Blue Voyage

VII

To his Lady, his Mother, his Wife, his Sister: her Servant, her Child, her Lover, her Brother, and to express all that is humble, respectful, and loving, to his Cynthia, W. D. writes this.

ONE

You are not ill-educated, Cynthia — if for the first and last time you will permit me so to address you — and you will therefore recognize this clumsy paraphrase of the salutation with which Heloise began the first of her letters to Peter Abelard. It is not by accident that I choose this method of opening what will no doubt be the last letter I address to you. For what, under the peculiar circumstances — I refer to the fact that, for reasons into which I forbear to inquire, your mother and yourself have decided to drop me from your acquaintance — what could be more likely than this beautiful exordium to persuade your eye to read further? And that, for me, is all-important. The reasons for this you will readily understand. Suppose this letter is delivered to you by your stewardess. I shall be careful to address the envelope in a style which you will not recognize, so that you will at least not destroy it unopened; but having opened it, is there not a great likelihood that you will then tear it to pieces as soon as you see from whom it comes? Yes. And for that reason I have — let me confess at once my iniquity, calculated iniquity! — employed this striking method of greeting you. It will perhaps — that frail pontoon “perhaps,” on which so many desperate armies have crossed — amuse you, perhaps even a little excite your curiosity. You might retort, derisively, that it is odd of me to model my salutation on that of Heloise rather than on that of Abelard? But unfortunately, Abelard is altogether too blunt for my purpose. He plunges in with a directness quite disconcertingly up-to-date; beginning with a mere “could I have known that a letter not addressed to you would fall into your hands.” Would this be more likely to tempt you on, Cynthia? Or could I have the heart to begin, as Abelard began his fourth epistle, “Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more”?… This would be both melancholy and absurd.

And the impulse to write to you, by way of leave-taking, is imperious. It seems to me that I have an infinitude of things that I must say to you. You know how one feels on a dock, when one sees one’s friend sail away, perhaps forever? the regret, almost the agony, with which one remembers a few of the things one has forgotten to say, or hadn’t the courage to say? One never, after all, told him how much one loved him. Not even a hint. One never, after all, showed one’s simple joy in the fact that one, at least partially, possessed him. One never so much as breathed the suggestion that one would feel his absence. And then, there is all the good advice that one has forgotten to give, all the solicitude for his future that one has somehow failed to express! You are going to a tropical climate? Do not forget your cork helmet and your parasol! Remember, when you get up in the morning, to empty the scorpions out of your boots!.. You are going to the North Pole? Be sure, then, to take a thermos flask filled with hot rum and coffee, and plenty of almond chocolate, and your goloshes, and your heaviest woolens!.. Nor do I mean this facetiously. The advice is usually just as stupid as this, just as useless. But it serves its purpose: no matter how clumsily administered, it serves to express the aching concern with which one sees the departure; and its expression is at once accepted as just that and nothing else. And so it is with me, Cynthia. I have never told you in so many words that I love you — partly because there was no time for it, our acquaintance being so brief and so scattered; and partly for psychological reasons: my profound sense of inferiority, my sense of filthiness, and my fear of all decisive action, all being partially responsible. And now it is too late, for I find you (again in mid-Atlantic! surely one of the most remarkable coincidences that ever befell two human creatures!) engaged to be married; and no sooner am I informed of this fact than I am “dropped” by you — given, in fact, the “cut direct” by your mother. Well! This has one saving grace, this magnificent disaster — for I can now say, once and for all, that I love you.

Having said this much, however, I find myself oddly at a loss as to how to continue. The truth is, my imagination has dealt with you so continuously, and so strenuously, and so richly, that I have no longer any definite sense as to where, exactly, between us, the psychological boundary lies. Two nights ago, for example, after our encounter on the deck (where, of course, as I am in the second cabin, I had no right to be) I lay awake all night, re-enacting every scrap of our little history, and improvising a good deal besides. In this you were — as indeed you are in all my reflections—“Cynthia”; and you were admitted to an intimacy with me (this may surprise you!) which I have vouchsafed to no one else. As I look back on that long orgy of self-communion, which had you as its chief but not as its only theme, I find in it naïveté a good deal that amuses me. It is a curious and instructive fact, for example, that in that moment of Sturm und Drang I should have experienced so powerfully a desire to talk to you about my childhood. I found myself constantly reverting to that — babbling to you my absurd infantine confidences and secrets, as if you were — ah! — my mother. Exactly! And isn’t that the secret of your quite extraordinary influence upon me? For some reason which I cannot possibly analyze, you strike to more numerous and deeper responses in me than any other woman has done. It must be that you correspond, in ways that only my unconscious memory identifies, to my mother, who died when I was very small. Can it be that?… Anyway, there it is; and as I sit here in my beloved smoking room, waited on by Malvolio, (do you remember how, on the nice old Silurian, you reproached me for sitting in the smoking room so much? do you remember how, one evening, we listened, standing just outside the door, on the dark deck, to the men singing there?) — well, as I sit here, hearing the slap of rubber quoits on the deck above, it is again a desire to talk to you of my childhood that comes uppermost. Strange! It really seems to me that there is something exquisitely appropriate in this: it seems to me that in this there might be some hope of really touching you. I do not mean that I harbor any hope that you will break off your engagement and engage yourself to me. (For one thing, I am not at all sure that I would want to marry.) Nor do I mean anything quite so obvious as that you should be touched sentimentally. No. What do I mean, then? Well, I mean that this would be the most direct, simple, and really effective mode of establishing the right communion between us. I don’t think this is merely a circumlocution or clumsy evasion. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that to talk to you of my childhood — to tell you of some one particular episode — would be for us what the good advice regarding goloshes was for the departing traveler: a profound symbol of intimacy. Even that is not the whole story. For also — and here, I admit, I do plunge recklessly into the treacherous underworld of effects — I feel with a divine confidence that is tantamount to clairvoyance that to tell you of some such episode would be to do you an exquisite violence. Why? Because I am perfectly certain that whatever is true — I mean idiosyncratically true — of me, is also deeply true of you; and my confession would therefore be your — accusation! An impeachment which you would be the first (but with a delighted shock) to admit.

