Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

CHAPTER XLII

Something had happened. I switched on the reading lamp at the head of the bunk and looked at my watch. Four in the morning! I could have sworn that the noise which had roused me was the herald of eclipse and overthrow. But had I heard anything? My cabin appeared to be a private seclusion in the hush at the end of time and chance. Had the ship stopped? There was no movement. She might have been in harbor. Yet when I rested against the bulkhead I could hear the many tiny mysterious voices speaking everywhere in the ship: twitters, ticks and tacks, rumbles—a clang, a guggle—a purring and a humming, but all reduced and far. She was going slow. Just as I switched off the light the monstrous sound came again, a long shuddering bellow.

Fog! Well, we were nearing home and it was meet that I should have an early notice that I had come to the end of the islands, the beaches, and the forests. As for islands, I had seen as many as would make an archipelago of myths, islands suitable for all the fables. Only a few days ago I came out on deck at sunrise by chance, and we were steaming by Giardino, and Etna was over us. That was the very hour to pass through the Strait of Messina. We went close to Stromboli, which was vexed with heavy gusts of smoke, and the Lipari Islands were strung out beyond in the Mediterranean weather of the legends. Ah, what a chance man had in that sea, once he had got beyond the worst of his fears and his stone implements! And at least five times in the long story of his life there, after he learned to make bronze, he seemed well on the way to an intellectual light that was equal to the sunshine at his porch. To look at those lambent shores above that plain of malachite was to see the clear invitation to him. How could he remain in darkness? There were the very colors and the radiance to transmute the muddy residue of his mind. Yet each time that he was near to full achievement his house fell on him; perhaps because he met the eye of Jove with arrogance, and perhaps because his pride had made him careless. The sunset of that day when we passed through the Tyrrhenian Sea was like a pæan to the renown of man; and so all we latter-day witnesses of Heaven’s tribute to man’s long effort retired to the saloon, where there was a concert; and an elderly Scotch passenger, to whom probably not a secret of the visible universe is unrevealed, and not many of the secrets of God, sang to us something about the banks of Loch Lomond; or rather, he stated the case for the low road, and for the high, spectacles on the end of his nose, face slightly lifted to keep them there and to get a good sight of his notebook, as though this were evidence and we were in a police court.

There was the siren again! Evidently there was some distance still to go to the everlasting light. It was shuddering and bellowing when the prompt little steward came in with the morning tea just after six. That moment when the tray is put beside you, and the lamp is doused because now you can see by the light of another day, always seemed to me to be of miraculous and pleasant significance, as though not one of us can be forgotten, but in our due time, out of the fog of the vast and impersonal world not us, will come the knock at our door (come in!) just as if, after all our doubting derision, the hairs of the head of each of us really had been numbered.

We ought to have been off Ushant, but from the deck there was no telling where we were. The air was bleak, the decks were wet, and there was no horizon. I climbed to the captain’s bridge—by command, brought by the captain’s messenger; nothing less could induce me to venture there—and the master’s gray parrot, on seeing me, gave his confusing imitation of the bo’sun’s pipe, and then in a gruff voice condemned my eyes because I am a farmer and no sailor. The fog had thinned a little to weatherward, but in the east it lay in banks and gave a vista of many horizons, and all of them false. One looked that way, and got the impression that Europe was mislaid. Yet, no; the master said that during the night he received three cross-bearings by wireless, and that, in spite of my dubiety, we were in soundings and fifty miles south of the Lizard. We should be off Portland in the early afternoon.

There was a rumor, when we were at lunch, that the Start was in sight. But a retired naval surgeon was telling me about Peking at that moment. I am not sure that I listened attentively to the news that England was in view. I did not get up. Then presently it struck me that something had happened of more interest to me even than the nearness of Devon. I mean the fact that I did not get up to see it. This so puzzled me that I attended in but a polite way to the doctor’s further words on China. What had happened?

Look here—I admonished myself—when you’ve been nearing this particular island on other voyages you’ve stayed on deck till near sunrise so that you might see the first English light. What’s the matter now? You know you don’t want this lunch.

It was clear that I was returning on this voyage a man who was, in some way, different from the earlier traveler, and I am not sure that I liked this new character; but I will say for him that he himself was genuinely puzzled about it, and that he had no other feeling; in fact, he had no feeling at all, except that he was deeply and comfortably glad to be near home again. What, then, I exclaimed to myself, is not England home? What’s the difference?

You may be talking with a friend in a house where the mirrors are queerly placed, and you know your surprise when you see the reflection of some one you think you know, and which a steadier glance tells you is indeed an aspect of yourself you have not seen before. I caught now a glimpse of a man who did not want to go up and look at the Start. I could make nothing of him. I had a sight, as it were, of but the back of his head. He said diffidently that all he wanted was to see a familiar gate again, and the forms of the shrubs about it, and those who would most certainly have that gate open before he reached it. He explained that that gate happened to be in England, and not in Ternate; a distinction, I warned him, that was outrageous. No, he said. It would have been outrageous ten years ago, but that he was not responsible for what had come into those years. The world had been turning round and going on. Our little star was now in a different region of the sky. He was merely carried with it and must accept the new phenomena whether he liked them or not. Ternate might be home; and he quoted from one of his odd books: “Why should I be lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”

This new mark in his life so disturbed him that he felt he dare not reveal it to the English doctor who was returning home after some years in China and Japan. When both of them reached the deck the Start was far astern and was all but dissolved in a murk. In overcoats and wraps the passengers watched the approach of the ship to Portland; a gray sky and a forbidding coast which enlarged its gloom and made its frown more ominous till Portland hung over the ship, as though it were a giant that was not really very interested in the morsel of life that had crept to its feet. We gazed at it in silence. “Is that the prison on the top of it?” presently asked the naval surgeon. “Come into the smoke room out of it,” said he. “Will it never change? That is what it looked like when I lolloped under it in a destroyer, hunting for periscopes. Where’s that steward?”

This was more than I could stand. I knew what the doctor meant. But at times we want more than a mere fellowship in a murk. Were we still only at the end of an era? Had the new day not yet come?

We got under way again, and night fell on the coast and sank at last over all the waters. Leaning on the bulwarks and gazing landward, I could just make out a deeper shadow athwart the seas of night, formless under the faint glimmer in the meridian. It had no bounds. It was immense and intangible. Looking at it, I felt an awakening of understanding. I felt the inward glow of a new and deep desire. I cannot tell you what that shadow was, for, though transcendently it was there, it was dim and mysterious, almost beyond vision; England! That shadow was the indenture on the very stars of an old grandeur, the memory impressed on night itself, blurred but indelible, of an ancient renown. It was the emanation of an idea too great for us to know; the dimmering through the gloom to me in my isolation and misgiving of wonderful things almost forgotten, of the dreams and exaltations of splendid youth, of the fidelity of comrades, of noble achievements, of our long-past intimate sorrows, of precious things unspoken but understood, of our dead. No. Not even old night could hide that presence. It was indefinable, majestic, severe, and still. And it may have been resigned and communing, its age-long work done, in the fall of a darkness which it knew to be ultimate. Or it may have been retired within the night, dominant on its seas, making no sign, knowing the supreme test of all its labors was at hand, vigilant but composed, waiting for another morning to dawn in the hearts of men, when there should be light to build the City of God.

THE END