In the original preface to the First Edition, it will be seen that by
a perfectly justifiable stroke of artistic manipulation, the writer of
the letters, the Ocean Tramp himself, is drowned at sea. Neither
author nor publisher had offered any guarantee that the book was a
record of cold facts, and it was not deemed necessary at that time to
disillusion any of the public who saw fit to send in condolences upon
the tragic end of a promising career. Nevertheless, the book was
faithful enough in a larger sense, for the young man who wrote it had
undoubtedly died and buried himself in its pages. His place, it
appeared presently, was taken by a cynical person who voyaged all over
the seven seas in various steamers, accumulating immense stocks of
local colour, passing through the divers experiences which befall
sailor-men, reading a good many books, and gradually assuming the
_role_ of an amused spectator. Of this person, however, there is no
need to speak just now, and we must go back to the time when the
author, in that condition known to the cloth as "out of a ship,"
arrived in London, the following pages tied up in a piece of bunting,
in his dunnage, and took a small suite of chambers over the ancient
gate of Cliffords Inn. Now it would be easy enough, and the temptation
is great, to convey the impression that the writer had arrived in the
Metropolis to make his name and win fame and fortune with his
manuscript. So runs the tale in many a novel issued during the last
twenty-five years. It is time, therefore, to invent something new. The
penniless law-student who writes a best seller and wins the love of a
celebrated actress must make way for a sea-going engineer with a
year's wages and a volume of essays in his pocket, and who had not
succeeded in winning the love of anybody. Indeed the singular
moderation of the demands of this young man will be appreciated by
any one who has been afflicted with ambition, for he has never at
any time desired either to write a play, edit a magazine, or marry a
prima-donna. At the particular juncture when he took over the little
suite of furnished chambers from a young newspaper man who had
received a sudden invitation to visit a rich uncle, his principal
preoccupation was to pass his examination for his certificate
of competency as a first-class engineer. To this end he began a
mysterious existence possible only to the skilled Londoner. For the
benefit of those who are not skilled Londoners, the following
description may evoke interest.
In the morning on waking, he saw, through the small bowed window which
looked out into the Inn, the sunlight shining upon the gilded gothic
roof of the Rolls Building and possibly touching the tops of the trees
of the grimy enclosure. Stepping through into the front room he could
lean out of a mullioned affair below which he could read the date
carved in the stone--1472--and looking up a long narrow court he could
watch the morning traffic of the Strand passing the farther end like
the film of a cinematograph. Down below, a gentleman who sold studs,
shoe-laces, and dying pigs on the curb, and who kept his stock in a
cupboard under the arch, was preparing to start out for the day. A
dying pig, it may be mentioned, was a toy much in demand among
stock-broking clerks and other frivolous young gentlemen in the City,
and consisted of a bladder shaped like a pig whose snout contained a
whistle which gave out on deflation an almost human note of anguish.
Should the hour be before eight, which was probable since the author
had contracted the habit, at sea, of rising at four, he would be
further exhilarated by seeing his landlord, Mr. Honeyball, in a
tightly buttoned frock-coat and wide-awake hat, march with an erect
and military air to the end of the passage, dart a piercing glance in
either direction, and remain, hands behind back and shoulders squared,
taking the air. Which meant that Mrs. Honeyball was engaged in the
dark and dungeon-like kitchen below the worn flags of the archway,
preparing the coffee and bacon for Mr. Honeyball's breakfast.
Having washed and shaved--and here it may be set down, for the benefit
of Americans and others not skilled in metropolitan existence, that
when a building bears over its archway the date 1472 the bathing
arrangements within will not be of the most modern design--the author
then took his pipe, tobacco, and cane and prepared to descend the
winding stone stairway which ended in a door of heavy wood. This
contrivance opened directly upon the small triangular chamber where
Mrs. Honeyball each day laid the meals for herself and husband,
transacted her rent-collecting, and received occasional visitors
during late afternoon, self-effacing ladies of mature age who seemed
to shrink back into the panelling behind them and who assumed the
anxious immobility of figures in high relief, if the phrase may be
allowed to pass. At this early hour, however, no one is in sight save
Mrs. Honeyball herself, a slight elderly person with that look of
pink beatification on her face which accompanies some forms of
Christianity, emerging from another door which leads down a curved
stairway to subterranean regions. Mrs. Honeyball, it may be stated in
parenthesis, is of the great family of hero-worshippers, women who
are inspired with an indomitable and quite illogical faith in the
wisdom and strength of their gentlemen friends. The mere fact of the
author being a nautical character is sufficient for Mrs. Honeyball.
Beyond going as far as Margate on the _Clacton Belle_, a fat,
squab-shaped side-wheel affair very popular with London folk in that
era, Mrs. Honeyball's acquaintance with the sea is purely theoretical.
To her all sea-faring men are courageous, simple-hearted stalwarts
having their business in great waters, and she has intimated that she
always remembers them in her prayers. The modest breakfast, for two,
is spread on one side of the round table which is so much too large
for the room. She would be only too pleased if she could board me, but
it is not allowed. The Inn, I have been given to understand, has been
bought outright by some person of great wealth, whose design is to
pull it down and erect a block of apartments. Mrs. Honeyball is
somewhat afraid of this person. She gets in a great flutter, about the
twentieth of the month, over her accounts. Just now, however, she is
placidly benevolent and hopes that author has slept well. He has and
says so, and opening the outer door, an immense portal of heavy wood
studded with big black nails, he steps down into the archway, where
Mr. Honeyball is encountered. Mr. Honeyball has been in the army, has
retired on a sergeant-major's pension after twenty-three years service
and he salutes the author in correct military fashion.
