CHAPTER VIII

HE CONTINUES HIS TALE

"It was like this," he went on. "Apart from a general dislike of doing

things that boys consider 'bad form' my brother had no scruples at all.

For instance, if a stranger cheeks you, you _feel_ as if you'd like to

hit him. My young brother _did_ hit him. What was still more to his

advantage he gave people the impression that he was always ready to jump

over the table at them. My impression is that the old Head didn't dare

flog him and had been glad to find an excuse to get rid of him. It

didn't occur to the old chap that my brother wouldn't come home. He

little knew my brother!

"Several days passed and we began to get anxious. My mother telegraphed

the Head and the railway company. No good. Now it's all very well for

well-meaning people to say tell the police,' but when you are up against

a private disgrace, you think pretty hard before you walk into a police

station. My brother was fifteen and big for his age. Why, he might

disguise himself anyhow. The week-end came before we made up our minds

that the police would have to be notified. I went to Scotland Yard on

the Saturday afternoon with a reward and description. I don't pretend

that I felt very anxious about him. He had never sought either my

friendship or my protection, and we looked at life from totally

different angles. To me there was something common and dirty about an

intrigue with a school-slavey. My brother, I thought, should have been

above that sort of thing. But he wasn't and he never has been. With him

a woman is just a woman. He raises his hand and they come running, and

apologizing if they're late. So after I had been to Scotland Yard, I

stayed down West, went to a theatre and looked in at _El Vino_ for a

glass of port afterwards. _El Vino_ in those days had a curious

reputation, quite different from the Continental or the Leicester

Lounge. No one would ever suggest you were a loose fish because you

drank a dock-glass in _El Vino_, though there were women there every

night. Just as I was lifting the glass some one gave me a slap on the

back. It was my young brother.

"'Hullo, Charley!' he says. 'Fancy _you_ here.'

"'What are _you_ doing here?' I asked him. I realized he was as tall as

I was. 'Why aren't you at home?'

"'I'm coming home with you, Charley boy,' he says, looking round at the

girls. 'All the old talent here, you see!'

"I own frankly I was disgusted. I was so disgusted I never went into

that place again. We got the 12.20 at King's Cross and it was a quarter

past one in the morning before we arrived at our house. Here was a nice

state of things; the elder son finding his fifteen-year-old brother in

_El Vino_, and coming home with the milk. That was my brother's way all

along. He made everything I do seem a black sin. I left him to tell his

own story and turned in.

"The next morning he went on the carpet. My mother gave him a pretty hot

talking to. She told him he was a disgrace to the name of Carville, that

he'd begun bad and would go to worse. She asked him how she was ever to

get him into a position if he left school like that and for such a

reason. He took out a cigarette-case and helped himself. 'No need to

worry, mater,' says he, 'I've got a position already.'

"And so he had! He'd gone into the city and got a position in a big

wholesale house as a clerk. Ask me how he did it and all I can say is

'Personality.' He could do anything with anybody. There he was, fifteen,

with a guinea a week to start. And I was twenty-two and only getting a

few shillings more.

"After the first shock my mother resigned herself to the inevitable and

hoped for the best. And for a couple of years we managed to rub along

without any scandals. In our several ways, my brother and I were busy

with life, as far as we knew it. He went up to the city every day, and

played football and cricket, but the serious business of his life was

girls. He seemed to have hundreds. If I saw him in the Strand, on

Saturday, he would be with three or four. If I met him on Hadley Common,

on Sunday, he would have three or four there, but fresh ones. He had

them in the trains, he lunched with them in the city. Barring the few

hours he spent in our house at night he lived chiefly on girls. There

were a score or so in the house where he worked, a wholesale business in

Wood Street. It was a mania, you might say; but it was the girls who had

the mania, not he. He spent all his money as he got it on them, he

borrowed more and spent that. One thing particularly annoyed me just

about this time, and that was his free way of borrowing my clothes when

they fitted him. Vests and ties especially. You may think it a trivial

matter, but to me there was something exasperating in seeing one's

brother on a park seat in the dusk, with his girl's head leaning on

one's own fancy vest! He would just shy whatever he had borrowed on the

bed and leave me to pick the hair off it. What they call a _Superman_, I

believe, nowadays. I had another name for him.

"Apart from these annoyances, I was sliding along a well-oiled groove in

life. It generally happens that a young man in such a position as mine

marries and settles down for good. Now it may have been that my

brother's wholesale dealings with girls threw me to the other extreme. I

don't think that had much to do with it. I think, now, that I had a

natural bend towards Culture.

"Don't misunderstand me," said Mr. Carville. "I use that word without

any doubt of what it means. I know George Du Maurier's sneers. Culture

means an instinct for the best. I had that. I have it now.

"I don't say that culture is opposed to marriage. That would be

nonsense. But it may seriously interfere with marriage. A young man in

the twenties has no irresistible desire for matrimony. As a rule I

mean. And if sport or business or, as in my case, study, takes up his

attention, he will put it off for a while. That's what happened to me. I

had access to books. I had an easy job and no great responsibility. I

knew nothing about the world really; I only read about it in books. It

seemed to me a splendid thing to be a learned man. I became a book-worm,

reading several hours a day. What was I aiming at? Upon my soul I can't

say. It was just blind instinct leading me on to read the books that

since then have become part of me.

"My work was, as I said, light. The firm I was with were specialists in

certain machinery, and I was assistant to the London manager. I had to

plan out and make estimates for various plants, and travel about the

south of England getting orders and superintending erection. I can tell

you it just suited me, those journeys by train. I always had my book

with me, and as soon as I had been over a job, I forgot all about

contracts and went back to Pater, or Gibbon or Flaubert or Emerson,

whoever I happened to be reading. In the evenings I used to try and

imitate what I had read.

"But what could I write? What did I know? Nothing! I had never been

anywhere, I had never met anybody in particular, I had never been in

love. I had never waked up. I was in a sort of trance, surrounded by the

traditions of the genteel professional class. Of course, in a dim way I

knew that my mother expected me to be something exceptional, but I was

too comfortable to make any effort. It seemed to me I was quite

unconventional enough in being such a reader and in keeping clear of

girls. I wonder where I would have landed, supposing I had never waked

up.

"My brother was going his way all this time, when all of a sudden he

roused me up again. For a long time he had been earning twenty-five

shillings a week and spending forty, and my mother had been making good

the deficit. She had just given him a five-pound note to pay for his

quarterly season-ticket on the railway. He didn't pay it. Just went on

travelling to the city with the old one. Of course, a lot of people had

done that trick and the Company were wise to it. My brother was caught

and summoned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. You can believe

my mother was distressed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only

held his tongue and let her pay the forty shillings fine and costs. No!

he had to give the Lord Mayor a piece of his mind. And that made the

evening papers feature the amusing incident, as they call it.

"I must admit the boy made out a very good case. He told the Court his

father, his brother and himself had been travelling over the line for

something like sixteen years. Altogether we had paid the railways two

hundred pounds in fares. 'Now,' says he to the Court, 'if I had done two

hundred pounds worth of business with a firm, they wouldn't be down on

me for being a day or two late with a small account of five pounds,

would they? They'd be glad to accommodate me. But the railway wants to

put me in prison.' Well, the Lord Mayor happened to be a shareholder in

the railway, and of course he couldn't admit that at all. He fined him

the regulation forty shillings and several pounds cost. But as I said,

this peculiar argument of my brother's got the case into a prominent

position and everybody saw it. His employers saw it and cashiered him

the next morning. My uncle, who lived at Surbiton, saw it and wrote to

my mother.

"The first I saw of it was in the papers. I remember feeling sick and

giddy all over when I saw our name in the police court news. '_The Seamy

Side_' they called it. When I got home my brother and my mother were

having it out. He didn't care. It was all over for him, he admitted.

Better let him start afresh somewhere else. My mother wanted to send him

to Canada, where she had relatives, but he said he'd be damned if he

went to Canada. He was sick of clerking. What did he want to do? I asked

him. He said he was going in for engineering. I smiled at this, and he

rounded on me. 'Oh I don't mean your engineering,' he says. 'I mean

something that's worth while.' Very sneering he was.

"Well, do you know what he did? He got fifty pounds out of my mother to

start with and disappeared. That's all. Simply vanished without a word.

