still very hot. We are in the doldrums. The word “doldrums” conjures
up visions of adventure, of pirates, of Spanish galleons, of frigates
fighting privateers, and of Marryat’s characters.
I don’t believe a man who is not a sailor can write a really good book
about the sea. The knowledge involved is so intimate, and requires
years of soaking in. There are, of course, exceptions. Shakespeare
has led some people to believe that, besides being a lawyer, a Lord
Chancellor, and a woman, he was also a sailor. Rudyard Kipling, I
should say, could deceive the elect, and surely “Captains Courageous”
is one of the very best sea-stories ever written. “Treasure Island” is
an adventure book, and a masterpiece, but then it really deals very
little with the sea. Turn to Marryat: what a difference there is
between him and the amateur sea-writer! You feel that the sea is his
whole life; he lays bare the very pulse of the machine of sea-life.
I wish some of the great novelists had spent their early years on a
training-ship. I wonder what would have been the result had this been
the fate of George Meredith, for instance. I think it would have made
his style more lucid; but perhaps not. Can you imagine a ship of whom
the skipper was George Meredith, the first mate Henry James, the second
mate Thomas Hardy, the purser Bernard Shaw, the ship’s cook G. K.
Chesterton, and the steward Max Beerbohm? I can imagine the following
conversation taking place:--
_Scene: Deck of a Ship in the Indian Ocean_
CAPTAIN MEREDITH (_to First Mate James_): I think we had better fiddle
harmonics on the strings of the mainsail.
FIRST MATE JAMES: I mentioned to you, sir, the last time that we
somewhat infelicitously met, that I intended to appeal, with a
dozen differential precautions, to another and probably more closely
qualified meteorologic authority on the subject of the Second Mate’s
whimsical, wanton, perhaps fortunate but so far unconfirmed and
unqualified change of course, and indeed, if I may venture without
presumption, and at the risk of incurring the suspicion of undue
parenthesis, and of an almost tremulous desire to say everything, I
would, and indeed I had done so already, but for a fugitive shade
of displeasure on your eyebrows, I would adumbrate the shadow of a
surmise, that, faced as we are--
CAPTAIN MEREDITH (_impatiently_): The young who fear to enter the
forest of advice do so at the cost of losing their way in the lane
that knows no ending.
(_Enter Ship’s Cook Chesterton_)
COOK CHESTERTON: The Purser complains of the pea-soup. He says it is
not fit for a dog. It is true. It is not fit for a dog, but the whole
soul and glory of this fast and frantic life is to eat and to enjoy
food that a dog rejects. He doesn’t see that it is the dog who is
wrong.
PURSER SHAW: I never said that the dog was wrong in his choice of
food. I have no objection to eating dog biscuit; what I do object to
is eating dog soup.... What I do object to is eating a soup which
professes to be made of vegetables and in reality is made of dog. I
see no moral objection to cannibalism. I have no moral objection to
eating shoulder of boatswain; but I do object to the old-fashioned
superstition of believing that soup is still made of fresh peas when
_it isn’t_. That soup was made of old flesh. If you don’t believe me,
ask the steward. Here, Steward.
(_Enter Steward Beerbohm_)
CAPTAIN MEREDITH: Our battle is ever between undeserved rewards and
stolen fruits. What say you, Steward?
STEWARD BEERBOHM: Let us forget these bickerings and turn ourselves
lightly to the thought of home, of Piccadilly, of the artificial
haunts and the gaudy hostels, where indifferent cooks and careless
waiters proffer inartistically prepared _mets_ to the blasé, the
faded and the jaded and the new rich, who partake of it with feigned
satisfaction, and pay for it with a faint but exquisite pleasure in
knowing that the bill is more than they can afford.
PURSER SHAW: Your Piccadilly is here and now. I venture to submit
that the Steward is an incurable romantic. Now romance in food is
preposterous.
COOK CHESTERTON: There is nothing so romantic as food, nothing so
poetic as roast beef, nothing so fantastic as plum-pudding, nothing so
lyrical as eggs and bacon, nothing in cant modern sense so artistic as
a mutton chop, nothing so dreamy as toasted cheese.
PURSER SHAW: Exactly. You are still infected with the poison of your
nurseries and the sentiment of Christmas. I have exploded Christmas. I
have annihilated the nursery.
STEWARD BEERBOHM: I think Christmas very quaint and charming, and a
nursery, conducted according to the principles of the early years of
Victoria the First, a place of dainty manners and delicate precepts
and wistful rhymes. I would not forget them for anything.
