IV

My theory of repentance during the first few days at sea was to be fact.

At the start, I seemed to myself to be perfectly steady. The breeze

blew cold; I thought it even pleasant; and without over-exercise, I took

my last views of English coasts, and watched ships ahead of us blackly

smudging a vaporous sky. I attended dinner, and began to swell with vanity.

By this time the ship was rolling (after all yesterday's kind assurances).

There was no mistake about it: and my vanity and observation were at once

cut short by a surprise attack of sea-sickness. A dismal cowardice

came on me. The wind seemed changing, or perhaps--I inquired but

little--the course of the ship; the effect needed no inquiry. Time and

again, lowering my _morale_ at each arrival, the seas beat in a great

crash upon the ship's sides, and, with the attendant tilt, the scarcely

less welcome seethe of the waters flowing down the decks would follow.

The ship seemed to be provided with cogs, on which she was raised and

lowered with horrible deliberate jolts over a half-circle: then again,

the big wave would jump in with a punch like some giant Fitzsimmons.

My experience was growing. The sunshine died off the porthole; the

breeze was half a gale already, droning and whining louder and louder;

and I felt that my breaking-in was to be thorough enough.

Captain Hosea found time, now and then, to look at his passenger. We

kept up eloquent discourse, though I was handicapped. The origin of

species and the riddle of the universe are topics on which much enlivening

debate may occur, and certainly did then; but the floor of the debating

society should be made steady and not to lift and lean and recover with a

monstrous jerk as a point is being approached. "It's fierce," said he,

referring to the idea of infinite abyss. I could agree from the smaller

one which I myself seemed to be probing.

Sleep was not easy during these early hours of my holiday. I spent an

awkward night or two, listening to rattlings of all sorts, the

battering-ram shocks of the seas, and the thump of the engines,

watching the sweat on the rivets of my roof roll like the bubble in a

spirit-level, and my towel float out to an apparent unperpendicular

side to side. In this state of things I easily came to know the features

of my cabin, described on the door-key as "spare cabin port." Amidships it

was, between the wireless operator's premises and the captain's. The

porthole faced the poop, and more immediately, the ship's squat

funnel. Beneath the porthole, a padded seat was fixed; and I had on

one length of the room a disused radiator, a chest of drawers and a

washstand with mirror, where, despite a ventilator above, light rarely

seemed to come. On the opposite length there was a tall malodorous

cupboard and two bunk beds, of which I chose the lower one from sound

instinct at the beginning, keeping to it from force of habit afterwards.

Such was my dwelling; but I must not fail to mention the electric light

and fan. The place was painted white, but its past use as a store had

variegated it.

The steward likewise visited me here, and sympathized. The old fellow

talked to me much as if I had known him all my life; he being known well

enough, indeed, to the company for whom he was going to sea in his old

age. A scarred nose distinguished him for a time. He complained, with

a sort of personal visualization of the sea's boorishness, that while

attending to some stores he had been blown off a case into a barrel of

flour.

Having therefore spent the best part of my first two days at sea in

my cabin, which offered no great variety in itself, I was much pleased

to find myself able to arise, manfully, the third day. But I avoided

breakfast. The morning looked inviting, the black funnel gleaming even

richly in the sun, so presently I took the air. First, I had found some

difficulty in shaving, even with a safety razor; but it was accomplished.

We were still in the Bay of Biscay, and the _Bonadventure_ had not done

lurching and wallowing. To my naive eye, the sea was in considerable

commotion. Like ever-changing rocky coasts, the horizon rose and fell. As

unsteady as that, the day left behind its sunny comfort and brought

clouds and chillier air. I saw the navigators passing on their business,

but I could not emulate their equipoise; I attached myself to a rail

or fixture to watch them, this one coiling a rope, that trailing a

coco-nut mat in the sea--a capital cleanser; to watch the gulls also,

so easily keeping up with the plunging brows, amid all their side-shows of

wheeling and darting flights. Inured, I presently joined in at dinner in

the saloon; ate, and had no serious trouble. A framework, which was

described as a "fiddle," covered the table and checked the more mobile

crockery; but it could not prevent an accident in the steward's own

department, which caused his tone of private feud with Neptune to sound

clearly in the apostrophe, "Break 'em all, then, so we shall have none

for the fine weather." But fine weather was expected now.

V

My prospect brightened with the weather. "Things are looking bad,"

observed the chief engineer with an anxious glance at me. "Why?" I said

more anxiously. "There's three teaspoons missing," he answered, satisfied

at having played his joke. The morning, though the wind blew hard

against us, was sunny and cheerful; the light blue sky flying here and

there the streamer of a shining cloud, the moon going down ahead of us,

the drove of gulls still pleasing themselves in glistening whims of flight

among the waves. Warmer it was, but not yet warm enough for me: and going

out on the deck I often sheltered behind the cabins with fingers as of

old turning waxen for want of blood. I found the ancient sea a new

pleasure in its aspects: I liked to see the wave-tops suddenly become

crystalline with a clear green glow. Such a greenness immediately

associated itself with, and, I even thought, comprehended, the curious

emanation of the old mermaid stories. It is a light wherein the sudden

arising of a supernatural might seem natural.

