Sailcloth and coal-dust being our equivalent for sackcloth and ashes,
the steamer looks mournful indeed as she drives southward towards the
Cape. But with lower latitudes comes warmer weather, and a sea so
unutterably smooth that one loses faith in the agony of the Bay or the
Gulf of Lyons, while the hellish frenzy of the North Atlantic in
winter is a distemper of the brain. It is in such halcyon days that we
begin to believe in paint. The decks are methodically chipped and
scraped of their corroding rust, ventilators are washed and painted,
and all the deck-houses are cleansed of a coating of coal-dust which
seems appalling. As the days drone by the filth disappears; pots of
red, white, brown, and black paint come out of the Mate's secret store
in the "fore-peak," and one hears satirical approval from those
below. "Like a little yacht, she is," says one, and the Second Mate is
asked if he has a R. Y. S. flag in the chart-room. I fear the wit who
called the engine-room a whited sepulchre had some smack of truth in
him. The Mate had given it an external coating of paint as white as
the driven snow, and it needed no heaven-sent seer to perceive that
within it was full of all uncleanness. But what would you? The engines
do not run of themselves, though to say so is one of the navigator's
few joys in a world of woe. The ship herself knows better, I think,
though perchance she is like us other mortals, and thinks her heart
best unattended, and sees no connection between the twenty-five tons
of coal she eats per day and the tiny clink which the speed recorder
gives every quarter of a mile on the poop. We below, at any rate, know
all this, for therein is the justification of our existence. And so
_our_ decorations must needs wait till we reach port, when the holds
are in travail and the winches scream out their agony to the bare
brown hills beyond the town and mingle with the deep, dull roar of the
surf on the barrier reef.
And now let me describe my day at sea, as well as I am able. Different
indeed from those I was wont to spend at home. No delicious hours
in our pet hostelries; no Sundays with music and an open window
looking out upon the river; no rollicking evenings in some dear old
tumble-down studio; no midnight rambles towards home down the Fulham
Road, where the ghostly women walk; no cosy talks round the fire when
the fog lies white against the glass, while the candle-light glows on
the tall, warm rose-wood book-case, and all is well with us. Nay, as
eight-bells strikes ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting, and the
hands of the clocks point to twelve midnight, I awake. Ten minutes
before, George the Fourth, of whom I may tell more anon, switches on
the light and punches me in the ribs. I turn over to sleep again,
while he rummages in his berth for soap, towel, and clean shirt, and
goes below. A gay, likeable lad is George the Fourth, with bonnie
brown hair and steady blue eyes.
Mechanically I rise at twelve, hustle on my "dungarees," and,
sweat-rag in my teeth, I pass along the deck beneath the stars which
dust the midnight dome. My friend the Mate is just ahead, as I vanish
through a low-arched doorway which shows black against his white
paint. Careful now; these stairs are steep, and the upward-rising air
is like a gust of the "stormy blast of hell." Round the low-pressure
cylinder, then down again--and we are "below."
The steady beat and kick has become a thunderous uproar; by the yellow
light of the electrics you can see the engines--_my_ engines for the
next four hours. George is round by the pumps, stripped to the waist,
washing. He has finished; on the black-board he has recorded his
steam-pressure, his vacuum, his speed per minute, the temperature of
his sea water, his discharge water, and feed water; but he cannot
leave till I have thumbed all bearings, noted all water levels, tried
the gauges, and see that bilges, pumps, thrust-block, tunnel-shaft,
and stern-gland are all right. And while I do all this I try to make
out the orchestration of the uproar as my friend would some tremendous
Wagnerian clangour. Ah, what would he think of this, the very heart of
things, if he were but here?
Does George the Fourth feel the romance of it? Not a bit. George the
Fourth was pitch-forked into a marine engineering shop at the ripe
age of thirteen. He is twenty-two now, and carnal minded. He wants
"siller" for--well, _not_ for the Broomielaw. He wants to go "east"
again to Singapore, where the ladies of Japan are so charming and so
cheap. The only hope for him is that he may fall in love. I pray
without ceasing that he may fall in love. See the young pagan lounging
round by the stokehold door. Now you will perceive what I argued as to
the heroic nature of their lives.
