Outward Bound

by H. M. TOMLINSON

1

THE boy’s gaze, from his corner seal in (he train, was fixed on his homeland flowing past. He was too shy to look round at the rest of us, or else he was daydreaming and had forgotten we were there. I don’t think he saw, except absently, the telegraph posts and wires undulating along, and the distant sunny fields and hills in slow retreat. Occasionally he glanced quickly overhead at the luggage rack. His treasure remained where he had put it. I guessed he and his baggage, so new, were outward bound. That canvas bolster had not been aired before. This was the first time. So it was for hours. Then someone exclaimed at what had come into view from the opposite window. There were signs of the sea. The boy rose, one of our betters in a moment, and over our feet he went, ever regardless of our presence, to gaze out. As he stood w ith his back to us, and the masts and funnels grew higher, he began to sing to himself.

I could have sung with him, had I known the song. The music of the spheres, harmony in the poise of universal fettle, is not for the likes of us. It would be a continuo too deep for our ears, as inaudible as the dance of generative heal and light over rocks in summer. That boy ‘s humming might have been a faint echo of it. I wish I could recall the tune, I used to know an air of its kind, life rejoicing because it knew no better, but it is as far away as the hour eight hells, midnight—and I was watching from a ship’s bridge the coast lights of England fade astern, bound south to the foreign, for the first time. She was a collier, from Barry Dock of Wales. A bright eye w’as winking at us from shorewards. ‘Then a small voice spoke beside me. “That’s the Longships!“ I hadn’t heard the ship’s master come up the ladder.

It was a dark night, clear and calm. The ship’s wash was the only sound. The Longships was w inking at us. The port light of a schooner was abeam. The schooner was a trim black silhouette in luminous night, with a red spark in her middle. I don’t know her name, but she has not yet completed that voyage, for me. The Longships! How telling a name is, if heard in the due moment! There was nothing of consequence about my ship, nor in her business, and there would be no romance in her destination. She was deep with fuel for France, no more than an item in the old traditional economy of the British, now lost, of coal out, and corn and wine home; but it is as if she moved briefly into a position where, for the lucky, there is a glimpse of a truth which endures beyond routine and duties, economies, and departures and arrivals. She was soon out of it, of course. In another minute I was in the chart room, and the master was getting a bottle and glasses out of a cupboard; and even he didn’t know what unverifiable dimension his ship had appeared to reveal a moment ago, and I didn’t tell him. For his part, he said he hoped the barometer was lying, but he supposed we were in for a dusting; and we had that dusting the next evening.

I don’t say t here was any t hing peculiar about that evocation off the coast of Cornwall. That there was not may be the very remarkable thing about it. Nothing rum was there, though Cornwall and its waters are said to be occult, It was only as if that instant of night was not of the clock, but was from the beginning, world without end. Fora moment I stood at the ship’s rail myself, and there it was. If I were off the Longships next week I should not see it. Still, there is no need to try again, for those moments do not pass. They are rare, and they come without warning, but we never lose them; and they indicate as much of eternity as we can ever reason about. Yet who would believe us? Hardly another soul. No matter. Occasionally we are not only aware of existence, but above it, and are content.

Ought we to go to sea, and round the end of the land, bound south, bound anywhere, on watch for a sign? Of course we ought to, if we dismiss the expectation of signs and wonders as we mount the gangway. These things cannot be in the schedule, and do not go by the clock. They are never seen when looked for, however earnestly, and not at all by the proud at heart. Their bearings are no more exact than Ariel’s. The mind must be idle; emptied bare of its common thoughts, and as near to innocence as the stains of living will allow it to be. We shall never be given the glimpse because we deserve it.

I think I saw Circe’s island once; for if a traveler supposes the places of the legends have ceased to exist, then he will see only passport officers and hotels. There the island was, it seemed to me. I had just come on deck, and arrived at the same time as the sun, in my first Mediterranean voyage. It was in the days before wireless — in fact, it was before we had so many of those great improvements which now make life so entertaining that what the world was like long ago young people would not believe if it were described. There the island was, I tell you, all spectral gold, where my map gave no island. If Ulysses never landed there then no man ever did. The ship’s master admitted he had seen that island once or twice before, but only when the light was right. He added that he always gave it a wide berth. Homer must have sighted it, or we should never have had those yarns. There was a line of white along the base of it, and that would be the bleached bones of the men who had not given it a wide berth. Its name, I learned afterwards, is Alboran, and no traveler seems to know anything about it; but at least I saw in a mere glance at it how legends arise when Homers arc about.

