As if Larry had the shred of a chance against that redoubtable aged man! Wada reported that Larry, amongst other things, had lost a couple of front teeth and was laid up in his bunk for the day. When I met Mr. Pike on deck after eight o'clock I glanced at his knuckles.
They verified Wada's tale.
I cannot help being amused by the keen interest I take in little events like the foregoing. Not only has time ceased, but the world has ceased. Strange it is, when I come to think of it, in all these weeks I have received no letter, no telephone call, no telegram, no visitor. I have not been to the play. I have not read a newspaper.
So far as I am concerned, there are no plays nor newspapers. All such things have vanished with the vanished world. All that exists is the Elsinore, with her queer human freightage and her cargo of coal, cleaving a rotund of ocean of which the skyline is a dozen miles away.
I am reminded of Captain Scott, frozen on his south-polar venture, who for ten months after his death was believed by the world to be alive. Not until the world learned of his death was he anything but alive to the world. By the same token, was he not alive? And by the same token, here on the Elsinore, has not the land-world ceased? May not the pupil of one's eye be, not merely the centre of the world, but the world itself? Truly, it is tenable that the world exists only in consciousness. "The world is my idea," said Schopenhauer.
Said Jules de Gaultier, "The world is my invention." His dogma was that imagination created the Real. Ah, me, I know that the practical Miss West would dub my metaphysics a depressing and unhealthful exercise of my wits.
To-day, in our deck chairs on the poop, I read The Daughters of Herodias to Miss West. It was superb in its effect--just what I had expected of her. She hemstitched a fine white linen handkerchief for her father while I read. (She is never idle, being so essentially a nest-maker and comfort-producer and race-conserver; and she has a whole pile of these handkerchiefs for her father.)She smiled, how shall I say?--oh, incredulously, triumphantly, oh, with all the sure wisdom of all the generations of women in her warm, long gray eyes, when I read:
"But they smile innocently and dance on, Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:
'Am I not beautiful? Shall I not be loved?'
Be patient, for they will not understand, Not till the end of time will they put by The weaving of slow steps about men's hearts.""But it is well for the world that it is so," was her comment.
Ah, Symons knew women! His perfect knowledge she attested when Iread that magnificent passage:
"They do not understand that in the world There grows between the sunlight and the grass Anything save themselves desirable.
It seems to them that the swift eyes of men Are made but to be mirrors, not to see Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.
'For are not we,' they say, 'the end of all?
Why should you look beyond us? If you look Into the night, you will find nothing there:
We also have gazed often at the stars.'"
"It is true," said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to see how she had received the thought. "We also have gazed often at the stars."It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.
"But wait," I cried. "Let me read on." And I read:
"'We, we alone among all beautiful things, We only are real: for the rest are dreams.
Why will you follow after wandering dreams When we await you? And you can but dream Of us, and in our image fashion them.'""True, most true," she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and power mounted in her eyes.
"A wonderful poem," she conceded--nay, proclaimed--when I had done.
"But do you not see . . ." I began impulsively, then abandoned the attempt. For how could she see, being woman, the "far-off, disastrous, unattainable things," when she, as she so stoutly averred, had gazed often on the stars?
She? What could she see, save what all women see--that they only are real, and that all the rest are dreams.
"I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias," said Miss West.
"Well," I admitted lamely, "we agree. You remember it is what I told you you were.""I am grateful for the compliment," she said; and in those long gray eyes of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and self-certitude and answering complacency of power that constitute so large a part of the seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by woman.
