Part 13

It seems to me someone on the meteor gave a loud cry--probably it was this deponent--for by our light I saw we were rushing at the earth again. So close did we go that we almost struck a cluster of white houses. It was a near thing. We missed them all, luckily, for we hit the place at the open end of a street, and so shot through and out, just below the roofs. I heard a scream there as the pallid walls reeled past us. The thing beside me hooted in derision. What did that smile care for the fears of mortals at awful portents in their village at night?

At last I did not care, but in a mad and lawless mood, giving my soul to anarchy, began to enjoy it. Far ahead and below us in the dark sky there was a constant group of delicate stars, like the Pleiades, and I noticed that they grew in brightness and increased in numbers; and presently, beyond doubt, they were rushing at us. In a few seconds our meteor was in the cluster of them, missing them all again--our luck was astonishing--but before we got through them the motor stopped. There was a policeman standing under a hotel sign, and that hotel was mine. I got out of the car, crossed myself reverently, and turned to see what had brought me there. But the road was empty.

X. REGENT’S PARK

It is not so amusing as it used to be to watch lions and tigers in cages. We are beginning to feel that it is an unlucky plight for a respectable tiger to be pent within boards and iron bars while kind ladies throw biscuits and the gentleman with them smiles; for we know what would happen to the smile and the biscuits if the tiger were in the woods and coughed slightly not far away. There would be less beauty in the entertainment, it is true, if the Zoölogical Gardens maintained choice examples in cages of vitriol-throwers, child-beaters, market riggers, war-makers, spies, _agents-provocateurs_, and so on. Regent’s Park would have to be extended to hold so large and varied an exhibition of wild beasts. The most beautiful of murderers could never be compared for shape and grace with a good lion or jaguar. It may be said, therefore, that there is a subtle flattery in our caging of the finer and more dignified creatures.

We should find no pleasure in looking upon a caged sneak-thief, though certainly we keep them in cages, when we catch them; but the lion, I have been assured, is almost invariably a perfect gentleman who prefers not to quarrel and fight, and will leave the presence of the other animal with a gun if he can do so with delicacy and honour. Perhaps it is excusable in us that we should enjoy looking upon so noble a creature in safety. I have heard him, when he was in a cage, quietly swearing while gazing into the distance and a Bank Holiday crowd was staring at him; and even the most uncharitable of Christians could forgive him his bad language in such circumstances. And I have heard the tiger, when he was not in a cage, cough in the place where there was no Bank Holiday crowd, and at night; and I learned then that the mind of man does not feel so proud as it does at other times.

The lion, of course, knows nothing of the quantum theory; but perhaps most of our Privy Councillors are as innocent. If the test were made of most of us; if we were removed from the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, our knowledge which is kept growing, for love usually, by a few superior minds, we should not know how to make a fire without the matches of which we had been deprived. On the whole, probably we flatter the depth of that abyss between ourselves and the lower animals; and for the wolf who runs up and down his cage sullenly ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we do not exist, we are beginning to feel there is something to be said.

I suppose it is too soon to say that for the dogfish and the conger eel. The darkened corridors and the silence of the New Aquarium at the Zoölogical Gardens, and the eerie light there of an existence beyond us in which undulating forms suggest that life may have meanings outside our understanding, are so salutary that you hear hardly a sound from the visitors. They move about, speaking in whispers, as though in the presence of the awful. I heard a boy laugh there, but even that was subdued; and we may expect, of course, to hear the chuckle of a boy on the Judgment Day. The boy laughed while he was watching a crab with claws like grappling irons walk on the sea floor of the Aquarium. It went craftily, on its toes, and not straightforwardly, but sideways, as though its aim were evil. A turbot was flat on the sand, pretending to be the floor, but the crab put a hook on him. The turbot started; but the crab went straight on to the back of the fish. The boy laughed at the obvious surprise of both of them, which showed in a frantic eruption. But even the laugh was uncanny, for it broke out unexpectedly in an inhuman privacy which might have been the antechamber to the unspeakable.

