Familiar as he had become with the process of disillusionment, Paul was not quite prepared for the stony reality of Munich, for the icy rain that soaked his hat and filled the gutters with despairing tears, nor for the blundering tram-way guard who forgot to set him down at Ohmstrasse and carried him to the outer rim of Schwabing. Neither was he prepared for the ironic Führ di' Gott with which an octogenarian Portier waved him into the world again after informing him that Frau Stiglmayr had been dead fifteen years—a certain Frau Stiglmayr whose name and address had somehow persisted in his head since childhood. Damp to the very soul he sought out a cheap hotel near the Hauptbahnhof, made his way to the Hoftheater to hear Fra Diavolo—of all operas the least meet and fitting—then tossed for hours in a narrow bed, under an absurd feather Decke, sleepless and disconsolate.
Romance, he had learned, was not a property of strange lands and situations, but a magical lens through which one viewed utterly unmagical objects—a spurious beautifier. Nevertheless it was disheartening to give the lie to certain beguiling fictions. However absurd it may have been for a small boy, on the strength of a doddering musician's inscription, to envisage Munich as enchanted ground, however absurd it may have been for him to count on culling from Frau Stiglmayr's lips secrets that had gone up in smoke through Aunt Verona's kitchen chimney, Paul passionately regretted the necessity of disabusing his mind of the small boy's gracious fallacies. If it were merely a question of setting the small boy to rights regarding specific facts, the matter would have been simple and painless. But the correction threatened the very structure of life, its melodic line, its rhythms, and the supporting harmonies. It implied that the boy, thanks to false romantic premises, had been directing his life towards untenable conclusions. Yet, despite his nineteen-year-old conviction that reality was one thing and romance an illegitimate other, he could not quite bring himself to admit that the boy had been wrong, that his engrossed pursuit of will-o'-the-wisps had been the misapplication of energy Reason now made it out to be. After all, Romance had made life appear to be worth exerting oneself for. But for the lens, would it not have seemed prosaic and uninviting? Perhaps not. Perhaps if one had envisaged life as prose instead of poetry, a truer sense of values would have been developed in accordance with which life would have held forth more substantial lures. As it was, he reflected with the morbidness of youth, lifelong addiction to romance had undermined his constitution; and his craving for chimères was none the less strong for his knowledge of their debilitating effect.
Among the frequenters of cafés and concert-halls he tried to pick out people who might, thirty years ago or more, have sat tense and eager at the feet of Aunt Verona. In carriages and motor-cars he scanned faces for some sign of the aristocracy that had petted her. But all he found was a collection of folk who resembled their kind the world over. To think of Aunt Verona in their midst—whether the weird, broken Aunt Verona or the admirable artiste of the old musician's inscription—was a violation of all verisimilitude. Aunt Verona was merely the memory of a woman who had been seen through the magical lens by himself and a few choice spirits, while the cities which had been her glorious setting were memories even less tangible.
Munich, in short, and Vienna—to which he repaired—were dead, just as Aunt Verona was dead. Surrounded by students of divers nationalities, listening to subsidized performances, giving heed to masters who upheld the traditions of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler, he was as far from the fabulous soirées as he had been at the age of twelve—even farther, for he had lost the faith in their fabulousness which had inspired his boyhood. Another bitter drop in the cup was a guess that the poor old composer had been in the same leaky, romantic boat.
True, viewed as a mere example of reality, Vienna, like Munich, presented historical and artistic splendours. But these partook of the nature of shells. Again it was a question of his unbridled hopes. Music, he had persuaded himself, was a medium for the conveying of ineffable messages, a universal language designed to bring balm to the hearts of a humanity befuddled by words. Yet in Vienna, this most eclectic of shrines, where renowned masters and brilliant pupils foregathered, his notions were regarded as hallucinations, albeit of an amiable faddist whom it was easy enough to humour. The naïve wisdom of Mr. Silva counted for nothing among men who knew all there was to know on the subject of music. After Paul had aired his views the conversation fell back on an exchange of personalities. There was praise for so-and-so's manner of "rendering" a certain fugue; condemnation for so-and-so's "interpreting" of a certain étude; but no apparent comprehension of the spiritual influence exercised by Bach and Chopin. Certain factions maintained that the fingers should be raised high and the keys struck; others heatedly advocated the production of all effects through the graduated weight of the arm. Even methods of pedalling were discussed with an earnestness that would have done credit to state legislators.
