The Wet Light Of
The Day's End Comes More From The Water Than The Sky, And The Waves Are
Colourless
Through the haze of the rain, all but two or three blind
sea-horses swinging out of the mist on
The ship's dripping weather side.
A lamp is lighted in the wheel-house; so one patch of yellow light falls
on the green-painted pistons of the steering gear as they snatch up the
rudder-chains. A big sea has got home. Her stern flies up in the lather
of a freed screw, and her deck from poop to the break of the foc's'le
goes under in gray-green water level as a mill-race except where it
spouts up above the donkey-engine and the stored derrick-booms. Forward
there is nothing but this glare; aft, the interrupted wake drives far to
leeward, a cut kite-string dropped across the seas. The sole thing that
has any rest in the turmoil is the jewelled, unwinking eye of an
albatross, who is beating across wind leisurely and unconcerned, almost
within hand's touch. It is the monstrous egotism of that eye that makes
the picture. By all the rules of art there should be a lighthouse or a
harbour pier in the background to show that everything will end happily.
But there is not, and the red eye does not care whether the thing
beneath its still wings stays or staves.
The sister-panel hangs in the Indian Ocean and tells a story, but is
none the worse for that. Here you have hot tropical sunlight and a
foreshore clothed in stately palms running out into a still and steamy
sea burnished steel blue. Along the foreshore, questing as a wounded
beast quests for lair, hurries a loaded steamer never built for speed.
Consequently, she tears and threshes the water to pieces, and piles it
under her nose and cannot put it under her cleanly. Coir-coloured cargo
bales are stacked round both masts, and her decks are crammed and
double-crammed with dark-skinned passengers - from the foc's'le where
they interfere with the crew to the stern where they hamper the wheel.
The funnel is painted blue on yellow, giving her a holiday air, a little
out of keeping with the yellow and black cholera flag at her main. She
dare not stop; she must not communicate with any one. There are leprous
streaks of lime-wash trickling down her plates for a sign of this. So
she threshes on down the glorious coast, she and her swarming
passengers, with the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday eating out
her heart.
Yet another, the pick of all the East rooms, before we have done with
blue water. Most of the nations of the earth are at issue under a
stretch of white awning above a crowded deck. The cause of the dispute,
a deep copper bowl foil of rice and fried onions, is upset in the
foreground. Malays, Lascars, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Burmans - the
whole gamut of racetints, from saffron to tar-black - are twisting and
writhing round it, while their vermilion, cobalt, amber, and emerald
turbans and head-cloths are lying underfoot. Pressed against the yellow
ochre of the iron bulwarks to left and right are frightened women and
children in turquoise and isabella-coloured clothes. They are half
protected by mounds of upset bedding, straw mats, red lacquer boxes, and
plaited bamboo trunks, mixed up with tin plates, brass and copper
hukas, silver opium pipes, Chinese playing cards, and properties
enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild. In the centre of the crowd of
furious half-naked men, the fat bare back of a Burman, tattooed from
collar-bone to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of red and blue
devils, holds the eye first. It is a wicked back. Beyond it is the
flicker of a Malay kris. A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a
stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an ecstasy of terror.
Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down from
their ripening-places, and are lying between the feet of the fighters.
One pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a muzzled bear. His
owner, a bushy-bearded Hindu, kneels over the animal, his body-cloth
thrown clear of a hard brown arm, his fingers ready to loose the
muzzle-strap. The ship's cook, in blood-stained white, watches from the
butcher's shop, and a black Zanzibari stoker grins through the bars of
the engine-room-hatch, one ray of sun shining straight into his pink
mouth. The officer of the watch, a red-whiskered man, is kneeling down
on the bridge to peer through the railings, and is shifting a long, thin
black revolver from his left hand to his right. The faithful sunlight
that puts everything into place, gives his whiskers and the hair on the
back of his tanned wrist just the colour of the copper pot, the bear's
fur and the trampled pines. For the rest, there is the blue sea beyond
the awnings.
Three years' hard work, beside the special knowledge of a lifetime,
would be needed to copy - even to copy - this picture. Mr. So-and-so,
R.A., could undoubtedly draw the bird; Mr. Such-another (equally R.A.)
the bear; and scores of gentlemen the still life; but who would be the
man to pull the whole thing together and make it the riotous, tossing
cataract of colour and life that it is? And when it was done, some
middle-aged person from the provinces, who had never seen a pineapple
out of a plate, or a kris out of the South Kensington, would say that
it did not remind him of something that it ought to remind him of, and
therefore that it was bad. If the gallery could be bequeathed to the
nation, something might, perhaps, be gained, but the nation would
complain of the draughts and the absence of chairs.
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