From a Cornish Window Part 27

"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed, feed deep upon her peerless eyes."

So p.r.o.ne was Keats to sound this particular false note that Mr. Bridges had to devote some three pages of his essay to an examination of the poet's want of taste in his speech about women and his lack of true insight into human pa.s.sion. The worst trick this disability ever played upon Keats was to blind him to his magnificent opportunity in 'Lamia'--an opportunity of which the missing is felt as positively cruel: but it betrayed him also into occasional lapses and inept.i.tudes which almost rival Leigh Hunt's--

"The two divinest things the world has got-- A lovely woman in a rural spot."

This blemish may, perhaps, condemn it to a place below 'Autumn'; of which (I hope) reason has been shown why it cannot rank higher than (4).

And (6) _longo intervallo_ comes 'Indolence,' which may be fearlessly called an altogether inferior performance.

The 'May Ode' stands by itself, an exquisite fragment. But the two odes from _Endymion_ may be set well above 'Indolence,' and that to 'Sorrow,'

in my opinion, above 'Autumn,' and only a little way behind the leaders.

But the fall of the year is marked for us by a ceremony more poignant, more sorrowfully seasonable than any hymned by Hood or by Keats. Let us celebrate--

LAYING UP THE BOAT.

There arrives a day towards the end of October--or with luck we may tide over into November--when the wind in the mainsail suddenly takes a winter force, and we begin to talk of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept a silent compact and ignored all change in the season. We have watched the blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and let pa.s.s their scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a few kittiwakes appeared. A week later the swallows fell to stringing themselves like beads along the coastguard's telephone-wire on the hill. They vanished, and we pretended not to miss them. When our hands grew chill with steering we rubbed them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our pockets. But this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell.

We take one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through which, in a week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the Baltic merchantmen, our November visitors--bluff vessels with red-painted channels, green deckhouses, white top-strakes, wooden davits overhanging astern, and the Danish flag fluttering aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with us, as with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dissembled too long; and know, as we go through the form of debating it, that our date must be the next spring-tides.

This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding farewell to summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in ceremonial silence.

_Favete linguis!_ The hour helps us, for the spring-tides at this season reach their height a little after night-fall, and it is on an already slackening flood that we cast off our moorings and head up the river with our backs to the waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are ourselves towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession.

She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging, and all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside the town quay and beneath the shears--the abhorred shears--which lift this too out of its step, dislocated with a creak as poignant as the cry of Polydorus.

We lower it, lay it along the deck, and resume our way; past quay doors and windows where already the townsfolk are beginning to light their lamps; and so by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on bulwarks and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologise, like the Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own; and they never saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or jib-topsail delicate as samite--those heavenly wings!--nor felt her gallant spirit straining to beat her own record before a tense northerly breeze. Yet even to them her form, in pure white with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.

For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is renewed; and the shipwright who sent this keel down the ways to her element surely beheld the birth of a G.o.ddess. He still speaks of her with pride, but the conditions of his work keep him a modest man; for he goes about it under the concentred gaze of half a dozen old mariners hauled ash.o.r.e, who haunt his yard uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring how cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it would feel like to compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen reviewers. But to him, as to his critics, the ship was a framework only until the terrible moment when with baptism she took life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy of creation, realise that she had pa.s.sed from him? Ere the local artillery band had finished 'Rule Britannia,' and while his friends were still shaking his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his triumph? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess; to chase perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch it must pa.s.s from his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself upon the workmanship, the immaterial function. For of art this is the cross and crown in one; and he, modest man, was born to the sad eminence.

She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something better. Like a slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us; but it was we who gave wings to her, and with wings a soul, and a law to its grace, and discipline to its vital impulses. She is ours, too, by our grat.i.tude, since the delicate machine:

"Has like a woman given up its joy;"

And by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of her sweet companionship through long days empty of annoyance--land left behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean!

Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter of reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine--I think at times that she has found a more human language. Who that has ever steered for hours together cannot report of a mysterious voice 'breaking the silence of the seas,' as though a friend were standing and speaking astern? or has not turned his head to the confident inexplicable call?

The fishermen fable of drowned sailors 'hailing their names.' But the voice is of a single speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of the dead; it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely speaks. Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd, I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking, placidly staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker, and patently he has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer shipmate? She, too, knows the voice; even answered it one day, supposing it mine, and in her confusion I surprised our common secret. But we never hear it together.

She is seated now on the lee side of the c.o.c.kpit, her hands folded on the coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath the sail and across the sea from which they surely have drawn their wine-coloured glooms. She has not stirred for many minutes. No, it was not Cynthia.

Then either it must be the wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining at the impa.s.sable bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her master, or else--Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds, with mischievous harp?

"That was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell And wing our green to wed our blue; But whether note of joy or knell Not his own Father-singer knew; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it shivers through; The breast of us a sounded sh.e.l.l, The blood of us a lighted dew."

Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the ship; and if you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's s.e.x. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling through and along every nerve of her. Are you converted? That life is yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a G.o.d!

