The Sea Is Calling: A Saga of to-Day
I
A DECADE before my birth, and a few miles south of the rope spinnery where I scanned the sea for years, Jens Peter Jacobsen wrote: ‘She should be naked like a surge, and the wild beauty of the ocean must haunt within her. There must be some of the summer sea’s phosphorescence over her skin, some of the black, entangled horror of the seaweed forests in her hair. Yes, in her eyes the thousand colors of water must go and come in gleaming changes; her pale breast must be cool with a sensuous freshness; the billows murmur their cradle song through all her curves, and there is the suction of the Maelstrom in her kiss, and the bursting softness of the surf in her arms’ embrace.’ He wrote the truth, for the mermaid and the sea are one.
While I turned the wooden wheel, the sea lured me incessantly. At night in the sailor inn the tales of the sailors enticed me. At school the ships in the harbor coaxed me the forenoon long. On Sundays I would borrow a dory from a fisherman and rig it up with mast and lateen sail. And I would skip out of the harbor and cruise along the coast, through the surf and over the sand bars, from dawn to dusk. And the sea bewitched me as a charming woman would a man. I was in love with the sea, mad in my reveries of the sea, reckless in my escapades on the sea. I have often wondered that I never drowned.
Once I went to sea in my dory north of the harbor to sail home a girl who had sprained her ankle during a hike with a group of her school friends. Her name was Marie. A squall came up and drove us seaward. And the squall threw us upon Rocky Dike, where the fishermen went to their grave. Thousands of sea birds were resting upon the huge bowlders that encircled Rocky Dike. In the northern dusk the reef appeared like a funeral wreath thrown down from Heaven.
We kept in shelter behind a bowlder and pulled the dory with us. A gull, flying up from a nest, awoke myriads of birds, which in a moment thickened the air and magnified the roar of wind and breakers. Marie put her hand down in the nest and caressed the downy things that crouched together there. And they opened their beaks and wrestled with her fingers. Then the mother came darting. Above rolled billows of birds, with motions, colors, sounds, like a gale sweeping over the sea. They swung so near that their wings whipped our cheeks. ‘I want to go home,’ Marie cried. ‘I want my mother.’ But a surge answered her by carrying a log against the rock, crushing the log in two like a piece of straw.
Her agile body played hide and seek within my greenish oilskin suit. Wide sea boots sheltered her feet. And she was hooded by a sombre sou’wester. Her lips puckered in wistful reveries. Her eyelashes jutted out in a spray of delicate beauty. She whisked a drop of sea foam from her cheek, assuring herself that it was not a tear. She closed her eyes and snuggled up to me.
And I built her a fire of tarred driftwood. Its yellow tongues paled her face against the tar smoke like alabaster on black velvet. Her pupils grew and dilated with the flaring flames. The live coals warmed my blood, until I gasped with an ecstasy that took my breath away. Darkness shrouded us. The glow of coals threw a crimson blush into Marie’s face. An ember flew up, uncertain as a butterfly alighting on a flower. It swayed with the air current and fell upon her hand, which I was holding. The ember threw a searchlight into her sleeve. We were stunned and not able to move a finger. Then a shriek and a jerk—and I sat empty-handed.
Two nights later we rowed safely into the harbor in my dory, while the church bells tolled her death. For she was the wealthy grocer’s daughter.
One Sunday I was lying in the dying dune grass of early fall, drying my naked body in the afternoon sun and gazing at the sea. Such fawning homage did I pay the sea before I stirred that the wealthy Baron, the very ruler of the good land beyond the dunes, stole upon me on his thoroughbred and touched his whip lightly to my buttocks. ‘ Kid! ’ he said. ‘ Give my mare a swim. It’ll do her good.’
With a single leap I mounted the horse, straddling her girth and neck like a jockey, pressing my face into her mane, and with hissing delight inhaling her odor. I jerked my heels into her flanks, annoyed by her timidity in getting off. She slid down the fallow bluff, wincing at the fungus-covered flotsam of the shore. Fear drove a vapor from her body and made her heart thump through her shoulders and withers. She neighed with cutting dismay, like the siren of a ship in distress.
