"What," I asked conclusively, "shall I do about all this?" I waved my
arm round Fleet Street, source of all the light I know, giver of my gift
of income tax, limit of my perspective. How should I live when withdrawn
from the smell of its ink, the urge of its machinery?
"_That_," he said. "Oh, damn that!"
* * * * *
It was his light tone which staggered me and not what he said. The
sailor's manner was that of one who would be annoyed if I treated him
like a practical man, arranging miles of petty considerations and
exceptions before him, arguing for hours along rows of trifles, and
hoping the harvest of difficulties of no consequence at the end of the
argument would convince him. Indeed I know he is always impatient for
the next step in any business, and not, like most of us, for more
careful consideration. "Look there," said the sailor, pointing to
Ludgate Circus, "see that Putney 'bus? If it takes up two more
passengers before it passes this spot then you've got to come."
That made the difficulty much clearer. I agreed. The 'bus struggled off,
and a man with a bag ran at it and boarded it. One! Then it had a clear
run--it almost reached us--in another two seconds!--I began to breathe
more easily; the danger of liberty was almost gone. Then the sailor
jumped for the 'bus before it was quite level, and as he mounted the
steps, turned, and held up two fingers with a grin.
Thus was a voyage of great moment and adventure settled for me.
When I got home that night I referred to the authorities for the way to
begin an enterprise on the deep. What said Hakluyt? According to him it
is as easy as this: "Master John Hawkins, with the Jesus of Lubeck, a
ship of 700 tunnes, and the Solomon, a ship of seven score, the Tiger, a
barke of 50, and the Swalow of 30 Tunnes, being all well furnished with
men to the number of one hundred threescore and ten; as also with
ordnance and vituall requisite for such a voyage, departed out of
Plinmouth the 18 day of October in the yeere of our Lord 1564, with a
prosperous wind."
But we all know such things were done far better in that century. Yet
Master John Hawkins, who seems to have handled a fleet with greater
facility than I do this pen now I am so anxious to scratch it across
preliminaries and get it to sea, did not come to a decision by the
number of passengers on a Putney 'bus. So I turned to a modern
authority. Yet Bates, I found, is worse than old John Hawkins, Bates
actually arrives at his destination in the first sentence. He steps
across in thirty-eight words from England to the Amazon. "I embarked at
Liverpool with Mr. Wallace, in a small trading vessel, on the 26th day
of April 1848; and, after a swift passage from the Irish Channel to the
equator arrived on the 26th of May off Salinas."
Well, I did not. I say it is a gross deception. Voyaging does not get
accomplished in that off-hand fashion. It is a mockery to captives like
ourselves to pretend bondage is puffed away in that airy manner. It is
not so easily persuaded to disencumber us. Indeed, with this and that, I
found the initial step in the pursuit of the sunset red a heavy weight,
and hardly suited to the constitution of men who have worked into a deep
rut; but that high resolution and a faith equal to belief in the
liquefaction of St. Januarius' blood are needed to drop the protective
routine of years, to sheer off the dear and warm entanglements of home
and friendships; to shut the front door one bleak winter evening when
the house smells comfortable and secure, and the light on the hearth,
under such circumstances, is ironic in its bright revelation of years of
ease and stability till then not fully appraised; and so depart in the
dusk for an unknown Welsh coaling port, there to board a tramp steamer
for a voyage that has some serious doubts about it, though its landfall
shall be near the line, and have palms in it. The door slammed, I
noticed, in a chill and penetrating minor, an incident of travel I have
never seen recorded.
Now do I come at last, O Liberty, my loved and secret divinity! Your
passionate pilgrim is here, late, though still young and eager eyed; yet
with his coat collar upturned for the present. Allons! the Open Road is
before him. But how the broad and empty prospects of his freedom shudder
with the dire sounds and cries of the milk churns on Paddington Station!
And next I remember black night--it was, I think, about three a.m.--and
a calamitous rain, and a Welsh railway station where I had alighted,
faint with a famine, a kit bag soon to increase in weight and drag, and
a pair of numbed feet. There was a porter who bore himself as though it
were the last day and he knew the worst, a dying station light, the wind
and rain, and me. Outside was the dark, and one of the greatest coaling
ports in the world. As I could not see the coal in great bulk I could
not admire it. The railway man turned out the light, conducted me
politely into a puddle, set my course for the docks in uncharted night
with a dexter having no convictions, and left me. I began to hate the
land of the wild bard in which I found myself for the first time, and
felt a savage satisfaction in being nearly a pure blooded London Saxon;
and as I surveyed my prospects in that country, not even the fact that I
had a grandparent named Hughes would have prevented me striking Wales
with my umbrella, for it is only a cheap one; but I had left it in the
train.
It had never occurred to me (any more than it did to you when you got
this book to learn about the tropic sea and the jungle) that the Open
Road, where the chains fall from us, would include Swansea High Street
four hours before sunrise in a steady winter downpour. But there I
discovered that trade wind seas by moonlight, flying fish, Indians, and
forests and palms, cannot be compelled. They come in their turn. They
are mixed with litter and dead stuff, like prizes in a bran tub. Going
down the drear and aqueous street it was clear that if there are exalted
moments in travel, as on the instant when we discover we really may
prepare to go, yet exaltation implies the undistinguished flats from
which, for a while, we are translated. This is a travel book for honest
men. I am still on the flat. It will be to-morrow presently.
My chief fear was that my waterproof, rattling in the wind, would alarm
silent and sleeping Swansea. I found a policeman standing at a street
corner, holding out his cape to help away the rain. He could give me no
hope. He knew where the dock was, but the way thither was difficult and
torturous. I had better follow the tram lines, and ask again, if I saw
anybody. Therefore the tram lines I followed till my portable estate, by
compound interest, had increased to untold tons; but the empty tram way
went on for ever down the rows of frozen and desolate lamps, so that I
surrendered all my chances of the seas of the tropics and the jungle of
the Brazils, and turned aside from the course which the policeman said
led to ships and the deep, entered the dark portico of a shop, where it
was only half wet, and lit my pipe, there to wait for the shy gods to
turn my luck. Hesitating footsteps fumbled to where I was hidden, and
stopped at the flash of my match. "Could yer 'blige with a light,
mister?"
He was a little elderly seaman in yellow oilskins and a so'wester. He
was rather drunk. His oilskins gathered the reflected street shine, so
that he looked phosphorescent, an old man risen wet and shining from the
ocean. He was looking for Buenos Aires, he explained, and hadn't got any
matches. Now he, for the Plate, and I, for ultimate Amazonas, set off
down the Swansea tram lines. And the wind whined through overhead wires,
and a lost dog followed us along the empty thoroughfare where the only
sound was of waterspouts, and the elderly mariner sang bold and improper
songs, so that I wondered there was not an irruption of nightcaps at
upper Swansea windows to witness this disturbance of their usual peace.
