“It is with a good many people,” Carroll interposed with a smile.
In the meanwhile, they were driving out to the southwards, opening up the Strait, with the forests to port growing smaller and the short seas increasing in size. The breeze was cold, but the girl was warmly clad and the easy motion in no way troubled her. The rush of keen salt air stirred her blood, and all round her were spread wonderful harmonies of silver-laced blue and green, through which the straining fabric that carried her swept on. The mountains were majestic, but except when tempests lashed their crags or torrents swept their lower slopes they were wrapped in eternal repose; the sea was filled with ecstatic motion.
“The hills have their fascination; it’s a thing I know,” she said, to draw the helmsman out. “I think I should like the sea, too; but at first sight its charm isn’t quite so plain.”
“You have started him,” interposed Carroll. “He won’t refuse that challenge!”
Vane accepted it with a smile which meant more than good-humoured indulgence. “Well,” he began, “the sea’s the same everywhere, unbridled, unchanging; a force that remains as it was in the beginning. Once you’re out of harbour, under sail, you have done with civilisation. It has possibly provided you with excellent gear, but it can do no more; you stand alone, stripped for the struggle with the elements.”
“Is it always a struggle?” Evelyn asked, to prompt him.
“Always. The sea’s as treacherous as the winds that vex it; pitiless, murderous. When you have only sail to trust to, you can never relax your vigilance; you must watch the varying drift of clouds and the swing of the certain tides. There’s nothing and nobody to fall back upon when the breeze pipes its challenge; you have sloughed off civilisation and must stand or fall by the raw natural powers man is born with, and chief among them is the capacity for brutal labour. The thrashing sail must be mastered; the tackle cracking with the strain must be hauled in. Perhaps that’s the charm of it for some of us whose lives are pretty smooth—it takes one back, as I said, to the beginning.”
“But haven’t human progress and machines made everybody’s lives more smooth?”
Vane laughed somewhat grimly. “Oh, no; I think that can never be done. So far, somebody pays for the other’s ease. At sea, in the mine, and in the bush, man still grapples with a rugged, naked world.”
The girl was pleased. She had drawn him out, and she thought he had in speaking kept a fair balance between too crude a mode of colloquial expression and poetic elaboration. There was, she knew, a vein of poetic conception in him, and the struggle he had hinted at could only be described fittingly in heroic language. It was, in one sense, a pity that those who had the gift of it and cultivated imagination had, for the most part, never been forced into the fight; but that was, perhaps, not a matter of much importance. There were plenty of men, such as her companion, endowed with endurance, who if they seldom gave their thoughts free rein, rejoiced in the struggle; and by them the world’s sternest work was done.