Julius Caesar believed it was better to be first in a small Iberian village than second in Rome. And Arthur Grey took Caesar at his word. He wanted to be a sea captain, and became a sea captain. The enormous house in which Arthur was born was gloomy indoors and majestic outside. It was surrounded by a flower garden and a private park. In whimsical strings, tulips of the rarest shades, silver blue, violet, and touched with rose, wound through the well-kept lawn. Ancient trees slumbered in diffused half-light i above the rushes of a winding stream. The castle fence—for this was a real castle—consisted of twisting cast-iron pillars joined together by iron grillwork. Each pillar was topped by a luxuriant cast-iron lily, and on holidays the lily cups were filled with oil and served as lamps which blazed out into the darkness in a long and fiery array. Grey's father and mother were the haughty prisoners of their position, wealth, and the laws of the society to which they belonged.
One part of their beings was occupied by a gallery of ancestors, little worthy of having had their portraits painted, and the other was filled with the hoped-for continuation of the gallery beginning with little Arthur. He was thus predestined to live out his life according to a fixed plan and to die in such a way that his portrait could hang on the wall without offense to family honor. There was one small hitch to this plan. Arthur Grey was born with a lively mind of his own and was not in the least inclined to continue along the lines of family precedent.
This vitality and the contrariness of the boy began to be apparent when he was eight. The knight-errant of whimsy, the explorer and the miracle-worker, in other words that person who chooses from among the infinite variety of roles in life, the most dangerous—that of the hero— came to the fore in Grey on the day he pushed a chair up against a wall so as to be able to reach up to a painting showing the crucifixion. He removed the nails driven through Christ's bleeding hands by covering them over with blue paint pilfered from a house painter. He found the painting more bearable in this condition. He was about to paint over the nails in the feet when his father took him by surprise. The old man helped him off the chair by the ear and asked, "Why did you spoil the painting?"
"I didn't spoil it."
"It's the work of a famous artist."
"I don't care," said young Grey. "I won't have nails sticking out of hands and blood running. I don't want it."
In his son's reply Lionel Grey recognized him- self. He hid his smile behind his mustache and did not punish him.
Young Grey searched the castle incessantly and made astonishing discoveries. In the garret he found discarded knights' armor, books bound in iron and leather, rotted clothing, and a big flock of doves.
In the cellar he acquired an interesting knowledge of Madeira, sherry, and other wines. Here in the dim light of sharppointed windows, resting beneath the weight of the slanting triangles of stone archways, stood large and small barrels. The largest, with its flat end against the back of the cellar, took up the entire wall. The century-old dark oak of the barrel shone as if polished. Among the smaller casks stood fat-bellied bottles of green or dark blue glass in woven covers. On the earthen floor between the stones grew gray mushrooms on thin stalks. Everywhere there was mold, moss, dampness, and a sour, stifling odor. An enormous spider web glistened gold in the far corner when, just before twilight, the sun brightened it with a last ray. There was also the spot where two casks of the finest Alicante of the times of Cromwell were buried. The wine keeper, Poldychoke, as he pointed out the corner to Grey, took the opportunity of repeating the story of this famous wine. Before beginning his account, Poldychoke did not fail to make sure that the spigot of the big barrel was functioning properly. And, indeed, as he continued his story, he went back to check again and again. One could see when he returned, from the involuntary tears of satisfaction that moistened his merry eyes, that his heart was obviously lighter.
"Well, here's the way it is," Poldychoke said to Grey, as he seated himself on an empty box and shoved snuff up his sharp nose. "Look over there. Just for one little glass of the wine buried there, many a drinker would let his tongue be cut out. Each of the barrels contains one hundred quarts of a substance that can make the soul explode and turn the body into stiff dough. Its color is darker than cherry. It is as thick as the thickest cream, so thick it will not pour from a bottle. It is encased in casks of ebony that are as strong as iron, and they are banded by double hoops of red copper. Engraved on the hoops in Latin are the words, "Grey will drink me down when he is in paradise.' This legend has been interpreted in many ways. Your great-grandfather, Simeon Grey, tried to trick fate by building himself a country residence and calling it Paradise. But guess what happened? The old gourmet got so excited he died of a heart attack just as they started to remove the hoops. Since then no one has touched the casks, and it is believed that to drink the precious wine will bring unhappi- ness.
"These casks were brought here by your ancestor, John Grey of Lisbon, on the good ship 'Beagle' in 1793. Two thousand gold piasters were paid for them. The legend on the casks was inscribed by the master annorer, Benjamin Elyan, of Pondicherry. The casks are buried in the earth to a depth of six feet and covered over with the ashes of grape vines. This wine has never been drunk, and never will be drunk. "I will drink it," said Grey, stamping his foot.
