Chapter XXXVII
A wonderful event to-day! For five minutes, at noon, the sun was
actually visible. But such a sun!--a pale and cold and sickly orb that
at meridian was only 90 degrees 18 minutes above the horizon. And within
the hour we were taking in sail and lying down to the snow-gusts of a
fresh south-west gale.
Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!--this sailing rule of
the navigators for the Horn has been bitten out of iron. I can
understand why shipmasters, with a favouring slant of wind, have left
sailors, fallen overboard, to drown without heaving-to to lower a boat. Cape Horn is iron, and it takes masters of iron to win around from east to west.
And we make easting! This west wind is eternal. I listen incredulously
when Mr. Pike or Mr. Mellaire tells of times when easterly winds have
blown in these latitudes. It is impossible. Always does the west wind
blow, gale upon gale and gales everlasting, else why the "Great West Wind
Drift" printed on the charts! We of the afterguard are weary of this
eternal buffeting. Our men have become pulpy, washed-out, sore-corroded
shadows of men. I should not be surprised, in the end, to see Captain
West turn tail and run eastward around the world to Seattle. But
Margaret smiles with surety, and nods her head, and affirms that her
father will win around to 50 in the Pacific.
How Charles Davis survives in that wet, freezing, paint-scabbed room of
iron in the 'midship-house is beyond me--just as it is beyond me that the
wretched sailors in the wretched forecastle do not lie down in their
bunks and die, or, at least, refuse to answer the call of the watches.
Another week has passed, and we are to-day, by observation, sixty miles
due south of the Straits of Le Maire, and we are hove-to, in a driving
gale, on the port tack. The glass is down to 28.58, and even Mr. Pike
acknowledges that it is one of the worst Cape Horn snorters he has ever
experienced.
In the old days the navigators used to strive as far south as 64 degrees
or 65 degrees, into the Antarctic drift ice, hoping, in a favouring
spell, to make westing at a prodigious rate across the extreme-narrowing
wedges of longitude. But of late years all shipmasters have accepted the
hugging of the land all the way around. Out of ten times ten thousand
passages of Cape Stiff from east to west, this, they have concluded, is
the best strategy. So Captain West hugs the land. He heaves-to on the
port tack until the leeward drift brings the land into perilous
proximity, then wears ship and heaves-to on the port tack and makes
leeway off shore.
I may be weary of all this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a
frigid sea, but at the same time I do not mind it. In my brain burns the
flame of a great discovery and a great achievement. I have found what
makes all the books go glimmering; I have achieved what my very
philosophy tells me is the greatest achievement a man can make. I have
found the love of woman. I do not know whether she cares for me. Nor is
that the point. The point is that in myself I have risen to the greatest
height to which the human male animal can rise.
I know a woman and her name is Margaret. She is Margaret, a woman and
desirable. My blood is red. I am not the pallid scholar I so proudly
deemed myself to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the books. As for
De Casseres--if ever I get back to New York, equipped as I now am, I
shall confute him with the same ease that he has confuted all the
schools. Love is the final word. To the rational man it alone gives the
super-rational sanction for living. Like Bergson in his overhanging
heaven of intuition, or like one who has bathed in Pentecostal fire and
seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod the materialistic dictums of
science underfoot, scaled the last peak of philosophy, and leaped into my
heaven, which, after all, is within myself. The stuff that composes me, that is I, is so made that it finds its supreme realization in the love of woman. It is the vindication of being. Yes, and it is the wages of being, the payment in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh and breath.