But no — This is an evasion, an attempt to rationalize a mere feeling, ex post facto. The truth is, I am confused, and scarcely for the moment know what I do think or feel. Unhappy? Oh, yes! as the Negro spiritual says. What else could be expected? Yet I blame no one but myself for my unhappiness, and I hope I am too intelligent to suppose that my unhappiness is of any importance. Confused. My imagination darts in fifty directions, checked in each. I desire you — I hate you — I want to talk intimately with you — I want to say something horribly injurious to you … At one moment, it is of the purely trivial that I should like to talk to you. I should like to tell you of the amusing affair of old Smith (who was with me when I met you) and Mrs. Faubion, who sits opposite us at table; of how, last night, having made himself mildly tipsy with Guinness, he attempted to get into Mrs. Faubion’s room, just as she and her roommate (an incredible young woman!) were going to bed; how he put his foot inside her stateroom door (and such funny shoes he wears! horned like the rhino!) and tried to engage her in banter, meanwhile displaying, as if guilelessly, a purse full of gold sovereigns! At dinner, last night, he had told me of this project, and I had tried to dissuade him from it. No use. He was convinced that Mrs. Faubion was “that sort” … And this morning at breakfast, when Mrs. Faubion and I were alone, it all came out, the whole wretched story. “What was the matter with Mr. Smith last night?” “Matter? Was something the matter?” “Yes! He came to our room, and got his foot inside the door, and wouldn’t go away — all the time trying to show some gold money he had in a pocketbook! We had to shut the door in his face!.. Actually!.. And then he tried to come back again! I had to threaten to ring for the steward …” She looked at me, while she said this, with an air of profound wonder and mystification, perhaps just faintly tinged with suspicion. It puzzled her. What could have been the matter with the old man? And was I involved?… I suggested, of course, that he was just a little tipsy, and urged her to pay no attention to it. She remained, however, puzzled, and a little unconvinced … And Smith! When I walked round the deck with him later in the morning, did he say anything to me about this tragic — for him, I assure you, tragic — adventure? Not a word. Not a single word. But he was unhappy, and quiet — I could see the misery in him turning and turning round that dreadful and brief little disaster; while he revolved in his mouth one of the “expensive” cigars which his employer had given him as a parting present … Well, a horrible little episode, you will say, and why should I want to describe it to you? Again, because I am sure it will touch in you certain obscure chords which it touched in me, and set us to vibrating in subconscious harmony. Pity? Horror? Wonder? A sense of the disordered splendor and unexpectedness and tragedy of life? All these things, Cynthia; but chiefly the desire that we might again, as last year at the Bach concert, listen together.

And of course my childhood recollection is even better than that; for, narrated by me to you, it constitutes the playing upon us both of a chord unimaginably rich in stimuli. Consider some of these. The fact that I tell you this story — (as a “story” it is nothing — merely, say, the description of the sailing of a whaleship from New Bedford) — puts you in the position of the mother, and me in the position of the child; but it also makes our relation that of father and daughter. Again, it makes us both children—brother and sister, perhaps. Or, once more, it takes the color of a dual conspiracy, the delicious conspiracy of two adults to become children. Sentimental? No doubt. But the device, if anything so entirely spontaneous can be called a device, is universal. Baby talk! My baby doll! Icky fing!.. Revolting when we detect others in this singular regression, but just the same the instinct is powerful in all of us, and given the right circumstances will betray itself without the least compunction … Very well, then — the right circumstances have arisen chez moi, and I must report to you this tiny episode taken from my childhood. Like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, it seems to have no connection; but, tangential though its pertinence may be, its pertinence is none the less profound.

When my mother and father died, the children were distributed, for temporary shelter, among various relatives; and it was my good fortune to be sent for a winter to the house of my father’s cousin, Stanley Bragg, in New Bedford, who had come forward with an offer to look after “one male child.” Of course, I was at first bewildered by the abrupt change, the removal from tropics to New England, the separation from my brother and sister; but on the other hand I had always been fond of Cousin Stanley; and his house, which I had several times visited, had always seemed to me quite the most beautiful and romantic in the world. It stood well back from County Street, concealed by elms and huge horse chestnuts, on a high grassy terrace. On the lower lawn (and this had, to begin with, particularly fascinated me!) stood a life-sized figure of a stag, cast in dark metal. It looked very lifelike, especially when it had been wetted (as frequently in summer) by the garden sprinkler. The garden, behind the house, was divided formally into squares by high box hedges which were full of spiderwebs and superb spiders — the latter I used to tempt out of their deep funnels of silk by twitching a strand of web with a twig: and I had the feeling that they used positively to growl at me. Here there was an old-fashioned chain well, like a little latticed house, overgrown with honeysuckle, which worked with a crank; and which kept up a gentle clinking while from the revolving cups on the chain it gushed forth the most delicious water. There were also fruit trees, flower beds, a wilderness of nasturtiums round the pump, and at the end of all, before you got to the barn, grape arbors all across the back wall — so thickly grown that on a not too rainy day you could crawl in under the vines and eat grapes in shelter. In the stable, of which John was the benevolent king, were the two horses which Cousin Stanley kept; a solemn black closed coach; a light buggy, for country driving; and, in the cellar, a pig. On one wall, where the whips and harnesses were hung, was nailed a wood carving of a large heart-shaped leaf.

The house itself was a comfortable mansard-roofed affair, with a wide “piazza” (on which stood tubs of hydrangeas) and lofty rooms in which one got an impression of a good deal of white marble. Among its wonders, for me, were the wooden shutters, which slid magically out of the walls beside the windows, and a great number of small carved objects of jade and soapstone and ivory, brought from China and Japan by Cousin Stanley’s father. Best of all, however, was the attic, and its cupola. Cupola! I remember how strange the word sounded when I first heard it pronounced by Miss Bendall, the housekeeper, who smelt of camphor. It struck me as “foreign”—a Northern word, surely! — and I hadn’t the remotest idea in the world how one would go about spelling it. But from the moment when Cousin Stanley, stooping a little (as he was very tall) led us up the dark stairs to the warm wooden-smelling attic, and then, with triumph (this was several years before) showed us the cupola itself, I entertained no doubts as to its fascinations. Miserable child, who has no cupola for his rainy mornings! It was in itself a perfect little house, glassed on all sides, with a window-seat all around, so that one could sit on whatever side one liked and look out to the uttermost ends of the earth. Over the slate roofs of houses, one looked steeply downhill to the harbor, the bright masts, the blue water, the Fairhaven ferry, and Fairhaven itself beyond. Farther to the right one saw the long red brick buildings of the cotton mills (not so numerous as now) and then the Point, and the Bug lighthouse, and the old fort, and the wide blue of Buzzard’s Bay. With a good glass, one might have made out the Islands; or observed the slow progress of a Lackawanna or Lehigh Valley tug and its string of black coal barges all the way from Fort Rodman to Cuttyhunk; or pick up the old Gay Head sidewheeling back from Wood’s Hole, with its absurdly laborious walking beam.

