud and
+prolonged applause.)
+
+"I should be glad," wrote one who is still unashamed to call himself my
+friend, "if you could run down here one evening and address a meeting
+on your experiences. Just conversationally, you know."
+
+A casual sort of letter. Designedly so. But I could see through it. It
+was an invitation which did not wish to scare me from accepting it. I
+smiled with serene amusement at its concluding sentence.
+Conversationally! Why, that would be merely talking; tongue-work;
+keeping on and on after one usually, if merciful to a friend, lets him
+off. I felt instantly that for once it might be even more pleasant to
+entertain an audience than to be one of the crowd and bored. And it
+happened that my experiences really did give me something to say, and
+were exactly what an audience, in war-time, might be glad to hear. I
+therefore wrote a brief note of acceptance, as one to whom this sort of
+thing comes ten times a day; and thought no more about it.
+
+No more, that is to say, till I saw the local paper announced me as a
+coming event, a treat in store. I was on the list. There were those
+that evening who, instead of going to a theatre, a concert, or to see
+Vesta Tilley, would come to hear me. I felt then the first cold
+underdraught of doubt, the chilling intimation from the bleak unknown,
+where it is your own affair entirely whether you flourish or perish.
+What a draught! I got up, shut the door, and looked at the day of the
+month.
+
+That was all right; yet another fortnight!
+
+But what weakness was this? Anybody, could do it, if they knew as much
+of my subject as did I. Many men would do it, without a tremor, without
+shame, if they knew next to nothing about it. Look at old Brown, for
+example, whose only emotions are evoked by being late for dinner, the
+price of building materials, the scandalous incapacity of workmen, and
+the restriction of the liberty of the subject by trade unions! He will
+sit, everybody knows, while wearing plaid trousers and side-whiskers,
+on the right hand of a peer, in full view of thousands, at a political
+meeting, untroubled, bland, conscious of his worth, and will rise at
+the word, thumbs carelessly thrust into his waistcoat pockets, begin
+with a jest (the same one), and for an hour make aspirates as uncommon
+as are bathrooms in his many houses.
+
+He has nothing to say, and could not say it if he had; but he can speak
+in public. You will observe the inference is obvious. One who is really
+capable of constructive thought (like you and me); who has a wide range
+of words to choose from even when running; who is touched, by events,
+to admiration, to indignation, to alarm, to--to all that sort of thing,
+he could ... the plastic audience would be in his skilful hands, there
+is no doubt. (Hear, hear!)
+
+Time passed. As Mr. A. Ward once pointed out, it is a way time has. The
+night came, as at last I began to fear it would. My brief notes were in
+my pocket, for I had resolutely put from me the dishonourable and
+barren safety of a written lecture. In the train--how cold was the
+night--I wished I had gone more fully into the matter. Slightly
+shivering, I tried to recall the dry humour of those carefully prepared
+opening sentences which shortly would prove to my audience that I had
+their measure, and was at ease; would prove that my elevation on the
+platform was not merely through four feet of deal planking, but was a
+real overlooking. But those delicate sentences had broken somehow. They
+were shards, and not a glitter of humour was sticking to the fragments.
+
+I felt I would rather again approach one of those towns in France,
+where it was likely you would run into the Uhlans, than go to that
+lecture hall. No doubt, too, my friend had explained to them what a
+clever fellow I was, in order to get some reflected glory out of it.
+Then it would serve him right; there would be two of us.
+
+The hall was nearly full. What surprises one is to find so many ladies
+present. A most disquieting fact, entirely unforeseen. They sit in the
+front rows and wait, evidently in a tranquil, alert, and mirthful mind,
+for you to begin. I could hear their leisurely converse and occasional
+subdued laughter (about what?) even where, in a sort of frozen, lucid
+calm, indifferent to my fate, the mood of all Englishmen in moments of
+extreme peril, I was handing my hat and coat to my friend in a room
+behind the platform. All those people out there were waiting for me.
+
+When we got on the platform the chairman told them something about me,
+I don't know what, but when I looked up it was to find, like the soul
+in torment, that a multitude of bodiless eyes had fixed me--eyes
+intent, curious, passionless.
