# Solo/Chapter 5

One night early in January Paul kept an independent watch on the house deck, perched on the gunwale of a spare lifeboat. He would have preferred his favourite daytime seat on the anchor, but there was a rule against distracting the attention of the lookout. Despite a moderate fair breeze, the heat generated during the day still enveloped the ship. It was as though the gloom of the Indian Ocean were made of warm, impalpable wool. Some of the men had brought their bedding out on the hatches. Paul could not sleep when there was a prospect of a light being sighted before dawn.
To think that the goal was less than a hundred miles distant, that with daylight the outlines of a new coast should be visible! The antipodes—the other side of the world! And only a year or two ago, it had been difficult to grasp the conception that people in these latitudes did not feel like flies walking on a ceiling!
On and on, with never a sign of lagging provided there was the ghost of a breeze to support her—good old Clytemnestra! A little weary, perhaps, but it was not her fault if barnacles thickened on her hull. Perhaps she was looking forward to the prospect of drydock as eagerly as any of her thoughtless crew looked forward to a fried egg and a pint of bitters in a pub.
After nearly four months of unbroken horizons, the thought of the coming day was overpoweringly sweet. ​The four months had been wonderful enough in their own way. During that period Paul felt he had crossed the invisible meridian separating childhood from adolescence. Just as the Clytemnestra had brought him into a region of bright new stars and a more potent sun, so she had mysteriously brought him into a new personal hemisphere; the sun of his individuality bore down upon him more directly, and his vague desires shone forth in constellations. The second movement in the composition of his life was well under way; the opening theme had been declaimed and sonorously amplified, and this lonely night watch was a sort of mental recitative, making a transition to the variation which would begin on the morrow, a variation which he could not quite foretell. That made the waiting breathlessly expectant.
He was now thirteen years of age, but the moral experience of several years had been crowded into the interval since his twelfth anniversary. He felt much older in mind and body than when he had signed the articles, yet he enjoyed a freedom and buoyancy of spirit he had never known in those years which grown-ups referred to as the happiest. Men spoke lightly of carefree childhood. He regarded childhood as a period of bitter perplexity, of groping fears, of haunted, tearstained nights, of tortuously developed principles and convictions, of brutal misunderstanding.
What price the far-off nights when he had cried himself sick at the fear that his mother had been buried alive! The endless days when he had striven vainly to overcome his enmity towards John Ashmill! The months of feud against Walter Dreer with whom he yearned to become reconciled! The weeks when he had struggled with monsters called into being by Walter's vile insinuations! Happiness, when every morning he had awakened to the sense of some ordeal! Happiness, when he had never entered the doors of a school​house without a trace of dread, nor passed out through the gates without feeling reprieved! If running breathlessly home from school, slamming the gate on a barbaric world, and seeking protection in a kitchen peopled with fantastic images could be accounted as happiness, he had had happy moments—but at what cost! Had glib grown-ups forgotten their own childhood, or had they been different? Probably that was the answer: he, Paul Minas, was a freak.
The four months had wrought a physical change, for he could now perform feats he would never have attempted in Gym. Moreover, his nautical lore had added cubits to his worldly stature. For the first time in his life he felt he occupied a classifiable status. True, he was a sailor with a difference, just as he had been an organist and a scholar with a difference. But being a sailor was a comfortable, inclusive estate in which there was accommodation for all the parts of one's nature difficult to classify.
In his information concerning ships and seafaring there were still vast gaps. At the same time, thanks to the old man and to his own aptitude, he knew more about navigation from the technical point of view than the oldest A.B. in the forecastle. And he could understand, if not execute, almost any order given on deck. The network of lines and tackle no longer baffled him, and he had ventured as far as the royal yard-arms in his desire to solve puzzles of construction. Ropes that had intrigued him he had followed to their sources, climbing hand over hand, or shinning aloft on converging lines. Once the old man had reprimanded him for attempting to climb a rope which was not supposed to be made fast at the upper end, and which might have come away under his weight. He could steer by the wind or by the compass, except on rough days, when the wheel kicked so hard that his young arms were ​overpowered. He had learned how to take dead reckonings and read portents in the sky.
It was an engrossing study, but there had been hours when the monotony oppressed him. He had grown mortally weary of twenty-odd circumscribed minds, the unending yarns which, if not lacking in picturesqueness and variety of detail, were hopelessly similar in tone, being confined to some aspect of sea life or the deeds of seamen on land. His mates had few ideas left with which to surprise him, and Paul had discovered that the element of surprise was as necessary to mental progress as salt was necessary in food.
It was consequently with a very fever of elation that he strained his eyes through the velvety blackness. Fair winds had been blowing for days, following a series of storms encountered south of the Cape of Good Hope. The pencil record in the chart-room showed only a short's pace between the position at noon and the port of Fremantle. And now a propitious breeze was bearing them straight towards the promised land.
"Birds of varigated plumage abound, but their cries are for the most part raucous. The songsters of European groves are practically unknown in the Commonwealth," Paul had read, and he wondered if he would see wild parrots perching on telegraph wires. He disliked parrots. But for them the boys of Hale's Turning would never have lurked around corners waiting to scream out at his approach, "Polly want a cracker, Polly want a cracker!"
He wondered if Australians ate pancakes and cornmeal muffins and frosted walnut cakes. He wondered what Australian candy was like, and marbles and tops. Did they play Nobbies and Lacrosse and Duck on the Rock? Almost any strange custom might prevail in a country where even the seasons were upside down. Fancy being hot and sticky in January! While he was ​clad in a cotton shirt, duck trousers and a pair of slippers, Walter Dreer and Gritty Kestrell were coasting down the snowy hill past Miss Todd's, or skating figure eights on the marsh ponds under the railway trestle!