You can imagine, Cynthia, how enthralled I was with all this, and how quickly, in my absorption in such wonders, I forgot the separation from my brother and sister, and the tragedy — now far off, tiny, and soundless — which had brought it all about. It soon seemed as if I had always lived in New Bedford, with Miss Bendall and Cousin Stanley and old John (a perfect stage coachman!) and Mabel, the Irish cook, who churned the butter in the pantry. I knew every flower and spider in the garden, every branch of every tree, and whether it would hold my weight or not; and every picture in every one of the forty-odd bound volumes of Harpers which I used to take up with me to the cupola. The great black cistern, which concealed somewhere a sinister little tinkle of water, was my ocean, where I sailed a flotilla of small blue-painted boats provided by Cousin Stanley. In the evenings, there was often a game of cribbage with Cousin Stanley or Miss Bendall, or else Cousin Stanley would talk to me about ships and shipping — he was a shipowner — and the voyages he had made as a young man. Smoking a crackling great calabash pipe, he talked rapidly and vividly; so much so that I sometimes found it difficult, afterward, to get to sleep: my senses stimulated, my imagination full of sights and sounds. It was a result of these talks that I began, in the afternoons and on Saturdays, exploring the wharves for myself. With what a thrill I used to start down Union Street, seeing, at the bottom of the mile-long cobbled hill, the bright golden eagle of a pilothouse! Or how entrancing to discover in the morning, when I looked down from the cupola before breakfast, a new four-master coming up the harbor, with its dark sails just being dropped!

The magnificent climax to all this, however, came early one Saturday morning — when Cousin Stanley woke me and told me to get dressed quickly: he “had a surprise for me.” The big bell in the Catholic steeple, a block away, by which I always went to bed and got up, was striking five, and it was just beginning to be light. What could the surprise be? I had no idea, but I knew better than to spoil Cousin Stanley’s delight in it by asking. When I went down the stairs, he was waiting for me in the darkness by the door, holding one finger to his lips as a sign to me to be quiet. We stole out, tiptoed across the piazza, and down the flagged path to the gate, where John was waiting for us with the buggy. “To the Union Street Wharf, John!” said Cousin Stanley — and instantly I was lost in a chaos of intoxicating speculations. Were we going to sea? but how could we, without luggage, without even our coats or sweaters?… The sky was beginning to turn pink as we turned from North Street; the city was profoundly still; not a sound, except for Betsy’s clip-clop on the asphalt and the twittering of sparrows and robins in the elms, where a deeper darkness seemed still to linger. But when we turned again, into the foot of Union Street, what a difference! For there before us, on the long confused wharf, was a scene of the most intense activity — a whale-ship was being made ready for the sea.

Dismounting, we plunged into the midst of this chaos. The ship, in which Cousin Stanley owned a share, was the Sylvia Lee: she was, he told me, pointing to her crossed spars, a brig, and one of the last sailing vessels in the whaling trade. Two gangways led aboard her; and along these shuffled a steady stream of men, carrying boxes, bundles, small kegs, and coils of rope. Cousin Stanley moved away to talk with someone he knew, leaving me beside a pile of fresh wooden boxes, the very boxes which were rapidly being shouldered aboard. Shouts, cries, commands, a fracas of voices — how did they manage to hear one another? A man with a brown megaphone was leaning over the bow rail of the brig (the white bowsprit pointed up Union Street) and shouting “Mr. Pierce! Mr. Pierce!” … Where was Mr. Pierce? and what was he wanted for? and who was the man with the megaphone? The tops of the masts were now struck by the sun, and became surprisingly brilliant, orange-colored, in contrast with the still-somber wharf and the dark hulk of the vessel herself. Sea gulls fluttered and swooped, quarreling, around the stem, where a man in a white jacket had emptied a pail of garbage. These too, when they rose aloft, entered the sunlight and became flamingo-colored. “Mr. Pierce!.. Mr. Pierce! Is Mr. Pierce there?” I became anxious about Mr. Pierce. What if he should arrive too late? It might be something terribly important. “Jones! send one of your men up to the office, will you, and see if Mr. Pierce is there. If he is, tell him I haven’t got my papers yet. At once!” Where was Jones? I heard no reply from him, but there must have been one, lost in the general hubbub, for the megaphone seemed to be appeased. Only for a moment, however: it reappeared immediately on the high deck of the stem, before the deckhouse. “Now then men, make it lively. I want those gangways cleared in five minutes … Mr. Jones, will you see that the slack in that cable is taken in.” … A block began a rhythmic chirping in the bow — two men, leaning backward, pulled in short, hard pulls at a rope. The pile of boxes beside me was diminishing — a dozen, ten, eight, six — condensed soup.

“Well, Billy! Shall we go aboard?”

This was the moment of Cousin Stanley’s delight, and in reply I could do nothing but grin. Was he serious? I didn’t like to commit myself, one way or the other.

“Come along, then!” he added, and led the way to the bow gangway, which was now clear. It consisted merely of two great planks lashed together at the ends, and it swayed, when we reached the middle, with a shortening rhythm which seemed disquietingly to come up to meet one’s foot in mid-air. In the dirty water between wharf and ship a lot of straw, bottles, and some lemon peels rose and fell, suckingly. I felt dizzy. I was glad to jump down from the broad black bulwark to the weatherworn deck. We walked aft, and climbed up the short companionway to the poop.

“Good morning, Captain! Just about ready, eh?”

“Mornin’, Stanley. Yep — tug should be here now.… There she is, too. You haven’t seen Pierce, have you?”

