CHAPTER VII
THE BOAT
Most of us have never known the day as it is and the night as it is. Protected from the wind and the sunlight by walls and houses, by artificial light from the darkness, by words from the truth, we have created an artificial world in the midst of the true world. In the wind, in the sunlight, in the sea, there are voices speaking a language long forgotten; lost when thought, becoming vocal, set up a language of its own and a tower of Babel in the world of dreams. Even still, when alone in the solitudes, on the moors, on the mountains, by the sea, through all the claptrap of language and thought come the voices; the true, eternal voices that were before we were and will be when we are not.
Voices of which all art, in marble, in tone, or in words, is but the pathetic imitation, an echo dulled and muffled and debased. In this lies the eternal despair of art.
To the mind of the commonest man, if he be imaginative, the language of the eternal things is louder far than to the mind of the most cultivated man if he be only imitative.
Gaspard’s mind was of the imaginative order. Up to this, in the forecastle or stokehold, on board ship or on shore, he had been held apart by his fellows or protected by the common things from the eternal truths. Loneliness in her extremest form had brought him in touch with them; or at least within whispering distance.
The great blue day, dying now, had searched his heart and mind; it was as though the old gods of nature had landed on the island and stood around him viewless and perplexing him with whispers. Fear, Air, Distance, Light, and Sea had spoken to him in turn and in chorus; Loneliness had echoed what they said.
There was something more in the wind and the sun and the sky and the sea than he had known of up to this; the drinking-bar, the forecastle, the sailors’ lodging-house, those black holes had hidden him from this knowledge; a debased language in which the word “sea” stood for wharves and ships, stokeholds and furnaces, decks and glimpses of ocean had paralysed his thought and numbed it. Twelve hours of loneliness and fear, face to face with nature, had loosened the old false labels from the truths of things and, without a glimpse of the real truths, a dim recognition of the falsities unsettled his mind.
The damning mesmerism of language had suspended itself partly for a moment in this partly unsophisticated mind, and as he sat watching the sun sink in the western sea, the word “sunset” or the word “sea” never occurred to him. He was thinking without language, lost in contemplation, like an animal viewing from a distance a new and curious but undisturbing phenomenon.
And the sight was tremendous as ten million cubic leagues of golden air could make it. Fire, Light, and Distance were there at this marriage of sun and ocean; colour, size, limit, all were banished from the infinite, indefinite universe of gold through which the golden sun was sinking to the golden sea.
The sun had almost reached the sea-line and for a moment Ocean and Sun hung apart, the splendour of the sea answering the splendour of the sky. For a moment time seemed to cease and silence supreme, everlasting, golden, and beautiful, held the West in her keeping.