+
+"I call upon--" said the chairman.
+
+I stood up. The sound of my voice uplifted in that silence was the most
+startling sound I have ever heard. Shortly after that there came the
+paralysing discovery that it is a gift to be able to think while
+hundreds wait patiently to see what the thought is like when it comes.
+This made my brow hot. There was a boy in an Eton suit, sitting in
+front with his legs wide apart, who was grinning at me through his
+spectacles. How he got there I don't know. I think he was the gift of
+the gods. His smile so annoyed me that I forgot myself, which saved me.
+I just talked to that boy.
+
+Once there was loud laughter. Why? It is inexplicable. I talked for
+about an hour. About what? Heaven knows. The chairman kindly let me out
+through a side entrance.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. A Division on the March
+
+
+We passed a division on the march the other day. Though the British
+occupy this country, it is not often one sees them as a multitude. When
+in the trenches, you are concerned with but a handful of your fellows.
+But just then an interminable river of steel helmets poured along in
+regular waves.
+
+It is something to be able to say you have seen a British army moving
+down the straight leagues of a French road through its guarding avenue
+of trees. My own brother may have been in that host.... Yet I never
+thought of him. A torrent of sounds swamped and submerged my
+thoughts--the clangour of chains, the rumbling of wheels, the deep
+growling of guns; and that most ominous and subduing sound in war, the
+ceaseless rhythmic tramp of armed men marching without music or song,
+men who, except the menace of their measured progress, that intimation
+of destiny and fate irresistible, are but a multitude of expressionless
+masks that glance at you, and pass.
+
+These men are all dressed alike; they are a tide of men. They all look
+alike. Their mouths are set. They move together with the common,
+irresistible, uncritical urge of migratory animals. Their eyes fix you
+in a single ceaseless interrogation. About what?
+
+There is no knowing. Don't ask me what the men are thinking in
+Flanders; I don't know, and I have been with them since the beginning.
+And I don't think any one else does.
+
+But once, as this division was passing, one of those little go-carts on
+perambulator wheels in which the men, holding drag-ropes, transport
+their own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would have
+recognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, to
+recover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few moments
+into something human and understandable. The wind took a few escaped
+leaves and blew them to me. The _Pickwick Papers_!
+
+It was as though the inscrutable eye of the army had tipped me a wink.
+
+I got the hint that I was, in the right sense, on the same road as
+these men. My brother was certainly there. For sometimes, you know, one
+has a bleak sense of doubt about that, a feeling of extreme isolation
+and polar loneliness. You wonder, at times, mixed up here in the
+mysterious complexities of that elemental impulse which is visible as
+ceaseless clouds of fire on the Somme, whether you are the last man,
+witnessing in helpless and mute horror the motiveless upheaval of earth
+in final ruin.
+
+So that, even as I write this, and glance, safe for tonight, at the
+strangeness of this French house, I see everything about me with
+astonishment, and feel I may wake at any moment to the familiar things
+of that home in which I fell asleep to dream of calamity.
+
+Moving about this dubious and unauthentic scene of war, an atom of a
+fortuitous host, each one of the host glancing at me with inscrutable
+eyes which seem to show in passing--if they show anything at all--a
+faint hint of reproach, the interruption of war by the page of a
+familiar book, and the sudden anxious effort by one of the uniformed
+phantoms to recover words which you remember well enough were once
+worth hearing, was like momentary recovery. An unexpected revelation.
+For a moment I saw the same old enduring earth under us. All was well.
+
+I often doubt here the existence of a man who is talking to me. He
+seems altogether incredible. He might be talking across the Styx; and I
+am not sure at the moment on which side of that river I stand. Is he on
+the right side or am I? Which of us has got the place where a daily sun
+still rises? Yes, it is the living men here who are the uncanny
+spectres.