“Pierce? No. Why?”

“He hasn’t brought my—”

The little tug Wamsutta (old friend of mine) floundered astern of us with ringing bells and a sudden up-boiling of foam over her reversed propellers. The pilot was leaning out of his little window, shouting, a corn cob in his fist. The Sylvia Lee began swaying a little, agitatedly, with creaking hawsers. The Captain turned his megaphone toward the Wamsutta and spoke quietly—

“I’ll be ready in five minutes, Peter … Mr. Jones, get your men aboard. Has Mr. Pierce been found?”

“Yes, sir. He’s just goin’ aboard.”

“All right. When he’s off, throw out your gangways, and be ready to give Peter a hand. And have some men standing by to cast off.”

“Yes sir.”

The wharf had suddenly become perfectly silent. A dozen men stood motionless, in a group, watching us with an air of profound wonder, as if already we had passed out of their lives and become something remote, unexplained, transcendental. One of the last of the whale ships! But we were something more than that — we were a departing world, the moon taking its first flight from the earth. And I felt myself that I belonged to the Sylvia Lee, and was at last taking leave of everything familiar, setting forth at daybreak toward the unimaginable, the obscure, the unattainable. Islands somewhere! the Islands of the Blest! or wherever it was that old Ulysses went, beyond the Pillars of Hercules — those same islands that I still dream about periodically, lying in mid-Atlantic, two fair green isles divided by a deep strait, and inhabited by a tall race of surpassing beauty! Was it something like this I thought of? The Wamsutta had come puffing alongside, its bell ringing twice and then once and then three times; the hawsers were cast off and fell swashing into the dirty water; and the Sylvia Lee, trembling, began to glide stern-foremost into the breezy harbor. The men waved their caps and shouted farewells. “So long, Mike! Don’t lose your false teeth!” “Don’t forget to tell Jim what I told you!” “So long, boys! We’ll be back for the next election!” “So long! So long!” … Phrases were replaced by shouts, and then the shouts by wavings; and as the Wamsutta turned us handily about in midstream, and then strode ahead of us with easier puffs and lengthening towrope, a pandemonium of bells and whistles gave us a wild salute. Good-by, New Bedford! Good-by, Achushnet River! We’re rolling down to Rio, rolling down to the Horn, racing north to the Pole, where the icebergs grind screaming together and the right whale breaches through a sheet of ice and snow!.. The lighthouse keeper in the “Bug” ran out on his lowest circular balcony and blew his little tin foghorn three times as we passed, and then, waving his arm, shouted something unintelligible. He looked very small, and his dinghy, bowing on the end of its painter under the balcony, seemed no bigger than a peasecod. I felt that I was leaving this, too, forever; and the gaunt scarred rocks of Fairhaven, which smelt so deliciously of kelp at low tide, where I had so often explored the salt pools; and Fort Rodman, where the tiny blue sentry crept back and forth by the barracks like a toy. Good-by, good-by! William Demarest is going away on the Sylvia Lee; you will never again see him driving on the Point Road, or gathering scallop shells on the salt beach that looks westward toward Padanaram. Never again. Never again.

Away on the Sylvia Lee! We had cleared the Point already, and now we could glance up the deep inlet that led to Padanaram and Dartmouth. Further off, on our starboard bow, lay the low green brightening shore of Nonquitt, with its Elephant Rock, its Spindle, its rickety little wharf, its mosquitoes, and its bog full of red lilies and orchids. I tried to make out the Spindle, with its little keg on top of the iron pole, but it was too far away. Farewell, Nonquitt! We are whalers sailing away to perils and wonders in uncharted seas!.. Cousin Stanley suddenly lifted me up so that I could see into one of the whaleboats, with its rusty harpoons and tub of coiled rope. Mr. Jones and the Captain were beside us; and Mr. Pierce, who had not gone ashore after all.

“She doesn’t look very smart, does she?” said the Captain. He rubbed a harsh finger on the blistered gunwale. “But there’ll be plenty of time for paintin’ and polishin’ between here and Valparaiso … I think if you’re goin’ to get some breakfast, Stanley—”

“Yes. I suppose we’d better have it. Like some breakfast, Billy?”

Breakfast! a deep qualm opened within me like a kind of marsh-flower. I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I was on a ship. We went down a steep stairway into the officers’ saloon, gloomy and evil-smelling, where a red and pink tablecloth covered a long table. At the forward end, the table abutted on a slant mast-root which was beautifully encased in varnished and inlaid wood, and around which ran a little mahogany tumbler-rack, like a veranda. But the smell was appalling! The smell of whale oil, perhaps, which, after years of whale voyaging, had saturated the ship. My gorge rose, and I was terrified lest, on a calm day, with no excuse whatever, I should disgrace myself by being sick. I sat down gingerly. The idea of eating food became abhorrent to me; the bread looked dusty and hard, the corned beef a thousand years old; the dishes, too, were thick and grayish, somehow oppressive. And then, to have corned beef, and boiled potatoes, with their skins imperfectly removed, for breakfast! In a state of passive weakness, not daring to move or speak lest the paroxysm should seize me, I allowed Mr. Jones to give me corned beef and potatoes. Reluctantly, I raised my fork to begin, when the cook (the man in the white jacket whom I had seen emptying the pail of garbage!) put down before me a thick china bowl, full of melted butter. Into this he dropped a dull leaden spoon. “Help yourself, sonny!” he said. “Whale oil.” Incontinently, I raised my hand to my mouth, and felt myself on the point of giving that horrible little crow which is the prelude to disaster. My mouth drew itself together — I felt my tongue cold against my cold palate — and then I rose and fled. Disgraced! The laughter that followed me up the steep stairway was kindly, however, and as I stood again by the bulwark in the fresh wind I forgot that momentary discomfort in the sheer romanticism of the voyage. Valpraiso! Was it really possible? These sails, which the men were now breaking out one by one, and which now gently filled with the following wind, and shifted a little with a settling creak of spars long unused, these sails would carry the Sylvia Lee all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and round the Horn to Valparaiso. What would Union Street seem like then, with its little green streetcars? Would the men remember Buttonwood Park, and the bears, and the motor-paced bicycle races at the bicycle track? Would they talk about these things, or long for them, these things which were now so commonplace and real? Would these things then seem as distant and incredible as Valparaiso seemed now?…

