“All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”
The short summer night was over; the stars were paling; there was a faint light above the hills. The flame in the ship’s lantern felt the day beginning. A cock in the hen-coop crowed, flapping his wings. The hour was full of mystery. Though it was still, it was full of the suggestion of noise. There was a rustle, a murmur, a sense of preparation. Already, in the farms ashore, the pails went clanking to the byres. Very faintly, from time to time, one heard the lowing of a cow, or the song of some fisherman, as he put out, in the twilight, to his lobster-pots, sculling with one oar.
Dew had fallen during the night. The decks of the Broken Heart, lying at anchor there, with the lantern burning at her peak, were wet with dew. Dew dripped from her running rigging; the gleam of wetness was upon her guns, upon her rails, upon the bell in the poop belfry. She seemed august, lying there in the twilight. Her sailors, asleep on her deck, in the shadow, below the break of the quarter-deck, were unlike earthly sleepers. The old boatswain, in the blue boat-cloak, standing at the gangway watching the dawn, was august, sphinx-like, symbolic. The two men who stood above him on the quarter-deck spoke quietly, in hushed voices, as though the hour awed them. Even the boy by the lantern, far aft, stood silently, moved by the beauty of the time. Over the water, by Salcombe, the fishers’ boats got under way for the sea. The noise of the halliards creaked, voices called in the dusk, blocks piped, coils of rope rattled on the planks. The flower of the day was slowly opening in the east, the rose of the day was bursting. It was the dim time, the holy time, the moment of beauty, which would soon pass, was even now passing, as the sea gleamed, brightening, lighting up into colour.
Slowly the light grew: it came in rosy colour upon the ship; it burned like a flame upon the spire-top. The fishers in their boats, moving over the talking water, watched the fabric as they passed. She loomed large in the growing light; she caught the light and gleamed; the tide went by her with a gurgle. The dim light made her larger than she was, it gave her the beauty of all half-seen things. The dim light was like the veil upon a woman’s face. She was a small ship (only five hundred tons), built of aromatic cedar, and like all wooden ships she would have looked ungainly, had not her great beam, and the height of her after-works, given her a majesty, something of the royal look which all ships have in some proportion. The virtue of man had been busy about her. An artist’s heart, hungry for beauty, had seen the idea of her in dream; she had her counterpart in the kingdom of vision. There was a spirit in her, as there is in all things fashioned by the soul of man; not a spirit of beauty, not a spirit of strength, but the spirit of her builder, a Peruvian Spaniard. She had the impress of her builder in her, a mournful state, a kind of battered grandeur, a likeness to a type of manhood. There was in her a beauty not quite achieved, as though, in the husk of the man, the butterfly’s wings were not quite free. There was in her a strength that was clumsy; almost the strength of one vehement from fear. She came from a man’s soul, stamped with his defects. Standing on her deck, one could see the man laid bare—melancholy, noble, and wanting—till one felt pity for the ship which carried his image about the world. Seamen had lived in her, seamen had died in her; she had housed many wandering spirits. She was, in herself, the house of her maker’s spirit, as all made things are, and wherever her sad beauty voyaged, his image, his living memory voyaged, infinitely mournful, because imperfect, unapprehended. Some of those who had sailed in her had noticed that the caryatides of the rails, the caryatides of the quarter-gallery, and the figurehead which watched over the sea, were all carven portraits of the one woman. But of those who noticed, none knew that they touched the bloody heart of a man, that before them was the builder’s secret, the key to his soul. The men who sailed in the Broken Heart were not given to thoughts about her builder. When they lay in port, among all the ships of the world, among the flags and clamour, they took no thought of beauty. They would have laughed had a man told them that all that array of ships, so proud, so beautiful, came from the brain of man because a woman’s lips were red. It is a proud thing to be a man, and to feel the stir of beauty; but it is more wonderful to be a woman, and to have, or to be, the touch calling beauty into life.
She had been a week in coming from the Pool to the Start. In the week her crew had settled down from their last drunkenness. The smuts had been washed from the fife-rails; the ropes upon the pins had lost the London grime from the lay of the strands. Now, as the sun rose behind the combes, flooding the land with light, smiting the water with gold, the boy, standing far aft, ran up her colours, and the boatswain, in his blue boat-cloak, bending forward slightly, blowing his smouldering match, fired the sunrise gun, raising his linstock in salute. The sleepers stirred among their blankets; one or two, fully wakened, raised themselves upon their elbows. A block creaked as the peak lantern was hauled down. Then with a shrill wail the pipe sounded the long double call, slowly heightening to piercing sharpness, which bids all hands arise.
