“How do you spell it?”
I told him. He moved his head at the impracticable nature of that name,
and observed:
“It's quite as long as your own--isn't it?”
There was no hurry. I had passed for master, and I had all the rest of
my life before me to make the best of it. That seemed a long time. I
went leisurely through a small mental calculation, and said:
“Not quite. Shorter by two letters, sir.”
“Is it?” The examiner pushed the signed blue slip across the table to
me, and rose from his chair. Somehow this seemed a very abrupt ending of
our relations, and I felt almost sorry to part from that excellent man,
who was master of a ship before the whisper of the sea had reached my
cradle. He offered me his hand and wished me well. He even made a few
steps toward the door with me, and ended with good-natured advice.
“I don't know what may be your plans, but you ought to go into steam.
When a man has got his master's certificate it's the proper time. If I
were you I would go into steam.”
I thanked him, and shut the door behind me definitely on the era of
examinations. But that time I did not walk on air, as on the first two
occasions. I walked across the hill of many beheadings with measured
steps. It was a fact, I said to myself, that I was now a British master
mariner beyond a doubt. It was not that I had an exaggerated sense of
that very modest achievement, with which, however, luck, opportunity,
or any extraneous influence could have had nothing to do. That
fact, satisfactory and obscure in itself, had for me a certain ideal
significance. It was an answer to certain outspoken scepticism and even
to some not very kind aspersions. I had vindicated myself from what had
been cried upon as a stupid obstinacy or a fantastic caprice. I don't
mean to say that a whole country had been convulsed by my desire to go
to sea. But for a boy between fifteen and sixteen, sensitive enough,
in all conscience, the commotion of his little world had seemed a very
considerable thing indeed. So considerable that, absurdly enough, the
echoes of it linger to this day. I catch myself in hours of solitude and
retrospect meeting arguments and charges made thirty-five years ago by
voices now forever still; finding things to say that an assailed boy
could not have found, simply because of the mysteriousness of his
impulses to himself. I understood no more than the people who called
upon me to explain myself. There was no precedent. I verily believe mine
was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking
a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and
associations. For you must understand that there was no idea of any sort
of “career” in my call. Of Russia or Germany there could be no question.
The nationality, the antecedents, made it impossible. The feeling
against the Austrian service was not so strong, and I dare say there
would have been no difficulty in finding my way into the Naval School at
Pola. It would have meant six months' extra grinding at German, perhaps;
but I was not past the age of admission, and in other respects I was
well qualified. This expedient to palliate my folly was thought of--but
not by me. I must admit that in that respect my negative was accepted
at once. That order of feeling was comprehensible enough to the most
inimical of my critics. I was not called upon to offer explanations;
but the truth is that what I had in view was not a naval career, but
the sea. There seemed no way open to it but through France. I had the
language, at any rate, and of all the countries in Europe it is with
France that Poland has most connection. There were some facilities for
having me a little looked after, at first. Letters were being written,
answers were being received, arrangements were being made for my
departure for Marseilles, where an excellent fellow called Solary,
got at in a roundabout fashion through various French channels, had
promised good-naturedly to put le jeune homme in the way of getting a
decent ship for his first start if he really wanted a taste of ce metier
de chien.
I watched all these preparations gratefully, and kept my own counsel.
But what I told the last of my examiners was perfectly true. Already
the determined resolve that “if a seaman, then an English seaman” was
formulated in my head, though, of course, in the Polish language. I did
not know six words of English, and I was astute enough to understand
that it was much better to say nothing of my purpose. As it was I was
already looked upon as partly insane, at least by the more distant
acquaintances. The principal thing was to get away. I put my trust in
the good-natured Solary's very civil letter to my uncle, though I was
shocked a little by the phrase about the metier de chien.
This Solary (Baptistin), when I beheld him in the flesh, turned out a
quite young man, very good-looking, with a fine black, short beard, a
fresh complexion, and soft, merry black eyes. He was as jovial and good
natured as any boy could desire. I was still asleep in my room in a
modest hotel near the quays of the old port, after the fatigues of
the journey via Vienna, Zurich, Lyons, when he burst in, flinging the
shutters open to the sun of Provence and chiding me boisterously for
lying abed. How pleasantly he startled me by his noisy objurgations to
be up and off instantly for a “three years' campaign in the South Seas!”
O magic words! “_Une campagne de trois ans dans les mers du sud_”--that
is the French for a three years' deep-water voyage.
