A swell running in its long undulations accompanied us until we had
passed Madeira, beyond its horizons. Mugs of tea slid suddenly and
swiftly across the saloon table; complaints were made at every meal,
and the mate hinted, with dreadful implications for my benefit, that a
special memorandum would be presented to Father Neptune, expected on board
shortly. Other hints of the passenger's future trials were made. We
were bound for the Plate, but we might be sent thence to Australia. That
addition, as a possibility, to my holiday perturbed me somewhat; I
envisaged the bailiffs in at home before I got back.
The second mate, Bicker, and the third mate, Mead, invited me to see
their observations and their watches. Bicker, a fine audacious spirit,
dark-haired, dark-eyed, four-or-five-and-twenty years old, had my
company in the afternoon, the days being warm and inviting. The typical
scene below the bridge was of Mead in his singlet rigging up a line,
whereon towels, socks and other properties were soon in the sun; while
mattresses aired over the cargo-hatch tarpaulin. Other toil at this hour,
save that of the engines and the man at the wheel, was not noticeable.
The boatswain and his wrinkled party, who actually did leave a sea-salt
impression in their stocking-turbans and greasy rags and roomy sea-boots,
had left the midships white, and had changed their ground for hose and
scrubber to the neighbourhood of the engines and the galley; but the
afternoons heard them not. An occasional whistle from the bridge would
summon hurrying feet up the ladder; the striking of the bell made Time's
pace perceived. Bicker would sometimes interrupt his large stories to
show me, or to try to show me, remote or tiny curiosities floating past
the ship. Perhaps a shoal of young porpoises bobbing along portended a
slight squall, its approach yielding those ever remarkable lights
that mark broken rain, lily-of-the-valley green, and on the waters a
silver glitter, while a shadow drooped over all. The third mate's
drying-ground was speedily cleared at these times.
Mead's watch occupied the four hours before noon, and the four before
midnight. At noon he would join with Bicker in "Shooting old Sol," a
process which, with its turning-up of pages packed with figures, reminded
me of old trouble in a famous mathematical school of severe traditions,
where hung on the walls a symbolic picture--a youth swimming for dear
life from a gigantic shark. In the evening I would find Mead on the
bridge, uttering to himself as likely as not his talismanic motto: _Quo
Fata Vocant_. He was a rover; from China he had gone to Australia to join
the Army in 1914; thence had seen Gallipoli, Egypt, and, I believe,
Palestine; went into the Navy with a commission after that; and now had
returned to the life in which he had been apprenticed a dozen years
before. As these evening colloquies with Mead became a rule with me,
and as it was Mead whom I came to know better than anyone else, other
matters relating to him will be found in their places.
There was no lack of good spirits aboard. Reminiscences of a humorous
tinge came up in almost every conversation; and conversation was an
earnest and frequent affair. Indeed, there was observable a certain
rivalry (as with those who supply the fashionable memoirs of the past
twenty or thirty years), who should remember the most: and each speaker
showed a vigorous faith in his own tale, which he scarcely extended
to his predecessor's. The mate, the clear-headed Meacock, with his
blunt serenity--embodying qualities in which I could not help seeing
the English seaman of the centuries--was eloquent one evening about
examiners. Examinations lie thick in the navigator's early way. He
recalled one well-known figure of these inquisitions, who, at a time
when no dinner interval was allowed to the candidates, used to bring out
frying-pan, steak and the rest, and tantalize every one by cooking himself
his dinner. (I wondered if this suggestion might be passed on to the
Universities.) Another original, Meacock went on, warming himself with the
recollection, had a preference for ordinary, that is seafaring, words.
_Examiner._ If I carry this barometer up a mountain, what happens?
_Candidate._ The mercury in the barometer subsides.
_Examiner (purple with disgust)._ You silly idiot, if you were sitting
on a table and I knocked you off, would _you_ subside?
Bicker was about to put in a reminiscence of his at this point, but
Meacock was already giving another instance of this examiner's zeal for
pure English.
_Examiner (producing a piece of wood)._ What colour's this?
_Candidate._ Chocolate.
_Examiner (purple once more)._ Chocolate! Chocolate be dam'd. Chocolate's
something to eat--What COLOUR is it?
The chief engineer, seeing me somewhat handicapped by temperament from
wandering about as inquisitively as I ought to have done, came up one
afternoon to take me into "_his_ little slice of the ship." I am sorry
to think how vague my imagination and how inactive my gratitude had been
up to that first descent down the iron stairways and crossings to the
engine-room. The stifling air and the throbbing roar, of course, kept
my notions vague, but the degree of vagueness was not so disgraceful as
it had been. He pointed out all things to one comprehending scarcely
anything, except a chalk legend on the wall which ran:
Aston Villa
Celtic
Manchester U,
and so on, which I noticed for myself. The ruling passion--(passion at
the referee's ruling, says the cynic).
I was aware, meanwhile, of vast steel rods and arms in violent motion,
named severally by the chief in a mighty voice, which nevertheless
was too much of a whisper for me. The gangways round them, it was easier
to learn, were narrow and greasy. The cool skill with which an engineer
was anointing these whirling forms, his hand dapping mothlike with the
tapering can above them, was enough to amaze me. Under a strange
construction like a kiln, by way of a low red door, we went into the
vault where the dusky, glowing and actually grinning firemen were
tending the furnaces. (It happens all day, every day in thousands of
ships!) Above, we had looked in at a dark hole--I rightly thought, over
the boilers--and breathed for a moment a most parching element, so that
the heat of the stokehold did not frighten me. The chief introduced me
to the third engineer, Williams--we roared out cordially; and then he
inducted me to the mysteries aft, where, along the shaft which revolves
the propeller, a specially greasy passage runs. Here, as throughout this
cavernous region--I remembered Hedge Street Tunnels, which to the
initiated will be a sufficient allusion--might not E. A. Poe, to-day,
have set a story to rival the _Cask of Amontillado_? I suggested it to
the chief, but he saw no adventurous, unusual quality in his tunnel. Right
aft appeared a long vertical ladder, ascending to a manhole--a safety
appliance, he explained it, of the war, but to me it resembled a danger
appliance.
Having gone as far as we could, we turned back to the engine-room. I was
now accustomed enough to notice that the sultry air of the place was
occasionally tempered by a draught of the cooler kind. But I found it hard
to realize how man could tolerate surroundings so trying as these in
order to earn a wage which in a comfortable employment would be nothing
out of the way. I pictured myself as an engineer on a steamer. I feared
that, in time, the approach of each watch of four hours down among the
machinery, fume, sweat and thunder would become a formidable problem.
"Use" no doubt explained the nonchalance of pallid Williams as he groped
with his slush-lamp to his work. But I thought of the war, when, after
a while, useful "use" began to desert the soldier and to leave him on
tenterhooks worse than the apprehensions of the unused.
We were climbing upstairs again--up from the underworld of battle
headquarters?
I had appreciated the handful of cotton waste which the chief had given
me at the first: and now went off to read poems. The man to whom this
"divelish yron yngine"--if I do not misquote Spenser--is given for control
(and is controlled), returned to his outstanding labour--that of filing
part of a curious patent electric torch which the captain had asked him to
restore to life.