I left Capri, as you will have guessed, somewhat in a hurry; in fact, I firmly and speedily ran away as hard as I could. All September, so I see now, I had been living in the flimsiest paradise of a fool. I had thought it was possible to detach one’s self so utterly from the joys and frailties of the human race that one could take any liberties one chose, look at and live in beauty, and cease to be man. Then suddenly the flesh twitched me, and like the flowers of Klingsor’s garden my sexless paradise fell in red ruin of autumn leaf about my ears. For me, anyhow, such a paradise was not possible, and I had--only just--the sense to see that it was better to live decently and dully than--otherwise.
So I took ship at Naples and came home by sea, for why one should shut one’s self up in a grilling box of scarlet velvet and grind along a steel path to the din of rolling wheels, when the divine waterways are at the door, is more than I ever could imagine. Two moments of the voyage I shall never forget.
Out in the Bay of Biscay we had a couple of days of heavy gale, the wind blowing from the west like a solid thing. The sea, which till then had been calm, gradually began to get up. There was no sun, and from a gray and infinite flatness it grew streaked and wrinkled. Then the wrinkles began to amalgamate, every two or three wrinkles turning themselves into one definite furrow, and the streaks formed themselves into sprayed wave-caps. When I went to bed the ship was still fairly steady, but full of wandering creaks and groans, and clothes hanging up on my cabin walls whispered against the woodwork and oscillated backwards and forwards. During the night, however, we began to pitch and roll in earnest, and, waking once, I heard the scream of the screw whirling impotently out of water, and the jar of straining wood and rivets. All next day the riot of the skies and din of the seas grew greater, until, coming on to deck after dinner, one had to dash at suitable moments over the open to gain handhold before the next lurch. Eventually I found a corner sheltered from the wind behind the smoking-room, and sat there with the gale thundering madly above my head and yelling and thrumming in the quivering rigging. The sky was quite clear and cloudless, and though there was no moon the stars made a gray twilight overhead. As the ship laboured on with reeling gait, the mast near above me would strike wildly right and left through a hundred stars, scoring a black line through the Pleiades and the Bear. For a moment Orion’s belt would be framed between the yard-arms, the next it would plunge out of sight behind me. Then Cassiopeia’s chair would waver over the bulwarks, tremulously perched, and in a second, as if it was roped to some celestial swing, would soar high to the zenith. Then the bulwarks themselves would rise a black blot into the sky; the next moment they reeled giddily downwards, and at my feet almost there raced by huge dimnesses of gray sea and flying foam with veiled and luminous specks of phosphorescent light glimmering like marine glow-worms.