"That's a bold chap!" exclaimed Poldychoke. "Are you going to drink it in paradise?"
"Of course. This is paradise! I have it right here, see?" And Grey laughed quietly, opening his palm. The tender yet firm lines were lit up by the sun, and the small boy closed his fingers into a fist. "Here it is right in here! Now it's here and now it's gone."
As he spoke, he opened and closed his hand, and finally, pleased with his joke, ran out ahead of Poldychoke and up the dark stairway into the corridor of the ground floor.
The kitchen was strictly forbidden territory to Grey. But once he had discovered its world of blazing hearth, fires, of steam, soot, and sizzle, of bubbling and boiling liquids, of clattering knives, of delicious smells, the boy went often to the enormous room. The cooks moved about in silence like oracles. Their white kitchen bonnets outlined against the background of blackened walls endowed their work with the solemnity of a religious service. The merry fat dishwashers at the water barrels rinsed the dishes to the ringing of china and Silver. Small boys, bending beneath their heavy iloads, carried in full baskets of fish, oysters, .crabs, and fruits. On the long table lay rainbow-colored pheasants, gray ducks, colorful chickens, and a pig's carcass with a short little tail and eyes shut like those of an infant. There were also turnips, cabbages, walnuts, black raisins, and suntanned peaches.
In the kitchen young Grey was a bit shy. It seemed to him as if here everything were ruled by dark, powerful forces, the mamspring of the life of the castle. Shouts sounded like commands and invocations. The movements of those working, thanks to long habit, had acquired a precision that seemed inspired. Grey was not yet tall enough to peer into the biggest pot of all, which seethed like Vesuvius, but he felt a special respect for it. With trepidation he watched it being stirred by two servants. Smoky foam splashed out on the hot stove, and steam, rising from it in waves, filled the kitchen. One time so much liquid splashed out that one of the kitchen maids scalded her arm. Her skin grew bright red immediately. Even her fingernails became crimson with the accumulation of blood, and Betsy, as she was called, wept and rubbed the burn with oil at the same time. The tears poured relentlessly down her round and frightened face.
Grey froze. While the women were bustling around Betsy, he felt for her suffering and wanted to understand her pain.
"Does it hurt a lot?" he asked.
"You just try it and you'll see," Betsy had replied, covering her arm with her apron.
The boy, frowning, climbed up on a stool, reached into the pot with a long spoon for some of the hot liquid—it was mutton soup—and dripped it on his hand. The sharp pain made him reel. White as flour. Grey went up to Betsy, sticking his stinging hand into his trouser pocket. "I'm sure it hurts a lot," he said, saying nothing of his own experiment. "Let's go to the doctor, Betsy. Let's go!"
He pulled her energetically by the skirt, at the same time as the proponents of home remedies vied with each other in preparing recipes for her salvation. But the girl, in great torjment, went along with Grey. The physician iid ease the pain and dress the burn. Only after Betsy had left did Grey show his own hand.
This minor episode made twenty-year-old Betsy and ten-year-old Grey the best of friends. She kept stuffing his pockets with dumplings and apples. And he repeated to her fairy tales and other stories that he read in his books. When he discovered that Betsy could not marry the stableboy, Jim, because they had no money to set up housekeeping, Grey broke open his porcelain piggy bank with the fireplace tongs and took out his savings amounting to about one hundred pounds. Rising early and waiting till dowryless Betsy had gone to work in the kitchen, he crept into her room and hid his gift in the girl's trunk. With it he left a note which said: "Betsy, this is for you. From the Chief of the Brigands, Robin Hood." There was a big fuss in the kitchen over the incident. Finally Grey had to come forward and confess. But he refused either to take the money back or to say anything more about it.
His mother was one of those persons whom life casts in a ready-made mold. She lived in a semi-slumber, lulled by a security that provided for every wish of her rather mediocre person. She had nothing to do at all, except consult her seamstress, her doctor, and her butler. But her passionate, almost religious, attachment to her strange child was, it would seem, the one outlet for good instincts otherwise so anaesthetized by her upbringing and fate that they were no longer really active, leaving her without any real will of her own. She resembled a hen who had hatched a swan's egg. She was pained by the beautiful strangeness of her son. Sadness, love, and constraint welled up in her when she pressed the boy to her breast. Her heart did not speak the same language as her conventional tongue.
