OLD JUNK

BY

H. M. TOMLINSON

FOREWORD BY S. K. RATCLIFFE

NEW YORK ALFRED · A · KNOPF 1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BYALFRED 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 writingspublished 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 whoduring the later stages of the war visited the western front assured methat this was the right word by which to describe the memory left amongofficers and men, not so much by his work as a war correspondent, as byhis original and fascinating character. A legend, too, he appears to bein the newspaper world of London: but there in a different sense, byreason of the singular contradiction between the human creature belovedof all his fellows and the remarkable productions of his pen. _

_The first thing to say about H. M. Tomlinson, the thing of which youbecome acutely aware on making his acquaintance, is that he is aLondoner. "Nearly a pure-blooded London Saxon" is his characterizationof himself. And so it is. He could have sprung from no other stock. Inperson and speech, in the indefinable quality of the man, in the humourwhich continually tempers his tremendous seriousness, he belongs toLondon. Among the men of our time who have done creative writing I canthink of no other about whom this can be so precisely stated. _

_It was in the opening years of the century that I first began tonotice his work. His name was appearing in the columns of a Londonmorning newspaper, since absorbed by the_ Daily News, _over articleswhich, if my memory is not at fault, were mainly concerned with thelife of Thames side. They were written with extraordinary care. The manwho did them had, clearly, no competitor in Fleet Street. And hefurnishes a striking illustration of the chances and misfits of thejournalistic life. When, after some years of absence in the Far East, Iwas 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 greatLondon newspaper. A man born for the creation of beauty in words wasdoing daily turn along with the humble chronicler of metropolitantrivialities. _

_A year or two before the war the quality of his mind and of his stylewas revealed in_ THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE--_a "narrative of the voyage ofthe tramp steamer_ Capella, _from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, andthence two thousand miles along the forests of the Amazon and MadeiraRivers to the San Antonio Falls, " returning by Barbados, Jamaica, andTampa. Its author called it merely "an honest book of travel. " It isthat no doubt; but in a degree so eminent, one is tempted to say thatan honest book of travel, when so conceived and executed, must surelycount among the noblest works of the literary artist. _

_The great war provided almost unlimited work for men of letters, andnot seldom work that was almost as far from their ordinary business asfighting itself. It carried Tomlinson into the guild of warcorrespondents. In the early months he represented the paper to whichfor some years he had been attached, the London_ Daily News. _Later, under the co-operative scheme which emerged from the restrictive policyadopted by all the belligerent governments, his dispatches came to beshared among a partnership which included the London_ Times--_as odd anarrangement for a man like Tomlinson as could well be imagined. Itwould be foolish to attempt an estimate of his correspondence fromFrance. It was beautiful copy, but it was not war reporting. To thoseof us who knew him it remained a marvel how he could do it at all. Butthere was no marvel in the fact, attested by a notable variety ofwitnesses, of Tomlinson as an influence and a memory, persisting untilthe dispersal of the armies, as of one who was the friend of all, asweet and fine spirit moving untouched amid the ruin and terror, expressing itself everywhere with perfect simplicity, and at times witha shattering candor. _

_From France he returned, midway in the war, to join the men who, underthe Command of H. W. Massingham, make the editorial staff of theLondon_ Nation _the most brilliant company of journalists in the world. His hand may be traced week by week in many columns and especially, inalternate issues, on the page given up to the literary_ causerie. 

_To the readers of books Tomlinson is known at present by_ THE SEAAND THE JUNGLE _alone. The war, it may be, did something to retardits fame. But the time is coming when none will dispute its right toa place of exceptional honour among records of travel--alongside thevery few which, during the two or three decades preceding the generaloverturn, had been added to the books of the great wayfaringcompanions. It is remarkably unlike all others, in its union ofaccurate chronicle with intimate self-revelation; and, although it isthe sustained expression of a mood, it is extremely quotable. I chooseas 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 thatpassage--its spiritual quality, its rhythm, its images. And he willknow 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 andessays of which it is composed are of different years and, as a glancewill show, of a wide diversity of theme. The lover of the great bookwill be at home with the perfect picture of the dunes, as well as withthe two brilliantly contrasted voyages; while none who can feel thetouch of the interpreter will miss the beauty of the pieces that may beless 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 withand transfused, he may write one of the living books enshrining theexperience of these last five years. But, just as likely he may not. Isubscribe, in ending this rough note, to a judgment recently deliveredby a fellow worker that among all the men writing in England todaythere is none known to us whose work reveals a more indubitable senseof 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. Thebarometer has fallen, and the wind has risen to hunt the rain. I do notknow where _Celestine_ is going, and, what is better, do not care. Thisis December and this is Algiers, and I am tired of white glare anddust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf. Allday the sky was without a flaw, and the summer silence outside thetown, where the dry road goes between hedges of arid prickly pears, wasnot reticence but vacuity. But I sail tonight, and so the barometer isfalling, and I do not know where _Celestine_ will take me. I do notcare where I go with one whose godparents looked at her and called herthat. 

There is one place called Jidjelli we shall see, and there is anothercalled Collo; and there are many others, whose names I shall neverlearn, tucked away in the folds of the North African hills where theycome down to the sea between Algiers and Carthage. They will revealthemselves as I find my way to Tripoli of Barbary. I am bound forTripoli, 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. Itfalls. When I went aboard the wind was howling through the shipping inthe harbour of Algiers. And again, _Celestine_ is French, and so we cando little more than smile at each other to make visible the friendshipof our two great nations. A cable is clanking slowly, and sailors runand 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 starsbegin to revolve about us as though the wind really had got the skyloose. The _Celestine_ is turning her head for the sea. The stars thenspeed 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 outalone, with me. Tripoli becomes more remote than I thought it to be inthe early afternoon, when the French sailor talked to me in a caféwhile he drank something so innocently pink that it could not accountaltogether for his vivacity and sudden open friendship for a shy alien. He wanted me to elope with _Celestine_. He wanted to show me hisAfrican shore, to see his true Mediterranean. I had travelled fromMorocco to Algiers, and was tired of tourist trains, historic ruins, hotels, Arabs selling picture-postcards and worse, and girls dancingthe dance of the Ouled-Nails to the privileged who had paid a fewfrancs to see them do it. I had observed that tranquil sea; and inplaces, as at Oran, had seen in the distance terraces of coloured rockpoised 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, andlifts us high, turns us giddy with a sudden betrayal and descent; anddoes it again, and again. Africa has vanished. Where Algiers probablywas there are but several frail stars far away in the dark that soar ina hurry, and then collapse into the deep and are doused. 

But here is le Capitaine. There is no need, of course, to be anxiousfor _Celestine_. If her master is not a sailor, then all the signs arewrong. 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. _Voilà!_

He is a little dark man, with quick, questioning eyes, and hair like aclothesbrush. His short alert hair, his raised and querulous eyebrows, his taut moustaches, and a bit of beard that hangs like a dagger fromhis under lip, give him the appearance of constant surprise andfretfulness. When he is talking to me he is embarrassingly playful--butI shall show him presently, with fair luck, that my inelastic Saxonputty can transmute itself, can also volatilise in abandonment tosparkling nonsense; yet not tonight--not tonight, monsieur. He is sogay and friendly to me whenever he sees me. But when one of the staffdoes that which is not down in the book, I become alarmed. Monsieurbangs the table till the cruet-stoppers leap out, and his eyes areunpleasant. Yes, he is the master. He rises, and shakes his forefingerat the unfortunate till his hand is a quivering haze and his speech ablast. "Ou--e--e--eh!" cries the skipper at last, when the unfortunateis on the run. 

He has an idea I cannot read the menu, so when an omelette is served heinforms me, in case I should suppose it is a salad. He makes helpfulfarmyard noises. There is no mistaking eggs. There is no mistakingpork. But I think he has the wrong pantomime for the ship's beef, unless French horses have the same music as English cows. After thefirst dinner, I was indiscreet enough to refuse the cognac with thecoffee. "Ah!" he chided, smiling with craft, and shaking a knowingfinger at me. He could read my native weakness. I was discovered. "Viskee! You 'ave my viskee!" A dreadful doubt seized me, and I wouldhave refused, but repressed my panic, and pretended he had found myheart. 

He rose, and shouted a peremptory order. A little private cabinet wasopened. 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 forwhich he imagines I am perishing in stoic British silence. "Viskee!" Idrain off, with simulated delight, my large dose of methylated spirit. Not for worlds would I undeceive the good fellow, not if this weretrain-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 EnglishGrammar, for he is wishful to know us better before I leave him. And heshall. To this Frenchman I determine to be nobler than I was made. Ithink I would teach him English all the way to Cochin-China. He writesin his notebook, very slowly, while his tongue comes out to look on, asentence like this: "The nombres Française, they are most easy that theEnglish language. " Then I put him right; and then he rises, reaches hishands up to my shoulders, looks earnestly in my eyes, and la-las myNational Anthem. It may please God not to let me look so foolish as Ifeel 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 withthe arm of the harbour thrown about my poor _Celestine_. The deck of aGrimsby trawler discharging fish in the Humber on a wet Decembermorning is no more desolating than was the look of _Celestine_ underthe mountains of Bougie; and Bougie, if you have a memory for thecoloured posters, is in the blue Mediterranean. But do I grumble? I donot. With all the world but slops, cold iron, and squalls of sleet, Iprefer _Celestine_ to Algiers. 

Most likely you have never heard of the black Mediterranean. It isusual to go there in winter, and write about it with a date-palm inevery paragraph, till you have got all the health and enjoyment thereis in the satisfaction of telling others that while they are choosingcough 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. Therewere some Arab deck passengers on our coaster. One of them sat lookingat a deck rivet as motionless as a fakir, and his face had thecomplexion of a half-ripe watermelon. His fellow-sufferers were onlyheaps of wet and dirty linen dumped in the lee alley-way. It was badenough in a bunk, where you could brace your knees against the side, and keep moderately still till you dozed off, when naturally you wereshot out sprawling into the lost drainage wandering on the erraticfloor. What those Arabs suffered on deck I cannot tell you. I neverwent up to find out. At Bougie they seemed to have left it all toAllah, with the usual result. It was clear, from a glance at thosepiles of rags, that the Arab is no more native to Algeria than theEsquimaux. I was much nearer home than the Arabs. That shining coastwhich occasionally I had surprised from Oran, which seemed afloat onthe sea, was no longer a vision of magic, the unsubstantial work ofIris, an illusionary cloud of coral, amber, and amethyst. It was thebare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin ofgranite under the wrack of the bleak north. 

As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for brightsunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, theirwhite walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks betweenthe styes. Their lissom and statuesque inhabitants become softened andbent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were ashamedto live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so well insunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle. They have not thatequality with the storm which makes the Sussex beech and oak, heavilybased and strong-armed, stand with a look of might and roar at thecharges of the Channel gale. By this you will see that Bougie must waituntil I call that way again. From the look of the sky, too, there is nodoubt we are in for a spell of the kind of weather I never expected tomeet in Africa. I was a stranger there, but I knew the language ofthose squadrons of dark clouds driving into the bay. 

The northern sky was full of their gloomy keels. There were intervalswhen the full expanse of Bougie Bay became visible, with its concourseof mountains crowded to the shore. At the base of the dark declivitiesthe combers were bursting, and the spume towered on the gale like greysmoke. Out of the foam rose harsh rubble and screes to incline againstbroken precipices, and those stark walls were interrupted by mid-airslopes of grass which appeared ready to avalanche into the tumultbelow, but remained, livid areas of a dim mass which rose into dizzypinnacles and domes, increasing the tumbling menace of the sky. A fleetof clouds of deep draught ran into Africa from the north; went agroundon those crags, were wrecked and burst, their contents streaming fromthem and hiding the aerial reef on which they had struck. The landvanished, 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 caredas little for the storm as for the steward. His last bales were nosooner in the lighters than he made for Jidjelli. But Jidjelli dauntedeven him. The nearer we got, the worse it looked. My own feeling wasthat the gathering seas had taken charge of our scallop, a cork in thesurf, and were pitching her, helpless, towards terrible walls built ofnight 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 andsteadily develop towards distinction. Then the howling gale began toscream, the ceiling lowered and darkened, and merged with the rocks, reducing the world but to our _Celestine_ in the midst of near flashesof white in an uproar. When presently a little daylight came into chaosto give it shape again, there was an inch of hail on our deck, and themountains had been changed to white marble. We saw a red light burn lowin the place where Jidjelli ought to be, a signal that it wasimpossible to enter. Our skipper put about. 

That is all I know of Jidjelli, and all I wanted to know on such anevening. The sound of the surf on the rocks was better to hear when itwas not so close. We followed that coast all night while I lay awake, shaking to the racing of the propeller; and I blessed the unknownengineers of the North Country who took forethought of nights of thatkind when doing their best for _Celestine_; for, though bruised, Istill loved her above Algiers and Timgad. She had character, she hadset her course, and she was holding steadily to it, and did not praythe uncompassionate to change its face. 

III

For more than a week we washed about in the surf of a high, dark coasttowards Tunis. We might have been on the windward side of Ultima Thule. Supposing you could have been taken miraculously from your fogs andmidday lamps of London, and put with me in the _Celestine_, and toldthat that sullen land looming through the murk could be yours, if youcould guess its name, then you would have guessed nothing below thefortieth parallel. 

No matter; when you were told, you would have laughed at your loss. Nowyou understood why it was called the Dark Continent. It looked the homeof slavery, murder, rhinoceroses, the Congo, war, human sacrifices, andgorillas. It had the forefront of the world of skulls and horrors, ultimatums, mining concessions, chains, and development. Its rulerswould 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 atall. I was merely looking at it. The feeling had been growing on mesince 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 notchill you because you wish you were home, and home is far away. It doesnot come of your rare and lucky idleness, in which you have to donothing but enjoy yourself; generally a sufficient reason formelancholy, though rarely so in my own case. No, Africa itself is thereason. There is an invisible emanation from its soil, the aura of evilin antiquity. You cannot see it, at first you are unaware it is there, and cannot know, therefore, what is the matter with you. This hauntingpremonition is different from mere wearying and boredom. It gets worse, the longer you stay; it goes deeper than sadness, it descends into aconviction of something that is without hope, that is bad in itsnature, and unrepentant in its arrogant heart. When you have got so fardown you have had time to discover what that is which has put you solow. The day may be radiant, the sky just what you had hoped to find inAfrica, and the people in the market-place a lively and chromaticjangle; but the shadow of what we call inhumanity (when we are tryingto persuade ourselves that humanity is something very different) chillsand darkens the heart. 

Yet the common sky of North Africa might be the heaven of the firstmorning, innocent of knowledge that night is to come. It is not a hardblue roof; your sight is lost in the atmosphere which is azure. The sunmore than shines; his beams ring on the rocks, and glance in coloursfrom the hills. From a distance the flowers on a hill slope will pourdown to the sea in such a torrent of hues that you might think the archof the rainbow you saw there had collapsed in the sun and was now rillsand cascades. The grove of palms holding their plumes above a whitevillage might be delicate pencillings on the yellow sheet of desert. The heat is a balm. The shadows are stains of indigo on the roads andpale walls. 

IV

One day we found Sfax. I went ashore at Sfax, interested in a namequite new to me. The guide-book did not even mention it; perhaps it wasnot 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 ofphosphate. Sfax! Well, anyhow, I had long wished for Africa, anywherein Africa, and here I was, not eager to get home again, but notdisinclined. What I had seen of it so far was a rather too frequentedhighway opposite the coast of Europe--a complementary establishment. Progress had macadamised it. Commerce and its wars had graded anduniformed and drilled its life. Its silent people marched in ranks, asit were, along mapped roads foredoomed, and its mills went round. Itslife was expressed for export. It was on the way to Manchester andsuccess. Of all the infernal uses to which a country can be put thereis none like development. Let every good savage make incantationagainst it, or, if to some extent he has been developed, cross himselfagainst the fructification of the evil. As for us whites, we areeternally damned, for we cannot escape the consequences of our pastcleverness. The Devil has us on a complexity of strings, and some daywill pull the whole lot tight. But Sfax! Had I escaped? Was there achance?

I found a city wall, a huge battlement, ancient and weathered, like anunscalable cliff, and going through its gate was entering the shadowsof 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 andcasements, which leaned towards each other confidentially, and leftonly a ragged line of light above. These alley-ways were crowded withcamels, asses, and strange men. An understanding and sneering camel ina narrow passage will force you to take what chance there is of escapein desecrating a mosque, while Moslems watch you as the only Christianthere, or of going under its slobbering mouth and splay feet. It doesnot care which. 

It was market-day for Sfax. There were little piles of vivid fruitbeside white walls where a broad ray of sunlight found them. There weresilversmiths at work, tent-makers, and the makers of camel harness. Thetanners had laid skins for us to walk over. There were exotic smells. Iwent exploring the crooked turnings with an indifference which wasstudied. I was getting an interesting time, but was distinctlyconscious of eyes, a ceaseless stream of eyes that floated by, watchfulthough making no sign. Several times I found myself jostled with someroughness. It occurred to me that I had heard on the ship that Sfax wasthe only town which had offered resistance to the French; its men havea fine reputation throughout Tunisia, which they do something now andthen to maintain, in consequence. They certainly appeared a sturdy andvirile lot. They were not listless, like the Arabs of Algeria, who havenothing to show for themselves but the haughty and aloof bearing of theproud but beaten. 

Having discovered that the enemy was vulnerable though strong, the menof Sfax go through the day now with the directed activity of those whoonce had got the worst of it, but have a hope of doing better nexttime. They gave me a lively and adventurous scene. They moved withsilent and stealthy quickness. Their eyes glanced sideways from undertheir cowls. Their hands were hidden under their jibbahs. A few of themstared with the hate of the bereft. It is not possible to faceeverybody in a press which moves in all directions, and I was the onlyEuropean who was there. 

Passing a mosque, where I noticed the Moslems had attempted, but hadnot completed, the obliteration of some representations of birds, --sothe mosque was once, evidently, a place where other gods had beenworshipped, --I hesitated, wishing to look closer into this curiosity, but recollected myself, and was passing on. An Arab in the turban ofone who had been to Mecca was squatting cross-legged on the old marblepavement outside the mosque, and I just took in that he was a finevenerable fellow with an important beard, with a look of wisdom andexperience in his steady glance from under the strong arches of hiseyebrows 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 upwardhad a smile of understanding mischief, and in such an alien city asSfax, I was prepared to declare there is but one God and Mahomet is Hisprophet. For that sort of thing comes easy to me; and would have beenquite true, as far as it went. Then I went back to him, and fearingthat after all I might be addressing but the parrot which had alreadyexhausted its vocabulary, I tried it on him: "Shall I take my boots offhere, father, or may I sit down with you?"