Well, Cynthia — I draw to the end of this simple narrative. I find myself losing heart or losing impetus. What if, after all, the impulse to tell of it should seem to you rather silly?… Yet, at the last minute, it had its thrill of terror, which perhaps more than anything else served to make it memorable. For when the sails had all been spread, and the towrope had been cast off, and the Wamsutta drew away to starboard and stopped, her nose pointing toward Cuttyhunk, it was then that the greatest moment came. One of the whaleboats was manned and lowered into the sea; into this we clambered, Mr. Pierce and Cousin Stanley and I; and the men pulled away toward the waiting tug. The Sylvia Lee hung enormous above us, her sails flapping, as we drew out from her shadow; but I now paid little attention to the beautiful tall ship, for I had discovered that the whaleboat was leaking, leaking fast! In a moment I had to draw up my feet. Before we had gone half the distance to the Wamsutta we had taken in about four inches of water. Were we sinking? Would we get there before we sank? What astonished me was the indifference of the men at the oars — they sat with their feet in the swashing water and hauled stolidly away as if nothing whatever were occurring. I felt, therefore, that it would be a breach of etiquette to comment, or show anxiety, and I scarcely knew what attitude to take toward Mr. Pierce’s humorous observation that it looked “as if they were trying to drown us.” It hardly seemed a subject for joking. I was measuring the water, measuring the gap between us and the Wamsutta; and seldom have I experienced such an acute sensation of relief as when we drew alongside and climbed aboard in a smell of oil and hot-breathing engines. More remarkable still, however, was the fact that the men in the whaleboat did not pause to bail out the water — which was now halfway up their legs — but at once turned the heavy boat about and started back again. How slowly, how laboriously, she seemed to creep! By the time they had come up once more with the Sylvia Lee her gunwales were only a foot out of water. They were safe, however — we saw them climb briskly aboard. And then we saw the boat being hauled up, while one man bailed with a pail, flinging great scoops of hollow silver over the side; and at once, majestically, with filling sails, the Sylvia Lee bore away. The men waved to us and shouted — the Wamsutta blew three vibrating blasts of her whistle — and while the ship moved statelily southward, we turned and chug-chugged back toward New Bedford. Good-by, Sylvia Lee!.. Good-by indeed. For the Sylvia Lee was destined to be one of the tragedies of the sea. None of the men who sailed away with her ever returned. No one ever knew how she was wrecked. All that was found of her, two years later, west of the Horn, was the fragment of sternplate that bore her name.

(Not sent.)

TWO

MY DEAR MISS BATTILORO:

You will be surprised to learn that this is the second letter which I have written to you today — and that to the writing of the first (which I have decided not to send to you, and which I am not sure I ever intended to send) I devoted several hours. This behavior must seem to you very peculiar. Indeed, it seems peculiar to me, though I am (if anybody is!) in a position to understand it. Why should I be writing you letters at all? Why on earth? It is easy for me to put myself in your place (bad dramatist though I am) and I can therefore without the least difficulty imagine the mixture of bewilderment, curiosity, contempt, and annoyance, or even shame, shame for me, with which you will receive this last of my underbred antics. Why in God’s name should this upstart young man (not so young either), this mere ship’s acquaintance, this New Englander with intermittent manners, presume to write to you? you who so habitually and unquestioningly regard yourself as one of the world’s chosen few? And how entirely characteristic of him that instead of coming to see you he should write—send you, merely from one end of a ship to another, a morbidly and mawkishly self-conscious letter!.. All of which is perfectly just, as far at it goes; and I doubt whether I can find any very adequate defense. You have, of course, an entire right to drop me without advancing reasons. Who among us has not exercised that privilege of selection? If the manner in which you have administered the “cut” seems to me extraordinarily ill-bred and uncharitable, who am I that I should rebuke you for a want of courtesy? I have been rude myself. I have even, occasionally, to rid myself of a bore, been inexcusably cruel. One must, at times, defend oneself at all costs, and I recognize perfectly that this has seemed to you an occasion for the exercise of that right. Ah! (you will say) but if you admit all this, why talk about it? Why not take your medicine in silence, like a gentleman?… Well, I could reply that as I seem to have lost in your eyes the privileges of a gentleman, I have therefore lost also the gentleman’s obligations; and as you have put me in the position of an outcast, I might as well make a virtue of necessity, and, as a final gesture of pride, haul up the Jolly Roger.

But no — that’s not exactly what I mean. Why is it that I seem always, in trying to say the simplest things, to embroil myself in complications and side issues, in references and tangents, in qualifications and relativities? It is my weakness as an author (so the critics have always said) that I appear incapable of presenting a theme energetically and simply. I must always wrap it up in tissue upon tissue of proviso and aspect; see it from a hundred angles; turn laboriously each side to the light; producing in the end not so much a unitary work of art as a melancholy cauchemar of ghosts and voices, a phantasmagoric world of disordered colors and sounds; a world without design or purpose; and perceptible only in terms of the prolix and the fragmentary. The criticism is deserved, of course: but I have often wished that the critics would do me the justice to perceive that I have deliberately aimed at this effect, in the belief that the old unities and simplicities will no longer serve. No longer serve, I mean, if one is trying to translate, in any form of literary art, the consciousness of modern man. And this is what I have tried to do. I am no longer foolish enough to think that I have succeeded — I am in process of adjustment to the certainty that I am going to be a failure. I take what refuge I can in a strictly psychological scrutiny of my failure, and endeavor to make out how much this is due to (1) a simple lack of literary power, or genius, or the neurosis that we give that name, and how much to (2) a mistaken assumption as to the necessity for this new literary method. What if — for example — in choosing this literary method, this deliberate indulgence in the prolix and fragmentary, I merely show myself at the mercy of a personal weakness which is not universal, or ever likely to be, but highly idiosyncratic? That is perfectly possible; and it brings me back to my starting point. I am like that — I do think and feel in this confused and fluctuating way — I frequently suspect that I am nothing on earth but a case of dementia praecox, manqué, or arrested. Isn’t all this passion for aspects and qualifications and relativities a clear enough symptom of schizophrenia? It is as a result of my uncertain and divided attitude toward you that you now finally wash your hands of me; the conflict in me between the declared and the undeclared produced that callow and caddish ambiguity of behavior which offended you. And now, in this letter, I continue the offense! I mumble and murmur and beat round the bush — and succeed in saying nothing. Why is it that I don’t simply say that the whole trouble has been that, from the moment when I first saw you coming up the gangway to the Silurian, last year, I adored you and was terrified by you? Yes, you terrified me. But what use is there in analyzing this? None. The important thing is merely to say that I have loved you, that I love you, and that I must, now that you have dropped me, take any available way of telling you this, no matter how much the method may offend you.