The students seemed to Paul a collection of precocious babies; their masters mere coaches whose picturesque senility was mistaken for a sort of godhead. Virtuosity was the game, music merely a ball for athletic virtuosi to kick. For five, six, seven hours a day one was expected to engage in digital acrobatics; each composition was examined, phrase by phrase, like a strange machine; its soul, vaguely indicated by such marks as espressivo, andante doloroso, was reduced to terms of metronomics and pedal pressures; the objective of the whole process being to come upon a platform and evoke thunderous commendation from auditors who would judge the performance not by its success or failure in conveying the composer's sooth—of which the great majority of them would be as egregiously ignorant as the performer—but by its approximation to or divergence from the performance of some current "genius," whose title had been bestowed in accordance with similar standards of judgment. True, among masters and pupils there was endless talk concerning interpretation, but the point, more often than not, was lost in a haystack of pedantic quibbling.
In the composition classes a like spirit prevailed. Students were not encouraged to express, in musical terms, some heartfelt conviction; they were required to compose a hymn on Monday, a minuet or a canon on Thursday, in conformity with grammar—a certain margin being allowed for breaches "in good usage," which was to say, solecisms made by robust rebels like Wagner and Berlioz. Between exercises of this sort the lecturer struck intervals on a concealed keyboard and asked members of the class to name them, by ear. All which, while constituting a reality, of its kind most excellent, was not the pot of gold.
For weeks Paul went faithfully to classes and concerts at the Musikvereinsgebäude, in the hope that illumination would break through the fog of drudgery. Away from the studios, at a hired piano, his soul went on rare excursions, but these were in the nature of truancy. The rest was school all over again—school of the j' ai-tu-as-il-a variety; and as he had once fled the droning chorus of verb-conjugators to vivify the verbs in books, so now he retired to make music that should tout simplement sound forth proclamations otherwise inexpressible. He was no longer the mutinous boy chafing at drill; he was the man realizing that his goal was not the goal of his neighbours. For him the prescribed exercises were a mockery. The faster his fingers flew, the more sardonic became the laughter of scales and arpeggios, the more maliciously they echoed the truth of his bitter discovery. Music had once been the channel for everything mystical in his nature. He could lose his soul in it and gloriously "find" it in the process. But in the long interval since he had "nearly been able to play the Liszt sonata" his soul had perforce sought other vehicles. It was too late to harness musical steeds for its journey. Musicians evinced an interest in his talent; he might, with application, become a virtuoso. Yet though he mastered every trick and played with a comprehension surpassing that of all his contemporaries, a deep importunate part of himself would still remain mute. Audiences might listen spellbound and applaud to the echo; yet at the end of his most exalted performance he would stand before them—as he had stood that night years ago in Fremantle—unhappy, almost ashamed, conscious that they had taken the shadow for the substance and mistaken the superficial message of a sonata or a concerto for the message that lay far beneath it, writhing impotently and clamouring for expression.
All this came to him one hot summer's evening as he sat in the Volksgarten staring at the foam in his glass and hearing an orchestra wind its way through the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The suave undulations lulled his mind, drove away all distracting thoughts, and left him a strange clairvoyance. With a numb heart he took stock of his latest disillusionment. Music, the last stronghold of his romanticism, must be abandoned. He must marshal his forces again and seek higher ground. His message, whatever it should prove to be, was not for the casual souls who imbibed music as their bodies imbibed beer. Whatever it was, it was serious—as serious as religion, and of the nature of religion. It might never be manifested to himself, much less to the world. In that case what a fatuous farce life would have been! Better never to have wondered and hoped and ventured. But dignified dumbness was preferable to cheap sound. Rather than turn himself into a public entertainer he would withdraw to some coral island—and live in seclusion.
Suddenly, and for the fourth or fifth time in his life, the world stood still. He had heard a rustling sound beside him and a familiar voice calling, "Paul, Paul!"
Only a fat man with a fat and foody family were near him. But for a moment he had been in the presence of Aunt Verona. The illusion of it was still with him as he rose and made his way between tables and miniature trees. He was thrilled, dazed, unnerved.
Once outside, he found himself in a bog of doubt. The city was a stony waste peopled by the living dead. Aunt Verona, thirty years before, had turned her back on it, and later, from the depths of her retreat, made one more despairing attempt but ended by burning her record. "Futile" was the word she had used for it.