In a way it was a relief. We gave out that he had gone to Canada and the

scandal died down. A month later my uncle wrote and mentioned that

Frank had called on him and borrowed fifty pounds to go to New Zealand

with. I don't know how he managed to do it, for my uncle doesn't let go

easy at all. He has had to work for his money too hard. Personality, I

suppose. If my brother had had a five-minute personal interview with the

Lord Mayor I daresay he would have got the old chap to pay the fine for

him.

"After this little brush-up my mother and I jogged along for a few years

as quiet as before. I was still in my job as manager's assistant, and

still reading away into the classics. I was about twenty-five when all

my ideas and prejudices slid away over side and I found I had got the

disease we call love. It nearly killed me."

Mr. Carville paused and leaned over to knock his pipe against the

geranium-tub. We did not interrogate him. There was something numbing to

me in the thought of this quiet ordinary little man telling us in a

quiet matter-of-fact tone that love had nearly killed him. We had no

comment worthy of the fact. He looked across the valley for a moment as

though lost in retrospection.

"She came home from a convent in Brussels," he continued, feeling for

his little brass box, "and to use the slang of our professional class,

her people knew my people. That was the way we talked. If a thing was

good, we called it 'ripping.' If it was unpleasant, we said it was

'beastly.' I believe the slang has changed since then, but the silly

artificial spirit of it will never change. Why can't educated people

speak English?

"She came home from a convent in Brussels. Her home was about a mile

off, a big house in East Barnet, and she called with her mother one day

when I happened to come home from a journey early. She gave me a

look....

"You see, she wasn't beautiful. She was well-dressed and well-mannered

and she had grey eyes. Beyond that I haven't any distinct memory of what

she was like. And the astounding thing to me, when I look back on that

business, is the utter lack of any common interests. How _could_ I

expect her to take any notice of me? I was a book-worm. I couldn't do

any of the social tricks she admired. I knew as much about music as a

cow, and considered tennis a bore. And yet I wanted her. I wanted that

eighteen-year-old girl as I've never wanted anything since. I made

myself a door-mat for her feet, I took her impudence and said nothing, I

waited for her and made no complaint when she forgot to keep an

appointment. My mother saw it and did her best to help me (though it

wasn't much), for she wanted me to get married. This would have been a

good match, for it so happened that 'her people' were in a position to

advance me in my profession, as I called it.

"And strange to say, my persistence did make some impression. I did make

some headway. I chucked my books to one side, went in for tennis, and

even took girls up the river to Kingston and Bourne End, she being one

of them. It made a hole in the little bank account I had started, but I

suppose it was worth it. I met a lot of pretty girls; but I was not

after a pretty girl; I was after her. The river was a lot in my favour,

I believe. It so happened that Belvoir's young brother, a Charterhouse

boy, whom I knew slightly, nearly ran our punt down one Saturday with

his launch. It made a big impression on Gladys, my knowing young

Belvoir. You see she had been at school with Belvoir's cousin, so it all

worked in. In a way I suppose I was happy ... yes, it's a wonderful

thing, a tremendous thing to be in love; but all the same, I wouldn't

like to go through it again!

"So it stood, when one day in the autumn, the whole thing capsized. My

brother came back.

"He didn't come back like any other prodigal I ever heard of. No, he

came back in his own way, like a conquering hero, which he was. He came

back on an automobile.

"You laugh? But you must remember that in those days there weren't fifty

automobiles in England. When my brother came up the London Road with a

whiz and a bang, a long trail of blue stench coming out of the back of

the machine, I really think that was the third or fourth time I had ever

seen such a thing. Well, there he was, a great big chap with a hooked

nose and flashing black eyes behind the goggles. Where had he been?

Neither to Canada nor to New Zealand. He'd been to France. He'd gone

there and learned the motor-car business in one of the first shops ever

built. Picked it up you may say, as he picked everything up, but he got

it none the less. He'd seen the possibilities of the thing, and here he

was appointed London agent for the French firm at three hundred a year.

He, laughed when he saw me. 'Hullo, Charley!, he sneers. 'How's the

puff-puffs?' He sneered at everything about me. I had learned to read

French pretty well and knew my classics in the original, but here was my

young brother sneering at me in French _argot_ which he knew I couldn't

resent because I couldn't understand it.

"He would come down to the tennis club that evening, though I didn't

want him. Somehow I dreaded introducing him to Gladys. There was no need

for me to worry. He introduced himself. In another five minutes he was

talking French with her, and she was screaming with laughter at the

stories he told her. He saw her home....

"You can understand that the next day I was in a bad condition for work.

And it so happened that I had a job that needed all the concentration I

could give it. I don't remember a single detail of it. I had been

neglecting my work then, like all young chaps in love, but on this

occasion I made a costly mistake. I marked the driving pulley on a

line-shaft a foot too small. The aggravating part was I sent it to the

head office in Yorkshire without revising it and _they_ got on to my

boss. He took the bit in his teeth and went for me. He gave me a week to

find another job. I was 'down and out.'

"I was paralyzed for a while. I didn't know where to turn. The bottom

had dropped out of my world for good and all. Another job! Why, I knew

men in that employ who had held their jobs for forty years.

"I said nothing about it at home. My brother, with his three hundred a

year and his French _argot_, made home unbearable and I thought of

clearing out of it. But where could I go? You see, if you work for some

specialist for a number of years, the only job you can move to is a

position with another specialist of the same line. And this business I

was in was run by about six big firms.

"Still, the thought of clearing out held me. I saw that if my brother

was going to live at home, I'd have to go. And Saturday came round and

found me wondering what to do.

"At times I used to go over to my uncle's at Surbiton. It was my duty to

pay respects, so to speak. His family had a grudge against my mother,

because if my father hadn't married her, they would have inherited his

money, so that there was not much love lost between them. But

occasionally my old uncle would ring me up and ask me to go down with

him. He did this Saturday I speak of, and as there was no one else in my

office at the time I told him my trouble. And he laughed! Humph!

"The inhuman old shell-back laughed! And yet, if you'll believe me, when

I heard the old chap rumbling at the other end of the wire, it cheered

me up. I began to think, 'Why, he may have influence. He may get me a

job.' You see the vicious state of mind of the professional class! When

I mentioned the possibility to him, he said, 'I can get you a job all

right. How'd you like to go to sea?'

"I nearly dropped the receiver when he said that. Go to sea! People in

residential suburbs didn't go to sea!

"'Eh?' I said. 'What d'you mean?'

"'What I said,' he bellows. 'Go to sea,'

"'I'll come round and talk to you,' I said.

"I went round and found him in the office. He was a fierce old chap,

burnt black with sun, and with hair grey as the sea. He was enjoying his

life apparently, bossing things in that office. But he told me at once

that he could do no more than give me a chance to start at the bottom. I

must work up and pass the Board of Trade tests for each grade. I give

him credit for painting the picture as dark as he could. He even

suggested I should try and get another draughtsman's job if I was afraid

of going through the mill. But I didn't know enough to be afraid, and

asked him off-hand when he would need me.

"'We don't need you,' he said, as if surprised. 'We can get a couple of

thousand young fellows to-morrow if we want them. It's up to you.'

"That was the first slap in the face. I sat there in that great gloomy

vault of an office in Fenchurch Street, looking at the half-models of

ships and a map of the docks at Monte Video on the walls, and wondering

what I should do. I was not hesitating, you understand, because of

pride. No, that was gone. My brother, when he saw Gladys home, had done

for that. It was more like a fear gripping at me. I was scared at

letting go of my professional easy-going life. I'd never been on a ship

since I'd been born on one. I knew nothing about marine engineering. I

hesitated because I was afraid.

"'When shall I start?' I asked after a while.

"'The _Corydon's_ in the river now,' said my uncle. 'They want a Fourth:

can you get down to-night?'

"'To-night!' I said. 'I've not given notice yet!'

"'Phone from here,' he says.

"'But I've nothing packed,' I whimpered. And he laughed.

"I know now why he laughed. Partly because a landsman is always rather a

comic figure to a sailor, partly because he knew how I had been brought

up. He had never agreed with the theory of gentility which had taken

such a hold of my mother. He was as out of place in his Surbiton home as

a bear in a back-yard. His daughters, my cousins, couldn't make him see

the importance, in England, of gentility. When he and my father and all

the rest of them had been boys on that New England farm, they had had to

clear stones off the land. No stones, no dinner. And now he had a house

in Surbiton, and was laughing at me, who had never lifted a stone in my

life. Even in the works where I was a pupil we had always had a little

private lavatory to wash and change in. He laughed at me. He believed

one trip would be enough for me. He didn't believe for a minute that I

would stick to it.