2

SAILORS in the days of sail, when the horizon about them was unbroken for months, seldom had much to show for solitude except a new becket or knot, or a ship in a bottle, just as another man, in the loneliness of his soul, has nothing to prove his interest in existence other than a nice collection of investments, or a row of books he wrote, once on a time, but long out of print. It is not easy to count our valuables, if we are fools enough to try. It would be difficult to name them, to say nothing of selling them. They are inevident. There is no proof.

I remember reading of an explorer who had suffered the rigors of a voyage to the ice barrier of the Antarctic. He noted in his log one day his fear that his ship would not clear the floes before winter caught her. He added to the entry That at daybreak the world of ice changed color from bronze to light apple-green, from pink to crimson, in an ominous quiet, and was surprised that the dogs peered overside with him, fixed by they didn’t know what; no more did he. Afterwards, home in London, the thought of it would come over him, and he had to leave his family and a comfortable fireside, and go out without saying why, to be alone in the wind and rain.

I don’t know, but I fancy he went out, on his lonesome, to look again at the sum of the value of all his voyaging. That sort of impulse will come over a man. It is the only thing to do, if the rest of the company is settled, cheerful, and satisfied. He has a serious matter to think about; but what is it? Of course, he knows well enough, his friends would see nothing there. If he explained it, they might conclude that his past trials in a latitude far to the south of warm human fellowship had touched him somewhat. Silence in outer darkness had worked into his head. So not a word to them about it, though he could not make sense of it himself.

Out he goes, then, into the wind and rain of a city’s abandoned streets after midnight, broody over that momentary half-assurance, or challenge, that chanced in an Antarctic sunrise, while he was stuck in his navigation; as though he had chanced upon an unexpected enlargement of the world, an existence unknown and unexplored. It was gone while he looked, and it left no clue. He has no clue to it yet, either. Baffled, he sees what a pity it is that conscious thought can discover no way into that radiant seclusion. Still, he felt fairly sure, it seems, at that juncture of the voyage, of something beyond his physical confinement in a ship with universal ice on guard about. There seemed to be a more serious disability. Was it likely that consciousness, however wide-awake one may be, is not quite good enough? That a man’s apprehension is kept within bonds more obdurate than the ribs of a ship beset by ice and no way on her? And he could not get out; in that he was as the dogs beside him. There are verities, then, it appears, without ascertained aids to navigation.

That sort of thing must be left to the poets, and they can make nothing better of it than the beauty of the earth and the glory of the skies; which leaves us where we were. The expectation of hitting on the whereabouts of such a surmise is never in our itinerary when we board a ship. It has no verifiable bearings. Instead, very likely it is only a wet day, and the ship still taking in cargo. That’s how it usually is with me, and in winter, and I like it. The pungent smells are Iriendly; we have met before. You only gel them on a wet deck, the hatches open, and the winches in use, on a heavy November day. The sounds and cries outside the cabin are immemorial to the act of departure.

It must have been the same with Elizabethan voyagers. Time slows down. But there is nothing in our itinerary concerning Xanadu. What fools we should look, if we wrote it down plain! Constraint might be put upon us by our friends, and they would be right. Still, you know, and I know, it is the hope we always carry with us, added to the antiseptics and carminatives, though it is so far from being a buoyant hope that it sinks out of sight. Better let it go and accept what comes, with good grace.

We know quite well that it is not worth while going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar, as Thoreuu needlessly pointed out. Still, we wish he had tried it. He would have counted more than cats. We miss the book he would have made. Anywhere on earth, with any professed object, and to it by any mode of travel, will suit some eyes; and for that reason another regret forms that we shall have no book on the American scene— what a book it could have been! by the author of Old Calabria. Yet speculations as to what this famous author and trav eler, and that one, would have made of other lands — instead of France, Henry James in Patagonia, Santayana among the Dyaks making bis way across Borneo? —will delay us. While stowing things away in I be cabin, the idea comes that a whole book could be made of them; il would not be worth writing. The ship has fallen quiet. The winches have stopped. It sounds as if the hatches are going on.

