Part 14

If there is a better window in the world than my portlight in Burra I do not know it. I look out on space from that opening in the topworks of a village which at night is amid the stars and in daylight is at sea. My cubicle is shady, but the light outside may be bright enough to be startling when of a morning it wakes me. I sit up in bed, wondering whether our ship is safe. The portlight seems too high and bright. The eyes are dazzled by the very chariot-spokes of Apollo, and ocean can be heard beneath me, vast and sonorous. The senses shrink, for they feel exposed and in danger. But all is well. Our ship that is between the sky and the deep has weathered more than two thousand years, and no more has happened to it than another fine day. Burra has not run into the sun.

From my bed to-day the first thing I saw was a meteor flaming alongside us. But my window kept pace with it. The speed of the streaming meteor was terrific, but it could not pass us. Soon the meteor was resolved into the gilded vane of a topmast; I understood that a strange ship had come in. Nothing but time was passing my window. Yet still I had no doubt that the light in the east beyond the ship’s vane, ascending splendid terraces of cloud to a choir which, if empty, was so monitory that one felt trivial and unprepared beneath it for any announcement by an awful clarion, was a light to test the worth of a dark and ancient craft like Burra. I listened for sounds of my fellow-travellers. They were silent. There was an ominous quiet, as if I were the first to know of this new day.

Then I just heard some subdued talk below, and the sounds of a boat moving away. As the speakers drew apart they called aloud. Yeo was off to fish by the Middle Ridge. The shipyard began its monody. One hears the shipyard only when its work begins. That means we are all awake. Those distant mallets continue in a level, confident chant, the recognised voice of our village. But by the time breakfast is over the fact that Burra is still building ships is no more remarkable than the other features of the Estuary; the ears forget the sound. Only if it ceased should we know that anything was wrong. For a minute or two no doubt we should wonder what part of our life had stopped. But the hammering has not ceased here since the first galley was built, which was before even the Danes began to raid us. The Danes found here, we have been told, seafarers as stout as themselves, with ships as good as their own, and got the lesson that, if quiet folk always acted with such fierce promptitude and resolution when interfered with, then this would be an unlucky world for pirates.

Yet have no fear. I am not going to write a history of Burra. There was a time when I would have begun that history with no more dubiety than would a man an exposition of true morality. But the more we learn of a place the less is our confidence in what we know of it. We understand at last that the very stones mock our knowledge. They have been there much longer. I do feel fairly certain, however, that absolute truth is not at the bottom of any particular well of ours. This village, which stands round the base of the hill where the moors decline to the sea and two rivers merge to form a gulf of light, is one I used to think was easily charted. But what do I know of it? The only certainty about it to-day is that it has a window which saves the trouble of searching for a better. Beyond that window the clouds are over the sea. The clouds are on their way. The waters are passing us. So, when I look out from my portlight to learn where we are, I can see for myself there may be something in that old legend of a great stone ship on an endless voyage. I think I may be one of its passengers. For where is Burra? I never know. The world I see beyond the window is always different. We reach every hour a region of the sky where man has never been before, so the astronomers tell us, and my window confirms it. Ours is a celestial voyage, and God knows where. So I dare not assume that I have the knowledge to write up the log-book of Burra. I should very much like to meet the man who could do it. We certainly have a latitude and longitude for the aid of commercial travellers and navigators who want our address, and it is clear that they too, as they seem able to find us so easily, must be keeping pace with us; that they are on the same journey as ourselves to the same distant and unknown star; but when one night I ventured to hint this surmise, as a joke, to an experienced sailor who came in for a pipe with me, he said he had never heard of that particular star; all the stars he knew were named. He said it was easy for him to lay a course for Burra, anyhow, and to keep it, just by dead reckoning. Besides--he pointed out--how could a man learn his whereabouts from a star he didn’t know and couldn’t see? Yes; how could he? But it is no joke. That old mariner had never heard of the perilous bark which some men have to keep pumped watertight, and to steer in seas beyond all soundings by a star whose right ascension can be judged only by inference, and by faith that is sometimes as curiously deflected as is any compass.

