The day had dawned grey and melancholy. A mist of fine, drizzling rain blotted out the low, monotonous shores of the estuary, and the crew—dull and dispirited, the last night’s drink not yet out of them—hove the anchor short with hardly a pretence of a shanty. But a fresh, sharp wind began to blow from the north-east as the light grew, and presently the ship was romping down Channel with everything set.
Broughton stood on the poop beside the Channel pilot, watching the familiar coast of so many landfalls slip rapidly by. Like him, the red-faced, stocky man at his side had watched the ship grow old. His name figured many a time, in Broughton’s stiff, precise handwriting, in those shabby, leather-backed volumes which recorded her unconsidered Odyssey:
“6 a.m. Dull and rainy. Landed Mr. Gardiner, Channel pilot.”
“Start point bearing N. 6 miles. Pilot Gardiner left.”
“Off Dungeness, 3 a.m. Took Mr. Gardiner, pilot, off North Foreland.”
Bald, unadorned entries, dull statements of plain fact set down by plain men with no knowledge of phrase-turning; yet there is more eloquence in them than in all the word-spinnings of literature to those who read aright. What sagas unsung they stand for! What departures fraught with hopes and dreams, with remorse and parting and farewell! What landfalls that were the triumphant climax of long endurance, of patient toil, of cold, hunger, heat, thirst, not to be told in words! What difficulties met and surmounted, what battles fought and won!
The ship glistened white and clean in the morning sun. The men were hard at work washing down decks, ridding her of the last traces of the grime accumulated during her long period in port. Ah, thought Broughton, it was good to be at sea again! The doubts and anxieties of the last six weeks seemed to slip away from him as the river mud slipped from the ship’s keel into the clean Channel tide. The accustomed sights and sounds, the familiar lift and quiver of his ship under him, were like a kind of enchanted circle within which he stood secure against the dark forces of destruction and change. He was a king again in his own little kingdom. The very act of entering up the day’s work in the log book—the taking of sights—all the small duties and ceremonies that make up a shipmaster’s life—helped to create in him an illusion of security. He was like a man awakened from a terrifying dream of judgment, reassuring himself by the sight and touch of common things that the world still goes on its accustomed way. A strange sense of peace and permanency wrapped him round—the peace of an ancient and established order of things seeming so set and rooted that nothing could ever end it. It seemed incredible that all this microcosm should pass away—that the uncounted watches should ever go by and the ship’s faithful bells tell them no more. She appeared to borrow a certain quality of immortality from the winds and the sea and the stars, the eternal things which had been the commonplaces of her wandering years.
Most of all, it was the fact of being once more occupied that brought him solace. By what queer doctrine of theologians, by what sheer translator’s error, did man’s inheritance of daily labour come to be accounted as the penalty of his first folly and sin? Work—surely the one merciful gift vouchsafed to Adam by an angry Deity when he went weeping forth from Paradise! Work—with its kindly weariness of body, compelling the weary brain to rest. Work, the everlasting anodyne, the unfailing salve for man’s most unbearable sorrows—which shall last when pleasure and lust and wealth are so many Dead Sea apples in the mouth, a comfort and a refuge when all human loves and loyalties shall fade and fail.
Five days after the “Maid of Athens” took her departure from the Lizard it began to breeze up from the north-west. At three bells in the first watch the royals and topgallantsails had to come in, then the jibs; and when dark fell she was running before wind and sea under fore and main topsails and reefed foresail. But she liked rough weather, and under her reduced canvas she was going along very safely and easily, so Broughton decided to turn in for an hour’s rest in order to be ready for the strenuous night he anticipated.
“I am going to turn in for an hour or so,” he said, turning to the mate; “call me in that time, if I am not awake before. And sooner if anything out of the way should happen. I think we shall have a dirty night by the look of it.”