Part 5 (1/2)
A few words in sea life--as fish, mere, and row--are said to be so old that the philologists refer them to the Aryans, or, as others might say, give them up as a bad job. These words appear to be common to all the sons of Adam who preferred adventurous change to security in monotony, and so signed on as slaves to a galley. Anchor we imported from the Greeks--it is declared to be the oldest word from the Mediterranean in the language of our s.h.i.+ps; admiral from the Arabs, and hammock and hurricane from the Caribs, through the Spaniards. But other words of our seamen are as native to us as our grey weather, for we brought them with other habits overseas from the North--words like hail, storm, sea, s.h.i.+p, sail, strand, cliff, shower, mast, and flood.
To examine words in this manner is simply to invite trouble, as did the man who a.s.sumed that ”bending a sail” was done as one would bend a cane, not knowing that the sailor uses that word in the original sense of ”fastening.” Once, in my ignorance, I imagined ”schooner” was of Dutch origin, but was careful to refer to the invaluable Skeat. Only just in time, though. And he says that the word was born on the Clyde, grew up in New England, migrated to Holland, and then came back to us again. Once upon a time (1713) at Gloucester, Ma.s.sachusetts, a man was witnessing a new fore-and-aft rigged vessel glide away on a trial trip, and exclaimed ”She sc.o.o.ns!” So all her kind were christened. Science of that kind is almost as good as romance.
XIX. Illusions
FEBRUARY 15, 1919. Southwark Street is warehouses and railway bridges, and at its best is not beautiful; but when at night it is a deep chasm through which whirl cataracts of snow, and the paving is sludge, then, if you are at one end of it, the other end is as far away as joy. I was at one end of it, and at the other was my train, due to leave in ten minutes. Yet as there was a strike, there might be no train, and so I could not lose it; I had that consolation while judging that, with more than half a mile of snow and squall intervening from the north-east, I could not do the length of the street in ten minutes. So I surrendered the train which might not run to whoever was able to catch it, and in that instant of renunciation the dark body of a motor lorry skidded to the kerb and stopped beside me. A voice that was as pa.s.sionless as destiny told me to hop up, if I were going towards the station. The headlong lorry, the sombre ma.s.ses of the buildings which were now looming through the diminis.h.i.+ng snow, and the winter's night, roused a vision of another place, much like it, or else the snow and the night made it seem like it, and so my uppermost thought became too personal, unimportant, and curious for converse. All I said, as I took my place beside the steering wheel, was: ”It's a wretched night.” (But I might have been alone in the lorry. There was no immediate answer.) I communed secretly with my memory. Then the voice returned out of the darkness. It startled me. ”This corner,” it remarked, ”always reminds me of a bit of Armentieres.” The voice had answered my thought, and not my words.
The lorry stopped and I got down. I never saw the driver. I do not know whose voice it was; if, indeed, there was with me in that lorry more than a shadow and an impersonal voice.
Yet now the night could do its worst. I had the illusion that I had seen through it. Were these bleak and obdurate circ.u.mstances an imposture?
They appeared to have me imprisoned helplessly in time and snow; yet I had seen them shaken, and by a mere thought. Did their appearance depend on the way we looked at them? Perhaps it was that. We are compelled by outside things to their mould, and are mortified; but occasionally they fail to hide the joke. The laugh becomes ours, and circ.u.mstance must submit to the way we see it. If Time playfully imprisons us in a century we would rather have missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed to wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam, and where to miss the last train--supposing it runs at all--is the right end to a perfect day of blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter when we find that the whole of it is shaken by a single idea? Might it not vanish altogether if enough of us could be found to laugh at it? This dream a.s.sisted me to some warmth of mind through the rest of the cold night till I arrived on the station platform, after the train had left.
To help further in destroying my faith in the permanence of our affairs and inst.i.tutions, it then appeared the platform was vacant because my train was not yet in. It was coming in at that moment--or so a porter told me. Our protean enemy took his most fearful form in the War when he became a Hidden Hand. Was this porter an agent of the G.o.ds for whose eternal leisure our daily confusion and bad temper make an amusing diversion? Was he one of the malicious familiars who are at work amongst us, disguised, and who playfully set us by the ears with divine traps for b.o.o.bies? This porter was grinning. He went away with his hand over his mouth, and at that moment a train stopped at the platform. The engine was at the wrong end of it.
One official told me its proper locomotive was at East Grinstead, and that we might not get it. Perhaps its home was there. And yet another official whose face was as mysterious as that of the station clock, which was wearing a paper mask, said that the engine of my train had, in fact, gone. It had gone to Brighton. He did not know why. It had gone alone. I turned vacantly from this bewilderment and saw a man with the sort of golden beard an immortal might have worn standing under a station lamp, and breaking now and then into peals of merriment, occasioned, it seemed to me, by what the first porter was telling him. Then both of them looked towards me, and stopped. If in one more gust of hearty laughter that hollow wilderness of a station had vanished, gloom and dreary echoes and frozen lights, and I had found myself blinking in a surprising sunlight at that fellow in the golden beard, while he continued to laugh at me in another world than this, where he was revealed for what he was, I was in the mind for placid acceptance. Well, the miraculous transformation was as likely as an engine for that train.