I lashed her hip with the flat of my palm. In springy curvets she vaulted through the shallow water, prancing through seashells, dipping her feet in shoals of gamboling shrimps and minnows, until the seaweed brushed her thighs and loins. She whinnied like a cooing dove, turned her head in the air, sniffed the breeze into her nostrils, and stopped. I swung a fist into her ribs, until she bounced and rebounded through purple sea verdure, through a sea of depth and motion. Her nose, poking into the peak of the swell, snatched stridulous whiffs of air. And she voiced her fears with a snort.
I clung to her neck. My hand clasped her windpipe; my fingers bored themselves into her jugular vein. I jerked my heels into her flanks. My right hand held the reins. Out into rough water I steered her. Between my own grunts and savage yells I swallowed and spat up the eddies, and in my wild delight forgot the danger. Dusk enveloped us in its gray, mongrel shadow when we began to sink. The horse listed, sank, came up, and sank again. Once more she reached the surface, but her head and neck remained submerged. She rolled over on her side languidly. Luckily we struck a sand bar, where she revived. I jerked her nose to the surface with the reins and cheered her. Then for the first time did I realize how far out we were.
II
I was twelve when I climbed aboard a Swedish schooner that was ready to leave the harbor. I crawled in hiding under the windlass. But it was dark before the sailors heaved the ship’s hawser and hoisted the gangplank aboard. We passed the colored lights in the mouth of the harbor, and the water became rougher. The schooner plunged northward through the sea. And before we were out in Cattegat an hour the waves washed over the deck, soaking my clothes and chilling my skin.
In front of the forecastle lay the chain hole. I stole down the stairs. There, at least, the sea did not wash over me. While I sat freezing on the rusty pile of iron links my teeth chattered in my head, and the roar of the breakers and the creaking of the ship’s hull grew loud. The schooner rolled through the sea, tumbling down the steep slopes to find herself the next moment thrown up on another mountain peak. And the lumber cargo shifted to starboard and gave the schooner a pugnacious tilt. The starboard shoulder rammed against the sea doggedly.
When all hands were ordered on deck I crept out of the chain hole and groped my way to the forecastle. How I wished to creep into a bunk and cuddle up beneath a warm blanket! But I actually feared that the sailors might throw me overboard if they found me there. A tin cup fell from a shelf and rolled back and forth on the floor. It frightened me. And I seized a pair of woolen underdrawers and ran to the chain hole. I stuck my feet into them and pulled them over my shoulders, and tied the waistband around my neck. My hands and arms were imprisoned. I lay down, bumping my head against the iron links, and wished that I were home.
I was awakened by a streak of lantern light shining in my face. Two sailors, hidden in oilskin suits, leaned over me. They were frightened, and stared, one behind the other, afraid to advance and ashamed to retreat. Finally they took courage and hauled me out of my hiding place and aft to the captain’s cabin under the poop. There they left me, eyeing myself in a mirror. What a sight I made in the sailor’s underwear!
The captain entered and gave a jovial grunt that shook his body. He took me over to his ship’s chest, where he bent down and pulled out socks and underwear and a blue broadcloth suit. He stripped me of all my clothes and made me put on his own. I disappeared entirely in his pants. He folded them to the knee. The upper end he fastened with safety pins over my shoulders. The coat dragged on the floor.
Outside, the storm raged many days and nights. During the day I sat in the cabin looking at the sea through the porthole. At night I slept on a couch. Once when I awoke, the captain, in his oilskin suit, was bending over me. He patted my cheek and went away, chuckling. Then I felt a lump in my throat.
One glorious sight I remember on this trip. The schooner was bound for Iceland. Winds and tides led her astray, so that every hour she advanced a knot she backslid one half. On the edge of the horizon the evil gleam of an iceberg appeared and vanished. The first day the tiny speck rocked and toppled off, climbed and retreated, and at night died out. But at sunrise the speck appeared again and throughout another day of frosty clearness threw a steel glint toward me, a glint hard and unfriendly, which throughout a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth day prodded my eyes, and each night died a scintillating death, like the sun before a total eclipse. Then, in the pitch of night, the iceberg took a leap, wild and sudden, and turned into a monster with horns that rived the clouds of heaven, and a bilging body that ploughed the depth a hundred fathoms down.