For indeed you shall be a G.o.d, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings--run out and drop from you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page as it rolls past to break on the sh.o.r.e towards which you revert no glance.

Even the romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.

"Sails of silk and ropes of sendal, Such as gleam in ancient lore, And the singing of the sailor, And the answer from the sh.o.r.e--"

These shall pa.s.s and leave you younger than romance--a child open-eyed and curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch the gannets diving--

"As Noah saw them dive O'er sunken Ararat."

Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a G.o.d, to the gates of a kingdom I must pause to describe for you, though when you reach it you will forget my description and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that is a part of its charm.

Walter Pater, reading the _Odyssey_, was brought up (as we say) 'with a round turn' by a pa.s.sage wherein Homer describes briefly and with accuracy how some mariners came to harbour, took down sail, and stepped ash.o.r.e.

It filled him with wonder that so simple an incident--nor to say ordinary --could be made so poetical; and, having pondered it, he divided the credit between the poet and his fortunate age--a time (said he) in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture 'in the great style'

against a sky charged with marvels.

You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth of which I am telling, and are swept over the rolling bar into quiet water--you will discover (and with ease, being a G.o.d) that Mr. Pater was entirely mistaken, and the credit belongs neither to Homer nor to his fortunate age. For here are woods with woodlanders, and fields with ploughmen, and beaches with fishermen hauling nets; and all these men, as they go about their work, contrive to make pictures 'in the great style' against a sky charged with marvels, obviously without any a.s.sistance from Homer, and quite as if nothing had happened for, say, the last three thousand years. That the immemorial craft of seafaring has no specially 'heroic age'--or that, if it have, that age is yours--you will discover by watching your own yachtsman as he moves about lowering foresail and preparing to drop anchor.

It is a river of gradual golden sunsets, such as Wilson painted--a broad-bosomed flood between deep and tranquil woods, the main banks holding here and there a village as in an arm maternally crook'd, but opening into creeks where the oaks dip their branches in the high tides, where the stars are gla.s.sed all night long without a ripple, and where you may spend whole days with no company but herons and sandpipers. Even by the main river each separate figure--the fisherman on the sh.o.r.e, the ploughman on the upland, the ferryman crossing between them--moves slowly upon a large landscape, while, permeating all, 'the essential silence cheers and blesses.' After a week at anchor in the heart of this silence Cynthia and I compared notes, and set down the total population at fifty souls; and even so she would have it that I had included the owls.

Lo! the next morning an unaccustomed rocking awoke us in our berths, and, raising the flap of our dew-drenched awning, we 'descried at sunrise an emerging prow' of a peculiarly hideous excursion steamboat. She blew no whistle, and we were preparing to laugh at her grotesque temerity when we became aware of a score of boats putting out towards her from the shadowy banks. Like spectres they approached, reached her, and discharged their complements, until at last a hundred and fifty pa.s.sengers crowded her deck. In silence--or in such silence as a paddle-boat can achieve--she backed, turned, and bore them away: on what festal errand we never discovered. We never saw them return. For aught I know they may never have returned. They raised no cheer; no band accompanied them; they pa.s.sed without even the faint hum of conversation. In five minutes at most the apparition had vanished around the river-bend seawards and out of sight. We stared at the gently heaving water, turned, and caught sight of Euergetes, his head and red cap above the forecastle hatch. (I call our yachtsman Euergetes because it is so unlike his real name that neither he nor his family will recognise it.) "Why, Euergetes," exclaimed Cynthia, "wherever did they all come from?" "I'm sure I can't tell you, ma'am," he answered, "unless 'twas from the woods,"--giving us to picture these ardent holiday-makers roosting all night in the trees while we slumbered.

But the odd thing was that the labourers manned the fields that day, the fishermen the beach that evening, in un-diminished numbers. We landed, and could detect no depletion in the village. We landed on subsequent days, and discovered no increase. And the inference, though easy, was startling.

I suppose that 'in the great style' could hardly be predicated of our housekeeping on these excursions; and yet it achieves, in our enthusiastic opinion, a primitive elegance not often recaptured by mortals since the pa.s.sing of the Golden Age. We cook for ourselves, but bring a fine spirit of emulation both to _cuisine_ and service. We dine frugally, but the claret is sound. From the moment when Euergetes awakes us by washing down the deck, and the sound of water rushing through the scuppers calls me forth to discuss the weather with him, method rules the early hours, that we may be free to use the later as we list. First the c.o.c.kpit beneath the awning must be prepared as a dressing-room for Cynthia; next Euergetes summoned on deck to valet me with the simple bucket. And when I am dressed and tingling from the _douche_, and sit me down on the cabin top, barefooted and whistling, to clean the boots, and Euergetes has been sent ash.o.r.e for milk and eggs, bread and clotted cream, there follows a peaceful half-hour until Cynthia flings back a corner of the awning and, emerging, confirms the dawn. Then begins the business, orderly and thorough, of redding up the cabin, stowing the beds, washing out the lower deck, folding away the awning, and transforming the c.o.c.kpit into a breakfast-room, with table neatly set forth. Meanwhile Euergetes has returned, and from the forecastle comes the sputter of red mullet cooking.

