Part 4

On deck it was still dark. Nothing could be heard but the running of the tide along the body of our stationary ship. The note of the water was pitched curiously high. It was something like the sound of a tide running out quickly over shallows. An officer hurried through a loose group of passengers, politely disengaging himself from their inquiries, and vanished into the darkness of the after-deck. There were only a few lights. They seemed to be irrelevant. Only odd fragments of the ship could be seen. She was but a lump, and was doing nothing, and her people wandered about her busily but without aim. I could hear an officer’s voice loudly directing some business by the poop; there was that sound, and the thin hissing of a steam-pipe.

A big man in an ulster, whom I recognised as one of the fellows who, the night before, had decided at what hour we should arrive, began telling me rapidly how necessary it was for him to catch some train “absolutely without fail.” I think he said he had an important engagement. I was not listening to him very intently. The ship was aground.

But he did not appear to know it. Like the other passengers, he moved to and fro, all ready to start for home, within a few paces of his suit-case. These people waited in confident groups for the tender, guarding their possessions. Some of them were annoyed because the tender was dilatory.

There was no sign of any tender. Beyond us was only the murmuring of the running waters, and the darkness. Through the night a distant sea-lamp stared at us so intently that it winked but once a minute. Its eye slowly closed then, as if tired, but at once became fixed and intent again.

I was leaning over the port side, and the port side was leaning, too. She had a decided list. A seaman came near me and dropped the lead overside. He gave the result to someone behind me, and I turned. Two fathoms! The mate grinned and left us.

The darkness, as we waited for the tender which did not come, was thinned gradually by light from nowhere. I could now see the creature with one yellow eye. It was a skeleton standing in the sea on many legs. Some leaden clouds formed on the roof of night. The waters expanded. Low in the east, where the dawn was a pale streak, as if day had got a bright wedge into the bulk of chaos, was the minute black serration of a town. The guardian lamp at sea grew longer legs as the water fell, and when at last the sun looked at us the skeleton was standing on wide yellow sands. The ship was heeling over considerably now, for she was on the edge of the sands; the engineers put over a ladder and went to look at the propellers.

It was hours past the time of our arrival. There was no tender. There was no water. The distant town was indifferent. It made no sign. Perhaps it did not know we were there. The lady passengers, careless of their appearance, slept in deck chairs, grey and unkempt. The man who had to be in London before noon “without fail” was also asleep, and his children were playing about a coil of rope with a kitten.

IX

My first attempt to read at sea was a dreary failure. Yet how I desired a way to salvation. We were over the Dogger Bank. It was mid-winter. It was my first experience of deep water. A sailor would not call fifteen fathoms deep water; I know that now; yet if you suppose the North Sea is not the real thing when your ship is a trawler, and the time is Christmas, then do not go to find out. Do not look for the pleasure of travel in that form.

That morning, hanging to the guide rope of a perpendicular ladder, and twice thrown off to dangle free in a ship which seemed to be turning over, I mounted to watch the coming of the sun. It was a moment of stark revelation, and I was shocked by it. I could see I was alone with my planet. We faced each other. The size of my own globe--the coldness of its grandeur--the ease with which swinging shadows lifted us out of a lower twilight to glimpse the dawn, an arc of sun across whose bright face black shapes were moving, and then plunged us into gloom again--its daunting indifference! Where was God? No friend was there. There were ourselves and luck. That night a great gale blew.

So I tried Omar Khayyam, which was an act of folly. I could not resign myself even to the ship’s Bible, the only other book aboard. Printed matter is unnecessary when life is acutely conscious of itself, and is aware, without the nudge of poetry, of its fragility and briefness. I tried to read the Christmas number of a magazine, but that was worse than noughts and crosses. “You come into the wheel-house,” said the mate, “and stand the middle watch with me. It’s all right when you face it.” In the still seclusion of the wheel-house after midnight, where the sharpest sound was the occasional abrupt clatter of the rudder chains in their pipes, where the loosened stars shot across the windows and back again, where the faint glow of the binnacle lamp showed, for me, but my companion’s priestly face, and where chaos occasionally hissed and crashed on our walls, I found what books could not give me. The mate sometimes mumbled, or put his face close to the glass to peer ahead. They had a youngster one voyage, he told me, who was put aboard another trawler going home. The youngster was ill. That night it blew like hell out of the north-west. In the morning, so the hands advised the mate, “the youngster’s bunk had been slept in, so they said the other trawler would never get to port, and she didn’t.” I listened to the mate, and the sweep of the waves. The ship trembled when we were struck. But it seemed to me that all was well, though I don’t know why. What has reason to do with it? Is the sea rational?

