Mary, what news?--
The lands, as I suppose,
Are drenched with sleet or drifted up with snows,
The east wind strips the slates and starves the blood,
Or thaws and rains make life a sea of mud.
You close each door, draw armchairs nigh the fire,
But draughts sneak in and make you draw 'em nigher--
No matter: still they come: play parlour gales
And whisk about their hyperboreal tails;
Bed's the one hope, and scarcely tried before
Next morning's postman thunders at the door.
Meanwhile--if I may gently hint--I wear
But scanty clothes, though all the sun will bear;
A red-hot sun smiles on a hot blue sea
And leaves my bunk to laziness and me:
I read, until a lethargy ensues,
Tales of detectives frowning over clues
And last month's papers; then the strain's too strong,
Man wants but little, nor that little long,
The deck-chair in the shadow now appeals,
Until the next hash-hammer rings to meals.
But not alone in climate may I claim
Advantage; while you feel the slings of fame,
Beset at all hours by the shapes of those
Who volunteer your wants to diagnose,
Who come with merchandise and go with cheques;
No licensed interrupter haunts these decks,
No vans of wares along these highways clatter.
None urges to insure, buy broom or platter.
There is no sheaf of letters every day,
Regretting, and so forth: no minstrel's lay:
Proofs, none: reminders, none--while daily you,
Poor creature, tear your hair and struggle through,
And darken paper till you light the lamps,
And the last shilling disappears in stamps.
Nor weightier cares you lack, it is decreed;
The clock won't go, the chickens will not feed,
The pump, always a huffy ancient, swears,
"Water? if you wants water, try elsewheres":
The infant wonder, she who must inquire,
Investigates herself into the fire,
The playful snowball whizzes through the pane,
In brief, you try to kick the cat: in vain.
Here no such troubles blot the almanac
For me; no day is marked with red or black:
Events--eventicles--are few, as these,
The sighted school of bobbing porpoises,
The flying-fish when first I saw them leap
And flash like swallows over the blue deep;
The rose-red sunset, or the Sunday duff,
Or--but enumeration cries "Enough."
There is no Mary in the Atlantic, true,
Nor cellared bookshop to be foraged through.
But as I said, at least I've found the sun
And idle times--even this will soon be done;
A corner where no rags-and-bones apply,
Nor postman comes, nor poultry droop and die.
X
The South-East Trade was blowing fresh next day, if a damp clammy rush of
hot air deserves the term. The threatened heavy rains of the Doldrums had
not come; the heavy heat subdued talk at table. Cloud and sultry steamy
haze had hung about us during the morning; at two or thereabouts the
first land seen by the _Bonadventure_ since her first day's stubborn
entry into the English Channel came into view. My view was at first none
at all; but encouraged by Bicker and with his glasses I could make out
the island of Fernando Noronha, twenty miles away to the south-east. A
tall peak and the high ground about it for a space gave the illusion
of some great cathedral, a Mont St. Michel seen by Cotman faintly
forthshadowed; then, the willing fancy rebuked, I discerned its low
coasts of rock, inhospitable and mist-haunted.
This singular crag breaking out of the mid-ocean, I knew, was a convict
settlement. "Life sentences" were safely mewed up here. At length we
were abeam of this melancholy place, while the sun seemed to make a show
of its white prison camp, at a distance of twelve or thirteen miles.
It would have been hard not to imagine the despair of men condemned to
such a prison. The peak's stern finger might have struck with awe the
first navigators to approach it. To see the immutable pillar in every
sunset and at every sunrise, surveying all the drudgery, the emblem of
perpetual soullessness, must be an unnerving punishment. The constant
processions of ships, to whom Fernando Noronha is a welcome mark, with
their smoke vanishing swiftly to north or south, could scarcely tantalize
more?
The rough overhanging pinnacle faded again, and evening fell. Leaning
with the third mate over the bridge canvas, while the moon, now waxing,
riding through the frontiers of a black cloud, cast a dim avenue over
the sea, and from other dishevelled clouds a few quiet drops came down,
was a most peaceful luxury. About the bows the water was lit up by sudden
flashes gone too soon. These travelling lights--akin to the gem of the
glow-worm seen close--were, according to Mead, the Portugee men-of-war
which I had seen by day. No name could be less descriptive. These small
creatures, at night living lamps of green, by day with their glassy red
and blue like the floating petals of some sea-rose, were worthy of some
gentler imagist. When, Mead said, you take them from the water, they
are nothing but a little slime; evanescent as the rainbow on the spray.
Splendour and fiery heat marked the day still. I had discarded jacket and
socks, enjoying the soothing gush of air about the ankles; otherwise
even reading was made unprofitable by the drug-like heat. The same sky
and seascape, the same condemnations of "a dirty ship" recurred day by
day. "The worst ship I ever sailed on, mister. You turn in washed and
you wake up black." The bath was still an enjoyable interlude, despite
mechanical drawbacks. The bath proper was out of order, owing tosome
deficiency of the water-pipes. At one end, in substitution, you lodged
your bucket in a board with a hole in it. At the other end a crossbar
offered the bather a seat. Much splashing transferred the water from
the bucket to your coal-dust surface; while, there being little air in
the bathroom, you breathed sparingly. Yet how well off was the acrobat
with his sponge, compared with the fireman who just then was taking
bucket after bucket of ashes from the stokehold hoist and tipping them
overboard--a job that was never done until the engines rested in port;
that punctuated our progress, as did the morning hosepipe on the cabins
and the bridge deck.
