That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my
life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It
would, I suppose, make a book by itself—it has made a fairly voluminous
official report—but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an
episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.
Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and
delay, sea—sickness, general discomfort and humiliating self—revelation
are the master values of these memories.
I was sick all through the journey out. I don’t know why. It was the
only time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some pretty bad weather
since I became a boat-builder. But that phantom smell of potatoes was
peculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every
one of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by
quap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but
the stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation
kept me, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical
wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more
intimate vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape
Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with
Beatrice and my keen desire to get the _Maud Mary_ under way at once,
to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a
coat. Heavens! how I lacked that coat! And, moreover, I was cooped up
with two of the worst bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain.
Pollack, after conducting his illness in a style better adapted to the
capacity of an opera house than a small compartment, suddenly got
insupportably well and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he
smoked a tobacco as blond as himself, and divided his time almost
equally between smoking it and trying to clean it. “There’s only three
things you can clean a pipe with,” he used to remark with a twist of
paper in hand. “The best’s a feather, the second’s a straw, and the
third’s a girl’s hairpin. I never see such a ship. You can’t find any
of ’em. Last time I came this way I did find hairpins anyway, and found
’em on the floor of the captain’s cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?...
Feelin’ better?”
At which I usually swore.
“Oh, you’ll be all right soon. Don’t mind my puffin’ a bit? Eh?”
He never tired of asking me to “have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes
you forget it, and that’s half the battle.”
He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe
of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue
eye at the captain by the hour together. “Captain’s a Card,” he would
say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. “He’d like
to know what we’re up to. He’d like to know—no end.”
That did seem to be the captain’s ruling idea. But he also wanted to
impress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of good family and
to air a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature,
to the English constitution, and the like.
He had learnt the sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a book;
he would still at times pronounce the e’s at the end of “there” and
“here”; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into a
reluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping at
things English. Pollack would set himself to “draw him out.” Heaven
alone can tell how near I came to murder.
Fifty-three days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and
profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent the
rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped up
in a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from the
sight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a lightly ballasted ship
that rolled and pitched and swayed. And all the time the sands in the
hour-glass of my uncle’s fortunes were streaming out. Misery! Amidst it
all I remember only one thing brightly, one morning of sunshine in the
Bay of Biscay and a vision of frothing waves, sapphire green, a bird
following our wake and our masts rolling about the sky. Then wind and
rain close in on us again.
You must not imagine they were ordinary days, days, I mean, of an
average length; they were not so much days as long damp slabs of time
that stretched each one to the horizon, and much of that length was
night. One paraded the staggering deck in a borrowed sou’-wester hour
after hour in the chilly, windy, splashing and spitting darkness, or
sat in the cabin, bored and ill, and looked at the faces of those
inseparable companions by the help of a lamp that gave smell rather
than light. Then one would see going up, up, up, and then sinking down,
down, down, Pollack, extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant,
bringing his mind slowly to the seventy-seventh decision that the
captain was a Card, while the words flowed from the latter in a nimble
incessant good. “Dis England eet is not a country aristocratic, no! Eet
is a glorified bourgeoisie! Eet is plutocratic. In England dere is no
aristocracy since de Wars of Roses. In the rest of Europe east of the
Latins, yes; in England, no.
“Eet is all middle-class, youra England. Everything you look at,
middle-class. Respectable! Everything good—eet is, you say, shocking.
Madame Grundy! Eet is all limited and computing and self-seeking. Dat
is why your art is so limited, youra fiction, your philosophin, why you
are all so inartistic. You want nothing but profit! What will pay! What
would you?”...
He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans have
abandoned, shruggings of the shoulders, waving of the arms, thrusting
out of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of the hands under
your nose until you wanted to hit them away. Day after day it went on,
and I had to keep any anger to myself, to reserve myself for the time
ahead when it would be necessary to see the quap was got aboard and
stowed—knee deep in this man’s astonishment. I knew he would make a
thousand objections to all we had before us. He talked like a drugged
man. It ran glibly over his tongue. And all the time one could see his
seamanship fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetually
uneasy about the ship’s position, perpetually imagining dangers. If a
sea hit us exceptionally hard he’d be out of the cabin in an instant
making an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a dread of the
hold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked leaks. As we drew near
the African coast his fear of rocks and shoals became infectious.
“I do not know dis coast,” he used to say. “I cama hera because
Gordon-Nasmyth was coming too. Den he does not come!”
“Fortunes of war,” I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive but
sheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in the choice of these
two men. I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had the artistic temperament
and wanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express
his own malignant Anti-Britishism.
He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain. On the whole I was
glad I had come even at the eleventh hour to see to things.
(The captain, by-the-by, did at last, out of sheer nervousness, get
aground at the end of Mordet’s Island, but we got off in an hour or so
with a swell and a little hard work in the boat.)
I suspected the mate of his opinion of the captain long before he
expressed it. He was, I say, a taciturn man, but one day speech broke
through him. He had been sitting at the table with his arms folded on
it, musing drearily, pipe in mouth, and the voice of the captain
drifted down from above.
The mate lifted his heavy eyes to me and regarded me for a moment. Then
he began to heave with the beginnings of speech. He disembarrassed
himself of his pipe. I cowered with expectation. Speech was coming at
last. Before he spoke he nodded reassuringly once or twice.
“E—”
He moved his head strangely and mysteriously, but a child might have
known he spoke of the captain.
“E’s a foreigner.”
He regarded me doubtfully for a time, and at last decided for the sake
of lucidity to clench the matter.
“That’s what E is—a _Dago!_”
He nodded like a man who gives a last tap to a nail, and I could see he
considered his remark well and truly laid. His face, though still
resolute, became as tranquil and uneventful as a huge hall after a
public meeting has dispersed out of it, and finally he closed and
locked it with his pipe.
“Roumanian Jew, isn’t he?” I said.
He nodded darkly and almost forbiddingly.
More would have been too much. The thing was said. But from that time
forth I knew I could depend upon him and that he and I were friends. It
happens I never did have to depend upon him, but that does not affect
our relationship.
Forward the crew lived lives very much after the fashion of ours, more
crowded, more cramped and dirty, wetter, steamier, more verminous. The
coarse food they had was still not so coarse but that they did not
think they were living “like fighting cocks.” So far as I could make
out they were all nearly destitute men; hardly any of them had a proper
sea outfit, and what small possessions they had were a source of mutual
distrust. And as we pitched and floundered southward they gambled and
fought, were brutal to one another, argued and wrangled loudly, until
we protested at the uproar.
There’s no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw it.
The romance is in the mind of the landsman dreamer. These brigs and
schooners and brigantines that still stand out from every little port
are relics from an age of petty trade, as rotten and obsolescent as a
Georgian house that has sunken into a slum. They are indeed just
floating fragments of slum, much as icebergs are floating fragments of
glacier. The civilised man who has learnt to wash, who has developed a
sense of physical honour, of cleanly temperate feeding, of time, can
endure them no more. They pass, and the clanking coal-wasting steamers
will follow them, giving place to cleaner, finer things....
But so it was I made my voyage to Africa, and came at last into a world
of steamy fogs and a hot smell of vegetable decay, and into sound and
sight of surf and distant intermittent glimpses of the coast. I lived a
strange concentrated life through all that time, such a life as a
creature must do that has fallen in a well. All my former ways ceased,
all my old vistas became memories.
The situation I was saving was very small and distant now; I felt its
urgency no more. Beatrice and Lady Grove, my uncle and the Hardingham,
my soaring in the air and my habitual wide vision of swift effectual
things, became as remote as if they were in some world I had left for
ever....