Two months later the captain put me ashore in Frederikshavn again.
III
The sea was calling. But my parents were against my being a sailor. My father had become a telephone worker, and was erecting poles and stringing a steel wire between the rescue stations along the dunes. He was home but once a month. My mother was still a washerwoman, and remained so until her eighth child was born. How strong and tireless they were, those two toilers! Their energy was my rich heritage. He was a quiet, practical man, sinewy and with an aristocratic face. She was of a more poetic nature, with a sound sense of humor but an unsound temper.
The children are all alive. My older brother was the image of father and I of mother. His twin sister had our grandmother’s meekness. My younger brother came to possess mother’s imagination and father’s practical patience. My younger sister had all of mother’s faults and virtues, like myself. The sixth child was a girl with golden curls and blue, dreamy eyes and a delicately chiseled face. She loved to dream the hours away in the front window and listen to an old soldier grinding his street organ. The seventh and the eighth child were boys. They were born after I ran away for good. The younger I saw the other day for the first time — a tall sailor lad of eighteen, on shore leave. He resembles mother, except that he has none of her temper and seems looser knit.
After my return from the Swedish schooner I worked in a tobacco shop, where I stripped leaves, crushed the stalks into snuff, and dipped chewing tobacco in black juices. Once the boss whipped me with ropes of raw chewing tobacco. I had stolen the licorice sticks that should have gone into the pot of dipping juice. And often, when I failed to separate a leaf from its stalk without tearing it, he would slap my fingers with the wooden trowel with which he rolled the chewing tobacco.
The smell of the shop reminded me of sailors and forecastles. One afternoon the shop burned to the ground. The kerosene lamps had just been lighted when one fell to the ground and exploded. In a moment the room was a blazing flame; the dry tobacco leaves and the baskets, burning like paper, blocked our escape to the staircase. The boss ran about among the children with the trowel in his hand, shouting, ’Jump through the windows!’ I made a leap through a window and fell on the stone pavement below. For a moment I lay dazed. But something hard hit me in the neck, and the boss’s trowel rolled down in front of me. And the whack aroused me before the roof came crashing. I caught the trowel and crawled away. The trowel was all that was saved.
I found a job at an upholsterer’s shop, where I stuffed seaweed into mattress covers. I worked among several men, who varnished and shellacked the woodwork of beds and bed springs, or sewed and tacked leather covers on sofas. Often these men were drunk. When they had money, I was on the run after Akvavit. They taught me to make booze by dropping a pinch of salt into the shellac and shaking the solution. The shellac would precipitate in lumps on the bottom while a quantity of clear alcohol floated on top. This they drank. Many an afternoon I shook shellac. And when a wandering journeyman visited the shop I was especially busy. The quicker I got him drunk and asleep in the seaweed, the better for me. For it was harder work to shake a pot of shellac than to stuff seaweed into mattress covers. And the ocean was in the seaweed.
At fourteen I started to help my father on the west coast of Jutland, where the sea of Skagerrack never ceased to roar. From the northern tip of Skagen, and as far south as the German border, we erected poles and strung steel wires. The dunes were covered with imported cactus that held down the sand, which otherwise would have destroyed the inland soil. The richer dairy farms farther south lay tilting so close to the bluffs that the sea ate its way underneath, foot by foot, and at every storm took a slice off. The peasants were forever moving their barns and huts.
Into granite castles owned by the Danish nobility, over moats and remains of drawbridges, we strung a wire; and into coöperative dairies with tall chimneys and large centrifuges; and into lighthouses with steam engines and dynamos and blinding beacon mirrors; and into the inns of every fishing village, where the market trade and the local bartering took place; and into every bathing resort, where the wealthy Københavnerinde idled away her summers; and into the rescue stations high on the dunes, where the lone coast patrol kept vigil day and night. The ancient and the modern we united with a tiny steel wire — my father and I.
With steel spurs on my ankles I climbed the pole and strapped myself to the top, while I fastened the wire tight on the glass insulator. But the sea was calling. Children in the yellow mail coach would wave a handkerchief. The fisher lass on her way to meet her father would wave her hand. The bather swimming in the surf would swing a brown, bejeweled arm. The daughter of a nobleman from one of the castles would smile as she passed by on her horse. And my young eyes were open to these greetings. My heartheat would quicken. My temples would throb. Yet a sail at sea would stir my heart more. And the toot of a distant steamer, greeting me when I swung my cap, still more. And the entrancing beauty of the sea most of all.