On and on—east of the sun and west of the moon. A man stumbled aft to relieve his mate at the wheel. At intervals came the ghostly call from the bows, "All's well," followed by a gruff acknowledgment.
At midnight the watch changed, but Paul merely snuggled to a more comfortable position on a thwart of the lifeboat. Despite his subdued excitement he was drowsy and thought of curling up in the hanging folds of a lowered staysail, when he was electrified by the cry, "Light ahead."
Feeling that circumstances justified a breach of the regulations, he scrambled down from the house and ran to see for himself. "Blimey!" exclaimed the lookout in a cautious whisper. "It's Gentleman Jim out of 'is bed. Smell the steak and kidney puddin', did 'e?"
"Where is it?" demanded Paul.
"First turnin' on the roight. Sign o' the crown and anchor. Wut you gunna 'ave?"
"Oh shut up, Shorty. Show me the light."
As a protest against the nickname, the lookout snatched Paul up, bore him to the rail, and pointed ahead. "Watch," he directed. In a few moments Paul detected a tiny point lower than the stars and more golden in lustre, which disappeared like some stealthy signal. After long seconds it flashed again—and again.
"At last!" he sighed, as the seaman put him down.
"Oho! Y'ain't old enough to 'ave a woman, you know."
"Is that so? And what could a little shorty like you do with one?"
The reply was entrusted to the toe of an agile boot, but Paul ducked, and from the safety of the iron ladder ​thumbed his nose. He found the mate pacing the poop, but didn't dare ask all the questions in his mind, lest he be thought childish.
The next few hours passed slowly, but with dawn came the sight so eagerly awaited—a low, slate-black shadow dividing the sky from an ocean all mother-of-pearl. At six o'clock Paul took tea to the captain's room, and two hours later, when he went forward with the basket, the sun had dispelled the shadows, the water had become a yellowish jade, and the coast was revealed in a sand-coloured stretch, patched with green hollows. White clouds hovered over the hills, and everything was bathed in gold. The Clytemnestra had ceased to represent the boundaries of the world, and was now a mere insect crawling painfully over a wrinkled pool. The captain peered through his telescope at a blob of smoke.
"It's a tug already," remarked the mate as he came down to breakfast. "We'll be alongside by noon."
Paul contrived to be on deck when the tow-boat approached within hailing distance. He had never seen a sight more exhilarating than this sturdy tug as she reared and coughed and wallowed in the green waves, belching forth smoke. She was intensely alive, and her personality was not unlike that of an officious sheepdog.
Thanks to the fair wind, which would have enabled him to sail to the very mouth of the Swan river, the old man drove a sharp bargain with the captain of the tow-boat. To Paul's astonishment his first question, when terms had been settled by the aid of a megaphone, was as to the outcome of "the war." The old man seemed unaccountably pleased that somebody had licked somebody else. Paul had not even known they were fighting; but he was tremendously interested in the discovery that Australians—judging from the captain of the tow-boat—said "sile" for sail.
​At the old man's command, Paul ran up to the poop and threw out a sounding line to which one of the deckhands, amiably—and a little patronizingly—smiling, attached a bundle of newspapers. Paul drew the packet aboard, with professional gestures, and the tug, with a clang of bells and a churning of the propeller, plunged forward, preparing to let out her thick hawser.
Paul spread the newspaper on the chart-room desk. Such strange-looking sheets they were—not a bit like the Halifax Herald! The captain's form loomed in the companion-way, and Paul ran off to make the beds, debating the mighty, jubilant, breathless alternatives: should he go first to see Veronique, or Hamlet, or Miss Dolly Castles in Pinafore?
Never had trees been so green, roofs so red, nor life itself so promising. Even the bare island that lay off the coast had a personality, for "There," said the pilot, "is where the Orizaba went down."
The sails were furled. The tow-boat had dropped back and made fast at the side to guide the helpless vessel through the channel of the river. Had water ever been as utterly flat as this? Paul wondered that it could float tall ships.
That vivid brick building on the bank, surmounted by a short mast on which was a time-ball—those vines with purple-blue flowers like the clematis that split down the walls of Gritty's brown house thousands and thousands of miles away—but of a blueness!
The gigantic black-funnelled liner moored to the quay—a P. and O. And ahead of her was a real battle cruiser! The only warship Paul had seen was a wheezy revenue cutter in Halifax. "That's the Euryalis," explained the pilot, most satisfactory of men, "the flagship of the Australian squadron."
​Slowly past steamers, past warehouses, towards the innermost space of the quay, near the bridge which cut off the navigable portion of the river. It seemed hours before the ship was finally moored, a rat-guard placed on each hawser, the gangway adjusted. The captain had gone ashore with the quarantine officer. Stevedores, ship chandlers, butchers, and grocers were making their way aboard, and dinner was standing cold on the table. Men and horses, a thousand bewildering signs of the life lived on land! Paul was feeling the effect of his vigil, and chafed at the thought that he could not set foot on this enchanted soil until the day's tasks were done, perhaps not then. Moreover, it appeared that one's wages were not paid outright, but in driblets, at the captain's discretion. For the first time he realized the significance of having signed on for a full voyage, which meant that his discharge and pay-day were contingent upon his returning to the home port, Liverpool.
He was vaguely apprehensive. It would be just like old boy Wilcove to find out what ships had sailed from Halifax on the date of his disappearance. Paul was not sure whether or not Dr. Wilcove had any legal control over him, but the man who was always referred to as his guardian, whatever that implied, might be fussy enough to take some measures toward compelling him to return. What if an Australian policeman should come aboard and march him off to the big P. and O. boat flying the blue Peter! His imagination was fired at the thought of travelling by steam through the Red Sea and being transferred in England to another splendid liner bound for Halifax. But Halifax! And Hale's Turning! And school! Without seeing Australia!