After that voyage there were others, and sometimes a desert of time to give to books. Yet if to-night we were crossing the Bay, going out, and she was a wet ship, I should have a dim reminder of the sensations of my first voyage, and much prefer the voice of a shipmate to a book. The books then would not be out of the trunk. They would do well where they were, for a time. The first week, uncertain and strange, the ship unfamiliar and not at all like the good ships you used to know so well; her company not yet a community, and the old man annoyed with his owners, his men, his coal, and his mistaken choice of a profession--the first week never sees the barometer set fair for reading. Some minds indeed will never hold tight to a book when at sea. Mine will not. What is literature when you have a trade wind behind you? I have tried a classical author then, but it was easier to keep the eye on the quivering light from the seas reflected on the bright wall of my cabin. It might have been the very spirit of life dancing in my own little place. It was joyous. It danced lightly till I was hypnotised, and slept in full repose on a certitude of the virtue of the world.

But recently there was an attempt, the time being spring, to cut out the dead books from my shelves, the books in which there was no longer any sign of life. Then I took that classical author, rejected one memorable voyage, and looked at his covers. When he was on the ship with me I found him meagre and incommunicative. Something has happened to him in the meantime, however. He is all right now. His covers, I notice, have been nibbled by exotic cockroaches, and their cryptic message adds a value to the classic which I find new and good. Scattered on the floor, too, I see a number of guide books. They are soiled. They are ragged. Their maps are hanging out. When I really needed them I was shy of being seen in their company, and they were left in the ship’s cabin during the day, or in the hotel bedroom. The maps and plans were studied. Sometimes they were torn out of a book and pocketed; I could never find the courage to walk about Rome or Palermo with a Baedeker. It always seemed to me like the wearing of a little Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes on the coat collar.

Those guide books were more interesting on the wet days of a journey, when it was impossible, or undesirable, to go roaming. They were full of descriptions of those things one must on no account overlook when in a country. Yet in the fine morning after a wet day, when I went out without a guide book, the little living peculiarities of the town, which the book had not even mentioned--because everybody ought to be aware of them, of course--were so remarkable that the place where Ariadne was turned into a fountain, and where Aphrodite tried to seduce another handsome young mortal, were forgotten.

[Illustration: _I met a cheerful goatherd._]

So once, when hunting near Syracuse for “the famous _Latonie_, or stone quarries, in certain of which the Athenian prisoners were confined,” and several of whom were spared, so the book said, because they could repeat choruses of Euripides, I met a cheerful goatherd, an old man, with a newly fallen kid under his arm, who told me, in an American language so modern that I hardly knew it, that he used to sell peanuts in Chicago. He did not repeat choruses from Euripides, but even the great dramatist, I am sure, would have been surprised by the fables of the peanut merchant. I forgot the quarries, while listening to them. The fabulist and I sat with our backs against a boulder over which leaned an olive tree. The goats stood around, and stared at us; and not, I believe, without some understanding of their master’s stories.

