THE tall, flaxen-haired stewardess Matilda had finished cutting
Schwartzbrod and had gone to bed. The Danish boarhound slept heavily
under the lee of the chicken-coops, the six or seven cats were upon the
cabin sofa, and with the wind from the south-west, raising a terrific
sea, and sending showers of spray flying over the tops of the black rocks
which fringed the town, the S.S. _Oldenburg_ got under way and staggered
out into the gut.
The old white city girt on the seaward side by its breakwater of tall
black rocks, the houses dazzlingly white, the crenelated walls, the long
stretch of sand, extending to the belt of grey-green scrub and backed in
the distance by the sombre forest, lay in the moonlight as distinct and
clear as it had been mid-day. Clearer perhaps, for the sun in a sandy
landscape seems to blur the outlines which the moon reveals; so that
throughout North Africa night is the time to see a town in all its beauty
of effect. The wind lifting the sand, drifted it whistling through the
standing rigging of the tramp, coating the scarce dried paint, and making
paint, rigging, and everything on board feel like a piece of shark-skin
to the touch. The vessel groaned and laboured in the surface sea, and on
the port quarter rose the rocks of the low island which forms the
harbour, leaving an entrance of about half-a-mile between its shores and
the rocks which guard the town.
West-south-west a little westerly, the wind ever increased; the sea
lashed on the vessel’s quarter, and in spite of the dense volumes of
black smoke and showers of sparks flying out from the salt-coated
smoke-stack, the tramp seemed to stand still. Upon the bridge the
skipper screamed hoarsely in Platt-Deutsch down his connection-tube to
the chief engineer; men came and went in dirty blue check cotton clothes
and wooden shoes; occasionally a perspiring fireman poked his head above
the hatch, and looking seaward for a moment, scooped off the sweat from
his forefinger, muttered, “Gott freduma,” and went below; even the Arab
deck-hands, roused into activity, essayed to set a staysail, and the
whole ship, shaken between the storm and the exertions of the crew,
trembled and shivered in the yeasty sea. Nearer the rocks appeared, and
the white town grew clearer, more intensely white, the sea frothed round
the vessel, and the skipper advancing to a missionary seated silently
gazing across the water with a pallid sea-green face, slapped him upon
the back, and with an oath said, “Mister, will you have one glass of
beer?” The Levite in partibus, clad in his black alpaca Norfolk jacket,
grey greasy flannel shirt and paper collar, with the whole man surmounted
by the inevitable pith soup-tureen-shaped hat, the trade-mark of his
confraternity, merely pressed both his hands harder upon his diaphragm
and groaned. “One leetel glass beer, I have it from Olten, fifty dozen
of it. Perhaps all to be wasted; have a glass beer, it will do your
shtomag good.” The persecuted United Presbyterian ambulant broke silence
with one of those pious ejaculations which do duty (in the congregations)
for an oath, and taking up his parable, fixing the pith tureen upon his
head with due precaution, said, “Captain, ye see I am a total abstainer,
joined in the Whifflet, and in addeetion I feel my stomach sort o’
discomposed.” And to him again, good Captain Rindelhaus rejoined, “Well,
Mister Missionary, do you see dat rocks?” The Reverend Mr. McKerrochar,
squinting to leeward with an agonizing stare, admitted that he did, but
qualified by saying, “there was sic a halgh, he was na sure that they
were rocks at all.” “Not rocks! Kreuz-Sacrament, dose rocks you see are
sharp as razors, and the back-wash off them give you no jance; I dell
you, sheep’s-head preacher, dat point de way like signboard and not
follow it oop himself, you better take glass beer in time, for if the
schip not gather headway in about five minutes you perhaps not get
another jance.” After this dictum, he stood looking into the night, his
glass gripped in his left hand, and in his right a half-smoked-out cigar,
which he put to his mouth mechanically now and then, but drew no smoke
from it. The missionary too looked at the rocks with increased interest,
and the Arab pilot staggering up the ladder to the bridge stolidly
pointed to the surf, and gave us his opinion, that “he, the captain and
the faqui would soon be past the help of prayer,” piously adding, “that
it seemed Allah’s will; although he thought the Kaffirs, sons of burnt
Kaffirs, in the stoke-hole were not firing up.”
With groans and heavings, with long shivers which came over her as the
sea struck her on the beam, the vessel fought for her life, belching
great clouds of smoke out into the clear night air. Captain and
missionary, pilot and crew, stood gazing at the sea; the captain now and
then yelling some unintelligible Platt-Deutsch order down the tube; the
missionary fumbling with a Bible lettered “Polyglot,” covered in black
oil-cloth; and the pilot passing his beads between the fingers of his
right hand, his eyes apparently not seeing anything; and it seemed as if
another twenty minutes must have seen them all upon the rocks.