"But I was making up my mind. Somehow or other, in spite of my

twenty-five years in cotton-wool, I had imagination enough to see in my

uncle's weather-beaten old face something that was not in the city

faces I saw every day. He had come into London out of an alien world.

Then, I argued, there are other worlds beside this one! I had not

realized it before! All the time I was snug in my little job in Victoria

Street men were out on the sea, out in the heat and cold and wet, living

in a totally different world to mine. You may think it a foolish and

common enough idea, but to me it was dazzling, blinding. It took hold of

me. I could think of nothing else. I said, 'I'll go, but I can't go

to-night, I've nothing to wear.' So my uncle told me to go to Cardiff

and meet the _Corydon_ at Barry Dock.

"'What's she like?' I said, standing up. He took me into another office,

and showed me a beautiful model of a steamer.

"'There she is,' he says. 'That's the old _Corydon_. I commanded her for

three years.' I can tell you I was pleased to think I was going to sea

in such a fine ship. Humph!

"I went home and had a talk with my mother. All _her_ ideas were

capsized too. Here was her eldest son, the quiet, studious, respectable

elder son, out of employment, while her harum-scarum disobedient Frank

was getting three hundred a year and with good prospects. She was all

bewildered by it. You can't blame her. She looked at me when I told her

what I was going to do. 'Take plenty of socks,' she said, quietly.

'You'll need them at sea.' And I suddenly remembered she'd done the very

same thing I was to do, long ago; broken out of her life and made a

fresh start--on the sea.

"And what had happened to me? You'll think I was a pretty cheap sort of

a lover to let my brother cut me out so easy as that. You'll say I never

really loved her. Who can tell that? Who can say how much or how little

he loves? Yes, yes, I loved her. But what, I ask you, is the use of a

man mooning his life away for a girl who has never given him a minute's

thought? It is a waste of time and energy and life. When that view of

worlds outside of mine broke on me the love-trance broke. I said to

myself: 'I am young; I will go out and see things.' Well, I went out and

I saw things, and I don't regret it. But there's one thing we never see

again, and that's the illusion of first love.

"I begged my mother to say nothing to Frank about me until I was gone,

and a day or two later I slipped away to Paddington with a couple of

grips and took the train to Barry Docks. It will give you an idea of the

quiet life I had led when I tell you this was my first long journey. I

had been to places within one hundred and fifty miles of London, but

never farther. I felt lost when they turned me out on the platform at

Barry in the rain and dark. A seaport is not a very attractive place to

a landsman.

"The next twenty-four hours were strenuous for me. More than once I

wondered if I could live through it. When I got to the dock I walked up

and down looking for a ship that resembled the model of the _Corydon_.

There weren't any. I asked a man in a blue frock-coat if the _Corydon_

had come in.

"'Aye,' says he. 'Here she is, just abaft of ye,' and he pointed to a

rusty, dirty old tub with a battered funnel and a bridge all blocked

with hatches. That the beautiful shiny _Corydon_? There was the name on

her stern--_Corydon, London_. She was loading coal from a big elevator.

Her decks were piled high with it, and where there wasn't coal there was

mud, black oozy mud, and ashes and ropes and soppy hatches. I climbed up

the ladder and one by one got my grips aboard. And I stood there in the

rain, my gloves all black with the coal on the ladder, my nice

mackintosh barred with it, and my boots slipping on the iron plates. No

one took any notice of me. Men went to and fro in oilskins and shouted,

but they didn't seem to see me. Just for a moment I thought of bolting!

Humph!

"Finally I spoke to one of the men, saying I had a letter for the chief

engineer. He took me round into a dark alleyway under the bridge-deck

aft and shouted down: 'Here comes the Second,' he says. 'He'll fix ye.'

"Well, he came up, that Second did, not very pleased at being disturbed.

'What is it?' he says. He was grease from head to foot, as though some

one had been rolling him in a sewer.

"'I'm the Fourth Engineer,' I said. 'Oh, are ye,' says he, 'I thought ye

were comin' this mornin'. Better get a boiler-suit on and give a hand.

We're goin' to sea to-morrow noon.'

"He took me along the alleyway and unlocked a door. 'There,' says he,

'there's your room. Ye share wi' the Third.' It was a smelly little

hole, and so dark I could scarcely make out the bunks.

"'I haven't a boiler-suit with me,' I said, and he looked at me. He was

a younger man than I was, and I felt it would be strange to have to take

orders from him. 'Oh,' he says, 'you're about my size, I'll lend you

one.' I couldn't help thinking as he went into his berth next to ours,

that if he was the Second and I was the Fourth, what on earth would _I_

be like when we got to sea?

"And then he took me down below.

"That was my introduction to my new career. No handshakes, no good

night's rest--nothing. I got into the Second's boiler-suit and followed

him down. We had to work all night. The Third was down there all the

time under the boilers. He was an old chap; must have been sixty, with a

moustache that was dirty brown at the tips and grey at the roots, and a

crease down each of his cheeks that was always twitching while he

chewed. He was lying on his side in a puddle of water, a slush lamp

close to his head, working a ratchet-drill into the shell of the boiler.

I had to crawl in alongside of him and help him. _Me!_ And I'd been

writing 'fitters' instructions' in the office for three years. It was a

come-down.

"And yet, something inside of me responded to the call. Say it was

romance if you like, say it was sentiment, say it was just foolishness.

Something inside of me answered to the call. We worked all that night,

patching that bad plate on the boiler. The other boilers were under

steam, so you can believe it was hot down under there. My hands were

all soft with office work, and in the first few hours I got cuts all

over them, and the salt of the boiler-seams got into them and made them

raw. What a time it was! It wasn't long before I was as dirty as the

rest of them. I forgot all about time or food or sleep; just fetched and

carried as I was told. Once the Second, who was screwing the holes we

drilled, asked me if I had been to sea before. I said 'No,' and both of

them said 'Oh Lord!' I can't blame them now. I've said it myself since,

when I've found a new starter on my hands.

"The Chief came down about three o'clock in the morning and looked

through the hole in the boiler casing. He was a little man with a glass

eye. 'Is the Fourth there?' he says, sucking at his pipe. 'Yes,' I said,

and he raps out, 'Yes what?' Humph!

"When the patch was on we had to get the boiler filled and the fires

away as soon as we could. I tried to get some information out of the old

Third, but he just chewed and spat. When I asked the Second he says, 'Oh

Hell, I can't stop to show ye now. Take a hand-lamp and go and see the

run o' the pipes yerself.' I was nearly dropping for sheer sleepiness,

but I made up my mind I would not give in. At breakfast time the Chief

said we'd missed a tide and couldn't get away till midnight, and I

thanked God. But it's a funny thing about a steamer, that the more time

you have the more work there is to do. We had stores to get stowed away,

and as soon as that was done a steam-pipe split on the fore-deck and we

had to go in the rain and patch it. I didn't know where things were; I

didn't know the names of things; I didn't know how they should be done.

I'd been a gentleman for six years, never soiling my hands except to

clean my bicycle. When the Second said to me at tea-time, 'You'd better

knock off and turn in. You'll be on watch to-night,' I began to realize

what I was in for. I sat on the settee in our room and tried to think.

No wonder my old shell-back uncle had laughed. My clothes were lying all

round. I had no bedding, nor sea-gear, and I didn't know where to get

it. Suddenly the door opened and the Chief came in.

"'Haven't you a letter for me?' he says. I gave it to him. 'Captain

Carville's nephew, I see. Coming for a trip, or are you going to stick

to it?' I looked at him.

"'I'm going to stick to it if it kills me,' I said. 'I'm here for

keeps.' He nodded. He liked that.

"'Got any gear?' he says. I said, 'I've got nothing except an extra suit

and some pyjamas.'

"He told me to get washed and go ashore and buy some bedding. 'I don't

know how you'll get on with that old Third,' he says. 'The last Fourth

left because of him.'

"'I'm not going to leave, sir,' I said. I wasn't going back for anybody.

I was going to find out something about life, right away from everybody

I'd ever known.

"'Bully for you,' says he, and with that he went away. I went ashore and

bought myself some gear, and by the time I got back it was eight

o'clock by my watch.