He was tempted to bolt. In this little city—he now knew it was little, though from the mouth of the river ​it had seemed boundless—he could find something to do, surely. But the old man!
Paul returned to his broom and dust-pan. He couldn't play the old man false, for somehow he was confident the old man wouldn't play him false. Contact with the fine sailorliness of his captain had instilled in him a sense of sportsmanship.
Not much chance of getting ashore to-night. But the stevedore had said they might be two months unloading. Then they would have to take on ballast before proceeding to Sydney for a cargo. There was plenty of time, and he was tired. It was strange to be motionless. His bunk would not seem natural without the lulling sea-saw and the creaking of beams. And the ship, made fast to a wharf, her yards projected against the walls of warehouses, seemed to have lost her very identity.
Such quantities of sand as there were in the place! Enough to make the walrus weep! When the wind blew it drove in dusty clouds along the roads. And the low opposite bank of the river was a long stretch of pure sand, broken only by a few scrubby trees and amorphous buildings.
The captain returned at supper time, followed by a man carrying bags of fruit for the cabin table. Paul could read nothing in the old man's countenance, and under the stress of issuing orders the captain seemed oblivious of his existence. Piqued, Paul rang the supper bell with needless vigour. Then, on returning to the pantry, he heard a voice sharply calling, "Steward!"
In his bedroom the captain was sorting out letters for members of the crew. "Take these forward," he ordered, "And these are for you."
Paul picked up two envelopes addressed "Master Paul W. Minas, care Captain Caxton, Br. Barque Clytemnestra, Fremantle, W.A."
​A few minutes later, in the pantry, with a sinking heart and tremulous curiosity, he opened them. One was from Dr. Wilcove!
"My dear Paul,
"Whatever possessed you to play such a prank? However, by the time this reaches you, you will have regretted your impulse as much as we have all regretted it, so I needn't rub it in."
Regret it, forsooth!
"I trust this will find you none the worse for your voyage."
None the worse!
"Margaret Kestrell came to see me on receiving your letter. I'm bound to say I'm surprised that you chose to confide in a little girl rather than your guardian. I had had no hint of your difficulties at school until I hurried up to Halifax. It seems that there was misunderstanding on both sides, yet none, I feel sure, that could not have been adjusted."
"So?" This was an echo of Otto's dialect.
"However, that's a closed chapter. What I now propose, and indeed insist on, is that you return to consult with me concerning your education. You may not realize that as executor of your father's will and that of Miss Windell, I am responsible for properties being administered in your interest until you come of age. So long as we here are responsible for your welfare, the least you can do is to render our task possible. Perhaps you can understand our anxiety, and our wish to regain ​the confidence which, perhaps owing to our own negligence, we seem to have forfeited."
Paul felt guilty.
"I am writing to Captain Caxton, who, as you doubtless know, was with your father at the time of his death on the Brandywine."
Julius Priest! And the old man hadn't let on!
"I am also sending him a draft for £150——"
Five times fifteen—$750—Gee-rusalem!
"He will arrange passage home for you. I expect you to write me on receipt of this, and please believe me, my dear Paul,
"Your affectionate guardian."
Paul replaced the letter in its envelope. On returning from the supper table with the remains of the first course—how they had pitched into the fresh beef!—he broke open the other letter:
"Dear Paul,
When Paul was lighting the lamps that evening the captain looked up from his papers. "They seem to have been worried about you back in Nova Scotia," he commented.
"Yes, sir." The match trembled in Paul's fingers.
"Your cock and bull story put rather a different face on matters, didn't it?"
Paul bristled and drew himself up with a tinge of theatricality. "I hope I've proved how much in earnest I was," he said.
The captain smiled and puffed at his cigar. "You've earned your wages all right. But I'm afraid you'll have to go back."
Paul's eyes smarted, and he had to remind himself that in a day or two he would be wearing long trousers.
"I'd jump overboard rather than go back to Hale's Turning," he retorted.
The captain tapped his cigar ash into a tray, and Paul could no longer control himself.
"Oh, why are you on their side?" he cried. "If you were a friend of my father's, like Dr. Wilcove said, why do you want to send me back to a hateful, rotten, stuffy school? If you do, I'll only run away again where nobody can find me, so you might as well not!"
"Do you think your father and mother would have approved of your running away?"
Paul glanced up at the old man with a new interest. "Did you know my mother too, sir?"
"For the matter of that," replied the captain, "I knew you, as well. I was mate with Captain Andrew when he took your mother and you on a voyage to Durban. You were pretty young then. From about one to one and a half."
Paul shrank weakly to a settee, forgetful of his stew​ardship. His mouth was open, but he had nothing to say. Finally he exclaimed:
"And you knew all the time!"
"Since the day when I saw your father's watch lying on the table—the watch you forgot to pawn."
Paul winced at the needless thrust. If the old man only knew how he treasured the keepsake!
"Do you think your mother would have been pleased at the thought of your leaving school so young?"
"How do I know? I don't think she would have objected if she knew how stupid it was!" His only clue to his mother was through Aunt Verona, and Aunt Verona had always seemed to be on his side. "Do you think she would have objected? "he inquired diffidently.
"She was a rare one for books and music. That old piano there used to belong to her."
So that was why the old man had suggested his playing it in the dog-watches! His own mother's piano! Verily, life was almost too painfully miraculous. Music was the weak spot in his armour. There had been moments during the long voyage when he had yearned for the big piano in the playroom. But if it must come to a choice between music and the sea, between a life of practising and a life of seeing hundreds of new countries, he could only decide in favour of the latter. In his mind, for months and months, had been running the phrase: "Qui n'oubliera jamais ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne." He, too, must see places that he would never be able to forget. What education could compare with a visit to cities steeped in music and romance, cities which had fostered rare spirits! Besides, education was largely a matter of books. He had learned ten times as much in Aunt Verona's kitchen as he had learned from Miss Ranston and Miss Hornby.