But Allah perhaps was on the watch; and the wind falling for an instant,
or the burnt Kaffirs in the stoke-hole having struck a better vein of
coal, the rusty iron sea-coffin slowly gathered headway, staggered as the
engines driven to the highest pressure seemed to tear out her ribs, and
forged ahead. Then lurching in the sea, the screw occasionally racing
with a roar, and the black decks dripping and under water, the scuppers
being choked with the filth of years, she sidled out to sea, and rose and
fell in the long rollers outside the harbour, which came in from the
west. Rindelhaus set her on her course, telling the Arab helmsman in the
pigeon-English which served them as a means of interchanging their few
ideas, “to keep her head north and by west a little northerly, and let
him know when they were abreast of Jibel Hadid;” adding a condemnation of
the Arab race in general and the particular sailor, whom he characterized
as a “tamned heaven dog, not worth his kraut.” The sailor, dressed in
loose Arab trousers and a blue jersey, the whole surmounted by a greasy
fez, replied: “Yes, him know Jibel Hadid, captain, him keep her head
north and by west all right,” and probably also consigned the captain and
the whole Germanic race to the hottest corner of Jehannum, and so both
men were pleased. The boarhound gambolled on the deck, Matilda peeped up
the companion, her dripping wooden shoes looking like waterlogged canoes,
and the Scotch missionary began to walk about, holding his monstrous hat
on with one hand and hugging the oilskin-covered “Polyglot” under his
left arm. Crossing the skipper in his walk, in a more cheerful humour he
ventured to remark: “Eh! captain, maybe I could mak’ a shape at yon glass
of beer the now.” But things had changed, and Rindelhaus looked at him
with the usual uncondescending bearing of the seaman to the mere
passenger, and said: “Nein, you loose your obbordunity for dat glass
beer, my friend, and now I have to navigate my ship.”
The _Oldenburg_ pursued the devious tenor of her way, touching at ports
which all were either open roadsteads or had bars on which the surf
boiled with a noise like thunder; receiving cargo in driblets, a sack or
two of marjoram, a bale of goatskins or of hides, two or three bags of
wool, and sometimes waiting for a day or two unable to communicate until
the surf went down. The captain spent his time in harbour fishing
uninterestedly, catching great bearded spiky-finned sea-monsters which he
left to die upon the deck. Not that he was hard-hearted, but merely
unimaginative, after the way of those who, loving sport for the pleasure
it affords themselves, hotly deny that it is cruel, or that it can
occasion inconvenience to any participator in a business which they
themselves enjoy. So the poor innocent sea-monsters floundered in slimy
agony upon the deck; the boarhound and the cats taking a share in
martyring them, tearing and biting at them as they gasped their lives
away; condemned to agony for some strange reason, or perhaps because, as
every living thing is born to suffer, they were enduring but their fair
proportion, as they happened to be fish. Pathetic but unwept, the
tragedy of all the animals, and we but links in the same chain with them,
look at it all as unconcerned as gods. But as the bearded spiky fish
gasped on the deck the missionary tried to abridge their agony with a
belaying-pin; covering himself with blood and slime, and setting up the
back of Captain Rindelhaus, who vowed his deck should not be hammered
“like a skidel alley, all for the sake of half-a-dozen fish, which would
be dead in half-an-hour and eaten by the cats.”
The marvels of our commerce, in the shape of Waterbury watches, scissors
and looking-glasses, beads, Swiss clocks, and musical-boxes, all duly
dumped, and the off-scouring of the trade left by the larger ships duly
received on board, the _Oldenburg_ stumbled out to sea if the wind was
not too strong, and squirmed along the coast. Occasionally upon arrival
at a port the sound of psalmody was heard, and a missionary boat put off
to pass the time of God with their brother on the ship. Then came the
greetings, as the whole party sat on the fiddlee gratings jammed up
against the funnel; the latest news from the Cowcaddens and the gossip
from along the coast was duly interchanged. Gaunt-featured girls,
removed by physical conditions from all temptation, sat and talked with
scraggy, freckled, and pith-hatted men. It was all conscience, and
relatively tender heart, and as the moon lit up the dirty decks, they
paraded up and down, happy once more to be secure even for a brief space
from insult, and to feel themselves at home. Dressed in white blouses,
innocent of stays, with skirts which no belt known to milliners could
ever join to the body or the blouse; with smaller-sized pith hats,
sand-shoes and spectacles; their hands in Berlin gloves, and freckles
reaching far down upon their necks, they formed a crushing argument in
their own persons against polygamy. Still, in the main, all kindly
souls, and some with a twinkle in their white-eyelashed steel-grey eyes,
as of a Congregationalist bull-terrier, which showed you that they would
gladly suffer martyrdom without due cause, or push themselves into great
danger, out of sheer ignorance and want of knowledge of mankind. Life’s
misfits, most of them; their hands early inured to typewriting machines,
their souls, as they would say, “sair hodden doon in prayer;” carefully
educated to be ashamed of any scrap of womanhood they might possess.