"Never shall I forget that night. I'd meant to write my mother and uncle

and tell them I was all right, but I was too tired and worried. The old

Third came aboard at ten o'clock with a skinful, and the Second was

rushing round cursing me because there was nobody else to curse. The

firemen were drunk and the donkey-man was drunk. And at eleven-fifteen

the gong sounded for slow-astern. I stood by the telegraph and worked

the handle, and do what I would I kept shutting my eyes. My God! I

thought, shall I ever sleep again? The old Third stood near me, his eyes

all bloodshot, the crease in his cheek working, his dyed moustache all

draggled, his breath--Humph! He was cunning enough to pretend he was all

right, helping the Second with the reversing gear. Now and again the

Chief would come down and give an order, his glass eye fixing me in a

queer way. I never got used to that glass eye. It wasn't part of him, so

to speak, and it distracted one's attention. The Chief himself would be

talking quite friendly to you, when you would suddenly catch sight of

that glass eye glaring at you, full of undying and unreasonable hate. He

would be roaring with laughter at some joke, while all the time the

glass eye seemed to be calculating a cold-blooded murder. It was strange

enough in its socket; but I tell you, when I ran up to call him for a

hot bearing one night and he looked across at me with one bright blue

eye and the other bloody-red and sunken, and I saw the glass thing

staring at me from the dressing table--Humph!

"At last, about one o'clock in the morning, we were outside, and he sent

me up to see if the pilot had gone. Just as I stumbled up on the

bridge-deck I saw the pilot going over the side, down a rope ladder. Oh,

didn't I wish I was going with him! She was beginning to roll, you see.

"And yet, though I was in the depths, so to speak, up to the eyes in it,

as I stood there in the rain and wind, the sweat bitter cold on my body,

I saw the coast-wise lights, and realized with a sudden jump of the

heart what I was doing. I was out at sea. And I'd been born at sea.

Twenty-six years in cotton-wool! Can you realize what I had done?

Somewhere inside of me there was something answering the call. I was

going back through toil and sorrow to my own. I was away at last. I went

down again into the engine-room and told them that the pilot was gone.

The Second says, 'Get yourself turned in, then.'

"I could have put my head on his shoulder and cried for joy!

"Well, I've said enough to give you an idea of the sudden turn in my

fortunes. A week ago I was in love, and comfortably tucked away inside a

cozy corner of the professional class. My brother was a mysterious

prodigal. Suddenly he butts in, and all is changed. He's snug and safe

in a good berth, he's taken up the tale of his girls just where he left

off, and I'm out at sea, Fourth Engineer of a rusty old freighter bound

for a place I'd never heard of: Port Duluth, British Namaqualand. Well,

let him marry her and be hanged! I thought; I'm out of that world. I was

resolved not to go near London town till I'd worked out my probation on

the _Corydon_. I saw that I was back in the Third Form at school again.

I saw that my shipmates knew nothing about culture or public schools or

art or gentility. I saw they knew their business, and if I would be

willing and quick to jump, they would teach it to me. My only real

trouble was that old Third. If he'd only been a little cleaner in his

habits! He would lie on the settee when he was off watch, the creases in

his cheeks twisting, his bloodshot old eyes fixed on the toes of his red

slippers and then--biff!--he would spit on the floor. But even that I

could have stood if he'd been more cheerful. He never smiled, only

creased his cheeks a little deeper. In time I learned why the last

Fourth, a gay young spark of twenty-two, had fled out of the ship. This

old Third, old Croasan his name was, didn't care what happened to him.

His children were grown up and run away; he was too ignorant to get a

certificate, and he was just waiting for a ship to go to the bottom and

take him with her. When the Second told me that I didn't believe him. I

held, as most people hold, that even a man a hundred years of age will

fight like a tom-cat for his life. But I found that the Second was

right!

"We struck bad weather as soon as we got into the Bay. The _Corydon_ was

loaded to her summer draught and here was a westerly gale coming on her

bow, and later on her beam. She rolled day and night, shipping big seas

all the time. This rolling washed the bilge water up on the plates in

the stoke hold and lifted them, so that the small Welsh coal, like the

Lehigh stuff you get here, was washed into the limber and choked the

pump suctions. Very soon the bilge began to fill. The old ship was

leaking like a basket any way, and she took a heavy list to port. All my

watch that night, from eight o'clock till twelve, I was on those

bilge-pumps trying to make them draw, while the Chief looked after the

engines. It was no joke, with her listed over like that, the platform

under water and green seas coming down through the skylights. I thought

of my pleasant home at Oakleigh Park then, the quiet autumn streets, the

bright fire in the dining-room and the cosy warm bed. Oh yes, I thought

of it, but not with regret. I was out to win through, and all hell

wouldn't have made me desert!

"At twelve o'clock it was pretty serious. The Chief had the Second out

to help with the pumps and sent me to call the old Third. It was his

watch on the main engines, you see, twelve to four. Our berth was

flooded. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor, and at

every sea the water flew through the leaky joints of the dead-lights,

all over old Croasan. To and fro on the floor my slippers were floating

and a torn magazine swam into the room from the alleyway as I opened the

door. The oil from the lamp was dripping on to the drawer tops, and

every time she gave a deeper roll the light flared. I put the magazine

under it to catch the drip, and as I did so I caught sight of a picture

in it, a picture of two men standing on the deck of a ship in a storm.

Underneath were the words, 'I think she's sinking.' Curious, wasn't it?

That's just what I thought. I turned to old Croasan. He lay in his bunk

just as he had come off watch at six o'clock, his dungarees shining with

grease, his tattooed arms grey with dirt. He looked eighty years old as

he lay there with his bald head against the bottle rack, the pouches

under his eyes marking dark shadows on his creased cheeks. I shook him,

and he opened his eyes for a second. I hardly knew what I was doing, I

was so crazy with sickness and bruises and incessant toil. 'Mr.

Croasan,' I shouted at him. 'Eh!' says he, without opening his eyes.

'Oh,' I said, 'I--I think she's sinking.' He opened his eyes for about

two seconds and then said to me in a terrible voice just as a big sea

crashed over our heads and the ports spurted, 'Let her sink and be

damned!' he says and never stirred. I left him there. I ran back to the

engine room. I felt I couldn't stay and argue the point with a man who

would not make a fight for us, for himself.

"The Chief decided to cut holes in the suction pipe just under the

water-line. Then when the pumps sucked them clear, we bound them up with

jointing and cut more holes lower down. Oh! it was grand! For fourteen

hours we went on doing that, up to our shoulders in the bilge, the

grease caking on us in a fresh layer every time we climbed out to get

something in the store. The weather eased a little off Finisterre and we

got her righted. We went up to the Chief's room to have a nip of

whisky.

"'Ye see,' said the Second. 'Ye see, mister, there's some as dinna

care.'

"Old Croasan came out of the bunk when the trouble was over. I felt too

proud of what I'd been through to be hard on the poor old chap, proud of

being in the thick of it. I was seeing life at last. This was what I'd

come for. 'Ah,' says the Chief, his glass eye fixing me over his whisky

glass, 'you'll be marked if you stay on the _Corydon_.'

"I was. It took that old box of misfortune thirty-two days to make Port

Duluth. Every day we had some breakdown or other. She was like a good

many other ships that fly the Red Ensign, worn out. But did I grumble?

Not a bit of it. I looked at it as any man will who's got sand in him.

It was a fight. There was no fighting in Victoria Street; it was simply

riding through life on rubber tyres. Books, art, comfort, philosophy,

all these things are well enough; but the _Corydon_, the rusty, leaking,

treacherous old _Corydon_, with her starting rivets and banging old

engines, she was the real thing, the thing to mark a man and teach him

what he's made of.

"I don't suppose any of you people have ever heard of Port Duluth. I

certainly hadn't. When I asked where it was, the others told me it was

'up a creek.' In England this would have meant very little; but I had

learned from my mother to call even the Thames a creek, and so I was

able to swallow the apparent paradox of a seven-thousand-ton ship

insinuating herself up to what was known locally as 'a railhead.' When I

persisted and wanted to know the name of the creek, nobody knew, but

they said it was one of the channels of the Niger River. Then, I argued

in my bookish way, Port Duluth must be in Nigeria. But this wasn't so

certain at all. I became acquainted with the ragged edge of the British

Empire. I gathered that the boundaries were not entirely settled, but

that when the railway was carried along some watershed into the

interior, it would link up with another system and our sphere of

influence would automatically extend to include Port Duluth. And when I

kept on at my shipmates and wanted to know what made the sphere of

influence so very precious I received the staggering answer that it was

nuts. We were building battle-ships and recruiting armies and building

railways and bridges and harbours, for nuts. To me, walking to and fro

on the after-deck in the glow of a tropical sunset, it seemed absurd.