"I don't see why I can't read at sea as well as at school," he argued.
​The captain was non-committal. "Well," he concluded, "it don't do to decide rashly."
Paul felt that this remark might refer to his rashness in having run away. Tears threatened to break through his defences, as he got up from the settee. He was unwilling to leave the matter on such a dubious footing. He was wretched and craved some crumb of encouragement.
"If you were my father, instead of you, sir," he ventured, in husky tones, "would you think me awful for acting the way I have?"
The captain rose from his chair and placed a hand on Paul's shoulder. "Oh, I don't know as I'd go that far," he said. "At any rate, if I was your father, instead of me, I'd be a damn sight better man than I am . . . He'd a been pleased at the way you've kept the slop-chest accounts and done the brass. And, if he'd a gone for to blame you, you could a reminded him that he run away himself when he was a lad."
"Oh, did he?" Paul's throat ached. He wanted to thank the old man for something, but didn't know what, nor how.
"Better turn in now," advised the captain.
The dread that he might be sent home, tinging all his moods during the ensuing days, added a strange poignancy to Paul's impressions. The little town with its narrow streets and low brick buildings was full of marvels. The commonest objects wore an aspect so different from corresponding objects at home that they acquired an abnormal intrinsic interest. Instead of asking for candy you asked for lollies; instead of buying chocolate dudes you bought little cardboard boxes labelled "Fry's" or "Cadbury's." You had to be ​wary of half-crowns, for they were deceitfully like florins.
Then the speech of these people! They said "thruppnse" for threepence, "frock" for dress, and "gaing" for going. They called ice-cream "hokey-pokey" and served it in little cups made of biscuit. The newsvenders sold queer papers like Ally Sloper's Half Holiday and Tid-Bits and when they spoke of "home" they meant England! And such an odd way of pronouncing "home"—as though there were at least two vowels in the middle and no h to speak of!
And Miss Green, who arranged entertainments at the Seamen's Institute, Miss Green who was about thirty and rather thin, Miss Green with whom he might quite easily have fallen in love, had he not already fallen in love with Miss Dolly Castles, the star of that quite too delicious Pinafore—to say nothing of Phœbe Meddar, whose image he kept "polishing up so faithfully"in his heart—Miss Green lived in what she called an "upstairs 'ouse!" Most houses here hadn't any upstairs! And Miss Green had never seen snow! But she had been in a part of the north-west where it was so hot you couldn't put your hand on a cat's back—and Paul had asked if the cat burnt her tongue when she tried to lick herself!
There was something quaint about it all, and something heart-catching. Probably it was merely the thought that you might have to turn your back on everything and go home, just when you had set foot on the edge of experience!
The evening at the theatre had been dazzling and faultless. Hazel Kirke was tame compared with Dick Deadeye and Hebe and Josephine and the sisters and cousins and aunts in their pink dresses—no, frocks. "And I polished up the handles so faithfully, that now I'm the Ruler of the Queen's Navee—" That was him, Paul Minas! And the lilt of it! If Gritty could only have been along! ​He pictured Gritty, with her snub nose and saucy eyes, singing "I'm called little Buttercup, de-ah little Buttercup——"
Veronique and Hamlet, alas, were being played in Perth. Perth was an elegant city, compared with the grubby seaport. But his heart was none the less in the grubby seaport, for it represented his first glimpse and taste of exoticism. Nothing in life could ever eclipse his first walk along the shopping streets of Freemantle, nothing could ever be as sweet as the first "lolly" he had put into his mouth, nothing quite so thrilling in its way as the first order he had ever given a waitress, in a funny tea-shop where there were only three tables!
One of the sharpest thrills of all had come during his first walk through the streets of Perth. In a baker's window he had seen a placard advertising a recital to be given by Madame Melba. For a moment the material world fell away, he was transported straight into a world of tangible dreams, and he realized that the great life of adventure had begun in earnest. For Melba was one of the immortal figures portrayed in Aunt Verona's big blue volume of musical celebrities. How well he recalled the portrait—the long plaits of hair, the eyes lifted toward heaven, the hands clasping a prayer book. In the same volume were portraits of Max Alvary, and Frances Saville, Jean de Reszke, Paderewski, Patti, Rubinstein and a dozen others. He had thought of them as creatures who had had their being in a world quite remote from any he would ever be likely to know. True, Aunt Verona had once breathed the atmosphere of that faery world, but that only enhanced the glamour. It had never occurred to him that those creatures might still be alive; the mere fact that their photographs were in a book seemed to throw them into some dim past. And now, here in Perth, was an announcement that the fabulous ​Melba was going to sing! And he, Paul Minas of Hale's Turning, was actually in a corner of the globe where such miracles came to pass!
Unhappily, when he had examined the placard more closely he had found that it was many months old. It was a lazy baker. She had come and gone. Even so, he was breathing air into which glorious notes had been poured—notes as much more enthralling than Miss Todd's as heaven was more enthralling than earth—if there "would have been" a heaven! He had nearly seen a dream come true—had been "hot," as they said in the game of "search the button." And Dr. Wilcove and the old man coolly expected him to go back to Hale's Turning to be educated!
