CHAPTER XII

WORLD CONSCIOUSNESS

_The Third Side of the Triangle_

... For surely once, they feel, we were Parts of a single continent. Now round us spreads the watery plain-- Oh, might our marges meet again!

1

I had gone out to the _Katori-maru_ to inspect my quarters. I always loved to get away from shore, even if only in a launch or sampan; it was so much cleaner and fresher on the bay. That afternoon it was altogether too attractive out there, and the city of Kobe lay so snugly below the hills that I decided to remain on board till late in the evening, and missed the last launch. I hailed a sampan. In this, with the wind splashing the single sail and the spray scattering all about us, we slipped romantically back to the American Hatoba. It was my last entrance to Kobe.

All of the next day I kept changing trains and creeping over Japanese hills and rice-fields in my devious and indirect route to Yokohama by way of Japan's national shrine, Yamada Ise. A few days later I was on board the _Katori-maru_, the newest type of Japanese shrine, the modern commercial floating shrine, named after one of the most ancient of shrines in Japan. The Katori shrine is said to have been founded some twenty-five hundred years ago during the reign of the mythical first emperor, Jimmu Tenno. It was dedicated to deities who possessed great military skill and has always been patronized mainly by soldiers. Transferring shrines from land to sea is a hazardous procedure. For me, however, I was ready to give my offering most willingly as long as it brought me to Seattle. There were too many people willing to patronize floating shrines at that time for me to be too particular about deities.

For a moment, as we slipped away from the pier, I felt what a dying man is said to feel when the flash-like review of life's experiences course through his sinking consciousness. I saw Japan and all its valleys, its dirt and its sublimity; and with all its past confusions I loved it.

Waiting for a final glimpse of Fuji left me idle enough to observe the little things about me. There was, for instance, the two-by-two-by-five sailor who was showing two Japanese girls through the "shrine" he was serving. I followed them about the ship. He was explaining to them various mysteries.

The Sailor: "Kore wa otoko no bath. [This is the men's bath.]" To the minds of these Japanese maidens such a distinction was surprising.

The Sailor: "Kore wa second class. [This is second class.]" This was like treading on sacred ground to these lowly born mites.

The Sailor: "Kore wa kitsu en shitsu. [This is the smoking-room.]" Why a special room for so simple a service--and why men only?

He led them above to the hospital. He never made any comments, they asked him no questions, but followed, single file, as is proper for Japanese girls, agape with curiosity. They passed the life-saving equipment. A tiny voice ventured a question. An amazed member of the Japanese Government (it was a government subsidized vessel) said, with semi-scorn:

"Kore wa? _Boat._ [This? _Boat._]" And they went below.

2

All of that forenoon, waiting for the _Katori-maru_ to slip away from the pier, I watched for Fujiyama, that exquisite pyramid (to the summit of which I had climbed twice), but it was veiled in mist. I wanted to see what it looked like from the sea, just as I had seen what the sea and the universe looked like from its peak. All afternoon, as Japan was receding into the past, I tried to distinguish old Fuji, but there was only a glittering edge, like a sword, beneath the low, bright sun. After dinner I went on deck and there in all that simple splendor which has made it the wonder of the world, stood Fujiyama, with a soft, sunset glow beneath its peak. The symbolic sword had vanished. And I felt that in all those years and miles and space which gather in my memory as that single thing--the Pacific Ocean--nothing transcends in loveliness the last view of Fuji from the sea.

Then for two days the world seemed to swoon in mist. The fog-horn kept blowing drearily every two minutes; yet the steamer never slackened its speed for a moment; in fact, we made more miles those two days than during the clear days that followed. We had taken the extreme northern route and were soon in a cold latitude. The fog became crisp, as though threatening to crystallize, and when I stood on the forward deck it was almost like being out in a blizzard. The siren continued to emit its melancholy wail across a wilderness of waves lost in mist. One could not see the length of the ship. At midnight I woke, startled by the sudden cessation of the propellers. For three hours we were stationary, owing to engine trouble. The steamer barely rocked, giving me the sensation of the deep as nothing ever did before. It was at once weird and lovely, and in the darkness I could imagine our vessel as lone and isolated, a thing lost in an open wilderness of space. The siren continued moaning like the wail of a child in the night, and once I thought I heard another siren off in the distance. We started off again and from then on didn't once slacken our speed in the least, so large, so spacious, so unfrequented is the Pacific in these days.