We came at length to abandoned lagoons, where spectral ships were moored
down the marges, and round the wide waters was the loom of uncertain
monsters and buildings. Railway metals waylaid us and caught us by the
feet. There were many electric moons swaying in the gale, and they
spilled showers of broken light, which melted on the black water, and
betrayed to us our loneliness in outer night. The call of a vessel's
syren across that inhospitable space was heard by us as the prolonged
moan of the lost.
The old man of the sea took me under a stack of timber to light his
pipe. He borrowed my box of matches, and malicious spurts of wind
extinguished each match, steadily, as mine ancient struck them. It was
now 4 a.m. He threw each bit of dead wood down, without irritation, as
though it were the fate of man to strike lights for the gods to douse,
but yet was he uplifted now beyond the hurt of cosmic mockery. The
matches were not wasted. At least they lighted up his sorrowful face as
he talked to me. I would not have had him any the less drunk, for it but
softened his facial integument, which I could see had been hardened and
set by bitter experience, masking the man; but now his jaded life,
warmed by emotion, though much of the emotion was artificial and of the
pewter born, was quick in his face again, and made him a human
responsive to his kind, instead of a sober and warped shellback with a
sour remembrance of his hardships, and of the futility of his endurance,
and of the distance away of his masters with their bowels of iron.
He had seven children, and the sea was a weary place. Had I any
children?--and God keep them if I had. He was a troublesome old man
("that's another light gone") but he had just left his kids ("ah, to
hell wi' the wind") and he had to talk to someone about them, and that
was my rotten luck, said he. We got to the fifth child, and I heard
something about her, when the wind reached round the wood stack at us,
and snatched the last glim. So it was in the dark that I heard about the
other two and the wife, while one of my pockets filled with rain. Only
Milly, he said, was at work, and what was four pound a month for the
rest? And he was sick of the sea and chief mates, and did I think a chap
stood for a better time when he died, if he kept off drink and did his
bit without grousing, like some of the parson fellers said? Then he
indicated my ship, and disappeared in the dark. He is still waiting an
answer to his last question, which I have saved for you to give him.
For me, I was in no mood to discuss whether balm is to be got in Gilead,
when we come to the place; but stumbling among the lumber on the
deserted deck of the S.S. "Capella," I found a cabin, fell into it, and
remember nothing more but the smell of hot bread, eggs and bacon, and
coffee, which visited me in a beautiful dream. Then I woke to the
reveille of a tin whistle, which the chief engineer was playing in my
ear; and it was daylight. The jumble of recollections of the night
before were but dark insanities. But the smell of that aromatic food, I
give grace, did not pass with the awakening, for next door I heard
lively sizzling in the galley. Already Fleet Street was hull down.
* * * * *
If you are used only to the methods of passenger steamers and regular
routes, then you know little of travel. You are but carried about.
Insistent clocks and schedules keep that way, and the upholstered but
rigid routine is a soporific. You never see the hither side of the
hedge. The granite countenance of fortune, her eyes filmed like frozen
pools, which keeps alert and bright the voyager who is unprotected from
her unscheduled and unmoral acts except by his own ready buckler, is
watched for you by others. You are never surprised into fear by the
unlucky position of the planets, nor moved to sing Laus Deo, when now
and then, the stars are propitious. I had been brought hastily to the
"Capella," for it was said she was sailing instantly. This morning I
learned at breakfast that nobody knew when she could sail. Our steamer
sat two feet higher than her capacity. There was some galvanised iron to
come from Glascow, some machinery from Sheffield; and owing to labour
difficulties we were short of several hundred tons of coal. A little mob
of us, all strangers, shuffled after the Skipper's spry heels that
morning to the Board of Trade offices, where an official mumbled over
the ship's articles, to our shut ears, and we signed where we were told.
A more glum and unromantic group of voyagers, each man twirling his
shabby hat in his hands as he waited his turn for the corroded pen, was
never seen this side of the Elizabethan era. I became the purser of the
"Capella," with my wages lawfully recorded at a shilling per month.
I was committed. There was no withdrawal now but desertion. And
desertion, at times, I seriously considered, because for a week more the
cargo dribbled down to us, while I endured as a moucher about those
winter docks with their coal tips, and the muddy streets with their
sailors' slop marts, marine stores, and pawnshops having a cankered
display of chronometers, telescopes, and other flotsam of marine failure
and wreckage. Daily the quays and the dismal waterside ways with their
cheap shops were still more depressed by additional snow mush and drives
of sleet; and it was no warmth for this idler that he saw the tradesmen,
because of the season, putting holly among their oranges and wreathing
beer bottles with chains of coloured paper. The iron decks and cabins of
my new home were as chill and unfriendly as the empty grate, the marble
tables, and the tin advertisements of chemical slops of a temperance
hotel. Am I plain? Such are the conditions which compass the wayward
traveller. This is what chills one's rapid pulse when pursuing at last
the rosy visions of boyhood. The deplorable littoral of our island
kingdom is part of a life on the ocean wave, and should help you in
coming to a decision when next you see a friendless and bestial
sailorman. It becomes necessary to declare that we shall really get down
to the tropics presently; have the courage to wait, like the crew of the
"Capella." Our ship did sail, when she was ready.
It was the afternoon before we sailed, and having listened long enough
to my messmates, who, after dinner, weighed the probabilities of
malaria, yellow fever and other alien disasters into our coming strange
voyage, that I went into the town to take my last look round a book
shop, and to get some marine soap, dungarees, and things. Here was I at
last with my heart's desire. On the very next day I should sail, I
myself, and no other hero, veritably Me at last, for a place not on the
chart, because the place we should find, at the journey's end, the map
described with those words of magic: "Forest" and "Unexplored." I made
my way round crates and barrels on that untidy deck, which had a thick
mud of coal dust and snow, to the ladder overside. Coal dust and melting
snow! But where was the uplifted heart, the radiant anticipation, as of
one to whom the future was big with treasures to be born, which are the
privilege of a young pilgrim, released from his usual obligations to
pursue far horizons in the Spanish main, while his envious fellows in
the city still cast ledgers under gas lamps? Here was another swindle of
the romanticists. You may search their warm and golden pages in vain for
coal tips, melting ice, delays, and steam heaters that will not work for
cold cabins. Down they go here, though. These gallant affairs, I
thought, as I descended the wet and gritty ladder, are much better done
before the fire at home, in your slippers; for the large scale map, as
you traverse its alluring blank areas, leaves out the conditions which
now, when I am on the actual business, precipitate as frozen spicules,
as would north winds, my warm, aerial, and cloudy enthusiasms that were
wont to be dyed such wonderful hues by sunsets, poems, and tales of old
travel. Another of these congealing draughts was now to catch me
unbuttoned. Because of our unusual destination, and the wild stories
that were told of it, we were a point of interest in Swansea docks, and
had many interviewers and curious visitors. Some of them were on the
quay then, inspecting our steamer, and as I stepped off the ladder one
turned to me.
"Mister," he whispered, "are you going in her?"
"I am," I said.
"O gord," said he.