He walked on and on through the streets—afraid.
For two years Paul lived in Vienna, supplementing his savings by sums earned as accompanist for violinists and singers. His tardy discovery that music was an art rather than a philosophy was followed by the realization of his abysmal want of knowledge. Disappointed in the studios, he was arrested by the libraries. He was bewildered by the scope of human erudition and appalled by his own nescience.
Only when he reminded himself that, like differently prepared foodstuffs in a grocer's shop, all knowledge must be reducible to a comparatively small number of ingredients, did he have courage to take his education in hand. Then with feverish zeal he gave himself over to the task. Works on every subject, from sex to sunspots, in German, English and French—he tackled one by one. His most momentous finds were in the realm of speculative thought. Schopenhauer, Marx, Taussig, Bergson, and a dozen minor thinkers, he weighed in his balance. Each battered at the wall of truth from a different angle; each made breaches; none got through. Yet despite the accretions he was stuffing into his mental store-room, there was no longer a sense of chaos. A reliable principle of selection was quietly at work, ranging facts and opinions on shelves from which they could be readily reached down in case of discussion.
Of discussion there was plenty, for he inevitably came into contact with men who were artists and philosophers by virtue of their youth if not their talent. Their elders, weary of trying to know everything, had in most cases adopted some theory upon which, as upon string suspended in water, they could crystallize all the facts they were capable of taking into solution. One old man in particular interested Paul, a university professor whose pet theory was that Jean-Jacques Rousseau constituted a sort of head waters from which flowed all the streams of present-day literature, art, philosophy, education and national policy. He had written articles tracing Rousseau's influence on Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Danton, Tolstoi, Novalis, Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Wagner, and a dozen other men of genius.
Paul accompanied him one day to an exhibition of impressionistic paintings hoping that, for once, the theory would be left in the Garderobe with the walking-sticks, but no sooner were they inside the gallery than the professor began, "All this, lieber Freund, is foreshadowed in Rousseau. These impressionists feel they are unique in their feelings and must express this uniqueness by discarding rules. Jean-Jacques, you'll remember, said, 'Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vu.'"
The quotation brought Paul up with a start. Ever since he could remember he had been saying something quite like that to himself. Like Rousseau, and a whole world full of tiresome souls, he had been priding himself on the fact that he was unlike everybody else. Suddenly it seemed to him that there was no particular distinction in being unique. Certainly if uniqueness led to nothing more distinguished than the turning out of messy green, yellow and pink canvases there was little to be said for it. His reaction to writers like Nietzsche and Max Stirner had been a revulsion from superegoistic doctrines. Once more he saw the advantages of being a "quite ordinary boy."
On the other hand, he was oppressed by the swarm of people amongst whom he was moving; he often longed to retire into himself and "shut upon his retreat the floodgates of the world." Once, in the crowded, smoky atmosphere of a café, he caught himself underlining the following verses in Shelley's Julian and Maddalo:
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."
He found he was getting a surfeit of books, a surfeit of discussion. His daily habits became more haphazard. He took longer walks into the suburbs. He fraternized with irresponsible students and returned the glances of still more irresponsible young women. One of these, Lottchen, upon whose favours he was believed to have an option that amounted to a proprietary right, gave him, through a chance remark, a clue to his state of mind. She had asked about his plans for the future, and he had replied half-heartedly that he would probably return to the sea. "Oh," she exclaimed, "you must look a perfect darling in uniform!"
He had a bantering smile for her femininity, and while Lottchen assured him she adored everything that wore a uniform, "even the messenger-boys," his mind wandered on to its own circuitous conclusions. All life was an effort to effect some satisfactory reconciliation between uniformity and one's complex individualism. For all women, and most men, uniformity was an end in itself. For him most varieties of human uniformity ignored or did violence to his passion for self-development, for the broadest sympathy and comprehension. In "that untravelled world" of which he was for ever catching glimpses that lured him on, was a sublime sort of uniformity for which, more and more ardently, he thirsted.
He knew Vienna held nothing further for him. He was not at all reconciled to the thought of a career on the sea; but there one could at least take a dead reckoning of one's progress, and plan some course for the future.