Only an irreverent boy would find anything funny in such a place. There is no comic element, that we know of, under water. It is not surprising that visitors to the Aquarium are subdued, or that they feel pity for the few sea-birds which happen to be exiled there from the day. That pity shows the difference. Pity for birds in a great aviary is rare, and maybe it is unnecessary. That is a matter in which we should consult the birds, if ever we doubt our own generous hearts. But sorrow for birds confined to a dungeon in the dim light and silence where eels and octopuses are at home is instant and right. In a reverse way that sorrow proves that the theatrical effect of the new Aquarium is good. It is good. It is marred only by the presence of those birds, which is forced and unnatural.

The recesses of the tanks, where antennæ are seen vibrating or exploring in the shadows, when the eye is accustomed to the hyaline indistinction, where sinuous figures are seen in apparition, or a pair of jaws that picture soulless destiny itself gulp spasmodically and incessantly, somehow challenge the soul in a way impossible to the most terrible lion. With what respect one stares at that inert and leathery length, the lungfish, for he is the link between the sea-bottom dark from which came all life, and those hill-tops which life now regards as suitable for select villas. It was fortunate for our speculative builders that somehow, when it was left stranded in drying mud, the ancestor of the lungfish was able to fashion his swimming bladder into an organ which made him independent of gills, and equipped him for a life in the sun, though it was only a suspended life. See what has come of it!

It is not only the silence and the twilight of the Aquarium which are impressive, but the sense that no more than plate glass separates us from a frightful gulf of time. And consider the fascination of the octopus! Could there be anything more sinister than the cold stare of the eyes surmounting that bulging stomach? Yet watch it shoot through the water and alight upon a rock, tentacles and all, with a flowing grace never equalled by a young lady practising a courtesy for the Court. That, however, only adds to its attraction, curiously enough; because attractive it is, for a reason so natural in mankind, and yet so obscure and difficult to define, that to look for it might take us into the Antarctic of philosophy. I found the largest audience of the Aquarium at the tank of the octopus, patiently waiting for what satisfaction, joy, terror, horror, consternation, or what not, it could bestow. It is useless for the ladies to protest that they love the Angel fish better, or any of the banded and prismatic tropical forms of the Amazon or the coral reefs. I saw very few people at the tanks where those opalescent or enamelled creatures were proving that our finest artists in the fantasies of decoration are bunglers. No. The superior audiences were for the octopus, for the grotesque and carnivorous spinosities, and for the conger eel.

XI. A DEVON ESTUARY

I

It was decided that someone must stand by the boat. There was an uncertainty about the tide, and there might be a need to moor her elsewhere. The other two members of the crew did not propose a gamble to decide which one of the three of us should stay with her while the other two went into the town. I was told off as watchman, at once and unanimously, and it was clear that in this the rest of the crew knew they were doing the orderly thing. Their decision was just. It was I who was to be left. It is the lot of the irresolute to get left, though sometimes the process is called the will of God. The boat, with me in it, was abandoned. The two of us had to make the most of each other for an indefinite time.

Perhaps the boat, being a boat of character and experience, had no confidence in her protector, because after a spell of perfect quietude, in which I thought she slept, without warning she began to butt the quay wall impatiently. She was irritably awake. But I was not going to begin by showing docile haste when a creature named _Brunhilda_ demanded my attention so insistently. Instead, I leisurely filled my pipe and lit it, took half-a-dozen absent-minded draws at it, and then went forward idly and lengthened the mooring-line. The boat fell asleep again at once.

Our line was fast to a ring-bolt which possibly was in the old stonework of that quay wall when the ships which moored there were those that made of a voyage to America a new and grand adventure. That ring-bolt was rust, chiefly. Its colour was deep and rich. With the sun on it, the iron circle on its stem might have been a strange crimson sea-flower pendent from the rock over the tide. A precipitous flight of unequal steps ran from the top of the quay down its face to the water. The steps continued under the water, but I don’t know how far. They dissolved. Of the submerged steps I could not count below the sixth, and even the fourth and fifth were dim in a submarine twilight. The tread of the midway step, which was near my face and just below it, was uncertain whether it ought to be above water or sunk. Sometimes, when I looked that way, it was under a few inches of glass, but as I looked the glass would become fluid and pour noiselessly from it. Once when the glass covered it I noticed an olive-green crab was on the step, set there, as it were in crystal. When he darted sideways it seemed unnatural, and as if he were alive and free. It was when he moved that I began to suspect that many affairs, an incessant but silent business of life, were going on around me and under the boat.