That night I met a number of my grave fellow shipmates in the town. The
question was, Should we then go back to the ship?
"What," burst out one of us in surprise--his gold-laced cap was already
resting on his right eyebrow--"Now? Not me. Boys, don't freeze the
Carnival. Follow me!"
We followed him. The rest of the evening is more easily given in dumb
show. There was a mechanical piano in a saloon bar, and it steadily
devoured pennies, and returned to us automatic joy, fortissimo, over
which our conversation strenuously high-stepped and vaulted. Later,
there was a search for cabs, and an engineer carried with him everywhere
two geese by their necks and sometimes trod on their loose feet. When he
did this he snatched a goose from his own grasp, and then roundly abused
us for our post-dated frivolity. We learned our steamer was now moored
in mid-dock. We found a quay wall, and at the bottom of it, at a great
depth in the dark, the level of the water was seen only because shreds
of lamp-shine floated there. We understood a boat was below, and found
it was, and we loaded it till the water brimmed at the gunwale. As we
mounted the "Capella's" rope-ladder only one goose fell back into the
dock.
* * * * *
The "Capella" started in her sleep, and she woke me. She was still
trembling. Resting my hand on her I felt her heart begin to throb,
though faintly. We were off.
It was a bright morning, early and keen. Those habitual quays now were
moving past us. The decks were cleared, the carpenter and some sailors
were fixing the hatches, and the pilot, muffled in a thick white shawl,
was on the bridge with the Skipper. We stopped in the outer lock, the
exhaust humming impatiently while a pier-head jumper--for we were a
sailor short--was examined by our doctor. The Skipper had some short
words for an official who had mounted the bridge, because the third mate
had deserted, and had taken his half pay; and the official, who had
volunteered to get us a substitute, had failed. There were now but two
mates for our big tramp steamer going a long and arduous voyage which
included the navigation for some months of narrow inland waterways in
the tropics. Our first mate, passing amidships where the Purser was
leaning overside, stopped to tell me what this meant for him and the
second mate. I was mighty glad it was not the purser's fault. I have
never heard a short speech more passionate; and his eyes were feral. Yet
it became increasingly clear to me, as the voyage lengthened, that his
eyes no more than met the case.
Out we drove at last. It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon
morning which had got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday
morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a
vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this
trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays
had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding
us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and
eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your ambassador while you
still slept, and betrayed not, I hope, any greyness and bleared satiety
of ours to its pure, frail, and lucid regard. That was the last good
service I did before leaving you quite. I was glad to see how well our
old earth did meet such a light, as though it had no difficulty in
looking day in the face. The world was miraculously renewed. It rose,
and received the new-born of Aurora in its arms. There was clouds of
pearl above hills of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames. The
shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we rolled. The breakfast
bell rang not too soon. This was a right beginning.
The pilot was dropped, and a course was shaped to pass between Lundy and
Hartland. A strong northwester and its seas caught us beyond the
Mumbles, and the quality of the sunshine thinned to a flickering stuff
which cast only grey shadows. The "Capella" became quarrelsome, and
began to strike the seas heavily. You may know the "Capella" when you
see her. She is a modern three-thousand-ton freighter, with derrick
supports fore and aft, and a funnel; and the three of them are so
fearful of seeming rakish that they overdo the effect of stern utility,
and appear to lean ahead. She is a three-island ship, the amidships
section carrying the second mate's cabin, and the cabins of the four
engineers, all of them, excepting the Chief's cabin, looking outwards
overseas across a narrow sheltered alleyway; and on a narrower
athwartship's alleyway there, and opening astern, are the Chief's place,
and the cook's galley, the entrance to the engine-room, and the
engineers' messroom. Above this structure is the boat deck. You may
reach the poop, which contains the master's and chief mate's quarters,
the doctor's and steward's berths, and the saloon, by descending a
perpendicular iron ladder to the long main deck, or else, as all did at
sea, by a flying trestle bridge, which is dismantled when in port. Her
black funnel is relieved by a cryptic design in white, and her bows are
so bluff that, as the chief mate put it, "her belly begins there." She
might not take your eye, but a shipowner would see her points. She
carries a large cargo on a comparatively low registered tonnage. The
money that built her went mostly in hull and engines, and the latter do
their work as sweetly as an eight-day clock, giving ten and a half
knots, weather permitting, on a low coal consumption. There was not much
money left, therefore, for balm in the cabins, and that is the reason we
do not find it there.
At sundown the sky cleared. The wind, increased in violence, had swept
it of the last feather. Lundy was over our starboard bow, a small dark
blot in a clear yellow light which poured, with the gale and the rising
seas, from the west. The glass was falling. Now, the Skipper has often
told me how his "Capella" had faced hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, when
laden with ore, and had kept her decks dry. There are other stories
about her surprising buoyancy, when deeply laden, and I have heard them
all at home, and they are fine stories. But what lies they are! For
there below me, with Lundy not even passed, and the Bay of Biscay to
come (Para not to be thought of yet) were tons and tons of salt wash
that could not get time to escape by the scuppers, but plunged wearily
amongst the hatches and winches.
"I've never seen her as dirty as this," grumbled the chief engineer
apologetically, peeping from his cabin at cold green water lopping over
casually on to the after deck. "It's that patent fuel--its stowed wrong.
Now she'll roll--you can feel it--the cat she is, she's never going to
stop. It's that patent fuel and her new load line."
Certainly she sat close to the sea. I had never seen so much lively
water so close. She wallowed, she plunged, she rolled, she sank heavily
to its level. I looked out from the round window of the Chief's cabin,
and when she inclined those green mounds of the swell swinging under us
and away were superior, in apparition, to my outlook.
"Listen to it," said the Chief. He stopped triturating some shavings of
hard tobacco between his huge palms, and sat quietly, hands clasped, as
though in prayer. The surge mourned over the deck. The day, too, was
growing towards the dusky hours of retrospection. That sombre monody
outside was like the tremor and boom of the drums funebre. "That chap
some of you talk about--Lloyd George!"--said the Chief, suddenly rubbing
his tobacco again with energy. (Good God, I thought, and here we are at
sea too. Now what has the misguided man done.) "If I had him here I'd
hold him down in that wash on deck till it cleared. Then he'd know. He
put it there, to break sailors' legs. This steamer, she had dry decks
till her load line was altered. She carries more now than she was built
for, two hundred tons more. If I had him here--but there you are!
Popularity! There's a fine popular noise for you, isn't it? Sailors
growled for better food. 'What about this improved food scale?' says Mr.
Lloyd George to the shipowners. 'Oh,' said they, 'we'll give 'em better
food, the drunken insubordinate dogs, if you'll make overloading legal.'
'Why,' says Lord George, 'then it wouldn't be illegal, would it?' So it
was done. What does the public know about a ship's buoyancy? Nothing.
But it understands food. So the clever man heightens the Plimsoll mark,
adds a million or so to shipowners' capital by dipping his pen in the
ink, and gives Jack more jam. What you want ashore," the Chief added
bitterly, "is not more voters, as some say, but more lunatic asylums."
