Ten thousand miles from land are we,
Hark how the wild winds pipe!
What grand reflection swells in me?
This morning we'll have tripe.
For ever and evermore
These billows rage and swell;
O may I, through their angry roar,
Not miss the breakfast bell.
Here octopi, here great white whales,
Here krakens haunt the Main;
Mad mermaids sing--my courage fails--
Here comes Harriet Lane.[1]
There, far far down, what jewels lie,
What corals, red enough
To make this sauce[2] seem pale, which I
Am wolfing with my duff!
To think that one lone ship should thus
Ride o'er the greedy seas!
Alas! what will become of us
Now we've run out of cheese?[3]
The northern spring came into the air. Scraps of the casual verse of one
English poet who never tired of the year afield started up in memory
now, where the pondered solemn music of others had no reverberation; and
so for the rest of my voyage. The sea for a time grew intensely calm, the
swell seeming to swim along under a mantle of pearl or quicksilver. The
undulating surface stretched to the horizon, unbroken anywhere by restless
foam; and over this calm lay the golden track to the setting sun. When
presently a breeze ruffled this strange sleep, it was as though shoals
of tiny fishes had everywhere risen to the surface; and in one or two
places, those bubbling, flickering shoals were actual and not imaginary.
As if schooled by misfortune, Sparks now posted up in the port alleyway a
statement of football results and tables; so that many bosoms aboard
needed no longer to feel a heaving anxiety. A turtle lazily floated by,
watched by many who could have welcomed him on deck; a whale passed,
shouldering and spouting the brine; and shortly, as the midnight moon
had portended, the dark green sea began to run in hilly ridges, sometimes
sluicing the decks, and tilting the _Bonadventure_ to one side or the
other. Grey rain-squalls flew over us now and then; but, considering our
near approach to the redoubtable Bay, we were in excellent weather. The
mate, however, was not one to take chances; and certain barrels, an anvil
and a few other heavy movables were shifted from the windward side of the
engines.
The steward and his adjutant had now little time certain in which to
reform my room, so they fell upon it with paint brushes and "flat white"
in vigorous style; it had been my hope to be allowed this labour, but I
remembered my "Tom Sawyer," where painting as a recreation was so truly
valued. Mouldytop was seldom seen in these days without his pot and
brush; he went at it from dawn to midnight and then did overtime. My
room was turned into a whited sepulchre, which is better than a sooted
one, but as it was a sort of receptacle for coal-dust, which was coal
grease withal, even when port, ventilator and door were all closed, it was
to be feared, _tamen usque recurret_, it would be black again in a week.
We came into a region of ships, tramps like ourselves for the most part,
and the less handsome oil-tankers also. Finisterre lighthouse shone
kindly upon us. With a fair wind, the concourse of shipping dwindling
away somewhat as we went on, we now entered the Bay. Our angles began
to be anything but right, but it was much gentler weather than I had any
reason to need. Fair as it was for us, save for the cinders that fell
in showers amidships, the vessels running in the teeth of the weather
were pitching with vigour. Grey and shrouded the sea met us in hills and
valleys, with white ridges and flecked with foaming veins; as we went
further into the famous corner, the _Bonadventure_ could not but roll and
lurch as though she liked it, and the waves were mountainous; yet out
there we passed a fishing boat making beautiful weather of it.
The second mate, Bicker, could scarcely get any sleep; but not on any
score of weather or discomfort. All his watch below, or most of it, one
might see him standing at his sea chest with pen scratching away at the
forthcoming _Optimist_. So sweet is journalism when wooed as a casual
mistress. Shall I go on? No.
My trouble was not what to write but what to read. Even Young's _Night
Thoughts_, buried in annotations reverent and irreverent, began to grow
familiar beyond all reason. _Pears' Cyclopaedia_, _Brown's Nautical
Almanac_, _The South Indian Ocean Pilot_, _Phrenology for All_, and
other borrowed books, were all at much the same stage. This ship was
not the one recently reported in the newspapers in which the chief read
poetry like a passion, the cook chewed Froude with his morning crust, and
the cabin-boy needed the help of Hegel. I forget if those were the
actual claims, but in any case that was another ship. About now, an
accident happened to my Young. It seemed as if a Poltergeist had visited
the spare cabin port during the night, for awaking I found my settee,
and the _Night Thoughts_ thereon, waterlogged. Perhaps the heavy rain
had been answerable for this, but I could not see how--my port was
closed. Poltergeist had spared my novel, lying next to Young: evidently he
thought that already watery enough. Young, immortal, made a surprising
recovery.