FIRST MATE JAMES: The word nursery, now you speak it, throws a
curious thrill through the lining, so to speak, of the psychological
situation. We might, in fact, in such a case even follow the steward
into another and no less refined a speculation, the question of
whether the nursery, the sanest seat of moral ethics, might not, after
all, be the high final if somewhat narrow circle of all ultimate--that
is to say--
CAPTAIN MEREDITH: To have the sense of the eternal in the nursery is
nothing. To have had it is the beginning of wisdom. But let us rather
put off discussion of the theme, until round the mahogany we can
broach a bottle of the Old Widow, nay rather, Hermitage--ah! that was
a great wine--
STEWARD BEERBOHM: The suggestion of asceticism in the name, blent with
the sensuality of the thing, heightens its charm. Who would not be a
hermit, and dwell in one of those rococo palacules built for weary
monarchs in an age of scepticism, flute-playing, and minuets?
(_Enter Second Mate Hardy_)
SECOND MATE HARDY: The spirit of the years is looking down upon our
ship with an ironical smile. O Wessex, Wessex! Would that I could see
Stonehenge and a large red moon rising over the plain.
CAPTAIN MEREDITH: I am glad to be away from the island of chills and
the _informes hiemes_.
PURSER SHAW: Sir, with all due respect, I cannot allow this digression
to continue. No Englishman can talk consecutively for more than two
minutes on the same subject.
COOK CHESTERTON: That is why the Irish have conquered England.
CAPTAIN MEREDITH: Observe the Southern Cross, if indeed that be the
Southern Cross, hanging like a jeweled hilt in the spheral blue--
STEWARD BEERBOHM: Pretty little trinket! Is it a brooch or an
aigrette? Methinks a device of Cartier--
CAPTAIN MEREDITH: Those stars are pebbles on the silvery wheel-course
of the chariot of the moon.
SECOND MATE HARDY: Pitiless, inflexible stars, thousands and thousands
of millions of miles away.
PURSER SHAW: Don’t you believe it. That’s one of the lies men of
science tell us.
COOK CHESTERTON: It doesn’t matter if the stars are twenty miles off,
or twenty millions of miles off. The point about the stars is that
they are stars.
(_Enter an Ordinary Seaman_)
ORDINARY SEAMAN: Please, sir, the ship is sinking.
SECOND MATE HARDY: I knew it! O Irony!
PURSER SHAW: Then we shall have to eat roast boatswain after all.
FIRST MATE JAMES: If I might hazard a suggestion, without of course
trying to grasp any impertinent or rather importunate shadow of a
scheme--
ORDINARY SEAMAN: The cabin boy has escaped in the galley.
CAPTAIN MEREDITH: O brave!
STEWARD BEERBOHM: Ouf!
(_The ship sinks with all hands._)
[Illustration: THERE IS NOTHING SO ROMANTIC AS FOOD]
* * * * *
To-night (when is it? I have lost count of time, but I know it is
still July) one of the officers told me a yarn. It was his own ghost
story, and it was ultimately spoiled for him, just as happened in the
case of Kipling, when he heard phantom billiard players playing all
night and found out the next day that the noise was caused by a rat and
a loose window-sash. This is the story; but I shall spoil it in the
telling because to tell a sea-yarn you must be a sailor.
The ship was sailing somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope. It was
dirty weather and the sailor who was on watch came and reported to the
officer that there was a ghost in the sea, for’ard.
The officer sent him away, but he returned almost immediately and
reported that the ghost was still there.
The officer said rude things, and added that he had better go aloft and
watch the ghost from there. Another man was sent to replace the craven,
and all was calm for a while, when suddenly this second sailor came
back, pale with fear, and said that a woman was rising through the mist
from the sea. Some one else was sent to replace this man, and the ghost
had such an effect upon him that he fell down and broke his leg. Then
the captain came on deck and the officer reported the state of affairs
to him. He went forward and came back saying, “It is a ghost.” Then,
being a religious man, he fetched a Bible and tried to exorcise the
ghost by reading the Scripture.
While this was going on, the officer who told me the story went
forward, and there, as plain as a pikestaff, in the murky mist, he saw
a white woman slowly rise in the swell and then disappear. Paralysed
with horror, he stood looking at the sea, and the woman rose once more;
and then, his fear left him, and he realized that it was the figurehead
of the ship which had got knocked off.
But I have spoiled that story. I have merely told the bare facts; what
you want is the whole thing; the dialogue, the details; the technical
terms.
From Colombo to Fremantle is probably the most monotonous part of the
voyage. The only object of interest is the albatross, but as nobody
shot one, with a crossbow, no untoward events happened.
_Fremantle: July_
Fremantle is the least attractive of ports. You are not meant to stay
there. You are meant to go on to Perth. Nevertheless, it was my first
sight of an Australian city. It struck me as being in some ways rather
like a Russian provincial town; this is not odd, because Russia is
a country of colonists. What differentiates a Russian city from an
Australian--and indeed from any other city--is the churches with their
gilded spires and blue cupolas and their Byzantine shape.
