Once more I am out at sea. I have stowed away my "shore gear," slipped
the movable bar across my book-shelf, screwed up my windows, and made
all snug against the wind blowing up-channel. There is a gentle roll;
she is in ballast, for the Western Ocean, and the Mate does not smile
when we discuss the probable weather. He would like a little more
ballast, I know, and he thinks she "draws too much forrard." Well, I
am minded to go on deck for a smoke before I turn in. And the Third
Officer is on watch.
I call him the Innovation. There is to be much tallying on this
charter, and there is a happy rumour that the _Benvenuto_ will pay in
future. "I hear," said my friend the Mate, "I hear, Mr. McAlnwick,
that she has been reconstructed." By which he means that certain
financial props have been introduced into her economy, and she is no
longer in liquidation. The Mate glories in a four-hour watch, and the
Innovation takes the eight to twelve.
He walks across the bridge with a dozen swift strides. Then a peculiar
slew of his active little frame, and he whirls back to starboard. His
keen, clean-shaven face, hardened prematurely into an expression of
relentless ferocity, looks out from the peak of his badge-cap, the
strap cramming the crown against his bullet head. He is twenty-two,
and pure Liverpool. He served his apprenticeship in sail on the
Australian and Western American coasts. A middle class education is
submerged beneath seven years at sea, seven years of unbridled lust,
seven years of the seven deadly sins, seven years of joyous and
impenitent animalism.
There is no break in his voice when he speaks of "his old lady"--she
is religious. His "old man" is "a hard case," another name for a
Liverpool skipper. He met his brother this time at home--"didn't
know him, mister. Hadn't seen him for six years." His knowledge of
some things extends from Sydney and Melbourne to Marseilles and
Hamburg, from Amsterdam to Valparaiso; he drinks Irish neat, and his
conversation is blistered from end to end with blasphemous invocations
of the name of the Son of God.
I do not overdraw this picture of one who is only a type of
thousands. It is impossible to give any adequate specification of him.
He takes me, metaphorically, by the throat, and I am helpless. With
vivid strokes he paints me scene after scene, episode after episode,
of his life in "a windbag," and I see that he exaggerates not at all.
He candidly admits that, in his opinion, Marseilles is heaven and
Georgia the other extreme. He passed for second mate a month ago,
collected half a dozen shipmates, and terminated the orgies in the
police-court.
The psychology of such a soul fascinates me. I hold to my cardinal
doctrine of the illimitable virtue latent in all men; and I am right.
The unspeakable anathemas he pronounces on a certain skipper, who let
one of his apprentices die in a West Coast "hospital," his own
terrific descent into the Chilean "common grave," groping for the body
among the rotten corpses, feeling for the poor lad's breast, where
hung a broken rouble, token of some bygone Black Sea passion--all this
tells me that I am right. Stark materialist though he is, he looks
with scared awe upon the mysteries of religion, and the denunciations
of the Dream on Patmos make him hope and pray that his own end may
come in a deep sleep.
We are out beyond the Scillies now, and the Atlantic stretches before
us in a grey, ominous immensity. The wind is rising steadily as I turn
in, and the ship is rolling deep. The waves loom up, white-crested,
snap sullenly, and surge away aft. A deeper roll, the sea crashes
against my ports, and I screw them tighter. I think we are to have a
bad night of it. As I draw my curtain I catch sight of a letter on my
drawer-top, and I sink back with a sigh of content. "A grey eye or
so!"