"Sit down, " he said. 

He was a man of medicine. He sold there prophylactics againstsmall-pox, adultery, blindness, the evil eye, sterility, or any othertrouble which you thought threatened you. If a man feared for thefaithfulness of his spouse, it seems Father the Hadj could secure itwith a charm, and so allow him to spend the night elsewhere in perfectenjoyment and content. That is what the quiet old cynic told me, andinvited me to inspect his display of amulets and fetishes, colouredglass tablets with Arabic inscriptions, and a deal of stuff whichlooked unreasonable to me, articles the holy man either could not orwould not resolve into sense. 

His English, which he had learned as a shipping agent for the pilgrimtraffic, soon reached its narrow limits, to my sorrow. When it leftcommon objects and we wished to compare our world (for there is nodoubt he was an experienced and understanding elder who knew to withina little what he might expect of his God and of his fellows), we wereleft smiling at each other, and had to guess the rest. Yet at least thebazaar could witness this good Moslem of age and admitted wisdomsitting opposite a dubious Christian in a companionable manner; andthere was that testimony to my advantage. They even watched him drawhis finger across his throat in serious and energetic pantomime, andsaw me nod in grave appreciation, when he was trying to make meunderstand what was his sympathy for the Christian conquerors of Sfax. 

I went outside the landward gate of the city, and looked out over thelevel of brilliant sand which stretched out from there to Lake Tchad. What a voyage! What a lure! Perhaps there is no more perilous journeyon earth than that, and if a traveller would vanish into the past, intosuch Oriental countries as the voyagers of Hakluyt saw with wonder, then to leave Sfax, and go across country to the Niger, would equalwhat once came of fooling with the arcana of the Djinn. Though, afterall, 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 almostcertain the magic would be too powerful. 

About the bright yellow sea of the desert which came up to the highcliffs of the town, the squatting camels made dark hummocks. Strings ofdonkeys converged on the city gate bearing water-pots and baskets ofcharcoal. Sometimes a line of camels swayed outwards through the crowd, disappeared among the shrines, going south. Watching such a caravan gowas the same as watching a ship leave port. 

By the wayside was a huckster. He banged a tomtom till he had gathereda crowd from the loose concourse of men who had come long journeys withesparto grass, or gums and ostrich plumes, and much else from thesecret region inland. He was selling cotton shirts, and was anentertaining villain. By the corners of his mouth his humour was leery. He did not laugh, but his grimaces were funny. The variegated crowd andthat huckster was too enticing, and forgetting I had not seen one of myown kind since leaving the ship, and that my face among those black andbrown masks was as loud as the tomtom, I mingled my outrageous touristtweeds with the graceful folds of the robes. The huckster kept glancingat me, and from grave side-long glances that crowd of men went to theextraordinary length of grim smiles. Suddenly I recognized the trick ofthat Arab cheapjack. It may be seen at work in Poplar, my native parishto which the ships come, when a curious and innocent Chinaman joins thegroup about the fluent quack in the market place. 

As soon as dignity permitted I passed on, and my dignity did not keepme waiting for any length of time. 

Uncertain, and not a little nervous, I wandered among some plantationsof olives and false peppers, where the domes of the tombs floated likewhite bubbles on the foliage. Here an Arab beckoned to me, and told mehe had been watching me for some time--for he was an English medicalmissionary in disguise--and warned me that these gardens and shrineswere quite the wrong place to wander in alone. It appears that only afew days since the flame of insurrection flashed down the bazaar, licked up a few French soldiers who happened to be there, and hadalmost got a hold before the garrison appeared and doused it. He tookme to his house, with its windows heavily barred, for there hispredecessor had been murdered. (If this could happen at thestarting-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 ofhay and stable muck, where camels had carefully folded themselves onthe ground, and chewed reflectively, their eyes half closed; and largedrowsy asses mechanically fanned their ears at the loathly swarms. Themissionary surmised that the caravanserai below was the perfectreflection of one we had heard more about, which was once at Bethlehem. The square was enclosed with flat-roofed stables, and it being a busytime they were all occupied. The first one, immediately below us, wasfilled with a family of Kabyles, which consisted chiefly of amagnificent virago of a wife, tattooed, with a fine gold ring in hernostrils, who seemed to have a trying life with her mild andcontemplative old husband. She had more children than one could countwithout giving the matter that close attention which might bemisinterpreted. She cradled them in the manger every night. Loud as hervoice was, though, I could almost hear the old man smile as he walkedaway from her. They had two contemptuous camels who never lifted aneyelid when she raised her voice to them, but chewed calmly on, withfaces turned impassively towards the New Jerusalem of camels, whereviragoes are not; and several resigned asses who appeared to havehanded their souls back to their Maker, because souls are but extratrammels in this place of sorrow. 

Next door to them was a regular tenant who bred goats, and fed them outof British biscuit-tins. Beyond them the stable was occupied by a partyof swarthy ruffians who had arrived with a cargo of esparto grass. Inthe far corner, a family, crowded out, had been living for weeks undera structure of horrible rags. Smoke, issuing from a dozen seams, gavetheir home the look of a smouldering manure heap. 

V

You probably know there are place-names which, when whisperedprivately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit eastof the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print without athrill. 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 anotherphase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco, Para, Port Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie River, Tripoli ofBarbary. They are some of mine. Rome should be there, I know, andAthens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and that is all I can sayabout it. 

Why give reasons for our preferences? How often have our preferencesany 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 mewhen my mind is tired. Others may make magic with Ostend, Biarritz, orAncoats; and they are just as lucky as the man who obtains the spell bylooking at the Dry Tortugas on the map. 

When I set out from Newport on this voyage, I did not expect to seeTripoli of Barbary. We have never considered the possibility that ourfavourite place-names really do stand for stones that have veritableshapes and smells under a sun which comes and goes daily. Nor was mysteamer exactly the sort of craft which could, by the look of her, everattain to the coast of Barbary. What would a steamer know about it? Shewould never fetch the landfall of a dream. I was not surprised, therefore, when she fetched Tripoli quite wrong; not the place at allfor which I was looking on the southern horizon. But then, she was buttaking crockery there, in crates; and crockery is less vulnerable, isrough freight, compared to a fancy. The crockery, however, got to itsTripoli quite safely. 

We anchored; and there was Tripoli, standing round a little bay, withits buildings, variously coloured, crowded to the west, and slenderminarets standing as masts over the flat decks of the houses. I landedat a narrow water-gate, and the Turkish officials regarded me as thoughI had come to remove the country. When I wished to embark again, thesecurious people in uniform were even more serious than when I arrived. After a long hesitation, permission was given me niggardly to leaveTripoli, and my ship's boatmen pointed out the urgent need to supply acertain rowboat in the bay with that morsel of paper. To lose that tinydocument would have a shocking result, for a warship was in the bay tosupport the rowboat. We passed that warship. Some day a hilarioustraveller will tear his document into fragments, and that warship willfire at him, and sink. The system here, a mere tabulation of fear andsuspicion, those reflexes of evildoers who have the best of reasons tobe jealous of their neighbours, is protective exclusiveness in itsperfect flower, and perhaps it would be better to be really dead thanto live under it as a warm, law-abiding corpse. 

I should guess that, with a slight magnification to make the objectplainer, there are three soldiers to each worker in North Africa. Onfrom Oran the gaudy fellow in uniform has been very conspicuous, themost leisured and prosperous of the inhabitants, and one cameunwillingly to the conclusion that it is more profitable to smokecigarettes in a country than to grow corn in it. As for Tripoli, itsuniformed protectors hide the protected; but perhaps its natives havelearned how to live by killing one another. It is possible I have notdivined the more subtle ways of God's providence. 

Tripoli, like other towns oh these shores, looks as though it weresloughing away. Where stones fall, there they lie. In the centre of thetown is a marble triumphal arch in honour of Marcus Aurelius. Age wouldaccount for much of its ruin, but not all; yet it still stands cold, haughty, austere, though decrepit, in Tripolitan mud, with mean stuccoand plaster buildings about it. The arch itself is filled in, and isused as a dwelling. Its tenant is a greengrocer, and the monument toMarcus Aurelius has an odour of garlic; but it need not be supposedthat that was specially repugnant to me. How could the white marble ofMarcus, to say nothing of a warmer philosophy no less austere, beacceptable to our senses unless translated, with a familiar odour ofgarlic, by modern greengrocers? I shall think more of Tripoli ofBarbary 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 toalight, its hurried retreat down the long straight of convergingmetals, a rapidly diminishing cube, seemed to be measuring for me theisolation of the place. Clayton appeared to be two railway platformsand a row of elms across an empty road. After the last rumble of thetrain, which had the note of a distant cry of derision, there closed inthe 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 wasthe 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 overthe station fence. He was reading. Before him was a hand-cart lettered"Humphrey Monk, Grocer and General Dealer, Clayton. " The boy worespectacles which, when he looked at me, magnified his eyes so that thelad seemed a luminous and disembodied stare. I saw only the projectionof his enlarged gaze. He promised to take my luggage to Clayton. Iwalked through three miles of steady rain to the village, by a stretchof marshland so hushed by the nearness of the draining sky that theland might have been what it seemed at a little distance: merely afaint presentment of fields solvent in the wet. Its green melted intothe 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, towhich city folk retire for a change in the summer. During the wintermonths many of the shops of the big town are closed till summer bringsthe holiday-makers again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fillwith street litter, old paper, and straws. The easterly winds cut thelife out of the streets, the long ranks of automatic machines look outacross the empty parade, and rust, and the lines of the pier-deckadvance desolately far into the wind and grey sea, straight anduninterrupted. It is more than barren then, Clayton-on-Sea, for man hasbeen there, builded busily and even ornately, loaded the town withstructures for even his minor whims in idleness; and forsaken it all. So it will look on the Last Day. The advertisements clamour pills andhair-dye to a town which seems as if the Judgment Day has passed andleft the husk of life. So I was driven to the original Clayton, theplace which gave the name, the little inland village that did, when Ifound it, show some signs of welcome life. It was a clump of whitecottages in a vague cloud of trees. It had some chimneys smoking, therewas a man several fields away, and a dog sitting in a porch barked atme. Here was a little of the warmth of human contiguity. 

When night came, and the village was but a few chance and unrelatedlights, there was the choice between my bedroom and the taproom of theinn where I lodged. In the bedroom, crowning a chest of drawers, was alarge Bible, and on the wall just above was a glass case of shabbysea-birds, their eyes so placed that they appeared to be looking upfrom Holy Writ with a look of such fatuous rapture that one's idea ofimmortality became associated with bodies dusty, stuffed, and wired. (Oh, the wind and the rain!) Yet there was left the bar-parlour; andthere, usually, was a dim lamp showing but a table with assorted emptymugs, a bar with bottles and a mirror, but nobody to serve, and apicture of Queen Victoria in her coronation robes. 

There was but one other light in Clayton which showed sanctuary afterdark for the stranger. It was in Mr. Monk's shop. His shop at least hadits strange interests in its revelation of the diverse needs ofcivilized homes, for Mr. Monk sold everything likely to be wantedurgently enough by his neighbours to make a journey to greater Claytonprohibitive. In one corner of his shop a young lady was caged, for itwas also the post office. The interior of the store was confused withboxes, barrels, bags, and barricades of smaller tins and jars, withalleys for sidelong progress between them. I do not think any orderever embarrassed Mr. Monk. Without hesitation he would turn, sure ofhis intricate world, from babies' dummies to kerosene. There were cardshanging from the rafters bearing briar pipes, bottles of lotion for thehair 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 ofthese things, for their separate flavours were so blended by oldassociation that they made one indivisible smell, peculiar, but notunpleasant, when you were used to it. I found Mr. Monk's barrel of sodaquite a cherishable seat on a dull night, for the grocer's lamp wasthen the centre of a very dark world. Around it and beyond was only theblackness and silence of vacuity. And the grocer himself, if not busy, would give me his casual and valuable advice on the minor frailties ofthe human, and they seemed as engaging and confusing in theirdirectness 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 winkwhen he was sure you were not deceived. He knew much about the gentryaround, those bored and weary youths in check coats, riding breeches, and large pipes, and the young ladies in pale homespun costumes who hadrude and familiar words to all they judged were their equals, and wereaccompanied invariably by Aberdeen terriers. 

One evening I spoke to Mr. Monk of his boy. The boy, I said, seemed astrange little fellow. Mr. Monk, in his soiled, white apron, turned onme, 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"--andpressed a fat thumb against his head again. "But you have to put upwith any boy you can get here. " He sighed. "The bright kids go. Clearout. There's nothing fer 'em here but farm labour an' the poor rate. Idon't know how the farmers about here could make a do of it if wedidn't pay rates to keep their labourers from dying off. My boys getfed 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 thatboy. Can't see anything five minutes off, either. Must be under hisnose, and your finger shouting at it. He's got a cloudy mind. Yet he'sclever, in his way. There's the door-mat of the shop. As soon as anyone puts a foot on that mat, the clock in my kitchen strikes two. Allhis fake. But he does rile the customers. Silly young fool. If there'stwo parcels to deliver, it's the wrong one gets first chance. "

In a land where discovery had not gone beyond the blacksmith's forgeand the arable fields, a native boy who had turned a door-mat into awatchdog was an interesting possibility. There the boy was at thatmoment, stepping off his responsive mat, ill-clad, the red nose of hismeagre face almost as evident as his magnified stare of surprisedinquiry, and his mouth open. Mr. Monk chaffed him. I spoke with someseriousness to him, but he was shy, and gave no answer except somethroat noises. Yet presently he ceased to rub a boot up and down oneleg, and became articulate. He mumbled that he knew the telegraphinstrument too. ("Oho!" said Mr. Monk, looking interested. "You do, doyer? 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 fullon my face. Had I ever seen a Marconi station? I talked to him, perhapsunwisely, of some of the greater affairs. He said nothing. His mouthremained open and his stare full-orbed. 

There was one grey, still Sunday when it was not raining, the grey skybeing exhausted, and I met the grocer's boy a little distance from thevillage, sitting on a fence, reading. The boy closed his book when hesaw me, but not before I had noticed that the volume was open at a pageshowing one of those highly technical diagrams of involved machinerywhich only the elect may read. I took the book--it was a manual ofcivil engineering--and asked questions with some humility; for beforethe man who understands the manipulating of metals and can make livingservants for himself out of pipes, wheels, and valves, I stand as woulda primitive or an innocent and confiding girl before the magician whointerprets for them oracles. With the confidence of long familiarityand the faint hauteur of shyness he explained some of the diagrams inwhich, at that moment, he was interested. 

We talked of them, and of Clayton; for I wished to know how thisgrocer's boy, who went about masked with a mouth open a littlefatuously, an insignificant face, goggles, and a hand-truck, himself ofno account in a flat and unremarkable place aside from the press oflife's affairs, had discovered there were hills to which he could lifthis eyes after those humiliating interviews with Mr. Monk concerningthe wrong delivery of cheese and bacon. I was aware of the means bywhich news of the outer world got to Clayton. It came in a popularhalfpenny paper, and that outer world must therefore have seemed toClayton 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 theelms 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 nochance here. You never hear of anything. "

You never heard of anything. That countryside really looked remoteenough from the centre of affairs, from the place where men, undistracted by the news and pictures of the halfpenny illustratedPress, were getting work done. Clayton was deaf and dumb. Some milesaway the smoke of the London train was streaming across the dim fieldslike a comet. We both stood watching that comet going sure and brightto its destiny, leaving Clayton behind, regardless of us, and as thoughall we there were nothing worth. We were outside the pull of life'sspinning hub. Beyond and remote from us things would be happening; butno voice or pulse of life could vibrate us, merged as we were withinthe inelastic silence of Clayton. 

We walked back to the village, and the boy said good-night, passingthrough a white gate to a cottage unseen at that late hour of theevening. Near midnight I left my stuffed birds, with their fixed andupturned gaze, and went into the open, where above the shapeless lumpsof massive dark of Clayton the stars were detaching their arrows, forthe night was clear and frosty at last. Sirius, pulsing andresplendent, 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. Hecame forward. At first he appeared to be agitated; but as he talkedbrokenly I saw he was exalted. He was no grocer's boy then. The ladhalf dragged me, finding I did not understand him, towards his home. Wewent round to the back of the sleeping cottage, and found a littleshed. On a bench in that shed a candle was burning in a ginger-beerbottle. By the candle was a structure meaningless to me, having nothingof which I could make a guess. It was fragmentary and idle, thebuilding which a child makes of household utensils, naming it anythingto its fancy. There were old jam-pots, brass door-knobs, squares ofindia-rubber, an electric bell, glass rods, cotton reels, and thinwires which ran up to the roof out of sight. 

"Listen!" said the grocer's boy imperatively, holding up a finger. Iremained intent and suspicious, wondering. Nothing happened. I wasturning to ask the lad why I should listen, for the shed was verystill, and then I saw the hammer of the bell lift itself, as thoughalive. Some erratic and faint tinkling began. "That's my wireless, "said the grocer's boy, his eyes extraordinarily bright. "I've only justfinished it. Who is calling us?"

III. Old Junk

Business had brought the two of us to an inn on the West Coast, and allits windows opened on a wide harbour, hill-enclosed. Only smallcoasting craft were there, mostly ketches; but we had topsail schoonersalso and barquantines, those ascending and aerial rigs that would beflamboyant but for the transverse spars of the foremast, giving one whoscans them the proper apprehension of stability and poise. 

To come upon a craft rigged so, though at her moorings and with sailsfurled, her slender poles upspringing from the bright plane of abrimming harbour, is to me as rare and sensational a delight as therediscovery, when idling with a book, of a favourite lyric. That whenshe is at anchor; but to see her, all canvas set for light summer airs, at exactly that distance where defects and harshness in her appareldissolve, but not so far away but the white feathers at her throat areplain, is to exult in the knowledge that man once reached suchgreatness that he imagined and created a thing which was consonant withthe stateliness of the slow ranging of great billows, and the soaringdensity of white cumulus clouds, and with the brightness and compellingmystery of the far horizon at sundown. 

