This master of a ship I remember first as a slim lad, with a shy smile,
and large hands that were lonely beyond his outgrown reefer jacket.
His cap was always too small for him, and the soiled frontal badge of
his line became a coloured button beyond his forelock. He used to come
home occasionally--and it was always when we were on the point of
forgetting him altogether. He came with a huge bolster in a cab, as
though out of the past and nowhere. There is a tradition, a book
tradition, that the boy apprenticed to the sea acquires saucy eyes, and
a self-reliance always ready to dare to that bleak extreme the very
thought of which horrifies those who are lawful and cautious. They
know better who live where the ships are. He used to bring his young
shipmates to see us, and they were like himself. Their eyes were
downcast. They showed no self-reliance. Their shyness and politeness,
when the occasion was quite simple, were absurdly incommensurate even
with modesty. Their sisters, not nearly so polite, used to mock them.
As our own shy lad was never with us for long, his departure being as
abrupt and unannounced as his appearance, we could willingly endure
him. But he was extraneous to the household. He had the impeding
nature of a new and superfluous piece of furniture which is in the way,
yet never knows it, and placidly stays where it is, in its wooden
manner, till it is placed elsewhere. There was a morning when, as he
was leaving the house, during one of his brief visits to his home, I
noticed to my astonishment that he had grown taller than myself. How
had that happened? And where? I had followed him to the door that
morning because, looking down at his cap which he was nervously
handling, he had told me he was going then to an examination. About a
week later he announced, in a casual way, that he had got his masters
ticket. After the first shock of surprise, caused by the fact that
this information was an unexpected warning of our advance in years, we
were amused, and we congratulated him. Naturally he had got his
certificate as master mariner. Why not? Nearly all the mates we knew
got it, sooner or later. That was bound to come. But very soon after
that he gave us a genuine surprise, and made us anxious. He informed
us, as casually, that he had been appointed master to a ship; a very
different matter from merely possessing the licence to command.
We were even alarmed. This was serious. He could not do it. He was
not the man to make a command for anything. A fellow who, not so long
ago, used to walk a mile with a telegram because he had not the
strength of character to face the lady clerk in the post office round
the corner, was hardly the man to overawe a crowd of hard characters
gathered by chance from Tower Hill, socialize them, and direct them
successfully in subduing the conflicting elements of a difficult
enterprise. Not he. But we said nothing to discourage him.
Of course, he was a delightful fellow. He often amused us, and he did
not always know why. He was frank, he was gentle, but that large
vacancy, the sea, where he had spent most of his young life, had made
him--well, slow. You know what I mean. He was curiously innocent of
those dangers of great cities which are nothing to us because we know
they are there. Yet he was always on the alert for thieves and
parasites. I think he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipresence
ashore. Proud of his alert and knowing intelligence, he would relate a
long story of the way he had not only frustrated an artful shark, but
had enjoyed the process in perfect safety. That we, who rarely went
out of London, never had such adventures, did not strike him as worth a
thought or two. He never paused in his merriment to consider the
strange fact that to him, alone of our household, such wayside
adventures fell. With a shrewd air he would inform us that he was
about to put the savings of a voyage into an advertised trap which a
country parson would have stepped over without a second contemptuous
glance,
He took his ship away. The affair was not discussed at home, though
each of us gave it some private despondency. We followed him silently,
apprehensively, through the reports in the _Shipping Gazette_. He made
point after point safely--St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez, Aden--after him
we went across to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we learned that he
was safe at Batavia. He had got that steamer out all right. He got
her home again, too. After his first adventure as master he made
voyage after voyage with no more excitement in them than you would find
in Sunday walks in a suburb. It was plain luck; or else navigation and
seamanship were greatly overrated arts.
A day came when he invited me to go with him part of his voyage. I
could leave the ship at Bordeaux. I went. You must remember that we
had never seen his ship. And there he was, walking with me to the dock
from a Welsh railway station, a man in a cheap mackintosh, with an
umbrella I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper parcel.
He was appropriately crowned with a bowler hat several sizes too small
for him. Glancing up at his profile, I actually wondered whether the
turmoil was now going on in his mind over that confession which now he
was bound to make; that he was not the master of a ship, and never had
been.
There she was, a bulky modern freighter, full of derricks and
time-saving appliances, and her funnel lording it over the
neighbourhood. The man with the parcel under his arm led me up the
gangway. I was not yet convinced. I was, indeed, less sure than ever
that he could be the master of this huge community of engines and men.
He did not accord with it.
We were no sooner on deck than a man in uniform, grey-haired, with a
seamed and resolute face, which any one would have recognized at once
as a sailor's, approached us. He was introduced as the chief officer.
He had a tale of woe: trouble with the dockmaster, with the stevedores,
with the cargo, with many things. He did not appear to know what to do
with them. He was asking this boy of ours.
The skipper began to speak. At that moment I was gazing at the funnel,
trying to decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice, rapid
and incisive, sure of its subject, resolving doubts, and making the
crooked straight. It was the man with the brown paper parcel. That
was still under his arm--in fact, the parcel contained pink pyjamas,
and there was hardly enough paper. The respect of the mate was not
lessened by this.
The skipper went to gaze down a hatchway. He walked to the other side
of the ship, and inspected something there. Conned her length, called
up in a friendly but authoritative way to an engineer standing by an
amid-ship rail above. He came back to the mate, and with an easy
precision directed his will on others, through his deputy, up to the
time of sailing. He beckoned to me, who also, apparently, was under
his august orders, and turned, as though perfectly aware that in this
place I should follow him meekly, in full obedience.
Our steamer moved out at midnight, in a drive of wind and rain. There
were bewildering and unrelated lights about us. Peremptory challenges
were shouted to us from nowhere. Sirens blared out of dark voids. And
there was the skipper on the bridge, the lad who caused us amusement at
home, with this confusion in the dark about him, and an immense
insentient mass moving with him at his will; and he had his hands in
his pockets, and turned to tell me what a cold night it was. The
pier-head searchlight showed his face, alert, serene, with his brows
knitted in a little frown, and his underlip projecting as the sign of
the pride of those who look direct into the eyes of an opponent, and
care not at all. In my berth that night I searched for a moral for
this narrative, but went to sleep before I found it.