By way of Berlin and Hamburg, the famous old Hamburg—but not at all conspicuously stocked with Bechstein pianos—Paul journeyed to Holland and England. Dwindling funds restricted his movements during the following weeks, as well as preparation for nautical examinations. When the certificate of Master Mariner was handed to him he had little more than enough money for his fare to Liverpool, where he was to join a cargo ship bound for Bombay. A stroke of fortune had brought him face to face in Fenchurch Street with the former apprentice he had known in Hong Kong. This young man was now second officer of a smart passenger liner and had found Paul a berth as third officer in a cargo ship belonging to the same company.
Although Paul cherished a retrospective fondness for his chum tinged with a new goodwill for the friendly assistance, he was at a loss to understand what had brought them, in the beginning, so closely together, and was relieved when the time came for parting. For other reasons, however, the parting left him forlorn.
"You'll be all right now, old man," his friend said in farewell. "You've a good berth, and the company'll do you well if you stick. Good luck and bong voyage and all that sort of thing!"
Paul accepted these good wishes in the spirit in which he had accepted his berth: gratefully, but without elation. For just as he had outgrown his boyish attachment to the debonair apprentice—he recalled now that he had, with a trace of femininity, secretly adored the apprentice's uniform: shades of Gritty and Lottchen!—so, he felt he had outgrown his berth. It seemed absurd to indulge such misgivings before the ink was dry on his Master's papers; but the misgivings were all the more ominous on that account.
They returned with strange emphasis when he boarded his new ship. "Been up to London, have you, Mr. Minas?" began the captain, by way of breaking the ice.
"Yes, sir," replied Paul—then whimsically added the familiar phrase from the ribald sailor song, "To see what I could see."
"Ay—and what did you see at all?"
It was at that moment that the misgivings returned; for how was he to tell a hearty skipper that he had seen a play by Barrie, caricatures by Max Beerbohm, quasilords and ladies bouncing upon tame steeds in Rotten Row, and—God save the mark—the Wallace Collection!
After two years consulting of and catering to a tyrannical set of tastes, desires and principles, Paul found unexpected refreshment in the simple routine of the sea, where superior officers shouldered the burden of making decisions. The sense of freedom he experienced as the Cranmore churned her way out of the Mersey was, in view of his duties, circumscribed, but he concluded that the sense of freedom in any one plane of being was contingent upon imprisonment of faculties in other planes; there was always a string to the kite. Abstract liberty, like the geometrical point, was merely a façon de parler—an unstable sea upon which only Peters were rash enough to walk, and from which only Peters were rescued. Shelley the poet, enamoured of liberty, impersonated a cloud and offered himself to the West Wind, but Shelley the citizen came croppers. Poor old Jean-Jacques, chained worshipper of liberty and reprehensible amateur of morality, while indulging in speculative vertiges, took care to keep his feet on the ground. "J'aime beaucoup ce tournoiement," he confessed, then spoilt—or saved—the situation by stipulating, "Pourvu que je sois en sureté." Paul knew, in short, that he was imbibing an intoxicating draught, and was fully aware of the effect of intoxicants.
On this occasion the effect endured about five days. At the end of that period he saw the coast of Spain, and discovered that Spain, which he had not visited, meant more to him, literally and figuratively, than Bombay, with which he was familiar. He was standing on the main deck, supervising the lashing down of a row of stalls containing polo ponies. The boxes had become insecure during a siege of bad weather in the Bay of Biscay.
His eyes rested on the dim shore-line, and his thoughts, mounted on a leisurely Rosinante, ambled inland. Castles in Spain—Castilian women of an exotic blondness, like blood-oranges—Carmen—Lazarillo—Figaro—amber grapes, bull-rings, acrid cafés where livid, moustached women and tight-trousered men danced to schottisches in which rhythms swished like flaming petticoats under the enveloping skirt of the melody. He pictured John Tanner in the Alhambra, enjoyed Granada with a Shavian relish, then snorted at the incongruity. He was a romanticist despite his Shavianism, and he began to suspect Shaw of the same wretched defection. One must be anti-romantic to be Shavian, and anti-Shavian to be Shawlike!
He turned from the rail with a sigh. As usual the daydream had ended in an intellectual paradox.
And that poor, caged pony! A Lascar deckhand had hit it over the nose to punish it for trying to kick the back out of its box. Why shouldn't it kick the back out of its box!