Some mornings, when breakfast-time came with the top of the tide, wecould look down on the plan of a deck beneath, with its appurtenancesand junk, casks, houses, pumps, and winches, rope and spare spars, binnacle and wheel, perhaps a boat, the regular deck seams curving andpersisting under all. An old collier ketch she might be, with a nameperhaps as romantic as the _Mary Ann_; for the owners of these littlevessels delight to honour their lady relatives. 

Away in mid-stream the _Mary Ann_ would seem but a trivial affair, nomatch for the immensities about her, diminished by the vistas of shoresand beaches, and the hills. But seen close under our window youunderstood why her men would match her, and think it no hardihood, withgales and the assaults of ponderous seas. Her many timbers, so wellwrought as to appear, at a distance, a delicate and frail shape, arereally heavy. Even in so small a craft as a ketch they are massiveenough to surprise you into wondering at the cunning of shipwrights, those artists who take gross lumps of intractable timber and metal, andcompel them to subtle mouldings and soft grace, to an image which weknow means life that moves in rhythmic loveliness. 

Talk of the art of book and picture making! There is an old fellow Imet in this village who will take the ruins of a small forest, takepine boles, metal, cordage, and canvas, and without plans, but from theideal 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 hermasts, would keep you by her side all day in harbour; build you thekind of girded, braced, and immaculate vessel, sound at every point, tuned and sweet to a precision that in a violin would make a musicianflush with inspiration, a ship to ride, lissom and light, the upliftedwestern ocean, and to resist the violence of vaulting seas and thedrive of hurricane. She will ride out of the storm afterwards, none toapplaud her, over the mobile hills travelling express, the rags of hersails triumphant pennants in the gale, the beaten seas pouring from herdeck. 

He, that modest old man, can create such a being as that; and I haveheard visitors to this village, leisured and cultured folk, whose owncreative abilities amount to no more than the arranging of somedecorative art in strata of merit, talk down to the old fellow who canthink out a vessel like that after supper, and go out after breakfastto direct the laying of her keel--talk down to him, kindly enough, ofcourse, and smilingly, as a "working man. "

I told you there were two of us, at this inn. We met at meals. I thinkhe was a commercial traveller. A tall young fellow, strongly built, apleasure to look at; carefully dressed, intelligent, with hard andclear grey eyes. He had a ruddy but fastidious complexion, though hewas, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swiftin his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he couldcome to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. Hehad no moments of laxity and hesitation, even after a breakfast, on ahot morning, too, of ham and eggs drenched in coffee. He made me feelan ineffective, delicate, and inferior being. 

He would bang out to business, after breakfast and a breezy chat withme; and I lapsed, a lazy and shameless idler, into the window, towonder among the models outside, the fascinating curves of ships andboats, as satisfying and as personal to me as music I know, as the liltof ballads and all that minor rhythm which wheels within the enclosingharmonies and balance of stars and suns in their orbits. Those forms ofships and boats are as satisfying as the lines which make the strengthand swiftness of salmon and dolphins, and the ease of the flight ofbirds with great pinions; and, in a new schooner which passed thiswindow, on her first voyage to sea--a tall and slender ship, a being soradiant in the sun as to look an evanescent and immaterial vision--asinspiring 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 onemorning. "They're mostly ancient tubs, and at the most they only muckabout the coast. Now a P. & O. Or a Cunarder! That's something to lookat. " He was looking down at me, and there was a trace of contempt inhis smile. 

He was right in a way. I felt rebuked and embarrassed, and could notexplain to him. These were the common objects of the Channel after all, old and weather-broken, sea wagons from the Cowes point of view, sourceof alarm and wonder to passengers on fine liners when they sight thembeating stubbornly against dirty winter weather, and hanging on to thestorm. Why should they take my interest more than battleships andCunarders? Yet I could potter about an ancient hooker or a trampsteamer all day, when I wouldn't cross a quay to a great battleship. Ilike the pungent smells of these old craft, just as I inhale the healthand odour of fir woods. I love their men, those genuine mariners, theright diviners of sky, coast, and tides, who know exactly what theircraft will do in any combination of circumstances as well as you knowthe pockets of your old coat; men who can handle a stiff and crankylump of patched timbers and antique gear as artfully as others wouldthe clever length of hollow steel with its powerful twin screws. 

But when my slightly contemptuous companion spoke I had no answer, feltout of date and dull, a fogey and an idle man. I had no answerready--none that would have satisfied this brisk young man, none thatwould 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 beganto feel for this idle preference of mine for old junk, I began pickingout 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 empirewould leave me frigid, when a bit of an old rail that an old shellbackhad 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. Therewas a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. Thenervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to ashriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left itswhite column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the releasedshadows. Black spectres danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love freshair, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of mylittle friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me intothe 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. Itwould be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolishcomparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades. " Thatpinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night, in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of asulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous onthe limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings intodistinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind allour verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like toknow of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candlefor me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostlysuggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we areconquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplatethe dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; asthey 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 itsillumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. Thelight for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, alimited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taperbeside the only worshipper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing cancompare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is aliving heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrousspectres stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darknessof the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to floodinstantly and founder us in original gloom. 

The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering intorment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just amoment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. Theshadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looksat its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemyof light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, agolden lily on a silver stem!

"Almost any book does for a bed-book, " a woman once said to me. Inearly 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 ideawas that the bed-book is a soporific, and for that reason she evenadvocated the reading of political speeches. That would be a dissoluteact. Certainly you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! Youwould enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, notonly unshriven, but in the act of guilt. 

What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, ora Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they areno good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I havenamed are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confessat times they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just asours, their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For mypart, they are too big for bedfellows. I cannot see myself, carrying myfeeble and restricted glim, following (in pyjamas) the statuesquefigure of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austerepity, the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not aftermidnight! 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 gelidtranquillity of the upper air, where even the colours are prismaticspicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ballbelow 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 overtimeon fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. Bybreakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We shouldall be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, oncethe pillow is nicely set. 

For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remainattentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, ofthe seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than weare. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away withsuch books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Templeof Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyteto 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 timewhen one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the GreatWorks which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of ushave not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written aboutliterature as there is about theology. 

 * * * * *

There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. Itis much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactlyright. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinningfellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness, anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernallyclever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Onlythe sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. Thelate candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays maketransparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at restbeside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequentialaffairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportionsbecause we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place inthe heavens where duty, honour, witty arguments, controversial logic ongreat questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil inthe indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind thencertainly smiles at cleverness. 

For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is whiteand lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bareof illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and star-like, as a clear andlonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all havegone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of thatplace must come, as it were, with honest and open pages. 

 * * * * *

I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in thosesentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortableand sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressedbecause not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear themlightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confidentdiction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who haswatched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secretdebate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body ofthe evil they have created. 

That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of theintimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to theHouyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about ourcontemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called amisanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the selectintimacy of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred ofmankind, not at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange andterrible nature of this genius who thought that much of us, but how itis that after such a wise and sorrowful revealing of the things weinsist on doing, and our reasons for doing them, and what happens afterwe have done them, men do not change. It does seem impossible thatsociety could remain unaltered, after the surprise its appearanceshould have caused it as it saw its face in that ruthless mirror. Wepoint 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 asbed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving itwith some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughtsengendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately tohand in the bookshelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day onehas had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far aspossible 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 lostevery night for months with Doughty in the _Arabia Deserta_. He is acraggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as onegets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends onethoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders ofDoughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and theshins broken, and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fiercesun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adamhimself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takestime--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returnedfrom a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on theRed Sea coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with theworld you used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know ofno other test. 

Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with hisboys nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated thathabit of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for noreason 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 thepast. The familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, itswonderful well-remembered stories of things long past, --like that ofEsther, one of the best in English, --the eloquent anger of the prophetsfor the people then who looked as though they were alive, but werereally dead at heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think ofit, 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 bayopening north-west upon the Atlantic, with a small island in the midstof the expanse, a heap of sundered granite lying upon the horizon likea faint sunken cloud, like the floating body of a whale, like an areaof opalescent haze, like an inexplicable brightness at sea when noisland can be seen. The apparition of that island depends upon thefavour of the sun. The island is only a ghost there, sometimesinvisible, sometimes but an alluring and immaterial fragment of thecoast we see far over the sea in dreams; a vision of sanctuary, of theplace we shall never reach, a frail mirage of land then, a roseous spotwhich is not set in the sea, but floats there only while the thought ofa haven of peace and secure verities is still in the mind, and whilethe longing eye projects it on the horizon. 

The sun sets behind the island. On a clear day, at sundown, the islandbehaves so much like a lump of separated earth, a piece of the blackworld we know, that I can believe it is land, something to be found onthe 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, thereal coast which stretches seaward to it, marching on either hand intothe blue, confident and tall, is hardly more material, except by thestones of my outlook. The near rocks are of indubitable earth. 

Beyond them the coloured fabric of the bay becomes diaphanous, and Ican but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for init the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above themseem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear fromtheir places and stream inland as torn flimsies and gossamer. 

It is the sublimation of earth. Our own shining globe floats with theothers in a sea of light. Here in the bay on a September morning, ifour world till then had been without life and voice, with this shinethat is an impalpable dust of gold, the quickened air, and the seasmoving as though joyous in the first dawn, Eros and Aurora would haveknown the moment, and a child would have been born. 

None but the transcendent and mounting qualities of our elements, andthe generative day which makes the surf dazzling, and draws thepassionate azure of the bugloss from hot and arid sand, and makes theblobs of sea-jelly in the pools expand like flowers, and ripens theclouds, nothing but the indestructible essence of life, life upliftedand dominant, shows now in this world of the bay. 

Below the high moors which enclose the bay, those distant sleepyuplands where the keels of the cumulus clouds are grounded, there aresaline meadows, lush and warm, where ditches serpentine betweenbarriers of meadowsweet, briers and fat grasses. Nearer to the sea thelevels are of moist sand covered with a close matting of thyme, andherbage as close and resilient as moss, levels that are not green, likefields, but golden, and of a texture that reflects the light, so thatthese plains seem to have their own brightness. 

The sea plains finish in the sandhills. In this desert you may press ahand into the body of earth, and feel its heat and pulse. The west windpours among the dunes, a warm and heavy torrent. There is no need tomake a miracle of the appearance of life on our earth. Life was at thehappy 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-wornpebbles, and beyond the pebbles at low water is the wet strand overwhich 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 tothe 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 issomething outside my knowledge; but I know that in the depth of thatmystery is security and content. 

There is a fear I have, though, when they trip it over the solid andunquestionable stones, and leave the stones to fly off into the winddown that shining entrance to the deep. For the strand has nosubstance. Their feet move over a void in which far down I see anothersky than ours. They go where I doubt that I can follow. I cannot leavemy hold upon the rocks and enter the place to which their late andaerial spirits are native. It is plain the earth is not a solid body. As their bodies, moving over the bright vacuity, grow unsubstantial andelfin with distance, and they approach that line where the surfglimmers athwart the radiant void, I have a sudden fear that they mayvanish quite, and only their laughter come at me mockingly from thenear 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 Birminghamsuburbs, out into the raw, bleak winter roads between the hedges, quitebeyond the big town smoking with its enterprising labours, oneapproached the village of calamity with some awe and diffidence. Youfelt you were intruding; that you were a mere gross interloper, comingthrough curiosity, that was not excused by the compunction you felt, tosee the appearance of a place that had tragedy in nearly all its homes. Young men streamed by on bicycles in the same direction, groups werehurrying there on foot. 

The road rose in a mound to let the railway under, and beyond the fardip was the village, an almost amorphous group of mean red dwellingsstuck on ragged fields about the dominant colliery buildings. Threehigh, slim chimneys were leisurely pouring smoke from the grotesqueblack skeleton structures above the pits. The road ran by the boundary, and was packed with people, all gazing absorbed and quiet into thegrounds of the colliery; they were stacked up the hedge banks, and thewalls and trees were loaded with boys. 

A few empty motor-cars of the colliery directors stood about. Acarriage-horse champed its bit, and the still watchers turned at onceto that intrusive sound. Around us, a lucid winter landscape (for ithad been raining) ran to the distant encompassing hills which liftedlike low ramparts of cobalt and amethyst to a sky of luminous saffronand ice-green, across which leaden clouds were moving. The country hadthat hard, coldly radiant appearance which always impresses a sad manas this world's frank expression of its alien disregard; this world nothis, on which he has happened, and must endure with his trouble for abrief time. 

As I went through the press of people to the colliery gates, the womenin shawls turned to me, first with annoyance that their watching shouldbe disturbed, and then with some dull interest. My assured claim toadmittance probably made them think I was the bearer of new helpoutside their little knowledge; and they willingly made room for me topass. I felt exactly like the interfering fraud I was. What would I nothave given then to be made, for a brief hour, a namelessmiracle-worker. 

In the colliery itself was the same seeming apathy. There was nothingto show in that yard, black with soddened cinders and ash muck, wherethe new red-brick engine-houses stood, that somewhere half a milebeneath our feet were thirty men, their only exit to the outer worldbarred by a subterranean fire. Nothing showed of the fire but a whitishsmoke from a ventilating shaft; and a stranger would not know what thatsignified. But the women did. Wet with the rain showers, they had beenstanding watching that smoke all night, and were watching it still, forits unceasing pour to diminish. Constant and unrelenting, it streamedsteadily upward, as though it drew its volume from central fires thatwould never cease. 

The doors of the office were thrown open, and three figures emerged. They broke into the listlessness of that dreary place, where nothingseemed to be going on, with a sudden real purpose, fast but unhurried, and moved towards the shaft. Three Yorkshire rescue experts--one ofthem to die later--with the Hamstead manager explaining the path theyshould follow below with eager seriousness. "Figures of fun"! They hadmuzzles on their mouths and noses, goggles on their eyes, fantastichelms, and queer cylinders and bags slung about them. As they went upthe slope of wet ash, quick and full of purpose, their comical gear andcoarse dress became suddenly transfigured; and the silent crowd cheeredemotionally that little party of forlorn hope. 

They entered the cage, and down they went. Still it was difficult forme to think that we were fronting tragedy, for no danger showed. Anhour and more passed in nervous and dismal waiting. There was a signal. Some men ran to the pit-head carrying hot bricks and blankets. Thedoctors took off their coats, and arranged bottles and tinklingapparatus on chairs stuck in the mud. The air smelt of iodoform. Acloth was laid on the ground from the shaft to the engine-house, andstretchers were placed handy. The women, some carrying infants, brokerank. That quickly up-running rope was bringing the first news. Therope stopped running and the cage appeared. Only the rescue party cameout, one carrying a moribund cat. They knew nothing; and thewhite-faced women, with hardly repressed hysteria, took again theirplaces by the engine-house. So we passed that day, watching the placefrom which came nothing but disappointment. Occasionally a child, tooyoung to know it was adding to its mother's grief, would wailquerulously. There came a time when I and all there knew that to godown that shaft was to meet with death. The increasing exhaustion andpouring sweat of the returning rescue parties showed that. Yet theminers who were not selected to go down were angry; they violentlyabused the favouritism of the officials who would not let all risktheir lives. 

I have a new regard for my fellows since Great Barr. About you and methere are men like that. There is nothing to distinguish them. Theyshow no signs of greatness. They have common talk. They have coarseways. They walk with an ugly lurch. Their eyes are not eager. They arenot polite. Their clothes are dirty. They live in cheap houses on cheapfood. They call you "sir. " They are the great unwashed, the mutablemany, the common people. The common people! Greatness is as common asthat. There are not enough honours and decorations to go round. Talk ofthe soldier! _Vale_ to Welsby of Normanton! He was a common miner. Heis dead. His fellows were in danger, their wives were white-faced andtheir children were crying, and he buckled on his harness and went tothe assault with no more thought for self than great men have in agreat cause; and he is dead. I saw him go to his death. I wish I couldtell you of Welsby of Normanton. 

I left that place where the star-shine was showing the grim skeleton ofthe shaft-work overhead in the night, and where men moved about belowin the indeterminate dark like dismal gnomes. There was a woman whosecry, when Welsby died, was like a challenge. 

Next morning, in Great Barr, some blinds were down, the street wasempty. Children, who could see no reason about them why their fathersshould 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 ofthe 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; andthough once we thought he was much impressed by the dignity of the mancontrolling a road roller, for it seemed it would be well to be thatslow herald in front with a little red flag, he has shown but thefaintest regard for the offices of policeman, engine-driver, andsoldier. 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 beensome advance from that early affair of black angles which, withoutexplanation, might have stood for anything, but was meant for a cutter. Now, in a manner which a careless visitor could think was the hauteurof an artist who is too sure of himself to care what you think of hiswork, but is really acute shyness, he will present you at short noticewith 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, suchpaintings have their faults; but as delineations of that sort of shipthey have technical exactitude not common even in the studios. 

In fact, he has found an old manual of seamanship, and theillustrations get more attention than some people give to Biblicalsubjects. During vacant afternoons there is an uncanny calm in thehouse, a silence which makes people think they have forgotten somethingimportant; but it is only that the Boy is absent with the argonauts. Heis in tow of Argo, as it were, one of its heroes, surging astern in alarge easy-chair, viewing golden landfalls that are still under theirearly spell in seas that ships have never sailed. There are no suchvoyages in later life, none with quite that glamour, for we have triedand know. Lucky Boy, sailing the greatest voyage of his life!Occasionally, when a real ship is home again, and some one calls to seeif we still live there, the Boy is allowed to go to bed late, and therehe sits and fills his mind. 

"And what, " said this deponent one evening, "about taking His Nibs withme?" (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 washardly so certainly not as it seemed. There are times when he canconcentrate on a subject with awful pertinacity, though the occasionsare infrequent. This was one, however. He went. I knew he wouldgo--when he heard about it. 