You see, I knew nothing of raw products. Until I went to sea I didn't

know how far the common things come. I didn't know that Yorkshire

pig-iron was smelted from Tunisian and Ionian ore, or that the sugar in

my tea had gone from Java to New York and from there to Liverpool. I

didn't know where things came from nor where they went. The geography at

school had some of it no doubt. I can recall some few vague facts about

flax at Belfast and jute at Dundee. Humph! That trip to Port Duluth was

worth a million geography lessons.

"To begin with, I learned much about rivers. In England a river is

something easily comprehended. You can see along it, and across it, and

it is locked, bolted and barred with towns and bridges and weirs and

tow-paths. It is no more like an African river than a tame cat is like a

leopard. Yet on the map the only difference is that perhaps the large

river will have two mouths, and several tributaries running into it,

exactly like a branch running into a tree. It wasn't like that at all. I

had an atlas with me and when we reached the mouths of the great river I

tried to find out where we were on the map. But it was hopeless. Where

the map showed one channel there were hundreds on the chart. And the

chart was out-of-date. It seemed a dream to me. I was under the

impression that navigation nowadays was a humdrum affair of making

points, steering on a ruled pencil line on the chart, so much for

currents, so much for tides and so on. So it is, no doubt, in a great

measure; but we can hardly realize how much of it is sheer skill and

gallant daring. Even the men who do it don't realize it because they are

always doing it. That first voyage to Port Duluth was a revelation to me

in several ways. I had my own private troubles you may be sure. I was as

green as grass. My hands blistered and my heart sickened many a time.

But I am glad to think I could see other things as well. To me it was

thrilling to look out across the oily blue glitter and see a hazy line

which was the Ivory Coast. There was the Slave Coast and the Gold

Coast--the words had a new significance now! And when I came up out of

that awful engine-room and saw the land close in, the eternal grey-green

line of mangrove swamp holding up the blazing vault of the sky, I forgot

my troubles. I said to myself in a whisper, 'This is what I came for.

This is the world!'

"I asked where we had anchored, seeing no sign of life ashore, and they

told me it was the Bar. We must wait for high water. Away ahead was the

bar buoy, a white blob on the water. I stood leaning against a stanchion

trying to sense the atmosphere of the place until the Second called me,

for there was something to do. There was always something to do in that

terrible old ship. I went down, and together we wrestled with the

dynamo-engine, a cheap contraption with a closed crank chamber full of

muddy oil which was supposed to splash into all the bearings, and

didn't. We needed a washer, a special sort of thing. The old one was

worn out. We needed screws, too, to fasten it with, small brass screws

with flat heads that sank in out of sight. When I asked where these were

coming from if we hadn't got them on the ship, the Second said with some

asperity, that it would be my job to make them on my anchor watch that

night. I was surprised at this and made some remark about getting them

from ashore, and it so tickled the poor over-worked Second that he stood

up suddenly, spun round towards the reversing engine and broke into

peals of hysterical laughter. I shall never forget the sight of him as

he stood there in his sodden, filthy singlet and dungarees, his arms

knotted and burned and bruised, his common little face twisted into an

expression of super-human scorn. For a single moment he was sublime,

lifted out of himself, with the mere effort of pouring contempt upon my

ignorance. He tried to put it into words, and sputtered. He looked as

though in a trance and some stormy spirit was struggling within him. The

sweat ran off us in streams as we stood there in the light of a couple

of slush-lamps flaring in the draught from the stokehold door. Then he

abruptly abandoned his search for vitriolic language and rushed into the

store for a piece of brass rod. It was a curious performance. I was

impressed. I realized in a dim way that there was no longer a hardware

shop round the corner. The making of those screws was nothing in itself,

but it was the principle behind it, the principle of never being

stumped. And these rough, uncultured, north-countrymen were my teachers.

The Chief fixed me with his one good eye at lunch. 'We don't get things

from ashore in this employ,' he observed, and left me to soak it in.

"I suppose I ought to have been downhearted at being so ignorant and

dirty and tired, but I wasn't in the least. It was too interesting.

There was a grim irony, to me, in the appalling contrast between the

behaviour of that worn-out dynamo and the smug theory in the text-books

and trade catalogues I had been used to so long. I had read of the way

to detect faults in a circuit, but it seemed to me there was no need to

look for faults on the _Corydon_; it was the virtues, the sound places,

that needed looking for. And yet, strange to say, out of her decrepitude

loyalty was born. I found it growing on me day by day, a jealous regard

for her, the pity that becomes a sort of cantankerous affection.

"But to go on with that day, we crossed the bar. It was high water at

four in the afternoon and I had to go down again to stand by the

telegraph. With my head against the reversing engine wheel I could feel

the slow vibration of the anchor coming up, and hear the sough of the

exhaust coming back from the windlass. The Second and old Croasan stood

near by, their faces blank with waiting and fatigue, like the faces of

dead men. Old Croasan's eyelid would flicker now and then and the tip of

his tongue would move stealthily round the inside of his lips. He hadn't

shaved for several days and his face was vague and venerable, glistening

grey bristles. When he leaned gently against the vice-bench and folding

his arms, closed his eyes, he looked like a hundred-years'-old corpse.

He closed his eyes. It was not interesting to him, this crossing of the

bar.

"Suddenly we got an order, and we started. I went along the tunnel to

see the bearings were all oiled, and while I stood in the dark gloom at

the far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a

sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered

before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered,

broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell,

bump, bump, bump. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked

along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a

pale glint and I could have sworn I saw the whole bag of tricks move

slowly up and subside as the keel floundered across that ridge of mud

and soft rock. She must be breaking in half, I thought. I had heard of

such things. I gathered myself up and hurried back to the engine-room,

where I found everybody perfectly calm. The ship, it appeared, was now

on the bar and it was our business to keep the engines going at full

speed until she was gradually urged over. At intervals she bumped. Some

mass of rock or clay on which she rested would collapse and immediately

the propeller would shove her a little further over. Our vacuum almost

disappeared, for the injection pipe got blocked with mud. This meant

more work for me in starting the ballast pump, and when that got choked

too, I had to open it up and clean the valve-boxes. It didn't seem to

matter what happened, there was a new job for me. I wondered with a sort

of temporary bitterness whether they would miss me if I dropped suddenly

dead. And I was obliged to admit to myself that in all probability they

wouldn't. They would just go ahead and do the job themselves and bury me

when they got through.

"And this, mind you, was no breakdown, no emergency, but just the

ordinary day's work. If the owners didn't want to risk breaking the

ship's back on the bar there were plenty of others who would. It was

like putting a horse at a dyke, getting his fore-feet across, and then

lashing him furiously until he had kicked a lot of earth away and

finally got himself over. When I had put the doors on the ballast pump

again I noticed the main engines were running normal once more. We were

over. We had crossed the bar. My mind was running on the romantic

nature of this performance when I went up to get my tea. I recalled

Tennyson's poem and wondered what he would have thought of the old

_Corydon_ and her undignified scramble across the bar. The others caught

something of this in my face, I suppose, for the Second said to the

Chief, 'I suppose the Fourth'll be for the beach to-night, eh?' and they

laughed. 'Don't you go ashore here then?' I asked, and they laughed

again. 'No, there's nothing to go ashore for,' said the Chief, and he

fixed me with his eye. 'Why,' he added, 'don't you know where you are?

You're in the middle of all the atrocities here.' The others nodded

'That's right. Any amount of atrocities--round here.' It seemed a silly

way of putting it. Here we'd come thousands of miles just to get into

the middle of atrocities! For a moment the word conveyed nothing to me.

I had been getting into the way of thinking the _Corydon_ was by way of

being something of an atrocity, but I knew that was not what my

shipmates meant. I'm not sure even now that there ever had been any

atrocities in that part of the world. I read about them in a book once;

but the things that get into books have always eluded me. Already I had

laid hold of that cardinal fact in my new life. The old ideas, the old

conventional phrases and assumptions, were cumbersome, inadequate or

untrue. Take that word 'atrocity.' Well enough in a radical leading

article; but what core of real truth was there in it when it was used by

a living man at a railhead up the Niger River? To anyone with

imagination it was comic. But my shipmates were not given to much

imagination. In the business of their lives they were alive and original

and racy. They used phrases and turns of thought that sometimes thrilled

me with their vivid power. But outside of that narrow channel they had

nothing but newspaper phrases, like 'atrocities,' mere catchwords that

chill one's soul with their bald, withered and bloodless pretensions.