As a deputy of Providence it was Paul's duty to reprimand the Lascar in sharp pidgin-English for abusing a thousand-guinea horse; that duty done, he proceeded, as a fellow-prisoner, to explain to the pony, in terms of pats and cluckings, that freedom was a relative quantity, not to be attained by vicious hoofs. If the pony had retorted, "Do you call it freedom to be delivered into the hands of some hare-brained cavalry officer whose notion of what conduces to my welfare is to make me gallop over a dusty field after a little ball he merely wants to hit?" Paul would have replied, "On the whole, yes. You'll be better off, for instance, than your ninety-second cousins on Dartmoor. Notwithstanding which, throw the silly ass if you can—and a clean getaway to you!"
As the Cranmore lurched through a bright blue, early-autumn Mediterranean, Paul's spirits reflected the sea's suppressive calm. He had learned the ways of the ship, weighed her crew in the balance, found it wanting, and settled down for the voyage. It was depressing to acknowledge how easily he had established his footing. It meant that during the remainder of the voyage there would be nothing but books, the caprices of the weather, and passing landmarks to provide stimulation. And on subsequent voyages the prospect of slow, monotonous promotion. One day he would be put in command of a ship; then of a bigger ship. By that time his hair would be grey, or gone. And the rest of the men seemed to think—but what mattered what they thought! His mental processes never tallied with those of his neighbours, never had, and never would, on land or on sea, world without end, Amen! Why trouble then to look back or forward, why do anything but accept life as it was, and sleep whenever possible!
At Port Saïd the Cranmore was to coal and unload a marble statue for a pasha's palace. Paul obtained leave, drew some money, dressed in civilian clothes, and went ashore to look for a sextant and other articles which lack of funds had prevented him from buying in England.
Down the gangway; into a clumsy bumboat painted red and blue; through hordes of fruit, cigarette and postcard venders; towards the breakwater near which brown-legged fishermen stood up to their knees in water hauling at nets; past a towering Orient liner from Australia; along teeming quays—the red tarbooshes, the Arabic inscriptions on signboards, the solicitations of dirty dragomans—the whole miscellany welded together in a brassy light which sharpened lines and angles, all under a pearl and turquoise sky. Already, at this wicked portal, Paul had recaptured the smell of the East.
As he left the quay a ragged urchin came running up to advertise the attractions of a bawdy house prepared to cater to the most exactingly perverse. The proffered enticements, each more indecent than the last, Paul declined with a shake of the head, but let the boy complete the catalogue. There was something piquant in the contrast between the tender years of the child and his monstrous sapience. "Hi, Mist' Ferguson, you wan' see" and the diminutive tout put forward a final bait.
Ferguson was a generic name for Englishmen, interchangeable with Disraeli and Cornwallis-West. Paul had heard enough.
"Ecklahburra!" he cried. "Kaleb!"
And at the sudden menace in his tone the boy scuttled off.
Fascinating, putrid land! Its very babes were born wicked. Paul had a new conception of what was meant by the doctrine of original sin, As a boy he had supposed "original" sin signified some specially ingenious form of iniquity.
The book shops as usual lured him, but he coveted so many objects that he ended by buying none, and wandered on. In two more hours he would be back on board, bound south through the canal, an automaton in the service of automata. A satiric comment, which he had heard sailors repeat on stormy nights, was running through his head, "Who wouldn't sell a farm and go to sea!"
A craving for isolation sent him walking away from the central streets, beyond the railway station, down a barren road towards infinite flat stretches of sand. In a grubby shop by the wayside he stopped to drink Turkish coffee and eat sweet Syrian pastries. Then he returned to the glaring waste and continued his aimless walk. He was a small boy again, playing hookey. Outwardly he trembled, but an unwonted inner calm, like that of a top at full spin, was stealing over him. Some conflict was being waged between two parts of his nature. He had no desire to take sides; was not even curious as to the outcome.
At length he sat down for sheer weariness in the shade of a peppercorn tree by the side of a deserted camel track. On all sides the wilderness extended. Far to his left were the only signs of civilization: low walls and a huddle of roofs. At long intervals, a few hundred yards before him, ships passed, as though slowly cutting their way through banks of sand. There was no trace of the ribbon of water that floated them.
The conflict was at an end, and the strange inner calm had enveloped him in a physical numbness that left his mind pellucid. In planes of existence infinitely remote, clocks must be ticking, pens recording, throats laughing and cursing, engines grinding and propelling. Here, inertia reigned, unchallengeably.
An odd procession of young Minases trooped before him: timid, cocksure, lonely, eager, disappointed, ecstatic and morose boys—all authentic versions of himself, and all dead.