These amenities concluded and watches compared with the great clock of
the Law Courts visible from the end of the passage, the author turned
westward and set off briskly toward Charing Cross, buying a paper on
the way, and noting from time to time the attractively attired young
ladies who were hurrying to their various employments. At the risk of
evoking a certain conventional incredulity in the readers' bosom, the
author is constrained to point out that he harboured only the purest
and most abstract sentiments towards these young women. There is a
period in the life of the literary artist, unhappily not permanent,
when the surface of his mind may be described as absorbent of
emotional influences, a period which results in the accumulation of
vast quantities of data concerning women without to any degree
destroying the authentic simplicity of his heart. And when the point
of saturation is reached, to use an engineer's phrase, the artist,
still preserving his own innocence, begins to produce. And this, one
may remark in passing, is the happiest time of his life! He combines
the felicity of youth, the wisdom of age, and the unencumbered
vitality of manhood. He knows, even while in love, as he frequently is
at such periods, that there are loftier peaks beyond, mountain-ranges
of emotion up which some day he is destined to travel, and he
disregards the pathetic seductions of those who would bid him settle
in their quiet valleys.
Arriving in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, the author takes an
affectionate glimpse into Trafalgar Square, and turns down a steep,
narrow street, leading towards the River, where is situated a small
eating house. At that time, it should be observed, almost the only way
for a stranger to obtain a breakfast in London was to go to a
hotel and engage a room. Even at railroad terminals, where the
refreshment-rooms were just beginning to be swept and garnished, and
the waitresses were yawning behind the big urns, they did not regard
the famished traveller with any enthusiasm. It was felt that a
stranger wanting food at that hour had been up to no good. The author,
being a skilled Londoner, was put to no such inconvenience. It was his
habit, at intervals, to write special articles for the London papers,
articles which had to be delivered to the night commissionaire on duty
in the office of the newspaper. The particular functionary employed by
the _News_ was a social being and fond of port, and over a dock-glass
at Finches, the celebrated bar in Fleet Street, had recommended a
certain chop-house where night-birds ate before retiring to their
nests in distant suburbs. To this hostelry the author therefore
repairs, down the narrow declivity, in at the door whose brass handles
are being vigorously polished by a youth in a green baize apron, and
upstairs to a long low chamber furnished with small tables. Here one
discovers some half-dozen strays from the millions of Londoners who
breakfast in orthodox fashion--in the secrecy and sullen silence of
their own homes. And the salient feature of the people in this
upstairs room is the inexorable isolation of their souls. No one
speaks. One or two look up from their food as the author makes his way
to the window from which he commands a glimpse of blue sky, the
elevation of an enormous brick wall, and possibly a locomotive having
its firebox cleaned on a siding and panting as though afflicted with
lung trouble. He takes his seat not far from a young woman who is
breakfasting on a bun and a glass of milk. She is reading a book, a
fat novel in fine print, the covers soiled with food and the corners
grimy with years of friction. She is there every morning eating a bun
and drinking a glass of milk. She has a clear, delicate face, blonde
hair, and large black eyes. Her hands are fine, too, though they might
be better kept. One suspects she does her own washing after she gets
home at night.
The reader may possibly wonder why the author should lower himself in
the esteem of men by dilating upon the appearance of a stray young
woman whom fate had washed up on the shores of time near him and whom
the next wave would inevitably bear away again. But the reader must
exercise a little patience. Several women appear in this preface, and
the author imagines they may reveal to the reader something of the
mentality which wrote this book. A mentality somewhat alien to the
English, since it was profoundly interested in women without incurring
any suspicion of French naughtiness, or endeavouring in any way to
make itself pleasing to them. A mentality hampered by an almost
hysterical shyness which, however, was capable of swift and complete
evaporation in certain circumstances.
So far, let it be premised, the shyness was still in evidence, and the
author became as silent and austere as the other members of the
company. There was a youth, in trousers obviously pressed under his
mattress, and a coat too short for him, whose air of shabby smartness
brought tears to the eyes of the author, who had passed through very
much the same purgatory years before. Indeed it was very much like a
coffee room in purgatory, if the reader can imagine such a thing, for
every one of the patrons had this distinguishing trait--they were
shackled and tortured and seared by the lack of a little money. The
mangy old waif who asked for a cup of tea and furtively fished out of
a little black oil-cloth bag a couple of thick sandwiches; the
middle-aged person with a fine moustache, frock-coat, and silk-hat,
who ordered coffee and bacon and eggs, and forgot to eat while his
tired eyes fixed themselves with insane intensity upon a mineral-water
advertisement on the opposite wall; the foreign lady (whom the author
hastens to record as a virtuous matron) whose bizarre hat and brightly
painted cheeks were stowed away in an obscure and lonely corner where
she pored over a Greek newspaper; the middle-aged gentleman whose
marbled note-book was filled with incredibly fine writing and columns
of figures which ought to have meant something substantial, but which
were probably only lists of bad debts utterly uncollectable--all these
poor people would have been carried up to heaven had they suddenly
discovered under their plates a twenty-pound note. And the desire to
do this thing, to play the rich uncle for once, was at times so keen
that the author felt himself in purgatory, too, in a way, and lost his
appetite thinking about it.
The reader may opine that such a meal would be but a poor preliminary
for a morning of study, but the fact remains that the contemplation
of misery stimulates one's mental perceptions. Once more out in the
Strand, having watched the young woman descend the narrow street
and fling a swift glance over her shoulder as she turned into
Northumberland Avenue, the author mounted a Barking 'bus and settled
himself in the front seat, a gay little Union Jack fluttering just
above his head, and gave himself up unreservedly to reflections evoked
by a return, after some years at sea, to his native air. Every foot of
the way eastward brought up memories long dormant beneath the swarms
of alien impressions received since going to sea, impressions that
ranged from the songs of an octaroon in a blind-tiger back of
Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, to the mellow _Boom-cling-clang_ of
temple-bells heard in the flawless dawn from a verandah above the
sampan-cluttered canals of Osaka. Between his nostrils and the ancient
odours of creosote blocks and of river mud drying at low tide came the
heavy scent of Arab quarters, the reek of Argentine slaughter-houses
and the subtle pervasions of Singapore. Since he had read with
careless neglect the familiar names over familiar shops where he
and his father had dealt in the common things of life, his eyes
had ached with the glittering hieroglyphics of Chinatown and the
incomprehensible futilities of Armenian and Cyrillic announcements.