When taking bearings from my window, merely to get the time of day, I can see the edge of the quay below and a short length of it. That gives promise enough that Burra is of stout substance, and rides well. A landing-stage, a sort of stone gangway, is immediately under the window. Whoever comes aboard or leaves us, I can see them. At low tide these stone stairs go down to a shingle beach where ketches and schooners rest on their bilges, their masts at all angles. Corroded anchors and chains lie littered about. In summer-time I smell tar and marine dissolution. Morning and those stairs connect us with the fine things that the important people are doing everywhere. Open boats with lug sails bring gossips and the news from the other side of the water, and on market-day bring farmers and their wives with baskets of eggs, chickens, butter, and vegetables, and perhaps a party of tourists to gaze at us curiously and sometimes with disparagement. Few objects look so pleasant as a market-basket nearly full of apples, and with some eggs on top. Yet it is well to admit, and here I do it, that there are visitors who call Burra a dull and dirty little hole.

[Illustration:

_At low tide these stone stairs go down to a shingle beach_-- ]

Indeed, there is no telling how even my window in Burra will take a man. Once I brought a friend to sit with me, so that he could watch the ferry and the boats, the dunes on the far sides, and the clouds. I thought, with him as look-out astern, he could tell me when a ship came down river, and I could warn him when I saw a vessel appear at the headland (out of nowhere, apparently), and stand in for the anchorage. What more could he want? But he said the place was dead. He complained that nothing happened there.

I don’t know what he wanted to happen there. It gives me enough to think about. I always feel that plenty is happening to me as I watch those open boats. When a Greek vase is the equal of one of them in grace it is the treasure of a national museum. But our men can build such craft in their spare hours. The human mind, confused still and thick with the dregs of the original mud, has clarified itself to that extent. It would not be easy to prove that man has made anything more beautiful than one of our boats. Its lines are as delicate and taut as a dove’s. It is quick and strong, and it is so poised that it will change, when going about, as though taken by a sudden temerarious thought; and then in confidence it will lift and undulate on a new flight. The balance and proportions of its body accord with all one desires greatly to express, but cannot. In that it is something like music. The deep satisfaction to be got from watching a huddle of these common craft, vivacious but with wings folded, and tethered by their heads to the landing-stairs, each as though eagerly looking for the man it knows, will send me to sleep in a profound assurance that all is well. For they seem proper in that world beyond my window, where there is the light and space of freedom. The tide is bright with its own virtue. The range of sandhills across the Estuary is not land, nothing that could be called soil, but is a promise, faint but golden, far in the future. You know that some day you will land there. But there is plenty of time for that. There is no need to hurry. It is certain the promise is for you. One may sleep.

After dark, like a fabulous creature, Burra vanishes. There is little here then, except an occasional and melancholy sound. I have for companionship at the window at night only a delicate star-cluster, low in the sky, which is another village on the opposite shore. Maybe Burra too, is a star-cluster, when seen from the other stars, and from that distance perhaps appears so delicate as to make its indomitable twinkling wonderful on a windy night. There are a few yellow panes here after sunset, and they project beams across the quay, one to make a hovering ghost of a ship’s figure-head, and another to create a lonely bollard--the last relic of the quay--and another to touch a tiny patch of water which is lively, but never flows away, perhaps because the Estuary has vanished and it has nowhere to go. It prefers to stay in the security of the beam till morning.

Now it is curious, but after dark, when our place has disappeared except for such chance fragments, and when to others we can be but a few unrelated glints among the other stars, that Burra is most populous, warm, and intimate. I see it then for what it is, a vantage for a few of us who know each other, and who are isolated but feel secure in the unseen and hitherto untravelled region of space where the sun has abandoned us. All around us is bottomless night. Our nearest neighbour is another constellation.

IV

I have learned at Burra that we townsfolk know nothing of the heavens. There are only wet days in the city, and fine. The clouds merely pass over London. They cross the street, and are gone. They cast shadows on us, they make the place dark, they suggest, with a chill, that there are powers beyond our borders over which even the elders of the city have no jurisdiction. The day is fine again and we forget our premonition; it was only the weather.

