M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a
cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it,
and half the ship has to clean up the mess.
--RUDYARD KIPLING.
The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they
would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and
William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck
steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at
Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages!
William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer
in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude
toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not
know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his
feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his
disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the
purveyors of publicity, you may know him.
One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting by the
open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young
man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to
Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker in London. Mr. Secker,
like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the
titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned
to look over Mr. Secker's announcements, that a train of events was
about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve
months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when
I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a
telegram signed by a dozen of them: "_Congratulations. Name him
Casuals_!"
It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of 1915-16
that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the
not-to-be-forgotten words.