So it came about that he regarded the cheerful, homely, and sun-lit
Strand with extraordinary delight, a delight enhanced by the
incorrigible conviction that in a few weeks he would quit it once
more for distant shores. Yet the charm, evanescent as it was, laid an
authentic hand upon his pulse and made it beat more quickly. Here he
had bought his first dress-suit. The tailor's shop was gone and a
restaurant with bulging glass windows thrust out a portly stomach into
the street. Here again he had lunched in days gone by on Saturdays,
and loitered far into the afternoon to flirt with the waitress. Here,
where Wellington Street plunged across and flung itself upon Waterloo
Bridge, one beheld staggering changes. The mountainous motor bus put
on speed and scampered past the churches left like rocky islets in the
midst of a swift river of traffic. Once past Temple Bar and in the
narrow defile of Fleet Street the author's thoughts darted up Fetter
Lane and hovered around a grimy building where he had pursued his
studies with the relentless fanaticism of youthful ambition. There,
under the lamp-post at the corner, one keen evening in early spring,
he had what was for him a tremendous emotional experience. In the
German class (for he was all for _Wilhelm Meister_, _Faust_, _The
Robbers_, and _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ in those days) was a German girl
learning English, a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart.
Often when it came to his turn to read from the set piece of
literature, he felt this girl's eyes upon him and he would raise his
own to find her regarding him with a steady, appraising glance. And
yet she seemed to vanish effectively enough in the general confusion
of departure. Once she picked up his pencil and asked mutely for the
use of it, and he assented with what he knew was a fiery blush. She
replaced it with a firm nod of the head and her steady glance. For a
few days the thought of her bothered his dreams and then, in the
fanatical pursuit of knowledge, the mood evaporated. Perhaps she was
aware of this and laid her plans accordingly, for on the last evening
of the session, as he came down the steps of the college and turned
toward Fetter Lane, he saw her standing under the lamp-post at the
corner. A frightful predicament! It was one thing to read about
Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his free emotional development, about
Arthur Schopenhauer living in Venice with his mistress and writing
philosophical works, or to approve the newly translated vapourings of
Frederick Nietzsche. It was quite another to walk steadily onward and
encounter a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart who stood
waiting with unmistakable invitation in her pose. When he arrived at
the corner he was in a condition bordering on blind panic and he
heard, as through a thick wall, a hoarse, musical voice murmur
unintelligible words. He heard himself murmur something which brought
a look of angry astonishment into her eyes. He heard the words "Don't
you like me?" far off, drowned by a buzzing of the blood in his
ear-drums. And then a vicious thrust forward of the blonde head, a
show of big white teeth, and the contemptuous phrase "Nassty you are!"
as she flung round and hurried down the street.
No doubt she was right. Often, in the night-watches at sea, the author
has recalled the vitality of her appeal, the genuine frankness of her
character, and wished for an opportunity to express his regret for his
_gaucherie_ and offer adequate amends. And as the 'bus lumbers along
towards Ludgate Hill he thinks of her and wonders precisely what
purpose these fugitive and fortuitous encounters serve. These futile
yet fascinating conjectures bring him past Saint Paul's, in whose
shadow he has spent many hours reading old books at the stalls in
Holywell Street, and the 'bus races along Cannon Street, is brought up
almost on its hind wheels at the Mansion House Corner, and the author
gets a brief glimpse of Princes Street and Moorgate Street, where he
was once "something in the City" as we used to say, before the
policeman's hand is lowered and the eastbound traffic roars along
Threadneedle Street and so down to Aldgate, where the author descends
by the famous Pump, to begin the serious business of the day. For it
must not be forgotten that this daily 'bus-ride from Charing Cross to
Aldgate Pump is not prosecuted in a spirit of sentimental reverie. The
author is going to school. Across the road may be seen a building
athwart whose topmost window runs a tarnished gold sign _Teague's
School of Engineering_, only all three ns of the last word are
missing, which seems in keeping with the name Teague somehow, and
gives the whole affair a touch of Irish dissipation. Nothing, however,
could be more misleading. Upstairs, four flights, the last two
uncarpeted or linoleumed, one discovers only an austere establishment
from which both Teague and his possible dissipation are long since
departed. The business is now owned by a dapper young man of pleasing
exterior and almost uncanny technical omniscience, who for a lump
inclusive fee undertakes to pull the most illiterate of seafarers
through the narrow portals of the government examination. He gives
that impression as he sits at his desk in his private office, the
cuffs of his grey frock-coat and his starched white shirt drawn up out
of the way. He has the capable air of a surgeon, the swift, impersonal
competence of an experienced _accoucheur_. His business is to get
results. It is not too much to say that he gets them.
In the room beyond, however, in which the author takes his seat in the
humble capacity of student, there is the curiously strained atmosphere
that is to be found in all companies of disparate personalities
intent upon a common end. Seated in rows at a number of pine desks are
a score of men whose ages range from twenty-three to forty-five. Some
are smoking. Others, with tongue protruding slightly from the corner
of the mouth, and head on one side, are slowly and painfully copying
the drawing of a pump or a valve-box. Others, again, are in the
murky depths of vast arithmetical solutions extracting, with heavy
breathings, the cube root from some formidable quantity, and bringing
it to the surface exhausted and far from certain as to the ultimate
utility of their discoveries. They have come from the far ends of the
sea-lanes, these men, from Niger River ports and the coast towns of
China, from lordly liners and humble tramps, from the frozen fjords
of Aelborg and the crowded tideways of the Hooghley. They are
extraordinarily unprepossessing, most of them, for the time was not
yet when sea-going was considered, save as a last resource, like
selling newspapers or going to America. These men were mostly
artisans, thick-fingered mechanics who had gone to sea, driven by some
obscure urge or prosaic economic necessity, and the sea had changed
them, as it changes everything, fashioning in them a blunt work-a-day
fatalism and a strong, coarse-fibred character admirably adapted to
their way of life. But that way is far from schools and colleges.
They lack that subtle academical atmosphere so essential to genuine
culture. They have none of them what the educated classes call an
examination brain. They resemble a pack of sheep-dogs in a parlour.
They accept with pathetic fidelity the dogmas of their text-books, and
they submit humbly to incarceration while their heads are loaded down
with formulas and theories, most of which they jettison with relief
when they feel the first faint lift of the vessel to the ocean swell
outside the breakwater.
