Read Ebook: Walking Shadows: Sea Tales and Others by Noyes Alfred

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PRELUDE xi

WALKING SHADOWS

Of those who fought and died Unreckoned, undescried, Breaking no hearts but two or three that loved them; Of multitudes that gave Their memories to the grave, And the unrevealing seas of night removed them;

Of those unnumbered hosts Who smile at all our boasts And are not blazed on any scroll of glory; Mere out-posts in the night, Mere keepers of the light, Where history stops, let shadows weave a story.

Shadows, but ah, they know That history's pomp and show Are shadows of a shadow, gilt and painted. They see the accepted lie In robes of state go by. They see the prophet stoned, the trickster sainted.

And so my shadows turn To truths that they discern Beyond the ordered "facts" that fame would cherish. They walk awhile with dreams, They follow flying gleams And lonely lights at sea that pass and perish.

Not tragic all indeed, Not all without remede Of clean-edged mirth. Our Rosalie of laughter, The bayonet of a jest, May pierce the devil's breast, And give us room and time for grief, here-after.

So let them weep or smile Or kneel, or dance awhile, Fantastic shades, by wandering fires begotten; Remembrancers of themes That dawn may mock as dreams. Then let them sleep, at dawn, with the forgotten.

WALKING SHADOWS

THE LIGHT-HOUSE

When he first emerged, he had some difficulty in descrying his goal across that confused sea. His eye was guided by a patch of foam, larger than the ordinary run of white-caps, and glittering in the evening sun like a black-thorn blossom. As the sky brightened behind it, he saw, rising upright, like the single slim pistil of those rough white petals, the faint shaft of the light-house itself.

He stole nearer, till these pretty fancies were swallowed up in the savagery of the place. It greeted him with a deep muffled roar as of a hundred sea-lions, and the air grew colder with its thin mists of spray. The black thorns and white petals became an angry ship-wrecking ring of ax-headed rocks, furious with surf; and the delicate pistil assumed the stature of the Nelson Column.

It made his head reel to look up at its firm height from the tossing conning-tower, as he circled the reef, making his observations. He noted the narrow door, twenty feet up, in the smooth wall of the shaft. There was no way of approaching it until the rope-ladder was let down from within. But, after midnight, when the custodian's wits might be a little drowsy, he thought his plan might succeed. He noted the pool on the reef, and the big boulder near the base of the tower. There was only one thing which he did not see, an unimportant thing in war-time. He did not see the beauty of that unconscious monument to the struggling spirit of man.

Its lofty silence and endurance, in their stern contrast with the tumult below, had touched the imagination of many wanderers on that sea; for it soared to the same sky as their spires on land, and its beauty was heightened by the simplicity of its practical purpose. But it made no more impression on Captain Bernstein than on the sea-gulls that mewed and swooped around it.

When his observations were completed, the U-99 sheered off and submerged. She had to lie "doggo," at the bottom of the sea, for the next few hours; and there were several of her sisters waiting, a mile or so to the north, on a fine sandy bottom, to compare notes. Two of these sisters were big submarine mine-layers of a new type. The U-99 settled down near them, and began exchanging under-water messages at once.

"If you lay your mines properly, and lie as near as possible to the harbor mouth, you can leave the rest to me. They will come out in a hurry, and you ought to sink two-thirds of them." This was the final message from Captain Bernstein; and, shortly after eight o'clock, all the other submarines moved off, in the direction of the coast. The U-99 remained in her place, till the hour was ripe.

About midnight, she came to the surface again. Everything seemed propitious. There were no patrols in sight; and, in any case, Captain Bernstein knew that they seldom came within a mile of the light-house, for ships gave it a wide berth, and there was not likely to be good hunting in the neighborhood. This was why the U-boats had found it so useful as a rendezvous lately.

"They could be smashed with a three-inch gun," thought Bernstein, "and they are very costly. Many thousand pounds of damage could thus be done, and perhaps many ships endangered." But he concluded, with some regret, that his other plans were more promising.