A day came when we were at the railway station, and he was to cross thesea for the first time. He was quite collected. His quiet eyeenumerated the baggage in one careless side-glance which detected therewas a strap undone and that a walking-stick was missing. In all thatcrowded tumult converging on the stroke of the hour his seemed to bethe only apart and impassive face, and I began to think he wasindifferent; he merely looked at the cover of one magazine, and thenturned to the window and observed the world leaping past with thedetachment 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--andthen he passed a radiant wink, and one of his dangling legs began toswing 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. Iasked him to let me share it with him. "Did you see that old man at thestation when the train was starting?" he whispered. "He couldn't findthe carriage where his things were--he was running up and down withouta hat. Perhaps he was left behind. " What do man's misfortune's matterto 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 tellhim there was plenty of time. "Two funnels, " I heard him say insurprise, and there is no doubt at that moment some of the importanceof the occasion was reflected on myself. That extra funnel told him, Ihope, I was doing this business in no meagre spirit. None of yoursingle-funnel ships for our affairs. At the quay end of the gangway hestopped me, interrupting the whole concourse to do so. "Where's thatother bag?" he demanded severely. I was annoyed--like the people whowere following us--but I had to admire him all the same. At his age nodoubt it may be demanded that a ship be put about for a bag leftbehind. When this childish egoism is maintained well into life, largefortunes may be made. It is, perhaps, the only way. As soon as a mancan relate his personal affairs to those of the world, and understandshow unimportant he really is, from that moment he becomes a failure. Some men never do it, and thus succeed. Therefore I allowed the Boy tolead me aboard, and so secured a good berth at once, to the envy ofthose who were unaided by a child. Already I was informed that, afterdue inspection, the steamer had plenty of boats, "so it won't matter ifwe sink. " In five minutes we had discovered the companions toeverywhere on that ship, and were, I believe, the only passengers whocould find our way about her before she left port. 

But a glance seaward, and a word with an officer, gave me a thought ortwo, and I broke off the Boy's interesting conversation with a fatherlyFrench quartermaster to take him where he could at least begin withsome food. "What a lark if there's a storm, " laughed His Nibs, removinga 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 awave. The Boy made an exclamation partly stifled, and looked at mequickly. I did not look at him, but went on with the food. He stoppedeating, and remained with his gaze fixed on the ports, gripping hischair whenever they went dark. He said nothing about it, but he musthave been thinking pretty hard. "I suppose this is a strong ship, isn'tit?" he questioned once. 

As we were about to emerge into the open, the wet, deserted deck fellaway, and a grey wave which looked as aged as death, its white hairstreaming in the wind, suddenly reared over the ship's side, as thoughlooking for us, and then fled phantom-like, with dire cries. The Boyshrank back for a moment, horrified, but then moved on. I think I heardhim sigh. It was no summer sea. The dark bales of rain were speeding upfrom the south-west, low over waters which looked just what the seareally is. 

I am glad he saw it like that. He hung on in a shelter with aneedlessly tight grip, and there was something of consternation in hiseye. But I enjoyed the cry of surprise he gave once when we weregetting used to it. A schooner passed us, quite close, a midget whichfairly danced over the running hills, lifting her bows and soaringupwards, light as a bird, and settling in the hollows amid a whitecloud. "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 onthe table, or on the floor, nothing happened to it. I can only say thatthat morning the paper was full of vile hairs, which the pen keptgetting into its mouth--enough to ruin the goodwill of any pen. Yet allthe circumstances of the room seemed luckily placed for work to flowwith ease; but there was some mysterious and inimical obstruction. Thefire was bright and lively, the familiar objects about the tableappeared to be in their right place. Again I examined the gods of thetable to be sure one had not by mischance broken the magic circle andinterrupted the current of favour for me. They were rightlyorientated--that comic pebble paper-weight Miss Muffet found on thebeach of a distant holiday, the chrysanthemums which were fresh fromthat very autumn morning, stuck in the blue vase which must have gotits 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 pencontinued to do nothing but draw idle faces and pick up hairs, which itheld firmly in its teeth. Then the second telegram was brought to me. "What about Balkan article?" it asked, and finished with a studiedinsult, after the manner of the editor-kind, whose assurance that thefunction of the universe is only fulfilled when they have published thefact makes them behave as would Jove with a thick-headed immortal. "These Balkan atrocities will never cease, " I said, dropping thetelegram into the fire. 

Had I possessed but one of those intelligent manuals which instruct theinnocent in the art, not only of writing, but of writing so well that avery disappointed and world-weary editor rejoices when he sees themanuscript, puts his thumbs up and calls for wine, I would haveconsulted it. (I should be glad to hear if there is such a book, with apotent 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, mycarefully chosen but lazy and wilful staff of words, to my immediateaid. But there was no answer; only the cobwebs moved there, though Ithought I heard a faint buzzing, which might have been a blow-fly. Nodoubt my staff--small blame to them--were dreaming somewhere in thesun, 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 nooningit in Algiers, and others were prospecting the South Seas, flatteringthemselves, with gross vanity, how well they could serve me there, ifonly I would give them a chance with those coloured and lonely islands;and others were in the cabins of ships far from any land, gossipingabout old times; and these last idle words, it is my experience, arethe most stubborn of the lot, usually ignoring all my efforts to getthem home again and to business. I could call and rage as I chose, orentreat them, showing them the urgency of my need. But only a uselessand indefinite article came along, as he usually does, hours and hoursbefore the arrival of a lusty word which could throw about thesuggestions quicker than they may be picked up and examined. 

Very well. There was nothing for it but to fill another pipe, and dwellwith some dismay upon such things as, for instance, the way one's lightgrows smoky with age. Is there a manual which will help a man to keephis light shining brightly--supposing he has a light to keep? But if hehas but the cheapest of transient glims, good and bright enough for itsnarrow purpose, is it any wonder it burns foul, seeing what businessusually it gets to illuminate in these exciting and hurried times. Whatwork! I think it would make rebels of the most quiet, unadventurous, and simple-featured troop of words that ever a man gathered about himfor the plain domestic duties to employ them regularly, for example, insweeping up into neat columns such litter as the House of Commonsmakes. It would numb the original heart of the bonniest set of wordsthat rightly used would have made some people happy--sterilize them, make them anaemic and pasty-faced, so that they would disturb the peaceof mind of all compassionate men who looked upon them. That my ownstaff of words refused my summons. .. . 

But what was it I said I wanted them for just now? I gazed round thewalls upon the portraits of the great writers of the past, hoping forinspiration. Useless! Upon Emerson's face there was a faint smile ofmost infuriating benevolence. Lamb--but I am getting tired of hissmirk, which might be of irony or kindness. He would look savage enoughtoday, hearing his constantly returning Dissertation on Roast Pig thumpthe door-mat four times a week; for that, he can be assured, is the wayeditors would treat it now, and without even preliminary consultationswith lady typist-secretaries. Of the whole gallery of the great I feltthere was not one worth his wall room. They are pious frauds. Thisinspiration business is played out. I have never had the worth of theframes out of those portraits. .. . Ah, the Balkans. That was it. And ofall the flat, interminable Arctic wastes of bleak wickedness and frozenerror that ever a shivering writer had to traverse. .. . 

My head was in my hands, and I was trying to get daylight and directioninto the affair with my eyes shut, when I felt a slight touch on myarm. "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 hereyes 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 alittle older (and already knows enough to place the responsibility forintrusion on his sister with her innocent eyes and imperturbable calmand golden hair), stood a little in the background, pretending to beengrossed with a magnet, as though he were unaware that he was reallypresent. Curls hopped about on one leg frankly, knowing that the otherswould be blamed for any naughtiness of hers. Her radiant impudencenever needs any apology. What a plague of inconsequential violators ofany necessary peace! When would my lucky words come now?

The Boy probably saw a red light somewhere. "Haven't you finished unclewe thought you had has a topsail schooner got two or three masts I sawa fine little engine up in the town today and an aeroplane it was onlyseventeen 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 Muffetdances across a room there is no international crisis in all this worldwhich would distract any man's frank admiration. When Miss Muffet stepsit on a sunny day, her hair being what it is, and her little feet inher strap shoes being such as they are, then your mood dances inaccord, and your thoughts swing in light and rhythmic harmony. I gotup. 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 whichis seen through her mane--she reached up for my hand, for she cannotimitate her sister's hornpipe without holding on. 

Miss Muffet reached a corner of the room, and swung round, light as afairy, 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 totheir mind. But I had nothing to give them to do. They could just standaround and look on now, for when Curls seriously imitates her sister, and then laughs heartily at her own absurd failure, because her feetare irresponsible, that is the time when you have nothing to do, andwould not do anything if it had to be done. .. . 

What time it was the next interruption came--it was another telegram--Idon'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 lightand ready pen, there, standing at eager attention, was all my staff, waiting the call. What had happened to bring them all back? If thewriters of literary manuals will explain that secret to me, I shouldacquire true wealth. 

IX. A First Impression

Certainly it was an inconsiderate way of approaching the greatest cityof the Americas, but that was not my fault. I wished for the directapproach, the figure of Liberty to rise, haughty and most calm, a noblesymbol, as we came in from overseas; then the wide portals; then NewYork. But the erratic tracks of a tramp steamer go not as her voyagerswill. They have no control over her. She moves to an enigmatic will inLondon. It happens, then, that she rarely shows a wonder of the worldany respect. She arrives like sudden rain, like wind from a newquarter. She is as chance as the fall of a star. None knows the day northe hour. At the most inconvenient time she takes the wonder's visitorsto the back door. 

We went, light ship from the South, to Barbados, for orders; andbecause I wanted New York, for that was the way home, we were sent toTampa for phosphates. As to Tampa, its position on the globe is knownonly to underwriters and shipbrokers; it is that sort of place. It is amere name, like Fernando de Noronha, or Key West, which one meets onlyin the shipping news, idly wondering then what strange things theseafarer would find if he went. 

Late one night, down a main street of Tampa, there came, with thedeliberate movement of fate, a gigantic corridor train, looming as highas a row of lighted villas, and drawn by the awful engine of a dream. That train behaved there as trams do at home, presently stoppingalongside a footway. 

Behind me was a little wooden shop. In front was the wall of acarriage, having an entrance on the second storey, and a roof athwartthe meridian stars. One of its wheels was the nearest and most dominantobject in the night to me, a monstrous bright round resting on a muddynewspaper in the road. It absorbed all the light from the little woodenshop. Now, I had hunted throughout Tampa for its railway terminus, fruitlessly; but here its train had found me, keeping me from crossingthe road. 

"Where do I board this train for New York?" I asked. (I talked like afool, I know; it was like asking a casual wayfarer in East Ham whetherthat by the kerb is the Moscow express. Yet what was I to do?) "Boardher right here, " said the fellow, who was in his shirt sleeves. Therefore I delivered myself, in blind faith, to the casual gods whoare apt to wake up and by a series of deft little miracles get thingsdone fitly in America when all seems lost and the traveller has evenbared his resigned neck to the stroke. 

But I had not the least hope of seeing New York and a Cunarder; notwith such an unpropitious start as that. With an exit like Euston onenever doubts sure direction, and arrival at the precise spot at theexact moment. You feel there it was arranged for in Genesis. Theofficials cannot alter affairs. They are priests administeringinviolate rites, advancing matters fore-ordained by the unseen, and sono more able to stay or speed this cosmic concern than the astronomerwho schedules the planets. The planets take their heavenly courses. ButI had never been to the United States before, did not know even thenames of their many gods, and New York was at the end of a greatjourney; and the train for it stopped outside a tobacco shop in theroad, like a common tram. 

There was another night when, with the usual unreason, the swift andluxurious glide, lessening through easy gradations, ceased. I saw somelights in the rain outside. How should I know it was New York? We hadeven changed climates since we started. The passengers of my early daysin the train had passed away. There was nothing to show. More, I feltno exultation--which should have been the first of warnings. Merely wegot to a railway station one night, and a negro insisted that I shouldget 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. Isaw a man in a shiny cape under the nearest lamp, and beyond him avista of reflections from vacant stones, which to me always, more thanbleak hills or the empty round of the sea, is desolation. There were nospacious portals. There was no figure of Liberty, haughty butwelcoming. There was rain, and cabs that waited without hope. There wasexactly what you find at the end of a twopenny journey when your onlyluggage is an evening paper, an umbrella, and that tired feeling. Notknowing where to go, and little caring, I followed the crowd, and sofound myself in a large well-lighted hall. Having no business there--itwas a barren place--I pushed on, and came suddenly to the rim of theworld. 

Before me was the immensity of dark celestial space in which wanderedhosts 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 forgottenJimmy'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 someother viewless soul behind you, still with thoughts absent on worldlytrifles, mutters concerning boots when in the Milky Way, you will knowhow I felt. Here was the ultimate empty dark in which the sun couldnever shine. The sun had not merely left the place. It had never beenthere. It was a remote star, one of myriads in the constellations atlarge, the definite groups which occulted in the void before me. Looking at those swiftly moving systems, I watched for the flash ofimpact; but no great light of collision broke. The groups of lightspassed and repassed noiselessly. 

Then one constellation presently detached itself, and its orbitevidently would intersect our foothold. It came nearer out of thenight, till I could see plainly that it appeared to be a long sectionof a well-lighted street, say, like a length of Piccadilly. Itapproached end-on to where I stood, and at last impinged. It actuallywas a length of street, and I could continue my walk. The streetfloated 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 ofit soon joined a roadway on the opposite shore. The dark river was asfull of mobile lengths of bright roadway as Oxford Circus is ofmotor-buses; and the fear of the unknown, as in the terrific dark of adream where flaming comets stream on undirected courses, numbed mylittle mind. I had found New York. 

I had found it. Its bulk was beyond the mind, its lights were fallingstar systems, and its movements those of general cataclysm. I shouldfind no care for little human needs there. One cannot warm one's handsagainst the flames of earthquake. There is no provision for men in thewelter, but dimly apprehended in the night, of blind and inhumanpowers. 

Therefore, the hotel bedroom, when I got to it, surprised and steadiedme 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 Ilearned that by working the hands of this false clock correctly I couldprocure anything, from an apple to the fire brigade. Now this wascarrying matters to the other extreme; and I had to suppress a desireto 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, conveyinga glass and a bottle. So there was a method then in this generalmadness after all. I tried to regard the wonder as indifferently as thewaiter's own cold and measuring eyes. 

_March 1910. _

X. The Derelict

In a tramp steamer, which was overloaded, and in midwinter, I hadcrossed to America for the first time. What we experienced of thewestern ocean during that passage gave me so much respect for it thatthe prospect of the return journey, three thousand miles of those seasbetween me and home, was already a dismal foreboding. The shippingposters of New York, showing stately liners too lofty even to noticethe Atlantic, were arguments good enough for steerage passengers, whodo, I know, reckon a steamer's worth by the number of its funnels; butthe pictures did nothing to lessen my regard for that dark outer worldI knew. And having no experience of ships installed with racquetcourts, Parisian cafés, swimming baths, and pergolas, I was naturallypuzzled by the inconsequential behaviour of the first-class passengersat 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. Ofcourse, this might have been merely the innocent profanity of thesimple-minded. 

Embarking at the quay next day, I could not see that our ship hadeither a beginning or an end. There was a blank wall which ran out ofsight 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 tothe upper floor of a warehouse, and from thence a bridge led us to adoor in the wall half-way in its height. No funnels could be seen. Looking straight up from the embarkation gangway, along what seemed theparapet of the wall was a row of far-off indistinguishable facespeering straight down at us. There was no evidence that this buildingwe were entering, of which the high black wall was a part, was not animportant and permanent feature of the city. It was in keeping with themagnitude of New York's skyscrapers, which this planet's occasionallynon-irritant skin permits to stand there to afford man an apparentreason to be gratified with his own capacity and daring. 

But with the knowledge that this wall must be afloat there came nosense of security when, going through that little opening in itsaltitude, I found myself in a spacious decorated interior which hintednothing of a ship, for I was puzzled as to direction. My last shipcould be surveyed in two glances; she looked, and was, a comprehensibleship, no more than a manageable handful for an able master. In thatship you could see at once where you were and what to do. But in thisliner you could not see where you were, and would never know which wayto take unless you had a good memory. No understanding came to me inthat hall of a measured and shapely body, designed with a cunninginformed by ages of sea-lore to move buoyantly and surely among theranging seas, to balance delicately, a quick and sensitive being, toevery precarious slope, to recover a lost poise easily and with thegrace natural to a quick creature controlled by an alert mind. 

There was no shape at all to this structure. I could see no line therun of which gave me warrant that it was comprised in the rondure of aship. The lines were all of straight corridors, which, for all I knew, might have ended blindly on open space, as streets which traverse acity and are bare in vacancy beyond the dwellings. It was possible wewere encompassed by walls, but only one wall was visible. There weidled, all strangers, and to remain strangers, in a large hall roofedby a dome of coloured glass. Quite properly, palms stood beneath. Therewere offices and doors everywhere. On a broad staircase a multitude ofus wandered aimlessly up and down. Each side of the stairway wereelectric lifts, intermittent and brilliant apparitions. I began tounderstand why the saloon passengers thought nothing of the voyage. They were encountering nothing unfamiliar. They had but come to anotherhotel for a few days. 

I attempted to find my cabin, but failed. A uniformed guide took careof me. But my cabin, curtained, upholstered, and warm, with mirrors andplated ware, sunk somewhere deeply among carpeted and silent streetsdown each of which the perspective of glow-lamps looked interminable, left me still questioning. The long walk had given me a fear that I wasremote from important affairs which might be happening beyond. Myaddress was 323. The street door--I was down a side turning, though--bore that number. A visitor could make no mistake, supposing hecould find the street and my side turning. That was it. There was avery great deal in this place for everybody to remember, and most of uswere strangers. No doubt, however, we were afloat, if the lifebelts inthe rack meant anything. Yet the cabin, insulated from all noise, wasnot soothing, but disturbing. I had been used to a ship in which youcould guess all that was happening even when in your bunk; a sensitiveand communicative ship. 

A steward appeared at my door, a stranger out of nowhere, and askedwhether I had seen a bag not mine in the cabin. He might have beencreated merely to put that question, for I never saw him again on thevoyage. This liner was a large province having irregular and shiftingbounds, permitting incontinent entrance and disappearance. All thisshould 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 nebulousmass too vague to hold together unless we were constantly wary. 

In the saloon there was the solid furniture of rare woods, the ornatedecorations, and the light and shadows making vague its limits andgiving it an appearance of immensity, to keep the mind from the thoughtof our real circumstances. At dinner we had valentine music, dreamystuff to accord with the shaded lamps which displayed the tables in alower rosy light. It helped to extend the mysterious and romanticshadows. The pale, disembodied masks of the waiters swam in the duskabove the tinted light. I had for a companion a vivacious American ladyfrom the Middle West, and she looked round that prospect we had of anexpensive café, and said, "Well, but I am disappointed. Why, I've beenlooking forward to seeing the ocean, you know. And it isn't here. "

"Smooth passage, " remarked a man on the other side. "No sea at allworth mentioning. " Actually, I know there was a heavy beam sea runningbefore a half-gale. I could guess the officer in charge somewhere onthe exposed roof might have another mind about it; but it made nodifference to us in our circle of rosy intimate light bound by thosevague 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 alllaughed. "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 pretendsto have seen. I do believe the realists are no more reliable than theromanticists. Here we are a thousand miles out, and none of us has seenthe sea yet. Tell me, does not a realist have to magnify his awfulbillows just to get them into his reader's view?"