+
+I have come in a lonely spot upon a little cross by the wayside, and
+have been stopped by a familiar name on it. Dead? No. There, right
+enough, is my veritable friend, as I knew and admired him. He cannot be
+dead. But those men in muddy clothes who sometimes consort with me
+round the burning logs on the hearth of an old chateau at night, I look
+across the floor at them as across countless ages, and listen to their
+voices till they sound unintelligibly from a remote and alien past. I
+do not know what they say to me. I am encompassed by dark and insoluble
+magic, and have forgotten the Open Sesame, though I try hard to
+remember it; for these present circumstances and the beings who move in
+them are of a world unreal and unreasonable.
+
+I get up from the talk of war by that fireside of an old chateau built
+on a still more ancient field where English archers fought a famous
+battle six hundred years ago. A candle stands on a bracket beneath a
+portrait of a lady. The lady is in the dress of the days of the French
+Revolution. She is young and vivid, and looks down at me under lowered
+eyelids in amused and enticing scrutiny. Her little mouth has the
+faintest trace of a contemplative smile; and as I look at her I could
+swear the corners of her mouth twitch, as if in the restraint of
+complete understanding.
+
+She is long gone. She was executed at Arras. But I know her well. The
+chateau is less cold and lonely than it was.
+
+Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of which
+are unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows leap. The
+place is so still that I can hear the antique timbers talking. But
+something is without which is not the noise of the wind. I listen, and
+hear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted horizon of
+outer night thudding on the earth--the incessant guns of the great war.
+
+And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny
+silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child,
+who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable,
+the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with
+the knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of all
+the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I
+used to know in the morning.
+
+_Winter 1917._
+
+
+
+
+XIX. Holly-Ho!
+
+
+In the train bound for the leave boat, just before Christmas, the
+Knight-Errant, who also was returning to the front, re-wrote the
+well-known hymn of Phillips Brooks for me, to make the time pass. It
+began:
+
+    "Oh little town of Bethlehem,
+      To thee we give the lie."
+
+So you may guess, though I shan't tell you, how it continued. For the
+iron was in the soul of the Knight and misery was twisting it. I cannot
+pretend it was a pleasure trip. This was to be our third Christmas in
+Flanders. Is it any good trying to pass on the emotion common to men
+who go to that place because they must? No, it is not. Yet, throughout
+the journey to the boat, I was not astonished at the loud gaiety of
+many of our passengers. I have got used to it; for they were like that
+when they landed at Boulogne in August 1914; and they will be no
+different when they come back for good, to comfortable observers who
+prefer to be satisfied easily.
+
+There was a noise of musical instruments and untractable boots on the
+floor-boards. While waiting in the nervous queue on the Day of Judgment
+one of those fellows will address a mouth organ to the responsive feet
+of a pal, and the others will look on with intent approval, indifferent
+to Gabriel. Having watched disaster experiment variously with my
+countrymen for three years, I begin to understand why once the French
+hated us, why lately they have learned to admire us and to be amused by
+us, why the blunders of our governing classes don't damage us vitally
+(which seems miraculous unless you know the reason); and, indeed, why
+that blessed flag has braved a thousand years the battle and the
+breeze.
+
+It is because the quality of our Nobodies (about whom a great epic will
+get written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receive
+the inspiration), it is because any average Nobody has a cool
+impregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. That
+gives the affair something of the comic. That is what makes the humour
+of the front. And after the first silent pause of respect and wonder at
+one more story of the sort a journalist knows so well who knows but a
+little of railway men and miners, seamstresses and the mothers in mean
+streets, and ships and the sea, one cannot help chuckling. Again, the
+sons of Smith and Jones and Robin! The well-born, the clever, the
+haughty, and the greedy, in their fear, pride, and wilfulness, and the
+perplexity of their scheming, make a general mess of the world.
+Forthwith in a panic they cry, "Calamity cometh!"
+
+Then out from their obscurity, where they dwelt because of their low
+worth, arise the Nobodies; because theirs is the historic job of
+restoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss about
+it. Theirs is always the hard and dirty work. They have always done it.