The water was as still and clear as the air. It seemed but little denser. It was only the apparition of water. It was tinted so faint a beryl that I know when my fingers touched it only because it was cold, and the air was hot. When first I glanced overside it was like peering into nothing, or at least at something just substantial enough to embody shadows. So I enjoyed the boat, which was tangible. The bleached woodwork of the little craft had stored the sun’s heat. Perhaps, though, it was full of the heat of past summers, even of the tropics, and its curious smells were memories of many creeks and harbours. It had been a ship’s boat. In its time it may have been moored to mangrove roots. It had travelled far. I don’t know when I enjoyed a pipe so much. The water was talking to itself under the boat. We were sunk three fathoms below the top of the quay, out of sight of the world. I could see nothing living but a scattered area of sea-birds resting on the tide. One of the birds, detached from his fellows, a black-headed gull, was so close that the pencilled lines of his plumage were plain. He cocked an eye at me enquiringly. He came still closer, of his own will or through the will of the tide--there was no telling--and we stared frankly at each other; and I think I may believe he admitted me as a member of whatever society he knows. Not a word was said, nor a sign made, but something passed between us which gave everything a value unfamiliar but, I am confident, more nearly a right value. This made me uncertain as to what might happen next. I felt I was the discoverer of this place. It was doubtful whether it had ever been seen before. I had accidentally chanced upon its reality. As to those stone steps, I had been up and down them often enough in other years, but I had the feeling they were new to me this morning, that they turned to me another and an unsuspected aspect. It was in such a moment that I first saw the crab at my elbow, and when he darted sideways it was as if he were moved by a secret impulse outside himself, the same power which moved the gull towards me, and which pulled the water off the step.

I looked overside to see whether this power were visible, and what it was like. There were six feet of water between me and the wall, and its surface was in the shadow of the boat; but the sunlight, at the same time, passed under the keel of the boat, so between my craft and the wall I could see to a surprising illuminated depth. The steps that were submarine were hung with algæ; near the surface of the water their fronds were individual and bright, but they descended and faded into mystery and the half-seen. Some of the larger shapes far below, whatever they were, seemed to be in ambush under the boat, and what they were waiting for in a world so dim, removed, and strange, I preferred not to consider, on a fine day. Those lurking forms, which might have been nether darkness itself becoming arborescent wherever sunlight could sink down to it and touch its unfashioned murk into what was lifelike, were eternally patient and still, as confident as things may be which wait in the place where we are told all life began. Midway between the keel of the boat and that lower gloom a glittering little cloud was suspensory. Each atom of it in turn caught a glint of sunlight, and became for an instant an emerald point, a star in the fathoms. But I was not the first to detect that shoal of embryonic life. A pale arrow shot upwards from the shadows at the cloud, which instantly dispersed. That quick sand-eel missed his shot.

That cloud was alive; the water and the dark forest below were populated. The impulse which kept the water moving on and off the step--by now it was using another step for its play, for the tide was falling--continued to shoot flights of those silver arrows into the upper transparency. They flew out of the shadows into the light and were back again quicker than the eye could follow them; and as casually as though they had known this sort of thing for æons, the morsels of life suspended in the upper light parted and vanished, to let the arrows through; then, as by magic, the glittering morsels reformed their company in the same place. No number of darting arrows could destroy their faith in whatever original word they once had been and the quay wall a vitreous hemisphere, a foot across. It had a pattern of violent hieroglyphics in the centre of its body. Its rim was flexible, and in regular spasms it contracted and expanded, rolling the medusa along. The creature darkened as it rolled into the shadow of the boat. It sank under me and was suddenly illuminated, like a moon, as it entered the radiance beneath. It was while watching it that I noticed in the water some tinted gold.

There drifted into the space between the boat sparks which I was ready to believe came of the quality of the sea itself, for I could see the water was charged with a virtue of immense power. When the jellyfish had gone I watched one of those glims, for it was not doused at once, but merely changed its colour. It moved close to the boat. The sparkling came from a globe of pure crystal, which was poised in the current on two filaments. The scintillating globe, no larger than a robin’s egg, floated along in abandon in the world below my boat, sometimes bright in elfish emerald, and then changing to shimmering topaz. Scores of these tiny lamps were burning below, now that my eyes were opened and were sensible of them. They had been suddenly filled, I suppose, by the power which pulsed the algæ, which had turned the medusa into a bright planet, shot the arrows, opened my own intelligence, and given sentience to the other atoms of drifting life. The water was constellated with these little globes changing their hues, and I remembered then that Barbellion once said a ctenophore in sunlight was the most beautiful thing in the world....