Of all the sensations that had stirred him, the most profound, the most haunting had been the sound of the chimes—in the tower of the Fremantle town hall. The second evening in port he had hurried through his tasks and come ashore alone, unwilling to have his first impressions clouded by the inept remarks of a companion. After ferreting his way through side-streets, he had walked to a sandy hill behind the town from which he could see the ocean. The hill was covered with tufts of wiry grass, and here and there were eucalyptus trees, their long smooth, bark-patched trunks showing pink and lavender and palest lemon in the glow of the dying day. Far away, on one side, was an Oval dotted with cricketers, and a fife and drum band was playing "Cock o' the North." The brick and stone villas, so quaint after the wooden houses of Nova Scotia, clustering beneath him and stretching along the river bank, seemed ineffably cosy. Each was a home, replete with mother, father and children: the three essential factors of the game called "House" which was a favourite with the little girls of Hale's Turning. Here he was on the opposite side of the world, alone on a bare hill-top, with mere fancies to ​serve him as brothers and sisters, while at his feet nestled the homes of aliens who, for all their odd ways, were quite similar to Nova Scotians. Yet on this whole continent there was no creature who had heard of Paul Minas. Here he stood, like the son of a god on some sacred mount, watching Australians at their sports, philosophizing about them in a brand new pair of long trousers, infinitely well-disposed toward them, yet for all they knew of it he might just as well be on the top side of the world. If he were to go back the very next day, it would be to them as though he had never been here, yet for him the whole world would henceforth seem quite different than it would have seemed had he not been here. When the sun had sunk into the sea, he made his way down the hill and walked towards the centre of town along a residential street bordered by scorched gardens in which dusty red and yellow flowers struggled for existence. At the juncture of two deserted streets he came to the town hall, and as he was crossing the triangular space in front of it, his thoughts in a cloud, the bells began to chime.
At home there was the school bell, and every church had a single bell which on the Sabbath summoned the faithful monotonously to its doors, but until this evening Paul had never heard chimes. The four deep-voiced bells, solemnly intoning their formula of sixteen notes, enthralled him, and he stood spellbound as a still deeper voice tolled the hour. But the musical formula of the chimes did more than enthral him: it engendered a nameless mood compounded of wistfulness, yearning, loneliness, disillusionment, regret, confidence, and iridescent hope. The chimes were beautiful but infinitely sombre; they were a little weary, a little sad, resigned, but at the same time unflinching. Above all, they were wise. Their message was a proverb, a simple chord which yet expressed the essence of all truth. There was a hint of ​eternity in the chimes, and a hint of fortitude. For Paul they were even prophetic.
"You, boy," they seemed to say, "you will go from this town to other towns, from this land to other lands, always exploring, always an alien. You will seek knowledge and happiness, but you will find them only in oddments, like apples fallen from a barrow; the barrow will always be beyond the brow of the hill. It is your destiny to be sad when you wish to be glad, and most sad of all when you learn that life is only a brief solo, and that your solo, in the ears of God, is, like a million others, merged into the blurred, harmonious hum of the cosmos. So much for vanity, boy. So much for your long trousers. Our chime is a marching-song and an epitaph. Let it for ever echo in your heart, and you will be neither too improvidently hopeful nor too cruelly deceived:
Paul had been unconsciously holding a bruised leaf of eucalyptus to his face. Its odour, bitter-sweet and pungent, seemed an integral part of the oracle.
Miss Green's invitation to attend the concert at the Seamen's Institute Paul regarded as a tribute to his personal distinction, and he made a careful toilet. On arriving at the hall he was discountenanced to find not only that the whole crew had been invited, but that one of them, Dismal Jimmy, was to contribute a song to the programme. Paul's vanity was punctured, and as he took a seat beside Otto he chided himself for having been a prig.
​Otto had received his discharge and was to sail next day as deck-hand on a German liner, the Barbarossa. Paul regretted the prospective loss of his burly chum and was envious of Otto's opportunity to return to such a romantic land—though he still disapproved of Otto's reason for returning.
The hall was soon filled, for there were several ships in port and apart from the pubs and the beguilements of Perth—some miles distant—rival attractions were few. The fact that Dismal Jimmy was on the programme while he, Paul Minas, was merely a member of the audience, offended his sense of proportion. Furthermore, his long musical abstention, while it had brought surcease from practice, had ended by inducing an acute desire to make music. As he sat looking up at the piano his shoulders and arms and finger-ends yearned. The antiquated piano on the ship was feeble and unresponsive. Here was a piano which looked as though it might wail and exult. Through his mind coursed grandiose passages from the Schumann "Carnival," and from the querulous, clamorous Chopin étude in C minor which gave off flashes of lightning in the treble while thundering in the base. And no one had even asked if he could "do" anything! The curse of being only thirteen.
A sailor with a rasping baritone sang about "the brave, the brave hussars," and another, with erratic notions of pitch and tempo, sang a ballad which was largely a matter of "Dairy down, dairy ah, dairy dairy oh!" Miss Green doggedly accompanied, whilst necklaces danced about her thin dry neck. There were two daubs of pink on her cheek-bones; her nose was whiter than her elbows; and she wore a yellow muslin dress that made her hair look dusty. But Miss Green was nice. In her presence one felt pleasantly masculine and protective, and jealous of all other males. And Paul had a loyal desire not to be captious about her appearance or her musicianship. Perhaps ​some day a thoroughly chivalrous first-mate would lead her to the altar, then her necklaces might cease rattling.
When Dismal Jimmy's turn came, there was an awkward consultation in whispers. The Cornishman had no music, and Miss Green couldn't play by ear. Paul's pulses throbbed. He was sure Dismal Jimmy planned to sing "The Vicar of Bray" or "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep." Paul could improvise accompaniments, provided he knew the tune. Consequently when the curate, who was chairman, called for a volunteer Paul timidly responded. Otto gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder and shoved him into the aisle. When Dismal Jimmy had settled the matter of key, Paul played a flourishing entrée, and the song proceeded.