Though I had left politics at home, to be settled by others, like the
trouble with the drains, the dog licence, and the dispute about the
garden fence, I glanced with interest at the Chief. I know him well. Not
only is he a kindly man, but he himself is also a philosophic rebel. But
his eye was hard, and he still ground the tobacco with forgetful energy,
us though an objectionable thing were between his strong hands. Then
impatiently he threw the tobacco loose on his log book, which was open
on his deck, paused, and said, "Ah, maybe the man thought a little
freeboard the less didn't matter. God give him grace," and picked his
flute out of a bookshelf which was fastened above his bunk; sat down
over the steam heater, and broke out like a blackbird. Yet was it a
well-remembered air he fluted so well. I listened so long as respect for
the artist demanded, then rose, filled my pipe from the fragrant grains
on the log book, and left him. Presently I would listen to such airs;
but this was too soon.
I repeat I had confidence in the "Capella" to gain. I went forward to
get it, mounting the bridge, where my cabin mate, the youthful second
officer, was in charge, in his oilskins. A cheerful sight he looked. "I
think," said he briskly, "we're going to catch it." He was puckering his
face over our course. Lundy was looming large--even Rat Island was
plain--but it looked so frail in that flood of seas, wind, and wild
yellow light streaming together from the evening west, that I looked for
the unsubstantial island to spring suddenly from its foundations, and to
come down on us a stretched wisp of thinned and ragged smoke. The sea
was adrift from its old confines. The flood was pouring past, and the
wind was the drainage of interstellar space. Lundy was the last delicate
fragment of land. It still fronted the upheaval and rush of the
ungoverned elements, but one looked for it to be swept away.
Yet that wild and scenic west, of such pallor and clarity that one
shrank from facing its inhospitable spaciousness, with each shape of a
wave there, black against the light as it reared ahead, a distinct
individual foe in the host moving to the attack, was but the prelude.
Night and the worst were to come. Just then, while the last of the light
was shining on the officer's oilskins, I was only surprised that our
bulk was such a trifle after all. Our loaded vessel looked so bluff and
massive when in dock. She began to attempt, off Lundy, the spring and
jauntiness of a trawler. The bows sank to the rails in an acre of white,
and the spume flew past the bridge like rain. The black bows lifted and
swayed, buoyant on submarine upheavals, to cut out segments of the
sunset; then sank again into dark hollows where the foam was luminous.
The cold and wind were bitter dolours.
We rolled. I grasped the rail of the weather cloth, in the drive of wind
and spume, and rode down on our charger like a valiant man; like a
valiant man who is uncertain of his seat. Something like a valiant man.
We advanced to the attack, masts and funnel describing great arcs, and
steadily our bows shouldered away the foe. I think sailors deserve large
monies. Being the less valiant--for the longer I watched, the more grew
I wet and cold--it came to my mind that where we were, but a few weeks
before, another large freighter had her hatches opened by the seas, and
presently was but a trace of oil and cinders on the waters. You will
remember I am on my first long voyage. The officer was quite cheerful
and asked me if I knew Forest Gate. There were, he said, some fine girls
at Forest Gate.
We rounded Hartland. It was dusk, the weather was now directly on our
starboard beam, and the waves were coming solidly inboard. The main deck
was white with plunging water. We rolled still more.
"I can't make out why you left London when you didn't have to," said the
grinning sailor. "I'd like to be on the Stratford tram, going down to
Forest Gate."
This was nearly as bad as the Chief's flute. I held up two fingers over
those hatches of ours, called silently on blessed Saint Anthony, who
loves sailors, and went down the ladder; for night had come, and the
prospect from the "Capella" was not the less apprehensive to the mind of
a landsman because the enemy could not be seen, except as flying ghosts.
The noises could be heard all right.
I shut my heavy teak door amidships, shut out the daunting uproar of
floods, and the sensation that the night was collapsing round our
heaving ship. There was a home light far away, on some unseen Cornish
headland, rising and falling like a soaring but tethered star. Nor did I
want the lights of home.
"I love the sea," a beautiful woman once said to me. (We, then, stood
looking out over it from a height, and the sea was but the sediment of
the still air, the blue precipitation of the sky, for it was that
restful time, early October. I also loved it then.)
I was thinking of this, when the concrete floor of the cabin nearly
became a wall, and I fell absurd-wise, striking nearly every item in the
cabin. Was this the way to greet a lover? Sitting on a sea-chest, and
swaying to and fro because the ship compelled me to a figure of woe, I
began to consider whether it was only the books about the sea which I
had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself. Perhaps it is better not to
live with it, if you would love it. The sea is at its best at London,
near midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before
a glowing fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It
is wiser not to try to realise your dreams. There are no real dreams.
For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will
never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was
married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human
kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behaviour are hidden.
The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark
desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because
you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune, and
drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. Yet, thought I, that
night off Cornwall, if I pray now as one of the privileged and lucky
foolish, this very occasion may prove to be set apart for the sole use
of the calculating wise. Because that is the way things happen at sea.
What else may we expect from It, the nameless thing, new-born with each
dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me had it degenerated into its
mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before
poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when
the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mudbank.
Here, you see, is the whole trouble in appealing to Omnipotence. Picture
me entering the wide western ocean at night, an inconspicuous but
self-important morsel sitting on a sea-chest, at a time when it was
perhaps ordained that hundreds of ships should have anxious passages.
(Afterwards I learned very many ships did have anxious passages.) How
could I expect to be spared, even though somewhere the hairs of my head
were all numbered? It is plain that to spare me would be to extend
beneficence to all. There only remained to me my liberty to hope that
our particular steamer might miss all seventh waves, by luck. I was free
to do that.
I turned up the dull and stinking oil lamp, and tried to read; but that
fuliginous glim haunted the pages. That black-edged light too much
resembled my own thoughts made manifest. There were some bunches of my
cabin mate's clothes hanging from hooks, and I watched their erratic
behaviour instead. The water in the carafe was also interesting, because
quite mad, standing diagonally in the bottle, and then reversing. A lump
of soap made a flying leap from the washstand, and then slithered about
the floor like something hunted and panic-stricken. I listened to
numerous little voices. There was no telling their origins. There was a
chorus in the cabin, rustlings, whispers, plaints, creaks, wails, and
grunts; but they were foundered in the din when the spittoon, which was
an empty meat tin, got its lashings loose, and began a rioting fandango
on the concrete. Over the clothes chest, which was also our table and a
cabin fixture, was a portrait of the mate's sweetheart, and on its frame
was one of my busy little friends the cockroaches; for the mate and I do
not sleep alone in this cabin, not by hundreds. The cockroach stood in
thought, waving his hands interrogatively, as one who talks to himself
nervously. The ship at that moment received a seventh wave, lurched, and
trembled. The cockroach fell. I rose, listening. I felt sure a new
clamour would begin at once, showing we had reached another and critical
stage of the fight. But no; the brave heart of her was beating as
before. I could feel its steady pulse throbbing in our table. We were
alive and strong, though labouring direfully.