It is necessary, now and then, to have around a clear and uninterrupted horizon, and to let a long silence fall between self and the multitude, for the sake of sanity. A great city is seen at its best, and can be regarded calmly, only when the tide has turned seaward, the glare of metropolitan lights begins to fade, and soon the only sound is of unseen waters. A space opens in the smoke and fudge to let the stars appear, and there the ancient constellations are, as if they had been absent so long only because we had shut them out, not knowing what we were doing. One can turn in tonight wilh assurance. To hear the hours being made on the ship’s bell is no warning of the passing of time. Only the journey of the sun is being measured. A fixed idea of time and existence is already working loose. There goes the bell for the second dogwatch. We must be passing the Girdler Light by now.

The names of our coastwise lights — those traditional lights, too, will go out presently, when the marvelous wireless beacon is in general use—almost rank wilh those of ihe stars. I do not regret that 1 shall have done with the sea in the year when the coasts of my island will be lightless, all one with darkness itself, whatever the weather; when the lamps of home on headland and outlying rock and shoal will be doused. Revisiting the glimpses, coming in from the outer, my ghost won’t know his own place when Pendeen, Lundy, and the Eddystone, the Forelands and the resi, are not keeping watch wilh characteristic bright eyes for wanderers in ihe night. Xo more Nantucket, Fastnet, Pladda, Ushant, and Finisterre? Perhaps the very names will be changed to numbers. Progress, progress! But t cannot yet declare, with that member of Parliament whose office il is to plan our towns and countryside, and who had to explain why he allowed the defilement of the surroundings of a glorious old cathedral: Progress, not sentiment. Yes, that is what he said.

Tell me, what is progress? Doesn’t that depend on the way we are going, and what we expect to gain when we gel there? I am all for sentiment while our destiny is uncertain; the earth would turn to ashes without memory and affect ion. If to make a mechanistic desert of our planet, and that at present is what we are doing, is not to blast from it the reason for our continued existence, then indeed life is in a void, as science advises us il is, so of course is without purpose, and we are free to please ourselves while we have time for it, which may not be long. Some people, the sentimental, are not yet persuaded thal this conclusion need be accepted, though it is a belief natural to the mental climate of our age. It affcels profoundly the arts as well as science. Without useless sentiment, without affection which never counts the cost, without magnanimity, then nihilism. No more the making of music; mystery has been dismissed from the universe, and instead of awe men feel the pride of conquest. Human aspiration has risen to something more ralional than nobility, reverence, and joy. The heart, that is to say, is flyblown, though ihe brain, cleansed by proper know ledge of all superstitious nonsense, retains its mathematics, and can measure the means to access of more power. The admonition of ihe best that men have thought and done is now offered to the deaf and blind. The mental climate of our age is pestilential.

3

IN the first morning at sea, little of all this is remembered. It goes downwind like the coils of the ship’s vapors, a dream of the night too vague and inconsequential to be noticed. While in the city , you cannot doubt that ihe fulurc of man is of first importance, and that he seems, poor fellow, to be confidently indifferent to the omens; but with a first look round on heaven and the life on the walers, when outward bound, it is possible to believe thal an absoiule sanity exists apart; we mav share it or leave it, just as we please. With the coming of the sun the English coast is surprisingly reposeful, as if near neighbor to the splendid east, and its equal, whatever may be the time spirit. The splendor is taken by’ cliff and upland as its right; the home we are leaving has an aspect we had forgotten. it is still in its prime. History might not have begun. It keeps an inherency untouched by the zeal of many generations, and could survive the prolonged residence of the most destructive of common convict ions.

The radiance of England, elevated in the beginning of another day, is not contemporary, nor a promise for the future, but is the sign of an existence not altogether subject to us and our aims. It is worth making a journey to be assured of that, and it was not charged for in the passage money. Our present mental climate, in a distant view, is a patch of cold fog, and will last only while there is no change of wind.

