how terribly foolish and
piteous great men were.... Jesus dead on a crucifix; Socrates and the
hemlock bowl; the earnest Paul beheaded at Rome.... A little wisdom, a
little callousness would have avoided all this.... How satisfied he was,
how damned petty! His little bourgeois life, his harem of one pretty
girl, his nice ship ... smug as a shop-keeper ... and then life, fate,
whatever you call it, had tripped him up, abashed, beaten, through the
medium of a mountebank wrestler whom he had conquered in a street
brawl....

[Illustration]

And after seven years of blackness, and despair. The long reach to
Buenos Aires, and the querulous sea-birds mocking him: On the land is
desolation and pettiness and disappointment.... And what is there on the
sea? The great whale is dying; the monster who ranged the deep must go
because men must have oil to cast up their accounts by the light of it,
and women must have whalebone for stays.... The sleek seal with brown
gentle eyes must die that harlots shall wear furs.... And there never
was a Neptune or a Mannanan mac Lir.... There were only stories from a
foolish old book.... The sun shines for a moment on the green waters,
and your heart rises.... But remember the blackness of the typhoon,
and how the cold left-hand wind rages round the Horn.... And the coral
islands have great reefs like knives, and the golden tropics lure to
black lethal snakes.... Fool! Fool! We have ranged the clouds, and there
is no good-willing God.... There is only coldness and malignant
things.... So cried the querulous sea voices, and they tempted him: "All
you have known is desolation and vanity. Better to have died a boy while
the meadows they were green.... All before you is emptiness," they
mocked. And they came nearer: "Behold, the night is black, the ocean is
of great depth, immeasurable, the ship plows onward under a quartering
breeze. A little step, a little step leeward, a vault over the taffrail
as over a little ditch, and there will be peace and rest. Look at the
water flow past. No problems there.... God! how close he had been to it,
in the seven black years, the long voyage from Liverpool, and the sordid
town at the end.... How close! And then Alan Donn, God rest him! had
died, and he had gone back to Ireland, and met Granya, and been foolish
as a boy in his teens. A shipload of rifles to free Ireland! What a
damned fool he had felt when they had simply shooed him away!"

He thought to himsel