So many boats. All leaving, or soon to leave, for foreign places. To elsewhere. That elsewhere to which they all yearn and which calls to Sam from the other side of the horizon. Boats, tankers and great liners, either coming from or going to that elsewhere. But all taken. All full. And this is the problem.
Sam is strolling along the wharves, watching the boats. An eye always out for the great liners when they’re in — and one is. And even though he has no sketching pad with him (unusual for Sam) he still sees patterns and forms and compositions wherever he looks. The cranes, like the long necks of prehistoric beasts, the masts on the tankers and the liners, the smoke from their funnels, signalling either recent arrival or departure. And the labourers and passengers, either coming or going.
The war (and when he thinks of the war he thinks mostly of the Pacific War) has been over for eleven months now and you’d think that everybody would be back. But it takes a long time to bring an army home, to bring an army back to a place that will be both home and not home any more. And so there is still the occasional sad ship arriving at these wharves, and sad train at the railway stations. Although not today. And Sam knows this because he strolls along these wharves regularly. If he can’t leave the country just yet, he can, at least, come to the place from which they will leave and feel the excitement of departure — even if it is other people’s.
Today, further along the dock, he sees one of the great liners taking on passengers. Many of them women, quite possibly, he muses, war brides. War brides, bound for America. You wouldn’t think there’d be that many but week after week the boats take them to … where? His mind plays with possibilities: Butte, Montana; Chicago; New York; Flagstaff, Arizona; Concord, Massachusetts; St Louis, Missouri (Eliot’s birthplace); and more. Sam likes the sound of American towns and cities. He has memorised them without meaning to and consequently has a store of names to draw upon, so could play this game for quite some time.
But as he nears the liner he is distracted by the many emotions written into the faces around him, there to be read in the bright winter sunshine. That woman — who waves back at her mother (no father in sight) and, presumably, her sister (for they look alike) — whose eyes look, well, frightened. A war bride? He doesn’t know but guesses she is. And he makes up a little story around those frightened eyes. Almost as though, he imagines, some part of her is just beginning to realise that in the hothouse, in the pressure cooker that the city became during the war, she married a stranger and must now go to live with him in the strange land he calls home and which she may eventually call home too — but which she may not. For the fact is, and the years will bear this out, that many of those brides who leave on the boats, which week after week transport them to their new homes in America, will come back. These will be the ones who married strangers, and who never learnt to call the country home to which their impulsive infatuations transported them. Like, possibly, that woman leaning over the railing, her hair piled high in the wartime style. And suddenly he wishes he had his pad and pencils with him. For she is a study in herself. A portrait of apprehension. For every time he comes to the dock he finds in the faces of those arriving and departing a portrait. Today this woman with the frightened eyes is his portrait. But with no pad or pencil he will have to memorise her. And, to this end, he stares long and hard at her. And she doesn’t notice because she has eyes only for that part of the world’s population (which is in a constant state of movement at the moment) standing on the wharf directly beneath her.
He is suddenly struck by the thought, a speculation really, on just who will be standing on the dock directly beneath him the day that he departs. And does he want anybody to be there? For when he pictures the scene he sometimes sees people there and sometimes nobody. Tess will be there one time. And he asks himself if that is the last face he wants to look upon before he slips over the horizon and into that elsewhere for which he has yearned throughout the years. Perhaps it will provide that sense of goodbye that he feels you ought to have on such occasions, for there will always be a part of him that will find it difficult to wave farewell to Tess, but no part that will find it difficult to farewell this city and this country. For he knows in his restless bones that he is done with them both.
Then again, perhaps he’d just like to slip out of the city and the country unobserved. No one to wave to. No one to look upon. Yes. That, he thinks, is the way to leave. A solitary departure. Sam, the solitary figure at the railings, waving to no one. A mystery. The wayfarer. The explorer, nose pointed towards new worlds. A shadow, almost, slipping over the horizon into the elsewhere that awaits him.
And so when Sam imagines the day of his departure at this particular moment, he imagines a solitary departure. No one there to farewell him because all his ties, like the ribbons that link the dock to the boats, will have been broken. Snapped. And, in this way, a shadow and a mystery even to himself, he will feel most fully the adventure of a new beginning.
So, his stroll complete, Sam leaves the docks, the gangplanks, the trolleys, tankers and liners echoing with the sounds of departure and arrival, and walks back towards the studio and the city that will lay claim to him, and hold him there, for only a little while longer.