The _Bonadventure_ entered the tropics, calm, hot, blue expanse. I do
not know why, but our passing into that zone was for me contemporary
with an access of wild and vivid dreams. These were odd enough to cause
me to record what remained of them in the morning, and as they still seem
prominent in my recollections of my sea-going, I make a note of some of
them. Now, it was no other than the great Lord Byron, pursuing me with a
knife, applauded by two ladies. The basis of actuality, at least, was
there. Now I was taking my way along weedy rivers, which at first
were the innocent shallow streams I once met and knew in Kent. But as the
dream progressed a Byronic change came over it; and these streams grew
more and more foul with weeds and grotesque in stagnation, until I
realized as if with an awakening that they were full of tremendous fish,
pike perhaps, often perch, and hybrids of many colours and streakings.
These fish lay watching, stretched from one bank to the other; their
number, my loneliness, their immensity, my fixity conspired to frighten me
unspeakably.
At other times the river was in flood, and I, as before, compelled by
the secret of the matter to walk along its towpath, in danger of its
torrents; the path itself became unknown, or lay between two huge channels
choking with muddy torrents. Ever expecting the worst, I was suddenly
at an ancient mill, watching
Slow Lethe without coil,
Softly, like a stream of oil
gliding under the footbridge. This was sickly phantasm, the very waters
breathing decay. The scene swiftly changed. Paddington! and you, dear
old friend C., racing with me across the metals to catch a train, and----
Then C. is in his grave again, and I am in a trap outside my old home;
a stranger stands in the road, cuts his throat; I look on, smile, and
shudder, for he races after the trap with his knife; but I outstare his
Malayan eyes, and he gives up the chase. By way of respite, I now walked
at leisure into a bookshop, and my hand fell upon rarities indeed. _The
Church_, by Leigh Hunt--I had never seen that before! "We don't have
much time for dinner," said the bookseller, and I took the hint and
went out.
And there were other familiar scenes in this phase of nightly alienation.
On occasion, though I awoke several times from a haunting, I fell asleep
again to return to it. Half-nonsense as these dreams were, there was a
persistent force about them. Here was the battalion, expecting to be
attacked. Its nerves, and mine, were restive. The attack broke out
farther up the line, and we got off with a reaction almost as unwelcome
as a battle. Or I was in a town behind the line, into which a number of
very small round gas-shells were falling; then, in the cattle-truck for
the front; presently, in the wild scenery of great hills and deep curving
ravines which I seemed to know so well. (The entrenched ridges in the
unnatural light of the flares looked monstrous once.) I was company
commander; we were to be relieved; and, God, what had I done? Begun to
bring my men out before the other crowd had come up! The mound would
be lost, I should be "for it." The company must be halted in the open;
and so we waited for the relief. It never came.
Still the dreams came: the war continued. S. S. was with me, walking up
a big cobbled road, muddy as ever, towards the front. On every side lay
exhausted men, not caring whether they were in the mud or not. I was
not quite sure, but was not this Poperinghe Station? At that station
was--I hope is--an hotel, bearing the legend, "Bifsteck a Toute Heure";
was this gaudy-looking place, perhaps, the same? At all events, S. S.
said, "Let's go and have a port." We did, and the drink appears to have
gone to my head, for I now found myself alone, walking across a large
common or pasture. Here Mary and another woman went by, but I could not
at the moment recognize them. There, beyond the common with its dry
tussocks, stood a town, flanked by mountains, which I knew to be--Barry.
A cathedral or abbey of white stone rose in gigantic strength into the
sunlight. This place, I soliloquized, so near the line, and yet not
shelled! But I was not to escape. I proceeded. The screen alongside was
blown down. Better slink along these hedges at the double! It was the
support line. Some large splinter-proof dugouts came into sight, and
some officers, who told me about an attack. We were going over. I
recognized my destined end.