I murmured something feeble and sociable. I saw then why sailors nevertalk directly of the sea. I, for instance, could not find my key atthat moment--it was in another pocket somewhere--so I had no iron totouch. Talking largely of the sea is something like the knowing talk ofyoung men about women; and what is a simple sailor man that he shouldopen his mouth on mysteries?

Only on the liner's boat-deck, where you could watch her four funnelsagainst the sky, could you see to what extent the liner was rolling. The arc seemed to be considerable then, but slowly described. But theroll made little difference to the promenaders below. Sometimes theywalked a short distance on the edges of their boots, leaning over asthey did so, and swerving from the straight, as though they had turnedgiddy. The shadows formed by the weak sunlight moved slowly out ofambush across the white deck, but often moved indecisively, as thoughuncertain of a need to go; and then slowly went into hiding again. Thesea whirling and leaping past was far below our wall side. It was likepeering dizzily over a precipice when watching those green and whitecataracts. 

The passengers, wrapped and comfortable on the lee deck, chatted asblithely as at a garden-party, while the band played medleys ofnational airs to suit our varied complexions. The stewards came roundwith loaded trays. A diminutive and wrinkled dame in costly fursfrowned through her golden spectacles at her book, while her maid satattentively by. An American actress was the centre of an eager group ofgrinning young men; she was unseen, but her voice was distinct. The twoVanderbilts took their brisk constitutional among us as though theliner had but two real passengers though many invisible nobodies. Thechildren, who had not ceased laughing and playing since we left NewYork, waited for the slope of the deck to reach its greatest, and thenran down towards the bulwarks precipitously. The children, happy andinnocent, completed for us the feeling of comfortable indifference andsecurity which we found when we saw there was more ship than ocean. Theliner's deck canted slowly to leeward, went over more and more, beyondwhat it had done yet, and a pretty little girl with dark curls riotousfrom under her red tam-o'-shanter, ran down, and brought up against usviolently with both hands, laughing heartily. We laughed too. Lookingseawards, I saw receding the broad green hill, snow-capped, which hadlifted 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 rockingus with some ease, there was a commotion forward. Books and shawls wentanywhere as the passengers ran. Something strange was to be seen uponthe waters. 

It looked like a big log out there ahead, over the starboard bow. Itwas not easy to make out. The light was failing. We overhauled itrapidly, 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, andsank 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 notthere, 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 wasovercast and driven, and seas that were uplifted, which had grownincredibly huge, swift, and perilous, and they had colder and moresombre hues. 

The derelict was a schooner, a lifeless and soddened hulk, so heavy anduncontesting that its foundering seemed at hand. The waters poured backand forth at her waist, as though holding her body captive for theassaults of the active seas which came over her broken bulwarks, andplunged ruthlessly about. There was something ironic in theindifference of her defenceless body to these unending attacks. Itmocked this white and raging post-mortem brutality, and gave her adignity that was cold and superior to all the eternal powers could nowdo. She pitched helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flewopen under the break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for thedead might have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and agreat comber ran at her, as if it had but just spied her, and thoughtshe was escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion weheard. She had gone. But she appeared again far away, on a summit indesolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit, theaccusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky. 

I turned, and there beside me was the lady who had wanted to find thesea. She was gazing at the place where the wreck was last seen, hereyes 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 notsee her owner. The unequal stones of that wall have the weatheredappearance of a natural outcrop of rock, for they were matured by thetraffic of ships when America was a new yarn among sailors. They arethe very stones one would choose to hear speak. Yet the light of earlymorning in that spacious estuary was so young and tenuous that youcould suppose this heavy planet had not yet known the stains of nightand evil; and the _Mona_, it must be remembered, is white without andegg-blue within. Such were the reflections she made, lively at anchoron the swirls of a flood-tide bright enough for the sea-bottom to havebeen luminous, that I felt I must find Yeo. The white houses of thevillage, with shining faces, were looking out to sea. 

Another man, a visitor from the cities of the plains, was gazing downwith appreciation at the _Mona_. There was that to his credit. Hisyoung wife, slight and sad, and in the dress of the promenade of aLondon park, was with him. She was not looking on the quickness of thelucent tide, but at the end of a parasol, which was idly marking thegrits. 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 roundhead, and its stiff prickles glittered like short ends of brass wire. It was easy to guess of him, without knowing him and thereforeunfairly, that, if his wife actually confessed to him that she lovedanother man, he would not have believed her; because how was itpossible for her to do that, he being what he was? His aggressive face, and his air of confident possession, the unconscious immodesty of theman because of his important success at some unimportant thing orother, 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 seawardopen out the dunes of the opposite shore of the estuary, faint withdistance and their own pallor, and ending in the slender stalk of alighthouse, always quivering at the vastness of what confronts it. Yeowas sitting on a bollard, rubbing tobacco between his palms. I told himthis was the sort of morning to get the _Mona_ out. He carefully pouredthe grains into the bowl of his pipe, stoppered it, glanced slowlyabout the brightness of the river mouth, and shook his head. This was agreat surprise, and anybody who did not know Yeo would have questionedhim. But it was certain he knew his business. There is not a moredeceptive and difficult stretch of coast round these islands, and Yeowas born to it. He stood up, and his long black hair stirred in thebreeze under the broad brim of a grey hat he insists on wearing. Thesoft hat and his lank hair make him womanish in profile, in spite of abody to which a blue jersey does full justice, and the sea-boots; butwhen he turns his face to you, with his light eyes and his dark andleathery face, you feel he is strangely masculine and wise, and must beaddressed with care and not as most men. He rarely smiles when afoolish word is spoken or when he is contradicted boldly by theinnocent. He spits at his feet and contemplates the sea, as though hehad 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 toPebblecombe. "

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 thereluctance of the driver of his own car. 

The sailor pointed a stern finger seawards, to where the bar is shownin charts, but where all we could make out was the flashing ofinconstant white lines. 

"Well?" questioned the man, who glanced out there perfunctorily. "Whatof 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'splacid face with melancholy attention, turned to her husband and placeda 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 risingseveral 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 takemy friend with me. " The sailor nodded my way. 

The man did not look at me. I was not there to him. He gave animpatient jerk to his head. "Ready to go? Of course I'm ready to go! Ofcourse. Why do you suppose I asked?"

Yeo went indoors, came out with a bundle of tarpaulins for us, andbegan moving with deliberation along to the _Mona_. Something was saidby the woman behind us, but so quietly I did not catch it. Her husbandmade confident noises of amusement, and replied in French that it wasalways the way with these local folk--always the way. The result, Igathered, 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 raisethe 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 wouldbe 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 thelanding-stage. While I made the seats ready for the voyagers and handedthem in, Yeo took two reefs in the lug-sail (an act which seemed, Imust say, with what wind we felt there, to be carrying his prescienceto bold lengths) and hauled the sail to its place. I went forward tolower the centre keel as he came aft with the sheet in his hand. The_Mona_ sidled away, stood out, and then reached for the distantsandhills. The village diminished and concentrated under its hill. 

When clear of the shelter of the hill, on the lee foot of which thevillage shelters from the westerly winds, the _Mona_ went over suddenlyin a gust which put her gunwale in the wash and kept it there. Thedipper came adrift and rattled over. Yeo eased her a bit, and hisuncanny eyes never shifted from their fixed scrutiny ahead. Ourpassenger laughed aloud, for his wife had grasped him at the unexpectedmovement and the noise. "That's nothing, " he assured her. "This isfine. "

We cleared the shallows and were in the channel where the weight of theincoming tide raced and climbed. The _Mona's_ light bows, meeting thetide, danced ecstatically, sending over us showers which caught in thefoot of the sail. The weather in the open was bright and hard, and thesun 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 andlight, grew material and great. The combers, breaking diagonally alongthat forsaken beach, had something ominous to say of the bar. Even Iknew that, and turned to look ahead. Out there, across and above theburnished sea, a regular series of long shadowy walls were forming. They advanced slowly, grew darker, and grew higher; then in theirparapets appeared arcs of white, and at once, where those lines ofsombre shadows had been, there were plunging strata of white clouds. Other dark bands advanced from seaward continuously. There was a tremorand sound as of the shock and roll of far thunder. 

We went about again, steering for the first outward mark of thefairway, the Mullet Buoy. Only the last house of the village was nowlooking at us remotely, a tiny white cube which frequently sank, on itsprecarious ledge of earth, beneath an intervening upheaval of thewaters. The sea was superior now, as we saw the world from our littleboat. The waters moved in from the outer with the ease of certainconquest, and the foundering shores vanished under each uplifted sendof the ocean. We rounded the buoy. I could see the tide holding it downaslant with heavy strands of water, stretched and taut. About we wentagain for the lifeboat-house. 

There was no doubt of it now. We should be baling soon. Yeo, with onebrown paw on the sheet and the other on the tiller, had not moved, noreven, so he looked, blinked the strange, unfrowning eyes peering fromunder the brim of his hat. The _Mona_ came on an even keel by thelifeboat-house, shook her wing for a moment as though in delight, andwas off again dancing for the Mid Buoy. She was a live, responsive, andhappy bird. "Now, Yeo, " said the passenger beside the sailor, beamingin proper enjoyment of this quick and radiant experience. "Didn't Itell you so? What's the matter with this?"

There was nothing the matter with that. The sea was blue and white. Thefrail coast, now far away, was of green and gold. The sky was theassurance of continued good. Our boat was buoyant energy. That bay, when in its uplifted and sparkling mood, with the extent of its libertyand the coloured promise of its romantic adventure, has no hint at allof the startling suddenness of its shadow, that presage of its complexand 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 youwant to go back, say so now. Soon you won't be able to. We may be keptout. If we are, don't blame me. "

"Oh, go on, you, " the man said, smiling indulgently. He was not goingto relinquish the fine gift of this splendid time. 

Yeo put his pipe in his mouth and resumed his stare outwards. He saidno more. On we went, skimming over inflowing ridges with exhilaratingundulations, light as a sandpiper. It was really right to call that aglorious morning. I heard the curlews fluting among the stones of theMorte Bank, which must then have been almost awash; but I did not lookthat way, for the nearing view of the big seas breaking ahead of usfixed my mind with the first intentness of anxiety. Though near the topof the flood, the fairway could not be made out. What from the distancehad appeared orderly ranks of surf had become a convulsive wildernessof foam, piled and dazzling, the incontinent smother of a heavy groundswell; for after all, though the wind needed watching, it was nothingmuch. The _Mona_ danced on towards the anxious place. Except thedistant hills there was no shore. Our hills were of water now we nearedthe bar. They appeared ahead with surprising suddenness, came straightat us as though they had been looking for us, and the discovery madethem eager; and then, when the head of the living mass was looking overour boat, it swung under us. 

We were beyond the bar before we knew it. There were a few minuteswhen, on either hand of the _Mona_, but not near enough to be more thanan arresting spectacle, ponderous glassy billows ceaselessly arose, projected wonderful curves of translucent parapets which threw shadowsahead of their deliberate advance, lost their delicate poise, andbecame plunging fields of blinding and hissing snow. We sped past themand were at sea. Yeo's knowledge of his work gives him more than thedexterity which overcomes difficulties as it meets them; it gives himthe prescience to avoid them. 

The steady breeze carried away from us the noise of that great tumulton the bar, and here was a sunny quietude where we heard nothing butthe wing of the _Mona_ when it fluttered. The last of the land was theBar Buoy, weltering and tolling erratically its melancholy bell in itshuge red cage. That dropped astern. The _Mona_, as though she had beenexuberant with joy at the promise of release, had come out with whoopsand a fuss, but, being outside, settled down to enjoy liberty in quietcontent. The little lady with us, for the first time, appeared notsorry to be there. The boat was dry. The scoured thwarts were even hotto the touch. Our lady held the brim of her big straw hat, looking outover the slow rhythm of the heavy but unbroken seas, the deepsuspirations of the ocean, and there was even a smile on her delicateface. She crouched forward no longer, and did not show that timidhesitation between her fear of sudden ugly water, when she would haveinclined to her husband's side, and her evident nervousness also of hermate. She sat erect, enjoying the slow uplift and descent of the boatwith a responsive body. She gazed over-side into the transparent deeps, where large jellyfish were shining like sunken moons. I got out mypipe. This suggested something to our other passenger, and he got outhis. He fumbled out his pouch and filled up. He then regarded theloaded pipe thoughtfully, but presently put it away, and leanedforward, gazing at the bottom of the boat. I caught Yeo's eye in a verysolemn wink. 

The _Mona_, lost in the waste, coursed without apparent purpose. Sometimes for a drowsy while we headed into the great light shiningfrom all the Atlantic which stretched before us to America; and againwe turned to the coast, which was low and far beyond mounting seas. Bywatching one mark ashore, a grey blur which was really the tower of afamiliar village church, it was clear Yeo was not making Pebblecombewith any ease. I glanced at him, and he shook his head. He then noddedit towards the western headland of the bay. 

That was almost veiled by a dark curtain, though not long before thepartitioned fields and colours of its upper slopes were clear as amosaic; so insidiously, to the uninitiated, do the moods of this baychange. Our lady was at this moment bending solicitously towards herhusband, whose head was in his hands. But he shook her off, turningaway with a face not quite so proud as it had been, for its complexionhad become that of a green canary's. He had acquired an expression ofholiness, contemplative and sorrowful. The western coast haddisappeared 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. Helooked up once with a face full of misery and reproach, and said, forgetting the past with boldness, "Don't you think we'd better begetting back? It's looking very dark over there. "

Yeo munched with calm for a while, swallowed, and then remarked, whileconning 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 mangot into the bottom of the boat and groaned. 

Light clouds, the feathery growth of the threatening obscurity whichhad 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 thatsought us out again and at once died, in a chill gloom. The glassy seasat once became opaque and bleak. Their surface was roughened withgusts. The delicate colours of the world, its hopeful spaciousness, itsdancing 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 windand white rain, pressing us into the sea. The _Mona_ made ineffectiveleaps, trying to get release from her imprisonment, but only succeededin pouring water over the inert figure lying on the bottom boards. In aspasm of fear he sprang up and began to scramble wildly towards hiswife, who in her nervousness was gripping the gunwale, but was facingthe affair silently and pluckily. "Keep still there!" peremptorilyordered the sailor; and the man bundled down without a word, like adog, an abject heap of wet rags. 

The first weight of the squall was released. The _Mona_ eased. But therain set in with steadiness and definition. Nothing was in sight butthe waves shaping in the murk and passing us, and the blurred outlineof a ketch labouring under reduced canvas to leeward. The bundle on theboat's floor sat up painfully and glanced over the gunwale. He made noattempt to disguise his complete defeat by our circumstances. He sawthe ketch, saw she was bigger, and humbly and loudly implored Yeo toput him aboard. He did not look at his wife. His misery was in fullpossession of him. When near to the ketch we saw something was wrongwith a flag she was flying. We got round to her lee quarter and hailedthe 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. "Allright, " 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 aninnocent mind startled by the brutality of a world she did not know, but a mind controlled and alert. You could guess she expected nothingnow but the worst, and had been schooling herself to face it. Herhusband, when he knew what was on that ship, repudiated the vessel withhorror. Yet we had no sooner fallen slightly away than he looked upagain, was reminded once more that she stood so much higher than ourboat, and cried, "Yes, yes!"

The two craft imperceptibly approached, as by gravitation. The men ofthe 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 anotheropportunity, floundering about below the black wall of the ship, presently it came, and we shoved over just anyhow the helpless bulk ofthe man. He disappeared within the ship like a shapeless sack, andbumped like one. When I got over, I saw the _Mona's_ mast, which wasthrusting and falling by the side of the ketch, making wildoscillations 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 werebringing his body home. The helmsman indicated a form lashed in asail-cloth to the hatch. They were standing on and off, waiting to getit over the bar. Yeo they knew so well that hardly any words passedbetween them. They were glad to put the piloting in his hands. He tookthe wheel of the _Judy of Padstow_. 

The substantial deck of the _Judy_ was a great relief after the dizzygyrations of the aerial _Mona_; and our lady, with a half-glance atwhat on the hatch was so grimly indifferent to all that could happennow, even smiled again, perhaps with a new sense of safety. She saw herhusband settled in a place not too wet, and got about the venerableboards of the _Judy_, looking at the old gear with curiosity, glancing, with her head dropped back, into the dark intricacy of rigging upheldby the ponderous mainmast as it swayed back and forth. Every time themen went hurriedly trampling to some point of the running gear shewatched what they were at. For hours we beat about, in a great noise ofwaters, waiting for that opportunity at the entrance to home andcomfort. Once Yeo took us as far towards the vague mist of surf as thedismal tolling of the Bar Buoy, but evidently did not like the look ofit, and stood out again. 

At last, having decided, he shouted orders, there was a burst ofactivity, and we headed for the bad place. Soon we should know. 

The _Judy_ began to plunge alarmingly. The incoming rollers at timesswept her along with a rush, and Yeo had his hands full. Her bowsprityawned, rose and fell hurriedly, the _Judy's_ unsteady dexter pointingin 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 wasclear it was all Yeo could do to keep her to her course. Columns ofspray 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 streamingdown its long slope. It accelerated, as if it could see it would soonbe too late. It nearly was, but not quite. A cataract roared over thepoop, and Yeo vanished. The _Judy_, in a panic, made an attempt at amove which would have been fatal then; but she was checked and her headsteadied. I could do nothing but hold the lady firm and grasp a pin inits rail. The flood swept us, brawling round the gear, foundering thehatch. For a moment I thought it was a case, and saw nothing butmaniacal water. Then the foam subsided to clear torrents which flungabout 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 theother passenger till his wife screamed, and then I saw him. Two figuresrolled in a flood that was pouring to the canting of the deck, and oneof them desperately clutched at the other for aid. But the other wasthe dead skipper, washed from his place on the hatch. 