But it should on no account be assumed from the above truthful
estimate of their mentality that these men are to be dismissed as mere
factory hands or negligible land-failures. The sea has her own way of
making men, and informs them, as the years and miles go by, with a
species of differential intuition, a flexible mental mechanism which
calibrates and registers with astonishing accuracy and speed. They
become profound judges of human character within the rough walls of
their experience, and for women they betray a highly specialized
esteem....
For all that, as they sit here in their extremely respectable blue
serge suits, which still show the sharp creases where they were laid
away in unskillful folds during the voyage, they give one an
impression of lugubrious failure. It must be confessed that simple as
the examinations are they are beyond the range of many of us. The
habits of study are not easily retained during the long stretches of
watch-keeping intermitted with hilarious trips ashore. We find a great
difficulty in keeping our minds on the problems set down. Outside
is a blue sky, the roar of traffic at the confluence of four great
thoroughfares, and the call of London, a very siren among cities, when
one knows! Over yonder, a cigarette in his mouth, his head on his hand
and his elbow asprawl on the desk, making idle marks with a pencil, is
a youth who is nursing a grievance against the government. He has been
up eight times and failed every time. He is going up again with us
next Tuesday. Yet, as it has been whispered to me during lunch hour by
my neighbour, a robust individual just home from Rangoon, he is a
first-class man; just the chap in a break-down; always on the job;
fine record. There is another, between us and the sectional model of
a feed pump valve, who never looks up, but figures unceasingly with
elbows close to his sides, his toes turned in, the nape of an
obstinate, close-cropped neck glistening pale gold and pink in the
morning sun. Without having been to sea with this party or even having
seen his face, one is aware that he will always be found with his pale
eyes wide open when the light is flicked on at One Bell. He has been
sometime in tramp-steamers, who carry no oilers, for there is a hard
callous on the knuckle of his right forefinger where the oil-feeder
handle has been chafing. Whether he would be a tower of strength in a
smash-up is not so easily divined. Next to him a young gentleman is
sitting sideways smoking, a pair of handsome cuff-buttons of Indian
design flashing at his wrists. He is, my neighbour has informed me
during lunch, from the P. & O. and he corroborates this by asking a
question of the lecturer concerning a broken valve-spindle of enormous
dimensions. He stands for class in our community and gives a certain
tone to the group who go up on Tuesday. Unhappily he falls out on
the second day, owing to certain defects in his arithmetic, and
disappears. No doubt he has gone to another sea-port to try a less
austere examiner.
And after lunch, the principal of Teague's School of Engineering
suddenly emerges from his private office, hangs up a card labelled
"_No Smoking during Lectures_" and proceeds to feed us with the
irreducible minimum of information necessary for our ordeal. By long
practice, astute contriving, and careful cross-examination of
successful pupils he has arrived at such a pass that he seems to know
more about the examiner's mind than that gentleman himself. He repeats
slowly and deliberately the exact form of answer which is most likely
to draw approval from the grand inquisitor, and we copy it down
hastily in our notes. The sleeves of his grey frock-coat are pulled
back to keep the chalk dust from soiling them as he rapidly sketches
on the board for our edification. We listen with respect, for we know
he has been through precisely the same mill as ourselves, he has come
on watch at midnight with his mouth dry and his eyelids sagging and
wishing in his heart he were dead. He has won out and now stands ready
to show us the way. We listen to every word. The lecture is short,
sharp, apposite, a model of all a lecture should be, stripped to the
bare bones of fundamental truth, pared clean of every redundant word.
As the clock strikes three he claps his hands to rid them of chalk,
pauses for a moment to answer pertinent questions, and vanishes into
his office once more.
Most of us go home.
The author now has an assignation with a lady, and the reader who
has been patiently waiting for some sort of literary allusions in a
preface to a volume of literary essays, is about to be gratified. The
scene changes from the vulgar uproar of Aldgate to a flat in Chelsea.
Hurrying through Houndsditch, across Leadenhall Street and up St. Mary
Axe, the author discovers the right 'bus in Broad Street about to
start. They are filling the radiator with water and the conductor is
intoning a mysterious incantation which resolves itself into "_Benk!
Oobun, Benk! Piccadilly, 'Yde Pawk, Sloon Stree', Sloon Square, Kings
Road, Chelsea an' Walham Green. Here y' are, lidy._" With long
practice he can make the vowels reverberate above the roar of the
traffic. The words Benk and Pawk come from his diaphragm in sullen
booms. To listen to him is a lesson in prosody. He enjoys doing it. He
is an artist. He extracts the uttermost from his material, which is
the mark of the supreme artist. He unbends when he comes up to collect
the fares from the author and a lady who is probably returning to
Turnham Green after a visit to her married daughter at Islington, and
he leans over the author's shoulder to scan the racing news in the
Stop Press Column, a courtesy as little likely to be withheld in
London as a light for a cigarette in Alexandria. "Hm!" he murmurs,
stoically. "Jes' fancy! An' I had 'im backed for a place, too. That's
the larst money I lose on _that_ stable." He clatters down again and
one hears his voice lifted once more as he rumbles: "_Benk--Ooborn
Benk!_" with diaphragmatic intensity.
To know London from the top of a 'bus is no doubt a liberal education,
but it may be questioned whether the tuition is as extensive and
peculiar with a gasoline-driven vehicle as with the old horse-hauled
affairs that took all day to jungle along from the North Pole Inn at
Wormwood Scrubbs to the Mile End Road, or from the Angel at Islington
to Roehampton. Almost before the author has digested a leading article
dealing with the Venezuelan Question the 'bus roars down Sloan Street,
shoots across the Square, and draws up just where a few people are
already collecting by the pit-doors of the Court Theatre for the
evening performance of "Man and Superman." This being the end of a
stage, if the pleasantry may be pardoned, the author descends and
walks onward to his destination, which is a flat down by the River.