IV
During the mackerel season I hired out in Bette-Fanden’s cutter. Late at night we put to sea, Bette-Fanden and I, sailing north under a breeze that blew the sharp sea smell into my nostrils. We passed close under Rocky Dike and shied seaward into deeper water, where we uncoiled the nets and fastened them between a pair of hawsers, dropping these foot by foot into the sea. The one hawser, buoyed up by corks, and the other, drawn down by lead, spread the nets into a long, steep wall.
We waited for hours before we hauled the nets aboard. The silence of night was broken by the splash of mackerel upon the surface, by the cutter, creaking under the weight of fish, and by the distant shoal waters. Bette-Fanden feared the reef and leaped up at the faintest noise. He hauled the hawsers aboard and coiled them up, while I freed the fish that were caught by their gill slits in the meshes of the nets, and dropped them in the bottom of the cutter. The nets were like bundles of silk, dyed in gorgeous tints and hues. The glazed eyes of the mackerel glowed like heaps of pearls. Their scales glittered like diamonds.
During dark nights and during moonlit nights, while we waited to heave the nets aboard, the sea was like a magic crystal that reflected not only those concrete events of my childhood that were verified by reason, but also those obscure and hidden ones that could be recognized only by the tuning fork of my feelings. There was one sea, but there were nine varieties of tides and winds to change the sea. And each of these I hooked up fantastically with persons of previous years. The sea — or perhaps it was my adolescent yearnings—produced them in vivid illusions: Hedvig, Karla, the wealthy grocer’s daughter, the sailor girls on the water front, the deaconess of the Mission Church, my aunts, my sisters, my only woman teacher, and my mother.
The sea was like a dead child when neither tides nor winds stirred. And its foam vanished like tears of girlhood when the breezes blew the surf seaward. When a storm chased the surges into the bowlders’ arms, they laughed and wept in their first love. And when the gales raced the tides from the gray clouds beyond, the breakers hoydened over the bowlders, sottishly, like harlots on the ships in the harbor. The ebb tides salvaged the waves from the coast like nuns withdrawing from mundane soil. The tidal waves hedged themselves shoreward like brides eager to settle down. And when the winds and the ebb tides scudded away together, the billows, like giddy flappers, shook their heads at love. A shoreward squall and an ebb tide would ram each other in a tilting match, till, spinsterlike, the sea would preen its own heart and hutch its desires beneath virgin wrinkles. And the storms would tug at the tidal waves, and the womb of the swell would burst, and broods of thirsty ripples would suckle the breast of the sea.
V
At the age of sixteen I began to live on the high sea. In the forecastle of various tramp steamers I lived — in a small room with two portholes on the hull side, eight narrow bunks spiked on to three of the walls, and a shelf on the fourth wall for tin dishes. There was no room for chairs or benches on the floor, or for any clothes on the walls. Whatever I possessed I kept in my bunk. At dawn a sunbeam stole through the porthole; shadows moved on the walls and scattered on the floor; billows were beating against the hull; bells for watches rang like far-off church bells; the steam whistle, greeting another sea tramp, sounded like distant bugle calls. At night I lay awake, gazing down into the magic depth. The edge of the bow was cleaving through the smooth surface, churning the sea foam into sizzling oil. The starry sky twinkled above; pitch darkness ahead.
And the sea was the same as at home, except that there were not nine but ninety-nine varieties of tides and winds to change it. During a storm the steamer would dip its nose deep in the water, growl, and shake off the waves. And when the anger of the elements grew the steamer would dive down through the swell, leaving its propellers whirring high in the air, while the old steel hull rattled from stern to bow. Sometimes the waves would be like sea birds clashing against the steamer, shaking their wings over the intruder; sometimes like a flock of panting pointers, leaping over a hedge; sometimes like a pine forest in a snowstorm. And sometimes the steamer would leap through the breakers like the narrow-gauge train through the sand dunes at home, trailing clouds of white behind.