It was long past Peter's usual bedtime; but he was trimming his oil lamp, just now, in his tiny octagonal sitting-room, half-way up the tower. He had been busy all the evening, with the secret of his happiness, which was a very queer one indeed. He was trying to write a book, trying and failing. His papers were scattered all over the worn red cloth that tried--and failed--to cover his oak table, exactly as poor Peter's language was trying to clothe his thought. Indeed, there were many clues to his life and character in that room, which served many purposes. It had only one window, hardly larger than the arrow-defying slits of a Norman castle. It was his kitchen, and a cooking-stove was fitted compactly into a corner. It was his library; and, facing the window, there was a book-shelf, containing several tattered volumes by Mark Rutherford; a Bible; the "Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," by Gladstone; the "First Principles" of Herbert Spencer; and the Essays of Emerson. There was also a small volume, bound in blue leather, called "The Wonders of the Deep." The leather binding was protected by a brown paper jacket, for it was a prize, awarded by the Westport Grammar School, in 1864, to Peter Ramsay, aged fourteen, for his excellence in orthography. This, of course, was the beginning of all his dreams; and it was still their sustainment, though the death of his father, who had been the captain of a small coasting steamer, had thrown Peter on the world before he was fifteen, and ended his hopes of the scholarship, which was to have carried him eventually to the heights.

Nobody knew of Peter Ramsay's secret, or the urchins might not have waited at all, and even the kindest of his friends would have regarded him as daft. But the comedy was not without its tragic aspect. Peter Ramsay may have been cracked, but it was with the peculiar kind of crack that you get in the everlasting hills, a rift that shows the sky. With his imperfect equipment and hopeless lack of technique, he was trying to write down certain truths, for the lack of which the civilized world, at that moment, was in danger of destruction.

Peter knew all this, though he would not have said it in so many words. In his book, he was trying to meet the main onset of all those destructive forces. He had realized that the modern world had no faith, since the creeds had gone into the melting pot; and he was trying to write down, plainly, for plain men, exactly what he believed.

He turned over the red-lined pages of the big leather-bound ledger, half diary, half commonplace book, in which, for the last forty years, he had made his notes. It was a queer medley, beginning with passages written in his youth, that recalled many of his old struggles. There was one, in particular, that always reminded him of a school friend named Herbert Potts, who had eventually won the coveted scholarship. They used to go for walks together, over the hills, and talk about science and religion.

"So you don't believe there is any future life," Peter had said to him one day.

"Not for the individual," replied Herbert Potts, adjusting his glasses, with a singularly intellectual expression.

"I am afraid all the evidence points that way," said Potts, and as he had just passed the London matriculation examination, the words rang like a death-knell in Peter's foolish heart. He remembered how the words had recurred to him in his dreams that night, and how he awoke in the gray dawn to find that his pillow was wet with tears.

There were many other memories in his book, memories of the long struggle, the wrestling with the angel, and at last the music of that loftier certainty which he longed to impart.

But in spite of this modern invention, Peter Ramsay had quietly gone back through the centuries. He looked as if he were talking to a very great distance indeed, a distance so great that it became an immediate presence. He was kneeling down by the bed, clasping his hands, lifting his face, closing his eyes, and moving his lips, exactly like a child at his prayers.

It is an odd fact, and doubtless it would have fortified the great ironic intellects of our day to know that in the darkness of the reef outside, seventy feet below, four shadowy figures had just landed from a collapsible boat, belonging to the U-99. Three of them were now hauling it out of reach of the waves. The fourth was Captain Bernstein. He stood, fingering his revolver, and looking up at the two lighted windows.

Concerning these things, Peter received no enlightenment; but he rose from his knees with a glowing countenance, and hurried down to his work again.

"I'll begin at the beginning," he muttered.

He consulted his ledger, and decided that a certain paragraph, written long ago, must take the first place in his book. He wrote it down just as it stood.

"We have forgotten the first principles of straight thinking--the axioms. We have forgotten that the whole is greater than the part. Hence comes much fallacy among modern writers, even great ones, like that pessimist who has said that man, the creature, possesses more nobility than that from which he came.

"There are some who say that this is only putting the mystery back a stage. This is not a true statement. The mystery is that there should be anything in existence at all. The moment you have a grain of sand in existence, the impossible has happened, and the miracle of the things that we see around us can only be referred to some primal miracle, greater than all, because it contained all their possibilities within itself.

