Look here—I admonished myself—when you’ve been nearing this particular island on other voyages you’ve stayed on deck till near sunrise so that you might see the first English light. What’s the matter now? You know you don’t want this lunch.
It was clear that I was returning on this voyage a man who was, in some way, different from the earlier traveler, and I am not sure that I liked this new character; but I will say for him that he himself was genuinely puzzled about it, and that he had no other feeling; in fact, he had no feeling at all, except that he was deeply and comfortably glad to be near home again. What, then, I exclaimed to myself, is not England home? What’s the difference?
You may be talking with a friend in a house where the mirrors are queerly placed, and you know your surprise when you see the reflection of some one you think you know, and which a steadier glance tells you is indeed an aspect of yourself you have not seen before. I caught now a glimpse of a man who did not want to go up and look at the Start. I could make nothing of him. I had a sight, as it were, of but the back of his head. He said diffidently that all he wanted was to see a familiar gate again, and the forms of the shrubs about it, and those who would most certainly have that gate open before he reached it. He explained that that gate happened to be in England, and not in Ternate; a distinction, I warned him, that was outrageous. No, he said. It would have been outrageous ten years ago, but that he was not responsible for what had come into those years. The world had been turning round and going on. Our little star was now in a different region of the sky. He was merely carried with it and must accept the new phenomena whether he liked them or not. Ternate might be home; and he quoted from one of his odd books: “Why should I be lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
This new mark in his life so disturbed him that he felt he dare not reveal it to the English doctor who was returning home after some years in China and Japan. When both of them reached the deck the Start was far astern and was all but dissolved in a murk. In overcoats and wraps the passengers watched the approach of the ship to Portland; a gray sky and a forbidding coast which enlarged its gloom and made its frown more ominous till Portland hung over the ship, as though it were a giant that was not really very interested in the morsel of life that had crept to its feet. We gazed at it in silence. “Is that the prison on the top of it?” presently asked the naval surgeon. “Come into the smoke room out of it,” said he. “Will it never change? That is what it looked like when I lolloped under it in a destroyer, hunting for periscopes. Where’s that steward?”
This was more than I could stand. I knew what the doctor meant. But at times we want more than a mere fellowship in a murk. Were we still only at the end of an era? Had the new day not yet come?
We got under way again, and night fell on the coast and sank at last over all the waters. Leaning on the bulwarks and gazing landward, I could just make out a deeper shadow athwart the seas of night, formless under the faint glimmer in the meridian. It had no bounds. It was immense and intangible. Looking at it, I felt an awakening of understanding. I felt the inward glow of a new and deep desire. I cannot tell you what that shadow was, for, though transcendently it was there, it was dim and mysterious, almost beyond vision; England! That shadow was the indenture on the very stars of an old grandeur, the memory impressed on night itself, blurred but indelible, of an ancient renown. It was the emanation of an idea too great for us to know; the dimmering through the gloom to me in my isolation and misgiving of wonderful things almost forgotten, of the dreams and exaltations of splendid youth, of the fidelity of comrades, of noble achievements, of our long-past intimate sorrows, of precious things unspoken but understood, of our dead. No. Not even old night could hide that presence. It was indefinable, majestic, severe, and still. And it may have been resigned and communing, its age-long work done, in the fall of a darkness which it knew to be ultimate. Or it may have been retired within the night, dominant on its seas, making no sign, knowing the supreme test of all its labors was at hand, vigilant but composed, waiting for another morning to dawn in the hearts of men, when there should be light to build the City of God.
THE END