+If they don't do it, it will not be done. They fall with a will and
+without complaint upon the wreckage wilfully made of generations of
+such labour as theirs, to get the world right again, to make it
+habitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spend
+the rest of their lives recreating order out of chaos. A hopeless task;
+but they continue at it unmurmuring, giving their bodies without stint,
+as once they gave their labour, to the fields and the sea. And some day
+the planet will get back to its old place under the sun; but not for
+them, not for them.
+
+A Nobody never seems to know anything, but by the grace of God he gets
+there just the same. I was not far from Ypres and the line of the Yser
+during the first battle for the Channel ports. Do you know how near we
+were to the edge of the precipice not long before that Christmas? We
+were on the verge. We were nearly over. I knew it then. So when, later
+still, I used to meet in France an enigmatic, clay-coloured figure with
+a visage seamed with humorous dolours, loaded with pioneering and
+warlike implements, rifles, knives, tin hats, and gas masks, I always
+felt I ought to get down and walk. Instead of which he used to salute
+me as smartly as he could. He will never know how cheap and embarrassed
+he used to make me feel. I wish I knew enough to do him some justice.
+
+And here once more is the leave boat, and this is another Christmas
+Eve. It was a still twilight, with a calm sea and a swell on our
+starboard beam. We rolled. We looked back on England sinking in the
+night. A black smudge of a destroyer followed us over with its eye on
+us. The main deck was crowded with soldiers--you could not get along
+there--singing in their lifebelts; at times the chorus, if approved,
+became a unanimous roar. They didn't want to be there. They didn't want
+to die. They wanted to go home. But they sang with dolorous joy. The
+chorus died; and we heard again the deep monody of the sea, like the
+admonitory voice of fate. The battles of the Somme were to come before
+the next Christmas; though none of us on that boat knew it then. And
+where is the young officer who went ashore under the electric glare of
+the base port, singing also, and bearing a Christmas tree? Where is
+that wild lieutenant of the Black Watch--he had a splendid eye, and a
+voice for a Burns midnight--who cried rollicking answers from the back
+of the crowd to the peremptory megaphone of the landing officer, till
+the ship was loud and gay, and the authorities got really wild? And the
+boy of a new draft, whose face, as I passed him where he had fallen
+in,--the light dropped to it,--was pale and nervous, and his teeth
+chattering! Ah, the men we met in France, and the faces we saw briefly,
+but remember, that were before the Somme! Shadows, shadows.
+
+It rained next morning. This was Christmas Day. We were going to the
+trenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospect
+of straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, in
+an inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into my
+northerly ear, and the A.S.C. motor-car driver, who was mad, kept
+missing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint.
+One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whose
+father was the devil and his mother an ass, plunged into a pond of
+black Flanders mud as we passed, and raked us with solvent filth. We
+wiped it off our mouths. God rest you merry, gentlemen. A land so
+inundated that it inverted the raw and alien sky was on either hand.
+The mud clung to the horses and mules like dangling walnuts and bunches
+of earthy and glistening grapes. The men humped themselves in soddened
+khaki. The noise of the wheels bearing guns was like the sound of doom.
+The rain it rained. O come, all ye faithful!
+
+We got to a place where there was no more wheeled traffic. There was
+nothing moving, nothing alive. That country was apparently abandoned.
+To our front and left, for no apparent reason, three little dirty
+yellow clouds burst simultaneously over a copse, with a smash which
+made you feel you ought to be tolerant to men with shell-shock. On our
+right was an empty field. Short momentary flames leaped constantly from
+its farthermost hedge, with a noise like the rapid slamming of a row of
+iron doors. Heavy eruptions, as though subterranean, were going on all
+the time, the Lord knew where. But not a man was in sight till we got
+to a village which looked like Gomorrah the day after it happened. Some
+smoke and red dust were just settling by one of the ruins, and a man
+lay there motionless with his face in the rubbish....
+
+There was a habitation where sacking kept the wind and rain from
+unlucky holes, with holly behind pictures tacked to its walls, and a
+special piece of inviting mistletoe over a saucy lady from _La Vie
+Parisienne_. There was an elderly and serious colonel, who had an
+ancestor at Chevy Chase, but himself held independent views on war; and
+a bunch of modest boys with sparkling eyes and blithe and ironic
+comments. They also did not discuss the war in the way it is discussed
+where war is but lowered street lights. We had bully beef, the right
+sort of pudding,--those boys must have had very nice sisters,--and
+frosted cake. There were noises without, as the book of the play has
+it, and plenty of laughter within, and I enjoyed myself with a sort of
+veiled, subconscious misery; for I liked those lads; and we are so
+transitory today.