However, I woke up alive, having again suffered more from fear and the
atmosphere of it--in projection--in a few seconds, than I was ever
conscious of suffering in a day of the actual war. With weary and aching
head, whether these fantasies were to blame or not, I looked out to
ask the wireless expert if there had been a storm in the night. He
grinned, and going farther I saw outside a sea of pale glow not a great
deal more disturbed than a looking-glass.
The ashen whiteness soon gave place to a deep blue, and our entry into
the tropics became plainer and plainer, the sea fluttering with the
sun's blaze. This was unfamiliar also, to be roasting on the water in
January. The pith-helmet season began. The third mate could not claim
a pith helmet, but he displayed what none of the others could, as he sat
washing on the step of the alleyway--a marvellous red and blue serpent
tattooed on his arm, by the very Chinaman, he said, who had tattooed King
George. It was, I still think, a superfine serpent.
Washing, or "dobing," was not Mead's sole recreation. Literature, and
even poetry, with limitations, had its power over him. Suspecting me of
critical curiosity about his favourite poets, he directly approached the
matter. Rudyard Kipling and "A Sentimental Bloke" were satisfactory, but
he couldn't bear the others who gave their views on love. Lawrence Hope
had done one or two good things--but the rest, as Keats, Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, and so forth, might as well be cut out. His approval of Kipling
was confirmed by Meacock's saying in the saloon, where books and authors
were a favourite pabulum, "H'm--the third mate seems to be getting very
interested in Kipling. He brought me a paper with all he could remember
of _IF_ written out on it, and asked me if I could supply any of the rest."
This literary halo aroused Bicker, who was already known to me as the
ship's poet, and had unfortunately left his MSS. at home. He now urged
his claims. "The gardener called me Poet when I was about seven or eight,
and I often get called that now." The chief, chuckling, brought off his
little joke. "I suppose that's what drove you to sea."
In connection, no doubt, with poetry, that strange device, the mate looked
back to a ship in which he once served, and which was chartered to carry
the largest whale ever caught in Japanese waters to New York for the
New York Museum. By whale, he said he meant the skeleton, of course;
but it had been sketchily cleaned, "and when we got her to New York,"
he said with a comical frown, "nobody could get near the hatches": and,
finding the sequence easy, he added that there was often some peculiar
cargo on that New York-Hong Kong run--take for instance those rows of
dead Chinamen in the 'tween-deck homeward bound.
The face of the sky often held me delighted. There is nothing, I think, of
dullness about this world's weather; and its hues and tones may still be
a sufficient testing theme for the greatest artists with pen or pencil.
To express the sunset uprising of clouds, many of them in semblance of
towering ships under full sail, many more like creatures mistily seen in
endless pastures, was an attempt in which my own vocabulary scarcely
lasted a moment. One evening, the nonpareil of its race, especially
"burned the mind."
At first the blue temple was hung with plumes of cloud, golden feathers.
When these at last were grey, a rosy flush swiftly came along them, like a
thought, and passed. It seemed as though the night had come, when the
loitering tinges of the rose in a few seconds grew unutterably red, and
the spectacle was that of an aerial lattice or trellis among the clouds,
overgrown with the heavenly original of all roses. "In Xanadu----" From
brightness the amassed cloud-bloom still increased to brightness: then
suddenly the flames turned to ember. Even now again a ghost of themselves
glowed, until all was gone, and Sirius entered upon his tenancy of
another glory, and Orion and Canopus, casting a hoar-frost glimmer ahead
of the riding ship.
Hosea agreed this was a remarkable sunset; then took me off to the
friendly tot and talk in his room. He loved to discuss all sorts of theory
in art and religion, of which he might have been, with a slight change
of circumstance in his boyhood, a student and enthusiast: meanwhile, the
sailor in him would be rummaging through the makings of a curiosity shop
which crowded his official desk, besides the manifests and ship's
articles--his watches, knives, coins and notes of twenty countries,
photographs of friends all over the world.