"L.P. Top end is warm," I observe reproachfully.
"'Twas red-hot when it came to me," he exaggerates genially, putting
a clay "gun" in his mouth, and adding:
"Chief says, clean Number Four smoke-boxes fore and aft yoore watch,
an' ta trimmers to tak' nowt fra' th' thwart-ship boonkers."
Then he swings away, climbing the stairs with one eye on the engine.
A goodly youth, such as we admire; a magnificent young animal with
possibilities.
And then the firemen. I stand under the ventilator--it is cooler--and
I watch them toil. Think well upon it, my friend. These were men
doing this while you were at your German University, while you were
travelling over Europe and storing your mind with the best of all
times. They are doing it now, will do it while you are at your work at
the Institute. They have their business in the great waters. That
little man there, with two fingers of his left hand gone, is Joe, a
Welshman from his beloved Abertawe. Beyond him, again, the huge gaunt
frame and battered deep-sea cap, the draggled military moustache
surmounted by high cheek-bones, the long, thin, sinewy arms tattooed
with French dancing-girls--where shall our knowledge of the nations
place him? That is Androwsky, from Novorossisk, in South Russia. A
vast, silent man, uttering but three or four words a day. His story? I
cannot tell it, for he never speaks. In my poor way I have tried to
get it in German, but it is no good. In the meantime he is almost the
best fireman in the ship. Indeed, all my men are good. Scarcely ever
do we have less than full steam at the end of the watch.
And now, my engines! To the uninitiated it is, I suppose, a tiresome,
bewildering uproar. And yet every component, every note of this great
harmony, has a special meaning for the engineer; moreover, the
smallest dissonance is detected at once, even though he be almost
ready to doze. So finely attuned to the music does the ear become that
the dropping of a hammer in the stokehold, the rattling of a chain on
deck, the rocking of a barrel in the stores, makes one jump. It is the
same with the eye. It is even the same with the hand. We can tell in
an instant if a bearing has warmed ever so slightly beyond its
legitimate temperature. And so it is difficult to know "who is the
potter and who the pot." The man and the machine are inextricably
associated, and their reflex actions, one upon the other, are
infinite. It is this extraordinary intimacy, this ceaseless vigilance
and proximity, that gives the marine engineer such a pull over all
others where endurance and resource accompany responsibility. In all
big power-stations you will find many men with long sea service in
charge of the engines.
I remember arguing once with a matter-of-fact apprentice in the shop
concerning the suburbs as suitable localities for such as he. He was
not convinced. "There!" he said, slapping the shelf above his bench.
"That's where I'd like ter sleep. All yer gotter do at six o'clock is
roll off and turn to!" Well, that is just what he would get at sea. In
most steamers the engineer walks out of the mess-room, bathroom, or
berth, into an alley-way on either side of the engine platform. The
beat of the engines becomes part of his environment. He sleeps with it
pulsing in his ears, so that if she slows or stops he opens his eyes.
When I go up at four o'clock and call the Second Engineer, he will
stretch, yawn, half open one eye, and mutter, "What's the steam?"
To keep him awake I retail some piece of current engine gossip.
"After-bilge pump jibbed at three o'clock," I say. "Aw ri' now?" he
asks. "Yes, aw ri' now," I answer. "You'll have to watch the M.P.
guide though--she's warm." Then, remarking that the after-well is dry,
and that I've got plenty of water in the boilers for him, I leave him
and go below till he relieves me. It is a point of honour among us to
know every kink and crotchet of day-to-day working. If a joint starts
"blowing" ever so little away up in some obscure corner of our
kingdom, we know of it within an hour or two. One would think we
were a mothers' meeting discussing our babies, to hear the grave
tittle-tattle concerning the inevitable weakness of babies and engines
which passes over the mess-room table.
Now come with me along the tunnel, then, to the end of the world.