+
+Then one of them took me for a Christmas walk in his country. "Have you
+got your gas helmet?" he said. "That's right. It makes your eyes stream
+with tears, and you look such a silly ass." On we went. I began
+Christmas Day in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud too
+late; though you never can tell, when a noise like the collapse of an
+iron roof goes off behind you, where you are going to put your feet at
+that moment. We went through a little wood, where the trees were like
+broken poles with chewed ends. Over our heads were invisible things
+which moaned, shrieked, and roared in flight. It was astonishing that
+they were invisible. Sometimes the bottom of the mud of that
+communication trench was close, and sometimes not; you knew when you
+had tried. And as the parapets usually had dissolved at the more
+dubious places, and I was told and heard that Fritz had machine guns
+trained on them, I did not waste much time experimenting.
+
+I found the firing-line, as one usually does, with surprise. There was
+a barrier of sandbags, oozing grey slime, and below, in a sort of
+little cave, with his body partly resting in a pool of water, a soldier
+asleep. Just beyond was a figure so merged in the environment of
+aqueous muck and slime that I did not see him till he moved, and his
+boots squelched. He lifted a wet rag in the grey wall and got
+surprisingly rapid with a rifle which was thrust through the hole and
+went off; and then turned to look at us. "That fellow opposite is a
+nuisance," said my officer. "He's always potting at this corner." "Yes,
+sir," said the figure of mud, darkly louring under its tin hat, "but I
+know where the blighter is now, and I'll get the beggar yet." With a
+sudden recollection he then touched iron, and grinned.
+
+Slithering above the ankles in well-worked paste, and leaning against a
+wall of slime, I tried to find "the nuisance opposite" with a
+periscope; but before me was only a tangle of rusty wire, a number of
+raw holes in shabby green grass, some objects lying about which looked
+like tailors' dummies discarded to the weather, and an awe-inspiring
+stillness.
+
+There were some interchanges with serious men, who did not sing, but
+who sat about in mud, or leaned against it, and were covered with it,
+or who were waiting with rifles ready, or looking through periscopes,
+or doing things over fires which smoked till the eyes were red. "Come
+and see our mine crater," said my guide. "It's a topper. Fritz made it,
+but we've got it."
+
+I knew where that crater would be, and I thought the less of it as a
+spectacle. But "out there" one must follow one's leader wherever he
+goes. He was going to make me crawl after him in "No Man's Land," and
+it was not dark yet. So I acquired that sinking sensation described in
+the pill advertisements. The mud got down our collars; but we arrived,
+though I don't know how, because I was thinking too much. It was only a
+deep yellow hole in the ground, too, that crater, with barbed wire
+spilled into it and round it; and you were warned to breathe gently in
+it, for Fritz might lob a bomb over. He was six yards off.
+
+In the forlorn and dying light of that Christmas Day I then noticed a
+muffled youngster beside me, who might have been your son, alone,
+gripping a rifle with a fixed bayonet, his thoughts Heaven knows where,
+a box of bombs ready to hand in the filth; and his charge was to give
+first warning of movement in that stillness beyond. As we crawled away,
+leaving him there, I turned to look at that boy of yours, and his eyes
+met mine....
+
+_December 1916._
+
+
+
+
+XX. The Ruins
+
+
+For more than two years this town could not have been more remote from
+us if it had been in another planet. We were but a few miles from it,
+but the hills hid it, and the enemy was between us and the hills. This
+town was but a name, a legend.
+
+Now the enemy had left it. When going into it for the first time you
+had the feeling that either you or the town was bewitched. Were you
+really there? Were time and space abolished? Or perhaps the town itself
+was supernatural; it was spectral, projected by unknowable evil. And
+for what purpose? Suspicious of its silence, of its solitude, of all
+its aspects, you verified its stones by touching them, and looked about
+for signs that men had once been there.