Aboard, less remote interests revealed themselves. The cook, that lean

aproned figure, walked slowly between the stores and his stronghold

the galley, carrying perhaps a couple of large onions; and the smell

of cooking might rise above that of the Atlantic. The tawny firemen

emptied their buckets of cinders in long series through the iron chute

over the side; or found, by request, work for an oilcan round the funnel.

Everything said, in its manner, "No blind hurry, no delay."

Hosea invited me to his ampler room for daily conversations over the

friendly glass; we talked much, but not about the sea. His active mind,

after searching through the files of recent newspapers saved up during his

stay in port, had many an opinion on affairs less adjacent; and he had a

curious miscellany of reading at his service. Sir Edwin Arnold was one

of his few poets, and for him he spoke out most generously. Here I was

obliged to watch my behaviour. As a person engaged in literature, I

could not precisely admit the ignorance of the _Light of Asia_ which I

have always enjoyed; and I wished I had read it. The conversation should

have run upon the sharks, the hula hula, typhoon and the submarine

barrage, by rights; not upon the history in blank verse of the founder

of Buddhism. It was some relief to find Hosea turning to Tennyson, whose

works he had upon his desk. Shakespeare, he said, he had been advised

by old captains to leave alone until he had turned forty.

From his book cupboard he lent me several books, of which I only failed

to master one. This was _The Lone Star Ranger_, by Zane Grey; a fiction in

which beauty was reached through blood, but not in this world. Far more

romantic was a large official treatise styled _North Atlantic Directory_,

reading which, I determined never again to leave any book about ships

and the sea in the threepenny tub.

Meals, the important thing in the trenches, began to impress me as

furnishing the incidents of seafaring life. They seldom came too soon.

Their atmosphere puzzled me in a minor way, until I was acclimatized

to the habits of the saloon. Little would be said at them for a long

time; then some one would quietly mention some occurrence of technical

bearings in the first place, and so educed, a few anecdotes would follow.

Phillips, the chief engineer, with his seasoned air and dry ironical

ease of speech, was perhaps the narrator of the saloon. I remember his

first tale that I heard: it was simple, yet picturesque. "Once we were

running in the banana trade. We went to Labrador for some fish. The

captain was putting in to Cape Sidney, and he didn't like the look of

some of the lights. So he went down to the bottle and got blotto. The

second mate--a little Greek, he was--was on the bridge, and he found

the captain was blotto, and he'd never been to Cape Sidney before,

and he was worried out of his wits. So he came down and asked me what

he should do. 'I can't tell you,' I said. 'But if I were you, I should

bring her round in circles outside here until daylight comes.' And there

he stayed, steering round in circles all night."

The ship was reckoned, by those in higher authority, to do ten knots

to the hour, but for a week or so her average was no more than eight.

This circumstance was never far away from our table-talk. The playful

interrogative "Ten?" would welcome Phillips to his place at dinner, as

the second mate handed him the slip giving the results of the midday

observations.

As the ship's officers and the sailors became better used to me, and

I to them, my voyage began to assume its intended holiday character. The

southward progress of the _Bonadventure_, disappoint her chief engineer

as she might, was felt in the improving weather; and as sea weather was

still a new world to me, I was never for long without some variation of

amusement. The colours of the rainbow in the waves leaping up at the

ship's side and in the veils of spray that they flung to the whisking

wind were soon reflecting themselves in my remembrance. On dark blue

ridge of surly water and on snowy coronal, the broken arc of the rainbow

was for ever flickering, just beyond the uncertain shadow of the ship.

The lively wind, meanwhile, as if by a sudden stronger impulse, would

whirl the green toppling seas over the lower deck, and the light cold

spray as high as the bridge. Here, I thought, was a lyric indeed; and

so, it looked, thought the gulls that disported about the ships, and

the shoals that, I fancied, like those of any small stream, would be up to

enjoy the sun.

Swabbing was going on aboard at a great pace. The boatswain, a sort

of combined walrus and carpenter, seldom allowed his swabbers and his

hosepipe to rest. The flow of dirty water from the cabin roofs made the

deck dangerous ground. So perish all accumulated dust! The _Bonadventure_

began to look clean, even resplendent.

When Hosea joined the merchant service, he tells me, old hands would

often make a disparaging comment upon the decline of sailing days. "I'm

giving up going to sea. I'm going in steamers." True, in the very names of

the old sails, up to their skyscrapers and their moonrakers, there

lingers yet the elemental dignity of the earlier sort of argosy. Even

the same metaphorical fountain of description seems to have ceased to

flow with the falling asleep of the famous clippers: and I doubt whether

the author of _London River_, that rich reverie, kindred with an essay

which has weathered a hundred years' storms--Charles Lamb's _South-Sea

House_--would write of the sea to-day in his translucent classical

revivings:

"The model of this Russian ship was as memorable as a Greek statue."

And yet, once or twice already, I was indistinctly aware of an antique

look about the ship forward, with her dark beak and all her shrouds and

spars and winches; as I watched her at twilight ploughing a grey sea

and still driving afield towards a horizon of sad vapours, braided with

the sunset's waning red, and, from time to time until darkness settled,

creviced with a primrose gleam, calm, clear and sweet amid its shadows.