Not much was said of the country to which we were going. Englishmen
were definitely unpopular there, said some one; English sailors, on the
slightest pretext, taken off by the police to the "calaboosh." "You
only want to look like an Englishman." "Well, what about trying to look
like a German?" The chief engineer rarely missed a chance to rub in his
politics, and he jumped at this one--"Doesn't the same thing apply at
home?"--with eager irony.
Ships were discussed and compared at almost every meal. Some, luxurious.
"But that yacht she was pretty, there's no getting away from it."
"That was _my_ yacht."
"They must employ quite a lot of shore labour to keep these yachts from
looking like ships."
"Well, they couldn't very well make them look like standard ships, if they
wanted to."
"Oh, I don' know--get the second mate and the chief to co-operate--saw off
the funnel halfway, and throw a few ashes about the decks."
Some, ideal.
"She looked just like the model of a ship--and she was spotless."
Some, not what they ought to be.
"I looked and saw her name, _The Duke of York_. I thought to myself, I'll
write to him and tell him about the state of his namesake. She looked like
a wreck."
Some, again, like the _Bonadventure_, standard ships, the hasty
replacements of submarine wastage. The criticism here, of course, had
the severity of domestic familiarity.
"They have these ships made in one piece at the shipyard. When they want
one, they just cut off a length, and join the ends."
"Well, I say the man who designed this ship ought to have designed another
and pegged out."
"Mister, she's a dirty ship."
I detected--it was not difficult--a vague prejudice against wireless.
The wireless operator was foolish enough to have at his fingers' ends
all the tabular details of shipping companies and their vessels, and to
display this dry knowledge in the middle of his seniors' recollections.
His seafaring experience, it may be mentioned, was altogether recent,
and among the elders he would have done better _not_ to know. It was of
course impersonally aired, this prejudice against wireless. First, there
was the view that as ships had hitherto, beginning with the Ark, gone to
sea without the invention, they could continue to do so. Then, the fact
that wireless might save life admitted, the system current was decried.
It seemed that the merchant ships of over 1,600 tons carried wireless
operators and sets, but that one operator to a ship was the allowance; now
one operator watched eight hours out of the twenty-four, and all were
off duty at the same time. So it was believed. "There's nothing in the
Bible," the critic would urge, "to say a ship mustn't be wrecked when all
the operators are off duty."
I had expected music--chanteys, or at least accordions--aboard a
merchantman; but very little was that expectation justified. There had
been a gramophone (and step-dancing), but it was out of action after one
evening's protracted use. It was not often, yet, that I had heard even a
whistled scrap; occasionally the coloured firemen would sing in falsetto.
An epidemic of hair-cutting broke out. Every time I saw the process
going on, the artist was a fresh one; and I was inclined to think that
we are a nation of hair-cutters. Among the practitioners, the cook,
with his usual severe expression, plied a neat pair of scissors. It
was a scene which reminded me of old trench life. I thought of a close
support trench opposite Auchy, about the month of June, 1916, where a
sickly programme of sniping by field guns, rifle grenades, "pineapples,"
and incredible escapes from them did not prevent my being shorn by the
steadiest of amateurs. With what outward intrepidity I sat there!
At the captain's request, the cook advanced to cut his hair. That done, he
cut mine. Venturing to talk, I was soon exchanging sallies of the British
Expeditionary Force, for he had been thereof, a tunneller. Of his being
in a countermined shaft at the wrong moment at Vimy, and his luck in
being dragged out by the sergeant-major, he gave some details; but the
first evident attack of mirth to which I had ever seen him give way
came as he mused over rations supplied by the French for a fortnight at
St. Quentin under some temporary arrangement. "Wine, beans, and b----
horseflesh," he said, _staccato_, and with a dry laugh like the rattling
of beans. "First we'd all get bound up and then we'd all get diarrhoea.
Oh, it was the hell of a go." "There," he said, leaving a little tuft over
my forehead, "you'll still be able to have a couple of quiffs there."
He was not only cook and hairdresser off duty, I found: he was given to
sketching portraits. I went once or twice to talk with him in the galley,
where the heat was enough to make the famous Lambert himself turn thin.
And his work, he pointed out, was continuous, with his assistant's
services; he had to put up double meals to suit the watches. "But why
do I stick it?" he said, taking a batch of bread from the oven and
standing it on end against the others. "A man can stick shore jobs all
right when there's five mouths depending on him. There's not a lot of
shore jobs now."
His drawings were done in the little corner where he and his mate had
their bunks. They were pictures of ladies and seamen of his acquaintance;
crude, with lips of a bitter redness, and cheeks faintly pink, staring
and disproportioned, yet done with such pains, such strivings after
"likeness," that when he requested me to help him to a post as artist
to _The Times_, I much wished that I could! I had no sooner made the
acquaintance of the cook's portraits than a poem was bashfully brought
to me by its author, Bicker. I must say that, although his lines had
occasionally been eked out with last resorts, there was a heartiness
about them which I liked; and, going down presently to his cabin, I got
him to show me more. He had already written several rhyming epistles
during the trip, which with the retiring instinct of poets he had left
to blush unseen. So we had aboard among a crew of forty or so a painter of
portraits and a writer of verse.
We had our philosopher too, Phillips, the chief engineer, veteran of
Khartoum, master of machinery, physician less active but more reliable
than the steward; but above all, the Diogenes--with a slush-lamp. His
philosophy might be no ill store about this time, when in the heat the
pitch melted from the seams of his cabin roof and mottled his bed, as he
put it: a circumstance not yet mentioned in sonnets wooing tardy sleep,
and which of course called upon that nimble sixpence of _Bonadventure_
conversation, "She _is_ a dirty ship."