The sunshine, now brilliant everywhere, showed that the Broken Heart was “by the head,” like most of the ships of her century. Her lines led downwards, in a sweep, from the lantern on the taffrail to the bowed, inclining figurehead. A wooden frame thrust outward over the sea; the cutwater swept up to meet it; at the outer end, under the bowsprit, the figurehead gleamed—the white body of a woman, the breasts bared, the eyes abased, the hands clasped, as in prayer, below the breasts. Beyond the cutwater, looking aft, were the bluff bows, swollen outwards, rising to the square wall of the forecastle, from which the catheads thrust. The chains of the fore-rigging, black with deadeyes and thickly tarred matting, stood out against the dingy yellow of the paint. Further aft was the gangway, with its nailed cleats; then the main-chains, and the rising of the cambered side for poop and quarterdeck. Far aft was the outward bulge of the coach, heavy with gold leaf, crowned by the three stern lanterns. The painters had been busy about her after-works. The blue paint among the gilding was bright wherever the twisted loves and leaves left space for it. Standing at the taffrail and looking forward, one could see all over her; one could command her length, the rows of guns upon her main deck, the masts standing up so stately, the forecastle bulkhead, the hammock nettings, the bitts and poop-rails with their carvings, each stanchion a caryatid, the square main-hatch with its shot rack, the scuttle-butt ringed with bright brass, the boats on the booms amidships, the booms themselves, the broken heart painted in scarlet on their heels.
The two men on the poop turned as the boatswain piped. They turned to walk aft, on the weather side, along the wet planks, so trimly parquetted. They walked quietly, the one from a natural timidity, the other from custom, following the old tradition of the sea, which bids all men respect the sleeper. The timid one, never a great talker, spoke little; but his wandering eyes were busy taking in the view, noting all things, even when his fellow thought him least alive. He was the friend of Captain Margaret, the ship’s owner. His name was Edward Perrin. He was not yet thirty-five, but wild living had aged him, and his hair was fast turning grey. He was wrinkled, and his drawn face and drooping carriage told of a sapped vitality, hardly worth the doctoring. It was only now and then, when the eyes lifted and the face flushed with animation, that the soul showed that it still lived within, driving the body (all broken as it was) as furiously as it had ever driven. He suffered much from ill-health, for he was ever careless; and when he was ill, his feeble brains were numbed, so that he talked with difficulty. When he was well he had brilliant but exhausting flashes, touches of genius, sallies of gaiety, of tenderness, which gave him singular charm, not abiding, but enough to win him the friends whom he irritated when ill-health returned. In his youth he had run through his little fortune in evil living. Now that he was too weak for further folly, he lived upon a small pittance which he had been unable to spend owing to the forethought of a bequeathing aunt. He had only two interests in life: Captain Margaret, whom he worshipped with touching loyalty; and the memories of his wild youth, so soon spoiled, so soon ended. Among those memories was the memory of a woman who had once refused his offer of marriage. He had not loved the woman, for he was incapable of love; he was only capable of affection; but the memory of this woman was sweet to him because she seemed to give some note of splendour, almost of honour, to his vicious courses.
He felt, poor wastrel, poor burnt moth, that his life had touched romance, that it was a part of all high beauty, that some little tongue of flame had sealed him. He had loved unavailingly, he thought, but with all the lovely part of him. Now that he was broken by excess he felt like the king in the tale, who, wanting one thing, had given up all things, that the grass might be the sooner over him. Vice and poverty had given him a wide knowledge of life; but of life in its hardness and cynicism, stripped of its flowers. His one fond memory, his one hopeless passion, as he called it, the one time in his life when he had lived emotionally, had given him, strangely enough, an odd understanding of women, which made him sympathetic to them. His ill-health gave him a distaste for life, particularly for society. He avoided people, and sought for individuals; he hated men, and loved his master; he despised women, in spite of his memory of a woman; but he found individual women more attractive than they would have liked to think. Intellectually, he was nothing; for he had never grown up; he had never come to manhood. As a boy he had had the vices of a man; as a man he had, in consequence, the defects of a woman. He was a broken, emotional creature, attractive and pathetic, the stick of a rocket which had blazed across heaven. He was at once empty and full of tenderness, cruel and full of sympathy, capable of rising, on his feelings, to heroic self-sacrifice; but likely, perhaps on the same day, to sink to depths of baseness. He was tall and weedy-looking, very wretched and haggard. He delighted in brilliant clothes, and spent much of his little store in mercers’ shops. He wore a suit of dark blue silk, heavily laced at the throat and wrists. The sleeves of his coat were slashed, so as to show a bright green satin lining; for, like most vicious men, he loved the colour green, and delighted in green clothes. He drooped forward as he walked, with his head a little on one side. His clumsy, ineffectual hands hung limply from thin wrists in front of him. But always, as he walked, the tired brain, too tired to give out, took in unceasingly, behind the mask of the face. He had little memory for events, for words spoken to him, for the characters of those he met; but he had instead a memory for places which troubled his peace, it was so perfect. As he walked softly up and down the poop with Captain Cammock that lovely morning, he took into his brain a memory of Salcombe harbour, so quiet below its combes, which lasted till he died. Often afterwards, when he was in the strange places of the world, the memory of the ships came back to him, he heard the murmur of the tide, the noise of the gulls quarrelling, the crying out of sailors at work. A dog on one combe chased an old sheep to the hedge above the beach of the estuary.
“I am like that sheep,” thought Perrin, not unjustly, “and the hound of desire drives me where it will.” He did not mention his thought to Captain Cammock, for he had that fear of being laughed at which is only strong in those who know that they are objects of mirth to others.
“I’ll soon show you,” he cried aloud, continuing his thought to a rupture with an imaginary mocker.