relative "combining weights"
seem to vary; by which I mean, their applicability to life, their
vital importance to me as a man, changes. This change, moreover, is
all in favour of the classics. One sees through shams more quickly--at
least, I think so. Books which I could always respect, yet never
touch, now come forth and show their glories to me. My own past work,
too, drops pathetically into its own place. And that is? Spare me this
confession!

One night, one star-light night, when the dark blue heaven, slashed
across with the pale immensity of the Milky Way, watched me with its
million winking eyes, I stole out on the poop with some stories in my
hand, and dropped them into the creamy rush of the wake. As the poor
little bits of paper swayed and eddied and drowned in the foaming
vortex, I felt, deep down in that heart which some say I do not
possess, a vague tremor of unrest. I felt, somehow, close to Eternity.
And then, as I went below once more, I wondered, "Will they _all_ go
like that?" "Shall I live to do _any_ good work?" Oh, the terrible
sadness of Noble Attempts! How I toiled at those stories! And all for
nothing. Flung, like the ashes from our furnaces, like the rubbish
from our larders, into the cruel oblivion of the unheeding sea.

IX

Such is the mood which comes over me at times when the pettiness of
the past starts up in the presence of these immensities of sea and
sky. M., you know, when he would come back to his studio from some
yachting cruise in the Channel, and find me in his armchair, would
drag me out to look at the ceaselessly changing glories of the river
at sunset, and tell me how the vastness of the sea always communicated
to him an overwhelming sense of the Power of God.

"You can't get away from it, old man," he would say. "Out there
alone, man is nothing, God is everything." Why could I never assent
to that? Why, when people ask me if I love the sea, am I silent? Well,
have you ever heard the sudden yapping of a puppy at night? Imagine
it, then, at sea. The two Immensities between which we creep: the sea
flashing with her own secret glory of phosphorescent fire, the sky
emblazoned with her countless diadems, and then--yap-yap-yap! That
is how the pestilent cackle of many people affects me when they
rave about the sea. Why do they not keep silent, like the stars?
God! These fools, I think, would clatter up the steps of the Great
White Throne, talking, talking, talking! When t