The Chief gave me an example of this after tea that night. For a brief

spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to

do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees,

were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth

was behind us. In front lay a broad, placid sheet of copper-tinted,

forest-rimmed water, the confluence of a number of stagnant creeks and

back-streams, a sort of knot in the interminable loops and windings of

the delta. Here and there in the line of tree-tops was a gap showing

where some waterway came through. Here and there, too, I could descry a

tiny beach of mud a yard or two wide, with a hut and a canoe tied to the

mangrove roots, and black, naked people crouched on their hams in the

shadows cast by the forest, engaged in their--to me--mysterious business

of living. They were far-away and more or less picturesque. So, too,

were the fishermen a mile away on the shining water silhouetted in solid

black against the western glow. At the time I was so full of new

impressions that I regarded the scene very much as one turns over the

pages of a 'book of views' in a friend's drawing room. I couldn't take

it in. That needs time, and also one must have the Key. I was musing

upon the apparent meaninglessness of a life that had thrown me up for a

moment at a place I'd never heard of before, thrown me up there to

assist in the astonishing job of transporting nuts, when the Chief

remarked, pointing with the stem of his pipe, 'Here's a chief coming.' I

looked round, expecting to see another stout, middle-aged man in singlet

and dungarees, with perhaps an old uniform patrol jacket whose brass

buttons were green with verdigris. But it was not so. He was indicating

a large canoe emerging rapidly from the waterway astern of us. As it

came more into our angle of vision I watched with extraordinary

expectancy. I was dazed, not only by the spectacle, but by the aplomb

with which my shipmates took these things. Here was a savage chief

sitting under an immense parasol in the stern of his state canoe,

propelled by a score of naked, black paddlers in white loin-cloths and

scarlet cricket-caps, coming to call on us. This was evidently his

intention, for the accommodation ladder went down with a rattle, and the

canoe with her twenty spear-shaped paddles swung alongside like a naval

pinnace, and a fat old chap, dressed in a vast white flannel nightgown

with a sort of dress-shirt front pleated on it in blue thread, came

slowly up the ladder. Came up and walked past with a heavy, flat-footed

tread, and disappeared into the saloon with the Old Man. I was too

astonished to speak for some time. That old fellow's face behind its

broad benevolence and its confusing tattooings and mutilations, had an

expression of power. It was an expression you do not find in London

suburbs. You do not find it in the faces of men who sit at a desk and

hire you and fire you. The momentary glimpse I had of that chief's face

made clear to me many passages in history, many things in literature,

many dark and tortuous riddles in the adventures of my own little tinpot

soul. And in the light of this discovery I heard the Chief, our chief,

saying, 'Yes, these chaps have power of life and death over their

people, power of life and death.'

"And for once the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper

gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment,

on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps,

for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the

old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really was a potential African

despot. In the midst of my reflections I heard another newspaper phrase,

'Not long ago the rivers ran blood.' This was the Second, who was fond

of stories inside comic supplements, and who was recalling a bygone

'atrocity,' I suppose. But it was curious to me, to notice how abruptly

they all dropped the journalist jargon the moment they spoke of

something they really understood. They regaled me with 'atrocities,'

with 'rivers running blood' and 'gold in the forests that no white man

had ever penetrated,' with 'power of life and death' and so on, but when

I inquired anxiously what this omnipotent monarch had come aboard of us

for, they replied without any hesitation,

"'To get a drink.'

"It seemed a contemptible diversion for a person inspiring such awe

politically. I don't say, mind you, that such _was_ his object. My

shipmates may have been as much in error about his motives as they were

about his power. I was too tired, too full of aches and humiliations of

my own, to investigate. He passed across my field of vision, and being

the first of his kind, left an ineffaceable impression. The sun went

down suddenly soon after, and the coppery glow vanished from the water,

leaving it a grey blur.

"'In the middle of all the atrocities'! The flashy, bombastic

phraseology came back to me with grim insistence that night when I went

down at eight o'clock to look after the boilers and pumps and to make,

with entirely inadequate means, those brass screws for the

dynamo-engine. The engine-room was in darkness save for the hand-lamp

that hung over the vice-bench. The fat cotton-wick smoked and crackled,

the light draught swirling it towards my head at times, singeing my hair

and making my eyes water. Behind me the silent, heated engines stood up,

stark and ominous like some emblem of my destiny watching me. The white

faces of the gauges over the starting handles stared blankly. From the

stokehold came the occasional clink of a shovel or the hollow clang of a

fire-door flung to. And I worked. I fought with the greasy brass and the

broken, worn-out tools. I made wasters and started again. The sweat

poured off me, and I drank thirstily the warm water in the can that

hung over my head in the ventilator. It was ten o'clock when I realized

I had made but one screw. The fireman on duty came through, and

remarking that he thought the wind had gone round, climbed the ladder to

change the ventilators. I heard the groan of the cowl as he pulled at it

and then my lamp flared gustily in a light breeze that came down. Light

as it was it was a blessed relief. It was more. It was a message. There

was a strange smell about it that gave a new turn to my thoughts. A

smell of the land, of the dark forests and fragrant plantations. Another

stock phrase came to me--'spicy breezes.' Working there at my miserable

task, I wondered if these were the 'spicy breezes' of the hymn-books. Of

a sudden I threw down my tools and went up the ladder to look round. All

day there had been in my mind a sort of undertow of resentment at the

tacit decision that I ought not to want to go ashore. I did want to. It

seemed to me an outrage to come so far and remain a prisoner in bondage

on the ship. I leaned on the rail by the gangway and looked along the

wooden wharf to where a few lights twinkled in the distance. Higher up,

beyond the cutting for the railway, the dark mass of a big shed loomed

up against the lights of what I supposed was Port Duluth. And from where

I stood I could hear a steady rhythmic throb, the unmistakable sound of

an engine. I wondered what it could be. Was it one of those weird

affairs I remembered in our catalogues, colonial engines with grotesque

fireboxes and elaborate funnels, for burning wood instead of coal? I

looked round. Nobody in sight. Everybody was below. The Chief and

Second were asleep, old Croasan was in his room with a bottle of gin,

drinking steadily. In another moment I had gone down the gangway and was

making for the shed. Just then I felt if I didn't speak to somebody who

wasn't under the spell of the _Corydon_, I would go crazy. I slipped

into an excavation and skinned my knees. I fell over some stacked rails

and barked my shins. I heard something scuttling in the darkness. I saw

the night-watchman on the _Corydon_ standing at the galley door, looking

out. And then, looking again towards my objective, I saw an open door in

the shed with a short, broad figure showing up sharply against a

brightly illuminated interior. I scrambled up the little incline and

found a path.

"I was suddenly conscious I had no particular reason for calling upon

this unknown person in the middle of the night. It is one of the

tragedies of human life that while we do most things by instinct or

intuition we have to clamp some 'particular reason' on our actions

before we can secure the approbation either of others or of ourselves.

Some men, like my young brother, never trouble themselves about it. But

all my life I have found myself hesitating upon the edge of actions that

might be heroic or fantastic or original or simply desirable, just

because I couldn't square them with a particular reason. It was so in

this instance. I came into the light of that doorway, and hesitated. But

the short, broad figure was not like me. In the most matter-of-fact

fashion he nodded his head and said in a clear voice with a strong

foreign accent, 'Good evening. How are you?' And I answered at once that

I was very well. He gave the cue, the cue which the _Corydon_ had

temporarily obliterated from my mind! He stood to one side and let me

see into his domain. A large central-draft oil lamp hung in the centre

of the roof of a small chamber. There was a door at the back, leading, I

surmised, to the boiler room, for in one corner stood the machine that

had attracted me from the ship, a curious hunched affair with a

violently working apparatus in front and pipes covered with snow curving

up and disappearing into the top of it. A small foot-lathe stood by a

bench, and on the bench itself was clamped a fret-work table and a

partly completed fret-work corner bracket. I wiped my face with my

sweat-rag and turned to get a good look at the owner of this variegated

display. It seemed to me I was having experiences after all.