There are certain thoroughfares in London which have always avoided
any suspicion of respectable regularity either in their reputation or
their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square,
for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the
cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of
the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street
Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between
Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the
most disconcerting divarications of design. In it meet democracy,
plutocracy, and aristocracy, artist and artisan, trade and tradition,
philosophy and philistinism, publicans and publicists, connoisseurs
and confidence men, sin and sincerity. It is not proposed to introduce
the reader to the whole of this goodly company. The Balzac of
Chelsea still tarries in obscurity. By some amazing oversight this
street, which has sheltered more artists and authors than any other
thoroughfare in the world, seems to have evaded their capture. Chelsea
is a cosmos. Cheyne Walk is a world, a world abandoned by genius to
the cheap purveyors of second-hand clap-trap and imitators of original
minds.
Let us go upstairs.
Miss Flaherty is one of those women who appear from time to time in
the newspaper world and who seem to embody in their own personalities
the essential differences between journalism and literature. Their
equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense
they are so prolific that they do not beget; they spawn. They present
a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly
inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest when they see it, but
they are congenitally incapable of describing it correctly. Their
conception of art consists of writing a book describing their own
sexual impulses. This is frequently so ungrammatical and obscure that
even publishers' readers balk at it, and it goes the rounds. In the
meanwhile, they produce an incredible quantity of daily and weekly
matter for the press. They wheedle commissions out of male editors by
appealing to their sex, and write sprightly articles on Bachelor Girls
and their Ideals, and the Economic Independence of the Married Woman.
They become hysterically lachrymose, in print, over a romantic love
affair, and relapse into sordid intrigues on the sly. They demand
political power without intending for a single moment to assume
political responsibility. Their days are about equally divided between
catching a husband and achieving what they describe as "a scoop."
To all this Miss Flaherty adds an unusual faculty for spectacular
antics. She has dressed in a red sweater and plied her trade, for a
day, as a shoe-shine boy. She has dressed in a green cloak and sold
shamrock on St. Patrick's day. She has dressed in rags and sung in the
streets for charity. She has hired a van and ridden about the suburbs
pretending to sell domestic articles. She has attended revival
meetings and thrown herself in a spasm of ecstasy upon what she calls
the mercy-seat. She has....
But the author is not absolutely sure whether she has ... after all.
He is of the opinion that, like most English women, she has no
talent for that sort of thing. Like most young women who babble of
emancipation she has an unsuspected aptitude for domesticity. She
makes tea far better than she writes articles. She is, under a
ridiculous assumption of slangy modernity, oppressively conventional.
However, the author's immediate concern is not with Miss Flaherty's
destiny at all, but with his manuscript which she has been XXXX
commissioned to place with a publisher. A writer of dime novels, on
being consulted as to the way to get a book published, said he didn't
know, never having had a book to publish save in weekly serial
numbers; and that, he hastened to observe, was quite another story.
And then suddenly remarked, slapping his thigh and reaching for the
makings of a fresh cigarette: "Why not try Imogene Flaherty? She's
anxious to start in as author's agent." The author had no objections
to raise beyond the fact that he disliked doing business with women
and was afraid of anybody named Imogene. The dime-novelist shook his
head and said women in business and journalism had come to stay. And
seriously, Miss Flaherty might easily be of immense assistance to the
author. "Very nice girl, too--h-m--hm!" This reminiscently. "Very
decent little woman. Go and see her--take my card--down in Cheyne
Walk. She had a flat down there near Church Street. H-m. Yes."
So it happened. And the result had been an explosion. Miss Flaherty
had accepted the commission and had read the manuscript and had, in
common parlance, gone up in the air. Her enthusiasm literally knew no
bounds. She did not actually foam at the mouth, but she displayed all
the symptoms of advanced literary hysteria. Now there is this to be
said for the sea--it may not furnish one with universal judgments
about women but it does provide the solitude and austere discipline
which enable a man to coordinate his hitherto chaotic ideas about
them. And women, if they only knew how they appear to the imagination
of men on the rolling waters, would undoubtedly modify their own
conceptions of life, and possibly profit by the change. Imogene,
however, had no such moment of illumination. She lived in an enchanted
world of imitation emotion and something in the author's manuscript
had set her off, had appealed to her rudimentary notions of fine
writing, and engendered a flame of enthusiasm. It is not too much to
say that she believed in that manuscript much more than the author
did. That is the correct attitude for a successful agent. Imogene did
not "push" the book, as salesmen say, so much as herald it. She
entered publishers' offices like a prophetess or one of the seraphim,
panoplied in shining plumage, blinding the poor human eyes with beams
of heavenly radiance, the marvellous manuscript, like a roll of lost
gospels, held out before her. She blew a blast on her trumpet and the
doors of the publishers' readers swung wide. No knowledge of English
literature prevented her from uttering her solemn conviction that here
was the greatest book since Geoffrey Chaucer laid down his pen. With
intrepid resource she warned the hesitating publisher that he
would have none save himself to blame if he missed this chance of
immortalizing his house, and eventually a publisher was discovered who
was willing to issue the book at the author's expense. All this,
let it be said with regret, did not bring a blush to the author's
sea-tanned cheek. On the contrary, he cherished a secret apprehension
that Imogene had gone mad.
The one fly in the ointment at this juncture was the author's
unmannerly attitude towards publishers who issued books at the
writer's expense. He went so far as to characterize them as crooks and
declined to have anything to do with them. He had been writing for a
good many years of apprenticeship and had arrived at the conclusion
that a man might get along in decent comfort all his life without
publishing anything at all, if fate so ordered it; and the suggestion
that he pay away his hoarded sea-wages just to have his name on a
book, clouded a naturally sunny temper for some time.
Here, however, sitting at tea in the intensely artistic flat on the
third floor over a grocery-store, and looking out upon the River
and the warehouses of the Surrey Side, the author is rapturously
apprised that the book is as good as sold. A publisher's reader, a
representative of an important house, has declared that the book has
distinction. This is a true record, in the main, and the author is
obliged to confess, thirteen years later, that he fell for this. In
his simplicity he thought it a fine thing to have distinction. And
this is true. It is a fine thing, but the fineness of the bloom is
soon licked off by the busy tongues of the Imogenes and their
masculine counterparts. The author did not see this so clearly at the
time. He felt as a cat feels when stroked. The patrons of distinction
were also in a position to make a cash offer for the copyright. In
those days, when fifty dollars a month was considered adequate
remuneration for his services at sea, the author had modest notions
about cash offers. He treated the matter in a sporting spirit and
closed.
