ea, high on a topsail-yard, to see the grey return of the glory of the
day. The work is often sheer murder, but it is the work of men, and
though the skin cracks and the nails bleed, as the bulging, slatting,
frantic canvas surges like a cast-iron wave, the thin red-shirted line
along the jack-stay does heroic work without meaning it, without one
touch of consciousness, without praise, and mostly without even that
reward of a "tot" of grog so sweet to the simple-minded sailorman. Ah,
yes, to be sure we were heroes, and I too (though now soft and
self-conscious) played an Homeric part upon the yard, was bold, and
afraid, and "funked" it with any god-smitten, panic-driven half-god by
Scamander's banks, or the windy walls of Troy. Now I know what it was,
and can see the grey wash of ocean, and the grey wash of white-faced
morning with the great seas driving against the rising day, even as the
rollers of the Atlantic surge against the base of a high berg. Little
good men at home, fat men, rotund, easy souls, or those who are neither
good, nor fat, nor easy, may stare and imagine yet not come near the
reality when the wind booms and the sea rises, and the great concave of
night sky flattens and presses down upon the driven ship, and men
strive to escape doom and yet care not, and work till they are blind,
and then drop down into the scant shelter of the deck, where the icy
wind seems warm after the strife and bellowing up aloft. Heroes? To be
sure we were heroes. What is being shot at a mile off, or a hundred
yards off, to being shot at by the very heavens while one hangs over the
gaping trenches of the sea? There is not an old shellback alive who has
clung between angry heaven and the grey-green pastures of the deep but
deserves a Victoria Cross for unconscious, dutiful, grumbling, growling
valour. He might justly call every scanty dollar he earns a medal. For
he has often fought in the Pacific, or by the Horn, or off the windy
Cape. To recall the thick tempest at midnight, when the wind harps
thunder on the stretched rigging, is to be a man again. If I blow their
trumpet, the trumpet of the old sea-dogs, these scallawags, these
Vikings, what matter if I seem to blow my own, having been their
companion one campaign or two upon the deep? That "Me" is dead, I know,
and can only be resurgent in memory, and will never laugh or feel afraid
again when the slatting canvas jars one's very teeth. Yet to remember
(as I can remember) ho