"He was young and had never shaved the down which grew on his cheeks and

the points of his chin. Young as he was he had the lines of half a

century scored under his eyes and on his temples, thin lines on clear,

yellow skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow too, as though he had

suffered from jaundice. Which he had, as I learned very soon after he

opened upon me in a clear, sonorous voice that rolled the r's and beat

like a flail on the labials and diphthongs. He wore a blue dungaree

boiler-suit, which is a combination affair, you know, and on his head he

had an old, greasy, red fez. It seemed to me a preposterous piece of

fancy dress up a creek on the Niger River. But I found later, to my

astonishment, that Moslems were common enough there; that they had

soaked through from the Mediterranean littoral and the head-waters of

the Nile generations ago. Not that this gentleman had soaked through, or

was a Moslem either. He had, as he informed me, been all over the world.

But it was not his fez, or his jaundiced complexion, or his fret-work,

or his languages, or his travels that marked him out for me at the time.

It was the simple fact that he was my first foreigner. In spite of my

having come in upon him, forced myself upon him as it were, he gave me

the impression of being the aggressor. I felt myself throwing up

defences against him. It is popular to gibe at the Englishman's

taciturnity abroad. There is a reason. The foreigner, not the best nor

the aristocratic foreigner perhaps, but the common run of him, act like

amiable invaders. They take possession of us, of our language, our

idioms, our games, our clothes, our machinery, ideas, everything. They

nod and smile and say knowingly 'How are you. All right, eh?' and assume

an intimacy you don't permit with your own family. This young chap in

the fez had other points, but at the outset I had the most extraordinary

sensation of leaning against the door of my soul, trying to keep him

out. I don't suppose it struck him that way. I dare say he thought me

rather subdued and untidy. He was very hospitable, asking me to 'take a

seat' at his bench, and showing me his fret-work. He told me he never

wasted any time, as that was the way to succeed. 'If at first you don't

succeed, try, try again,' he sang with the accents all on the wrong

syllables. He was very proud of this aphorism, evidently thinking it the

secret of our imperial race. And he told me his history. He was born in

Damascus, he said, so he knew Arabic. His father emigrated to Bolivia,

so he spoke Spanish. Then they pulled up stakes and went to New Zealand,

where he learned English. For some mysterious reason they again took

ship and came to the Cameroons, where he learned German. His family was

now in the Brazils, where no doubt they were learning Portuguese; but he

himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to

England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have

often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any

language they really know, which language do they think in? They always

seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating grass one sees in the

Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless to the end.

They never seem to do anything with their marvelous accumulation of

languages and knowledge of the world. Perhaps I wrong them. They may

have spiritual experiences transcending their gifts of speech. I don't

know.

"At that time, too, I was not seeking spiritual communion. The moment I

had caught sight of that little lathe I wanted to ask if he could make

screws. I wanted screws, brass ones with flat heads. As soon as I could

I explained this to him. Yes, he replied, with his smile of supreme

intelligence, he could make screws. How many? And the washer, could he

make that? Had he the material? I had the dimensions of that washer

burned into my brain and I made a little sketch of it on the bench. But

his education hadn't run to scale drawings, so I drew it in perspective

and repeated the figures with many gestures indicating roundness and

thickness and other properties. He began to make the screws, copying the

one I had made laboriously by hand. I offered to assist by putting my

foot on the treadle, but he said it was not necessary. 'Too many cooks

spoil the broth,' he added, and I felt disconcerted. He didn't mean

anything offensive, you know; he was only proud of his English. So I sat

watching him, or walked over to the little refrigerating plant

thundering away in the corner, with its shining oil cups and its pipes

covered with snow or glazed with ice. And while I stood looking at it, a

tall, bony native, a dirty loin-cloth wrapped about his middle, his ribs

and back all gashed with tribal scars and scaly with skin trouble, came

in and laid his corrugated forehead for a moment against the snow on the

pipes. He made an astonishing picture, with his thin arms outstretched

in support, as though he were supplicating the white man's god. It must

have been a confusing phenomenon to his simple mind, that fierce, hot,

galloping devil that made ice. And then he gathered a little of the soft

snow in his fingers and rubbed it over his face and lips and limped out

again. And every little while he or another bony creature very like him

would come in and go through the same performance. My friend at the

lathe never looked up, not caring to waste any of his precious time, I

suppose, but he observed, when I spoke of it, that the 'ignorant animals

liked the taste of snow.' I went back to the bench again and looked at

his fret-work. Goodness only knows why he was doing it. It was a

meaningless design of dots and wriggles. When I asked him he said he was

doing it for a Christmas present for his mother in Pernambuco. He added

that she was a Maltese and he had learned Italian from her. I was so

oppressed by this amazing knowledge of languages that I couldn't say a

word in any language. It seemed silly for us to spend years scraping

together a few French words at school when a foreigner like this could

gather a dozen tongues in less time. And yet, when you go about the

world you will find such people by the score, and you will find them

working for and being governed by Englishmen who know no language but

their own and not always a great deal of that. I sat there running my

fingers over the fret-work bracket that was designed for the Maltese

lady in Pernambuco and trying to focus all these novel and conflicting

ideas when I suddenly recollected I was on watch. What if something went

wrong? I was new to watch-keeping then and had no subconscious sense of

responsibility to keep me on the alert. The sudden recollection was like

an electric shock. I jumped up, and saying 'I'll be back in a minute,'

ran down to the ship and so into the engine room, my heart in my mouth.

It was half-past eleven! But there was nothing wrong. I looked at the

gauge-glasses on the boilers, peered into the bilges, and found the

fireman at his post in the stokehold. And then I took the old washer and

went back to my friend in the fez. Mister George, he called himself. 'My

name is English,' he boomed in his reverberating voice. 'George, Mister

George.' I never knew his other name, if he had one. There you had the

invading quality I have spoken of. He seemed to think he was raised

above the common herd of foreigners by having an English name. Mister

George had made my screws, with one extra in case of need. And he found

a piece of brass that had in it a possible washer. I stood like one in a

trance watching him as he fixed it in his little lathe and adjusted the

tool-rest and took the first harsh chattering cuts. He was wonderfully

efficient. An English mechanic would have jeered at his crazy machine

and contemptible bits of tools, and he had an amateurish, ladylike air

of flinching from the chips. But he did it much more quickly than I

could have done it, I felt humbly. I only wished he would not smile in

such a detestable fashion and suddenly assault me with 'How are you now?

All right, eh?' I suppose he was practising his English. And as the

finishing touch was put on the washer with a thin, snaky file, he asked

suddenly if I had any books.

"'Books!' I repeated, surprised; 'what kind of books?' I had an idea he

could take no interest in anything save grammars and dictionaries.

Somehow, in spite of all his acquirements, one didn't associate that

transitory creature with books at all. 'Eh?' he said, harshly, 'I don't

understand. You understand, I wish for books.' 'Yes, what sort?' I

asked again. 'It doesn't matter,' he muttered, calmly, taking the

finished article from the lathe and putting it beside the screws, 'all

books are the same. It doesn't matter at all. You have books, eh?' I

said I had one or two, but I needed them. As a matter of fact, I had

only brought one or two engineering works with me and a funny old

leather-bound Norie's Navigation of my father's. My mother didn't know

whether I'd need it or not. I didn't. I had plenty to do without going

into navigation. It was a queer old thing, though, designed for men of

the old school who came aft from the forecastle and had to learn the

three Rs. 'You need them, eh? Ah, well, that is all right. I read many

books, yes. Plenty English books.' I saw light all at once. 'How much

for these?' I asked Mister George. He turned to look at the gauges of

the freezing plant and then glanced back at me over his shoulder. 'I

care nothing for money,' he said. 'It is the root of evil. But books!

Knowledge is power, yes.'

"It was confusing. Here was another victim of words, words he didn't even

clearly understand. He lived apparently in a copy-book world, full of

shining maxims and idiotic generalities. For an instant I had a queer

feeling of talking to one of those automatons one sees on the

stage--figures with gramaphones in their interiors, and who utter

strange, disconcerting sounds.

"'I will give you a book,' I said at last, taking up the things, 'and

many thanks for these. They said we couldn't get them made here, but

you see they were wrong.'

"He didn't understand a word of this explanation, I believe. He smiled,

moved his fez round and round his head as if on a socket, and remarked,

'Yes, you all right now, eh?'