I am reminded of this because a map of southeastern Sicily is hanging out of a book, the banner of a red-letter day. I rescued the volume from the mass of discarded lumber, and found that inside the cover of the book I had drawn a plan of the harbour of Tunis. Why? I’ve forgotten the reason. But I remember Tunis, for I had been drawn thither by this very book, which had said that nobody should leave the Mediterranean without seeing Tunis. There it was, one day. From the deck of my French ship I saw electric trams and the familiar _hôtels des étrangers_. A galley with pirates at its sweeps was pulling almost alongside us, and desperately I hailed it, threw in my bag, and directed them to take me to a steamer flying the Italian flag, for that steamer, clearly enough, was leaving Tunis at once. That was the ship for me. There was some difficulty with the dark ruffians who manned the galley, who followed me aboard the steamer. There they closed round me, a motley and savage crew. They demanded gold in some quantity, and with menacing flourishes, shattering voices, and hot eager eyes. Their leader was a huge negro in a white robe and a turban, whose expressive gargoyle, with a loose red gash across its lower part, had been pitted by smallpox. I did not like the look of him. He towered over me, and leaned down to bring his ferocity closer to my face. Some Italian sailors stopped to watch the scene, and I thought they were pitying this Englishman. But the latter was weary of Roman ruins, of hotels, of other thoughtful provision for strangers surprising in its open and obvious accessibility, and of guides and thieves--especially of thieves, shameless, insatiable, and arrogant in their demands for doing nothing whatever. At first he had paid them, for he was a weak and silly stranger who did not know the land; but now, sick of it all, he turned wearily on that black and threatening gargoyle while it was still in full spate of Arabic, shook his fist at it, and cried suddenly what chief mates bawl when things are in a desperate plight and constraint is useless. To his astonishment and relief the negro stepped back, turned to his crew and said to them sadly, in plain English, “Come on, it’s no bloody good.” The gang left that ship as modestly as carol singers who find they have been chanting “Christians Awake” to an empty house. Now, evidently guide books cannot lead you to such pleasing interludes, and may even beguile you away from them. I mean that books cannot guide you to those best rewards for travel, unless, of course, they are old and stained. They are full then of interesting addenda of which their editors know nothing, and of symbols with an import only one traveller may read. So when the days come in which, as guide books, they will not be wanted, you may read in them what is not there. This very guide book to the Mediterranean, for example, under the heading of “Oran,” describes it as “the capital of a province, military division, 60,000 inhabitants. It is not certain that Oran existed in the time of the Romans.” Some people would like us to believe that no place on earth can be of much interest unless the Romans once flattened it into meekness. But we have heard far too much of these Romans. They bore us. To-day we call them captains of industry and company promoters. Oran, or what I could see of it in the dark when we arrived, was as rich in promise as though it were thoroughly impeded with classical ruins. There were lights that were a concourse of planets, and as I lay reading in my bunk the ship was so quiet that you could hear the paint crack on a bulkhead rivet. I was reading this very guide book then, and it told me that beyond those calm and mysterious planets were Tlemçen, and Ein Sefra, “an oasis 1,110 metres above the sea level belonging to the Duled Sidi Sheikh. Here one catches a glimpse of the Algerian desert, which is the fringe of the Great Sahara.” I caught that glimpse, too, the next week.

These guide books, when you are home again, are as good as great literature. There, for another instance, is Baedeker’s “Switzerland.” Now the truth is, that book, bought for the first journey to the Alps, was among the things I forgot to pack. It was never missed. It is only to-day that we find it is indispensable. For it was bought in the winter of 1913. Again it was night, when we arrived. A sleigh met us, and took us noiselessly into the vaguely white unknown. Pontresina is a good name. In the morning there were the shutters of a bedroom to be opened, and a child who was with me gazed with wide eyes when the morning light discovered to him a field of ice poised ethereally on clouds, though the night had not gone from the valley below us; above the ice was a tincture of rose on far peaks. Is it likely that he will forget it? Or I? In any case, there is a diorama of those peaks in our guide book, and what rosy light is absent from that picture we can give to it.

X

Mayne Reid once persuaded us that to have a full life we should kill grizzly bears, bison and Indians. We were so sure he was right that school and work in London were then the proof of our reduction to pallor in servitude. We have been, since then, near enough to a bison to try it with a biscuit, but have never seen the smoke of a wigwam even in the distance. There remains with us a faint hope that a day will come when we shall see that smoke, for such a name as Athabasca is still in the world of the topless towers of Ilium; but some records of modern hunters of big game, published exultingly, have cured us of an old affliction of the mind. So far as we are concerned the lives of lions and bears are secure.

We now open a new volume on sport with an antipathy increased to a repugnance we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent narrative by an American writer, who had been collecting in Africa for a museum. He confessed that if he had not been a scientist he would have felt remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the infant, without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother; a nice group. That tableau, at that moment when the job was neatly finished, must have looked rather like good luck when collecting types in a foreign slum. He must have had a happy feeling when skinning the child.