This lady of high society, who could respond ii only with icy silence to the fiery appeals of life, whose delicate beauty repelled rather than attracted because it reflected a haughty constraint which was totally laddng in femininity, when left alone with her son became an ordinary mama who spoke in loving, gentle tones those heartfelt trivialities which cannot be put down on paper. She could not say No to her son at all. She forgave him everything: his visits to the kitchen, his dislike for his lessons, his disobedience, and his innumerable whims.
If he didn't want the trees pruned, they remained unpruned. If he asked that someone be forgiven or rewarded, it was done. He could ride any horse he wanted to, bring into the castle any stray dog, rummage about in the library, run barefoot, and eat whatever he felt like eating.
For a time his father fought against this, but in the end he gave in to his wife's wishes. He did, however, take one precautionary measure. The servants' children were removed from the castle because he feared that association with them might change what were a boy's caprices into permanent tastes that would be hard to uproot. He was, in general, occupied to the exclusion of everything else with innumerable family lawsuits whose origin dated back to the discovery of paper, and which would probably continue until the death of all pettifoggers and intriguers. In addition, affairs of state, business dealings in connection with his inheritance, the dictation of his memoirs, formal hunts, the reading of newspapers, and complex correspondence kept him away from his family. He saw his son so rarely that he sometimes forgot how old he was.
Thus young Arthur Grey lived in his own world. He played alone, usually in the rear courtyards of the castle which in olden times had been used for military purposes. These broad vacant lots, with remnants of deep moats and stone powder magazines overgrown with moss, were now fields of tall weeds, nettles, burdock, thorn bushes, and modest, varicolored flowers. Grey spent hours investigating mole holes, fighting the tall weeds, catching butterflies, and building fortresses out of broken brick, which he then bombarded with sticks and cobblestones.
He was twelve when in one supreme moment all the inner urgings of his spirit, all the undirected traits of his character, his secret aspirations, became fused into one unconquerable desire.
It hannened m the library. Its high door, the uper part of which was made of translucent glass, was usually kept locked. But the bolt was loose, and if one pressed hard enough, it would shift a bit and could, with an effort, be forced open. When the spirit of adventure pushed Arthur Grey into invading the library, he was astonished by the dusty light which reflected the glowing pattern of the stained glass that adorned the upper part of the windows. The silence of solitude lay here. Some of the dark rows of bookcases were joined onto the windows, half cutting off their light. In the aisles between the bookcases were piles of books: an open album, with loose pages scattered about; scrolls tied with gold cord; stacks of gloomylooking volumes; thick layers of manuscripts; an embankment of miniature books that crackled crisply when opened. There were drawings on tables, rows of new editions, maps; a variety of bindings, crude, soft, black, many-hued, dark blue, gray, thick, thin, rough, and smooth. The shelves were tightly packed with books. They seemed like walls enclosing life itself in their thickness. In the reflection of the glassenclosed bookcases, one saw other shelves which seemed to be splattered with colorless, shining spots. An enormous globe encircled in a spherical brass cross of the equator and meridian stood on a round table.
When he turned to leave. Grey saw hanging over the door an enormous painting whose power immediately permeated the mustiness of the library. It showed a ship, streams of foam flowing along its sides. It was at the very peak of rise on the crest of a mighty wave and seemed be coming straight at the onlooker. Its bowsprit, lifted high, hid the base of the mast. The crest of the wave, sliced by the keel, resembled the wings of a giant bird. Foam hung in the air. The sails, partly hidden behind the forecastle and bowsprit, were filled with the furious force of a storm. They lay backwards, in their full expanse, readying themselves to top the wave, straighten, and go forward, over the chasm ahead, driving the ship into new maelstroms. Tatters of clouds hovered over the ocean. The dim light of evening struggled hopelessly to stem the onrushing darkness of the night. But the most remarkable thing of all in this picture was the figure of a man standing on the forecastle, his back to the onlooker. In him was personified not only the entire situation, but the essence of that exact moment. Although in itself the man's pose—feet astride and arms waving - did not explain what he was doing, it conveyed an intense concentration directed at something on the deck, invisible to the viewer. The turned-up flaps of his long kaftan shook in the wind. His white braid and a black sword were flung back into the air. The lavishness of his uniform indicated he was the captain, and the balancing stance of his body pointed up the force of the wave. He wore no cap, and evidently completely absorbed in the danger of the moment, he was shouting—but what? Had he seen someone go overboard and given the order to come about? Or was he calling to the boatswain and trying to outshout the wind? Not actual thoughts but echoes of thoughts invaded Grey's mind as he looked at the painting. Suddenly he felt as if someone unknown and invisible had come up to him on his left and was standing beside him. All he had to do was to turn his head and the sensation would disappear. Grey knew this, but instead of silencing his imagination he listened to it. A soundless voice shouted some phrases, incomprehensible, as if in Malayan. He heard the rolling roar of long, drawn-out avalanches. An echo and a dark wind filled the library. All of this young Grey heard within himself. He looked around. Instantly the quiet silenced the noisy maze of fantasy. Communication with the storm was lost.