But it was not consummated in a word and with the gesture of signing
one's name. Things are not done that way when dealing with Imogenes.
One has to negotiate a continent of emotional hill-climbing and an
ocean of talk. A sea-faring person, schooled to deal with men and
things with an economy of effort, is moved to amazement before the
spectacle of a "bachelor girl" in action. One assumes, of course,
that she intends to remain a "bachelor girl." There is the solemn
initiation into the ranks of her pals. Palship, as she calls it, is
something quite different from friendship, and to a man of normal
instincts this is an alarming proposition. It is certainly far more
exhausting than an intrigue and far less interesting than a rationally
controlled friendship with a person of the same sex. And here it
is pertinent to put forward what the author conceives to be the
fundamental trouble with the Imogenes of both sides of the Atlantic.
It is pertinent because he was, at the time of writing this book,
under the influence of a very potent and inspiring friendship for a
man now dead, a friendship which moulded his ideas and inspired him to
hammer out for himself a characteristic philosophy of life. And one of
the most important determinations of that philosophy deals with the
common errors concerning friendship and love. The mistake of the
bachelor girl and her prototypes lies in their failure to recognize
the principle of sex as universal. It is not so much that men and
women cannot meet without the problem of sex arising between them as
that no two human beings can have any interchange of thoughts at all
without involving each other in a complex of which masculine and
feminine are the opposite poles. The most fascinating of all
friendships are those in which the protagonists alternate, each one,
owing to freshly revealed depths or shallows in his character,
assuming the masculine or feminine role. The Latin recognises this by
instinct. Just as his nouns are always either masculine or feminine,
so are his ideas. And his women, who have never heard of "bachelor
girls" or "palship," have achieved with consummate skill all and more
than the Imogenes have ever imagined. Any one who has ever enjoyed the
friendship of such women will recall that subtle aroma of sex which
informs the whole affair. The coarse-grained northerner is prone to
attribute the abundant vitality, the exquisite graces of body and mind
to a deftly concealed vampirism or sensuality. Nothing is further from
the truth. If you can play up to it, if your emotions and instincts
are under the control of a traditional and finely tempered will, a
notable experience is yours. Friendship, in fact, is the divinity
whose name must not be uttered or he will vanish. She will not inform
you, as Imogene does, that you are not in love with her and she is not
in love with you and therefore a palship is under way. On the
contrary, she will never let you forget that love is a possibility
always just out of sight, where it will always remain. She is
economically independent because men cannot do without her. She has
more rights than the Imogenes will gain in a thousand years; and she
is, moreover, something that men would strive to preserve in a
world-cataclysm, whereas no one would give Imogene a single panic
thought.
Imogene, however, has no inkling of this. She is under the impression
that she is one of the world's cosmic forces. In the rag-bag of
her brain whence she fishes out the innumerable formless and
gaudy-coloured pilferings from which she fashions her "special
articles," she cherishes an extraordinary illusion that she is a sort
of modern Hypatia. She says Aspasia, but that is only because she has
confused Kingsley's heroine with Pericles' mistress. She talks of
"mating with an affinity" of "influencing the lives of the men who do
things." She is very worried about the men who do things. It is a
proof of her conventional and Victorian mentality that she imagines
men who do things are inspired to do them by women; whereas it is
rather the other way round, the men who do things having to avoid the
majority of women as they would _cholera morbus_, if they are ever to
get anything done.
Springing up on the impulse of this thought the author makes his
excuses to the assembled guests and descends the dark stairway to the
street. To tell the truth, these glimpses into the society of literary
folk do not inspire in his bosom any frantic anxiety to abandon his
own way of life. He had a furtive and foolish notion that these
people are of no importance whatever. These coteries, these at-homes,
and flat philosophies are not the real thing. It sounds unsocial and
unconventional, no doubt, but it is a question so far unsettled in the
author's mind whether any genuine artist loves his fellows well enough
to co-habit with them on a literary basis. For some mysterious reason
the real men, the original living forces in literature, do not
frequent the _salons_ of the Imogenes. They are more likely to
be found in the private bars of taverns in the King's Road, or
walking along lonely roads in Essex and Surrey. Indeed, they may be
preoccupied with problems quite foreign to the immediate business of
literary conversation. They may be building bridges, or sailing ships,
or governing principalities. They are unrecognised for the most part.
The fact is they are romantic, and it is the hall-mark of the true
romantic to do what other men dream of, and say nothing about it.
The motives of the author, however, in deserting the flat in Chelsea,
were not entirely due to dreams of lofty achievement, but to the stern
necessity to read voraciously on the subject of Heat for his
examination. And one of the dominating changes which he discovers in
himself after the passage of thirteen years is a sad falling off in
brain-power. He is no longer able to read voraciously on the subject
of Heat and Heat-engines. His technical library remains packed with
grim neatness in his cabin book-case. When his juniors bring problems
involving a quadratic equation he is stricken with a horrible fear
lest the answer won't come out. He looks through his old examination
papers and echoes Swift's melancholy sigh "Gad! What a genius I had
when I wrote all that!" Most professional men, one is bound to
suppose, become aware at periods of the gradual ossification of their
intellects. And it is not always easy to retain a full consciousness
of the compensating advantages of seniority in the face of this
positive degeneration. One begins to watch carefully for errors where
one used to go pounding to a finish with a full-blooded rush. One has
a feeling of being overtaken; the young people of the next decade can
be heard not far behind, and they seem to be offensively successful in
business, in friendship, and in love. One has ceased to be interesting
to the women of thirty and the men of forty. The achievement of years
shrinks to depressing dimensions, and the real test is on. One becomes
uncomfortably aware of the shrewd poke of Degas that "any one can have
talent at twenty-five. The great thing is to have talent at forty."
The reader is invited to assume, therefore, that the author, at
twenty-five, was sufficiently talented and ambitious to read
voraciously on Heat and a great many other subjects. That he did so
he calls on Mrs. Honeyball to witness, since that lady was really
concerned for his health and urged him not to work too hard "for fear
of a break-down." There was never any danger of a break-down, however.
