It should never be forgotten, in a review of the seafaring life,
that these casual and irrelevant encounters with the offscourings of
hybrid races, though priceless to the philosopher and the artist, are
of no human value to the sailor at all. The jaded landsman imagines
that we seamen “see the world” and view “mankind from China to Peru.”
He romantically conceives us extracting the fine essences from the
crude masses of humanity with whom we are thrown in contact in the
seething ports of the Orient. He figures us ecstatically savouring
the “unchanging East” and beholding “strange lands from under the
arched white sails of ships.” It must be confessed that popular fiction
confirms these illusions. We who work in ships are supposed to be
prototypes of Mr. Kipling’s “Tramp Royal”――a flattering but untrue
assumption.
But while an intelligent person can see readily that, to the
unimaginative seafarer, this continual procession of detached images
will have no positive significance, very few observers realize how such
an environment tends also to indurate the soul. Yet so it is. In our
rough, homely way, we are fatigued with distinctions, and reduce the
Unknown to common denominators. We call Hindoos “coolies,” Chinamen
“Chinks,” Americans “Yanks,” Spaniards “Dagoes,” Italians “Spaghettis,”
and we let it go at that. We are majestically incurious about them
all. There is no British type so narrow, so dogmatic, so ignorant, so
impervious to criticism, so parochial in its outlook, as the seafaring
man or officer. You would imagine, from our ideas, that we had remained
all our days in our home towns. Indeed most of us have. Our real life
beats in the little houses in Penarth, Swansea, Seaforth, White Inch,
or South Shields. We have very little passion for the bizarre. We
become callous to the impact of the stray alien, and feed our narrow
hearts with wistful visions of an idealized suburban existence.
Going on at two is quite a different thing from the ghastly affair of
the small hours. Each period of the day has its own subtle quality,
which no arbitrary rearrangement of our own hours of work and rest can
destroy. And two o’clock in the afternoon is a time of disillusion,
a time when a man has neither great faith nor profound convictions.
The morning is gone, the evening too far away. Even tea-time seems at
an immense and tragic distance. It is the slack-water period of the
day. And it is the period when a man may perhaps experience, in the
space of a flash, a peculiar sensation of being an impostor! It is, I
suppose, in such moments that generals, commanders, chief engineers,
and the like jump overboard. It is a sensation extraordinarily vivid
and brief. No external evidence is of any avail to neutralize its dire
and dreadful omniscience. No personal written record, no esteem of
lifelong friends, no permanent and visible accomplishment can shield
the sensitive human soul, thus suddenly stripped bare by some devilish
cantrip of its own mechanism. One feels a hollow sham.
And the ship, at this hour, is strangely deserted. Those who have
work are gone to it, those who are off duty are resting after a hot
lunch. The day’s ration of meat is gone; the soldiers are on an upper
deck, out of sight. Thomas, stretched to an incredible length on the
deck steam-guard, snoozes in gross comfort. Ibrahim-el-Din, an Arab
coal-passer, is smoking a meditative cigarette by the after-rail. The
faded Irishman is perambulating in his stiff way round the machine,
and I take charge for another six hours. A Greek sailor, no doubt a
Venizelist, is painting a bulkhead in an amateur fashion. As I look
through one of the after-window scuttles I observe our agnostic Second
Officer drift past. He is probably going to resume his erotic novel, a
species of fiction for which he has a strange passion.
For an hour or so I look out of my machine-room window upon an untidy
after-deck, and reflect upon the vicissitudes of War. Visible through
the crystalline atmosphere, Salonika, floored with a jade-green sea and
domed with dappled azure, resembles the painted curtain of some titanic
theatre. It is in fact one of those monstrous “theatres of war” which
are now giving a continuous performance to the whole world. But for us
on transports that painted curtain is never lifted. We see nothing of
the performance. We are mere stage carpenters, or caterers, or perhaps
only stray freight wagons which bring some homely necessary material to
the grand display.
Such are my thoughts, more or less, when I catch sight suddenly of
my friend Tubby, the fat marine, standing on the gun-platform and
excitedly waving his arms toward the Vardar Marshes. I run out on deck.
Tubby comes hurrying along, shouting in the hoarse voice that goes with
immense girth and a short neck:
“See ’im, sir? A Tawb! A Tawb!”
And so it is a _Taube_. After a momentary search of the upper reaches
of the air, I spot him, a far-distant dot. And as we gather in a tense
little knot on the after-deck, straining our eyes, clawing tentatively
for a peep through the binoculars, the enemy monoplane sails serenely
toward us, and the guns begin to go. From the men-of-war near by, from
invisible batteries concealed ashore, the sharp cracks echo, and we
watch the oncoming dot ten thousand feet above the sea. Tubby says ten
thousand feet, and although I don’t believe he knows anything about
it, he has been in the Navy and possesses the prestige of the Senior
Service. He certainly knows more about it than we do.