"Beyond this, we are all agnostics. But our reason, building on what we see around us, carries us thus far. Modern thinkers have reversed this process. They begin with man as the summit, and explain him by something less. This again they explain by something less; and slowly whittle away all the visible universe till they arrive at the smallest possible residuum. There is no more tragic spectacle in this age than that of the philosophers who, like Herbert Spencer, having reduced the whole universe to a nebula, try to bridge the gulf between this nebula and nothingness. The great intellect of Spencer grovels below the mental capacity of a child of ten as he makes this absurd attempt, announcing that perhaps the primal nebula might be conceived as thinning itself out until nothingness were reached. It is the agnostics who evade the issue. For there are certain things here and now which we must accept. We know that Love and Thought are greater than the dust to which we consign them. There is only one choice before us. Either there is nothing behind these things, or else there is everything behind them. If we say that there is nothing behind them, all our human struggle goes for nothing. We abandon even the axioms of our reason, and we are doubly traitors to the divine light that lives in every man. If we say that there is everything behind the universe, each of us has his own private door into that divine reality, the door of his own heart."

At this moment three of the shadowy figures on the reef below were ensconcing themselves behind a boulder of rock, close to the base of the tower, and the fourth figure was groping about on the reef, collecting a handful of stones.

"I have heard men say," Peter continued, "that they cannot believe in a God who would permit all the suffering on this earth, or else he must be a limited God who cannot help himself.

"This is another question involving the freedom of the will. How long would a world hold together if we could all depend on a miracle to help us at every turn, or even to save the innocent from the consequences of our guilt? Those who ask the question usually assume that our sufferings here are the end of all. The fact that the opposite assumption accords better with our sense of justice is surely no reason for denying it, especially when it follows from the answer given in the first paragraph. These men, asking for miraculous proof of omnipotence, to save the world from suffering, are asking for nothing less than the abolition of law in the universe; and it is only in law that freedom can be found. The rising of the sun cannot be timed to suit each individual; but this is what modern thinkers demand. They say that an all-powerful God could do even this. When they have settled between themselves exactly what they wish, doubtless the Almighty could answer their prayer. Till then, it is better to say 'Thy law is a lantern unto my feet.'"

At this moment a stone came through the little window behind Peter. The glass scattered itself in splinters all over his red tablecloth. He leapt to his feet, blew the lamp out, and went to the window. He could see nothing in the darkness at first; but as he stood and listened, he thought he heard a voice in the pauses of the wind, crying for help.

Instantly, he hurried out and down the winding stair to the narrow door. He shot back the great bolts, and opened it. He stood there fifteen feet above the rocks, framed in the opening, his white hair and beard blowing about him, as he peered to right and left.

"Come down and help us, for God's sake!" the voice cried again.

And as Peter's eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw a dark figure crawling laboriously over the reef to the foot of the tower, where it fell as if in a faint. Peter's only thought was that a fishing boat had foundered. He dropped the rope ladder at once and descended. He stooped over the fallen man. In the same flash of time, he recognized that this was an enemy seaman, and three more shadowy figures leapt from their hiding-place behind a boulder of rock and gripped him.

"There is no cause for fear," said their leader, rising to his feet. "Our boat has foundered; but we shall die of cold if we stay out here. You must take us into the light-house."

Peter regarded them curiously, saying nothing. The leader went up the ladder, and beckoned to the others, who ordered Peter to go next, and then followed him.

"I regret that it was necessary to smash your window," said Captain Bernstein, as the queer group gathered round the lamp in Peter's living room. "But we might have died out there on a night like this, before you could have heard us shouting. We shall not harm you, although there are four of us. We are in danger ourselves. My friends and I are sick of this work; and, if we are sure of good treatment, we are prepared to help the British with all the information in our possession."

"How did you escape from the submarine?" said Peter.

Peter surveyed the four drenched figures thoughtfully. One of them was not realistic enough to satisfy him. There were several obviously dry patches about the shoulders.

"There's a pool on the reef," said Peter at last to this man. "Did you find it too cold?"

A change came over Bernstein's face at once.

Peter gathered up his beloved leather-bound book from the table, and held it under his arm. It was his most precious possession, and the protective act was quite unconscious. Then, for the second time that night, he went into his bedroom, followed by the four Germans. He was white and shaking. He could not understand what these men were after, and the message they proposed seemed to be useful to his own side. After all, the only kind of message that he could send would be something very like it. He might as well deliver it, since these crazy autocrats had decided that it must be given thus, and not otherwise.

He laid the precious book down on the bed, turned to the telephone, and lifted the receiver to his ear. As he did so, the cold muzzle of a revolver pressed against his right temple. The first buzzings of the telephone resolved themselves into a voice from the coast of England, asking what he wanted. Then, it seemed as if a new light were thrown upon the character of the words he was about to speak. He knew instinctively that, if he spoke them, he would be working for the enemy.

In the same instant, he saw exactly what he must do.

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