The motor-buses are all numbered and their routes are known, but the clouds are visitations, unannounced and inexplicable; warnings, which we disregard, that in truth we do not know where our city is. We cannot distinguish one cloud from another, because the narrow measure of heaven for each street allows us but an arc of a celestial coast, or one summit of a white range; before that high continent has more than suggested its magnitude we see the bus we want, or go down a side-turning.

Doubtless the meagre outlook of this imprisonment from the heavens must have its effect upon us. Our eyes go no more to the sky than they do to the hills. We have acquired, if we have not inherited, the characteristic of downcast eyes. Where there is no horizon there may be work, but no hope, and so we begin to see the way to account for the cynical humour of the Cockney. We say, in friendly derision, that they who look upwards more than can be justified by the rules of our busy community are star-gazers. When we look up, it is not to the hills, but to a post-office clock or the name of a street. The city has length and breadth, but no height, for the greater the elevation of its buildings, the lower its inhabitants sink.

But in this Estuary I have changed that view of the world for one that is flooded with light. The earth, I can see, is a planet, a vast reflector. We look up and out from Burra, in the morning, to learn what is stored in the sky; and if there is a moon we look to the heavens at night to judge how the men at sea will fare, while we sleep. For the clouds here plainly rule our affairs; or they are the heralds of the powers which rule us. The clouds take the light of the sun, and translate it into the character of our luck. On a bright morning over this bay, when the happy and careless imagine that all is well, the wind will begin to back. We are not at once aware of the reason for it, but the colours fade from the earth and from one’s spirit. The light dims. The uplands, which had been of umber and purple, become that shadow of desolation from which men seek refuge. Scud like gusts of livid smoke blows in swiftly from the southwest over the hills. The clouds which follow it are dark and heavy, and so low that they take the ground, roll over and burst. The uplands vanish. The sea grows bleak and forbidding, and the cliffs, with their crags and screes, turn into a prospect of downfall and ruin.

Yet when the wind is easterly, then the polish of the bay is hardly tarnished, the clouds are high and diaphanous veils, and there is no horizon, for sea and sky are merged as one concavity of turquoise. When the morning is of easterly weather and still, the sea floor about the boat is distinct in several fathoms, and the mind floats so buoyantly and confidently midway in space that it feels there is no human problem which could not be solved by a happy thought.

One afternoon the wind had been cool, for it came from the north of north-west; then, long before its hour, the sun vanished behind a veil. The wind fell with the sun. The world was without a movement, except for the languid and distant glinting of the breakers on the bar. The sea had the burnish of dull metal. The distant headlands were but faint outlines, and they might have been poised aloft, for there was as much light under them as above them. A steamer was passing from one headland to another, but whether it was sailing the heavens to another planet, or was going to America, it was hard to say. There were no clouds. There was only a vague light which was both sea and sky. In this indeterminate west, where the sun would then have been setting, was a group of small islands of pearl, not marked on the chart, where no islands ought to have been seen. They were too lofty and softly luminous to be of this earth; they floated in a threatening cobalt darkness. The day was a discernible presence, but it was ghostly; and I wish I could guess its origin, and why it stood over us, pale and silent, while we waited fearfully for a word that did not come.

V

On the shore of the dunes, which are across the Estuary from Burra, few boats ever ground. There are shoals, and a conflict of tides and currents, and then the surf. And why should a boat put over? Nothing is there but the lighthouse and the sand. Nor is it easy to approach it from the habitable land to the east, for after a long and devious journey by ferry and road to avoid the arm of the sea, you come first to a difficulty of marsh and dyke, and then to the region of the dunes. That journey takes all the best of the daylight, for you could not hurry if you knew every yard of the way, which nobody does; and then, once caught in the brightness and silence of the desert of sandhills, the need to hurry is forgotten.

It is one of the days with a better light when your boat grounds on that shore. You may begin to walk the beach along the firm wet sand by the breakers, but you cannot keep to it. Something which calls, some strange lump among the flotsam stranded on the upper beach, draws you towards the sandhills. It looked, you imagined, like a man asleep, with a dark blanket over him; but it proved to be only a short length of a ship’s spar covered with bladder-wrack. There is no returning then. Once you reach that line of rubbish it is the track you follow, the message you try to read. A baffling story, though, made of words from many stories, separated, partly erased, muddled by the interruption of storms, and woven irrelevantly into one long serpentining sentence which extends to the point where the shore goes round a corner; and from there, when you reach that point, continues to the next. It is made of shells, derelict trees, bushes which have drifted from shores only a botanist could guess, boards and fragments of wrecks, yarn and rope, bottles, feathers, carapaces of crabs and sea-urchins, and corks, all tangled with pulse into an interminable cable. Sometimes it runs through the black ribs of an old wreck.