It was when I was thinking whether bed would be, as I have so often
found it, the best answer to doubt, that I heard a boatswain's pipe.
I fought one side of the door, and the wind fought the other. My hurry
to open the door was great, but the obstinate wind jammed it firmly.
Without warning the wind released its hold, the ship fell over to
windward, the door flew open, and forth I went, clutching at the driving
dark. Then up sailed my side of the ship, and the door shut with the
sound of gunfire. I had never experienced such insensate violence. These
were the unlawful noises and movements of chaos. Hanging to a rail, I
was puzzling out which was the fore and which the rear of the ship, when
a flying lump of salt water struck me in the face just as a figure (I
thought it was the chief officer) hurried past me bawling "All hands."
The figure came back. "That you, purser? Number three hatch has gone,"
it said, and disappeared instantly.
So. Then this very thing had come to me, and at night! Our hatches were
adrift. It was impossible. Why, we had only just left Swansea. It could
not be true; it was absurdly unfair. This was my first long voyage, and
it had only just begun. I stood like the cricketer who is out for a
duck.
If I could tell you how I felt, I would. Somebody was shouting
somewhere, but his words were cut off at once by the wind and blown
away. I felt my way along a wet and dark iron alleyway which was giddily
unstable, pressing hard against my feet, and then falling from under me.
I got round by the engine-room entrance. Small gleams, shavings of
light, were escaping from seams in the unseen structure, but they showed
nothing, except a length of wet rail or a scrap of wet deck. The ship
itself was a shade, manned by voices.
I could not see that anything was being done. Were they allowing her to
fill up like an open barge? I became aware my surcharged feelings were
escaping by my knees, which kept knocking in their tremors against a
lower rail. I tried to stop this trembling by hardening my muscles, but
my fearful legs had their own way. Yet it is plain there was nothing to
fear. I told my legs so. Had we not but that day left Swansea? Besides,
I had already commenced a letter which was to be posted at Para. The
letter would have to be posted. They were waiting for it at home.
Somewhere below me a heavy mass of water plunged monstrously, and became
a faintly luminous cloud over all the main deck aft, actually framing
the rectangular form of the deck in the night. It was unreasonable. I
was not really one of the crew either, though on the articles. I was
there by chance. No advantage should be taken of that. A torrent poured
down the athwartships alleyway, and nearly swept me from my feet.
One could not watch what was happening. That was another cruel
injustice. The wind and sea could be heard, and the ship could be felt.
But how could I be expected to know what to do in the dark in such
circumstances? There ought to be a light. This should have happened in
the daytime. My garrulous knees struck the lower rail violently in their
excitement. I leaned over the rail, shading my eyes. I grew savagely
indignant with something having no name and no shape. I cannot even now
give a name to the thing that angered me, but can just discern, in the
twilight which shrouds the undiscovered, a vast calm face the rock of
which no human emotion can move, with eyes that stare but see nothing,
and a mouth that never speaks, and ears from which assailing cries and
questions fall as mournful echoes, ironic repetitions. This flung stone
falls from it, as unavailing as your prayers; but we shall never cease
to pray and fling stones, alternately, up there into the twilight.
Nevertheless, when the chief, with his hurricane lamp, found me, he says
I was smiling. The youth who was our second mate ran up and stood by us,
the better to shout to the deck below. He shouted, bending over the
rail, till he was screaming through hoarseness. He turned to us
abruptly. "They don't understand a word I say," he cried in despair.
"There isn't a sailor or an Englishman in the crowd, the ---- German
farmers." This, I found afterwards, was nearly true. These men had been
signed on at a Continental port. It was really our Dutch cook who saved
us that night. It was the cook who first saw the hatch covers going.
The ship's head had been put to the seas to keep the decks as clear as
possible, and being now more accustomed to the gloom I could make out
the men below busy at the hatch. Most conspicuous among them was the
cook, who had taken charge there, and he, with three languages,
bludgeoned into surprising activity the inexperienced youngsters who
were learning for the first time what happens to a ship when the
carpenter's chief job on leaving port has its defects discovered by
exceptional weather. They were wading through swirling waters as they
worked, and once a greater wave sprang bodily over them, and when the
hatch showed through the foam again some of the men had gone as though
dissolved. But it was found they had kept the right side of the
bulwarks, and the elderly carpenter, whose leg had got wedged in a
winch, was the only one damaged.
If you ask me when I shall be pleased to allow the necessary sun to rise
upon this narrative to give it a little warmth, then I must tell you it
cannot be done till we have fastened down the "Capella's" number two
hatch, at least. That hatch has gone now, and if hatches one and four
give way while number two is getting attention from the weary, soaked,
and frozen crowd which has just had an hour's desperate work at number
three, then I fear the sun will never rise on this narrative. (How Bates
got over to his wonderful blue butterflies in those forest paths under a
tropical sun in thirty-eight words I do not know. He must have been
thinking of nothing but his butterflies. I cannot do it, with the seas
and the ship keeping my mind so busy.)
Luckily, the other hatches kept staunch. We were watertight again. When
the Old Man, the Chief, the Doctor, and the Purser, gathered late that
night in the Chief's cabin to see what it was he had secreted in his
cupboard, and boasted of, we sat where we could, being comfortably
crowded, and I never knew tobacco could taste like that. I felt as if
never before had I found such large leisure for extracting its full
flavour. From being suddenly confined within a space which gave me a
short outlook of a few hours, I was presently released into the open
again and of what might remain to me of the usual gift of ample years. I
had all that time to smoke in. Never did a pipe taste so sweet. It is
idle for good and serious souls to think me graceless here with this
talk of tobacco immediately after such a release. Let me tell them my
sacrificial smoke rose up straight and accepted. Looking through the
smoke I saw clearly how worthy, kind, and lovable were the faces of my
comrades. I warmed to this voyage for the first time; as though, after a
test, I had been initiated. This was the place for me, with men like
these about me, and such great affairs to be met. I revelled in the
thought of our valorous bluff, insignificant as we were in that malign
desolation, sundered from our kind.
"Chief," said the Old Man, "it was my department that time. None of your
old engines did it."
"You've got a good cook," said the Chief, "I saw that." Then the Chief,
remembering something, turned in his seat to the picture hanging above
his desk of a smiling and handsome matron. "Here's luck, old girl," he
said, holding up his glass; "you can still send me some letters."