Cynthia clatters the cups and saucers, while in the well by the cabin door I perform some acquired tricks with the new-laid eggs. There is plenty to be done on board a small boat, but it is all simple enough. Only, you must not let it overtake you. Woe to you if it fall into arrears!

By ten o'clock or thereabouts we have breakfasted, my pipe is lit, and a free day lies before us--

"All the wood to ransack, All the wave explore."

We take the dinghy and quest after adventures. The nearest railway lies six miles off, and is likely to deposit no one in whom we have the least concern. The woods are deep, we carry our lunch-basket and may roam independent of taverns. If the wind invite, we can hoist our small sail; if not, we can recline and drift and stare at the heavens, or land and bathe, or search in vain for curlews' or kingfishers' nests, or in more energetic moods seek out a fisherman and hire him to shoot his seine.

Seventy red mullet have I seen fetched at one haul out of those delectable waters, remote and enchanted as the lake whence the fisherman at the genie's orders drew fish for the young king of the Black Isles. But such days as these require no filling, and why should I teach you how to fill them?

Best hour of all perhaps is that before bed-time, when the awning has been spread once more, and after long hours in the open our world narrows to the circle of the reading-lamp in the c.o.c.kpit. Our cabin is prepared.

Through the open door we see its red curtain warm in the light of the swinging lamp, the beds laid, the white sheets turned back. Still we grudge these moments to sleep. Outside we hear the tide streaming seawards, light airs play beneath the awning, above it rides the host of heaven. And here, gathered into a few square feet, we have home--larder, cellar, library, tables, and cupboards; life's small appliances with the human comradeship they serve, chosen for their service after severely practical discussion, yet ultimately by the heart's true nesting-instinct.

We are isolated, bound even to this strange river-bed by a few fathoms of chain only. To-morrow we can lift anchor and spread wing; but we carry home with us.

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night; I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea."

"I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom; And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night."

You see now what memories we lay up with the boat. Will you think it ridiculous that after such royal days of summer, her inconspicuous obsequies have before now put me in mind of Turner's '_Fighting Temeraire_'? I declare, at any rate, that the fault lies not with me, but with our country's painters and poets for providing no work of art nearer to my mood. We English have a great seafaring and a great poetical past.

Yet the magic of the sea and shipping has rarely touched our poetry, and for its finest expression we must still turn to an art in which as a race we are less expert, and stand before that picture of Turner's in the National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a good time coming when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find their bard and sit enshrined in 'great English national epic as grand as the _Odyssey_' It may be, but as yet our poets have achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and occasional pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest the excursionist. On me, at any rate, no poem in our language--not even _The Ancient Mariner_--binds as that picture binds, the--

"Mystic spell, Which none but sailors know or feel, And none but they can tell--"

If indeed they _can_ tell. In it Turner seized and rolled together in one triumphant moment the emotional effect of n.o.ble shipping and a sentiment as ancient and profound as the sea itself--human regret for transitory human glory. The great warship, glimmering in her Mediterranean fighting-paint, moving like a queen to execution; the pert and ign.o.ble tug, itself an emblem of the new order, eager, pushing, ugly, and impatient of the slow loveliness it supersedes; the sunset hour, closing man's labour; the fading river-reach--you may call these things obvious, but all art's greatest effects are obvious when once genius has discovered them. I should know well enough by this time what is coming when I draw near that picture, and yet my heart never fails to leap with the old wild wonder. There are usually one or two men standing before it--I observe that it affects women less--and I glance at them furtively to see how _they_ take it. If ever I surprise one with tears in his eyes, I believe we shall shake hands. And why not? For the moment we are not strangers, but men subdued by the wonder and sadness of our common destiny: "we feel that we are greater than we know." We are two Englishmen, in one moment realising the glories of our blood and state. We are alone together, gazing upon a new Pacific, 'silent, upon a peak in Darien.'

For--and here lies his subtlety--in the very flush of amazement the painter flatters you by whispering that for _you_ has his full meaning been reserved. The _Temeraire_ goes to her doom unattended, twilit, obscure, with no pause in the dingy bustle of the river. You alone have eyes for the pa.s.sing of greatness, and a heart to feel it.

"There's a far bell ringing,"

But you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the close of day, the end of deeds.

So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a sense of proud exclusiveness mingles with our high regret. Astern the jettymen and stevedores are wrangling over their latest job; trains are shunting, cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes amid clouds of dust.

We and we only a.s.sist at the pa.s.sing of a G.o.ddess. Euergetes rests on his oars, the tow-rope slackens, she glides into the deep shadow of the sh.o.r.e, and with a soft grating noise--ah, the eloquence of it!--takes ground.

Silently we carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm; silently we slip the legs under her channels, lift and make fast her stern moorings, lash the tiller for the last time, tie the coverings over cabintop and well; anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting no due rite. An hour, perhaps, pa.s.ses, and November darkness has settled on the river ere we push off our boat, in a last farewell committing her--our treasure 'locked up, not lost'--to a winter over which Jove shall reign genially.

"Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera."