Blue Voyage: A Novel, page 1
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Blue Voyage
A Novel
Conrad Aiken
E coelo descendit γνῶθι σεαυτòν.
JUVENAL XI, 27.
What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?
Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,
A phantom dim of past and future wrought,
Vain sister of the worm——
COLERIDGE: Self-Knowledge
I
“Will you stop,” said William Demarest, leaning his head out of the taxi window, “at the corner drug store?” Just like a cuckoo clock, he thought.
It had suddenly occurred to him that he had forgotten his sea sick pills—the little pink and green box was indispensable—oh, absolutely! A charm against sea serpents. As he stood on the marble floor, amid the thousand bottles and vials and jars, in a heavy smell of soap and disinfectant, watching the clerk wrap up and seal the box, the sound of the approaching voyage came loudly about him. Waves crashing against black portholes at midnight. Bugles blowing in sour corridors—red-carpeted corridors which suddenly, unaccountably, became hills to climb. O God, what a prospect! And the ship—what was the ship? A congregation of gigantic mushroomlike ventilators, red-throated, all belching a smell of hot oil and degenerate soup, with sounds of faint submarine clankings. Among them, a few pale stewards, faces like cauliflowers, carrying gladstone bags and hot-water bottles … He suddenly felt queasy. This would never do: it was all a matter of nerves. Day by day, and with every wave, the sea gets smoother and smoother. It might, in fact, be a regular yachting cruise—blue sky, blue sea, sunny decks, and a beautiful, mysterious young lady to talk to. Why not? It had happened before. “Thanks!” he said …
In the taxi, as they passed through Twenty-third Street, he lost fifteen years of his life, no less, and caught sight of himself (a very pale, sober-looking young man) mounting the stone steps of No. 421. The shy young widow was sitting in the garden watching her child. How had she managed to conceal so long from him, in their meetings in hall or on stairs, that she had only one hand?… And Stedman, the literary hack, came in at lunch-time to say, “Willst hog it with me over the way?”—his reference being to the free lunch at the saloon across the street. And the bedbugs! Stedman had left on his desk a small crystal vial, half full of bedbugs, alive, crawling, labeled, “Take one before retiring. Dr. Stedman.”—A gay time, then! Now those people were all gone. Stedman, in his spare time (of which there was precious little), made models of ships—exquisite little things. He had gone into an insurance office. The old painter was dead. What had become of the detective?… and his thin submissive little wife, who never lifted her eyes from her plate.
“Here you are, sir!” said the taxi driver, turning his head.
And there he was. The wharf. An enormous, depressing place, cavernous, engulfing bales and trunks by the cartload, but with no sign of a ship anywhere. Where should he enter? The usual terror assailed him. Everywhere stood uncompromising officials, emblems of stupidity. He carried his bag into the great sounding gloom, which was itself, with its smells of oakum and hemp and slimy piles, like a vast ship; dodged his way among thumping trucks—trucks were everywhere, each pushed by a pirate; and at last, through a great sea door, caught sight of the black iron side of the vessel, streaked with filth and rust. A qualm came over him. What disgusting animals ships were! always fouling their sides with garbage. However, perhaps the lavatory would smell of antiseptic … “Second cabin? Next gangway” … He crawled up the next gangway, steep as a funicular, and stepped onto the resilient deck. O Thalassa! Thalassa! Unmerciful sea. He was already fairly launched into the infinite, the immense solitude, which seemed (to the steward who took his bag) to mean so little. Yes: alone. Alone with the sea for eight days: alone in a cage with a world of tigers roaring outside.
“Am I alone in this cabin?” he asked.
“I don’t know, sir. You’ll have to ask the cabin steward, after we start.”
Now, Demarest, survey this cabin which will be your cell for eight days. Running water? Yes. Four berths. Ring once for Mr. Tomkins, twice for Mrs. Atherton. No porthole, of course. Red carpet, and the usual smell. He poured out a glass of water, and took two pills, as prescribed. The water was cloudy and tepid. Footsteps rang on the deck over his head.… And suddenly a feeling of unutterable desolation came over him, a nostalgia made only the more poignant by the echoes it brought of other voyages. Ah, that incurable longing for escape, for a spider’s cable by which he might swing himself abruptly into space or oblivion! But this time, was it an escape or a return?… And the voices of his former fellow voyagers, fellow crawlers toward the infinite, came round him in melancholy chorus. “A safety razor? Just like a bally little lawn mower. And a thundering hot towel on your face.” That was the “pynter and gilder” on the Empress. And his poverty-stricken roommate, who had got a Marconigram—for which he had to pay—saying, “Have a Guinness on us, at your expense.” His comic fury, his bulging eyes! To make it worse, his only hat, left carelessly in a bunk, was a moment later sat upon and crushed beyond recognition … The German girl, with the long blue ribbons down the back of her skirt, deliciously fluttering as she walked, whom he had been too shy to speak to. She came and stood beside him while the stewards danced and sang below the hatch, stood very close to him, put her hands on the rope. “Curiously melancholy,” he had thought of saying, “all this folk music is!…” Melancholy it was. But his courage had failed him; and next day, as he passed her (she was walking—how buoyantly she walked!—with the Professor), he heard her saying, “No, he vas afraid!” She laughed as she said it. And afterwards she had married the Professor. He had watched them pacing the deck, pacing the deck, looking more and more earnestly at each other. One time as he passed them the flying word was “gymnasium.” The next time it was “But SHAW!” Were they falling in love? Yes—as the voyage drew to its end they became inseparable; inseparable because they saw the inevitability of separation. They stood together at the railing, looking sadly at the gray waste of water. “Oh, how persuasive is the sound of the sea!” And he had felt curiously sorry for them, somehow—as if they had become in a sense, the sea’s victims: nothing of them but doth change …
He edged his way along the corridor, past a continuous shuffling line of stewards carrying bags, and up the brass-edged stairs. The sun had come out; on the cool east wind sang the soft quarter bells of the Metropolitan; playing their melodius prelude to the solemn striking of the hour. Three o’clock. A few of his fellow passengers idled about on the deck, stood in groups talking, or watched the last trunks being swung in a great net over the opened hatch. A whistle blew, and the net, with its bulging catch of trunks, dropped soundlessly into the hold, the donkey engine emitting a rapid rattle. Stevedores pushed boxes down the polished gangway, caught them with hooks, and pulled them into the ship.
“Is this Mr. Demarest?” A young man stood before him, earnest, a little shy, deferential.
“Yes?”
“My name’s Roscoe—I’m on the News. Helen Shafter told me you were on the ship, and I thought I’d look you up.”
“How on earth did you know me?” (Demarest felt flattered.)
“Oh, I’ve seen photos of you!… I’ve spoken to the purser about you—hope he’ll make you comfortable …”
“Helen Shafter? You know Helen Shafter?”
“Oh, I know Helen very well!”
One of Helen’s mutton chops? Had he been in love with her? Well, he must be discreet himself: it would never do to betray too great an intimacy with Helen.
“I hope,” said the young man, offering a cigarette, “you’re not joining the expatriates over there. Are you coming back?”
“Good Lord yes. I’m just going over for a——” Demarest laughed.
“Drink?”
“Yes, a drink! put it that way.… No, I’m too old to transplant. Too many roots to be broken, too much underground bleeding. Ten years ago—well, that would have been a different story.”
“I see … I’m glad to hear it. We don’t like to see our best men running away from us.”
“Oh! Best men!” Demarest felt a little idiotic.
“Your last book—I hope you don’t mind my saying so—I liked enormously.”
“I’m glad you liked it!”
“I certainly did … Hello! There’s the bugle!”
The bright brass notes came from a steward, who blew solemnly, facing the dock. The donkey engine had become silent. There was a rattle of chains, an air of poised expectancy.
“Well, so long,” said the young man, putting out his hand. “I hope you’ll have a good trip.”
“Thanks. So long!”
Roscoe disappeared down the deck stairs. Well, well—how remarkably pleasant. He was beginning to be a kind of celebrity. How fatuous it was! Pursers would bow to him, stewards would sing—Captains and second mates dance in a ring!… And all because he was slightly, but uncontrollably, mad. Damned decent of Helen, too. He wished now that he hadn’t parted with her at eight o’clock on the subway stairs, last night—or had arranged to meet her later, at the hotel … Would she have come?… Perhaps not. An unaccountable, brooding, witty, perverse creature. “I’m becoming unduly agitated, Helen.” “Very well, then!—I’ll remove the immediate stimulus.” And she had withdrawn
A devastating roar came from the siren: it was prolonged, shook the ship, and he noticed that the dock had begun to glide away. They were being blasted away from America. Handkerchiefs were waved, then dashed at tears; there were calls and cries; children were held up, their puppet arms wagged by enthusiastic parents. Good-by, New York, city of cigar shops and marble towers! The sight of the hysterical crowd was painful to him, and he walked to the other side of the deck.
They were not a very promising-looking lot of passengers. He might, after all, have to look up Dr. Purington in the first class—a snob, but intelligent. Two solid prelates, with kind eyes and soft beards, stood talking to a girl, perhaps their niece. She, at any rate, was pleasant to look at—tall, straight, graceful, with innocent gray eyes and a mouth just amiably weak. Still, one couldn’t have a flirtation with the niece of two Irish prelates. Or was she merely a comparative stranger—traveling, by some remote arrangement, under their protection—and anxious, for other purposes, to be dissociated from them?
“Well, what kind of voyage we going to have?”
The old-middle-aged man with the gray mustache and cigar: he leaned on the railing, gently revolving the cigar in his mouth with thumb and finger, staring exophthalmically at Staten Island.
“Looks all right now,” said Demarest, with a little laugh. “Still, you never know.”
“No. You never know … Not very exciting, I guess—ship’s half empty.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s what they say. Off season.… Can’t go on too long for me though! Let her rip.”
“Good God, don’t suggest it.”
“Don’t you like a voyage? Nice ship, nice people?—just suits me. Yes, sir, it just suits me.”
“No. I’d like to be chloroformed, and called when we get to Liverpool … You heard about the man who said he wanted the easiest job on earth—calling the stations on an Atlantic liner?”
“Ha, ha. That’s good … Yes, that’d be a nice job for me … just let it go on forever.”
The old-middle-aged man turned a humorous beam on Demarest. An oblique purple scar cleft his mustache near the left nostril.
“Only one thing I regret,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Didn’t get myself a cap. I meant to do it—remembered it, too, last night on the train, when I was taking off my shoes. ‘Frank,’ I said to myself, ‘don’t forget that cap!’ But I did. It went clean out of my head. I don’t feel just right in this tweed hat. I hardly ever use it. Does it look all right?”
“Looks all right to me!”
“Well, guess it’ll have to do … Been over before?”
“Yes. This is my tenth trip.”
“Tenth! My Lord. You’re a fish.”
They both laughed lightly. A red ferryboat passed them, crowded with faces, the waves swashing under its blunt bow; a golden eagle flashed on the pilot house, where they could see the pilot shifting the easy wheel.
“Was that a reporter talking to you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. I heard him mention the News … Well, there goes the Statue of Liberty—what’s she waving at, I wonder? Long may she wave. It’s about all she does … Fine piece of work, all the same … I’d like to have had the time to go out and see it.”
A flock of gulls sailed in the blue high over the Goddess; the towers of Manhattan began to soften in the October haze. The ship throbbed more palpably, the wind freshened. How quickly one forgets the sound of sea, thought Demarest—the death of a wave, the melancholy chorus of subsiding drops when wave breaks against wave, flinging white water into the air! There was Midland Beach—where he’d so often gone swimming, swimming among flotsam, old bottles and butter boxes. Was that the island he had swum across to?… Not so much of a swim after all. There, for the last time, he had seen Alan—Alan carrying a soiled towel, and grinning. Inconceivable vitality and charm: dead now, turned to ashes, fit to scatter on an icy sidewalk. He saw Alan leaning over the back of the sofa in the London boarding house, smiling amorously, with all his freckles, at the Welsh manageress. “What’s your hurry, Bill?… Mrs. Porter wants to talk to me—don’t you, Mrs. Porter!” And in the Underground, smirking ridiculously at the Great Lady, who blushed and smiled in answer. And in Piccadilly Circus, while waiting for a bus, bowing so elaborately to the girl who stood in the doorway. “Miss Simpkins, allow me to introduce my old friend Prince Schnitzkipopoff, sometime of Warsaw!…” Sometime of Warsaw! And where was Alan now, sometime of—life? Or was it Indiana?
“Have a cigar?” said Frank.
“Thanks! I don’t mind if I do. Have you got plenty?”
“More than I can smoke. I bought two boxes myself, and then the Boss, Mr. Charlton, gave me another. Pretty decent of him, wasn’t it? Havana too—expensive cigar. Well, it’s only natural—I’ve been in his employ for thirty years: Yes, sir, thirty years. A long time.” The old man looked wistfully at the water. “Yes, sir, thirty years. I felt bad about leaving—guess everybody felt bad about it. The Charltons gave a farewell party for me—I know them well, like one of the family. They know I’m crazy about cigars—and they had a little practical joke on me. You know those cigars that are loaded—explode? They gave me one after dinner—Bang! Gee whillikins, I was startled. And you know, even Selina, the old nigger cook, had been tipped off. She came to the door to see me light it. You ought to have heard her laugh!… Well, you know, they’re nice people, fine people, and New Orleans seems like home to me; but you can’t go on forever. I thought I’d like to see the Old Country again … There goes Coney Island.”
“You were born in England?”
“Devonshire. Left it thirty years ago; went straight to New Orleans; and been there ever since.”
“You’ll find England changed.”
“You know, I’m sort of afraid, in a way—I don’t believe I’ll know a soul in my town.”
“No relatives?”
“All dead … Isn’t it funny? And yet I’ve got this craving to go back and walk round there. That’s what I’d like to do—walk over the country. I was a great walker then—knew every stick and stone. And I may hate it—be lonely—come running back inside a month.”
The wind whipped their coats about their knees. Green waves from the southeast, fluctuant pyramids of water tossing their points into the wind. The bow lifted gently, far ahead. The ship fell into a long leisurely swing, first greeting to the sea, the unvintagable sea … What was this strange passion for crucifixion that overcame the old man, as it overcame himself?
“You’re like Ulysses, setting out at last to find the rim of the world, the Pillars of Hercules.”
“Not much! No exploring for me. I want to get back, that’s all.”
The old man looked at him with brown eyes comically solemn, in which there was just a trace of something shy and fugitive. The arched gray eyebrows gave his eyes an odd startled roundness of appearance, childlike and charming.
“No, sir, I’m too old for any exploring!”
“But isn’t that just what you’re doing? You don’t know what you’re going to … I don’t believe we’re ever too old to explore—we’re always exploring something. There was an old ex-Senator on a ship with me once—by George, he was a wonder. Eighty years old, with gout so bad that he could hardly walk, and had to keep one leg up in a chair when he sat in the smoking room. He’d outlived all his relatives except one son, who’d taken over his law practice—outlived his friends, his own generation, every damned one. He fought in the Civil War, was one of the first Government surveyors of Arkansas—surveyed it when it was a wilderness, hostile Indians. He knew Walt Whitman—Walt used to come and see his aunt, he said. He didn’t have much use for Walt. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why should I hang around Washington? I can’t live forever. There’s nothing for me to do here. I might as well die with my boots on. Besides,’ he said, ‘I haven’t seen Australia for thirty years, and I’d like to see it again. I hear it’s changed.’ So off he was going alone, eighty years old. A magnificent man, the kind we don’t seem to produce any more: huge frame, head like a lion, face like Gibraltar. He sat and listened to the arguments in the smoking room. When he said anything, it settled the discussion. We didn’t exist for him—were were just a lot of little yappers, still damp from the womb. I felt a sort of affection for him, and on the last morning as we were tying up, I hunted him out, on deck, to say good-by. ‘Oh, good-by!’ he said, sort of surprised, as if he’d never seen me before: and turned back to look at the landing stage … And you know, I don’t believe he ever had seen me—never bothered to focus his eyes on me, though we’d been talking together for a week.”