Now, we were nearing the one country. It needed no drab island of Ushant
with its lighthouse to tell me this; for hardly had I put down in my
diary "Much milder," when it became necessary to write "Much colder."
The tumults of the Bay were over and gone, and we were under a dun sky
dropping rain which obviously belonged to the English Channel.
We swung round Ushant and became more aware of the ups and downs of
navigation; these were less noticeable as we ran on. The prospect, or say
circumspect of the day was narrowed in by dismal rainstorm, and once
more it was a bleak amusement trying to make out the forms of ships
through the foggy veils. The wind moaning, the rain splashing, measured
out long hours, till all saddened into night with little to notice, save
the gulls and divers whom such weather suited well. At any rate we were
not unfortunate in our direction. The _Hammonia_ going the other way with
passengers showed us that by contrast.
The night elapsed, we came abeam of the Isle of Wight, which showed
but indistinctly, though the day was cold and steady. Calm indeed lay the
green Channel up which the _Bonadventure_ with speed sufficient to
please Phillips was making her way. Ships, or their smoky evidences,
made the time pass quickly. It was Good Friday, a great day for my
childhood in Kent, land of plum-pudding-dogs and monkey-tail trees, a
day when I heard, as indeed my elder companions had long foretold, the
church bells rung muffled; although I was disappointed in the purple
cassocks which, tradition fabled, would be worn by the choir on that
day. Lent (and Advent too for that matter) was solemn then and real,
outside of churches; and with Good Friday it appeared undeniable that
there had been done some thing at which Nature must go in mourning. The
three hours' service, like the watch that rang out the dying year and
rang in the new, was in every one's thought that we met; such ceremony
was not for nothing. The melancholy hymns of the season were more than
sung verses.
To-day, at least, we had hot-cross buns to our breakfast. So is the
Lord remembered in these years of discretion. The sailors had the day
to themselves.
Our course lay more or less east, and brought us a succession of glimpses
of shining cliffs and misty downs. Off Dover we saw both coasts at
once. In 1919 I hoped I had seen the last of that piece of France.
Running out of this strait into the North Sea under a shrewish though a
moderate wind, we passed a number of fishermen, and what struck my
mind with the strangeness almost of the Flying Dutchman, a three-masted
barque under full sail, at a distance. It was sunset at the time. She
caught the light and bowed upon her journey, a sweet sight, too quickly
lost in the dark. Soon we picked up the flash of a lightship off the Dutch
shore, and soon after that the cold to which my wanderings had not made
me careless sent me inside.
Chilly brightness and blue sky saw us making rapidly over the North
Sea, visited by thrushes and linnets, while the water seemed crowded
with those clever birds, though so gawky upon the wing, the divers.
We crossed the wake of an oil-tank, burning the water almost like the
witch's oils in "The Ancient Mariner," and scenting the air unlike those
abstractions; came to a lightship, where our course was altered; and met
the pilot cutter in a calm sea and air vivid with sun and cold about four.
The rope ladder went down, the row-boat came alongside, and the pilot
was taken up to the bridge. I could not repress odd emotions at thus
seeing again "Brother Boche"--he looked a replica of ancient types of
my acquaintance--after such a long separation.
The estuary of the Ems received us, a flat sheet of water, with low
coastlands only noticed by reason of towers here and there. The tides
obliged us to anchor some miles outside Emden at six, and to wait until
midnight. The sky darkened and loured into rain. At twelve in a black
and gusty night, to the accompaniment of much hooting and shouting, the
_Bonadventure_ moved up the river, and in the greyness and chill of
daybreak berthed in a quiet basin at Emden.
Through this last movement I had tried to snatch some sleep, but was
harassed by the socialism of Bicker and Mead, who considered it but fair
that as they were being deprived of their sleep, I should be deprived
of mine. They, therefore, visited me at intervals, switched on my fan
which was now quite unnecessary, prodded me with toasting-forks, and
so saluted the happy morn, like those larks which were now singing and
soaring to justify any praise of them that ever was written.
-----
[Footnote 1: "Harriet Lane." The name of that unfortunate lady is often
applied to the curious tinned meat provided aboard.]
[Footnote 2: "This sauce." A pink luxury poured over Sunday's duff.]
[Footnote 3: "Cheese." In these closing lines the poet's hope was to
record the actual expression of the saloon in general on receipt of the
steward's pronouncement: "That there was no more cheese."]