Several times Grey came back to look at the painting. It became for him the key word in the dialogue between his dreams and life and helped him to understand himself. The broad sea became a part of the small boy. He rummaged in the library, searching for and reading greedily those books behind whose golden doors there stretched the blue sheen of the ocean. In this sea, foam running astern, ships sailed. Some of them lost their sails, their masts, and devoured by the waves, descended into the darloiess of the deep amidst the twinkling phosphorescent eyes of fish. Others, in the grip of breakers, broke on reefs. The subsiding forse of the waves dangerously tossed a wrecked hull back and forth. The abandoned ship, with torn and broken rigging, lived through a long agony until a new storm broke it into bits. Others loaded successfully in one port and unloaded in another. The crew, at the tavern table, praised the life of the sea and gaily gulped down their drinks. There were pirate ships flying a Jolly Roger and with an awesome knife-bearing crew; ghost ships gleaming with deathly blue light; navy ships with soldiers, cannons, and music; ships of scientific expeditions looking for volcanoes, for marine plants and animals; ships with dark secrets and mutinies; ships of discovery and ships of adventure.
In this world of the sea, naturally the figure of the captain rose high above everyone else. He was the fate, the heart, the brain of his ship. He determined the crew's play and work. He picked the crew himself and he answered largely for its shortcomings. He knew the habits and family affairs of the ship's men. In the eyes of his subordinates he was the possessor of magic knowledge, thanks to which he could sail with assurance through boundless expanses from Lisbon to Shanghai. He coped with a storm by a complex system of countermeasures and quieted panic with bis curt orders. He sailed and he stopped where he wished. He directed departures and loadings, repairs and rest time. His enormous and wisely applied power, employed as it was in work full of incessant movement, was hard to imagine. Such authority, self-contained and total, was equaled only by the power of a God.
Such was the mental picture of a captain, such the image of his position that took hold of Grey's consciousness, his spiritual life. There is no other profession that can so perfectly fuse into a whole all of the treasures of life and at the same time keep inviolate the highly delicate pattern of each separate joy. Danger, risk, the power of nature, the light of a far country, the wonderful unknown, love budding and flowering in meeting and parting, the fascination of encounters, persons, events, immeasurable variety, and rising on the horizon the Southern Cross, the Big Dipper, and all the continents - all these are within range of a captain's sharp eyes. And yet his cabin is full of the homeland which never leaves him, with its books, pictures, letters, and dried flowers tied with a silken curl and resting in a suede pouch on a firm chest.
In the fall of his fifteenth year, young Grey ran away to sea. The schooner Anselm sailed from the port of Dubelt for Marseille, carrying on board a ship's boy with small hands and the soft features of a girl. The ship's boy was Grey, who had come aboard wearing patent leather boots as thin as gloves, cambric linens embroidered with the sign of a crown, and a fine traveling bag.
During a year while the 'Anselm' visited France, America, and Spain, young Grey squandered part of his assets on pastry, by this token paying tribute to the past. The remainder, in the name of the present and the future, he lost at cards. He wanted to be a real devil of a seafaring man. He drank down liquor, nearly choking. When he swam, he dove, head first, into the water, with a sinking heart, from a fifteen foot height. Little by htde he lost everything he had brought with him—except his strange, soaring spirit. He lost his frailty and became broad of bone and strong of muscle. A dark tan replaced his pallor. The once refined carelessness of his movements took on the precision of the working hand. In his thoughtful eyes there appeared a gleam like that of a person staring into a fire. His manner of speaking, after it lost its uneven, haughty, shy fluidity, became curt and exact.
The captain of the 'Anselm' was a good man but a strict sailor, who had taken the boy aboard out of caprice. He saw in young Grey's desperate desire to go to sea only an eccentric wish and gloated when he imagined how, in a month or so, the boy would say to him, without being able to look him in the eye: "Captain Hopp, l've scratched my elbows climbing about on the rigging. My side and my back ache. My fingers won't bend any longer. My head is splitting, and my legs are shaking. All of those wet ships' cables that weigh almost a hundred-weight suspended in one's hands, those jackstays, shrouds, windlasses, hawsers, topmasts, and crosstrees, the whole lot of them were created solely to torture my tender body. I want to go home to my mother."
