The Wind On the Sea
A fresh wind from the ocean made the waves sparkle when Daniel took his cruise. He was on a solitary tour of New York Harbor in a hired motorboat, his tribute to the general pleasantness of a spring day out of doors, balmy, yet with sufficient air. A motorboat was not, he reflected, as attractive to a lover of the sea as a sailboat, but it enabled him to poke around the arms of the port more satisfactorily. Today he set off down the harbor with the breeze in his face.
At first he passed close to the docks of the enormous ships, some of which were so long their shapely stems reached far out into the stream. Nothing was so exciting as seeing their masts and the tops of their huge funnels over the top of a dock. It reminded him of a glimpse he had had of the tall, delicate spars of sailing vessels over the roofs of a seacoast town. The realization of being on the immediate threshold of the romantic sea is irresistible in its rich suggestions, linking the most prosaic person for a moment with strange places, hitherto only imagined, and possibilities of adventure, startling even at a distance from the point of view of ordinary life. Daniel thought about this and other theories of his concerning the sea as his boat sauntered past the imposing liners which so engrossed his attention. Their sharp, carefully flaring bows and the suggestion of velocity in their slanting rigging attracted him. One was just docking as he went by. It was huge, and seemed a city with a host of tugs like parasites slowly pushing it around. He could never get over the size of them. It seemed like magic,—this, building a community that floated so snugly on the water, the four red funnels above adding the emblem of something powerful in its compactness. Yet in spite of their size, the steamers seemed at a distance slim and graceful, essentially ships and obviously made to deal with the exacting ocean. Daniel saw liners with more penetrating eyes than the ordinary casual observer, he was sure.
It was not long before he was off down the harbor away fromthe docks. Here the waves danced to the breeze among the little boats which carried on the teeming local traffic of the port, rushing back and forth like water-bugs on a pond. The vessels that were anchored strained at the ends of taut hawsers with the wind and tide both coming up the bay. Over near the farther shore against the sun, a great ship was moving down, a massive black shadow sliding imperiously out to sea. He steered the launch near the anchored vessels, under their high sterns. Reading their names was a fascinating diversion for an imaginative person like himself, he thought. Here was the “George B. White” of Jersey City, near it the “Orphan” of Bombay; here a sloppy tramp from Beirut, there an empty freighter of Cape Town; Japanese and Chinese and Javanese vessels were there whose names he could not read, and a little ship from the Piraeus, laden with smells from Athens—dirt from her gutters and hovels, and dust from the Acropolis.
Well, well, what a highway the sea was, after all. It was fascinating, the harbor, fascinating! These great ships always sailing out on voyages that somehow still seemed perilous, and others, looking—to the imagination, at least—weatherbeaten, coming in from foreign lands.
He turned and headed out past the narrows to the slow dips of the ground swell, powerful, but almost at peace for the moment, which his little boat climbed and descended like smooth, gentle hills. The sun still sparkled, and here the water slapped more vigorously against the sides of the boat, throwing flecks of spray out and whirling back some of them to sting his face. He was getting gradually drunk, he concluded. Certainly the spaciousness of everything around him was going to his head. But it was, he later decided, really the smell of the air that did it. No sweet gasoline-sick atmosphere of streets out here, nor the faint odor of millions of his fellow-men to which he was accustomed in the buildings he frequented. The breeze was fresh and tasted strong of salt. It had a palpable vigor of its own. Not artificially intoxicating like a stimulant, but with a gusty sting. It whipped his mind and brought it up eager and sharp, like a trembling racehorse.
That air—that makes men on steamers feel so ridiculously fitwithout exercise, enabling them to eat and eat—tea, jam, pastry, steaks, cheeses, and then sit and read all day in one steamer chair and be ravenous again! If only he could sail on a ship, he thought. To feel so strong and finely balanced—not, as usual, subject to his little moods of depression which so often went hand in hand with indigestion, he had discovered—to feel so well tuned! He had a vision of himself as he would stand on a ship—as he had, on the only trip he had ever taken—in the very peak of the bow, looking over and watching the tall prow sweep down on and devour the unsuspecting patches of the sea. He remembered how the breeze was steady in his face and how he used almost to taste it! His hair was worried by the wind and he relished its swift buffets on his face as he stood against it, drinking it in as a hot man drinks a running stream. What nameless joy he felt, he now remembered; and how he used so to overflow with something buoyant inside him that he would ecstatically smile. Well tuned! And singing, like an old lyre at the touch!
Well, if he could get to feeling like that he would give anything, he said to himself in his conventional way—and suddenly he grew disgusted. Give anything! Lord, he wouldn’t give up a month of his most valuable time. Love the sea! He had been repeating to himself all during his little outing that he loved the sea. He was one of those few who really loved the sea. He felt that he understood it better than a good many people. As though he knew anything about it, who had never gone to sea and never would. His experience of it standing on the street-like decks of a liner and watching it; thinking about it, he flattered himself, with rather a light touch, as it were, but still from a poetic point of view.
The light touch! Everything nowadays was written and spoken and even thought of with a light touch. A light touch in connection with the sea! The old sailing vessels—swift clippers around the horn; that was the ocean! No drawing-room stuff about that. When the brutal masters carried all the press of sail they could in those tremendous storms, till the topmasts went and the gear came flying down like a thunderbolt and had to be chopped away to save the ship. Trim ships where you worked beneath the lash, and insubordination was best viewed from the yardarm. Shipsused to go down and never be heard from—often in those days. But the men that lived were really children of the sea who knew its great aspects; and they knew their ships, every inch of them, from their thin spars that “shone like silver”, as the chantey says, to the bright copper on their keels.
The great longing, the parching thirst of a hothouse intellect for hardship swept over him like a wave of the sea itself. Hardship assumed an intrinsic value for him at once, as it had one winter in the South when he missed savagely the bleak Januaries of his Northern home; as it had when he read of the Homeric heroes who so relished battle, and the brawn children of Thor, and Sir Lancelot with his great shoulders in iron, oppressed and conquering. It seemed as though hardships were the only road to reality, somehow. Hardships of the sea,—the grim knowledge of experience; that would have given him something solid in his mind! But none of that on the ocean now. Where there had been towers of canvas (as he visualized it) now there were freighters. Clippers and freight ships! The sea rather intriguing whimsical people like himself—when once she held men until it was her will to fling them away! Whimsy! What was this compared to a strong man’s desire? What was this careful self-consciousness of his feelings to his grand impulses?—the humorous affairs of life to the grim ones?—dilettantism to the austere compulsion of a passion?
While Daniel was working himself up in this manner, he was steering straight out to sea, and, in doing so, overhauling a tramp steamer that was starting on a voyage. He was coming abreast of what he later called his fate. Upon impulse, he dared the wash of the boat when he came opposite and ran in close along her side, slowing down so as to keep pace for a while. She was old and scarred, with a dip in her middle like an overworked horse’s back which seemed to give her a jaunty air. Paint had not been wasted on her ramshackle sides, nor any white on her cabin above, nor red on her rusty funnel. Filthy clothes, drying in the sun, hung from clotheslines; a thick rope dragged over the side near the stern and it splashed irregularly in the water. She was dilapidated. But some of her crew were singing for some reason or other as they finished stowing cargo, and the sight of the little boat facingoutward and the sight of the great, blank, capricious sea ahead waiting for her was distinctly thrilling, particularly as a fog was coming up, making even the horizon mysterious in its invisibility.
What would it be like, Daniel wondered all of a sudden, if he were to hail this boat and jump aboard? Often he had considered doing some quite possible thing like this, such as getting off a Western train as it stopped at a little, unknown town and—simply staying there, or chucking his work some morning and going on the stage. But there he was again with those light fancies of his. People like himself seemed to have their individualities in glass cases, to be looked at like shell-flowers. What was he, anyway, that he actually could not do what he wanted to? Why should he be so bound, and he was bound, he knew, as if with iron bars. Tied down. Slaves, slaves, slaves. People thought of doing this and that—they still had impulses at least, thank God—and were powerless to do them. There seemed no manhood left. People didn’t seem to be in control of themselves any more. Freedom!—he wondered at the word. Oh, for a touch of it—just a taste—just a whiff! Creatures in the grasp of something huge and stolid! Damn those infernal practical considerations! What was the world, a gigantic taskroom—an ogre-like mill to be turned? By heaven, he must have a will! God knew hemuststand there free! He even looked around wildly to assure himself that he was there alone and free.
Then he stood up. There was the rope hanging over the side. He sprang for it, clutched it, and swung there.
There was no shield between him and a rasping sense of mortification as he dragged himself spluttering and coughing into his motorboat once more forty seconds later. He had so neatly proved what he had railed at in this unusual seizure of the disease of spring, and so humorously. Had staid old common sense ever had to deal so brazenly with an impulse as to make a man jump into the sea? Damp physically, and with a real bitterness in his heart at such a plain statement of affairs, the world seemed very dark. Depression swooped down upon his mind like the swift black shadow of a vulture, and as he made his way home for three hours it seemed to be actually feeding on his nerves. It was that dark, stone-wall type of depression which is unarguableand seems final—as though trusted old hope had a limit which was suddenly glimpsed around a bend in the road. It left no room for hypothesis; things were seen clearly to be foundationless that had been rocks to the imagination.
He resolved at any rate to bury this experience in his heart as a tragic sort of trophy which should represent in its bitter essence all the disgust with life that assails people during a lifetime. He had nearly played a trick upon mortality, he reflected. A fine gesture had been made, and he had snatched lustily for the unvouchsafed. It was an affecting experience and one to be reverenced. But of course what really happened was that he made a very good story out of it and one which afforded intense amusement to his friends, though he was prone to shed a mental tear as he told it now and then.
W. T. BISSELL.