I toiled within the steep walls of the stokehold. Through the iron grates thirty feet above I caught a glimpse of the blue sky. The coal crawled out of a chute at each side like an army of black snails. The four boilers stood facing me like a wild, four-headed beast, with four red mouths swallowing the food I shoveled into them. The coal scraped against the walls as it rolled down the chute. The engine pounded behind the boilers and shook the hull. I inhaled the fumes of burnt oil, and furnace odor, coal dust, and smoke, but very little sea air. And I worked like mad down in the stokehold, raking, slicing, cleaning, feeding the hungry demon. My heart throbbed like the engine. The blood pounded in my temples, ready, I thought, to spurt out of my head.
The stokehold is the hottest place on earth. It was too cramped down there to swing a shovel. The four-mouthed monster blew its breath upon my naked body and dried the sweat that left my pores. The steam was dropping. Each pound that the pointer of the steam gauge sank was like red-hot irons thrust through my eyes. The slag fell in glittering masses as I raked it out of the furnaces. It fell on the iron floor and threw a stench into my nostrils, and singed my body, and blinded my eyes.
I liked my comrades at sea sincerely, though their outward appearance was weak and hideous, their thoughts were gross and, on the whole, childish, and their desires were two — whiskey and brothels. Ashore they were looked upon with disgust; yet, society seldom reaches the core of a stoker’s nature. Many a diamond is hidden under a layer of dirt. They had developed a fair degree of artistic skill. They made pencil sketches of ships and harbors; they were musical and could play several instruments; they could orate sagas and folklore and many a Bible chapter by heart; they wrote versified love letters to the girls they left behind; they made full-rigged sailing vessels within frail medicine bottles, modeled putty into cyclonic billows, and painted with a delicate touch and patience the white froth and the greenish hue of the sea.
They took a soap bath and washed their clothes after each watch in the stokehold. It was disgraceful to turn in before washing up. And if a stoker suffered with stoker cramps and his fingers were unable to hold the sweat rag, his mate gave him the rub. Yet, despite their abhorrence of stale sweat and coal dust, there existed conditions aboard many times worse than the dirt from the stokehold. And nothing but a miracle quarantined me from the common diseases of the stokers. Daily my comrades doctored on each other with quacks and kerosene, green jelly soap and sea water.
How different they were from the healthy fishermen and the old-time sailors at home! Yet, when first I saw the naked stokers drive forward the steel monster, shoveling food into its greedy mouths while it spat coal dust and ashes and bituminous smoke into their syphilis sores, I wondered whether these wounded, modern heroes were not after all the stronger. Their bloodshot eyes and pain-drawn faces made me love them. Their swarthy bodies, with which they worked so hard to raise the pressure in the boilers, made me honor them. In their sleep they dreamed of the steel beast, roaring for more fuel. Often they had stoker cramp, often they fainted, always they worked till they dropped. Once, when I carried a fallen partner up on deck, I saw the expression I had seen in a painting of the crucified Christ.
Once a half-witted bully got aboard. The ‘Stoker Ghost,’ we called him. He did not get along with the crew, for besides being lazy he stole our tobacco, and ate the scrapings of our pipes, and chewed up the raw tea in the forecastle. And he stole my porthole bunk. Once he forced me to bleed an artery in his arm.
One day he refused to go on watchand this is the unpardonable sin among seafaring men. He strolled on deck long after the bell rang. The Chief came forward. And the Stoker Ghost opened his pocketknife. I would n’t work for such a kid as you,’ he said. The Chief was small and slim, and looked as though he was unable to lift a coal shovel. I saw him jump up like a cat whose tail had been stepped upon, strike his gold-braided cap off his head, and for a moment stand with his eyes focused on the stoker. With the passion of a tiger the little Chief leaped, hitting with the momentum of his body the crown of his own head against the big face of his antagonist — in the manner of a Copenhagen Apache (en københavnsk Bølle). The blow was so forceful that the Stoker Ghost dropped.