Alas! all this is beside the point. Why is it that I cannot, in some perfectly simple and comprehensive manner, tell you exactly how I feel about you, and exactly what sort of creature I am? One wouldn’t suppose that this would present inordinate difficulties. Yet, when I set myself the task this morning, do you know what form my unfinished letter was going to take? A long, sentimental reminiscence of my childhood! Yes, I actually believed for a moment that by some such circumferential snare as that I might trap you, bring you within my range, sting, and poison you with the subtle-sweet poison of a shared experience and consciousness. That again is highly characteristic of me. It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing — to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos — of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings — in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, “This is I!” … Is it any wonder that I am considered half mad, a charlatan, or, worse still, one who has failed to perceive the most elementary truth about art, namely, that its first principle is selection?… And here I struggle in the same absurd roundabout way to give you some inkling of the springs of my behavior, in a vain hope that you will think better of my failure to — what? To attract you? But I did attract you. To capture you? To avoid disgusting you? Perhaps it is that. “Here I am” (I might say), “this queer psychopathic complicated creature: honeycombed with hypocrisies and subtleties, cowardices and valors, cupidities and disgusts; on the whole, harmless …”

But let me make a new start. Am I not, at bottom, simply trying to impress you? behaving exactly like the typical male in spring? And the behavior exasperated, in my case, by the fact that I must, if possible, overcome a judgment which has already declared itself to be adverse. However, I can see no possible escape from that predicament. Any behavior, if calculated (whether consciously or unconsciously) to attract, is in its origin sexual. Why, then, be ashamed of it? You, yourself — since we last encountered — have been embraced by the male of your species; the sexual instinct has finally flowered in you and taken possession of you. Is there anything repugnant in this surrender?… To tell the truth I think there is. Whether this is a mere outcropping of Puritanism, I cannot say. It may be. Anyway, I find something essentially horrible in this complete abandonment of oneself to an instinct. Mind you, I do not for one moment deny the appalling beauty and desirability of the experience. I have known it several times, and never without ecstasy. But there is something in me which insists that this ought not to be made the center or foundation of one’s life; that it is a tyranny of the gross over the subtle; and that like every other attack on the liberty of one’s spirit it ought to be met with all the forces at one’s command. Must we be slaves to our passions? “For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute,” must we give up our freedom forever? No — and it was with all these perplexities smoldering in my eyes and heart that I first approached you, Cynthia. And more than this, I approached you with a definite and peculiar hope in my mind. Will this hope seem to you a kind of madness? Perhaps it will. What I hoped was that at last I had found a love which somehow transcended the flesh. Yes — I actually persuaded myself that I had captured the chimera; and that in Cynthia and poor William the phoenix and the turtle were met anew. A beautiful, a divine illusion! One of those heavenly beliefs which, in intensity of being, makes the solidest of our realities seem insubstantial as a shade. I am not a believer in souls, nor in immortality; I have no sentimental conception of God, no religion from which to extract, for my daily needs, color and light; yet in encountering you I felt that I could only explain what was happening to me by assuming at least a symbolic meaning and rightness in the treacherous word “soul.” For was I not at once treading a brighter star? And was I not — gross Caliban that I was — endeavoring, all of a sudden, to become an Ariel? And were we not, you and I, already partaking of a direct and profound communion from the moment that we looked at each other and spoke the first casual words of greeting? This communion was so perfect, so without barriers, and so independent of our bodies, our hands, our eyes, our speech even, that for the first time since I had become a man I found myself looking, startled, into the eyes of God — the God whom I knew as a child. Of course, the habit of criticism was too deeply engrained in me to permit any such illusion to go long unchallenged. I suppose, to tell the truth, that I never really wavered at all — unless my frequent visits to Westminster Cathedral (where, however, there was the additional motive that I hoped to encounter you) can be considered a wavering. Yet, if my mind was steadfast in its refusal to abdicate, it was also wise enough, or weak enough, to allow the soul a holiday. It observed, it recorded, it even despised, but it didn’t feel called upon to interfere. And in the end — this is what astonishes me! — it has come very near to believing that in this extraordinary holiday of the affections it might discover some sublime first principle of things by which the whole melancholy world might be explained and justified. This miraculous communion between us, Cynthia — was this perhaps an earnest of what was to come? I do not mean simply for us, for you and me, but for all mankind! Was it possible to guess, from this beautiful experience, that ultimately man would know and love his brother; that the barriers of idiosyncrasy and solipsism, the dull walls of sense, would go down before the wand of Prospero? This possibility seemed to me not merely a thing to be desired, but a necessity! And what obstacles lay between us and this divine understanding? Only one — the Will. When we sufficiently desired this communion, when at last we realized the weakness and barrenness of the self, we could be sure that we would have sufficient wisdom to accomplish the great surrender.

