Atop an Underwood (30 page)

Yet, Bill now admitted with reluctance, even Wesley Martin had set himself a purpose, and this purpose was the idea of life—life at sea—a Thoreau before the mast. Conviction had led Wesley to the sea; confusion had led Everhart to the sea.

A confused intellectual, Everhart, the oldest weed in society; beyond that, an intelligent modern minus the social conscience of that class. Further, a son without a conscience—a lover without a wife! A prophet without confidence, a teacher of men without wisdom, a sorry mess of a man thereat!

Well, things would be different from now on ... a change of life might give him the proper perspective. Surely, it had not been folly to take a vacation from his bookish, beerish life, as another side of his nature might deny! What wrong was there in treating his own life, within the bounds of moral conscience, as he chose and as he freely wished? Youth was still his, the world might yet open its portals as it had done that night at Carnegie Hall in 1927 when he first heard the opening bars of Brahms' first symphony! Yes! As it opened its doors for him so many times in his 'teens and closed them firmly, as though a stern and hostile master were its doorman, during his enraged twenties.

Now he was thirty-two years old and it suddenly occurred to him that he had been a fool, yes, even though a lovable fool, the notorious “shortypants” with the erudite theories and the pasty pallor of a teacher of life ... and not a liver of life. Wasn't it Thomas Wolfe who had struck a brief spark in him at twenty-six and filled him with new love for life until it slowly dawned on him that Tom Wolfe—as his colleagues agreed in delighted unison—was a hopeless romanticist? What of it? What if triumph were Wolfe's only purpose? .... if life was essentially a struggle, then why not struggle toward triumph, why not, in that case, achieve triumph! Wolfe had failed to add to whom triumph was liege ... and that, problem though it was, could surely be solved, solved in the very spirit of his cry for triumph. Wolfe had sounded the old cry of a new world. Wars come, wars go! elated Bill to himself, this cry is an insurgence against the forces of evil, which creeps in the shape of submission to evil, this cry is a denial of the not-Good and a plea for the Good. Would he, then, William Everhart, plunge his whole being into a new world? Would he love? Would he labor? Would he, by God, fight? [...]

That afternoon, while Everhart sat sunning near the poop deck, reading Coleridge's “Ancient Mariner,” he was startled by the harsh ringing of a bell behind him. He looked up from the book and glanced around the horizon with fear. What was it?

A droning, nasal voice spoke over the ship's address system: “All hands to the boat deck. All hands to the boat deck.” The system whistled deafeningly.

Bill grinned and looked around, fear surging in his breast. The other seamen, who had been lounging on the deck with him, now dashed off. The warm wind blew Bill's pages shut; he rose to his feet with a frown and laid down the book on his folding chair.

This calm, sunny afternoon at sea, flashing greens and golds, whipping bracing breezes across lazy decks, was this an afternoon for death? Was there a submarine prowling in these beautiful waters?

Bill shrugged and ran down to his focastle for the lifebelt; running down the alleyway, he hastily strapped it on, and clambered up the first ladder. An ominous silence had fallen over the ship.

“What the hell's going on!” he muttered as he climbed topsides. “This is no time for subs! We've just got started!” His legs wobbled on the ladder rungs.

On the top deck, groups of quiet seamen stood beside their lifeboats, a grotesque assemblage in lifebelts, dungarees, cook's caps, aprons, oiler's caps, bowcaps, khaki pants, and dozens of other motley combinations of dress. Bill hastened toward his own lifeboat and halted beside a group. No one spoke. The wind howled in the smoking funnel, flapped along the deck waving the clothing of the seamen, and rushed out over the stern along the bright green wake of the ship. The ocean sighed a soothing, sleepy hush, a sound that pervaded everywhere in suffusing enormity as the ship slithered on through, rocking gently forward.

Bill adjusted his spectacles and waited.

“Just a drill, I think,” offered a seaman.

One of the Puerto Rican seamen in Bill's group, who wore a flaring cook's cap and a white apron beneath his lifebelt, began to conga across the deck while a comrade beat a conga rhythm on his thighs. They laughed.

The bell rang again, the voice returned: “Drill dismissed. Drill dismissed.”

The seamen broke from groups into a confused swarm waiting to file down the ladders. Bill took off his lifebelt and dragged it behind him as he sauntered forward. Now he had seen everything ... the ship, the sea ... mornings, noons, and nights of sea ... the crew, the destroyer ahead, a boat drill, everything.

He felt suddenly bored. What would he do for the next three months?

Bill went down to the engine room that night to talk with Nick Meade. He descended a steep night of iron steps and stopped in his tracks at the sight of the monster source of the Westminster's power ... great pistons charged violently, pistons so huge one could hardly expect them to move with such frightening rapidity. The Westminster's shaft turned enormously, leading its revolving body toward the stern through what seemed to Bill a giant cave for a giant rolling serpent.

Bill stood transfixed before this monstrous power; he began to feel annoyed. What were ideas in the face of these brutal pistons, pounding up and down with a force compounded of nature and intriguing with nature against the gentle form of man?

