"Home From the Sea", by J.B. Priestley
(J.B. Priestley 1894-1984)
John B. Priestley
Home From the Sea
Home From the Sea
To return from a long voyage is almost to be born again. There is one brief moment, after landing, when you discover your old life as Columbus discovered America when you play stout Cortez not on a peak in Darien but on a bleak English quayside. It seems to you, if only for a second or so, that not one of the places you have seen — lands coloured like the rainbow ports with names that are themselves three-volume romances — is so fantastic as the grey little island to which you have returned. Then familiarity comes crashing down and everything round you is clear and solid and something known to you all your days whereas all your voyaging has crumbled into the fragments of a dream. Because I had made a good many voyages, lasting from a few hours to a week, I thought I knew something of the sea; but actually I knew nothing. Those short voyages do not allow you sufficient time in which to forget your old existence as a land animal or to see the life afloat as anything but a brief episode, a queer interlude of rocking decks and berths and alleyways and white paint. Now that I have spent week after week in this strange world, when ten thousand miles have foamed past, when two score suns have risen from the encircling waters and
plunged down into them again, I understand many things that were before a mystery.
Thus it was not long before I began to see the world as long-voyage sailors must always have seen it. In spite of the blue expanses on the map, I had always thought of the sea as a kind of happy accident, a bright novelty that made its appearance here and there so that landsmen might enjoy their holidays. Now I saw that the maps had told even less than the truth, that the world was indeed a waste of tumbling waters in which it was the land that was the happy accident. By observing narrowly the sun and stars, poring over charts and cunningly turning a wheel, you might, with luck, arrive where some solid stuff peeped out of the water and grew trees and grass and even streets and houses. We flatter ourselves, we men and apes and beetles, that the world belongs to us; but in truth it belongs to the fishes who can go round and round the globe with never a break in the rhythmical play of their fins and tails. We are mere interlopers. Look in at the nearest fishmonger’s and you will observe in the round eyes of the dead creatures there a look of pained surprise, of wounded dignity. Now, I can understand that look, for the fish, well aware of the fact that the world was made for him and his. kind, suddenly finds himself the prey of an insolent upstart with feet and lungs, who has only a fraction of the earth’s surface on which to live. An alderman kidnapped by a turtle could not be more surprised or feel more wounded in his dignity.
It is true that the ship itself was in a sense nothing but a floating bit of land, on which we could lead a life not surprisingly different from our customary one. But there were differences. The background, the vague ring of sea and sky, was all strange, so that even the ordinary things we did took on a new significance. Some people never notice this difference, and that is why they find sea voyages so tedious. Let us admit at once that long voyages, even to places with names like rich sonnets, are not the exciting affairs that the romantic fancy paints them as being. Compelled to pass the time somehow between one meal and the next (and how important meals, are on board! the four stout pillars of the day), you find yourself doing things that would be beneath your notice ashore: reading books that you have despised for years, playing crudely devised games with almost unsporting eagerness, encouraging your companions to tell their longest and dullest stories, indulging in naps without stint or shame. The days can be so empty of incident that the sight of a rusty old buoy that has drifted out into mid-ocean, a few floating spars, the mere idle rumour of a distant ship, will send every one crowding to the rails. No one can complain here of the hurrying hours, the day gone by like a flash, for time stretches out as empty and vacant as the shining space surrounding us. There is time for everything, even to work through all the games of Patience or to read the story of Clarissa Harlowe.
If you have no sense of the changed background, of having been born again into a strange little world, then this life may seem tedious enough; but most of us found it had a curious, fascinating quality of its own. Our old life faded like a dream. Our old interests, the familiar routine, were lost with the horizons of home. We were in a new world, and became, as it were, new people, strange even to ourselves. Our days may have seemed empty enough, passed in trivialities, entirely lacking that excitement with which our fancy had dowered them; and yet they came to have a significance and charm of their own, a kind of rhythmical flow, beating to the throb of the ship’s engines, that we were sorry to find broken, in spite of all the bustle and interest of an arrival in port, when we came to the land again. Even those who complained most of the tedium of sea voyages found themselves, rather to their astonishment, half regretting that they were leaving us at this port or the other, that the queer interlude was at an end.
There was, at least to me, a curious sweet melancholy that pervaded this easy empty life of ours and gave it a fascination, an indescribable charm. The background against which we performed our little antics seemed nearer to eternity than the familiar one of our ordinary life. The crowded, cosy, painted world we knew had faded into the silent universe of bright stars and black space. Night after night, when they danced on the boat deck, I would watch them with a kind of sweet trouble about my heart, a strange lovely melancholy like that of a boy in love through one long dreaming summer. The quaint tunes on the gramophone — those wistful dance tunes of our time that would be so bright and carefree if they only could — blown into a whisper by the tropical breeze; the little circle of coloured electric globes, the bare arms of the girls, the black coats and white coats of their partners, against the huge staring night, the stars and the restless shadow of the sea: all this held me night after night, for in this tiny patch of sound and light — something so little and lovely, foolish and yet half tragic there seemed to be all our human life. Nor was it any different when we held carnival and capered there as pierrots and shepherdesses and cowboys and gipsy maidens, for, once we had surged from below up into the night, these our revels shrank to a pin-point of light, a whisper in the darkness.
Now that I have set foot on shore again, it is as if I had never been away, had only dozed for a minute or two in my chair and been visited by a confused dream of a long journey. The seas and flaming sunsets and islands and tropical jungles have been packed away like the tattered scenery of some bankrupt theatrical company. That life on the ship which had blotted out all other existence is now nothing but a few coloured scraps in the memory, shredding away with every tick of my watch. Those people who made up my whole world only a little while ago, what are they now but ghosts ? Where is the general with the extraordinary eyebrows (they were far larger than any subaltern’s moustache); and pretty Miss N., whose fancy dress was so daring, who won so many prizes and stayed out so late, it was said, on the boat deck; and the baronet who had been a cow-puncher and grumbled because there were no hard biscuits and salt junk on the menu; and the parson’s wife, whose voice was too shrill and who danced far too many times with the sleek cavalry captain ?
Where are the three planters who never left one corner of the smoking-room; and the spectacled American who was so angry when his favourite game of shuffle-board was not included in the ship’s sports; and the three dark-eyed girls from Demerara who had just seen snow for the first time in England and could talk of nothing else; and the “bookie” from Yorkshire who was always getting up complicated decimal sweeps on the day’s run; and fat Mr. S, from Baltimore, who ate so much and so quickly that he seemed to be warehousing rather than eating his food; and the mysterious grim man who was going up the Orinoco; and the very old gentleman who sat opposite me at table and would always pinch all the rolls (as if they were little boys’ cheeks) at breakfast-time ? Where are they, these ghosts, dimming now while the cock crows in my memory ? And where is the ship that once carried them and me and was once all our world ? Already it it is as remote and insubstantial as the Flying Dutchman.