We were over the bar again, and the deck became level. But it remainedthe bottom of a shallow well in which floated with indifference theone-time master of the _Judy_, face downwards, and who presentlystranded amidships. Our passenger reclined on the vacated hatch, hiseyes wide with childish and unspoken terror, and fixed on his wife, whose ministering hands he fumbled for as does a child for his mother'swhen 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 youcan 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 itwould ever visit Hammond now, where he lives in a tenement building, ina room which overlooks the roofs and railway arches of Limehouse. Justoutside his window the tower of the church is rather too large and tooclose. 

Hammond has rooms in the tenement which are above the rest of thestreet. He surmounts many layers of dense humanity. The house is notthe usual model dwelling. Once it knew better days. Once it was theresidence of a shipowner, in the days when the London docks were fullof clippers, and shipowners husbanded their own ships and liked to livenear their work. The house has a broad and noble staircase, having acarved handrail as wide as a span; but much of the old and carvedinterior woodwork of the house is missing--firewood sometimes runsshort there--and the rest is buried under years of paint and dirt. 

Hammond never knows how many people share the house with him. "I'vetried to find out, but the next day one of 'em has died and two moreare born. " It is such a hive that most of Hammond's friends gave upvisiting him after discovering in what place he had secluded himself;but there he stays with his books and his camera, his pubs and hislightermen, Jews, Chinamen, sailors, and dock-labourers. Occasionally amissionary from the studios of Hempstead or Chelsea goes down to sortout 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 cameand looked through the window with me. "A funny thing happened to mehere, " he said, "the other evening. A pal of mine died. The bills whichadvertise for the recovery of his body--you can see 'em in any pubabout here--call him Joseph Cherry, commonly called Ginger. He was alighterman, you know. There was a sing-song for the benefit of his wifeand 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 knowthe country about here? Well, you have to mind your eye. You never knowwhat will turn up. I never knew such a place. Not all of Limehouse getsinto the Directory, not by a lot. It is bound on the east by China, onthe north by Greenland, on the south by Cape Horn, and on the west byLondon Bridge. 

"The main road near here is the foreshore of London. There's no doubtthe sea beats on it--unless you are only a Chelsea chap, with your eyesbunged up with paint. All sorts of things drift along. All sorts ofwreckage. It's like finding a cocoanut or a palm hole stranded in aCornish cove. The stories I hear--one of you writer fellers ought tocome and stay here, only I suppose you are too busy writing aboutthings that really matter. You are like the bright youths in the artschools, drawing plaster casts till they don't know life when they seeit. 

"Well, about this pawnshop. It's a sort of pocket--you know thoseplaces on the beach where a lot of flotsam strands--oceanictreasure-trove. I suppose the currents, for some reason sailors couldexplain, eddy round this pawnshop and leave things there. That pawnshopis the luckiest corner along our beach, and I stopped to turn over thesea 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 ofcurious involuted lines--a mist of lines--with a face peering throughthe mist, if you looked close enough. Rows of cheap watches hung ontheir chains, and there was a lot of second-hand meerschaum pipes, anda walrus tusk, carved about a little. What took my eye was an oldChinese bowl, because inside it was a little jade idol--a fearfullittle wretch, with mother-o'-pearl eyes. It would squat in yourthoughts 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 havejumped more if the idol had winked at me. 

"There stood Jabberjee. I didn't know that was his name, though. He waschristened Jabberjee after the trouble, by a learned Limehouseschoolboy, who wore spectacles. Do I make myself clear?"

I murmured that I was a little dense, but time might carry outimprovements. Hammond was talking on, though, without looking at me. "There the Lascar was. Lots of 'em about here, you know. He was theusual bundle of bones and blue cotton rags, and his gunny bags flappedon his stick legs like banners. He looked as uncertain as acandle-flame in a draught. Perhaps he was sixteen. I dunno. Maybe hewas sixty. You can't tell these Johnnies. He had a shaven cranium, andhis tight scalp might have been slipped over the bony bosses of hishead with a shoehorn. 

"I don't know what he was saying. He cringed, and said something veryquickly; I thought he was speaking of something he had concealed on hisperson. Smuggled goods, likely. Tobacco. 

"Looking over his shoulder, wishing he would go away, I saw a policemanin 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'tmake out what he was driving at. I was looking at his clothes, wondering what the deuce he had concealed there. At last something cameout of his rags. Talk about making you jump! It really did look likethe head of a snake. It was, too, but attached to a walking-stick--sortof handle. A scaly head it was, in some shiny material. Its eyes werelike 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 surprisedto 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 thoughhe knew he was a lot cleverer than I. Another thing. The place wassuddenly quiet, and the houses and shops seemed to have fallen farback. The pavement was wider. 

"There was something else, I noticed. The bobby had left the streetcorner, and was walking our way. The curious thing was, though, themore he walked the farther off he got, as though the road was beingstretched under his feet. 

"Mind you, I was still awake and critical. You know there is asubstratum 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 jollyloud, I think. I couldn't help it. That horrible thing seemed towriggle in my fingers. 

"It was the shout which brought the crowd. There was the policeman. Ican't make out how he got there. 'Now, what's your little game?' hesaid. That brought the buildings up with a rush, and broke the roadinto the usual clatter. 

"It was all quite simple. There was nothing in it then out of theordinary. Just a usual Lascar, very frightened, waving a cheap canewith a handle like a snake's head. Then another policeman came up in ahurry, and pushed through the crowd. The crowd was on my side, maudlinand sympathetic. They knew all about it. The coolie had tried to stabme. An eager young lady in an apron asked a boy in front--he had justforced 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 uphis language fast. 'Now then, old Jabberjee, ' said one nipper inspectacles. The crowd was laughing, and surging towards the police. Imanaged 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 thatkid'--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 basetheir 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 silverevening. The sky was overcast. There was no wind, and no direct sun. The light was refined and diffused through a thin veiling of pearl. Seaand 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, tinymodels of ebony set in a vast brightness. They were poised in theillumination, and seemed to be motionless, but we knew they were movingdown on us. "Here she comes, " said the seaman, "and a fine evening itis for the end of her last voyage. " Shipbreakers had bought thatbarque. She was coming in to be destroyed. 

The stillness of the world, and its lustre in which that fine blackshape was centred and was moving to her end, made me feel thatheadlands, sea, and sky knew what was known to the two watchers on thehill. She was condemned. The ship was central, and the regarding worldstood about her in silence. Sombre and stately she came, in the mannerof the tragic proud, superior to the compelling fussiness of littlemen, making no resistance. The spring tide was near full. It hadflooded the marsh lands below us, but not with water, for thoseirregular pools resplendent as mirrors were deeps of light. Thehedgerows were strips of the earth's rind remaining above a profound. The light below the lines of black hedges was antipodean. The barquemoved 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 ofthe hill. 

"She's altered a little, " meditated Galsworthy. "They've shortened hersticks, those Norwegians, and painted her their beastly mustard colourand white. She's hogbacked, too. Well, she's old. " The old mancontinued his quiet meditation. He was really talking to himself, Ithink, and I was listening to his thoughts. 

"Look!" cried Galsworthy, suddenly rising, his hand gripping myshoulder. The tug had cast off and was going about. The ship came righton. There was an interval of time between her and the shore which wasbreathless and prolonged. 

"She's aground!" exclaimed the old man to himself, and the hand on myshoulder gripped harder. He stood regarding her for some time. "She'sdone, " he said, and presently released me, sitting down beside meagain, still looking at her moodily, smoking his pipe. He was silentfor a time. Perhaps he had in his mind that he too had taken theground. It was sunset, and there she was, and there was he, and no moresparkling morning tides out of port for them any more. 

Presently he turned to me. "There's a queer story about her. Shecarried an extra hand. I'll tell you. It's a queer yarn. She had oneman at a muster more than signed for her. At night, you couldn't getinto the rigging ahead of that chap. There you'd find him just too muchahead 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 chapbehind him was in no hurry, after the first rush. Well, it made itpretty hard for her old man to round up a crew. He had to find men whodidn't know her. Men in Poplar who didn't know her, those days, werescarce. 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 knewher. She was the pick of the bunch, to my eye. But she was full oftrouble. I must say that. When she was launched she killed a man. Firstshe stuck on the ways, and then she went off all unexpected, like abird. That was always a trick of hers. You never knew her. And when shewas tired of headwinds, she'd find a dead calm. That was the kind ofship she was. A skipper would look at her, and swear she was the shipfor him. The other chaps didn't understand her, he'd say. A ship likethat's sure to be good, he'd tell you. But when he'd got her she'd turnhis hair grey. She was that sort. 

"One voyage she was six weeks beating to westward round Cape Horn. Wehad a bad time. I'd never seen such seas. We could do no good there. Itwas a voyage and a half. She lost the second mate overboard, and shelost gear. So the old man put back to the Plate. And, of course, allher crowd deserted, to a man. They said they wanted to see their homesagain before they died. They said there was something wrong about thatship, 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 thatup there? What's that figgerhead in y'r main to'gallan' cross-tree?' Iwas the mate, you know. I talked to that chap. He learned somethingabout getting the booze out of him before he came aboard. He got a moveon. 

"We were over four months making 'Frisco that voyage, and she thesailer she was. Why, she's logged thirteen knots. But she could getnothing right, not for long. She was like those fine-looking women mencan'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 muchabout her troubles, though. He'll break her up, troubles and all, andshe's for firewood . .. There you are, my dear, there you are . .. Butyou should have seen her at Blackwall, in the old days . .. What's theEast India Dock Road like, these times?"

The next day, at low water, I stood beneath her, and watched a cascadepouring incessantly from a patched wound in her side, for she had beenin collision, and that was why she was condemned. She was careened, like a slain thing, and with the dank rocks and weeds about, and thatmonotonous pour from her wound, she might have been a venerable seamonster from which the life was draining. Yeo hailed me from above, andup the lively rope ladder I went. She had a Norwegian name, but thatwas not her name. All Poplar knew her once. There she was born. She wasone of ours. That stone arch of John Company, the entrance to the EastIndia Dock, once framed her picture, and her topmasts looked down tothe Dock Road, when she was at home. I could believe Galsworthy. Shewas not so empty as she seemed. She had a freight, and Yeo did not knowit. Poplar and the days of the clippers! I knew she was invisiblypeopled. Of course she was haunted. 

The shipwrecker and I went about her canted decks, groped through darkrecesses where it might have been the rats we heard, and peered intothe sonorous shades of the empty cargo spaces. In the cabins we puzzledover those relics left by her last crew, which, without theirassociations, seemed to have no reason in them. There was a mockingsilence in the cabins. What sort of men were they who were familiarwith these doors? And before the northmen had her, and she was English, trim, and flew skysails and studding-sails, and carried ladypassengers, who were the Poplar boys that laughed and yarned here? Shewas more mine than Yeo's. Let him claim her timber. All the richfreight of her past was mine. I was the intimate of every ghost shehad. 

We sat in a cabin which had been her skipper's. There was a litter onthe floor of old newspapers and documents, receipts for harbour dues, the captain's copies of bills of lading, store lists, and somepicture-postcards from the old man's family. A lump of induratedplum-duff, like a geological specimen, was on the table. There was aslant of sunshine through a square port window, and it rested on adecayed suit of oilskins. We sat silent, the shipbreaker havingfinished estimating to me, with enthusiasm, what she had of copper. Hewas now waiting for his men to return to work. They were going to takethe masts out of her. But I was wondering what I could do to lay thatghost of my old shipping parish which this craft had conjured in mymind. And as we both sat there, looking at nothing, we heard, at theend 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 tookhis seat again. "Why, of course, " he said. "She's settling. That's whatit is. She's settling. But my men, the fools, will have it there's someone pottering about this ship. "

_May 1909. _

XIV. The Sou'-Wester

The trees of the Embankment Gardens were nearly stripped of theirleaves, and were tossing widely. Shutting the eyes, you could think youheard the sweep of deep-water seas with strident crests. The greaterbuildings, like St. Paul's, might have been promontories looming in adriving 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 halcyondays, --good-bye to the sun, --but I felt, for a reason I could notremember and did not try to recall, pleased and satisfied with thisgale and its wrack. The clouds seemed curiously familiar. I had seenthem before somewhere; they were reminding me of a lucky but forgottenoccasion of the past. Whatever it was, no doubt it was better thananything likely to happen today. It was something good in an old worldwe have lost. But it was something of that old world, like an old bookwhich reads the same today; or an old friend surviving, who would helpto make endurable the years to come. I need not try to remember it. Ihad got it, whatever it was, and that was all the assurance of itswealth I wanted. Then from the river came a call, deep, prolonged, andmelancholy. .. . 

So that was it! No wonder the low clouds driving, and the wind in thetrees, worked that in my mind. The tide was near full. There was asteamer moving in the Pool. She was outward bound. 

Outward bound! I saw again the black buildings of a Welsh coaling portat 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. Shegave a deep, shuddering warning. She was off. We had been for a lastrun round the town. We were to board her in the outer lock. The windwas 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 ishe---- 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 wouldbe hard luck for a dog. Our thoughts turned to the snug indoor placesof the lighted town behind us; for in the small hours we should beplunging 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 thisnight, 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. Itshines into the mind and abides there. We watched the horizonsteadfastly for lands we did not know. The sun came up each day to aworld that was not the same, no matter how it looked. At night wechanged our stars. We heard nothing but the wind and the waves, and thequiet voice of a shipmate yarning with his pipe in his mouth. Theelements could interrupt us, but not the world. Not a gull of that wasleft. 

And somehow the beginning of a voyage seemed to be always in westerlyweather, at the beginning of winter. The English land to me is atwilight coast with clouds like iron above it poised in a windy lightof aquamarine, and a sunset of lucid saffron. Against that westernlight, bright, bare, and penetrating as the ruthless judgment ofimpersonal divinity, the polished waves mount, outlined as hard as jet, and move towards us. The ship's prow rises to cut out segments of thewest; falls into the dark hollows of waves. The wind pours over us, anicy and ponderable flood, and is increasing. Where England has sunk inthe 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. Thereonce a voyager was sundered from insistent trifles. He was with simple, elemental things that have been since time began, and he had to meetthem with what skill he had, the wind for his friend and adversary, thesun his clock, the stars for counsel, and the varying wilderness hishope and his doubt. But the cruel misery of man did not intrude. He wasfree from that. All men at sea were his fellows, whatever theirlanguage, an ancient fraternity whose bond was a common but unspokenknowledge of a hidden but imminent fate. They could be strangersashore, but not at sea. 

But that is gone now. The sea is poisoned with a deadly sorrow not itsown, which man has put there. The spaciousness of the great vault abovethe round of waters is soiled by the gibbering anxieties of a thousandgossipers of evil, which the ship catches in its wires, to darken thenight 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 seawhich have passed. They too had their glooms, but they came of thedignity of advancing storms, and the fear which great seas put in menwho held a resolute course nevertheless, knowing that their weird wasone which good seamen have faced since first the unknown beyond theland was dared; faith, courage, and the loyalty of comrades, which allthe waters of the world cannot drown. But the heart of man, which willface the worst the elements can do, sickens at the thought of theperverse and inexplicable cruelty of his fellows. 

_October 1917. _

XV. On Leave

Coming out of Victoria Station into the stir of London again, on leavefrom Flanders, must give as near the sensation of being thrust suddenlyinto life from the beyond and the dead as mortal man may expect toknow. It is a surprising and providential wakening into a world whichlong 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, thepeople so brisk and intent on their own concerns, the signs sostartlingly familiar, that the man who is home again begins to doubtthat he has been absent, that he has been dead. But his uniform mustsurely mean something, and its stains something more!

And there can be no doubt about it, as you stand there a trifle dizzyin London once more. You really have come back from another world; andyou 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 whatyou know. There they gossip in the hall, and leisurely survey thebookstall, and they would never guess it, but you have just returnedfrom hell. What could they say if you told them? They would beembarrassed, polite, forbearing, kindly, and smiling, and they wouldmention the matter afterwards as a queer adventure with a poor devilwho 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 useof standing in veritable daylight, and telling the living, who havenever been dead, of the other place?

I know now how Rip Van Winkle felt about it. But his was a minortrouble. All he lost was some years. He had not changed, except thathis beard was longer. But the man who comes back from the line has lostmore than years. He has lost his original self. People failed torecognize Rip because they did not know his beard. Our friends dorecognize us when they greet us on our return from the front, but theydo not know us because we are not the men they remember. They are thesame as ever; but when they address us, they talk to a mind which isnot there, though the eyes betray nothing of the difference. They talkto those who have come back to life to see them again, but who cannottell 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 _communiqués_, the amplifying dispatches of war correspondents, the silence of absentfriends in danger, the shock of a telegram, and rather interestingfood-rationing. They think it is the same war which the leave-manknows. He will tell them all about it, and they will learn the truth atlast. 

All about it! If an apparition of the battle-line in eruption were toform over London, over Paris, over Berlin, a sinister mirage, near, unfading, and admonitory, with spectral figures moving in its reflectedfires and its gloom, and the echoes of their cries were heard, andmurmurs of convulsive shocks, and the wind over the roofs broughtghostly and abominable smells into our streets; and if that were tohaunt us by day and night, a phantom from which there was no escape, toremain till the sins of Europe were expiated, we should soon forgetpolitics and arguments, and be in sackcloth and ashes, positive nolonger, but down on our knees before Heaven in awe at this revelationof 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 thetelegraph wire, and the voices of children in the wood, and the dust ofwhite English country roads is smelled at evening. All that is adelight which is miraculous in its intensity. But it is very lonesomeand far. It is curious to feel that you are really there, delighting inthe vividness of this recollection of the past, and yet balked by theknowledge that you are, nevertheless, outside this world of home, though it looks and smells and sounds so close; and that you may neverenter it again. It is like the landscape in a mirror, the luminousprojection of what is behind you. But you are not there. It isrecognized, but viewed now apart and aloof, a chance glimpse at thesecure and enduring place from which you came, vouchsafed to one whomust soon return to the secret darkness in his mind. 

