But, alas! by the time I had got back into blank verse again, he had fallen in love, and as far as I know he lived happy ever after. But I often think of his clear, boyish voice singing, “Show me the way to the hearts of men.”
Gilbert Chesterton, whose genius I hope my friend will some day appreciate, once wrote a strange “crazy tale,” in which he meets a madman who had stood in a field; and this seemingly silent pasture had presented to his ears an unspeakable uproar. And he says, “I could hear the daisies grow!” Well, I have sometimes thought of that when in some roaring street of London. Could I but hear men and women think as they pass along! To what a tiny hum would the traffic fall when that titanic clangour met my ears! I imagine Walter Pater had this thought in mind when he says, so finely, of young Gaston de Latour: “He became aware, suddenly, of the great stream of human tears, falling always through the shadows of the world.”
How good that is! But, alas! So few read Pater. It is true men cannot possibly read everything. To quote another exquisite thinker, who I fear drops more and more into oblivion: “A man would die in the first cloisters” if he tried to read all the books of the world. But it is strange so few read those eight or nine volumes, so beautifully printed, which are Pater’s legacy to us. How they would be repaid by the delicate dexterity of his art, the wonderful music of his style! But I digress.
I have no doubt that many monarchs would envy the life of a steamship captain at sea. Indeed, his duties are non-existent, his responsibility enormous. He bears the same relation to his company that a Viceroy of India bears to the Home Government. So extended were his powers that he could take the steamer into a port, sell her cargo, sell the vessel herself, discharge her crew, and disappear for ever. It is a sad pill for us sentimentalists that those who live by and on the sea have less sentiment than any others. These masters are wholly intent on the things of which money is the exchange. They have never yet seen “the light that never was, on sea or land.” Their utmost flight above “pickings” and “store commissions” is a morose evangelicalism, a sort of ill-breeding illumined by the smoky light of the Apocalypse. But they never relax their iron grasp on this world. Perhaps because they feel the supernal tugging at them so persistently they hold the tighter to the tangible. They are ashamed, I think, to let any divinity show through. “And ye shall be as gods” was not uttered of them. The romance—that is the word!—the romance of their lives is never mirrored in their souls. And the realisation of this has sometimes led me to imagine that—it was always so! I mean that there was nothing poetic to Hercules about the Augean task, when the pungent smell of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he bent a sweat-dewed face to that mighty scavenging once more: that there was nothing poetic to Cæsar about the Rubicon: nothing poetic to Clive about India. The world seems to have an invincible prejudice against men who see the romance in the work they are doing. The footballing, cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works in an office in Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons’s, and plays football at Shepherd’s Bush, sees no romance in his own life, which is in reality thrilling with adventure, but thinks Captain Kettle the hero of an ideal existence. Captain Kettle, bringing coal from Dunston Staiths to Genoa, suffers day after day of boredom, and reads Marie Corelli and Hall Caine with a relish only equalled by the girl typewriters in the second-class carriages of the eight-fifteen up from Croydon or Hampstead Heath. These people cannot see the sunlight of romance shining on their own faces! I observe in myself a frantic resentment when I fail to convince the other officers that they are heroes. They regard such crazy notions as dangerous and scarcely decent. You can now perceive why religion occasionally gains such a hold upon these men. To be uplifted about work, or nature, or love, is derogatory to their dignity as bond-slaves of the industrial world; but in the realms of the infinite future, in the Kingdom of God, where “there shall be no more sea,” their souls break away from the harbour-mud, and they put out on the illimitable ocean of belief.
VI
It is so long since I set my hand to paper that I am grown rusty! I did not write you from Madeira—that is true. One cannot write from Madeira when “Madeira” means a plunging vortex of coal-dust, a blazing sun, and the unending roar of the winches as they fish up ton after ton of coal. Moreover, I was boarded by a battalion of fleas from the Spanish labourers in my vicinity—fleas that had evidently been apprenticed to their trade, and had been allowed free scope for the development of their ubiquitous genius. I looked at the old rascal who tallied the bags with me, envisaged in parchment, and clothed in picturesque remnants, and heard his croaking “Cincuo saco, Señor,” or “Cuarro saco, Señor,” as he bade me note the varying numbers on the hook, and I wondered inwardly whether the Holy Office had experimented during the sixteenth century with Spanish fleas, and so brought them to such an astonishing perfection in the administration of slow torture. Breeding, I take it, holds good with fleas as with horses, dogs, etc. Those born of parents with thicker mail, longer springs, harder proboscis, and greater daring in initiative, would doubtless be selected and encouraged, if I may say so, to go farther. It is possible that many famous recantations could be accounted for by this hypothesis. Galileo, for instance, probably had a sensitive epidermis which afforded an unlimited field for the exploitation of Spanish fleas, which formed, according to my theory, an indispensable item in the torture chest carried by the fraternity in Tuscany. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, I imagine to have been a dark-skinned heretic, tanned by travel and hardship, and regarding the aphanipterous insect with the sardonic contempt of one who had lived in England in the sixteenth century. His own gown probably contained....
I was roused from these musings by observing four bags come up on the hook, and hearing them saluted by my picturesque vis-à vis with “Cincuo saco, Señor!” I deserted my theory and hastened to point out the error of fact. He bowed his head in submission with all the haughty grace of Old Castile. When out at sea once more, I looked back along his ancestral line; I saw him in the days of old, marching through Italy with the Great Emperor, taking part in some murderous deed that cried to the law for vengeance, flying from Spain in a tall galleon to still more desperate work upon the high seas, settling in these pleasant islands with bloody booty in pieces of eight, drifting down and down to an adobe hut, and an occasional job as sub-deputy assistant stevedore to a British coal factor. Then he faded from my sight, and the life of an ocean tramp closed round me once more.