Still they were sympathetic, for sympathy is near akin to tears, and
looking at them one divined they must have shed tears plentifully, enough
to wash away any small sins they had committed in their lives.
The men, sunburnt yet sallow, seemed nourished on tinned meats and
mineral table-waters; their necks scraggy and red protruded from their
collars like those of vultures; they carried umbrellas in their hands
from early habit of a wet climate, and seemed as if they had been chosen
after much cogitation by some unskilled commission, for their unfitness
for their task.
They too, dogged and narrow-minded as they were, were yet pathetic, when
one thought upon their lives. No hope of converts, or of advancement in
the least degree, stuck down upon the coast, far off from Dorcas
meetings, school-feasts, or anything which in more favoured countries
whiles away the Scripture-reader’s time; they hammered at their
self-appointed business day by day and preached unceasingly, apparently
indifferent to anything that passed, so that they got off their due
quantity of words a day. In course of time, and after tea and
bread-and-butter had been consumed, they got into their boat, struck up
the tune of “Sidna Aissa Hobcum,” and from the taffrail McKerrochar saw
them depart, joining in the chorus lustily and waving a dirty
handkerchief until they faded out of sight. Mr. McKerrochar, one of
those Scottish professional religionists, whom early training or their
own “damnable iteration” has convinced of all the doctrine that they
preach, formed a last relic of a disappearing type. The antiquated
out-and-out doctrine of Hellfire and of Paradise, the jealous Scottish
God, and the Mosaic Dispensation which he accepted whole, tinged slightly
with the current theology of Airdrie or Coatbridge, made him a formidable
adversary to the trembling infidel, in religious strife. In person he
was tall and loosely built, his trousers bagging at the knees as if a
horse’s hock had been inside the cloth. Wrong-headed as befits his
calling, he yet saw clearly enough in business matters, and might have
marked a flock of heathen sheep had he applied his business aptitude to
his religious work, or on the other hand he might have made a fortune had
he chanced to be a rogue. He led a joyless stirring life, striving
towards ideals which have made the world a quagmire; yet worked towards
them with that simple faith which makes a man ten thousand times more
dangerous, in his muddle-headed course. Abstractions which he called
duty, morality, and self-sacrifice, ruled all his life; forcing him ever
onward to occupy himself with things which really he had no concern with;
and making him neglect himself and the more human qualities of courtesy
and love. And so he stood, waving his pocket-handkerchief long after the
strains of “Sidna Aissa Hobcum” had melted into the night air; his arms
still waving as the sails of windmills move round once or twice, but
haltingly, after the wind has dropped. Perhaps that class of man seldom
or never chews the cud either of sweet or bitter recollection; and if, as
in McKerrochar’s case, he is deprived of whisky in which to drown his
cares, the last impression gone, his mind hammers away, like the keys of
a loose typewriter under a weary operator’s hands, half aimlessly, till
circumstances place new copy under its roller, and it starts off again to
work.
He might have gone on waving right through the dog-watch had not the
captain with a rough ejaculation stopped his arm. “Himmel, what for a
semaphore, Herr missionary, is dat; and you gry too, when you look at dat
going-way boat . . . Well, have a glass of beer. I tell you it is not
good to look at boats and gry for noddings, for men that have an ugly
yellow beard like yours and mine.”
“I was na greetin’, captain,” said the missionary, furtively wiping his
face; “it was just ane of thae clinkers, I think thae ca’ the things, has
got into my eye.”
“Glinkers, mein friend, do not get into people’s eyes when der ship is
anchored,” Rindelhaus replied; “still I know as you feel, but not for
missionary boats. You not know Oldenburg eh? Pretta place; not far from
Bremerhaven. Oldenburg is one of the prettaest places in the world. I
live dere. Hour and half by drain, oot from de port. I just can see the
vessels’ masts and the funnel smoke as they pass oop and down the stream.