London was outside that window with 1472 carved below it, and at the
first warning of fatigue the author would take hat and stick and fare
forth in search of recreation and adventure. He would apologize to
Mrs. Honeyball and her friends gathered in the little room below,
where they were discussing what Mr. Honeyball described as "Christian
Work." Mr. Honeyball used to bring out this phrase with extraordinary
vigour and emphasis, as though the very enunciation were a blow to the
designs of Satan. The author heard, during a later voyage, that the
Honeyballs did eventually give up the mundane job of supervising
apartments and retired to a quiet sea-side town where they devoted
themselves entirely to "Christian Work."
It was on one of these evening strolls that the author became on
speaking terms with the girl who ate a bun and a glass of milk for
breakfast every morning. It is very easy to get acquainted with a
virtuous girl in England--so easy that the foreigner is frequently
bewildered or inclined to be suspicious of the virtue. It is a
facility difficult to reconcile with our heavily advertised frigidity,
our disconcerting habit of addressing a stranger as though some
invisible third person (an enemy) just behind him were the object of
our dignified disapproval. It may be explained by the fact that, from
the middle classes downward, and excluding the swarms of immigrants in
the large cities, we are a very old race, with a comprehensive
knowledge of our own mentalities. One finds blond, blue-eyed Saxon
children in East Anglia, and there are black-haired, brown-skinned
people in the West Country who have had no foreign admixture to their
Phoenician blood since the Norman Conquest. This makes for a certain
solidarity of sentiment and a corresponding freedom of intercourse.
Not that Mabel would understand any of this if she heard it. She has a
robust and coarse-textured mind curiously contrasted with her pale,
delicate features and sombre black eyes. She was one of those people
who seem suddenly to transmute themselves into totally different
beings the moment one speaks to them. As the author did one evening,
after peering absently through the window of a candy-store down near
the railroad arch below Charing Cross, and seeing her sitting pensive
behind the stacks of merchandise. She was very glad to see a familiar
face and recognised the claim of the breakfast-hour with a tolerant
smile and a cheerful nod. It is very easy, while talking to Mabel,
to understand why there is no native opera in England, and a very
powerful native literature. Opera can only prosper where the emotional
strain between the sexes is so heavy that it must be relieved by song
and gesture. We have nothing of that in England. Women, more even than
men, distrust themselves and eschew the outward trappings of romance.
But this makes for character, so that our friends and relatives appear
to us like the men and women in novels. Mabel was like that. She
walked in and out of half a dozen books which the author had recently
read. And her importance in this preface lies in the illumination she
shed upon this same subject of literature. The author at that time, as
will be seen in the following pages, was addicted to fine writing and
he held the view that literature was for the cultured and made no
direct appeal to the masses. Mabel unconsciously showed that this was
a mistaken view. Mabel was as chock full of literature as a Russian
novel. She had adventures everywhere. The author coming in and talking
to her, after breakfasting in the same coffee-room, was an adventure.
It would make a story, she observed with naive candour. Only the other
night, she remarked, a strange gentleman came, a foreigner of some
sort, and asked for chocolates. A very entertaining gentleman with a
bag, which he asked her to keep. No fear, she observed; no bombs or
things in _her_ shop--take it to the cloak-room in the station. Well,
he must have done so, for they got it out of there after his arrest.
Here was his photograph in the Sunday paper. Millions of francs he'd
stole. Like a novel, wasn't it? The author said it was, very, and
begged for more. He said she ought to write them down. Mabel looked
grave at this and said she had a fellow ... splendid education he had
had. Was in the Prudential. Her voice grew low and hesitating. He was
going to give it up! Give up the Prudential? But that was a job for
life, wasn't it? Ah, but he had it in him.... It appeared that he had
won five pounds for a story. It was wonderful the way he wrote them
off. In his spare time. And poetry. He was really a poet, but poetry
didn't pay, the author was given to understand. So he wrote stories.
Some people made thousands a year.
This was all very well from Mabel's point of view, but the author did
not want to go into the vexed question of royalties. He wanted, on the
contrary, to know Mabel's feelings towards the coming Maupassant of
North London. Did she love him? Or rather, to put the matter in
another way, did he love her? Was he permitted that supreme privilege?
Well, they had been going round together, on and off, this nine
months now. As for being _engaged_ ... he only got two pound a week as
yet, remember. Yes, that was why she wanted him to go in for this
writing and make a hit. She'd take it on and make ends meet somehow,
if he did that. She could help him. He said she had some good ideas,
only they wanted working out. And here was a secret--he'd written a
play! Mabel leaned over the candy jars and whispered this dreadful
thing in the author's ear. A friend of theirs had seen it--he was at
one of the theatres in the electrical department and knew all the
stars--and he said it was very good but needed what he called pulling
together! If only a reliable person in the play-writing line could be
found to do this pulling together, there might be a fortune in it.
The reader may be disturbed at Mabel's insistence upon the financial
possibilities of literature, but in this she was only a child of her
time. The point worthy of note is not her rapacity but the dexterity
with which she utilized literature to further her ambition. She was
identifying herself with literature and so fortifying her position.
She was really far better fitted to be the wife of a fictionist than
Imogene. And she could appreciate poetry addressed to herself. The
author eventually saw some of it for a moment, written on sermon
paper, but the stanzas shall remain forever vibrating in his own
bosom. She is memorable to the author, moreover, in that she brought
home to him for the first time the startling fact that every such
woman is, in a sense, an adventuress. She never knows what will happen
next. She is in the grip of incalculable forces. She has to work with
feverish haste to make herself secure and to use even such bizarre
instruments as literature in the pursuit of safety. Back in his tiny
chambers over the old Gate of Cliffords Inn, the author meditated
darkly upon that play that only required "pulling together" to make
it the nucleus of a fortune. Evidently, he reflected, there were
determined characters about, aided and inspired by equally determined
young women, battering upon the gates of Fame, and he felt his own
chances of success against such rivals were frail indeed. So he went
to sea again.