The Chief circled around him in quick leaps, beating him with a piece of hose on face and arms and legs until his limbs were streaked with blood blisters like tattoo marks on a cannibal. ’Lazy pirate! I’ll whip your bloody carcass into jelly!’ The Stoker Ghost did not utter a word; not a groan came from his lips. And the Chief kept on lashing him until he was beaten senseless. Then we were ordered to give him a wash and throw him into his bunk. And from that day he was broken. His cheeks grew hollow, his eyes sank into his head, and his muscles dwindled away. He could hardly drag himself down into the stokehold. And he began to eat iron, filing it to powder from an iron bar and gulping it down with water. He ate but little food, and no longer took his stroll on deck between watches. He would lie in my bunk, gazing through the porthole at the flying fish skimming above the water.
One morning after his watch he moaned horribly. In the afternoon he became delirious. His body shook violently, and he tore the hair off his chest and scratched the hullside with his hard finger nails. We stood in the doorway, staring. ‘His face is turning black,’ one whispered. I took a drink of water to the sick man, spilling most of it on his throat. One dipped a sweat rag in vinegar and bathed his face. One fanned him with a piece of cardboard. One found a stray pair of overalls, rolled them into a pillow, and stuck them under his head. One poured a pinch of snuff into his nostrils. One dropped a Bible into the bunk. And the officers also tried to relieve him. His raucous breathing grated on my ears. I took his watch in the stokehold.
In the morning, as the sun rose over the horizon, he died. We carried him up on deck, washed him, and wrapped him in canvas. And we tied a hunk of coal to his feet, the largest hunk we could find. The Chief stopped the engine. The steamer rocked on the ocean, respectfully, like an old woman in church. Silence reigned supreme. I, being the youngest of the Stoker Ghost’s colleagues, and, according to the captain, ‘the least polluted,’ read the Lord’s Prayer. Then we slid his body overboard. A shoal of flying fish flew over his grave. A little foam and a few murmuring bubbles — then the steamer put on full speed again.
VI
Whenever the steamer reached its goal and the engine stood dripping with oil, hot and sweating, a sombre, churchlike silence that made us whisper hovered over the stokehold and engine room. The wind and the sea had suddenly ceased to sing; the propellers had stopped spinning; the thick steel paws of the engine had quit their trampling; and the stuffed hull of the steamer no longer groaned. The struggle of human brawn against coal and fire, steam and iron, and the struggle of these against the sea and against the winds and the tides, had ended. There was a blessed breathing pause, a Sabbath rest, a truce, in the harbor.
Already before the anchor dropped, or before the steamer was moored, a flush of excitement reigned in the forecastle. We were getting ready for shore leave, shaking roaches out of our holiday suits, sponging off white mould spots, pressing our trousers — not with an iron, but by rolling them into a bundle and sitting on them.
If the steamer stole into harbor at early dawn, the shore leave was postponed until the engine had been groomed, and the bilges under the floor had been drained from waste oils, and the grease had been scraped off the circular staircase, and the five hundred condenser pipes and seven hundred boiler pipes had been cleaned out with long bars and brass brushes, and the cylinders and babbitt bearings and centrifugal regulator, and all the other vital organs, had been examined. We dug salt and soot out of the boilers and grease out of the bilges, and we loafed in the cool, tomblike tunnel where the propeller shaft stretched its sluggish segments from midships to the stern. We killed the day. And a childish impatience put a glow in our eyes.
In the harbor we ate twice as often as at sea — bread and coffee before seven, ham and eggs at eight, soup and steak at noon, bread and coffee at three, ham and eggs at six. Neither tough salt meat nor mouldy hardtacks, as at sea! And at every meal the peddlers were waiting for us on deck — Algerian Arabs, Alexandrian Turks, Brazilian hybrids, tattoo artists, peddlers of lascivious photographs, silksellers, venders of fruit, soap, and tobacco, pimps, runners, tramp sailors, sailor missionaries, and an occasional Dane who had settled down on foreign soil and who longed for a chat in his mother tongue.
When finally the engine stood sleek and shining in its stall, there was a wild scramble for the boiler passage to the stokehold, to be first at the faucet, and then to the forecastle for a shave. A sleeve of a coat or a shirt was to be patched, a rubber collar to be scrubbed, a few unruly locks of hair to be cut. A hurried bite of supper, a dash to the Chief for money, and a rush to the dory or gangplank. Late at night my comrades returned, tumbling down the forecastle stairs, crazed by whiskey and women. They would quarrel, they would weep, they would wrestle, they would draw their knives and fight in the pitch-black darkness. A paralyzing fear would possess me as I lay in my bunk listening. In the morning I would find them on the floor in contorted heaps, with a few harmless gashes on their arms.
