* * * * *
And now we are on board; and alas! some time before the breeze will be so. Take care of that huge boom, landsman Claude, swaying and sweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish to be knocked overboard. Take care, too, of that loose rope’s end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out. Take my advice, lie down here across the deck, as others are doing. Cover yourself with great-coats, like an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let us meditate little on this strange thing, and strange place, which holds us now.
Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of the long glassy swell. How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with useless outcries and struggles—only because they are idle. Let the wind take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant—their deafening dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious song of the breeze through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of bird on bough. So it is through life; there is no true rest but labour. “No true misery,” as Carlyle says, “but in that of not being able to work.” Some may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a great worldwide law, which reaches from earth to heaven. Whatever the Preacher may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is it but a blessing that “sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean,” as he says, and “all things, are full of labour—man cannot utter it.” This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa-nuts, and shaddock groves. For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they have been sailing out their little life, never touching shore or ground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of valves—small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who have learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about that submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the world’s destiny.
Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet! Can it be true that no rational beings are denizens there? Science is severely silent—having as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward is not silent—if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. The young man here has been just telling me that it was only last month one followed a West Indiaman right across the Atlantic. “For,” says he, “there must be mermaids, and such like. Do you think Heaven would have made all that water there only for the herrings and mackerel?”
I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that honest men’s guesses are sometimes found by science to have been prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and few universal legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, divine and reverend as she is. Why, like Keats’s Lamia,
‘Must all charms flee,
At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,’
who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new wonders which she herself reveals daily? Perhaps, too, according to the Duke of Wellington’s great dictum, that each man must be the best judge in his own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist or not. Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden—by which beautiful old word West-country people still call young girls—was followed up the shore by a mermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster? True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze. We will go there some day, and pick up a wild tale or two about it.
But, lo! a black line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees ‘a billow break.’ True: there they come; the great white horses, that ‘champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.’ That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, and the breeze will be down upon us. The young men whistle openly to woo it; the old father thinks such a superstition somewhat beneath both his years and his religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into a sly ‘whe-eugh’ when he has got well forward out of sight.
* * * *
Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur; the white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail forward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet.