Part 27 (1/2)
”Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes.”
So p.r.o.ne was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true insight into human pa.s.sion. The worst trick this disability ever played upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'--an opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it betrayed him also into occasional lapses and inept.i.tudes which almost rival Leigh Hunt's--
”The two divinest things the world has got-- A lovely woman in a rural spot.”
This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place below 'Autumn'; of which (I hope) reason has been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4).
And (6) _longo intervallo_ comes 'Indolence,' which may be fearlessly called an altogether inferior performance.
The 'May Ode' stands by itself, an exquisite fragment. But the two odes from _Endymion_ may be set well above 'Indolence,' and that to 'Sorrow,'
in my opinion, above 'Autumn,' and only a little way behind the leaders.
But the fall of the year is marked for us by a ceremony more poignant, more sorrowfully seasonable than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us celebrate--
LAYING UP THE BOAT.
There arrives a day towards the end of October--or with luck we may tide over into November--when the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept a silent compact and ignored all change in the season. We have watched the blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and let pa.s.s their scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a few kittiwakes appeared. A week later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the hill. They vanished, and we pretended not to miss them. When our hands grew chill with steering we rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell.
We take one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through which, in a week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the Baltic merchantmen, our November visitors--bluff vessels with red-painted channels, green deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits overhanging astern, and the Danish flag fluttering aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with us, as with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dissembled too long; and know, as we go through the form of debating it, that our date must be the next spring-tides.
This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding farewell to summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in ceremonial silence.
_Favete linguis!_ The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at this season reach their height a little after night-fall, and it is on an already slackening flood that we cast off our moorings and head up the river with our backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are ourselves towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession.
She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, and all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside the town quay and beneath the shears--the abhorred shears--which lift this too out of its step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry of Polydorus.
We lower it, lay it along the deck, and resume our way; past quay doors and windows where already the townsfolk are beginning to light their lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on bulwarks and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like the Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own; and they never saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as samite--those heavenly wings!--nor felt her gallant spirit straining to beat her own record before a tense northerly breeze. Yet even to them her form, in pure white with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.
For in every good s.h.i.+p the miracle of Galatea is renewed; and the s.h.i.+pwright who sent this keel down the ways to her element surely beheld the birth of a G.o.ddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but the conditions of his work keep him a modest man; for he goes about it under the concentred gaze of half a dozen old mariners hauled ash.o.r.e, who haunt his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring how cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it would feel like to compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen reviewers. But to him, as to his critics, the s.h.i.+p was a framework only until the terrible moment when with baptism she took life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy of creation, realise that she had pa.s.sed from him? Ere the local artillery band had finished 'Rule Britannia,' and while his friends were still shaking his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his triumph? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess; to chase perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch it must pa.s.s from his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself upon the workmans.h.i.+p, the immaterial function. For of art this is the cross and crown in one; and he, modest man, was born to the sad eminence.
She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something better. Like a slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us; but it was we who gave wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its grace, and discipline to its vital impulses. She is ours, too, by our grat.i.tude, since the delicate machine:
”Has like a woman given up its joy;”
And by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of her sweet companions.h.i.+p through long days empty of annoyance--land left behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean!
Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine--I think at times that she has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing and speaking astern? or has not turned his head to the confident inexplicable call?
The fishermen fable of drowned sailors 'hailing their names.' But the voice is of a single speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of the dead; it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd, I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking, placidly staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker, and patently he has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer s.h.i.+pmate? She, too, knows the voice; even answered it one day, supposing it mine, and in her confusion I surprised our common secret. But we never hear it together.
She is seated now on the lee side of the c.o.c.kpit, her hands folded on the coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the sail and across the sea from which they surely have drawn their wine-coloured glooms. She has not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not Cynthia.
Then either it must be the wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining at the impa.s.sable bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her master, or else--Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds, with mischievous harp?
”That was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell And wing our green to wed our blue; But whether note of joy or knell Not his own Father-singer knew; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it s.h.i.+vers through; The breast of us a sounded sh.e.l.l, The blood of us a lighted dew.”
Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the s.h.i.+p; and if you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's s.e.x. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a s.h.i.+p resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling through and along every nerve of her. Are you converted? That life is yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a G.o.d!
For indeed you shall be a G.o.d, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings--run out and drop from you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page as it rolls past to break on the sh.o.r.e towards which you revert no glance.
Even the romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.
”Sails of silk and ropes of sendal, Such as gleam in ancient lore, And the singing of the sailor, And the answer from the sh.o.r.e--”
These shall pa.s.s and leave you younger than romance--a child open-eyed and curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch the gannets diving--
”As Noah saw them dive O'er sunken Ararat.”
Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a G.o.d, to the gates of a kingdom I must pause to describe for you, though when you reach it you will forget my description and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that is a part of its charm.