The fog hung close for so many days that a rumor went round that the captain was unable to get his bearings. With neither sun nor stars to rely on men's best instruments are altogether inadequate. At half-past nine o'clock one evening, however, the steel blinds were closed over the port-holes. The ship began to pitch and roll. The waves rushed at us and broke against the iron cheek of the vessel. The fittings on deck rolled back and forth, and those passengers unused to the sea clung to their berths.

Only when we were within three days of the American coast did the sun come out. For over a week we had been in a dull-gray world which was becoming terribly depressing. We were considerably farther north than I had expected to be.

Five days after our departure, I was again at the 180th meridian, and enjoyed what only a very eager, active person could enjoy,--a forty-eight-hour day. This time, going eastward, we gained a day. I also had the pleasure of being within fifty degrees of the north pole just as three years before I had been within fifty degrees of the south pole. In other words, I had touched two points along the 180th meridian which were six thousand miles away from each other, or twice the distance from New York to San Francisco.

Calculations are somewhat misleading at times. For instance, when we were near the Aleutian Islands, I chanced to compare the records of that day's run as posted in the first saloon with those posted in the second saloon. The first read 4,240 miles from Yokohama; the second, 4,235 miles. Japanese handling of figures made the prow of the ship five miles nearer its destination than the stern. Japanese historians also have a tendency to make such innocent mistakes in their imperialistic calculations. Japan's feet do not seem to be able to keep pace with her desires.

As though to investigate this phenomenon, a little bird,--slightly larger than a sparrow, with the same kind of feathered back, but with a white breast, flitted down upon the deck before me,--and began hopping about. It approached to within two feet of me, then sneaked into a warm place out of sight. A stowaway from birdland, stealing a ride and planning, most likely, to enter America without a passport. Perhaps it thought that being near the stern of the boat, according to the calculations above quoted, it could still remain beyond the three-mile limit.

Then the homeward-bound spirit took possession of me,--that selfsame realization of my direction which had come over me upon sight of the Australian coast three years previously, a psychological twisting which baffled me for a time. Another day and we were within the last square marked off by the latitudinal and longitudinal lines,--the nearest I had been to America in nearly five years. To remind me of my wanderings, the flags of the nations hung in the dining-saloon: under nearly every one of them I had at some time found hospitality.

3

The reader who has followed me thus far has been with me about three months on the sea. What to the Greeks and the Romans was the Mediterranean, the Pacific will be to us seventy times over. Already there is a wealth of literature and of science which has come to us through the inspiration of that great waterway. For Darwin and Stevenson and O'Brien the Pacific has been mother of their finest passions. In the near future, our argosies will cross and recross those tens of thousands of miles as numerously as those of the Phoenicians on the Mediterranean in antiquity. They will bring us back the teas and spices and silks of the Orient. But there are those of us who have watched the "White Shadows" of the Pacific who would wish that something were brought away besides the ephemeral materials. For there is in the sea a kinship with the infinite and the absolute, and who studies its moods comes nearer understanding life.

I wandered along one night with a New Zealand man, without knowing where he was leading me. Suddenly we came, by way of a narrow pathway, against a wall of darkness. We were at the seashore. It was as though we had come to the world's end and the white glistening breakers arrived as messengers from eternity, warning us against venturing farther. I strained my eyes to see into that pitch-black gulch, but I might just as well have shut my eyes and let the persistent breakers tell the story of the sea in their own way. Afterward I often made my way out to that beach and sat for hours, or trod the sands till night left of the sea nothing but mournful whisperings.

One day in August, when the first snow fell over our little winter world in the far South, I had climbed the hills up to the belt of wildwood that girds the city of Dunedin. The very joy of life was in the air. Keenly I sensed the larger season,--that of human kinship merged in the centuries. I looked across the hills to mountains I had known; but it was then not the Alps I saw, not the Rockies, the Aeta Roa under the Southern Cross, nor yet the Himalayas nor the snow-packed barriers of the Uriankhai, the unrenowned Turgan group. In truth, I was not seeing impassable peaks at all, but imprisoned ranges which were themselves trying to outreach their altitudinal limitations. It was a world consciousness which was mine, and I towered far above the highest peaks, above the world itself. I saw no single group, no political sections nor geographical divisions, the conquest of ridges, the commingling of noises, the concord of peoples. And when men come to this world consciousness they will recognize and accept all, include the barrier and the plain. They will see these great, sheer rugged peaks knifing the floating clouds, yielding to the creeping glaciers, yet one and all, when released sweeping down the valleys as impassioned rivers, filling the lowest depths of earth, depths deeper than the sea, lower than the deserts. In such moments of world consciousness men will have to step downward from the bottom of the sea and upward from the summit of McKinley. Then barriers will become beacons. Mankind lives at sea-level. We care little about our neighbors over the ranges. That mental attitude makes barriers real and valleys dark. But when we turn them into beacons we shall climb the barriers in order to look into the valleys of our neighbors and they will become the ladders of heaven and the light unto nations. That is the lesson of the sea.