And observe how greedily we make the most of this little bit of war
which has come to us. Now he is right over us, sailing across a broad
shield of speckless blue, and we see the small white plumes of shrapnel
suddenly appear, above, below, and around him. He sails on. He must be
doing seventy miles an hour. Somebody doubts this. We ignore him, and
push the speed up to eighty miles. Say eighty miles an hour. Golly!
That was a close one. A white plume appears right in front of him. He
sails on. Evidently he has no bombs. Tubby says: “Tawbs don’t carry
no bombs.” What a mine of information he is! Again a hit, a palpable
hit. But he sails on. There is something sublime about this. Of course
he is a German and therefore damnable. But――but――well, he is damnably
adventurous. I wonder what he is doing. Has he a sweetheart, a German
_Mädchen_? I am supposed to believe she would not have the wit to
love him for this daredevil eagle-swoop over Salonika. I don’t think,
however, that patriotism compels me to hate that air-man up there.
_Crack-crack!_ go the guns. He sails on. He is, so far, supreme. A
dim sporting instinct, which used to have free rein at school, shoots
through my mind and I discover in myself no passionate desire to see
him hit. He himself seems to have no anxieties whatever. I recall a
line from Shelley:
He rides upon the platform of the wind,
And laughs to hear the fireballs roar behind.
Now he is over Ben Lomond and is turning toward Monastir, whence we
suppose he has come. Other batteries behind the town welcome him and
the Navy resigns itself, for once, to frustration. Crack after crack,
plume after plume. Now he is behind a cloud, and our attention is
taken up for a moment by the sight of our own machines manœuvring for
position in the offing. And the next time we see him he is coming down.
Tubby says so. Personally, I imagined him to be going up; but I never
contradict a navy man. Somebody else says he is hit. Our lieutenant,
on the upper deck with the commander, looking through his prismatic
glasses, says it looks like it. I glance at our group, all eyes raised
to the sky, mouths open, emblems of receptive vacuity.
Reluctantly we abandon our precious “Tawb” to the inland ranges
and return to the mundane life once more. Tubby walks to and fro,
a short man of enormous size, discoursing of “Tawbs.” I call him
my mythological monster, for he has served in the “_’Ercles_,” the
“_’Ecuba_,” the “_You roper_,” the _Endymion_ and the “_Amfi-trite_.”
When we go to sea, Tubby stands or sits by his gun and keeps a lookout
for submarines. He is one of Hardy’s Wessex yokels. When the war came,
he was malting at Malmesbury, and doing a small delivery-wagon business
for a local hardware store. He looks it. He could pose for John Bull, a
beef-eating, ale-drinking, Saxon John Bull. Now he is also an expert on
“Tawbs.” What tales he will tell by the malt-house fires in the winters
to come! Tales, perhaps, of “Tawbs!”
And so, in idle talk and modest vigilance, the day wears on, until
the sun is setting in turbulent reds and purples beyond the Vardar,
and the peak of Olympos, showing for a brief moment above the billows
of vapour, is flushed an exquisite pale rose colour. Lights begin to
twinkle on the shore. Those on day work begin to appear after their
wash, loafing about until dinner, smoking cigarettes, arguing after
the foolish, dogmatic way of sailors, getting heated over nothing,
condemning a nation in a thoughtless phrase. Some are writing home, for
a mail goes soon. Some come into the machine-room for a drink of water,
or for a chat.
The Fourth Engineer, who had viewed the aeroplane dressed in blue
serge trousers and an unbuttoned pajama jacket, now appears in his
uniform, still a little drowsy after his day’s sleep, but smiling in
his pleasant boyish way. Our conversation is not intellectual. We
really have not much to say. It would not bear writing down. Nor would
a comic paper take our jokes. Nevertheless, we talk and laugh and pass
the time. For myself, I talk to everybody: I talk to the nigger firemen
and the Chinese cook, to the dog and the cat, to the canary in my room
and the parrot who blasphemes so bitterly on the fore-deck.
So I keep in practice. For some day we shall have Peace, and we shall
go home, over the well-remembered road to Malta and Gib, and over the
mountainous western-ocean swell that is for ever charging across the
Bay. Some day this will happen, and we shall speak the Tuskar once
again, tie up in the old dock, and step ashore. And we shall take our
way, some of us, through the quiet countryside, where friends await
us, friends who will bid us tarry awhile and tell them our tales of
foreign parts, as mariners have done and always will do, while ships
come home from sea.