Here, in one short sentence, is the gist of this book, that the sea is
a way of escape from the intolerable burden of life. A cynic once
described it as having all the advantages of suicide without any of
its inconveniences. To the author it was more than that. It was the
means of finding himself in the world, a medium in which he could work
out the dreams which beset him and which were the basis of future
writings. But ever at the back of the mind will there be the craving
to get out beyond the bar, to see the hard, bright glitter of
impersonal land-lights die suddenly in the fresh gusts, and to leave
behind the importunate demands of business, of friendship, and of
love.
"From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free."
The words hummed in his brain as he ascended the stone stairs of the
gaunt building in Mark Lane to face the final ordeal of a _viva voce_
examination before the Head Examiner. There had been a hurried
consultation in whispers in the great examination room. In a far
corner was a glazed, portioned-off space where sat the regular
examiner with a perspiring candidate in front of him, tongue-tied and
weary. And there were a dozen more waiting. So the author was informed
in a whisper that he had better step upstairs and the Head Examiner
would deal with him. And settle his hash quickly enough, thought the
author as he sprang nimbly up behind the assistant examiner. He found
himself in a large, imposing office where at an immense desk sat a man
with a trim beard, rapidly scanning a mass of papers. The author
immediately became absorbed in the contemplation of this person, for
he bore an extraordinary resemblance to George Meredith. The head in
profile was like a Sicilian antique, with the clear-cut candour of a
cameo. Memories of _Lord Ormont and His Aminta_ crowded upon the
waiting victim and he found himself almost hysterical with curiosity
as to what would happen if he claimed to be a distant connection of
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but without the historic leg. What if he led
the conversation gently towards Richard Feverel's perfect love-story,
or alluded to a lady with whom he will always remain in love--Diana of
the Crossways? But nothing of the sort happened. The author was nodded
curtly to a seat, the assistant examiner chose another chair close by,
cleared his throat, shot his cuffs, and pulled up the knees of his
trousers. The Head Examiner, without looking up or desisting from his
rapid writing, began to express his deep regret that the author
apparently preferred to work an evaporator under a pressure instead of
a vacuum. There might possibly be some reason for this which he, the
Examiner, had overlooked, and he would appreciate it if the author
could so far unbend as to outline his experience in this business.
Whereupon the Head Examiner proceeded with his writing and left the
author, in a state of coma, facing an expectant assistant examiner,
who resembled some predatory bird only waiting for life to be extinct
before falling upon the victim. Somewhat to his own surprise, however,
the victim showed signs of returning animation, and began to utter
strange, semi-articulate noises. The Head Examiner wrote on with
increasing speed; the assistant examiner, somewhat disappointed, still
preserved an expectant air. The victim became more active, and
astounded himself by carrying the war into the enemy's camp. He
announced himself as an adherent of the pressure method. He became
eloquent, describing his tribulations working an evaporator on a
vacuum. But the aim of examiners apparently is not to hear what one
knows but to reveal to a shocked world what one does not know. The
subject was immediately changed to the advantages of multi-polar
generators and the ethics of the single-wire system. The assistant
examiner reluctantly resigned any thoughts of an immediate banquet
upon the author's remains and assumed an attitude of charitable
tolerance, much as one watches an insect's valorous struggles to get
out of the molasses. The Head Examiner from time to time interjected a
short, sharp question, like a lancet into the discussion, but without
looking up or ceasing to write with extreme rapidity. And as time went
on and the whole range of knowledge was gone over in the attempt to
destroy him, the author began to wonder whether these men thought he
had, like Lord Bacon, taken all knowledge for his province, whether
tramp steamers carried a crew of technical pundits, and whether there
would be so many literary men and women about if they had to go
through this sort of thing. And the thought of literature brought back
George Meredith to mind again, only to be dismissed. It was much more
like being examined by Anthony Trollope or Arnold Bennett, the author
decided, than by Meredith. Appearances are misleading. The thin,
classical face never roused from its down-cast repose and implacable
attention. But at long last the assistant examiner shuffled his papers
and remained silent for a moment, as though regretfully admitting that
the victim was, within bounds, omniscient, and could not be decently
tortured any longer. As an after thought, however, and glancing at the
Head Examiner as he did so, he enquired whether the author had
experienced any break-downs, accidents, smashes....
The author had. It was a subject upon which he was an authority,
having served in a ship twenty-five years old with rotten boilers and
perishing frames. And all unwittingly he became reminiscent and
drifted into the story of a gale in the Bristol Channel with the empty
ship rolling till she showed her bilge keels, the propeller with its
boss awash thrashing the sea with lunatic rage, and then the three of
us swaying and sweating on the boiler-tops, a broken main-steam pipe
lying under our feet. And it had to be done, for the tide and the
current were taking us up to Lundy, where half-tide rocks would soon
cook our goose, as the saying is. And as he grew absorbed in the tale
the author observed out of the corner of his eye that the Head
Examiner's pen paused and then was gently laid down, a new expression
of alertness, as though about to deliver judgment, came over the
finely cut features. And presently, as it was explained how an iron
collar was made and clamped about the broken pipe, and long bolts made
to pass into the solid flanges of the valve below, to haul the pipe
into its socket and hold it there by main force until we could get in,
the Head Examiner turned in his chair, and nodded as he touched his
beard lightly with one finger. It was about four in the morning when
the job was finished, the author recalled, and he came up on to the
wet deck, with low clouds flying past and Lundy an ominous shadow
behind, while the dawn lifted beyond the Welsh Mountains and the
jolly, homely lights of Swansea shone clear ahead. And as he paused
and remarked that the repair proved to be effective, he saw something
else in the face of the man watching him, something not seen before,
something not very easy to describe. But it may be said to have marked
another step in his career. Call it character, and the perception of
it. Something, as the reader will see, that is only emerging in the
pages of this book. Something harsh and strong-fibred, nurtured upon
coarse food and the inexorable discipline of the sea. Something that
is the enemy of sloth and lies and the soft languors of love. Indeed,
what the author has finally to say after all may be comprised in
this--that out of his experience, which has been to a certain degree
varied, he has come to the conviction that this same character, the
achievement and acceptance of it, stands out as the one desirable and
indispensable thing in the world, and neither fame nor wealth nor love
can furnish any adequate substitute for it.
S. S. _Turrialba_, August, 1920.
WILLIAM McFEE.