At its conclusion Miss Green waylaid Paul. On her homely face was an expression he knew quite well: fond, indulgent, adoring. If, after the manner of Miss Todd, she had linked her arm in his and said, "You're a wonder, Paul—dear," he would not have been surprised. What she did say was more to the point: "After that, you can't get out of giving us a solo! I'll tell Mr. Simpkins."
The next few numbers were a blur in Paul's mind. He was trying to select an appropriate piece from his old répertoire. The "Davidsbündler" march and the "Revolution" étude would sound grotesque on a programme that included such ditties as "We all went into the shop, to see what we could see!" He thought of salon pieces that would be sure of provoking applause. But he restlessly rejected them, for as the programme went on he became less anxious to show off than to convey to this roomful of seamen, stokers, engineers and stewards some superfine message. The simple wisdom of the bells had penetrated into his heart. His appetite for exotic sensations, appeased for the moment, had given place to a sense of well-being which became diffused in a new tenderness. Dimly, gropingly, he felt that if he could imbue his neigh​bours with a similar sense of well-being, some priceless blessing would grow out of it. He recalled Mr. Silva's old sayings, and longed to place these men under a spell they could never forget, to weld them together so that, as one, they should share the benefit of his recent meditations. He had it at heart to evoke in them some counterpart of the awe and humility, melancholy and exaltation, pity and fortitude he had felt upon hearing the symbolic chimes. He was still undecided when the curate announced that the next "item" would be a "piano selection by Master Laval of the Clytemnestra."
The jolt of being thus classified brought before Paul's eyes a vision of the good old Clytemnestra, trudging on, carrying him like the faithful white bear east of the sun and west of the moon. Moon! Those blue velvet nights when his thoughts had walked down its yellow carpet to the very edge of the world, when out of the silence he had conjured up the strains of the composition which Aunt Verona said was miscalled the "Moonlight Sonata." Assuredly it was out of place in this reeking hall—well, he must simply make it in place!
With a new sort of confidence but with none of the swagger of school-concert days, he mounted to the platform. In his mind he was reviewing whole pages to be's ure he remembered the intricate passages.
Instead of compelling his audience to warm his heart with their flattery, he would warm their hearts with the message of Beethoven, a message which he understood to-night infinitely better than in the days when he had glibly performed the sonata with uncalloused hands.
These men, he felt, expected something flashy, ragtime for preference: "Hunky-dory" or "Coon, Coon, Coon, I wish my colour would fade!" They were still humming the refrain of "Old Bull and Bush." A long dormant theatrical instinct seized him in its grip. For the moment he was on his old pedestal, his organ-bench, his sail locker, ​his forecastle-head nook, his cloud-top—King of the Castle. Nothing should detract from the illusion he meant to create—the illusion of warm velvety blackness, tropical seas, a carpet of moonlight, meditations reaching out toward infinite knowledge and informed by whisperings of the voice of God. They might think him silly, but silly or not he would exercise his kingly prerogative.
"Will some one please turn out the lights," he requested.
Mr. Simpkins raised his eyebrows; Miss Green fidgeted; the audience gaped. There was some fussing in the small room behind the platform, the curate cleared his throat and made faces, but Paul held his ground, and finally the lights went out with a resentful snap. A street lamp shed a bluish glow through the windows, but the platform was in obscurity. To dispel the awkwardness Paul played preparatory chords and arpeggios, and waited. Then with all the will power at his command, he submerged himself in the mood of the sonata.
With the opening bars a solemn elation possessed him, and his surroundings fell away. It was as though some divine soothsayer were using him to convey to mortals a beneficent augury. Often enough he had played this first movement literally. To-night he was contributing to its literal truth a fervid "Verily I say unto you." For to-night he felt the music not only as sound but as the epitome of wisdom.
In his subconsciousness was the image of himself, lulled by the sea, his soul borne like a melody over rhythmical waves. The theme of the movement was as noble as a ship; it was carried forward on waves of sound as unbroken as the waves of the ocean, with a momentum as irresistible as theirs, instinct with a like gentleness and sadness.
On and on—towards what? From the utter stillness Paul knew that his audience were asking the question. ​Towards what? First of all towards dawn, and as he broke into the tenderly playful and speculative mood of the second movement he was imbued with a sense of omnipotence. For, by abandoning his soul to the task, he had been able to make a hundred men forget the world of beer and ribaldry and show them, perhaps for the first time in their lives, their kinship with the sublime "wisdom and spirit of the universe." Otto was going home to learn the technique of slaughter, whilst he, Paul Minas, alias Laval the cabin-boy, could bewitch men into becoming as little children.
The onrush of the third movement transformed the tranquil scene in his subconsciousness to one of elemental clamour and menace. As on the distant night of the hurricane, so now he caught himself "rooting" for the elements, inciting them to violence, that he might demonstrate the triumph of human resistance—his resistance, for throughout this final movement he became identified with the melody. This was the very theme of his life, and he made it exultantly sing, all the while assaulting it with the full fury of the world's opposition. He would not deceive himself by minimizing the strength of his assailants. Hostile voices should scream, roar, rumble, plead, wail and sigh as they had done on the memorable afternoon when Aunt Verona had broken silence. Her inspired domination of the piano was his precedent for to-night's performance. Above the inimical chorus he sounded forth the dauntless theme—his theme. At all costs he must keep it pure, soaring, triumphant. His fear of making slips with work-coarsened fingers vanished like a mist in the sun. The music was playing itself. So should his very life.
If Aunt Verona could only hear—oh, to be able to explain to Aunt Verona that he was vindicating their "method," that he was proving to hundreds of men, to the whole crude and hapless world, that truth and love ​were indestructible, that hate and violence, for all their sardonic power, were futile! Aunt Verona had known. In the village, fools had whispered that she was mad, and she had disdained to explain. But to him she had explained—not in words, but in terms as subtle as those in which he was now exhorting a chance congregation. Aunt Verona had known; she had lived long enough to give him a hint; and now he was beginning to know. And he would go on learning, and some day the winds of knowledge would sweep him to the very shores of heaven. Meanwhile he was on the right course; he was catching glimpses of his soul, illuminating glimpses.