"'Yes,' I said, patiently, 'but if you want a book on navigation,

mathematics and so on, I can let you have it.'

"He nodded, but I don't think he followed me. So I took my screws and

washer, and telling him I would return, hurried back to the ship. You

know, I felt triumphant. I had scored, not only over my shipmates, but

over him, over Africa, over the whole of the universe that wasn't Me,

myself. I had taken a step forward. It is curious how difficult it is to

describe the simplest evolutions of the soul. But I was no longer

oppressed by Mister George and his languages. I had accomplished

something far beyond the most abstruse philologies--I had got what I

wanted.

"And I took him his book, a big obsolete tome bound in hide. He was

rapturous, wiping his hands on some waste and opening it upside down.

'Ah, yes, very good, very good!' he said. 'I read plenty English books,

yes. Thank you, I am very much obliged. Knowledge is power, eh?' I

smiled, I suppose, for he leaned toward me eagerly. 'No? You think not,

eh? Ah, when I had the jaundice, I read many books.' He waved his arms

to indicate long galleries of libraries. 'Plenty, plenty, books. Oh,

yes.' Once again I had the feeling of listening to an automaton. It

seemed so futile talking to such a being. Indeed, that is why I tell you

about him. He was my first foreigner. I had always been able to get into

some sort of touch with the people I had met. I knew how they lived and

loved and thought. But him! He had dressed his mind up in the showy rags

and remnants of our speech as a savage will dress his body in

incongruous clothing, and of what he was, inside, I could form no

conjecture. Between us was an impassable barrier. I was trying to

realize what made me so silent before his volubility, when the bell on

the forecastle of the _Corydon_ struck eight times. It was midnight and

my watch was over. I said good-bye. 'I will visit your ship,' said my

friend, Mister George. 'I have been on plenty ships. Oh, yes,

plenty....'

"I ran away at last. I daresay he would have practised his English on me

till daybreak if I hadn't run away. I went down and found things all

quiet, and then I came up and roused old Croasan. He was lying on the

settee and the gin-bottle stood on the chest-of-drawers, empty. He

raised himself on his elbow and looked at me gloomily. I was so glad to

get back and talk to a real human being, drunk as he was, that I patted

him on the shoulder and told him we would have the dynamos fixed up in

the morning. He blinked, and fell back exhausted. I hoisted him up again

and he looked round resentfully. 'Aren't you going to turn out?' I asked

him. 'Come on, Mister.' 'Is she all right?' he growled. 'Yes, of

course!' I answered, rashly, and he promptly lay down again and declined

to move. I was in a hole, but not downhearted. I couldn't turn in

unless he turned out, you know. I walked along the alleyway with a crazy

idea of calling the Chief half formed in my mind. But that seemed to

clash with the school-boy code that forbids sneaking. Poor old chap! I

thought. And yet I couldn't keep his watch. I had to get my sleep if I

was to be any good next day. I went back and lifted him, snoring, to his

feet. 'Come on, Mister,' I said, 'it's your watch.' And I heaved him

gently through the doorway and along the alleyway. I was nearly carrying

him. I don't know what my intention really was, whether I had a notion

the outside air would brace him up or whether I was going to tumble him

down the engine-room ladder. Anyhow, we were staggering about the dark

alleyway when we both fell with a crash against the Chief's door. It was

the most effectual thing I could have contrived. There was a growl of

'what's that?' from the Chief and he suddenly sprang out in his pyjamas.

Seeing only me, he shouted, 'What you making all this row about?' And

then he stumbled over old Croasan. I laughed. I couldn't help it. All

the while I was explaining to that indignant Chief how we came to be

there I was uttering cries of joy in my heart over the rich humanity of

it all. It was sordid and silly and wrong, but it was real. The Chief

lit his lamp and I saw his one bright eye and the empty, blood-red

socket glittering in the radiance. To think that I had been mad enough

to feel sick of the _Corydon_! I felt as if I had suddenly got home

again. And, just as suddenly, old Croasan had vanished. I looked at the

Chief in bewilderment. He eyed me solemnly, but without disfavour, and

strode along to our cabin. Throwing the empty bottle through the

port-hole, he said briefly, 'Get yourself turned in, Mister,' and went

back to his own room. I turned in quick, you can imagine. It had been a

great day for me. You may think it strange, but I look back at it as one

of the happiest in my life. Work! Work! It is the only thing that keeps

us sane when we're young. All else is only bladder--nonsense. Work and

the knowledge of it, and the planning of it. Work, and its failures, its

bitter anxieties, its gleams of inspiration, its mellow accomplishment,

and then the blessed oblivion!

"Well, four voyages I made in that old packet, each one worse than the

last, I believe--four voyages after nuts, and palm-oil, and enormous

square logs of mahogany, and cages of snarling leopards and screaming

parrots, and tanks of stealthy serpents. I used to wonder who found it

worth while to hire us to bring such bizarre and useless things into

England. Once one of the twenty-five hundred weight barrels of palm oil

slipped from the slings and fell on the deck with a soft crash. It

smashed like an egg, of course. Indeed, as the mess burst and splashed

all over everybody on the after-deck, it was not unlike an enormous yolk

in its brilliant gamboge colour, with the split and dismembered staves

lying radially round it like dirty white of egg. And someone muttered

that 'there was twenty quid gone.' The leopards, too, struck me on the

homeward trip. Anything less like the traditional wild beast of the

jungle you couldn't imagine. Most of them were mangy and had eye-trouble

of some sort. They would stare with a sort of rigid horror and

indignation at the dancing blue waves over side for hours, their blank,

topaz eye-balls never moving unless you poked with a stick, when the

brute would utter a cry of what seemed to me utter despair and settle

down once more to keep the ocean under observation.

"We did not always go to the same place. In fact, I saw very little of

Mister George. Railheads advance with our sphere of influence. But I

stuck it, and put in my year of service for my license. I was saving

money and looking forward to a spell in London. All the other people I

knew I let go. I realized I had been all the time an alien in that

genteel professional world.

"And so, one day, a year after I'd set foot on the deck of that old

ship, I said good-bye to the men I'd sailed with and took the train to

Paddington. How strange I felt I can't explain. As the cab took me down

the familiar streets and I saw the old familiar sights, I felt--well,

you'll know when you go back! Something had snapped. I was in it, but

not of it. I saw the young men walking in the streets, with their high

collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and

gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just

as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the _Corydon_ and the

blue tropic sea!

"I took a room at a hotel and went out to see my mother. I did this as

a duty, mind you. If my brother was there still I had no intention of

staying long. There was no room for the two of us in the same house. And

of course, I had a great desire to know if they were married. Humph!

"I found my mother living alone. He was gone again! She, Gladys, was

gone too. They hadn't been married, not a bit of it. He never had any

intention of marrying her. It was very difficult to get the actual story

out of my mother. She didn't know much, and she was reluctant to tell me

even that. But I found out at last that she, Gladys, had followed him.

Nobody knew where. He had given up his agency and started on a tour for

some patent tyre company. And she, at the lifting of his finger, had

gone after him."

Mr. Carville paused and looked towards a figure coming into view on the

path. It was Miss Fraenkel. I looked at my watch. It was twelve o'clock.

"Miss Fraenkel is coming up to lunch," I said to Bill. "Will you join

us, Mr. Carville?"

He stood up shaking his head and brushing the tobacco ash from his vest.

"I'll look in afterwards," he said, "but I told the wife I'd be back to

dinner."

"Where was she, all the time, Mr. Carville?" asked Bill.

He laughed and stepped down from the porch.

"I will tell you this afternoon," he said, and reached the sidewalk as

Miss Fraenkel crossed the street. He lifted his hat absently and passed

on, and she, pausing for a moment, gave him one of those swift and

searching glances with which her countrywomen are wont to appraise us.

She came on up to us.

"Why didn't you come sooner?" said Bill, "we've been expecting you."

"I've been getting signatures," she replied. "Is that him?"

"Yes. He's coming back after lunch."

"Did you tell him that I want to get his wife to join?"

We were silent. We had forgotten all about Miss Fraenkel's suffrage. She

scanned our faces with an eager look in her hazel eyes. I made an

effort.

"We thought," I said, "we thought that perhaps you would be able to

explain better than we could how----"

"Why, what have you been talking about, then?" she asked.

"We haven't been talking," I replied, looking at the little brass

pilgrim on the door. "We've been listening."

And then we went in to lunch.