+
+Such a town, which has long been in the zone of fire, and is then
+uncovered by the foe, gives a wayfarer who early ventures into it the
+feeling that this is the day after the Last Day, and that he has been
+overlooked. Somehow he did not hear Gabriel's trumpet; everybody else
+has gone on. There is not a sound but the subdued crackling of flames
+hidden somewhere in the overthrown and abandoned. There is no movement
+but where faint smoke is wreathing slowly across the deserted streets.
+The unexpected collapse of a wall or cornice is frightful. So is the
+silence which follows. A starved kitten, which shapes out of nothing
+and is there complete and instantaneous at your feet--ginger stripes,
+and a mew which is weak, but a veritable voice of the living--is first
+a great surprise, and then a ridiculous comfort. It follows you about.
+When you miss it, you go back to look for it--to find the miserable
+object racing frantically to meet you. Lonely? The Poles are not more
+desolate. There is no place as forlorn as that where man once was
+established and busy, where the patient work of his hands is all round,
+but where silence has fallen like a secret so dense that you feel that
+if it were not also so desperately invisible you could grasp a corner
+of it, lift the dark veil, and learn a little of what was the doom of
+those who have vanished. What happened to them?
+
+It cannot be guessed. House fronts have collapsed in rubble across the
+road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their
+eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and
+their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have
+avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has
+dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the
+dissolute. The lower floors are heaps of damp mortar and bricks. Very
+rarely a solitary picture hangs awry on the wall of a house where there
+is no other sign that it was ever inhabited. I saw in such a room the
+portrait of a child who in some moment long ago laughed while it
+clasped a dog in a garden. You continue to gaze at a sign like that,
+you don't know why, as though something you cannot name might be
+divined, if you could but hit upon the key to the spell. What is the
+name of the evil that has fallen on mankind?
+
+The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of
+the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the
+crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A
+rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage,
+and ugly litter and fragments. It is the flies which find these gardens
+pleasant. Theirs is now the only voice of Summer, as though they were
+loathly in the mouth of Summer's carcase. It is perplexing to find how
+little remains of the common things of the household: a broken doll, a
+child's boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a
+corn-chandler's ledger.
+
+It was lying open in the muck of the roadway, wet and discoloured. Till
+that moment I had not come to the point of believing the place. The
+town was not humane. It was not credible. It might have been, for all I
+could tell, a simulacrum of the work of men. Perhaps it was the patient
+and particular mimicry of us by an unknown power, a power which was
+alarmingly interested in our doings; and in a frenzy over its partial
+failure it had attempted to demolish its laborious semblance of what we
+do. Was this power still observant of its work, and conscious of
+intruders? All this was a sinister warning of something invisible and
+malign, which brooded over our affairs, knew us too well, though
+omitting the heart of us, and it was mocking us now by defiling in an
+inhuman rage its own caricature of our appearance.
+
+But there, lying in the road, was that corn-chandler's ledger. It was
+the first understandable thing I had seen that day. I began to believe
+these abandoned and silent ruins had lived and flourished, had once a
+warm kindred life moving in their empty chambers; enclosed a
+comfortable community, like placid Casterbridge. Men did stand here on
+sunny market days, and sorted wheat in the hollows of their hands. And
+with all that wide and hideous disaster of the Somme around it was
+suddenly understood (as when an essential light at home, but a light
+that has been casually valued, goes out, and leaves you to the dark)
+that an elderly farmer, looking for the best seed corn in the
+market-place, while his daughter the dairymaid is flirting with his
+neighbour's son, are more to us than all the Importances and the Great
+Ones who in all history till now have proudly and expertly tended their
+culture of discords.