Perhaps, after the seaweed, there are more corks in its composition than anything else. The abundance of corks on this desert shore, for they are to be found at the head of every miniature combe of the sandhills, most of them old and bleached, but some so fresh that it is easy to read the impress of the vintners on their seals, suggests that man’s most marked characteristic is thirst. If one went by the evidence on this beach, then thirst is the chief human attribute. In this life we might be occupied most of the time in drinking from bottles. Examples of the bottles are here, too. The archæologists of the future will find our enduring bottles and corks in association, and they will discover, by experiment, that the corks often fit the bottles, and they will deduce that both were used, in all probability, in conjunction. But for what reason? Nothing will have been left in the bottles for the archæologists but dirt. We occasionally look on to-day while a learned man, from fragmentary evidence, creates a surprising picture of the past. I feel I should enjoy coming back, several thousand years hence, to hear another learned creature, a table before him covered with the shards and corks of our years--one almost perfect example has the mysterious word BOLS cast on it--explain to his fascinated audience what he feels sure, from the relics before him, on which he has spent the best years of his life, the mysterious folk of our own age were like.

We can be fairly sure not much evidence of our own age will remain by then. What will survive us will be the oddest assortment of rubbish; but the pertinacious corks will be there. The British Museum will have gone. It will be impossible to refer to the London Directory. No Burke will exist. All the files of our newspapers, with their lists of honours, will have perished. What will our age be called? Not the Age of Invention, of the Great War, of Reconstruction, or anything else that is noble and inspiriting; for not a vestige of a democratic press, an aeroplane, a motor-car, or a wireless set will remain. There will be only corks and bottles.

“For the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy....” Yet it does seem unfair that of all the proud memories of these resounding days, nothing may persist but our corks and bottles. Another interruption of ice may creep down from the Pole, as has happened before; as indeed happened once to the undoing of a previous race of men. Its rigours increase, but so gradually that men are hardly aware that anything is happening. They say to each other at last, “The summers seem very short.” The cheerful Press of that day, true to its function of maintaining the spirit of the people, never mentions Winter, never speaks of the cold, but always turns its pages to the south, where most of the sun is.

Nevertheless that does not thaw the ice. It still creeps south. The habit of a week-end at a cottage is presently forgotten. Unalienable rights and privileges become buried under inexorable glaciers that know nothing of our sounder economic arguments. And, in the end, maybe the ball of St. Paul’s is dropped as an erratic block from the bottom of an iceberg to form a fossil in the ooze of a southern sea, to puzzle we may not guess what earnest investigator living in an ameliorated clime and time.

That ice retreats again, and the haunts and works of our age are exposed, as were those of Magdalenian man. And what have we been able to guess about him? Very little; but he did, we are sure, use implements having enduring parts of flint and bone. It is fairly certain that if he were aware that we judged him by his flints, he would be a little grieved. And it would be too bad if the trifles, which our butlers discarded with a flourish during our dinners were all that survived for the future to see of us. Why, that archaeologist of a time to come may not even deduce that we employed butlers.

VI

The rain had ceased, but the quay of Burra offered no other benefit. I was down there before dawn. Morning had not come, but I suppose the downpour had washed some of the dark out of the night, for all the quay was plain. It was not the quay I knew, but its wan spirit; and the vessels moored to it were ghosts, the faint impress of dead ships on a world that now just retained a memory of them. There was no sound. There were only phantoms in a pallor. Perhaps it had ceased to rain because rain would be too substantial for a bodyless world. The irregular pools on the quay were not water, but descents to the profound. Rain would at once enlarge them till the quay dissolved and became as the Estuary, and as the sky, for both sea and sky were nothing. They were the depth of the future, in which were hints of what some day might see the sun.