Once at Gibraltar I rowed ashore alone. How good it was to walk on the ground again! I could have kissed the stones I trod. Darkness set in suddenly. The streets were crowded with Spaniards, young men and smiling girls. Ragged children blocked my way, begging money and offering to show me the city. ‘Me show you nice bullfight.’ Bullfight! I had seen the butcher at home kill horses, bulls, cows, and hogs, until such sport no longer amused me. And had I wanted to see a fight I should have stayed aboard among my drunken mates. ‘Me show you nice singing girls.’ I felt indisposed to music. During the last month we had played harmonica, accordion, flute, ocarina, horn, and violin. ‘Me show you nice place where sailor was robbed and killed.’
A quiet place was what I longed for. I threw the last child a shilling, and the crowd fought to pull and push me through a street and up a path that was cut in the granite along the slope of the Gibraltar Rock. I sat down and looked out over the harbor. Hundreds of colored lights rocked on the anchored ships. The Milky Way was like rolling steam from a locomotive. The faithful Polaris twinkled in the clear Mediterranean night. The sky was sapphireblue and looked as soft as sealskin. The wake of the full moon gleamed upon the water clear across to Morocco. Searchlights from the French warship at Ceuta and from the English fort above me flashed in the night sky. The searchlights looked like swords in the hands of dueling giants, the rays of light crossing the heavens and darting at each other with dazzling speed.
Guitar and mandolin music reached me from the sailor resorts below. A sailor on a ship was singing, ‘Goodbye, My Bluebell,’ but his voice was drowned by a boy singing a Spanish serenade. How good it was to lie stretched on the solid rock and watch the panorama of the harbor and the Strait of Gibraltar, and to hear the voice of the city!
On a bleak Christmas Eve — my first away from home — I stole into a church in Marseilles near the water front, where a white-haired Protestant minister led me up to the Christmas tree. His daughter served me coffee and cake. And she gave me a smile which warmed my heart. And she gave me a pair of mittens which she herself had knitted — ‘to warm my hands at sea.’ But a stoker needs no woolen mittens to warm his hands at sea. I put them away in my sailor bag. And ten years later they warmed my hands on the Minnesota University campus — warmed my hands and my heart.
One Sunday morning I wandered through a Sicilian village, up the slopes of a sulphur mountain, where the bluest sky and reddest sun, the greenest water and yellowest fields in all the world thrilled me, and where olive-skinned children with pretty eyes and teeth and soft voices danced around me — the same children who on the previous day, aboard my ship, were dumping baskets of sulphur dust into the hatches.
Once my ship left me sick in Port Antonio, Jamaica, among a hundred Hindu coolies. These slender, rib-boned men and their childwives had caught the ‘fever’ during their passage from the East Indies. And when at night the wailing of these loin-girdled people grew too loud for my nerves I would wade through my ward, where they lay on the floor, and bribe the Negro nurse at the door and the Negro attendant in the hallway. Then I would steal out of the hospital and drag myself down to the rocky coast in front of the fort, and lie cooling myself in the Caribbean Sea, not so very many miles north of Robinson Crusoe’s island. My fingers would cling to a rock that jutted out of the surf, while my burning body tossed and rocked in the soft cradle.
I was drunk with fever and saw visions. The dome of heaven quavered and the stars fell like showers of glowing meteors. My fingers stroked the soft, sensuous blackness around me, and my lips pursed and puckered at the pitch of night. I shuddered at the primitive, almost violent urge of the night to draw me into a night of greater darkness. The murmurs of the surf weighed my young spirit down, like the gloom of death. And I climbed out of the water and up on the rocks to dress.
I wandered inland over the hills, into the banana and coconut groves of the Negro planters. Through a path in the tropical thicket I stumbled, over stumps and roots, while a black network of shadows threatened to ensnare me. Underbrush of cactus tore my hospital shirt. And the sound of the renting fabric magnified a thousand tears of the tissue of my heart, where two opposing feelings, love of life and fear of death, tore at each other. I pressed my cheeks hungrily against the darkness, and also my pulsating throat. I leaned against the night, stunned by its beauty.
