Part 11 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONUMENT TO CAPTAIN COOK At Botany Bay, Australia]

I made friends with the mate and the chief engineer and gained access to their superb collection of Emperor Penguin skins and an unusual number of photographs. Months afterward they wanted four men to complete the crew necessary for another journey south and I was tempted to join them, but tallow and bladder and a repressed pen were the negatives, while China and j.a.pan were the positives. So I sailed away with the rising sun in the direction of the great West that is the Far East. Crisp and clear in the bright morning air shone the towering peaks of the New Zealand Alps as I sailed toward Australia and to Botany Bay,--not, however, without being nearly wrecked in the fog which had gathered in Foveaux Strait, which separates Steward Island from the South Island in New Zealand. Bluff, the last little town in New Zealand, is said to have the most southerly hotel in the world. I saw it.

2

Four days from Bluff to Melbourne on a sea that seemed on the verge of congealing into ice. It was not cold, yet autumn-like. And the pa.s.sengers seemed the fallen leaves. The stewards maintained the reputation for impudence and unmannerliness of the Union Steams.h.i.+p Company crews, but I had grown used to that, and thanked my stars that this was the last coupon in the ticket I had purchased in Honolulu more than a year before. Of human incidents there was therefore none to relate.

But chill and melancholy as that Southern sea was, there hovered over it a creature whose call upon one's interest was more than compensating.

Swooping with giant wings in careless ease, the albatross followed us day in and day out. Always on the wing, awake or asleep, in suns.h.i.+ne or in storm, the air his home as the water is to fish, and earth to mammal.

Even the s.h.i.+p was no lure for him by way of support. He followed it, accepted whatever was thrown from it, but as for dependence upon it,--no such weakness, you may be sure. His sixteen feet of wing-spread moved like a s.h.i.+p upon the waves, like a combination of a s.h.i.+p and sails.

Swift, huge, glorious, unconsciously majestic, he is indeed a bird of good omen. How he floats with never a sign of effort! How he glides atop the waves, skims them, yet is never reached by their flame-like leapings; simulates their motion without the exhaustion into which they sink incessantly.

The albatross had left us, and now the swarming is his artistry, so refined his ”table manners.” He does not gorge himself as does the sea-gull, nor is he ever heard to screech that selfish, hungry, insatiable screech. Silent, sadly voiceless, rhythmic and symbolic without being restrained by pride of art, he exemplifies right living.

He is our link between sh.o.r.es, the one dream of reality on an ocean of opiate loveliness wherein there is little of earth's confusion and pain.

For the traveler he keeps the balance between the deadly stability of land life and the dream-like mystery of the sea. But for him it were impossible to come so easily out of an experience of a long voyage. Away down there he is the only reminder of reality. Which explains the reverence sailors have for him and their superst.i.tious dread of killing him. It is like the dread of the physician that his knife may too sharply stir the numbed senses of his patient under anaesthesia.

Land may be said to begin where the albatross is seen to depart. He knows, and off he swoops, s.h.i.+p or no s.h.i.+p to follow and to guide; back over the thousand miles of watery waste, to measure the infinite with his sixteen-foot wings, glide by glide, with the speed of a twin-screw turbine. Only when the female enters the breeding season does she seek out a lost island to rear her young. Independent of the sea, these birds are utterly confined to it, a mystery floating within mystery.

The albatross have left us, and now the swarming gulls abound. Why they are dignified with the Christian name ”Sea” when they are such homely land-lubbers, is a question that I cannot answer. Pilots, rather, they come to see us into the harbor, or, with their harsh screeching, to frighten us away.

But something within me would not know Australia, nor any lands, just then. Perhaps it was that my unconscious self was still with the albatross; for strange as it may seem I could not sense any forward direction at all that day, but only one that pointed backward,--toward home. Try as I would to realize myself on my way to Australia, still my mind persisted in pointing toward America. Not until we got the first sight of land ahead was my soul set right. Then it was the Sister Islands, Wilson's Promontory, the Ba.s.s Straits, with Tasmania barely in sight, Cape Liptrap, and finally Port Phillip. And Australia was on all fours, veiled in blue,--a thin rind of earth steeped in summer splendor.

Flag signals were exchanged with the lonely pilot-s.h.i.+p that hung about the entrance. All being well, we pa.s.sed on, crossing that point at the entrance where five strong water-currents meet and vanquish one another, turning into a smooth, gla.s.sy coat of treachery. The _Wimmera_ hugged the right sh.o.r.e of the largest harbor I have ever seen. In places the other sh.o.r.e could not be seen with the naked eye. But it is very shallow and innumerable lights float in double file to guard all s.h.i.+ps from being stranded.

Just as we entered, the sun set. A stream of color unconstrained obliterated all detail as it poured over the point of the harbor, filling the s.p.a.cious port. Clots of amber and orange gathered and were dissipated, softened, diffused, till slowly all died down and were gone. Darkness and the blinking lights of the buoys remained.