To what pitch of intensity this illusion, this belief, this doctrine of sublimation, was brought in me by my loss of you — if truly it can be said that I have lost you! — may be suggested to you when I tell you of a very peculiar experience which I had last night. I do not deny that I had taken a drink or two. Whisky is a useful anodyne. And after a whole day of concentrated misery it became pressingly necessary to break the continuity of my thought. I had sat too long in one place in the smoking room, keeping a watch through the half-opened window for a glimpse of your striped and diamonded Hindu jersey — and what a pang I suffered when at last I saw it, worn by your friend! Was that an intentional twist of the knife? No, of course not — it was an accident. But I had sat thus too long, and for too long I had blown round and round in one fixed vortex of thoughts and feelings. The only relief I had known all day was a talk with Silberstein, a Jew, and a fellow passenger of yours — a rather remarkable man: a seller of “chewing sweets” and a chess player. But, though I (to some extent consciously) sought release by talking of myself with reckless freedom to Silberstein, I had found no real comfort in it, nor had I found any more, at dinner, in the company of Smith and Mrs. Faubion. It is perfectly true — I may as well confess it — that Mrs. Faubion (vulgar little strumpet that she is) attracts me; and I discovered last night at dinner, with a gleam of delight which not even my prevailing misery could extinguish, that Mrs. Faubion is attracted by me. An extraordinary reflection on the deep pluralism of things, life’s contrapuntal and insoluble richness! Here, in the very crisis of a passion, a passion which is as nearly all-absorbing as a passion can be, I pause for a moment’s delicious flirtation with another woman! Nor is it so simple a thing as flirtation, either — it is darker and stronger than that, a deep current of mutual delight, which might easily, and might well, sweep us off our feet. We know this as we look at each other — we tacitly admit it. Between meals we always avoid each other, just as we always avoid any but the dullest banter, because we both know that to take any step whatever would be to be lost. Well! last night I was in no mood to be lost — lost in this sense. And when Mrs. Faubion — who was in a mood to be lost — touched my foot with hers under the table, I made no response, pretended that I thought it was an accident. Of course, it may have been an accident — but I sincerely doubt it. No, it was unmistakable … I rejected, then, this gay little overture from the pluralistic universe, not because it was in itself unattractive, but because — well, why, exactly? A psychologist might say that it was because my nervous system was at the moment too acutely in the state known as a “motor set”—a motor set which was directed to a woman named Cynthia. That is one way of putting it. My mandibles were poised, and pointed and ready to spring, but only in that one direction, and on receipt of that one stimulus. Mrs. Faubion, it is true, might have sprung the trap. I quite seriously entertained the thought. But I foresaw, or thought I foresaw, a more than usually swift disillusionment, followed by a horrible agony of self-reproach. She would satisfy, for the fleetingest of instants, the blind animal maw; but the mind, or soul, or whatever you like to call it, would be cheated, and being cheated would be even wretcheder than before. I do not pretend that I thought this out at the time as clearly as I think it out now for you. I merely felt the thing in an image or warm coalition of images, in a pang or an inkling of a pang, as I talked with Mrs. Faubion, withdrew my foot reluctantly, and met her somber eyes in a gaze a little too protracted. And I was saddened by it, and further and still more deeply saddened, when old father Smith confessed to me once more his amorous desire for her, and outlined for me the ugly little scheme by which he hoped to gain possession of her. A sinister and sorry little tangle! Demarest in hopeless pursuit of Cynthia, whose eyes were fixed on — whom? a captain in the Belgian army? while Smith desired Faubion, and Faubion (pour mieux s’amuser) rested her dark gaze on the absent-hearted Demarest. Why must things be like this? Why, Cynthia? I returned after a while to the smoking room, where men were singing smutty songs and telling smutty stories — where, in fact, as invariably occurs, the whole world was being reduced to its lowest common denominator — and drank whisky, meditating on these things. If only — I thought — we had some subtler medium than language, and if only we weren’t, all of us, little walled fortresses self-centered and oversensitive and so perpetually on the defensive! If only we could more freely give ourselves, more generously, without shame or stint!.. And it was out of these confused reflections, which were not so much reflections as feelings, that my peculiar experience developed, the peculiar little experience which I have approached in so roundabout a way, and of which in the end I shall have so absurdly little to tell you. For what did it amount to? Only this — that I had a kind of waking dream, one so vivid that it was almost a hallucination. A cynic would say of it that it was simply the result of whisky. But it was more than that, though I freely admit that whisky had broken down certain inhibitions and permitted to my unconscious a greater freedom. I was on the point of going to bed, when I decided to take a sniff of fresh air — up to the hurricane deck I went, therefore, disregarding once more the barriers; and there, as I stood in the marvelous darkness, alone in the world, alone with my ridiculous transitory little unhappiness, I indulged myself in a fantasy. I was then, suddenly, no longer alone. You were there, Cynthia, and so was Faubion, and so too were Smith and Silberstein. We were all there: but we were all changed. For when I first moved toward you, among the lifeboats, under the autumnal stars which seemed to gyrate slowly above us, I heard you — astonishing! — exchanging quotations from the Greek Anthology. Could it be true? It was true — all four of you had achieved a divine intimacy, a divine swiftness and beauty of mutual understanding and love, so that your four spirits swayed and chimed together in a unison, unhurried and calm, which made of the whole nocturnal universe a manifest wisdom and delight. I too participated in this gentle diapason, this tranquil sounding of the familiar notes, but my part was a timid one, less practiced, and I felt that I had not yet sufficiently passed out of myself to move as freely as you others among darknesses become luminous and uncertainties become certain. I still loved myself too much to love the world; too desperately struggled, still, to understand my own coils, and therefore, found the world obscure. But I did participate, a little, and I listened with joy. It was a miracle. These four utterly dissimilar beings, these four beings whose desires were in conflict, nevertheless understood each other perfectly, loved each other angelically, uttered one another’s thoughts and faintest feelings as readily as their own, and laughed together, gently, over their own profoundest griefs! What could I do but worship that vision? For the vision was indeed so vivid that for an instant I wholly forgot that all this excellence had come out of my own heart, and I could joyfully give myself to a pure worship. Only for an instant, alas! for abruptly the fantasy began to go wrong. A jarring note was sounded, a note of jeering corruption and hatred, then the clashing of individual will with will. As sometimes in a dream one is aware that one is dreaming, so I began to feel my own ugly idiosyncrasies which underlay each of these four beings, and to see that they were only projections of myself; and though I could continue the fantasy, and indeed was compelled to do so, I could no longer direct it; darker powers in my heart had taken command of it. The beautiful harmony which love and wisdom had achieved, and of which it seemed to me that they were about to make something final and perfect, became a nightmare in which my own lusts and hatreds shaped events swiftly toward a nauseating climax. The scene was a parody of the Crucifixion — and of a good deal else. I find it impossible to analyze completely, for a great deal of its meaning, at the end, was in the insupportable ugliness of its tone. In this horrible scene, I beheld you transfigured, Cynthia — turned into a stained-glass widow! What can have been the significance of that? Does it represent simply an effort to sublimate my love of you? Or was it — as I suspect — intended to show that this attempt as a sentimental sublimation could only partially succeed? Certainly, it presented you, or my conception of you, in a very unattractive light. Perhaps that is tantamount to saying that it presented me in a very unattractive light. I was pillorying myself for hypocrisy. Perhaps I was — or certain darker forces in me, a profounder and truer animal honesty — perhaps these were taking their revenge by wrecking this pretty dream of a “perfect communion.” Anyway, it is true that shortly before this waking dream I had been pondering the question of sublimation versus immersion. How can we possibly decide which is the better course to pursue? Shall we take the way of art, and lie, and try to make life as like the lie as we can — remold it nearer to the child’s desire — or shall we take the way of nature, and love? Love, I mean, savagely with the body!.. You can call that a quibble, if you like, replying that it is not really a question as between art and nature, but between two aspects of nature — the more primitive and the less primitive. But it makes no difference how you phrase it: the problem is there, and is insoluble. At one end savagery — at the other hypocrisy? Hypocrisy fine-branching and beautiful as coral, hypocrisy become an infinitely resourceful art? Either extreme is for us unreachable, or untenable if reached. We must struggle and fluctuate in the Limbo between — saving ourselves now and then from an art of life too fine-drawn by a bath of blood; or from an awareness and control too meager by a deliberate suppressing of our lusts, a canalization of those energies … And never, at any time, knowing exactly where we stand, what we believe in, or who we are.