The world has been too much with us. Instead of identity there is uniformity. We need, at times, a clear space around us, or we are lost. One never feels lost when alone in the waste with the elements. We know where we are then, for a change. Identity returns; the voyager begins to recognize himself again. He can hear his own thought in the quiet.

I have never felt nearer the heart of the matter than when on the bridge in mid-ocean, keeping the middle watch. The ship herself is less manifest I ban the blaze of Orion, yet the shadow under you must be held firmly to her course, nevertheless. There returns a certainty of the reign of law, under which is the ship, its watchkeeper, and Orion, however dark the night.

There is much to be said for a spell of silence in isolation, if one does not go into retirement with too many dogmas, for the unknown gods sport with fixed ideas wit hout mercy; at least wo have learned, through experience, that much of the gods. And why go into retreat, unless it is to test knowledge and faith in the light of discovery, should that good fortune attend on patience? And discovery, a view of things from a new vantage, one is sure to have, unless there is an expectation of signs and wonders.

There are plenty of revealed and recorded wonders, for instance, in Piddington’s Sailor’s Horn Hook, while that authority is establishing the law of storms with all the evidence from an abundance of ships’ logs over many years; but reading about these wonders is all I want. It is not worth while voyaging to the Indian Ocean in the cyclone season to witness the warning that heaven and earth are about to roll up. The threat might be fulfilled, as far as we are concerned. Nobody who has suffered the ocean in a rage would go out of his way to have that experience twice. It may he magnificent, but usually darkness hides it, and anyhow, you cannot keep still. Give me fair weather, and as much of it as is going. Only a fool would wanl to glimpse again mountains of water moving fast under a black ceiling lowered to the foam. After the truth has been rubbed in that bodily health is of slight importance to anyone but the self, nothing is gained merely by looking doom in the face day after day; though I have always relished observing the way shipmates faced it. You may change completely an opinion of the spirit of a man when with him in an allair ol that sort. These dramatic occasions are better when in books.

It is the little t hings of travel that matter. Early in the first morning out, the cabin is heavy with the residue of departure and the claims of the shore. Release comes with the first glance from a port light that looks forward. An unfamiliar deck is wet with spray or rain, and the glazed hatch tarpaulins might be of Argo herself; they are of silver, in a fresh light, and quivering in the wind. The ships head is alive against bright clouds, and the lookout in his oilskins is high enough in the morning to he on i he ramparts of an outpost of one planet, watching for another planet to swim into his ken.

That first peep should content any traveler with his time and place. The steward will be in soon with some coffee, and is sure to pause to pass a word or two. He will be curious to get an inkling of your drift. This is not a liner; and though you are of no importance, at any rate you are one of a small company, and that is of importance to those who will have to bear with you. You will gel to know a few of your fellows in a way that rarely happens in a citv street; narrow steel compartments are echoing, and there is no hiding between bulwarks. The person is bared at sea, and eommuuieation must be distinct, direct, and cut to t he bone. The sea makes short work of pretense.

I remember a ship’s master — he happened to be a reader of metaphysics and philosophy — delivering an opinion of a recent book while in the act of rising from the mess table, He began a s he gathered his feet under him, and the criticism was over by the time he had snatched up his cap and slapped it on. I cannot report what he said for a sufficient reason, but he condensed to a line and a half all that my knowledge had been fumbling silently to pul into proper shape for a week.

There are moments in a voyage that are as if a world were sighted that geographers have never measured and could not explore. They will doubt this extension we think we have glimpsed, and question it. Let them put it down to personal emotion of no scientific value, and so save learned argument. It cannot he argued. Besides, since Hamlet has been psychoanalyzed till he comes down to a page from a hook of medical eases, what could he made of us? But all the analyses cannot remove that ancient impression of the beauty of the earth and the glory of the skies, as the sun rises on a first approach to an oceanic island in trade-wind weather. It is the prevailing fashion to disparage life, and to mock the verities of the ancienls; we fail to understand what they meant by sublimity. Well, ahead of us this morning, there it is. And, though a voyager he aware of his brief nature, he is aware also in a moment that he shares in this triumph of existence, this bright reflection of a reality of which nothing yet Is known.