A long pause for the two deep octaves. Then a short recapitulation of the theme and a swift, exultant flourish, by way of proclaiming his final vindication.
His arms dropped, his nerves and muscles relaxed, and a great weariness came over him. He knew he had succeeded, but he no longer cared. He even forgot what he had been doing, and was surprised when the lights went up. He was mechanically bowing before a blur of heads. Thick-skinned hands and tough sea-lungs were acclaiming him. If he had begun by chastening his audience into a breathless entity, he had ended by inciting it to riotous approbation. Infinitely more decorous applause in the town hall of Hale's Turning had intoxicated him, but this noisy demonstration merely assailed his ears. What was hand-applause after that long pregnant silence! Even the pride in Otto's face moved him only to a momentary glow of pleasure. With a pang he realized that he had outgrown Otto and the Clytemnestra, as he had outgrown Hale's Turning.
For the sake of peace he played additional solos, then the concert was at an end, and he knew that Miss Green was waiting to invite him to have coffee and cake in the small inner room. At any other time he would have accepted gladly, but now he was too deeply buried in ​himself to be reached by promiscuous amenities. Something had been conceived in his soul, and he wished the process of gestation to go on unhindered. For all that he had spent himself without stint, he felt there was no one among his hearers who could have understood what it meant to him.
He found his way out unnoticed, and walked slowly towards the town by a roundabout route. The air was warm, soft and strong. The sky was alive with stars. Dusty gardens gave forth faint aromatic odours. Far off, the ocean sighed and licked the beach. Once a group of tipsy loiterers bawled impotently into the welkin. As he was making his way to the high street, the bells of the town hall, a few squares farther on, broke into their chime: fuller and deeper for the darkness and hush of night. His emotions raced to his throat and eyes fighting for an outlet, then surged back, leaving him in a warm flood. With the bells one wasn't alone; with the memory of their deep tones one could never be alone. La-fa-so-do—sixteen notes, slow, even, majestic. A magic formula. And each note went singing forth in a circle of sound which infinitely widened, like the circles in a pool. The circles would follow him to the very ends of the earth, always. God was subtle.
To-night their message was less grim, more comforting. "Courage, mon petit!" Aunt Verona's words! "Have faith in yourself, and nothing on earth can prevail against you." Beethoven had known it. The fifth bell tolled the hour of eleven.
He wandered on till he came to a bridge over the railway tracks. The sound of echoing footsteps drew him from his abstraction and he walked more quickly. He had by no means outgrown his distrust for shadows, and was consumed with a desire to turn and see who was following. To do so would be a sure proof of timidity, yet in the end he couldn't resist.
​He recognized the advancing figure as that of an officer who had been present at the concert. He was reassured, but surprised. Why should the officer have left his companions. Besides, there was a much shorter route to the end of the quay where the big liners moored.
As the stranger was overtaking him, Paul turned again and met a propitiatory smile. "Excuse me," began the newcomer with a German accent, "I tried to catch you and thank you for your playing."
Paul smiled diffidently. "Danke sehr."
The stranger puffed out his cheeks, opened wide his little eyes, and raised his arms in kindly protest against the boy's modesty. "Aber, es war schön, wunderbar—fabelhaft!"
Paul was flattered in spite of himself. "I felt like playing," he deprecated. "That makes all the difference. I couldn't do it again, as well!"
The big officer, chuckling, linked his arm in Paul's and fell into step with him. The gesture was instinctive and Paul didn't in the least resent it, though usually he shrank from the contact of any but his most privileged friends. One afternoon in the paint locker Shorty had touched him and looked at him in a strange manner, and Paul had wriggled quickly away. In a flash his knowledge of the world had taken a long leap forward and endowed him with self-protective caution.
Along deserted ways they walked, speaking alternately English and German. The officer was curious, and asked paternal questions. He was thirty-five or forty years old, stout, blond, sunburnt to the colour of a saddle.
Fact by fact Paul related his history. Never had he been called on to give a chronological account of himself, and the necessity of reducing his past to a well-proportioned narrative pleasantly exercised his ingenuity, and also helped him towards an understanding of himself. Moreover, the stranger not only understood the motives ​which had prompted his rebellious acts, but seemed to accept them as inevitable and normal. Paul felt all the freer to talk, inasmuch as his companion, in a few hours, would be on the high seas, bound for Germany, in the ship that was to carry Otto home. He took the occasion to put in a word for Otto, asked his new friend to be kind to his old one.
When they reached the Clytemnestra's berth, it was Paul who suggested that they should sit on a stack of lumber and prolong the interview. He talked of Aunt Verona, of the Bechstein piano, of the Sundays in Hale's Turning. He talked of his escape from school and his sea experiences, of his impressions of the new country, of its mysterious smells and sounds and sights, of his longing to smell all the exotic odours in the world, hear and see all the marvels, and know everything! He told of his conversations with the captain, of the letter from Dr. Wilcove, of his mood at the concert, his sudden feeling that the lights must be turned out, his yearning to convey some fine message to the assembly, his spiritual exaltation whilst playing, and his plunge into a bitter void when he had risen from the piano.
He had seen his mates straggling back to the ship. The cabin and forecastle lights had long been extinguished, and only the figure of the night watchman was moving. Faintly, from the direction of the town, came the ghostly sound of the chimes and the stroke of two. He couldn't tell his companion about the bells—their message was incommunicable. He shivered. He had got to the very end.
"And when do you go back to Canada?"