+
+I don't know that I ever read a book with more interest than that
+corn-chandler's ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a
+commonplace record of the common life which circulated there,
+testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have
+been no matter to me. Not for such successes are our flags displayed
+and our bells set pealing. It named customers at Thiepval, Martinpuich,
+Courcelette, Combles, Longueval, Contalmaison, Pozieres, Guillemont,
+Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of those
+places being what it was. Those villages did not exist, except as
+corruption in a land that was tumbled into waves of glistening clay
+where the bodies of men were rotting disregarded like those of dogs
+sprawled on a midden. My knowledge of that country, got with some
+fatigue, anxiety, fright and on certain days dull contempt for the
+worst that could happen, because it seemed that nothing could matter
+any more, my idea of that country was such that the contrast of those
+ledger accounts was uncanny and unbelievable. Yet amid all the misery
+and horror of the Somme, with its shattering reminder of finality and
+futility at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in the
+road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should
+rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which
+would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the
+future would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimly
+recall ancient tales of woe.
+
+_Spring 1917._
+
+
+
+
+XXI. Lent, 1918
+
+
+It was Meredith's country, and Atlantic weather in Lent. The downs were
+dilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company of
+pines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures.
+The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vast
+approaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the sky
+was transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast over
+the hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valley
+suddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a god had
+arrived, and that was the sign. Miss Muffet, whose profile, having the
+breeze and the surprise of the sun in her hair, was dedicated with a
+quivering and aureate nimbus, pulled aside the brush of a small yew,
+and exclaimed; for there, neatly set in the angle of the bough, was a
+brown cup with three blue eggs in it. I saw all this, and tried my best
+to get back to it; but I was not there. I saw it clearly--the late
+shower glittered on my coat and on the yew with the nest in it--but it
+was a scene remote as a memorable hour of a Surrey April of years ago.
+I could not approach; so I went back into the house.
+
+But there was no escape. For I freely own that I am one of those who
+refused to believe there would be "a great offensive." (Curse such
+trite and sounding words, which put measureless misery through the mind
+as unconsciously as a boy repeats something of Euclid.) I believe that
+no man would now dare to order it. The soldiers, I knew, with all the
+signs before them, still could not credit that it would be done. The
+futile wickedness of these slaughters had been proved too often. They
+get nowhere. They settle nothing. This last, if it came, would be worse
+than all the rest in its magnitude and horror; it would deprive Europe
+of a multitude more of our diminishing youth, and end, in the
+exhaustion of its impetus, with peace no nearer than before. The old
+and indurated Importances in authority, safe far behind the lines,
+would shrink from squandering humanity's remaining gold of its life,
+even though their ignoble ends were yet unachieved. But it had been
+ordered. Age, its blind jealousy for control now stark mad, impotent in
+all but the will and the power to command and punish, ignoring every
+obvious lesson of the past, the appeal of the tortured for the sun
+again and leisure even to weep, and the untimely bones of the young as
+usual now as flints in the earth of Europe, had deliberately put out
+the glimmer of dawn.
+
+Well for those who may read the papers without personal knowledge of
+what happens when such a combat has begun; but to know, and to be
+useless; to be looking with that knowledge at Meredith's country in
+radiant April! There are occasions, though luckily they come but once
+or twice in life, when the mind is shocked by the basal verities
+apparently moving as though they were fugitive; thought becomes dizzy
+at the daylight earth suddenly falling away at one's feet to the
+vacuity of the night. Some choice had to be made. I recalled another
+such mental convulsion: by Amiens Cathedral, near midnight, nearly four
+years ago, with the French guns rumbling through the city in retreat,
+and the certainty that the enemy would be there by morning on his way
+to Paris. One thing a campaigner learns: that matters are rarely quite
+so bad or so good as they seem. Saying this to my friend, the farmer
+(who replied that, in any case, he must go and look to the cows), I
+turned to some books.
+
+Yet resolution is needed to get the thoughts indoors at such a time.
+They are out of command. A fire is necessary. You must sit beside a
+company of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flames
+curling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily look
+into that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It has
+become acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no use
+in France, dwelling upon those villages and cross-roads you once knew,
+now spouting smoke and flames, where good friends are waiting, having
+had their last look on earth, as the doomed rearguards.