There was a shout above me. The crew had returned. It demanded to know whether I was tired of waiting.

II

We pushed out the boat, and four oars shattered the mirror and the revelation. Above the quay the white houses appeared, mounting a quick incline in chalk-like strata. They did not reach the ridge of the hill. The ridge was a wood dark against a cloud. Downstream, at the end of the ridge, our river is met by another. They merge and turn to go to sea. They become a gulf of confused currents and shoals in an exposed region of sandy desert, salting, and marsh, which ends seaward in the usual form of a hooked pebble bank. Beyond the bank and the breakers is a bay enclosed by two great horns of rock, thirty miles apart. The next land westward, straight out between the headlands, is America. A white stalk of a lighthouse stands amid the dunes, forlorn and fragile in that bright wilderness, a lamp at our door for travellers.

But we went upstream. The tide here, however, penetrates into the very hills. The exposed coils of roots and the lower overhanging branches of oaks in precipitous valleys, which in aspect are remote from the coast, are submerged daily, and shelter marine crustacea; the fox-gloves and ferns are just above the crabs. Yet where we grounded our boat, six miles from the lighthouse, the western ocean was as distant a thought as Siberia. On this still midsummer afternoon our lonely creek was the conventional picture of the tropics, silent, vivid, and far. The creek--or pill, as the natives of the west country call it in their Anglo-Saxon--is, like all the best corners of the Estuary, uninhabited and unvisited. Perhaps the common notion of the tropics, a place of superb colours, with gracious palms, tree-ferns, and vines haunted by the birds of a milliner’s dream, originated in the stage scenery of the _Girls from Ko-ko_ and other equatorial musical comedies, to which sailors have always given their hearty assent. That picture has seldom been denied. What traveller would have the heart to do it? The sons of Adam continue to hope that one day they may return to the garden, and it would be cruel to warn them that this garden cannot be entered through the Malay Straits or by the Amazon or Congo. We ought to be allowed, I think, to keep a few odd illusions in a world grown so inimical to idle dreaming. For the jungle in reality is rather like mid-ocean where there is no help. The sea is monstrously active, but the jungle is no less fearful because it is quiet and still. It is not variously coloured. It has few graces. Once within its green wall, that metallic and monotonous wall, the traveller becomes daunted by a foreboding gloom, and a silence older than the memories of Rheims and Canterbury. The picture is not of Paradise, but of eld and ruin. You see no flowers, and hear no nightingales. Sometimes there is a distant cry, prompted, it might be guessed, by one of the miseries which Dante witnessed in a similar place. Yet whatever beings use equatorial forests for their purgatory, they remain discreetly hidden; Dante there could but peer into the shadows and listen to the agony of creatures unknown. The grotesque shapes about him would mock him with aloof immobility, and Dante presently would go mad. He would never write a poem about his experiences. I saw this when reading Bates’ _Naturalist_ again, while the crew of the _Brunhilda_ gathered driftwood in a Devon creek to make a fire for tea. Bates does little to warn a reader that the forest of the Amazon is not a simple exaggeration of Jefferies _Pageant of Summer_. And what a book, I saw then, a man like Bates could have made of such a varied world as our Estuary. The range of life in this littoral, from the heather of the moors to the edge of the pelagic shelf where the continental mass of Europe drops to the abyss--a range, in places, of no more than ten miles--has not yet had its explorer and its chronicler. Yet I never saw in days of travel in the equatorial forest such hues and variety of form as were held in the vase formed by the steep sides of our little west-country combe. A cascade of rose, purple, yellow, white and green, was held narrowly by those converging slopes of bracken and oak scrub. That descent of colour was in movement, too, as a tumult would be, with the abrupt and ceaseless leaping and soaring of numberless red admiral, clouded yellow, peacock, fritillary and white butterflies. On the foreshore, where a tiny stream emerged from this silent riot, a cormorant on a pile was black and sentinel. Kingfishers passed occasionally, streaks of blue light. It was the picture of the tropics, as popularly imaged, but it was what travellers seldom see there.

III