A narrow, sliding water-tight door in the bulkhead here, under the
shadow of the thrust-block--elegance in design, you will observe,
being strictly subordinated to use. Follow carefully now, and leave
that shaft alone. It will not help you at all if you slip. The music
has died away, only a solemn _clonk-clonk--clonk-clonk_ reverberates
through this narrow, Norman-arched catacomb. At length we emerge into
a larger vaulted chamber, where the air is singularly fresh--but I
forgot. I am not writing a smugglers' cave story. We are under an
air-shaft running up to the poop-deck, and we may go no further. The
fourteen-inch shaft disappears through a gland, and, just beyond that
is the eighteen-foot propeller whirling in the blue ocean water. Here,
for us, is the great First Cause. Of the illimitable worlds of marine
flora and fauna outside these riveted steel walls the sailor-man knows
nothing and cares less. What are called "the wonders of the deep" have
no part in the life of the greatest wonder of the deep--the seaman.
And when the propeller drops away, as it does sometimes--drops "_down
to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes
are_"--there goes out from that ship all life, all motion. Even as
the mass of metal plunges downward and as the frenzied engineer
rushes through blinding steam and water to stop the engines in their
panic rush, the spirit of the vessel goes out of her in a great
sigh. With dampered ash-pits her fires blacken and go out, the idle
steering-engine clanks and rattles as the useless rudder tugs at her
chains, and the crew tell in whispers how it happened _just_ like that
on the _Gipsy Queen_, out of Sunderland, or the _Gerard Dow_, out of
Antwerp. All of which is not to be learned in the study at home. Let
us get back to the engine-room.
I am curious to know how all this would strike my friend at home.
Would it not, as Henley used to say, give him much to perpend? I hear
him mutter that phrase we talked out once, at the tea-table--"The Age
of Mechanism." But why not an Age of Heroism? Mind, I use this latter
word in its true sense as I use the word Hero. For some occult reason,
known only to Brixton and Peckham Rye, a hero is the person who jumps
into the Thames and pulls a woman out, or the interesting inanity of a
popular serial. There is nothing essentially heroic in life-saving.
Indeed, all the old heroes of Norseland, Rome, and Greece regarded
the saving of life with a contempt that was only natural when we
consider the utter lack of board schools and their frantic belief
in a hereafter. I imagine the Norse Sea-kings who pushed out to
Vine-land--aye, even down to Cape Cod--would have been puzzled to hear
an undersized clerk who had saved a man from a watery grave described
as a hero. _Their_ method was to pull the drowning wretch out with a
boat-hook, and curse him for being so clumsy as to fall in. Eric the
Red never worried about a sailor who had the bad judgment to be washed
overside during the night. Hercules would have felt outraged had the
Royal Humane Society of the period loaded him down with their medals.
Achilles would as soon have thought of committing the interminable
catalogue of the Grecian Ships to memory as of associating the saving
of life with the heroic. I am not suggesting that these heroes are
more worthy of emulation than a life-saver; I only want to explain
that there is, in our day, a race of beings, half-man, half-god, who
correspond, in all broad characteristics, to those rather indecent
heroes of early imaginative literature. They do with ease those deeds
which would have appalled the mailed monsters of chivalry; they regard
the other sex as being created solely for their use in port; they love
life dearly, but they leave the saving of it, like the heroes of old,
to the gods.
One has only to listen (in the galley) to their nonchalantly narrated
tales of mystery and horror to realize the truth of that argument. A
steady monotone is the key of their telling, their voices rising only
to hammer home some particularly horrific detail. Sometimes, in the
clangour of the engine-room, they will relate perilous misadventures
at sea, or ludicrous entanglements in sunny southern ports. But they
never waste breath in elaboration or "atmosphere." They leave that to
the nervous listener. They know nothing of the artistic values of
their virile tales. They do not know they are only carrying on the
tradition of the men of all time since Homer. They fling you the
fine gold of their own lives, and wallow in the tittle-tattle of
lady-novelists and _Reynolds's_. They seethe with admiration for
Captain Kettle's amazing manoeuvres, while the shipping offices are
papered with lists of those who are too indolent or too forgetful to
claim their service medals from the Government.