I have met the ships. I drive them upon the rocks and feed the sea. Wherever I appear they bow to our lord the Winter.”
And to his arrogant boasting nothing said the fog. Only he rose up slowly and trailed away from the sea and, crawling up long valleys, took refuge among the hills; and night came down and everything was still, and the fog began to mumble in the stillness. And I heard him telling infamously to himself the tale of his horrible spoils. “A hundred and fifteen galleons of old Spain, a certain argosy that went from Tyre, eight fisher-fleets and ninety ships of the line, twelve warships under sail, with their carronades, three hundred and eighty-seven river-craft, forty-two merchantmen that carried spice, four quinquiremes, ten triremes, thirty yachts, twenty-one battleships of the modern time, nine thousand admirals. …” he mumbled and chuckled on, till I suddenly arose and fled from his fearful contamination.
The Raft-Builders
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.
Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.
There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.
The Workman
I saw a workman fall with his scaffolding right from the summit of some vast hotel. And as he came down I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and do this for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall. And I could think of nothing but his folly in doing this futile thing, for not only would the man be unrecognizably dead in three seconds, but the very pole on which he tried to scratch whatever of his name he had time for was certain to be burnt in a few weeks for firewood.
Then I went home for I had work to do. And all that evening I thought of the man’s folly, till the thought hindered me from serious work.
And late that night while I was still at work, the ghost of the workman floated through my wall and stood before me laughing.
I heard no sound until after I spoke to it; but I could see the grey diaphanous form standing before me shuddering with laughter.
I spoke at last and asked what it was laughing at, and then the ghost spoke. It said: “I’m a laughin’ at you sittin’ and workin’ there.”
“And why,” I asked, “do you laugh at serious work?”
“Why, yer bloomin’ life ’ull go by like a wind,” he said, “and yer ’ole silly civilization ’ull be tidied up in a few centuries.”
Then he fell to laughing again and this time audibly; and, laughing still, faded back through the wall again and into the eternity from which he had come.
The Guest
A young man came into an ornate restaurant at eight o’clock in London.
He was alone, but two places had been laid at the table which was reserved for him. He had chosen the dinner very carefully, by letter a week before.
A waiter asked him about the other guest.
“You probably won’t see him till the coffee comes,” the young man told him; so he was served alone.
Those at adjacent tables might have noticed the young man continually addressing the empty chair and carrying on a monologue with it throughout his elaborate dinner.
“I think you knew my father,” he said to it over the soup.
“I sent for you this evening,” he continued, “because I want you to do me a good turn; in fact I must insist on it.”
There was nothing eccentric about the man except for this habit of addressing an empty chair, certainly he was eating as good a dinner as any sane man could wish for.
After the Burgundy had been served he became more voluble in his monologue, not that he spoiled his wine by drinking excessively.
“We have several acquaintances in common,” he said. “I met King Seti a year ago in Thebes. I think he has altered very little since you knew him. I thought his forehead a little low for a king’s. Cheops has left the house that he built for your reception, he must have prepared for you for years and years. I suppose you have seldom been entertained like that. I ordered this dinner over a week ago. I thought then that a lady might have come with me, but as she wouldn’t I’ve asked you. She may not after all be as lovely as Helen of Troy. Was Helen very lovely? Not when you knew her, perhaps. You were lucky in Cleopatra, you must have known her when she was in her prime.
“You never knew the mermaids nor the fairies nor the lovely goddesses of long
