And the dock postman (dear old Postie, who cadges sticks of hard tobacco and cigars from us when he brings good news) is standing on the quay while the ship is being moved into her new berth, and he waves a batch of letters when he sees me looking towards him. So! I have been burrowing in our boilers, testing the scale, inspecting stays and furnace crowns, and the joy of working has come back to me. I was solemn last evening, melancholic and somewhat metaphysical it seems; but let it stand. ’Tis morning, and Postie’s on the quay.
I breakfast alone. The others are ashore, but they will appear during the day to finish up and to bestow mementoes on the wretched one they leave behind. And so I sit smoking my pipe by the mess-room fire; Postie descends, beaming expectantly. He hands me two letters, one from my friend, one from——
There was a thick mist before my eyes, the fire seemed an infinitely distant red blur, and Postie, several continents away, was burbling about possible promotions, good voyage, fine weather, tobacco, and the like. Forgive me, old man, but your letter lay unopened for a while. I poured tobacco and cigars into Postie’s pockets, and sat down to think things out. Was it foolish of me to sit down to think? To set down the problem thus: Here am I, a man of infinite, almost unknowable latent possibilities, suddenly repossessed of the supreme power and glory of life. How can I, by taking thought, bring out those same possibilities, make them actual and patent to the world, apply them to the highest and noblest uses, and so justify myself before men? In some such manner did I put to my own soul the position, trying ever to keep in view the sanctity, the holiness of life, and the preciousness of its holiest of holies, where dwell, as I have said, the power and the glory.
It is late in the evening of this most momentous day, and I must put down my pen, but there is one thought which perhaps may serve as answer to the scepticism so often expressed when I asserted my belief in this world after all. I mean if a man, when he experiences some transcendent joy, is prompted to express that joy in terms of nobler effort and sterner consecration to the welfare of others—does not this fact lead him to infer that happiness is, at least, more natural than unhappiness? that the universe does indeed exist, in Emerson’s phrase, “hospitably for the weal of souls”? That, in fine, when the majority turn their faces this way, first keeping the houses of their souls swept and garnished for the love they are awaiting, then will the mountain of our misery be levelled, our valleys of despair filled up, and the rough places of life made plain?
So, at least, it seems to me just now as I sit and write. How I long for a talk with my friend!
“You’re my friend!
What a thing friendship is, world without end!”
XXXI
I was awakened by something rattling outside my open window-port, wakened to a small tragedy. A circular wire rat-trap, depending from a line held by someone on the poop, and containing two frantic rats, dangled against the opening. Alas! how they ran round and round and round! The cause of all their agony, a piece of decayed fish and a fragment of mouldy cheese, was left untouched as they dangled before me. The voice of my friend the Mate is audible down my ventilator. He is arguing with the Steward, one Nicholas, of whom you have heard. Said Nicholas is protesting in his clickety Graeco-English fashion, that the pelt of a drowned rat (dronded raht, Nicholas loquitur) is worth less than that of one skinned alive. To which horrible doctrine my friend the Mate opposes a blustering Irish humaneness issuing in “Dammit, ye shan’t!” Rats, meanwhile dangling, they as well as their fate hanging uncertain. At last they are lowered. (The Mate talking, I think, over his shoulder at Nicholas, who stands, probably in contemplative fashion, legs apart, face serious, brain calculating income derivable from rats skinned alive.) The line rising in a minute, I turn on my elbow to witness the end. Alas! Hélas!! Ach Himmel!!! How are the mighty fallen! Two grey shining lumps, each with tapering tail dropped limply through the bottom; fish, cheese, and rodents all on one dead level now, given over to corruption. Up, up—I hear the trap grounded on the poop over my head. I sigh as I climb out and wash. I rather like rats. The Grey One in the tunnel is an old chum of mine. I have never killed one yet, though often even Grey One has been chased up and down, in fun. He, sitting on a stringer and twirling his whiskers, has “views,” I think, about Men with Sticks, his conception of the Devil and all his angels.