* * * * *
The Chief, in case of an emergency, slept in his clothes that night on
the settee, and I climbed into his bunk. What a comfortable outline the
man had, as he lay on his broad back, mildly snoring. There was a tangle
of tense hair over a square copper coloured forehead. A long experience
of such nights was written in many lines on that brow, and was shown in
that indifferent snoring while chaos was without. The nose sprang out of
the big face like an ejaculation, and beneath it was a moustache clipped
short to show the red of the upper lip. The jaw was powerful, but its
curves made it friendly. His body and limbs hid the settee and had a
margin over. I quite believed what I had been told of his successful way
with refractory stokers. There was confidence to be got from a mere look
at that slumbering Jovian form. The storm assailed its hairy and fleshy
ears in vain. I braced my knees against the bulkhead to keep myself
still, the rolling was so violent, and went to sleep ... waking to find
us on a level keel; and was deceived into thinking the parallel lines of
grey and gold in the upper air, seen as a picture framed by the port,
were the heights about; a harbour into which we had run for shelter; but
it was only cloudland over the western ocean. The stillness, too, was
but a short reprieve. The wind was merely making a detour, to spring at
us from another quarter.
The sun died at birth. The wind we had lost we found again as a gale
from the south-east. The waters quickly increased again, and by noon the
saloon was light and giddy with the racing of the propeller. I moved
about like an infant learning to walk. We were 201 miles from the
Mumbles, course S.W. 1/2W.; it was cold, and I was still looking for the
pleasures of travel. The Doctor came to introduce himself, like a good
man, and tried me with such things as fevers, Shaw, Brazilian
entomology, the evolution of sex, the medical profession under
socialism, the sea and the poets. But my thoughts were in retreat, with
the black dog in full cry. It was too cold and damp to talk even of sex.
When my oil lamp began to throw its rays of brown smell, the Doctor,
tired of the effort to exalt the sour dough which was my mind, left me.
It was night. O, the sea and the poets!
By next morning the gale, now from the south-west, like the seas, was
constantly reinforced with squalls of hurricane violence. The Chief put
a man at the throttle. In the early afternoon the waves had assumed
serious proportions. They soared by us in broad sombre ranges, with
hissing white ridges, an inhospitable and subduing sight. They were a
quite different tribe of waves from the volatile and malicious natives
of the Bristol Channel. Those channel waves had no serried ranks in the
attack; they were but a horde of undisciplined savages, appearing to
assault without design or plan, but getting at us as they could,
depending on their numbers. The waves in the channel were smaller folk,
but more athletic, and very noisy; they appeared to detach themselves
from the sea, and to leap at us, shouting.
These western ocean waves had a different character. They were the sea.
We did not have a multitude of waves in sight, but the sea floor itself
might have been undulating. The ocean was profoundly convulsed. Our
outlook was confined to a few heights and hollows, and the moving
heights were swift, but unhurried and stately. Your alarm, as you saw a
greater hill appear ahead, tower, and bear down, had no time to get more
than just out of the stage of surprise and wonder when the "Capella's"
bows were pointing skyward on a long up-slope of water, the broken
summit of which was too quick for the "Capella"--the bows disappeared in
a white explosion, a volley of spray, as hard as shot, raked the bridge,
the foredeck filled with raging water, and the wave swept along our run,
dark, severe, and immense; with so little noise too; with but a faint
hissing of foam, as in a deliberate silence. The "Capella" then began to
run down a valley.
The engines were reduced to half speed; it would have been dangerous to
drive her at such seas. Our wet and slippery decks were bleak,
windswept, and deserted. The mirror of water on the iron surfaces,
constantly renewed, reflected and flashed the wild lights in the sky as
she rolled and pitched, and somehow those reflections from her polish
made the steamer seem more desolate and forlorn. Not a man showed
anywhere on the vessel's length, except merely to hurry from one vantage
to another--darting out of the ship's interior, and scurrying to another
hole and vanishing abruptly, like a rabbit.
The gale was dumb till it met and was torn in our harsh opposition,
shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed
our iron into its ponderable body. You could imagine the flawless flood
of air pouring silently express till it met our pillars and pinnacles,
and then flying past rift, the thousand punctures instantly spreading
into long shrieking lacerations. The wounds and mouths were so many,
loud, and poignant, that you wondered you could not see them. Our
structure was full of voices, but the weighty body which drove against
our shrouds and funnel guys, and kept them strongly vibrating, was
curiously invisible. The hard jets of air spurted hissing through the
winches. The sound in the shrouds and stays began like that of something
tearing, and rose to a high keening. The deeper notes were amidships, in
the alleyways and round the engine-room casing; but there the ship
itself contributed a note, a metallic murmur so profound that it was
felt as a tremor rather than heard. It was almost below human hearing.
It was the hollow ship resonant, the steel walls, decks, and bulkheads
quivering under the drumming of the seas, and the regular throws of the
crank-shaft far below.
It was on this day the "Capella" ceased to be a marine engine to me. She
was not the "Capella" of the Swansea docks, the sea waggon squatting low
in the water, with bows like a box, and a width of beam which made her
seem a wharf fixture. To-day in the Atlantic her bluff bows rose to meet
the approaching bulk of each wave with such steady honesty, getting up
heavily to meet its quick wiles, it is true, but often with such success
that we found ourselves perched at a height above the gloom of the
hollow seas, getting more light and seeing more world; though sometimes
the hill-top was missed; she was not quick enough, and broke the
inflowing ridge with her face. She behaved so like a brave patient thing
that now her portrait, which I treasure, is to me that of one who has
befriended me, a staunch and homely body who never tired in faithful
well-doing. She became our little sanctuary, especially near dayfall,
with those sombre mounts close round us bringing twilight before its
time.
Your glance caught a wave passing amidships as a heaped mass of polished
obsidian, having minor hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal
fractures in its glass. It rose directly and acutely from your feet to a
summit that was awesome because the eye travelled to it over a long and
broken up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to obscure thirty
degrees of light; and the imagination shrank from contemplating water
which over-shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk toppling in
collapse. The steamer leaning that side, your face was quite close to
the beginning of the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a
vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried far but plain in its
translucent deeps. It passed; and the light released from the sky
streamed over the "Capella" again as your side of her lifted in the
roll, the sea falling down her iron wall as far as the bilge. The
steamer spouted violently from her choked valve, as it cleared the sea,
like a swimmer who battles, and then gets his mouth free from a smother.