The bearded one approached me. I did not run away. I waited for the next thing. He had a book under his arm, and it is likely that the G.o.ds, who have no need to learn the truth, never read books. ”If,” he told me, ”you want to get to Sheepwash, you had better take this other train. It is going half the way. The engine for the train for Sheepwash can't be found.”
We both boarded the train for half the journey, and it did not appear to have any other pa.s.sengers. Yet, reckless of the risks I was taking in travelling alone with a suspected being at such a time--for where might not he and the train go?--I accepted the chance; and as I took my seat and regarded that bright beard, the shadow of my awful doubt became really serious, for it was only this week that I have been reading _The Twilight of the G.o.ds_. There was the disintegrating recollection of that book, with its stories of homeless immortals in search of new and more profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless voice in a motor lorry which ignored what I said but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory of mine that was strictly private; and there was the levity with which uniformed officials treated the essential inst.i.tutions of civilization.
All this gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy of our strong government might, at any moment now, roll up as a scroll.
Off we went. My fellow-traveller was silent, though he was smiling at something which was not in the carriage, to my knowledge. When he spoke, his eyes were not fixed on me. He looked into the air, and talked to whatever it was he saw. He pointed a finger at the light of the city lying beyond and below our carriage window. ”All they've built,” he said, ”stands only on a few odd notions. Now they're changing their notions, so down comes everything with a run. And don't they look surprised and pained!” (I felt like an eavesdropper, and thought I'd better show him I was present.) I apologized for overhearing him. He nodded shortly, a little condescendingly. ”We've accepted _that_”--he poked his stick towards where stood our Imperial city in the night--”as if it came by itself. We never knew our city was like that just because we never saw it in any other light. Now we're upset to find the magic-lantern picture is fading. Got to put up with it, though.” His book had been on the seat.
It fell to the floor, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It was _The Twilight of the G.o.ds_.
If I could have remembered at that moment one of the simple dodges for averting the evil eye I should have used it. The laughing malice of that book had so confused me for some days that I had begun to feel that even St. Paul's, a blue bubble floating over London on the stream of Time, might vanish, as bubbles will. The Hidden Hand, I began to believe, had something in it.
I intrigued a serious interview with my fellow-pa.s.senger, hoping to find evidence; and then the train stopped finally, six miles from home. At that very instant of time the train which we had previously rejected because it had no engine chose to run express through the station where we stood.
XX. Figure-Heads
MARCH 1, 1919. When the car got to the Board of Trade Office, which is opposite the old chapel of ease where the crews of John Company's s.h.i.+ps ”used to wors.h.i.+p,” as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle Dave by the kerb, with time apparently on his hands. I got down.
He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson was a mast and block maker, but his fame was the excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years since old Jackson made one, but if it is doubted that he was an artist, there is a shop near where he once lived which still displays three of his images, the size of life, reputed to have been conjured from baulks of timber with an ax. I remember Jackson. He rarely answered you when you questioned him about those s.h.i.+ps to which he had given personality and eyes that looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows. He regarded you, and only his whiskers moved in silent indifference (he chewed), as though you were wasting the time of a man and an artist. Those images of his were all of women. He would make no figure-head for a s.h.i.+p bearing the name of a man, though it were that of a Greek hero. And, of course, you dare not even think of the trousered legs of a modern man stuck each side of a s.h.i.+p's prow, boots and all; but the drapery of a woman flows with grace there. She would look indeed its vigilant guardian spirit. It would be pleasing to write of some of the more famous of those idols, as I remember them in repose, above the quays of the docks.
Here we were joined by some young men who knew Uncle Dave. They were looking for a s.h.i.+p. But Uncle continued to tell me of the merits of his friend the maker of figure-heads. A stoker became a trifle irritated.
”Well, what's the good of 'em, anyway?” he interjected. ”Lumber, I call 'em. They can't be carried on straight stems, and clipper-bows aren't wanted these days, wasting good metal. Why, even Thompson's White Star liners have chucked that sort of truck. They're not built like it now.
What's the good of figger-'eds?”
This youth's casual blasphemy in the presence of Uncle Dave (who once was bo'sun of a China clipper), extolling as he did his age of mere machines against the virtues of an age when s.h.i.+ps were expected to look good as well as do good things, made us shrink in antic.i.p.ation of the storm. For Uncle Dave has a habit of listening to a talk about s.h.i.+ps in a deliberate and contemptuous silence, with nothing to show of his inward heat but a baleful light in the eye. He does not like steamers. He does not think steamer-men are seamen. He declares they can never be seamen.
And now we waited, dreading that his anger, when it burst, would be quite incoherent with force. There was really something of hatred in his look as he gazed at the youngster, his mouth a little open, his hand holding his trembling pipe just away from his mouth, which had forgotten it. The old sailor bent forward, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his eyes at this young man as though trying to believe it was real.
An older hand interposed. ”Ah, come away now! I've heard chaps make game of figger-'eds, an' call 'em superst.i.tion. But I say let such things alone. I know things that's happened to funny fellows through making game of figger-'eds. There was the _Barbadian La.s.s_. She was a brigantine.
She used to run to Trinidad. There was something queer about her figger-'ed. It was a half-breed woman. She was smiling. She had bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and she used to wear earrings. Her chaps used to keep a spare pair for her in a box. She was always fresh and bright, but I've heard say she was never painted--no, not since the day the s.h.i.+p was launched.