It was an unlucky Friday morning;
“and, what’s more,” the chief officer
stopped on the gangway to call down to me on the quay,
“a black cat crossed my path when I left home
this morning, and a very nice black cat it was.”
The gangway was hauled up. The tugs began to
move the big steamer away from us, a process so slow
that the daylight between us and the ship increased
imperceptibly.
On my way home I paused by the shop
which sells such antiques as old spring mattresses,
china dogs, portable baths, dumb-bells, and even the
kind of bedroom furniture which one would never have
supposed was purchasable at second-hand. But
lower, much lower in the shopkeeper’s estimate
than even such commodities thrown into a
bin because they were rubbish, and yet not quite valueless was
a mass of odd volumes. The First Principles of
Algebra, Acts Relating to Pawnbrokers, and
Jessica’s First Prayer, were discovered
in that order. The next was Superstitions
of the Sea.
I am not superstitious. I have
never met a man who was. And look at the ships
in dock today, without figure-heads, with masts that
are only the support of derricks and the aerials of
wireless, and with science and an official certificate
of competency even in the galley! Could anything
happen in such ships to bring one to awe and wonder?
The dark of the human mind is now lighted, one may
say, with electricity. We have no shadows to
make us hesitate. That book of sea superstitions
was on my table, some weeks later, and a sailor, who
gave up trading to the East to patrol mine-fields
for three years, and who has never been known to lose
any time when in doubt through wasting it on a secret
propitiatory gesture, picked up the book, smiling a
little superciliously, lost his smile when examining
it, and then asked if he might borrow it.
We are not superstitious, now we are
sure a matter may be mysterious only when we have
not had the leisure to test it in the right way, but
we have our private reservations. There is a
ship’s doctor, who has been called a hard case
by those who know him, for he has grown grey and serious
in watching humanity from the Guinea Coast to the South
Seas. He only smiles now when listening to a
religious or a political discussion, and might not
be supposed to have any more regard for the mysteries
than you would find in the Cold Storage Gazette.
When he is home again we go to the British Museum.
He always takes me there. It is one of his weaknesses.
I invited him, when last we were there, to let us
search out a certain exhibit from Egypt about which
curious stories are whispered. “No you
don’t,” he exclaimed peremptorily.
He gave me no argument, but I gathered that it is
very well to be funny about such coincidences, yet
that one never certainly knows, and that it is better
to regard the unexplored dark with a well-simulated
respect till one can see through it. He had,
he said, known of affairs in the East, and they were
not provided for in the books; he had tried to see
through them from all points, but not with the satisfaction
he desired. For that reason he never invited
trouble unless he knew it was not there.
Another man, very like him, a master
mariner, and one who knew me well enough for secrets,
was bringing me from the French Coast for Barry at
full speed, in a fog. He was a clever, but an
indiscreet navigator. I was mildly rebuking
him by the door of his chart-room for his foolhardiness,
but he laughed quietly, said he intended to make a
good passage, which his owners expected, and that
when the problem was straightforward he used science,
but that when it was all a fog he trusted mainly to
his instinct, or whatever it might be, to inform him
in time. I was not to be alarmed. We should
have the Lizard eight miles on the starboard beam
in another hour and a half. By this time we
were continuing our talk in the chart-room. An
old cap of his was on the floor, upside down.
I faced him there, in rebuke of this reliance on
instinct, but he was staring at the cap, a little startled.
Then he dashed past me without a word for the bridge.
While following him at leisure I heard the telegraph
ring. Outside I could see nothing but the pallor
of a blind world. The flat sea was but the fugitive
lustre of what might have been water; but all melted
into nothing at a distance which could have been anywhere.
The tremor of the ship lessened, and the noise of
the wash fell, for the speed had slackened. We
might have become hushed, and were waiting, listening
and anxious, for something that was invisible, but
threatening. Then I heard the skippers voice,
quick but quiet, and arrived on the bridge in time
to see the man at the wheel putting it hard over.
Something had been sighted ahead of us, and now was
growing broad on the starboard bow a faint
presentment of land, high and unrelated, for there
was a luminous void below it. It was a filmy
and coloured ghost in the sky, with a thin shine upon
it of a sun we could not see. It grew more material
as we watched it, and brighter, a near and indubitable
coast. “I know where I am now,”
said the skipper. “Another minute or two,
and we should have been on the Manacles.”
Smiling a little awkwardly, he explained
that he had seen that old cap on the floor before,
without knowing how it could have got there, and at
the same time he had felt very nervous, without knowing
why. The last time was when, homeward bound
in charge of a fine steamer, he hoped Finisterre was
distant, but not too far off. Just about there,
as it were; and that his dead reckoning was correct.
The weather had been dirty, the seas heavy, and the
sun invisible. He went on, to find nothing but
worse weather. He did sight, however, two other
steamers, on the same course as himself, evidently
having calculated to pass Ushant in the morning; his
own calculation. He would be off Ushant later,
for his speed was less than theirs. There they
were, a lucky and unexpected confirmation of his own
reasoning. His chief officer, an elderly man
full of doubt, smiled again, and smacked his hands
together. That was all right. My friend
then went into the chart-room, and underwent the strange
experience we know. He wondered a little, concluded
it was just as well to be on the safe side, and slightly
altered his course. Early next morning he sighted
Ushant. There was nothing to spare. He
was, indeed, cutting it fine. The seas were
great, and piled up on the rocks of that bad coast
were the two steamers he had sighted the day before.
Why had not the other two masters
received the same nudge from Providence before it
was too late? That is what the unfortunate, who
cannot genuinely offer solemn thanks like the lucky,
will never know, though they continually ask.
It is the darkest and most unedifying part of the
mystery. Moreover, that side of the question,
as a war has helped us to remember, never troubles
the lucky ones. Yet I wish to add that later,
my friend, when in waters not well known, in charge
of a ship on her maiden voyage for he always
got the last and best ship from his owners, they having
recognized that his stars were well-assorted was
warned that to attempt a certain passage, in some
peculiar circumstances, was what a wise man would not
lightly undertake. But my friend was young,
daring, clever, and fortunate. That morning his
cap was not on the floor. At night his
valuable ship with her exceptionally valuable cargo
was fast for ever on a coral reef.
What did that prove? Apart from
the fact that if the young reject the experience of
their elders they may regret it, just as they may regret
if they do pay heed to it, his later misfortune proves
nothing; except, perhaps, that the last thing on which
a man should rely, unless he must, is the supposed
favour of the gods of whom he knows nothing but, say,
a cap unreasonably on the floor; yet gods, nevertheless,
whose existence even the wise and dubious cannot flatly
deny.
It may have been for a reason of such
a sort that I did not lend my book to my young sailor
friend who wished to borrow it. I should never
have had it back. Men go to sea, and forget us.
Our world has narrowed and has shut out Vanderdecken
for ever. But now that everything private and
personal about us which is below the notice even of
the Freudian professor is pigeon-holed by officials
at the Town Hall, I enjoy reading the abundant evidence
for the Extra Hand, that one of the ship’s company
who cannot be counted in the watch, but is felt to
be there. And now that every Pacific dot is a
concession to some registered syndicate of money-makers,
the Isle-of-No-Land-At-All, which some lucky mariners
profess to have sighted, is our last chance of refuge.
We cannot let even the thought of it go.