I wept and threw my arms around the darkness. Then, drunk with fever and drunk with the desire of life, and almost in a coma, I stumbled back to the hospital and fell into the arms of my Negro nurse.
VII
At the time I left my home for the sea I was a lad of sixteen, with wild eyes, a grotesque nose, protruding brow, and a wilderness of hair covering my ears. My eyes, nose, and brow were out of symmetry with the rest of my face, and this made me look manly yet childish, savage yet civilized, with the highbrow and lowbrow forever struggling for mastery.
When I put foot ashore in my home harbor after two years of sailing, my glorious childhood had ended. I was eighteen, and a man. The mark of the beast was on my brow. But so was the mark of the bard and the sage. Dual desires divided my heart into a sensuous delight for the sights of nature and a reverent awe for applied mechanics. And the two desires were equally strong.
My point of view was purely objective. I had outlook, and no insight. As yet only one world existed for me — the outside one. And I watched that world with an attitude, not hungry for possession, but æsthetic and intellectual. For neither my stomach nor my glands were ravenous in their demands. My eyes, however, were, and in two different directions — toward the beautiful disharmonies of nature and toward the ugly harmonies of modern machinery. Both dazzled me. Both drew me. Both divided my heart.
The old viking spirit drove me over the seas to skim the surface of nature — a warm, romantic rover. The new scientific spirit drew me down into the heart of nature to watch its hidden forces — a cool, realistic adventurer. Both of these, the old and the new, focused my eyes on America, the land of Columbus, Leif Ericsson, Indians, and romance, which I read about at sea; and the land of skyscrapers, bridges, air railroads, and realism, which I had seen on my shore leaves.
I came home to bid my parents and siblings and relatives farewell. A week later I walked into a steamship office in Copenhagen, sailor bag on shoulder and cap in hand, asking for a job across. How well I remember that morning! A hunchbacked clerk chased me into the street, where Prince Kristian came riding alone. The sight of the young, handsome Prince gave me a sudden warmth in my heart. I swung my cap in greeting. He smiled, and saluted, and three times nodded his head. To this day no one has ever saluted me save the present King of Denmark.
During the next fortnight I made a daily visit to the hunchbacked clerk; and each day he chased me into the street. Finally an older clerk, with a skipper face, remarked: ‘Why the hell don’t you sign him up and get rid ot him?’ And he did. He wrote with his left hand, I remember. I have before me my old seaman’s book, where he wrote my pedigree, and, under ‘marks of identification,’ ‘A tattooing of an American and a Danish flag on right arm’ — a red and blue design prodded into my white skin by a Baltimore Jew on my seventeenth birthday.
I boarded the liner the day before its departure, and the next morning, when the emigrants began to swarm on the dock, promenaded on deck in my new sailor uniform. From a passenger boat running between Russia and Copenhagen came a Levantine procession: old patriarchs, bright Jewesses, children leaping like lambs. Danish peasants and city people began to arrive. Up the gangplank they climbed in homespun clothes: mature men and women, husky boys with down on their chins, and young, flaxen-haired maidens.
Longshoremen were rolling trunks to the steam hoist, whence every minute a load leaped aboard like a giant grasshopper. For hours I hid among the passengers, watching the crowd below that was seeing the liner off.
At noon the Hellig-Olav started on her voyage. The people on the wharf followed along, cheering and waving their hands. The liner put on full speed and was soon in the middle of the sound. In the background I had a last glimpse of Our Lady’s Church — Admiral Nelson’s best target a century before, when temporary rafts floated out to fight his stately ships. On the starboard Sweden’s rocky coast rose out of the water like dark clouds. On the larboard Seeland’s fertile fields waved me a last farewell. The sight of a beech forest moistened my eyes. ‘Thou grove of Danish beeches’ (Du danske Bøgeskov) rang softly out over the sound. We passed close under Kronborg Castle at Elsinore, the home of the ‘melancholy Dane’ and of the Ghost, Holger Danske. That was the last I saw of my old country.
(In December Mr. Jensen describes his first years in America)