At present we live at a sea-level, but beneath and behind the barriers, are the peaks of earth. Hence walls of houses are as great barriers as mountains. Hence even thoughts are barriers and ideals become terrible, cold, insurmountable prominences.

But in world consciousness, which is the lesson of the sea, we do not reject anything,--the religions, the political parties, the anti-religions, and the negations,--but we bring them to the level of human understanding by absorption, by taking them in. That is the story of the sea.

The ocean breaks incessantly before us, but only the one majestic wave thrills as it rises and overleaps the rocky barrier. A forest is densely grown, yet only the stately, beautiful tree stirs the forest-lover. The street swarms with human beings all of whom are material for the friend-maker, yet only one of the mass, in passing, steeps the day's experience in the essence of love. But loving that one wave, or tree, or being does not shut us against the source of its becoming; rather does it teach us the possibilities latent in the mass. That is the moral of the sea.

But what is the sea? How can we know the sea? Is it water, space, depth? Can we measure it in miles, in the days required to traverse it, in steamship lines, by the turning of the screws, or by the system of the fourth dimension? To me who have been round the greatest sea on earth comes the realization that I have seen only a narrow line of it, and that I can only believe that the rest is what it has been said to be. Yet my faith is founded on my knowledge of the faithfulness of the sea.

The sea, we sometimes say, has its moods, but rather should they be called enthusiasms. It is really not the sea at all to which we refer, but to something which in the vague world of infinitude is in itself a sea whipping the surface of an unfathomable wonder. The sea's moods are not in its breakers, any more than is the surface phenomenon which floors the region between our atmosphere and ether, the story of our earth. We cannot reach down beneath the breakers and learn the secret of the heart of the sea. In ourselves, as in the sea, we obtain a record of that tremendous silence which is the harbinger of all sound, as the heavens are of all color.

One day in New Zealand I witnessed a conflict between the earth and the sea. A tremendous wind swept north-westward, and pressed heavily down upon the shore. It sent the sand scurrying back into the sea. Even the breakers, like the sand, fell back in furious spray like the waves of sea-horses,--back into the ocean. The entire length of the beach for three miles was alive with retreating spray, mingled with the bewildered sand-legions scurrying at my ankles.

One night, on the shores of Otago Harbor, the moon, blasted and blunted by heavy clouds, had started on its journey. In a little cave huddled a cloud of black night. We had spread the faithful embers of our camp fire so they could not touch one another, and wanting touch they died in the darkness. We had put the curse of loneliness upon each of them. The little cave had become only a darker spot on a dark landscape,--a landscape so rough, so rare and rugged, reaching the sea and the western sky of night. So rough, so unformed, so uncompleted. The maker of lands was beating against it impatiently, rushing it, forming it. What uncanny projections, what sandy cliffs! For ages the wind and sea have been whipping them into shape. Yet man could remove them with a blast or two. For thousands of miles, all round the rim of the great Pacific, the same process is going on, day and night. While upon land, man has continued working out his mission in the same persistent, unconscious manner.

O Maker of lands' ends, O Sea, when will man be formed? When will the conflicts among men cease? They have tried to curb one another and to subject one another to slavish uses, even and kempt. But still, after ages of whipping and lashing, they are still unfinished as though never to be formed. Are the various little groups which lie so far apart, scattered by some ancient camper, to die for want of the touch of comrade, like those embers in the darkness of that empty cavelet?

Here round the Pacific we dwell, each in his own little hollow. May not this vast, generous ocean become the great experiment station for human commonalty, for distinction without extinction? The dreams that centered in the other great seas--the Mediterranean, the Atlantic--were only partially fulfilled. But here at the point where East is West, it ought to be possible, because of the very obvious differences, to maintain relations without irritating encroachment. There was a time when passionate desire justified a man taking a woman from another with the aid of a club. To-day the decent man knows that however much he may love, only mutual consent makes relationship possible. And from the frenzy of untutored souls let those who feel repugnance withdraw till the force of a higher morality makes the rest of the world follow in its wake.

... now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating to the breath Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain: And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.