He gave me a delightful waking, and his friendliness was unwearied;
but I fear he did not enter upon the quest for a ship for me in a very
solemn spirit. He had been at sea himself, but had left off at the age
of twenty-five, finding he could earn his living on shore in a much more
agreeable manner. He was related to an incredible number of Marseilles
well-to-do families of a certain class. One of his uncles was a
ship-broker of good standing, with a large connection among English
ships; other relatives of his dealt in ships' stores, owned sail-lofts,
sold chains and anchors, were master-stevedores, calkers, shipwrights.
His grandfather (I think) was a dignitary of a kind, the Syndic of the
Pilots. I made acquaintances among these people, but mainly among the
pilots. The very first whole day I ever spent on salt water was by
invitation, in a big half-decked pilot-boat, cruising under close reefs
on the lookout, in misty, blowing weather, for the sails of ships and
the smoke of steamers rising out there, beyond the slim and tall Planier
lighthouse cutting the line of the wind-swept horizon with a white
perpendicular stroke. They were hospitable souls, these sturdy Provencal
seamen. Under the general designation of le petit ami de Baptistin I
was made the guest of the corporation of pilots, and had the freedom of
their boats night or day. And many a day and a night, too, did I spend
cruising with these rough, kindly men, under whose auspices my intimacy
with the sea began. Many a time “the little friend of Baptistin” had the
hooded cloak of the Mediterranean sailor thrown over him by their honest
hands while dodging at night under the lee of Chateau daft on the watch
for the lights of ships. Their sea tanned faces, whiskered or shaved,
lean or full, with the intent, wrinkled sea eyes of the pilot breed, and
here and there a thin gold hoop at the lobe of a hairy ear, bent over my
sea infancy. The first operation of seamanship I had an opportunity of
observing was the boarding of ships at sea, at all times, in all states
of the weather. They gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited
to sit in more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their
hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick plate
by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their
daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses of black
hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and dazzlingly white
teeth.
I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them,
Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style,
would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the
Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old
aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to
make me think of Lady Dedlock in Dickens's “Bleak House,” a work of the
master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense
and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that
its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other
men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and
in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by a not very
surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book reminded me strongly
of the “belle Madame Delestang.”
Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin, bony nose and a
perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together, as it were,
by short, formal side whiskers, had nothing of Sir Leicester Dedlock's
“grand air” and courtly solemnity. He belonged to the haute bourgeoisie
only, and was a banker, with whom a modest credit had been opened for my
needs. He was such an ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist
that he used in current conversation turns of speech contemporary,
I should say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money
matters, reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of
post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten ecus--ecus
of all money units in the world!--as though Louis Quatorze were still
promenading in royal splendour the gardens of Versailles, and Monsieur
de Colbert busy with the direction of maritime affairs. You must admit
that in a banker of the nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy.
Luckily, in the counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of
the Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts
were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in
making my wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous, Legitimist
(I suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of heavily barred
windows behind the sombre, ancient counters, beneath lofty ceilings with
heavily molded cornices. I always felt, on going out, as though I
had been in the temple of some very dignified but completely temporal
religion. And it was generally on these occasions that under the great
carriage gateway Lady Ded--I mean Madame Delestang--catching sight of my
raised hat, would beckon me with an amiable imperiousness to the side of
the carriage, and suggest with an air of amused nonchalance, “_Venez donc
faire un tour avec nous_,” to which the husband would add an encouraging
“_C'est ca. Allons, montez, jeune homme_.” He questioned me some times,
significantly but with perfect tact and delicacy, as to the way I
employed my time, and never failed to express the hope that I wrote
regularly to my “honoured uncle.” I made no secret of the way I employed
my time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots and so
on entertained Madame Delestang so far as that ineffable woman could
be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of his new
experience among strange men and strange sensations. She expressed no
opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her portrait hangs in the
gallery of my intimate memories, fixed there by a short and fleeting
episode. One day, after putting me down at the corner of a street,
she offered me her hand, and detained me, by a slight pressure, for a
moment. While the husband sat motionless and looking straight before
him, she leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of
warning in her leisurely tone: “_Il faut, cependant, faire attention a
ne pas gater sa vie_.” I had never seen her face so close to mine before.
She made my heart beat and caused me to remain thoughtful for a whole
evening. Certainly one must, after all, take care not to spoil one's
life. But she did not know--nobody could know--how impossible that
danger seemed to me.