Her task against those head seas and the squalls was so hard and
continuous that the murmur of her heart, which I fancied grew louder
almost to a moaning when her body sank to the rails, the panic of her
cries when the screw raced, when she lost her hold, her noble and
rhythmic labourings, the sense of her concentrated and unremitting power
given by the smoke driving in violence from her swaying funnel, the
cordage quivering in tense curves, the seas that burst in her face as
clouds, falling roaring inboard then to founder half her length, she
presently to raise her heavy body slowly out of an acre of foam, the
cascades streaming from her in veils,--all this was like great music. I
learned why a ship has a name. It is for the same reason that you and I
have names. She has happenings according to her own weird. She shows
perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they
laid for her. Her heredity cannot be explained by the general chemics of
iron and steel and the principles of the steam engine; but something
counts in her of the moods of her creators, both of the happy men and
the sullen men whose bright or dark energies poured into her rivets and
plates as they hammered, and now suffuse her body. Something of the
"Capella" was revealed to me, "our" ship. She was one for pride and
trust. She was slow, but that slowness was of her dignity and size; she
had valour in her. She was not a light yacht. She was strong and hard,
taking heavy punishment, and then lifting her broad face over the seas
to look for the next enemy. But was she slow? She seemed but slow. The
eye judged by those assailing hills, so vast and whelmingly quick. The
hills were so dark, swift, and great, moving barely inferior to the
clouds which travelled with them, the collapsing roof which fell over
the seas, flying with the same impulse as the waters. There was the
uplifted ocean, and pressing down to it, sundered from it only by the
gale--the gale forced them apart--the foundered heavens, a low ceiling
which would have been night itself but that it was thinned in patches by
some solvent day. And our "Capella," heavy as was her body, and great
and swift as were the hills, never failed to carry us up the long
slopes, and over the white summits which moved down on us like the
marked approach of catastrophe. If one of the greater hills but hit us,
I thought----
One did. Late that afternoon the second mate, who was on watch, saw such
a wave bearing down on us. It was so dominantly above us that
instinctively he put his hand in his pocket for his whistle. It was his
first voyage in an ocean steamer; he was not long out of his
apprenticeship in "sails," and so he did not telegraph to stop the
engines. The Skipper looked up through the chart-room window, saw the
high gloom of this wave over us, and jumped out for the bridge ladder to
get at the telegraph himself. He was too late.
We went under. The wave stopped us with the shock of a grounding, came
solid over our fore-length, and broke on our structure amidships. The
concussion itself scattered things about my cabin. When the "Capella"
showed herself again the ventilators had gone, the windlass was damaged,
and the iron ends of the drum on the forecastle head, on which a steel
hawser was wound, had been doubled on themselves, like tinfoil.
By day these movements of water on a grand scale, the harsh and deep
noises of gale and breaking seas, and the labouring of the steamer, no
more than awed me. At least, my sight could escape. But courage went
with the light. At dusk, the eye, which had the liberty during the hours
of light to range up the inclines of the sea to distant summits, and
note that these dangers always passed, was imprisoned by a dreadful
apparition. When there was more night than day in the dusk you saw no
waves. You saw, and close at hand, only vertical shadows, and they
swayed noiselessly without progressing on the fading sky high over you.
I could but think the ocean level had risen greatly, and was see-sawing
much superior to us all round. The "Capella" remained then in a
precarious nadir of the waters. Looking aft from the Chief's cabin I
could see of our ship only the top of our mainmast, because that
projected out of the shadow of the hollow into the last of the day
overhead; and often the sheer apparitions oscillating around us swung
above the truck of it, and the whole length vanished. The sense of
onward movement ceased because nothing could be seen passing us. At dusk
the steamer appeared to be rocking helplessly in a narrow sunken place
which never had an outlet for us; the shadows of the seas erect over us
did not move away, but their ridges pitched at changing angles.
You know the Sussex chalk hills at evening, just at that time when, from
the foot of them, they lose all detail but what is on the skyline,
become an abrupt plane before you of unequal height. That was the view
from the "Capella," except that the skyline moved. And when we passed a
barque that evening it looked as looks a solitary bush far on the summit
of the downs. The barque did not pass us; we saw it fade, and the height
it surmounted fade, as shadows do when all light has gone. But where we
saw it last a green star was adrift and was ranging up and down in the
night.
This was the dark time when, struggling from amidships to the poop, you
knew there was something organised and coherent under you, still a
standing place in chaos, only because you could feel it there. And this
was the time to seek your fellows in the saloon, where there was light,
warmth, sane and familiar things, and dinner. The "Capella's" saloon was
fairly large, and the Skipper's pride. It was panelled in maple and oak,
with a long settee at the foreward end upholstered in red velvet, the
velvet protected by a calico cover. A brass oil lamp with an opaline
shade hung over the table from a beam beneath the skylight. There was a
closed American stove, with a rigorously polished brass flue running up
through the deck. On two oak sideboards in corners of the saloon some
artificial plants blossomed; from single stems each plant blossomed into
flowers of aniline dyes and of different species. One of these plants,
an imitation palm, and a better imitation of life than the others, was
carefully watered throughout the voyage by the steward till it wilted
into corruption and an offence, and became a count against the steward
which the skipper never forgave, for he thought his floral ornaments
lovely. When a pretty Brazilian lady visitor at Itacoatiara admired the
magenta rays of one blossom, he culled it for her (five earnest minutes
with a sharp knife, for there was wire behind the green bark) more as a
sacrifice and a hard duty than a joy, and often spoke of it afterwards,
shaking his head regretfully.
Ah! that saloon. I remember it first, shiny, cold, and repellent, with a
handful of fire to its wide capacity for draughts, in the northern seas.
It had curious marine odours then, with which I was not friendly till
long after, odours that lamps, burnished brass, newly polished wood,
food, and the steward's storeroom behind it, never fully accounted for;
and I remember it as I found it in the still heat of the Amazon, when it
had the air of an oven; when, writing in it, the sweat ran off the
fingers to soil the paper, strange insects crawling everywhere on its
green baize table cover, and banging against its lamp. I remember it
assiduously now, every trivial feature of it, and the men, now scattered
over all the world, thrown together in it then for a spell to make the
most of each other. It has the indelible impress of a room of that house
where first the interest in existence awakened in us.
The Skipper, with stove behind him, took his seat before the soup tureen
at the head of the table. You would as soon think of altering the
chart-room clock, even were it wrong, as of touching the soup tureen
without the Skipper's orders. It is his duty and his right to serve the
soup, and to call the steward to inform him the density of the
vegetables in it is too heavy. We have no market garden on board, you
know.
The Doctor was on the Skipper's right hand, and the Purser next to the
Doctor, and on the opposite side, the chief mate. There was the plump
and bald-headed German steward, in white apron, the lid of one eye
heavier than the other, serving us in his shirt sleeves, sometimes
sucking his teeth with a noticeable click when he knew a dish deserved
our approval. You kept the soup in the plate by holding it off the table
and watching its tides. When her stern sailed up, and the screw raced,
the glass shade of the lamp, being a misfit, took our eyes to watch the
coming smash; the soup then poured over you, and trying to push your
chair back from the mess, you found the chair was a fixture on the
floor. This last fact was never remembered. I should try to push my
"Capella" chair back now, if I were sitting in it.
The Doctor, who had been long enough tinkering careless bodies to have
grown a little worn and grizzled, was often removed from us by a faint
but impervious hauteur, though maybe he was only a little better and
differently dressed. He was a patient listener, but his eyes could be
droll. The Doctor's chuckle, escaping from his thoughts while he was
unguarded, would sometimes make the captain look up from a narrative
with question and a trace of resentment in his glance. The captain was a
great traveller, but he was puzzled to find the memory of our surgeon
following him to the most remote and unfamiliar strands. "Now how did
that fellow come to be at a place like that?" the captain would whisper
to me afterwards. "Can't make him out. Who is he?" The surgeon had a
bottomless fund of short stories, to which he would sometimes go about
the time when we were pushing away the banana skins and nutshells. He
had an elusive and stimulating method with them. He knew his work. At
the end of one the captain would explain the fun to the seriously
interested mate (who had leaned forward to learn), placing spoons and
crumbs to demonstrate the main points. Then the mate, too, would join us
with his happy laugh. The late and giddy laughter of the mate, when he
also arrived, became a welcome feature of a yarn by the surgeon. We
expected it. The mate's own stories were usually bawdy; he always
prefaced them with some unmanageable hilarity, which impeded his start.
