The passage was from San Francisco to Leith in Scotland. In the course of it Guy put on fifteen pounds and came to a clear understanding with himself and at least one man of the crew.
They fought, he and this other man, in the waist, surrounded by a ring of seamen whose sympathy was entirely against Guy and with the Scotchman, named Macpherson. Macpherson was about ten pounds heavier than Guy but made the mistake of clinching. Whereupon Guy turned the fight into a wrestling match and threw his opponent. Macpherson’s head striking on an iron butt, there was no more battle in him that day. Nor did he challenge Guy in the rest of the passage.
Guy’s understanding with himself was as forcible and as fortuitous. It was gained, as such comprehensions are, in loneliness and in struggle. He got some of it on the ship’s yards, striving with half-frozen fingers to clutch the wet and stiffened sail. He got some more of it as he lay at night in the tropics on the hatch, looking up at a star-sprinkled and gently rocking sky. He got most of it in the spectacle of his fellows, a race of men dedicated to the achievement of a common purpose for no real or visible reward. Certainly they did not sail the seas for the sake of the few dollars it put in their pockets. They could live more comfortably ashore in the easeful jails for vagrants—“with running water and everything,” as one of them put it. They were where they were for the sake of doing something together. They would sail that ship from port to port. They would sail her along a trackless path across the eternal frontier of the ocean in a voyage without precedent. Every ship, it came home to Guy Vanton, is a Santa Maria; every sailor a Columbus. If they failed, they failed gallantly; if they succeeded, they succeeded in an enterprise bigger than themselves.
And they did succeed. At night, under the glare of the arc-lights, alongside a stone quay at Leith they stood, a patient little group up forward, and heard the mate, standing on the fo’c’s’le head, address them with the immemorial benediction of the sea, four words:
“That’ll do ye, men.”
A straggling cheer went up and they turned to the shore.
X
Guy Vanton saw now what he had never seen before, what he had come more than 15,000 miles to see: that the world of men and women is a fellowship into which all are admitted in such degree as they care to enter and on such terms as they make for themselves.
Without any subtleties he perceived that the past could bind him only in so far as he allowed it to do so. It was not his father who proposed him for fellowship in the community of men and women, nor could his father withhold that fellowship from him.
Nor his mother, nor anything that they had done or left undone. With the birth of every mortal a new and clean page is turned in human history.