The home folk do not know this, and may not be told--I mean they maynot be told why it is so. The youngster who is home on leave, though hemay not have reasoned it out, knows that what he wants to say, oftenprompted by indignation, cannot be said. He feels intuitively that thisis beyond his power to express. Besides, if he were to begin, wherewould he end? He cannot trust himself. What would happen if heuncovered, in a sunny and innocent breakfast-room, the horror he knows?If he spoke out? His people would not understand him. They would thinkhe was mad. They would be sorry, dammit. Sorry for him! Why, he is notsorry for himself. He can stand it now he knows what it is like. He canstand it--if they can. And he realizes they can stand it, and aremerely anxious about his welfare, the welfare which does not troublehim in the least, for he has looked into the depth of evil, and for himthe earth has changed; and he rather despises it. He has seen all hewants 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, butinexorably silent on what he knows. Some old fool said to him once, "Itmust be pretty bad out there?" Pretty bad! What a lark!

But for his senior, who also knows, though the feeling is the same, thenature of the combative adult male is less shy, and not merelynegatively contemptuous, but aggressive. It is difficult for him toendure hearing the home folk speak with the confidence of specialrevelation 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 thinkthere can be no other view; and they bear out their mathematicalarguments with maps and figures. It might be a chess tournament. Hefeels at last his anger beginning to smoulder. He feels a bleak andimpalpable alienation from those who are all the world to him. Heunderstands at last that they also are in the mirror, projected fromhis world that was, and that now he cannot come near them. Yet thoughhe knows it, they do not. The greatest evil of war--this is whatstaggers you when you come home, feeling you know the worst of it--isthe unconscious indifference to war's obscene blasphemy against life ofthe men and women who have the assurance that they will never be calledon to experience it. Out there, comrades in a common and unlightenedaffliction shake a fist humorously at the disregarding stars, and mockthem. 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 onlyone out of whom they can take it. They are to throw away their worldand die, so they must take it out of somebody. Therefore Jerry "gets itin 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 theirfellows, will burst into fury at the bond they feel. The obviousobstruction is the obstinate "blighter" with a machine-gun in front ofthem. At least, they are free to "strafe" him. 

But what is the matter with London? The men on leave, when they meeteach other, always ask that question without hope, in the seclusion oftheir confidence and special knowledge. They feel perversely they wouldsooner be amid the hated filth and smells of the battle-ground than athome. Out there, though possibly mischance may suddenly extinguish theday for them, they will be with those who understand, with comrades whorarely discuss the war except obliquely and with quiet and bitterjesting. Seeing the world has gone wrong, how much better and easier itis to take the likelihood of extinction with men who have the samemental 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 butcertain conviction that Europe is a decadent old beast eating her youngwith insatiable appetite, than to sit in sunny breakfast-rooms with thenewspaper maps and positive arguments of the unsaved!

_Autumn 1917. _

XVI. The Dunes

The dunes are in another world. They are two miles across the uncertainand hazardous tide races of the estuary. The folk of the village nevergo over. The dunes are nothing. They are the horizon. They are onlyseen in idleness, or when the weather is scanned, or an incoming shipis marked. The dunes are but a pallid phantom of land so delicatelygolden that it is surprising to find it constant. The faint glow ofthat dilated shore, quavering just above the sea, the sea intenselyblue and positive, might wreathe and vanish at any moment in the pourof wind from the Atlantic, whose endless strength easily bears in andover us vast involuted continents of white cloud. The dunes tremble inthe broad flood of wind, light, and sea, diaphanous and fading, alwayson the limit of vision, the point of disappearing, but are established. They are soundless, immaterial, and far, like a pleasing and personalillusion, a luminous dream of lasting tranquillity in a better but anunapproachable place, and the thought of crossing to them neversuggests anything so obvious as a boat. They look like no coast thatcould be reached. 

It was a perverse tide on a windless day which drifted me over. Thegreen mounds of water were flawless, with shadows of mysteries in theirclear deeps. The boat and the tide were murmuring to each othersecretly. The boat's thwarts were hot and dry in the sun. The sereneimmensity of the sky, the warmth and dryness of the boat's timbers, thedeep and translucent waters, and the coast so low and indistinct thatthe silent flashing of the combers there might have been on nothingsubstantial, were all timeless, and could have been but a thought and adesire; they were like a memorable morning in a Floridan caymiraculously returned. The boat did not move; the shore approached, revealed itself. It was something granted on a lucky day. This countrywould not be on the map. 

I landed on a broad margin of sand which the tide had just left. It wasfilmed with water. It was a mirror in which the sky was inverted. Whena breath of air passed over that polished surface it was as though theearth were a shining bubble which then nearly burst. To dare thatfoothold might precipitate the intruder on ancient magic to cloudlandfloating miles beneath the feet. But I had had the propriety to gobarefooted, and had lightened my mind before beginning the voyage. HereI felt I was breaking into what was still only the first day, for manhad never measured this place with his countless interruptions ofdarkness. I don't know whether that mirror had ever been darkened tillI put my foot in it. After the news I had heard on the quay thatmorning before starting out, news just arrived from London, the duneswere an unexpected assurance that the earth has an integrity and purityof its own, a quality which even man cannot irreparably soil; that itmaintains a pristine health and bloom invulnerable to the best ourheroic and intelligent activities can accomplish, and could easilysurvive our extinction, and even forget it once supported us. 

I found an empty bottle among the dry litter and drift above thetide-mark, sole relic, as far as could be seen there, of man. Nomessage was in the bottle. The black bottle itself was forlornly themessage, but it lay there unregarded by the bright immemorial genius ofthat coast. Yet it settled one doubt. This was not a land which hadnever known man. It had merely forgotten it had known him. He had beenthere, but whatever difference he had made was of the same significancenow as the dry bladder-wrack, the mummied gull near by, and thebleached shells. The next tide probably would hide the memento forever. At the time this did not seem an unhappy thought, though therelic had been our last witness, so enduring was the tenuous brightnessof the place, the shrine of our particular star, the visible aura ofearth. 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 andthe highest of the spring tides, a wilderness of fine sand, hot anddeep, its surface studded with the opaque blue of round pebbles andmussel shells. It looked too arid to support life, but sea-rocket withfleshy emerald stems and lilac flowers was scattered about. Nothingmoved in the waste but an impulsive small butterfly, blue as a fragmentof sky. The silence of the desert was that of a dream, but whenlistening to the quiet, a murmur which had been below hearing wasimagined. The dunes were quivering with the intensity of some latentenergy, and it might have been that one heard, or else it was theremembrance held by that strand of a storm which had passed, or itmight have been the ardent shafts of the sun. At the landward end ofthe waste, by the foot of the dunes, was an old beam of a ship, harshwith barnacles, its bolt-holes stopped with dust. A spinous shrub grewto one side of it. A solitary wasp, a slender creature in black andgold, quick and emotional, had made a cabin of one of the holes in thetimber. For some reason that fragment of a barque was more eloquent oftravel, and the work of seamen gone, than any of the craft moored atthe quay I left that morning. I smoked a pipe on that timber--for all Iknew, not for the first time--and did not feel at all lonely, nor thatvoyages for the discovery of fairer times were finished. 

Now the dunes were close they appeared surprisingly high, and wereformed, not like hills, but like the high Alps. They had the peaks anddeclivities of mountains. Their colour was of old ivory, and the longmarram grass which grew on them sparsely was as fine as green hair. Thehollowed slope before me was so pale, spacious, and immaculate thatthere was an instinctive hesitation about taking it. A dark ghost beganslowly to traverse it with outspread arms, a shade so distinct on thatvirgin surface that not till the gull, whose shadow it was, had goneinland, following its shadow over the high yellow ridge, did I knowthat I had not been looking at the personality. But the surface hadbeen darkened, and I could overcome my hesitation. 

From the ridge, the country of the dunes opened inland with theenlarged likeness of a lunar landscape surveyed in a telescope. Itmerely appeared to be near. The sand-hills, with their acute outlines, and their shadows flung rigidly from their peaks across the pallor oftheir slopes, were the apparition of inviolable seclusion. They couldhave been waiting upon an event secret from our knowledge, larger thanthe measure of our experience; so they had still the aspect of astrange world, not only infinitely remote, but superior with a greaterdestiny. They were old, greatly older than the ancient village acrossthe water. Ships left the village and went by them to sea gay with thebunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; andwhen such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with seamoss, 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 andimport. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all onthe same day. 

Only when resting on a knoll of one of the slopes, where the shadows ofa tuft of marram grass above my head lay as thin black wire on thesand, were the dunes caught in part of their secret. There was nosound. I heard the outer world from which I had come only as thewhistle of a curlew. It was far away now. To this place, the news I hadheard on the quay that morning would have sounded the same as Waterloo, which was yesterday, or the Armada, which was the same day--wasn'tit?--or the day before, or as the whistle of a curlew. Here we wereoutside time. Then I thought I heard a faint whisper, but when I lookedround nothing had altered. The shadows of the grass formed a fixedmetallic design on the sand. But I heard the whisper again, and with aside glance caught the dune stealthily on the move. 

It was alive. When you were not attentive, some of its grains wouldstart furtively, pour in increasing mobility fanwise, and restinstantly when looked at. This hill was fluid, and circulated. Itpreserved an outline that was fixed through the years, a known, named, and charted locality, only to those to whom one map would serve alifetime. But it was really unknown. It was on its way. Like the shipsthat were passing, it also was passing. It was only taking its owntime. 

Secluded within the inner ranges were little valleys, where, for awhile, the dunes had ceased to travel, and were at leisure. I got intoa hollow which had a floor of hoary lichen, with bronze hummocks ofmoss. In this moment of pause it had assumed a look of what we callantiquity. The valley was not abundant with vegetation, but enamelledand jewelled. A more concentrated, hectic, and volatile essence sent upstalks, blades, and sprays, with that direction and restraint whichperfection needs. More than in a likelier and fecund spot, in thisvalley the ichor showed the ardour and flush of its early vitality. Even now it could shape like this, and give these dyes! Chosen by anearth astringent and tonic, the forms were few and personal. Here youshould see to what influences our planet is still subject. The shapesin 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 ofevidence for which we look. 

Just showing in the drift on the seaward side of the valley were someworked stones and a little brickwork. When the sandhill paused, it hadalmost covered a building where man once worshipped. I could findnobody 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 endwas near as a hint, vague but glacial, of the transience of all theiraffairs. 

But what were their affairs? We should have to know them before wecould regret the dry sand which buried them. The valley looked verywell as it was. It showed no sign of failure. Over one of the stones ofthe forgotten altar was a casual weed which stood like a sign ofsuccess and continuance. It was as indecipherable as the stone, but theblue of its flowers, still and deep as rapture, surprising andsatisfying as an unexpected revelation of good, would have been betterworth reading for a knowledge of the heart from which could be drawnthe 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 longcherished a vision of a figure (well known to your private mirror)standing where it overlooks an intent and silent multitude to which itcommunicates with apt and fluent words those things not seen by mortaleyes, the dream of a world not ours. .. . You know what I mean. (Loud andprolonged applause. )

"I should be glad, " wrote one who is still unashamed to call himself myfriend, "if you could run down here one evening and address a meetingon your experiences. Just conversationally, you know. "

A casual sort of letter. Designedly so. But I could see through it. Itwas an invitation which did not wish to scare me from accepting it. Ismiled 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 himoff. I felt instantly that for once it might be even more pleasant toentertain an audience than to be one of the crowd and bored. And ithappened that my experiences really did give me something to say, andwere exactly what an audience, in war-time, might be glad to hear. Itherefore wrote a brief note of acceptance, as one to whom this sort ofthing 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 acoming event, a treat in store. I was on the list. There were thosethat evening who, instead of going to a theatre, a concert, or to seeVesta Tilley, would come to hear me. I felt then the first coldunderdraught 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 themonth. 

That was all right; yet another fortnight!

But what weakness was this? Anybody, could do it, if they knew as muchof my subject as did I. Many men would do it, without a tremor, withoutshame, if they knew next to nothing about it. Look at old Brown, forexample, whose only emotions are evoked by being late for dinner, theprice of building materials, the scandalous incapacity of workmen, andthe restriction of the liberty of the subject by trade unions! He willsit, everybody knows, while wearing plaid trousers and side-whiskers, on the right hand of a peer, in full view of thousands, at a politicalmeeting, untroubled, bland, conscious of his worth, and will rise atthe word, thumbs carelessly thrust into his waistcoat pockets, beginwith a jest (the same one), and for an hour make aspirates as uncommonas are bathrooms in his many houses. 

He has nothing to say, and could not say it if he had; but he can speakin public. You will observe the inference is obvious. One who is reallycapable of constructive thought (like you and me); who has a wide rangeof 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, thereis no doubt. (Hear, hear!)

Time passed. As Mr. A. Ward once pointed out, it is a way time has. Thenight came, as at last I began to fear it would. My brief notes were inmy pocket, for I had resolutely put from me the dishonourable andbarren safety of a written lecture. In the train--how cold was thenight--I wished I had gone more fully into the matter. Slightlyshivering, I tried to recall the dry humour of those carefully preparedopening sentences which shortly would prove to my audience that I hadtheir measure, and was at ease; would prove that my elevation on theplatform was not merely through four feet of deal planking, but was areal overlooking. But those delicate sentences had broken somehow. Theywere 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 thatlecture hall. No doubt, too, my friend had explained to them what aclever 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 ladiespresent. A most disquieting fact, entirely unforeseen. They sit in thefront rows and wait, evidently in a tranquil, alert, and mirthful mind, for you to begin. I could hear their leisurely converse and occasionalsubdued laughter (about what?) even where, in a sort of frozen, lucidcalm, indifferent to my fate, the mood of all Englishmen in moments ofextreme peril, I was handing my hat and coat to my friend in a roombehind 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 soulin torment, that a multitude of bodiless eyes had fixed me--eyesintent, curious, passionless. 

"I call upon--" said the chairman. 

I stood up. The sound of my voice uplifted in that silence was the moststartling sound I have ever heard. Shortly after that there came theparalysing discovery that it is a gift to be able to think whilehundreds 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 infront with his legs wide apart, who was grinning at me through hisspectacles. How he got there I don't know. I think he was the gift ofthe 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 forabout an hour. About what? Heaven knows. The chairman kindly let me outthrough a side entrance. 

XVIII. A Division on the March

We passed a division on the march the other day. Though the Britishoccupy this country, it is not often one sees them as a multitude. Whenin the trenches, you are concerned with but a handful of your fellows. But just then an interminable river of steel helmets poured along inregular waves. 

It is something to be able to say you have seen a British army movingdown the straight leagues of a French road through its guarding avenueof trees. My own brother may have been in that host. .. . Yet I neverthought of him. A torrent of sounds swamped and submerged mythoughts--the clangour of chains, the rumbling of wheels, the deepgrowling of guns; and that most ominous and subduing sound in war, theceaseless rhythmic tramp of armed men marching without music or song, men who, except the menace of their measured progress, that intimationof destiny and fate irresistible, are but a multitude of expressionlessmasks that glance at you, and pass. 

These men are all dressed alike; they are a tide of men. They all lookalike. Their mouths are set. They move together with the common, irresistible, uncritical urge of migratory animals. Their eyes fix youin a single ceaseless interrogation. About what?

There is no knowing. Don't ask me what the men are thinking inFlanders; 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 onperambulator wheels in which the men, holding drag-ropes, transporttheir own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would haverecognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, torecover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few momentsinto something human and understandable. The wind took a few escapedleaves 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 asthese men. My brother was certainly there. For sometimes, you know, onehas a bleak sense of doubt about that, a feeling of extreme isolationand polar loneliness. You wonder, at times, mixed up here in themysterious complexities of that elemental impulse which is visible asceaseless clouds of fire on the Somme, whether you are the last man, witnessing in helpless and mute horror the motiveless upheaval of earthin final ruin. 

So that, even as I write this, and glance, safe for tonight, at thestrangeness of this French house, I see everything about me withastonishment, and feel I may wake at any moment to the familiar thingsof that home in which I fell asleep to dream of calamity. 

Moving about this dubious and unauthentic scene of war, an atom of afortuitous host, each one of the host glancing at me with inscrutableeyes which seem to show in passing--if they show anything at all--afaint hint of reproach, the interruption of war by the page of afamiliar book, and the sudden anxious effort by one of the uniformedphantoms to recover words which you remember well enough were onceworth 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. Heseems altogether incredible. He might be talking across the Styx; and Iam not sure at the moment on which side of that river I stand. Is he onthe right side or am I? Which of us has got the place where a daily sunstill rises? Yes, it is the living men here who are the uncannyspectres. 

I have come in a lonely spot upon a little cross by the wayside, andhave been stopped by a familiar name on it. Dead? No. There, rightenough, is my veritable friend, as I knew and admired him. He cannot bedead. But those men in muddy clothes who sometimes consort with meround the burning logs on the hearth of an old château at night, I lookacross the floor at them as across countless ages, and listen to theirvoices till they sound unintelligibly from a remote and alien past. Ido not know what they say to me. I am encompassed by dark and insolublemagic, and have forgotten the Open Sesame, though I try hard toremember it; for these present circumstances and the beings who move inthem are of a world unreal and unreasonable. 

I get up from the talk of war by that fireside of an old château builton a still more ancient field where English archers fought a famousbattle six hundred years ago. A candle stands on a bracket beneath aportrait of a lady. The lady is in the dress of the days of the FrenchRevolution. She is young and vivid, and looks down at me under loweredeyelids in amused and enticing scrutiny. Her little mouth has thefaintest trace of a contemplative smile; and as I look at her I couldswear the corners of her mouth twitch, as if in the restraint ofcomplete understanding. 

She is long gone. She was executed at Arras. But I know her well. Thechâteau is less cold and lonely than it was. 

Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of whichare unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows leap. Theplace is so still that I can hear the antique timbers talking. Butsomething is without which is not the noise of the wind. I listen, andhear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted horizon ofouter 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 tinysilver 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 withthe knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of allthe guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth Iused to know in the morning. 

_Winter 1917. _

XIX. Holly-Ho!

In the train bound for the leave boat, just before Christmas, theKnight-Errant, who also was returning to the front, re-wrote thewell-known hymn of Phillips Brooks for me, to make the time pass. Itbegan:

 "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 theiron was in the soul of the Knight and misery was twisting it. I cannotpretend it was a pleasure trip. This was to be our third Christmas inFlanders. Is it any good trying to pass on the emotion common to menwho go to that place because they must? No, it is not. Yet, throughoutthe journey to the boat, I was not astonished at the loud gaiety ofmany of our passengers. I have got used to it; for they were like thatwhen they landed at Boulogne in August 1914; and they will be nodifferent when they come back for good, to comfortable observers whoprefer to be satisfied easily. 

There was a noise of musical instruments and untractable boots on thefloor-boards. While waiting in the nervous queue on the Day of Judgmentone of those fellows will address a mouth organ to the responsive feetof a pal, and the others will look on with intent approval, indifferentto Gabriel. Having watched disaster experiment variously with mycountrymen for three years, I begin to understand why once the Frenchhated us, why lately they have learned to admire us and to be amused byus, why the blunders of our governing classes don't damage us vitally(which seems miraculous unless you know the reason); and, indeed, whythat blessed flag has braved a thousand years the battle and thebreeze. 

It is because the quality of our Nobodies (about whom a great epic willget written when a poet is born good enough and big enough to receivethe inspiration), it is because any average Nobody has a coolimpregnability to the worst bad luck can do which is supernal. Thatgives the affair something of the comic. That is what makes the humourof the front. And after the first silent pause of respect and wonder atone more story of the sort a journalist knows so well who knows but alittle of railway men and miners, seamstresses and the mothers in meanstreets, and ships and the sea, one cannot help chuckling. Again, thesons of Smith and Jones and Robin! The well-born, the clever, thehaughty, and the greedy, in their fear, pride, and wilfulness, and theperplexity 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 lowworth, arise the Nobodies; because theirs is the historic job ofrestoring again the upset balance of affairs. They make no fuss aboutit. 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 andwithout complaint upon the wreckage wilfully made of generations ofsuch labour as theirs, to get the world right again, to make ithabitable again, though not for themselves; for them, they must spendthe 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 daythe planet will get back to its old place under the sun; but not forthem, not for them. 

A Nobody never seems to know anything, but by the grace of God he getsthere just the same. I was not far from Ypres and the line of the Yserduring the first battle for the Channel ports. Do you know how near wewere to the edge of the precipice not long before that Christmas? Wewere on the verge. We were nearly over. I knew it then. So when, laterstill, I used to meet in France an enigmatic, clay-coloured figure witha visage seamed with humorous dolours, loaded with pioneering andwarlike implements, rifles, knives, tin hats, and gas masks, I alwaysfelt I ought to get down and walk. Instead of which he used to saluteme as smartly as he could. He will never know how cheap and embarrassedhe 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 ChristmasEve. It was a still twilight, with a calm sea and a swell on ourstarboard beam. We rolled. We looked back on England sinking in thenight. A black smudge of a destroyer followed us over with its eye onus. The main deck was crowded with soldiers--you could not get alongthere--singing in their lifebelts; at times the chorus, if approved, became a unanimous roar. They didn't want to be there. They didn't wantto die. They wanted to go home. But they sang with dolorous joy. Thechorus died; and we heard again the deep monody of the sea, like theadmonitory voice of fate. The battles of the Somme were to come beforethe next Christmas; though none of us on that boat knew it then. Andwhere is the young officer who went ashore under the electric glare ofthe base port, singing also, and bearing a Christmas tree? Where isthat wild lieutenant of the Black Watch--he had a splendid eye, and avoice for a Burns midnight--who cried rollicking answers from the backof the crowd to the peremptory megaphone of the landing officer, tillthe ship was loud and gay, and the authorities got really wild? And theboy of a new draft, whose face, as I passed him where he had fallenin, --the light dropped to it, --was pale and nervous, and his teethchattering! 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 thetrenches. Christians awake, salute the happy morn. There was a prospectof straight road with an avenue of diminishing poplars going east, inan inky smear, to the Germans and infinity. The rain lashed into mynortherly ear, and the A. S. C. Motor-car driver, who was mad, keptmissing three-ton lorries and gun-limbers by the width of the paint. One transport mule, who pretended to be frightened of us, but whosefather was the devil and his mother an ass, plunged into a pond ofblack Flanders mud as we passed, and raked us with solvent filth. Wewiped it off our mouths. God rest you merry, gentlemen. A land soinundated that it inverted the raw and alien sky was on either hand. The mud clung to the horses and mules like dangling walnuts and bunchesof earthy and glistening grapes. The men humped themselves in soddenedkhaki. 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 wasnothing moving, nothing alive. That country was apparently abandoned. To our front and left, for no apparent reason, three little dirtyyellow clouds burst simultaneously over a copse, with a smash whichmade you feel you ought to be tolerant to men with shell-shock. On ourright was an empty field. Short momentary flames leaped constantly fromits farthermost hedge, with a noise like the rapid slamming of a row ofiron doors. Heavy eruptions, as though subterranean, were going on allthe time, the Lord knew where. But not a man was in sight till we gotto a village which looked like Gomorrah the day after it happened. Somesmoke and red dust were just settling by one of the ruins, and a manlay there motionless with his face in the rubbish. .. . 

There was a habitation where sacking kept the wind and rain fromunlucky holes, with holly behind pictures tacked to its walls, and aspecial piece of inviting mistletoe over a saucy lady from _La VieParisienne_. There was an elderly and serious colonel, who had anancestor at Chevy Chase, but himself held independent views on war; anda bunch of modest boys with sparkling eyes and blithe and ironiccomments. They also did not discuss the war in the way it is discussedwhere war is but lowered street lights. We had bully beef, the rightsort of pudding, --those boys must have had very nice sisters, --andfrosted cake. There were noises without, as the book of the play hasit, and plenty of laughter within, and I enjoyed myself with a sort ofveiled, subconscious misery; for I liked those lads; and we are sotransitory today. 

Then one of them took me for a Christmas walk in his country. "Have yougot your gas helmet?" he said. "That's right. It makes your eyes streamwith tears, and you look such a silly ass. " On we went. I beganChristmas Day in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud toolate; though you never can tell, when a noise like the collapse of aniron roof goes off behind you, where you are going to put your feet atthat moment. We went through a little wood, where the trees were likebroken poles with chewed ends. Over our heads were invisible thingswhich moaned, shrieked, and roared in flight. It was astonishing thatthey were invisible. Sometimes the bottom of the mud of thatcommunication trench was close, and sometimes not; you knew when youhad tried. And as the parapets usually had dissolved at the moredubious places, and I was told and heard that Fritz had machine gunstrained on them, I did not waste much time experimenting. 

I found the firing-line, as one usually does, with surprise. There wasa barrier of sandbags, oozing grey slime, and below, in a sort oflittle cave, with his body partly resting in a pool of water, a soldierasleep. Just beyond was a figure so merged in the environment ofaqueous muck and slime that I did not see him till he moved, and hisboots squelched. He lifted a wet rag in the grey wall and gotsurprisingly rapid with a rifle which was thrust through the hole andwent off; and then turned to look at us. "That fellow opposite is anuisance, " said my officer. "He's always potting at this corner. " "Yes, sir, " said the figure of mud, darkly louring under its tin hat, "but Iknow where the blighter is now, and I'll get the beggar yet. " With asudden recollection he then touched iron, and grinned. 

Slithering above the ankles in well-worked paste, and leaning against awall of slime, I tried to find "the nuisance opposite" with aperiscope; but before me was only a tangle of rusty wire, a number ofraw holes in shabby green grass, some objects lying about which lookedlike tailors' dummies discarded to the weather, and an awe-inspiringstillness. 

There were some interchanges with serious men, who did not sing, butwho 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. "Comeand 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 aspectacle. But "out there" one must follow one's leader wherever hegoes. He was going to make me crawl after him in "No Man's Land, " andit was not dark yet. So I acquired that sinking sensation described inthe 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 adeep yellow hole in the ground, too, that crater, with barbed wirespilled into it and round it; and you were warned to breathe gently init, 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 amuffled 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 givefirst 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 eyesmet mine. .. . 

_December 1916. _

XX. The Ruins

For more than two years this town could not have been more remote fromus 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. Thistown was but a name, a legend. 

Now the enemy had left it. When going into it for the first time youhad the feeling that either you or the town was bewitched. Were youreally there? Were time and space abolished? Or perhaps the town itselfwas supernatural; it was spectral, projected by unknowable evil. Andfor what purpose? Suspicious of its silence, of its solitude, of allits aspects, you verified its stones by touching them, and looked aboutfor signs that men had once been there. 

Such a town, which has long been in the zone of fire, and is thenuncovered by the foe, gives a wayfarer who early ventures into it thefeeling that this is the day after the Last Day, and that he has beenoverlooked. Somehow he did not hear Gabriel's trumpet; everybody elsehas gone on. There is not a sound but the subdued crackling of flameshidden somewhere in the overthrown and abandoned. There is no movementbut where faint smoke is wreathing slowly across the deserted streets. The unexpected collapse of a wall or cornice is frightful. So is thesilence which follows. A starved kitten, which shapes out of nothingand is there complete and instantaneous at your feet--ginger stripes, and a mew which is weak, but a veritable voice of the living--is firsta 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 miserableobject racing frantically to meet you. Lonely? The Poles are not moredesolate. There is no place as forlorn as that where man once wasestablished 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 thatif it were not also so desperately invisible you could grasp a cornerof it, lift the dark veil, and learn a little of what was the doom ofthose who have vanished. What happened to them?

It cannot be guessed. House fronts have collapsed in rubble across theroad. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Theireyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, andtheir walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles haveavalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but hasdropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over thedissolute. The lower floors are heaps of damp mortar and bricks. Veryrarely a solitary picture hangs awry on the wall of a house where thereis no other sign that it was ever inhabited. I saw in such a room theportrait of a child who in some moment long ago laughed while itclasped 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 bedivined, if you could but hit upon the key to the spell. What is thename of the evil that has fallen on mankind?

The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls ofthe streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and thecrude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. Arustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments. It is the flies which find these gardenspleasant. Theirs is now the only voice of Summer, as though they wereloathly in the mouth of Summer's carcase. It is perplexing to find howlittle remains of the common things of the household: a broken doll, achild's boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found acorn-chandler's ledger. 

It was lying open in the muck of the roadway, wet and discoloured. Tillthat moment I had not come to the point of believing the place. Thetown was not humane. It was not credible. It might have been, for all Icould tell, a simulacrum of the work of men. Perhaps it was the patientand particular mimicry of us by an unknown power, a power which wasalarmingly interested in our doings; and in a frenzy over its partialfailure it had attempted to demolish its laborious semblance of what wedo. Was this power still observant of its work, and conscious ofintruders? All this was a sinister warning of something invisible andmalign, which brooded over our affairs, knew us too well, thoughomitting the heart of us, and it was mocking us now by defiling in aninhuman rage its own caricature of our appearance. 

But there, lying in the road, was that corn-chandler's ledger. It wasthe first understandable thing I had seen that day. I began to believethese abandoned and silent ruins had lived and flourished, had once awarm kindred life moving in their empty chambers; enclosed acomfortable community, like placid Casterbridge. Men did stand here onsunny market days, and sorted wheat in the hollows of their hands. Andwith all that wide and hideous disaster of the Somme around it wassuddenly understood (as when an essential light at home, but a lightthat has been casually valued, goes out, and leaves you to the dark)that an elderly farmer, looking for the best seed corn in themarket-place, while his daughter the dairymaid is flirting with hisneighbour's son, are more to us than all the Importances and the GreatOnes who in all history till now have proudly and expertly tended theirculture of discords. 

I don't know that I ever read a book with more interest than thatcorn-chandler's ledger; though at one time, when it was merely acommonplace record of the common life which circulated there, testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would havebeen no matter to me. Not for such successes are our flags displayedand our bells set pealing. It named customers at Thiepval, Martinpuich, Courcelette, Combles, Longueval, Contalmaison, Pozières, Guillemont, Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of thoseplaces being what it was. Those villages did not exist, except ascorruption in a land that was tumbled into waves of glistening claywhere the bodies of men were rotting disregarded like those of dogssprawled on a midden. My knowledge of that country, got with somefatigue, anxiety, fright and on certain days dull contempt for theworst that could happen, because it seemed that nothing could matterany more, my idea of that country was such that the contrast of thoseledger accounts was uncanny and unbelievable. Yet amid all the miseryand horror of the Somme, with its shattering reminder of finality andfutility at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in theroad, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life shouldrise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue whichwould return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of thefuture would stop at rare relics, holding them up to the sun, and dimlyrecall ancient tales of woe. 

_Spring 1917. _

XXI. Lent, 1918

It was Meredith's country, and Atlantic weather in Lent. The downs weredilated and clear as though seen through crystal. A far company ofpines on the high skyline were magnified into delicate inky figures. The vacant sward below them was as lucent as the slope of a vastapproaching wave. A blackbird was fluting after a shower, for the skywas transient blue with the dark rags of the squall flying fast overthe hill towards London. The thatched roof of a cottage in the valleysuddenly flamed with a light of no earthly fire, as though a god hadarrived, and that was the sign. Miss Muffet, whose profile, having thebreeze and the surprise of the sun in her hair, was dedicated with aquivering and aureate nimbus, pulled aside the brush of a small yew, and exclaimed; for there, neatly set in the angle of the bough, was abrown cup with three blue eggs in it. I saw all this, and tried my bestto get back to it; but I was not there. I saw it clearly--the lateshower glittered on my coat and on the yew with the nest in it--but itwas 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 whorefused to believe there would be "a great offensive. " (Curse suchtrite and sounding words, which put measureless misery through the mindas unconsciously as a boy repeats something of Euclid. ) I believe thatno man would now dare to order it. The soldiers, I knew, with all thesigns before them, still could not credit that it would be done. Thefutile wickedness of these slaughters had been proved too often. Theyget nowhere. They settle nothing. This last, if it came, would be worsethan all the rest in its magnitude and horror; it would deprive Europeof a multitude more of our diminishing youth, and end, in theexhaustion of its impetus, with peace no nearer than before. The oldand 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 beenordered. Age, its blind jealousy for control now stark mad, impotent inall but the will and the power to command and punish, ignoring everyobvious lesson of the past, the appeal of the tortured for the sunagain and leisure even to weep, and the untimely bones of the young asusual now as flints in the earth of Europe, had deliberately put outthe glimmer of dawn. 

Well for those who may read the papers without personal knowledge ofwhat happens when such a combat has begun; but to know, and to beuseless; to be looking with that knowledge at Meredith's country inradiant April! There are occasions, though luckily they come but onceor twice in life, when the mind is shocked by the basal veritiesapparently moving as though they were fugitive; thought becomes dizzyat the daylight earth suddenly falling away at one's feet to thevacuity of the night. Some choice had to be made. I recalled anothersuch mental convulsion: by Amiens Cathedral, near midnight, nearly fouryears ago, with the French guns rumbling through the city in retreat, and the certainty that the enemy would be there by morning on his wayto Paris. One thing a campaigner learns: that matters are rarely quiteso 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), Iturned 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 acompany of flames leaping from a solidly established fire, flamescurling out of the lambent craters of a deep centre; and steadily lookinto that. After a while your hand goes out slowly for the book. It hasbecome acceptable. You have got your thoughts home. They were of no usein France, dwelling upon those villages and cross-roads you once knew, now spouting smoke and flames, where good friends are waiting, havinghad 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. Itis too distant. Romance, which many found good, would never hold myattention. But I had Samuel Butler's _Note Books_ with me for two yearsin France, and found that the right sort of thing. You may beginanywhere. There are no threads to look for. And you may stop for atime, while some strange notion of the author's is in contest for thecommand of the intelligence with your dark, resurgent thoughts; butButler always won. His mental activity is too fibrous, masculine, andunexpected for any nonsense. But I had to keep a sharp eye on Butler. His singular merits were discovered by others who had no more thanheard of him, but found he was exactly what they wanted. If his volumeof _Note Books_ is not the best example of its sort we have, then Ishould be glad to learn the name of the best. This Lent I triedColeridge again. But surely one's mind must be curiously at random togo to such woolgathering. I found him what I fear Lamb and his friendsknew him to be--a tireless and heavy preacher through the murk of whosenebulous scholarship and philosophy the revealing gleams of wisdom areso rare that you are almost too weary to open the eyes to them whenthey flash. Selden is better, but abstract, legal, and dry. 

Hazlitt compelled a renewal of an old respect; his humanity, hisinstinct for essentials, his cool detection of pretence and cant, however finely disguised, and his English with its frank love for theembodying noun and the active verb, make reading very like the clear, hard, bright, vigorous weather of the downs when the wind isup-Channel. It is bracing. But I discovered another notebook, of whichI have heard so little that it shows what good things may be lost inwar; for this book was published in 1914. It is the _Impressions andComments_ of Havelock Ellis. There have been in the past critics oflife and the things men do who have been observers as acute, aswell-equipped in knowledge, and have had a command of English as freeand accurate, as the author of "Impressions and Comments"; but notmany. Yet such judgments of men, their affairs and their circumstances, could have been written in no other time than the years just before thewar--the first note is dated July, 1912. The reflections are oftenchill and exposed; but so is a faithful mirror bleak, though polishedand gleaming, when held up to grey affairs in the light of a day whichis ominous. You seem to feel in this book the cold draught movingbefore the storm which has not come--the author knew of no storm tocome, and does not even hint at it; but the portents, and the look ofthe minds of his fellows, make him feel uncomfortable, and he asks whatails 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 ofpeace propaganda, Bianca Stella, Rabelais, the Rules of Art, the BayeuxTapestry, or Spanish cathedrals, should have been mislaid andforgotten. .. . 

The fire is dying. It is grey, fallen, and cold. The house is late andsilent. There is no sound but the ghostly creaking of a stair; ourthoughts are stealing away again. We creep out after them to the outergate. What are books and opinions? The creakings of an old house uneasywith the heavy remembrances and the melancholy of antiquity, and withsome midnight presage of its finality. 

The wind and rain have passed. There is now but the icy stillness andquiet of outer space. The earth is Limbo, the penumbra of a dark andpartial recollection; the shadow, vague and dawnless, over a vast stagefrom which the consequential pageant has gone, and is almost forgotten, the memory of many events merged now into formless night itself, andfoundered profoundly beneath the glacial brilliance of a clear heavenalive with stars. Only the stars live, and only the stars overlook theplace that was ours. The war--was there a war? It must have been longago. Perhaps the shades are troubled with vestiges of an old anddreadful sin. If once there were men who heard certain words and becamespellbound, and in the impulse of that madness forgot that their earthwas good, but very brief, and turned from their children and women andthe cherished work of their hands to slay each other and destroy theircommunities, it all happened just as the leaves of an autumn that isgone 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 arebeyond time. The night is their place, and only the unknowing starslook down to the little blot of midnight which was us, and our pride, and our wisdom, and our heroics. 

_April 1918. _

THE END