I think I should not care too much to live where man can see no ships.
Yes, yes, ah, here come Matilda mit de beer. Mein herz, you put him down
here on dis bale of marjoram, and you goes off to bed. I speak here mit
de Herr missionary, who gry for noddings when he look at missionary boat
go off into de night.
“Ah, Oldenburg, ja, yes, I live there. Meine wife she live there, and
meine littel Gretchen, she about den or twelve, I don’t remember which.
Prosit, Herr missionary, you have no wife; no littel Gretchen, eh? So,
so, dat is perhaps better for a missionary.”
The two sat looking at nothing, thinking in the painful ruminant way of
semi-educated men, the captain’s burly North-German figure stretched on a
cane deck-chair. About a captain’s age he was, that is, his beard had
just begun to grizzle, and his nose was growing red, the bunions on his
feet knotted his boots into protuberances, after the style of those who
pass their lives about a deck. In height above six feet,
broad-shouldered and red-faced, his voice of the kind with which a
huntsman rates a dog, his clothes bought at a Bremerhaven slop-shop, his
boots apparently made by a portmanteau-maker, and in his pocket was a
huge silver keyless watch which he said was a “gronometer,” and keep de
Bremen time. Instant in prayer and cursing; pious yet blasphemous;
kindly but brutal in the Teutonic way; he kicked his crew about as they
had all been dogs, and yet looked after the tall stewardess Matilda as
she had been his child; guarding her virtue from the assaults of
passengers, and though alone with her in the small compass of a ship,
respecting it himself.
After an interval he broke into his subject, just as a phonograph takes
up its interrupted tale, as if against its will.
“So ja, yes, Oldenburg, pretta place; I not see it often though. In all
eight years I never stay more to my house than from de morning Saturday
to Monday noon, and dat after a four months’ trip.
“Meine wife, she getting little sdout, and not mind much, for she is
immer washing; washing de linen, de house, de steps; she wash de whole
ship oop only I never let her come to see. The Gretchen she immer say,
‘Father, why you not stop to home?’ You got no littel Gretchen, eh? . . .
Well, perhaps better so. Last Christmas I was at Oldenburg.
Christmas eve I buy one tree, and then I remember I have to go to sea
next morning about eleven o’clock. So I say nodings all the day, and
about four o’clock the agent come and tell me that the company not wish
me leave Oldenburg upon de Christmas day. Then I was so much glad I
think I wait to eat meine Christmas dinner with meine wife, and talk with
Gretchen in the evening while I smoke my pipe. The stove was burning,
and the table stand ready mit sausage and mit bread and cheese, beer of
course, and lax, dat lax they bring from Norway, and I think I have good
time. Then I think on de company, what they say if I take favour from
them and go not out to sea; they throw it in my teeth for ever, and tell
me, ‘Rindelhaus, you remember we was so good to you upon that Christmas
day.’ I tell the agent thank you, but say I go to sea. Meine wife: she
gry and I say nodings, nodings to Gretchen, and sit down to take my tea.
Morning, I tell my littel girl, then she gry bitterly and say, ‘What for
you go to sea?’ I kiss meine wife and walk down to the quay; it just
begin to snow; I curse the schelm sailors, de pilot come aboard, and we
begin to warp into the stream. Just then I hear a running on the quay,
like as a Friesland pony come clattering on the stones. I look up and
see Gretchen mit her little wooden shoes. She run down to the ship, and
say, ‘Why you go sea, father, upon Christmas day?’ and I not able to say
nodings but just to wave my hand. We warp out into the stream, and she
stand grying till she faded out of sight. Sometimes I feel a liddel
sorry about dat Christmas day . . . But have another glass beer, Herr
missionary, it always do me good.” Wiping the froth from his moustache
with his rough hand he went below, leaving the missionary alone upon the
deck.
The night descended, and the ship shrouded in mist grew ghostly and
unnatural, whilst great drops of moisture hung on the backstays and the
shrouds.
The Arab crew lay sleeping, huddled round the windlass, looking mere
masses of white dirty rags; the seaman keeping the anchor-watch loomed
like a giant, and from the shore occasionally the voices of the guards at
the town prison came through the mist, making the boarhound turn in his
sleep and growl. The missionary paced to and fro a little, settling his
pith tureen-shaped hat upon his head, and fastening a woollen comforter
about his neck.
Then going to the rail, he looked into the night where the boat bearing
off his brethren had disappeared; his soul perhaps wandering towards some
Limbo as he gazed, and his elastic-sided boots fast glued to the dirty
decks by the half-dried-up blood of the discarded fish.