It is to this awful dilemma that my failure with you has brought me. Of this schism in my nature, which has always been known to me, I have now become acutely and horribly and unintermittently conscious … What shall I do? Shall I go on, half-civilized liar that I am, and add a few more reefs of flowery coral to my already disgracefully massive production, and thus help deluded mankind to add delusion to delusion? Or shall I turn back, and do my best to destroy this terrible structure of hypocrisy?… I think, Cynthia, I will turn back. I think I must turn my back on you. I think I must decide, once and for all, that though you are beautiful, and though I have fixed my heart on you as on nothing and no one else, you are a sham, a fraud, an exquisite but baseless, or nearly baseless, work of art. A living lie. A beautiful betrayal of nature. A delicious fake … I remember that you refused to have tea with me, at a Lyons or A.B.C., because they were “such grubby little places” … But as for me, I like them; and the grubbier the better.

(Not sent.)

THREE

DEAR MISS BATTILORO:

To say that I am astonished by what has occurred is to put it mildly. What have I done which could so offend you that you must “cut” me? Heaven knows I have enough “inferiority complex” to enable me to supply my own explanations — as far as that is concerned, I could find sufficient excuse for it were the whole world to conspire against me. But that is not the same thing. I should prefer to know — if you could bring yourself to tell me — what it is that has moved you to this sudden action. Do I, in asking this, expect too much? Perhaps I do. I remember only too well — as I remember every episode of our brief acquaintance — how, as we left the Wig-more Hall, after the concert, you made me run with you, positively run, so that you could avoid someone by whom you didn’t wish to be seen. This, at the time, rather disconcerted me. It brought pretty sharply before my eyes a feature in your character which alternately frightened, attracted, and repelled me, and which I had taken some care not to examine too closely. This was — is — your snobbishness. Well — now I am to be sacrificed on this exquisite altar, in this exquisite pre-Raphaelite boudoir-chapel of yours! Is that it? Perhaps you think I have been remiss in not coming to see you, or in failing to salute you yesterday morning? But I have tried, several times, to find you, in vain. I am in the second cabin, and therefore I cannot too freely wander about in your precincts. As for the other matter, I am simply too shy.

I mention these points in the very faint hope that the whole thing may have been an unfortunate misunderstanding. If that is the case, I am heartily sorry. But I know, at the bottom of my heart, that it is something more than that. It may even be — why in Heaven’s name not? — that you have taken a dislike to me. But if you consider — no, there is no use in considering. I was on the point of advancing our delightful acquaintance of last summer as a kind of claim upon you, and suggesting that, these things being so, it would be only decent of you to give me some hint of an explanation. But, as I abruptly see, one does not, when one decides to cut a friend, hand him a nice little note of explanation. One just cuts him; with a hard eye. Exactly as you, and your estimable mother, have done to me. And if he presume to ask for an explanation — as I am doing — why that only makes it more apparent that the cut was required.

But it occurs to me, belatedly, that in such a situation as this I ought to show myself possessed of a certain amount of pride. And so I am. I am not lacking in amour-propre. I suffer from that form of egotism which vacillates between an excessive vanity and a humility equally excessive. And as a matter of fact, the injury you have done me is so deep that even should the whole affair now turn out to be a mistake, even were you to apologize, I could never forgive you and never again quite respect you. I may not cease to love you — why need I any longer conceal this, which may have been the point from which your action has sprung — but already a profound hatred has joined itself to my love. I shall hate you, loathe you, despise you, as I have never hated before. Pride! If we encounter again, you will see that I have plenty of it. It will be Satanic. And if any smallest opportunity ever occurs, I will revenge myself upon you, “after no common action,” with the deftest psychological cruelty: for I am a master of that art, I am by nature cruel. That I will still be in love with you will not in the least prevent this. You have behaved like a charwoman. And if only once I may have the chance to treat you as such, to cut you face to face, to turn my back on you, it may be that I shall thus be able to rid myself of you forever, and recover my lost self-esteem. It may be that I—

(Not finished).

FOUR

I am extremely sorry that things should have turned out like this. I am sorry for any sins of omission, on my part, which may have brought it about; though I am at a loss to know what they may be. I am sorriest, however, that you should have felt it necessary to cut me, as if I were the most ordinary of ill-bred nuisances. Good Heavens! That is a new and illuminating experience, and one from which I hope greatly to profit. You need not have feared that I would ever become troublesome — I am sufficiently sensitive to know when others want to be rid of me, and I usually know it long before they know it themselves. To be misprized in that sense is an extreme surprise to me. But not so surprising, perhaps, as the finding how deeply I have misprized you.

(Not sent.)

FIVE

Sick transit!

(Not sent.)

SIX

……

(Not written.)