Mate (_pushing over his plate for soup_). That big wave washed out the
men's berths, sir.
Captain. Then it did some good. The dirty brutes.
Mate. Heard the men grumbling to-night. Said we'll never get the hawsers
to run out with them bugs in the hawse pipes. Say the bugs don't belong
to them, sir--ship's property.
Doctor. Any this end of the ship, captain? Good Lord!
Captain. Not a bug. And if there's any for'ard the men brought 'em. No
bugs in my ship. Never saw one in my cabin.
Mate (_making a confused effort to master his emotion, not to spill his
soup, and to be respectful_). Te-he! you will, sir, Te-he! (_Realises he
may not laugh, but suffers internally._)
Captain (_indicates an interrogation with frightful eyes and guttural
noises_).
Mate (_controls himself by concentrating on a fork_). Well, sir--I'm
just telling you--I heard it said the men annoyed with bugs--some of 'em
said seein's believin'--said they had enough for everybody. (_His voice
breaks into a stifled falsetto_) So they emptied a match--match--they
emptied a match box full down your ventilator this morning.
* * * * *
The captain would frequently keep his seat in the saloon after dinner
till he had finished his cigar, and in the vein, would put a leg over
the arm of his chair, which he had pushed back (his chair was cushioned,
and was not a fixture), and frowning at his cigar, as if for defects,
would voyage again his early seas. I suppose a sailor would call our
skipper a hard case. He was an elderly man, tall, spare, and meagrely
bearded. His eyes were set close into a knife-like nose, and they were
opaque and bright, like two blue stones under a forehead which narrowed
and tightened into a small shiny cranium. There were tufts of grey wool
above his temples. No light came through his eyes to make them limpid,
except when he was fondling Tinker, the dog. They shone from the
surface, giving him a look of peering and intent suspicion. The skin of
his face, neck and hands, now worked a little loose, was so steeped in
the tincture of sunshine that it had preserved an unctious child-like
quality. His dress and habits betrayed an appreciation of his own
person. He kept his own medicines.
I guessed he would have a ruthless process in an emergency; he would
identify the success and safety of the ship with his own. He laughed
from his mouth only, throwing his head back, showing surprisingly
perfect teeth, and laughter did not change the crystalline glitter of
his eyes. There was something alien and startling in his merriment. As
though his own mind were too cold for him at times he would seek out me,
or the chief, to find warmth in an argument. He would irritate us into a
disputation; and though he was a choleric man, quick at opposition, yet
his vocabulary then was flinty and sparse. It stuck, and was delivered
with pain. You could think of him labouring at his views of men and
affairs with a creaking slate pencil. He set one's teeth. But he was a
sailor, cautious and bold, with a knowledge of ships and the sea that
was a mine to me. Let me say that, during the voyage, I found him busy
making a canvas cot. He sat on the poop and worked there, bent and
patient as a seamstress, for days. With a judgment made too readily I
believed he was, naturally, making it for his own comfort, against the
heat of the river. When it was finished he was rolling up his ball of
yarn, surveying his job, and he said, mumbling and shy, that the cot was
for me.
The Skipper, on this day that our decks were swept, swore about the men
and the bugs during dinner, muttered with foreboding about the glass,
which was still falling, and the coals, which were being burnt to no
purpose. We were hardly doing more than holding our place on our course.
The saloon was delirious, and when she flung up her heels, the varied
noises rose with the racing propeller to a crescendo of furious
castenets. The mate let us. The Skipper sat glooming, eyeing his cigar
resentfully, his leg over the arm of his chair. The Doctor was swaying
with the ship, weary and forlorn. Tinker had an appeal in his eyes, and
made timorous noises. The Purser wondered why he was there at all, and
blamed his silly dreams. The night boomed without. What a night!
Skipper. If this southerly wind goes round to the west and north, look
out. I saw porpoises to-day too.
Doctor. When are we due at Para?
Skipper. Huh! What's this talk of Para? You wait. All this talk about
when we shall get there's no good.... Now in those Newfoundland
schooners where I served my time--I wouldn't have no talk in them about
getting anywhere. Seems as if somebody heard. You always run into it.
There was the "Lizzie Polwith." She was about 80 tons. Those west
country schooners in the fish trade are never more than 100 tons, else
they'd have to carry more than a master and one mate. I was her master,
and a kid of eighteen. We left Falmouth for Cadiz. Now look what
happened. My mate was old Tregenna. He was a regular misery. I never
knew such a dead homer, not so much as he was, always wanting to talk
about his wife. I say, when you've cast off, it's best not to have a
home. The ship wants all you can give her. Tregenna, he looked back a
lot. You know what I mean. Couldn't keep his mind on his job, but wished
he was through with it. There he'd be cutting bread at dinner, and it
'ud remind him, and he'd be wishing he was cutting it at home. When
things began to go stiff, he'd say, "who wouldn't sell his little farm
to go to sea?" Used to figure out on paper how long we'd be before we'd
be back. Why, you never know when you'll get back.
See what happened. We left Cadiz that year on the first of January, and
got things just right. The winds chased us over. There were big
following seas, but you know those schooners ride like ducks. Up and
over they go. Never a drop did we ship. Though they're lively enough to
bruise and sicken all but good sailors. And old Tregenna was rubbing his
hands and making out his figures better and better.
We arrived off St. Johns in a bit more than three weeks. I reckon I'd
done it all right, being such a young chap too. Well, I was turning in
that night, and just as I got into the companion a man said, "There goes
a lump of ice." I jumped out again. Why, there was ice all round us. The
sea was full of it as far as I could see into the night. "This is all
along of your figuring," I sang out to Tregenna. "But you'll have a lot
of time to reckon it up afresh," I said.
So he had. Do you know when we got in? We got in on April 15. We were
two months and a half getting in. And we came over in three weeks.
There's something in that Jonah story. Always some fool who can't keep
his mouth shut and his mind on his job.
We did have a time. Two and a half months, and our provisions ran out.
We were living on a little meal and dried peas. The ice chafed the
"Lizzie" till the rudder was worn down to the stock. It roughed up her
wooden sides till they looked as if they were covered with long coarse
hair. We were a sight when we got in. You wouldn't have known us,
hardly. We looked as if we'd come up from the bottom.... Don't ask me
when we shall get to Para. Wait till we're out of this. Listen to that
dog. Shut up, you Tinker. Making that noise, sir! Go and lie down.