Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others

by Alfred Noyes

He was restless to-night. It was his sixty-sixth birthday, and it reminded him that he was behindhand with his great work. Nobody else had reminded him of it, for he was quite alone in the world. He was beginning to wonder, almost for the first time, whether he was really destined to fail. He had begun to look his age at last; but he was a fine figure of a man still. His white hair and flowing white beard framed a face of the richest mahogany brown, in which the blood mantled like wine over the cheek-bones. His deep eyes, of the marine blue, that belongs only to the folk of the sea, were haunted sometimes by visionary fires, like those in the eyes of an imaginative child. He might have posed for the original fisherman of his first name. Of course, he was regarded as a little eccentric by the dwellers on the coast, whom he had often amazed by what they called his "innocence." The red nosed landlord of the Blue Dolphin had often been heard, on Sundays, to say that we should all do well if we were as innocent as Peter. When he visited the little town of Westport (which was now a naval base), the urchins in the street sometimes expressed their view of the matter by waiting until he was safely out of hearing, and then crowing like cocks.

Nobody knew of Peter Ramsay's secret, or the urchins might not have waited at all, and even the kindest of his friends would have regarded him as daft. But the comedy was not without its tragic aspect. Peter Ramsay may have been cracked, but it was with the peculiar kind of crack that you get in the everlasting hills, a rift that shows the sky. With his imperfect equipment and hopeless lack of technique, he was trying to write down certain truths, for the lack of which the civilized world, at that moment, was in danger of destruction.

This does not mean that Peter was the sole possessor of those truths. He was only one among millions of simple and unsophisticated souls, all over the world, who possessed those truths dumbly, and knew, with complete certainty, that their intellectual leaders, for the most part, lacked them, or had lost them in a multitude of details. These dumb millions were right about certain important matters; and their leaders, for all their dialectical cleverness, had lost sight of the truth which has always proceeded ex ore infantium. It was the tragedy of the twentieth century, and it had culminated in the tragedy of philosophical Germany. There were certain features of modern books, modern paintings, and modern music, that mopped and mowed like faces through the bars of a mad-house, clamoring for dishonor and brutality in every department of life. These things could not be dissociated from the international tragedy. They were its heralds. Peter Ramsay was one of those obscure millions who were the most important figures in Armageddon because they, and they alone, in our modern world, had retained the right to challenge the sophistries of Germany. They had not needed the war to teach them the reality of evil; and if they had sinned, they had never for a moment tried to prove that they did right in sinning.

Peter knew all this, though he would not have said it in so many words. In his book, he was trying to meet the main onset of all those destructive forces. He had realized that the modern world had no faith, since the creeds had gone into the melting pot; and he was trying to write down, plainly, for plain men, exactly what he believed.

He turned over the red-lined pages of the big leather-bound ledger, half diary, half commonplace book, in which, for the last forty years, he had made his notes. It was a queer medley, beginning with passages written in his youth, that recalled many of his old struggles. There was one, in particular, that always reminded him of a school friend named Herbert Potts, who had eventually won the coveted scholarship. They used to go for walks together, over the hills, and talk about science and religion.

"So you don't believe there is any future life," Peter had said to him one day.

"Not for the individual," replied Herbert Potts, adjusting his glasses, with a singularly intellectual expression.

"But if there is none for the individual, it means the end of all we are fighting for, because the race will come to an end, eventually," said Peter. "Why, think, Potts, think, it means that all your progress drops over a precipice at last. It means that instead of the Figure of Love, we must substitute the Figure of Death, stretching out his arms and saying to the whole human race, 'Come unto Me! Suffer little children to come unto Me!'"

"I am afraid all the evidence points that way," said Potts, and as he had just passed the London matriculation examination, the words rang like a death-knell in Peter's foolish heart. He remembered how the words had recurred to him in his dreams that night, and how he awoke in the gray dawn to find that his pillow was wet with tears.

There were many other memories in his book, memories of the long struggle, the wrestling with the angel, and at last the music of that loftier certainty which he longed to impart.