A vision of the future succeeded. The boyish Minases were sent scurrying by sadder, wiser ghosts, constituting a less definite and less diversified company. Some suspicion of the futility of their existence characterized and related them, and at the end of the procession trudged a weary old man, shabby, hungry, disdainful.
Paul looked "before and after," but without pining. The emotions which stirred within him seemed as impersonal as the delicate rustling of leaves overhead. His very life he shared with the tree, for he drew it from the same infinite source. The universe was a mint. He was a coin; the tree another. When the right time came each would be withdrawn from currency, to be remelted, restamped and reissued. It little mattered how one were invested, provided one kept in circulation. Even if one stepped out of circulation voluntarily, the resources of life would be none the poorer.
He lay at full length on the sand, and slept. When he awoke, the shadow of the tree extended far beyond his feet. He sat up and shuddered, for in his dreams he had been present at his own funeral. Miss Todd had sung "Abide with Me" and flatted. And the chimes of Fremantle tolled his knell.
The sounds he had heard in his sleep were the siren and bells of a passing ship. He watched her for a few moments, then turned his gaze far down the canal, in the direction of the last warehouses outside the town. There a big black, top-heavy steamer was approaching. His heart beat faster, and he sat back against the trunk of the tree, instinctively straightening his coat and necktie as if in anticipation of an encounter.
Slowly, slowly, the Cranmore advanced. He could hear, across acres of sand, the pulse of her engines, the breathing of her funnel. She was alive; he was fond of her; and she was carrying with her all his old life, carrying it away beyond recall.
On the decks he made out figures and identified them by their positions. Behind the house were the rows of stalls. The restless pony would miss him if none of the men did.
The port-hole of his own cabin! His bags were there—his books and music and letters, his clothes and the photographs of six or seven women, mistresses of a night or a week or a month.
The disciplines of the passing life were in their way good—necessary for those simple fellows on deck, but not meant for him. His disciplines must be self-imposed. This very act of running away—instinctive, unpremeditated as it had been—his mates would judge lawless; but it was in reality a stern and imperious duty.
When the ship was a mere speck surmounted by a scarf of smoke, Paul rose and set his face towards the north. The exalted calm had basely deserted him, and there had been tears in his eyes. He felt "like a motherless chile, a long ways from home," and dreaded to reenter the sinister town. Two years ago he would have been heartened by his hoard. But that was gone, and in its place he had a paltry meed of experience gained in the two years which had seen him over the threshold of manhood. One ingredient in that experience was unworldliness; another was doubt; another indifference. Three traitors in the camp!
Twilight overtook him and he reached the streets as they were awakening to their evening gaiety. A cool breeze stole through date palms in parched courts, and life whispered meaningly from shadowy doorways. Snatches of laughter sought him out, and pungent odours. From the inner harbour came the music of a marine band. Some magical agency was conspiring to throw a glamour over the sordidness of his surroundings.
On reaching the water-side he came into view of a liner ablaze with lights. A hundred noisy coolies were passing sacks of coal into her side. Small boats clustered about the gangway which swarmed with gayly dressed women and men in dinner jackets—Dutch men and women gleeful at the interruption in their long journey to Java.
The sight caused Paul another swift change of mood. He envied those people on the gangway: envied them their easy camaraderie.
He swung on his heel and walked towards the breakwater, turning to the left when he reached the deserted beach. The brown shallow sea at his feet hissed like water spilt on a stove. To his right the statue of Lesseps stood black against the indigo curtain of night brocaded with stars. Nearer, beyond the breakwater, was a tangle of masts where moored fishing-boats creaked like cradles. To his left the beach and the surf-crested rollers stretched unendingly. From the town behind him came stealthy echoes of civilization: the clanking of chains and winches, the rattle of wheels, the cries of boatmen, the sighing of dry leaves. The evening breeze made him shiver.
If only one had the courage to walk to the end of the breakwater and disappear for ever! Who would even wonder what had become of him? He was "half in love with easeful death." He knew just what Keats had meant.
A white-robed figure was running towards him from the direction of the road. "Hi, hi, Mist' Ferguson—you wan' see hoochie-koochie girl?"
"What! You back, you little blighter!"
The boy gave him a propitiatory grin.
"Here—here's a penny. Now hop it, or I'll bloody well drown you!"
The boy decided to cut his losses and sell out, as Paul turned back once more towards the port which struck him as a sort of overgrown pest-house for lost and infected souls