up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and sweet, fragrant of long sea distances; there was a soft warmth in it too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners on.
'So that's land! That's the Old Country!'
The words dropped out of their own accord; he could not help himself. The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and friendly touch; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it,—a whiff of his boyhood days—a smell of childhood and the things of childhood—ages ago, it seemed, in another life. The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweeping swells, and sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great desire to reach the land.
'Twenty years,' he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, 'twenty years since I last saw it!'
'And it's gol-darned nearer fifty since I seen it,' exclaimed a harsh voice just behind him.
He turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white; the hand that shaded his eyes was thick and worn; there was a heavy gold ring on the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled, loosely and unbuttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed, at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post; and it was only the light in the hard blue eyes—eyes still fixed unwaveringly on the distant line of the land—that redeemed it from a kind of grim savagery. Beaten and battered, yes! Yet at the same time triumphant. The atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis that he had failed in all he undertook—failed from stupidity rather than character, and always doggedly beginning over again with the same lack of intelligence—but yet had never given in, and never would give in.
It was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance; or to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years—a returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face remained expressionless and unmoved; but down both cheeks large tears ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the man with a sudden completeness that touched him with swift sympathy. At the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a desire to laugh.
'Fifty years! That's a long time indeed,' he said kindly. 'It's half-a-century.'
'That's so, Boss,' returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation; 'and I guess now I'll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it—and then git back again.'
He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head towards the man he was speaking to; only his lips moved; he did not even lift a finger to brush off the great tears that fell one by one from his cheeks to the deck. He seemed unconscious of them; as though it was so long since those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals; Paul Rivers actually heard them splash.
'I went out steerage,' the man continued to himself, or to the sea, or to any one else who cared to listen, 'and I come back steerage. That's my trouble. And now'—his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and watched a huge wave go thundering by—' I'm grave-huntin', I guess. And that's about the size of it. Jest see it and—git back again!'
The first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply—words with genuine sympathy in them—and then, getting no further answer, found it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the slippery decks.
A couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly. The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks, where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He was telling the history of his fifty years' disappointments and failures to one and all who cared to listen.
And, apparently, many cared to listen. The man's emotion was real; it found vigorous expression. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand dreams—ever one and the same dream, of course—and in the telling of it he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out; it did him a world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his overburdened soul.
And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.
It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man's passion, and its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying need of his.whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence.
'Lucky devil!' he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to his cabin for the field-glasses; 'he knows how to get it out—and does get it out! while I—with my impossible yearnings and my absurd diffidence in speaking of them to others—I haven't got a single safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can't get it out of me—all this ocean in my heart and soul—not a drop, not even a blessed tear!'
He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.
'Even my appearance is against me,' he went on with mournful humour; 'I look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God's world!'
He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.
'What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run and sing? Yet I know—though I can never tell it to another—what so many do not know! Who could ever believe that that man'—he pointed to himself in the glass, laughing—' wants above all else in life, above wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is Reality—which is God?'
A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making
