I
In 1929 the stock market crashed, and I got married for the first time and travelled into a foreign land across an ocean. All those things affected me, and the voyage perhaps most.
Everyone knows, from books or experience, that living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerfully strange things to humans. Captains and stewards know it, and come after a few trips to watch all passengers with a veiled wariness.
On land, the tuggings of the moons can somewhat safely be ignored by men, and left to the more pliant senses of women and seeds and an occasional warlock. But at sea even males are victims of the rise and fall, the twice-daily surge of the waters they float on, and willy-nilly the planetary rhythm stirs them and all the other voyagers.
They do things calmly that would be inconceivable with earth beneath them: they fall into bed and even into love with a poignant desperate relish and a complete disregard for the land-bound proprieties; they weep after one small beer, not knowing why; they sometimes jump overboard the night before making port. And always they eat and drink with a kind of concentration which, according to their natures, can be gluttonous, inspired, or merely beneficent.
Sometimes, if people make only one short voyage, or are unusually dull, they are not conscious of sea change, except as a feeling of puzzlement that comes over them when they are remembering something that happened, or almost happened, on board ship. Then for a few seconds, they will look like children listening to an old dream.
Often, though, and with as little volition, people will become ship addicts, and perjure themselves with trumpery excuses for their trips. I have watched many of them, men and women too, drifting in their drugged ways about the corridors of peacetime liners, their faces full of a contentment never to be found elsewhere.
(I know only one person who ever crossed the ocean without feeling it, either spiritually or physically. His name is Spittin Stringer, because he spits so much, and he went from Oklahoma to France and back again, in 1918, without ever getting off dry land. He remembers several places I remember too, and several French words, but he says firmly, ‘We must of went different ways. I don’t rightly recollect no water, never.’)
The sea change in me was slow, and it continues still. The first trip, I was a bride of some eleven nights, and I can blame on the ocean only two of the many physical changes in me: my smallest fingers and toes went numb a few hours after we sailed, and stayed so for several days after we landed, which still happens always; and I developed a place on the sole of my left foot about as big as a penny, which has to be scratched firmly about five times a week, a few minutes after I have gone to bed, whether I am on land or sea. The other changes were less obvious, and many of them I do not know, or have forgotten.
For a while, several years later, I mistrusted myself alone at sea. I found myself doing, or perhaps only considering doing, many things I did not quite approve of. I think that may be true of most women voyaging alone; I have seen them misbehave, subtly or coarsely, not wanting to, as if for a few days more than the decks beneath them had grown unstable. Then, as land approached and they felt nearer to something
