CHAPTER XXXTHE VOYAGE TO BROOLYI
OH, the ecstasy of that first day! To hear the accents of my native tongue around me, to see the features of the men I loved, after the long months of sojourn amongst strange peoples! It seemed years since I had used English, or spoken soul to soul with any human being. I dared not laugh or express my joy; I feared lest my utterance should be so overdone that I would seem mad. I sat and reined in my passion of reminiscence, waiting for the ebb of its inundating waters. My whole being was flooded with the intoxication of the familiar thoughts and moods of the past. I asked my old comrades to let me lie and meditate a while, and as soon as a meal was prepared, they might call me. As I lay I felt the memories of my boyhood and youth play upon me like the sweet sunshine of my old home in summer. I could have lived thus for ever. No utterance could have measured the happiness of my soul. Then the last touch to the overbalancing of my emotion was given by Sandy Macrae, my steward. As he moved about below preparing the table, he burst out into “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonny Doon.” The tears rolled down my cheeks, nor could I tell whether they came from sadness over the graves of the past or joy flooding every pore of my existence. He had a fine voice that tided with waves of emotion; and as he wailed forth, “And I sae weary, fu’ o’ care,” I broke into low sobbing. It was as if the spirits of my loved dead were speaking to me across the years and bidding me come to them, as if the voice of lament rang out of the unseen. Every nerve in my being quivered on the edge of song; I was shaken like a harp in the wind. Oh, if only I could have found utterance for this music of the infinite that was thrilling athwart my heartstrings! Nothing would come but tears.
The song ceased, and I fell back into the dull and joyless lethargy that follows great excitement. Life was a grey mist without vision beyond the immediate sensation. Annihilation—any change from this blank existence—would have been a delight. A shiver ran through my frame, as if some enemy had crossed my grave.
Again the pathos of the voice found full expression in “The Flowers of the Forest,” that beautiful threnody over the graveyards of dead ages; and the sense of the swift oblivion that overtakes even the greatest of the past came upon me. This earth was but a funeral orb of vanished pomp and ambition, a vast God’s-acre, wherein a few years or ages mingled the epitaph and the graven tombstone with the forgotten dust. The whole of life was but a burial procession into a nameless past, a series of everlasting farewells on the brink of an infinite oblivion. That all this passion and sadness and weeping should vanish without effect! That the singer should lie in the same unremembered dissolution as the sung! That the sighs and groans and cruel rendings of the heart that make up so much of the tale of life should be, within a few decades, as much forgotten as to-day’s zephyr or yesterday’s storm! That even this funeral orb should itself within a brief period of the life of our universe blacken and shrivel into death! The shrilling “a’ wede away” pierced the very heart as it sent these thoughts through my brain.
The ringing of the breakfast bell threw me with almost volcanic impetus out into the commonplace world of working and sleeping and feeding. I was soon replenishing the exhausted fires of energy, and the close of the meal found me rid of sentiment and settled into everyday feelings and purposes. We put out to sea that we might escape any hue and cry that might arise from the disappearance of Sneekape or the outbreak of the revolution of the slaves of Figlefia. It was not long till we had left that island a speck on the horizon scarce distinguishable from our smoke that lounged cloudlike across our wake, and we were deep in the history of our adventures.
The sailing-captain of theDaydream, Alick Burns, acted as spokesman, with a court of appeal in my old guide through Aleofane, Blastemo, and my steward, Sandy Macrae. After seeing me safe aboard the Tirralarian falla, they set out for Broolyi; but they had not reached it, for they were driven off by a great storm, and, in battling against it so as to prevent drifting into the circle of mist, they had exhausted their fuel, and had to make for the nearest islands of the archipelago they could find. Blastemo thought they were approaching a group of islands that was inhabited by the fiercest and most quarrelsome savages to be found within the rim of fog. Nothing could tame them or reduce their vanity and belief in their greatness and invincibility. When exiled from their respective communities, their ancestors had been of the ordinary size and usual proportions of men. But in the process of the generations they had gradually grown into pigmies with increasingly venomous dispositions. Their shores were the most inhospitable for all strangers, and no falla would approach them except under dire necessity. Stories of their inhumanity and towering conceit were told all over the archipelago. If they had as much ability to unite and as much power as they had venom and inflated self-esteem, they would dominate the whole earth. Happily, they were a feeble folk, still more enfeebled by their mutual envies and jealousies and dissensions. Yet they did all the harm they could, and especially delighted in getting the weak or invalid or sensitive amongst them to whom to apply their tortures.