Bill descended further, feeling as though he were going down to the bottom of the sea itself. What chance could a man have down here if a torpedo should ram at the waterline, when the engine room deck was at a level thirty or forty feet below! Torpedo ... another brutal concoction of man, by George! He tried to imagine a torpedo slamming into the engine room against the hysterical blind power of the pistons, the deafening shock of the explosion, the hiss of escaping steam, the billows of water pouring in from a sea of endless water, himself lost in this holocaust and being pitched about like a leaf in a whirlpool! Death! ... he half expected it to happen that precise moment.

A water tender stood checking a gauge.

“Where's the oiler Meade?” shouted Bill above the roar of the great engine. The water tender pointed forward. Bill walked until he came to a table where Nick sat brooding over a book in the light of a green-shaded lamp.

Nick waved his hand; he had apparently long given up conversation in an engine room, for he pushed a book toward Bill. Bill propped himself up on the table and ran through the leaves.

“Words, words, words,” he droned, but the din of the engine drowned out his words and Nick went on reading.

The next day—another sundrowned day—the Westminster steamed North off the coast of Nova Scotia, about forty miles offshore, so that the crew could see the dim purple coastline just before dusk.

A fantastic sunset began to develop ... long sashes of lavender drew themselves above the sun and reached thin shapes above distant Nova Scotia. Wesley strolled aft, digesting his supper, and was surprised to see a large congregation of seamen on the poop deck. He advanced curiously.

A man stood before the winch facing them all and speaking with gestures; on the top of the winch, he had placed a Bible, and he now referred to it in a pause. Wesley recognized him as the ship's baker.

“And they were helped against them, and the Hagarites were delivered into their hand, and all that were with them,” the baker shouted. “For they cried to God in the battle and he was entreated of them because they put their trust in him ...”

Wesley glanced around at the assemblage. The seamen seemed reluctant to listen, but none of them made any motion to leave. Some watched the sunset, others the water, others gazed down—but all were listening. Everhart stood at the back listening curiously.

“And so, brothers,” resumed the baker, who had obviously appointed himself the Westminster's spiritual guide for the trip, “we must draw a lesson from the faith of the Reubenites in their war with the Hagarites and in our turn call to God's aid in our danger. The Lord watched over them and he will watch over us if we pray to him and entreat his mercy in this dangerous ocean where the enemy waits to sink our ship ...”

Wesley buttoned up his peacoat; it was decidedly chilly. Behind the baker's form, the sunset pitched alternately over and below the deck rail, a florid spectacle in pink. The sea was deep blue.

“Let us kneel and pray,” shouted the baker, picking up his Bible, his words drowned in a sudden gust of sea wind so that only those nearby heard him. They knelt with him. Slowly, the other seamen dropped to,their knees. Wesley stood in the midst of the bowed shapes.

“Oh God,” prayed the baker in a tremulous wail, “Watch over and keep us in our journey, Oh Lord, see that we arrive safely and ...”

Wesley shuffled off and heard no more. He went to the bow and faced the strong headwind blowing in from the North, its cold tang biting into his face and fluttering back his scarf like a pennant.

North, in the wake of the destroyer, the sea stretched a seething field which grew darker as it merged with the lowering sky. The destroyer prowled.

When James Joyce wrote “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” he was asserting his belief in beauty, beauty as a lasting truth, beauty as a joy not transient but sustaining, a deeply religious feeling for beauty. In the “Portrait” he told of the beauty yet to come from Joyce; it came, in the ten-year labor, “Ulysses.”

Likewise, Tom Wolfe heralded beauty-to-come in his first novel “Look Homeward, Angel.” It came, in its fullest grandeur in “You Can't Go Home Again.”

In both cases, the young men (Dedalus and Gant) were aliens in a world unmindful of beauty as a religion. They were, indeed, pitted full-force against the hard wall of the world's will. Like two Messiahs, they were generally crucified, yet they survived to create the beauty they had heralded in their youths.

This is a strange truth. What is beauty, then, in the Gant-Dedalus sense?

In the first place, both attained the accumulated cultures of the world; they resembled Goethe in that they undertook huge labours during which they attempted to reach all of knowledge. These were heroic men, then. They were, in every sense, Promethean.

The beauty they saw is not the sparkle found in the romantic palaver, say, of revolutionists, or parvenus of the arts, or even Londonese super-seamen and prospectors. (This can be clarified for general understanding.) In other words, theirs was not the beauty of alluring things, say the fascinating junction of Moscow bells ringing on May Day; (this, indeed, is a type of beauty which makes for the religious life of many a youth); nor was their beauty something allied, or conjoined, with, let us say, the Left Bank, an oil still moist, Parisian breeze from the Seine, and candle guttering in the garret corner—this type of thing, I have found, is the religious ambition of many young people, as it was to me several years ago; nor was their sense of beauty completely fortified within the saloon scene, the broad, rugged America scene, the back-slapping, two-fisted, whiskey-guzzling beauty. It is quite safe to say that theirs was a beauty vast and deep enough to include
all
of these transient entities, but it went beyond & above these in a great circumveloping pall.