+
+The best books for refuge in times of stress are of the "notebook" and
+"table-talk" kind. Poetry I have tried, but could not approach it. It
+is too distant. Romance, which many found good, would never hold my
+attention. But I had Samuel Butler's _Note Books_ with me for two years
+in France, and found that the right sort of thing. You may begin
+anywhere. There are no threads to look for. And you may stop for a
+time, while some strange notion of the author's is in contest for the
+command of the intelligence with your dark, resurgent thoughts; but
+Butler always won. His mental activity is too fibrous, masculine, and
+unexpected for any nonsense. But I had to keep a sharp eye on Butler.
+His singular merits were discovered by others who had no more than
+heard of him, but found he was exactly what they wanted. If his volume
+of _Note Books_ is not the best example of its sort we have, then I
+should be glad to learn the name of the best. This Lent I tried
+Coleridge again. But surely one's mind must be curiously at random to
+go to such woolgathering. I found him what I fear Lamb and his friends
+knew him to be--a tireless and heavy preacher through the murk of whose
+nebulous scholarship and philosophy the revealing gleams of wisdom are
+so rare that you are almost too weary to open the eyes to them when
+they flash. Selden is better, but abstract, legal, and dry.
+
+Hazlitt compelled a renewal of an old respect; his humanity, his
+instinct for essentials, his cool detection of pretence and cant,
+however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for the
+embodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the clear,
+hard, bright, vigorous weather of the downs when the wind is
+up-Channel. It is bracing. But I discovered another notebook, of which
+I have heard so little that it shows what good things may be lost in
+war; for this book was published in 1914. It is the _Impressions and
+Comments_ of Havelock Ellis. There have been in the past critics of
+life and the things men do who have been observers as acute, as
+well-equipped in knowledge, and have had a command of English as free
+and accurate, as the author of "Impressions and Comments"; but not
+many. Yet such judgments of men, their affairs and their circumstances,
+could have been written in no other time than the years just before the
+war--the first note is dated July, 1912. The reflections are often
+chill and exposed; but so is a faithful mirror bleak, though polished
+and gleaming, when held up to grey affairs in the light of a day which
+is ominous. You seem to feel in this book the cold draught moving
+before the storm which has not come--the author knew of no storm to
+come, and does not even hint at it; but the portents, and the look of
+the minds of his fellows, make him feel uncomfortable, and he asks what
+ails us. Now we know. It is strange that a book so wise and enlivening,
+whether it is picturing the Cornish coast in spring, the weakness of
+peace propaganda, Bianca Stella, Rabelais, the Rules of Art, the Bayeux
+Tapestry, or Spanish cathedrals, should have been mislaid and
+forgotten....
+
+The fire is dying. It is grey, fallen, and cold. The house is late and
+silent. There is no sound but the ghostly creaking of a stair; our
+thoughts are stealing away again. We creep out after them to the outer
+gate. What are books and opinions? The creakings of an old house uneasy
+with the heavy remembrances and the melancholy of antiquity, and with
+some midnight presage of its finality.
+
+The wind and rain have passed. There is now but the icy stillness and
+quiet of outer space. The earth is Limbo, the penumbra of a dark and
+partial recollection; the shadow, vague and dawnless, over a vast stage
+from which the consequential pageant has gone, and is almost forgotten,
+the memory of many events merged now into formless night itself, and
+foundered profoundly beneath the glacial brilliance of a clear heaven
+alive with stars. Only the stars live, and only the stars overlook the
+place that was ours. The war--was there a war? It must have been long
+ago. Perhaps the shades are troubled with vestiges of an old and
+dreadful sin. If once there were men who heard certain words and became
+spellbound, and in the impulse of that madness forgot that their earth
+was good, but very brief, and turned from their children and women and
+the cherished work of their hands to slay each other and destroy their
+communities, it all happened just as the leaves of an autumn that is
+gone once fell before the sudden mania of a wind, and are resolved.
+What year was that? The leaves of an autumn that is long past are
+beyond time. The night is their place, and only the unknowing stars
+look down to the little blot of midnight which was us, and our pride,
+and our wisdom, and our heroics.
+
+_April 1918._
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Junk, by H. M. Tomlinson
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