Listening in his mind to this speech. Captain Hopp imagined how he would reply: "You just go wherever you please, my little chick. If your tender little wings have got a little tar on them, you can wash it off at home with Rosa-Mimosa Eau-de-Cologne."
The name for the eau-de-cologne, which Hopp had thought up himself, made him laugh in his thoughts louder than anything else, and when he had delivered his fare-thee-well, he would repeat out loud to himself: "Yes, yes, run along to your 'Rosa-Mimosa.'"
As time went on, this dialogue came to the mind of the captain less and less. Grey worked steadily toward his goal, with teeth gritted and face pale. He bore the nerve-wracking labor with a determined exertion of will, knowing that the more the severity of life on the ship penetrated his being, the easier things would become for him, and his awkwardness would be replaced by skill. It happened now and then that he was knocked down by a loop in the anchor chain and driven against the deck, that a ship's cable which slipped off the bollard tore out of his hands and burned the flesh from his palms, that he was hit in the face with a corner of a wet sail that had iron cables sewn into it. To sum it up, at first all the work was I trial and torture which demanded the sharpest of attention. But no matter how hard he breathed and how difficult it was to bend, a smile of contempt never left his lips. He bore in silence the laughter, mockery, and inevitable cursing until he became a "native" in this new orbit of life. And from then on he rephed to each insult with a blow of the fist.
Once when Captain Hopp observed how skillfully Grey had tied a sail to the yardarm, he said to himself: "Well, you rogue, you've won." When Grey returned to the deck, Hopp called him into his cabin and, opening a wellworn book, said: "Listen carefully. Stop smoklltig! We're going to turn this puppy into a captain."
And he began to read, rather one should say shout, from the book the ancient terminology of the sea. This was Grey's first lesson. Over the period of a year he learned navigation, shipbuilding, admiralty law, how to read sailing directions, and bookkeeping. Captain Hopp shook his hand and addressed him as an equal.
In Vancouver, Grey found a letter waiting from his mother. It abounded in tears and worry. He replied: "I understand. But if you were only to look at things as I do! Try to see them with my eyes. If you could only hear things as I do! Take a sea shell and put it to your ear, for it holds the roar of an eternal wave. If only you could love a smile as I do - for there is everything in your letter except love and a human being."
He sailed with the Anselm until it arrived with a cargo at Dubelt. Taking advantage of the stop, the twenty-year-old Grey went ashore to visit the castle.
All was the same as it had been five years before. Only the foliage of the young elms had become more lush, and the pattern which their shadow cast on the facade of the castle had grown denser and broader.
The servants who ran out to meet him were happy but startled. They froze into the same attitude of respect with which what seemed no longer ago than yesterday they had greeted the other Grey, his father.
They told him where to find his mother. He entered her high-ceilinged room and closed the lefoor quietly behind him. He stopped motionless, looking at the woman in a black dress whose hair had turned gray. She stood before a crucifix. Her passionate whisper resounded like a heartbeat. "Oh, for those at sea, for travelers, for those ill, and for those suffering and for those in prison," Grey heard, holding his breath. "And for my son . . ."
"I am here," and he could say nothing more. His mother turned. She had become thin. The haughtiness of her narrow face gave way to a new expression which seemed to bring back her youth. She walked swiftly to her son. A short laugh came from deep within her. There was a restrained exclamation, and the tears welled in her eyes. That was all. But in that moment she lived more intensely, more deeply, than at any time in her entire life. "I recognized you at once! Oh my darling, my little one!" And Grey ceased to be an adult.
She told him about his father's death, and then he told her about himself. She listened without reproach. But in what he had found to be the meaning of his life, the truth of his being, she saw only toys with which her little boy was amusing himself. Such toys as con- tinents, oceans, ships.
Grey spent seven days at the castle. On the eighth he took a large sum of money and re- turned to Dubelt, where he met Captain Hopp. "Thank you," he said to the captain. "You have been a real friend. Farewell, my elder comrade." And he underscored the meaning of the word with a handshake as tight as a vise. "From now on I must sail on my own, on my own ship."
Hopp spat in a temper, pulled his hand free, and went off. But Grey caught up with him and embraced him. Then they went together to a tavern where they were joined by the entire twenty-four-man crew of the Anselm. They drank and ate everything on the buffet and in the kitchen as well.
In a short time the evening star shone down on a dream fulfilled in the port of Dubelt— 'The Secret', a three-masted galiot of 260 tons, which had been purchased by Grey. And so, captain of his own ship, Arthur Grey sailed the seas for four years more before fate took him to the port of Lisse. But he never forgot how his mother had greeted him, and twice each year he visited the castle.
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