Two big s.h.i.+ps, brilliantly lighted, flinging their manes of smoke to the winds, pa.s.sed, one on its way to Sydney, the other to Tasmania and Adelaide in the south. Far in the distance ahead we could see the string of sh.o.r.e lights at Port Williamson. It took us three hours to overtake them, and we arrived too late to receive pratique. For half an hour the captain and the customs carried on a conversation with blinking lights.

The winches suddenly began their rasping sound, and the anchor dropped to the bottom. We did not debark that night.

3

I spent nearly six months in Melbourne and Sydney, those two eastern eyes of that wild old continent, and for the first time in a twelvemonth the sense of security from the sea obtained. For a fortnight I occupied a little shack on Manly Beach, near Sydney, but oh, how different it was there from the sand-dunes on the sh.o.r.es at Dunedin, in New Zealand! In the Dominion one had to hide within the interior to get away from the sea: on the beach one felt about to slip into Neptune's maw. But at Manly, Bondi, Botany Bay, the sea might hammer away for another eternity without putting a landlubber off his ease.

But we shall return to Australia in another section. The sea is still much in the blood, there is still a vast length that lies close to Asia and marks off another line of our imaginary triangle. Here are no landless reaches, but all the way to j.a.pan one pa.s.ses strip after strip, as though some giant earthquake had shattered part of the main.

Months afterward I took pa.s.sage once more, this time on the _Eastern_, bound for j.a.pan.

There was no mistaking the side of the world I was on and the direction of my journey from the moment I stepped upon the pier to which the _Eastern_ was made fast. Hundreds of Chinese, with thousands of boxes and bundles, scurried to and fro in an ant-like attention to little details. Then as the steamer was about to depart, mobilization for the counting of noses took place, and veritable regiments of emaciated yellow men lined the decks. Here and there a fat, successful-looking Chinese moved round the crowd, an altogether different-looking species, more as one who lives on them than as one who lives with them. On the dock stood several groups waiting to wave farewell to their Oriental kin. One of these groups was composed of a stout white woman with two very pretty Eurasian daughters,--as handsome a pair of girls as I saw in Australia. Their father was a well-to-do Chinese merchant taking one of his regular trips to China. In Australian fas.h.i.+on they were ready for a mild flirtation, spoke Australian English with Australian slang, and, aside from their pater, they were native to all intents and purposes.

And in Australia they remained.

Of those who departed, the major number likewise remained native--though to China--despite years and years of residence in Australia. It is a one-sided argument to maintain that because of that the Chinese are una.s.similable. There is no ground for such a deduction, because they arrived mainly after maturity, and the Chinese could challenge any white man to become one of them after he has fully acquired his habits and prejudices. But we had not been many minutes at sea before it was our misfortune to find that we had among us a Chinese boy who was born and brought up in New Zealand and was just then going to China for the first time. Here I had ample opportunity of observing the a.s.similability of the Oriental. And here I bow before the inevitable.

He had a.s.similated every obnoxious characteristic of our civilization, the pa.s.sion for slang, the impertinence, the false pride, the bluff which is the basis of Western crowd psychology. He was not a Chinese,--that he denied most vehemently,--he was a New Zealander, and by virtue of his birth he a.s.sumed the right to impose his boyish larrikinism upon all the s.h.i.+p's unfortunate pa.s.sengers. He banged the piano morning, noon, and night; he affected long, straight black hair, which was constantly getting in his way and being brushed carefully back over his head; and he took great pains to make himself as generally obnoxious as possible. He was not that serious, struggling Chinese student who comes to America afire with hope for the regeneration of his race. He was a New Zealander, knew no other affiliations, had no aspirations, and lorded it over ”those Chinese” who occupied every bit of available s.p.a.ce on the steamer.

In his way he was also a Don Juan, for he hovered over the young half-Australian wife of a middle-aged Chinese merchant who was taking her back to China for her confinement. She was morose, sullen, as unhappy a spirit as I have seen in an Oriental body. Obviously, China held few fine prospects for her. She was seldom seen in her husband's company, for he was generally below playing fan-tan or gambling in some other fas.h.i.+on. And the Australian half of her was longing for home. It seemed to devolve upon our young Don Juan to court this unhappy creature, and court her he did. But she had no resilience, no flash, her Chinese half-self offering him as little reward for his pains as a cow would offer the sun for a brilliant setting.

I expected any hour of the day to see that woman throw herself into the sea, or that husband stick a knife into the bold, bad boy, but nothing happened; the husband and the wife were seemingly oblivious of the love-making, and all went well.

Besides the Chinese crew and pa.s.sengers there were perhaps a dozen white people, including the officers. An old English army captain whose pa.s.sport confirmed his declaration that he was seventy-three years old, was taking a little run up to j.a.pan. His only reason was that j.a.pan was an ally, hence he wanted to see it. Such is the nature of British provincialism. Otherwise, there were but two or three young Australians bound for Townsville, and the stewardess. Somewhere along the coast we picked up a Russian peasant, who with his wife had been induced to emigrate to Australia, but who was now going home to enlist. As though there weren't already enough men in Russia armed with sticks and stones!