The heroic big-game hunter, with his picturesque gear, narrow escapes, and dreadful hardships, is a joke it is easy to understand since our so very recent experience of man himself as a dangerous animal. The sabre-toothed tiger of the past was a dove compared with the creature who is pleased to suppose that he was created in the likeness of his Maker. No predatory dinosaur ever equalled man’s praiseworthy understudy of the Angel of Death. Some years ago, on the arrival of fresh news at Headquarters in France of another most ingenious and successful atrocity, I remarked to a staff officer of the Intelligence Department that if this sort of thing developed progressively it would end in the enforced recruitment of orangutans. But that officer happened to be a naturalist. “No good,” he replied. “They wouldn’t do these things.” Such acts are the prerogative of man, who won the privilege in his upward progress.

With his modern weapons and ammunition, an experienced sportsman challenging a lion stands in little more danger than if he were buying a rug. The shock of his bullet would stagger a warehouse. It pulps the vitals of the animal. There is a friend of mine whose pastime it is to shoot big game, and we should pity any tiger he meets. It is not a tiger to him. It is only a target, which he regards with the composure into which he settles when someone brings him a long drink on a salver; and his common habit with a target is to group his shots till they blot out the bull’s eye. What chance has a tiger against so tender a creature? A rabbit would have more, for it is smaller. But at least it can be said for my friend that it merely happens that he prefers such fun to golf; he attaches no importance to it. Though he has shot an unfortunate example of every large mammal Asia has to offer, he does not plead that he has done so in the name of Science. Man himself, with appliances that reduce the craft of the tiger to a few interesting tricks, and an arm which paralyses a whale with one blow, is the most terrible animal in the world. He is the Gorgon. It is his glance which turns life to stone. Science, as stuffed animals are often called, excuses the abomination of any holocaust. If a nightingale were dilated with cotton-wool instead of music, that would be “science,” supposing it were the last of the nightingales. The reason given for the slaughter of so many harmless gorillas in the neighbourhood of Lake Kivu by several travellers was that those rare animals are dying out, and museums required them. Yet it may be said for us that these sportsmen find it necessary to excuse their behaviour to-day. They must explain at least why they feel no remorse. No longer may one destroy a family of apes and boast of it afterwards. If the crime is mentioned publicly, its author is careful to observe that he so acted as a naturalist, no doubt that we may thus distinguish him from a man who would have done the same in the name of religion. We are sometimes advised that the value of a training in science is that it makes honesty of thought more usual than we find it in the ordinary man, who merely rationalises his desires; and for guidance we are directed to examine the sad mental results which come of a purely literary or a political training. We should like to believe this, yet when we find a zoölogist writing to the _Times_ to confess that he would have flinched from the slaughter of a certain rare and fragile creature had he not known that his deed was excused because it was committed in the name of a museum, then a confusion of thought, probably literary, compels us to suggest that science may be no better an apology for a blackguardly act than is rum-running; and we are not forgetting that some of the worst of man’s ferocities have been performed solemnly and with full ritual in the name of God.

But the ethics of the hunt are not to be defined by men whose own boyhood was in the period when the rapid growth of factories and railways was causing a first wholesale clearance of wild life, both human and bestial, from the earth. We are too near to the raw trophies and benefits. That becomes clear, when, as we read in the news not long ago, American warships used live whales as targets for gun-practice. Makers of soap, too, would protest that it is right for commerce to send explosive harpoons into the same creatures, because the supply of fat is thereby increased. The matter is very difficult. Obviously if we want the land the buffaloes cannot have it, and if we want their oil the whales must part with it. The stage which Thoreau reached when he gave up fishing is several centuries ahead for most of us. My own notions about hunting would not bear a close inspection by either humanitarians or sportsmen. If one has heard only a rat whimper when an owl clutched it, and heard it continue to cry as the bird, with talons set vice-like, sat blinking leisurely in deep and complacent thought, then the scheme of things does seem a little sorry, though rats with their fleas are what they are. The scheme, too, includes liver-flukes and ticks. There are forms of life as deadly to man as he is to other animals. One’s right to kill is no more than one’s need and ability to kill. But if man brought compassion into the world, and bestows it on creatures other than his fellows, how did he come by it, and what may be its value in the evolution of life? Is it useless, like saintliness?

XI