The question gave Paul a shock. It was so specific. His world stood still, as it had done one night on Mrs. Kestrell's back stairs. Again there came a blinding flash to point out his course. And in the blackness which ensued, as the world again became grey and cold and palpa​ble, his gaze resting on the sharp crease of his long trousers, he announced in deliberate, almost scared tones:
"I'm not going back, ever."
Without warning, a few days later, Captain Caxton presented Paul with a steamship ticket, a book of traveller's cheques, and a certificate of honourable discharge made out in his real name. Taken aback by the completeness of these arrangements, Paul feigned acquiescence, but before embarking on the coastal steamer he had the foresight to bribe one of his casual acquaintances—an employé in a bookshop—to send a forged telegram timed to reach him on his arrival in Sydney. With this telegram he would counter any officiousness on the part of well-meaning gentlemen who had been invited to see him safely on his homeward way.
He had not the faintest intention of continuing on the prescribed route to Vancouver and thence overland to Halifax, but of his intentions, which were vague, he said nothing to the captain, who came to see him off. Paul, while grateful to the captain for his goodwill, was hurt at not having been consulted. That, he felt, absolved him of all obligation to confide his plans. The old man had put money—Paul's own, as it now appeared—into his hands and shipped him off, had done his duty, according to his lights—for which he would find his reward in heaven! Henceforth Paul was answerable only to himself, and as he stood on the towering promenade deck of the Kalgoorlie looking over the roofs of warehouses and down at the figures on the quay—the "sisters and cousins and aunts" of his fellow-passengers—the boy smiled with a timorous exultation at the enormity of his plot. The great adventure was beginning with a vengeance.
The steamer drew slowly away from the dock and for a few moments rested in mid-stream. As the last hawser ​was heaved aboard, the steam-winches ceased clanking and a silence ensued, broken only by farewell "coo-ees." Then, faint but clear, over the patchwork of hot tiles, came the sound of bells. Paul's eyes sought out the tower of the town hall and a mist blurred his vision. The chimes—the magic formula. It was a final message in a code unknown to the old man and all the others, a message for him alone, a message of warning and comfort. "Have faith in yourself." Aunt Verona's words: "Du courage, mon petit—ça ira!" Yes, but it was going to be a lonely progress—bitterlich! For all their wisdom and fortitude, the bells were sad.
Poor red, sandy hot, bare little town! Up the river, beyond the bridge, he could descry the dingy "upstairs house" in which Miss Green lived. It was all but obscured by the branches of a fig tree. On the hill behind the town, near a clump of jarrahs, he made out the spot where he had stood on his first evening ashore—godlike on a sacred mount. He conjured up the smell of eucalyptus, and the shrill strains of "Cock o' the North."
The prosperous steamship was gliding towards the breakwater that extended beyond the mouth of the river. Somewhere a signal was clanging. Paul pictured the brass indicators. "And I polished up the handles so faithfully!" That unforgettable night at the theatre! Some day, somewhere, he would go to vast theatres, hear famous orchestras and operas: Faust, Carmen, Parsifal!
Beyond the steamers, far away at the end of the quay, were the tall masts and disordered yards of the Clytemnestra. Lightened of her burden, she stood high, her sides garishly daubed with vermilion. No more séances in the old sail locker, with its smell of manilla. No more smuggled tins of cherries and peaches; no more chocolate-coated biscuits; no more yarns in the galley and carpenter-shop. They had all seemed sorry when he said good-bye, and sheepishly affectionate. Strange how one could grow ​to love a ship quite as though it were a person, yet also a home. Good old Clytemnestra! This great steamship was tearing him away from something he cherished more than he had known. He thought of a sentence he had read in a wise French book: "Life is a series of partial deaths." But, as he mourned the death of the precocious cabin-boy, he reflected that life was, by the same token, a series of creations. "Laval est mort," he philosophized. "Vive Minas!" The mantle of the cabin-boy, complete with honourable discharge, had descended upon Master Paul Minas, first-class passenger. Gentleman Jim, to be sure. Shorty's taunts were only the vesture of envy. Poor Shorty didn't suspect the self-belittling effect of envy, and would go on taunting people till he had shrunk into nothing. Above all else, Paul wished to avoid such a fate. Mark Laval had taught him a lifelong lesson by showing up his narrow-mindedness. He had a morbid fear of setting out on any path that seemed easy. He even distrusted the magical book of cheques which he was carrying under his belt. By merely signing his name twenty times he could have as much money as Mr. Silva had paid for his little house in Hale's Turning, and that didn't seem right. He was sure Mr. Silva's personal worth had something to do with the fact that Mr. Silva had had to toil for his possessions.
Despite these moralistic reflections, Paul could not be indifferent to the luck that was making it possible for him to see cities bigger than Halifax: Adelaide, named after a queen; Melbourne, where Melba was born; Sydney, whose harbour, according to Miss Hornby, was one of the most beautiful in the world, and, according to Miss Green, full of sharks which gobbled up boys and girls who fell off ferry-boats.
And at Sydney? Well, anything rather than go aboard the liner waiting to take him to Vancouver. He would have to write a letter to Dr. Wilcove, exonerating the ​old man. And he would tell Dr. Wilcove not to hold himself responsible for anything, if it was such a bother. After all, the trustees couldn't keep the moss from growing over the shipyard at Hale's Turning; besides, he didn't want it.
There was the island where the Orizaba had sunk. Deep under the green water were skeletons shut up in cabins and engine-rooms. An enormous propeller lay abandoned on the bronze rocks, and the sun beat scorchingly down.
A gong sounded and passengers precipitated themselves below deck. Paul was filled with curiosity as to the food. With an overwhelming shyness he made his way toward the dining-saloon. A steward in a white jacket would serve him!