At Fremantle the firemen went on shore--against orders. They drank
to their hearts’ content, and came back in a state of truculent
inebriation, as did many of the steerage passengers. We left Fremantle
in the evening. There was a strong wind blowing. Two little tugs were
doing their best to pull us out of the narrow harbour. They could
scarcely pull their own weight; and then one of the hawsers broke. We
drifted to port where alongside of the wharf some cargo steamers lay at
anchor.
“Hullo!” said somebody; “we shall only just do it.”
The passengers became interested.
Then it became evident that we weren’t going just to do it; and we
went--_crunch! crunch!_--into the steamers alongside the wharf,
carrying away the wooden gear they had to put cattle in.
Then began a slow battle of the tugs against the wind; whenever we
seemed to be moving to starboard, the wind brought us back again to
the wharf. It looked at one moment as if we were going to be there all
night. Two of the firemen were fighting forward. Then the wind dropped
a little, our own engines began to work, and we steamed safely out of
the harbour.
We did hardly any damage to the ship against which we crunched, except
carrying away that wooden gear; but the moment any little incident
of that kind happens in a ship, it makes you realize instantly how
disagreeable a real accident would be. These large ships look so
helpless under such circumstances: and after all, when accidents
happen, they happen, whether a ship is in harbour or in midocean,
whether she is large or small: witness the Royal George and the
Titanic.
_Adelaide: July_
We reached Adelaide on a Saturday night, and on Sunday morning I went
on shore and saw for the first time the dark-brown colouring, the
scrub, and the gum-trees of Australia. It was supposed to be winter;
but it was what we call in England early spring, because the almond
trees were in full bloom. The atmosphere was dazzingly clear but cold.
The whole colour and nature of the place, with its dark evergreens,
brown earth, luxuriant winter vegetation, and its blue and lilac hills
in the distance, and its limpid sky, reminded me of the south of France
in winter; but Australia has a peculiar atmosphere of its own which,
if properly painted, ought to make the fortune of a painter. There are
some very clever Australian painters.
Adelaide is called the “Garden City” of Australia. It deserves the
name, for it looks like a garden even in winter. The hotels are good,
the streets spacious and wide boulevards, and there is the most
beautifully situated steeplechase course I have ever seen. It being
Sunday, everything was shut: this made occupation in the city less
interesting than it might have been, and it was too cold to motor into
the hills.
At Adelaide fourteen firemen left the ship forever. The trouble about
firemen on the mail steamers that go to Australia is that they are
white men. They cannot stand the heat of the tropics and they do not
earn a living wage.
“Who,” as the chief engineer said to me, “would not be a fireman in
the Red Sea in July, when the temperature is 120 in the shade? And who
would not be a man who has to look after firemen?”
One cannot travel on a big liner without being amazed, or rather
aghast, at the conditions under which the crew and the stewards live in
the merchant service, and the terms under which the officers serve, so
that one wonders how it happens that any one goes to sea; and one is
inclined almost to agree with Dr. Johnson’s opinions on the subject.
“A ship,” he said, “is worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better
air, better company, better conveniences of every kind; and a ship has
the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a
sea-life they are not fit to live on land.”
“Then,” said Boswell, “it would be cruel in a father to breed his son
to the sea.”
“It would be cruel,” said Johnson, “in a father who thinks as I do. Men
go to sea before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and
when they come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is
then too late to choose another profession; as, indeed, is generally
the case with men when they have once engaged in any particular way of
life.”
But what is wrong with the officer’s life in the merchant service? it
will be asked.
The answer is that he is miserably underpaid. In some cases he gets
less than an able seaman gets in Australia. He has to buy linen, his
uniform, many pairs of whites. His work is one of great responsibility.
A captain when he has worked for twenty years gets no pension. Talk
with any officer in the merchant service and his advice to any one who
thinks of going to sea is, “Don’t.”
As to the men, a sailor’s life in a liner is about the same as a
sailor’s life anywhere, but the accommodation of the stewards is
miserable. The “glory-hole” where they sleep crowded together has an
almost incredible insufficiency of space and air. And a first-class
steward has to keep himself neat and clean: besides which he is
extremely hard-worked.
Talking of the recent dock strike in London with one of the stewards,
he told me they didn’t want to come out in sympathy with the strikers,
because they got absolutely nothing by it. They were most of them made
to come out on strike, with no prospect of any betterment in matters
which concerned them.
I don’t believe the stewards’ accommodation in a ship is a bit better
than it was forty years ago.
_Melbourne: July_
I practically only had a glimpse of Melbourne; a drive through the
city, a visit to a newspaper office and to some of the shops, a walk
through the park in the twilight, a dinner with a friend, and a drive
in a taxi back to the harbour.
I was struck by the mildness of the climate; but I was told that up
till then the weather had been very cold. I was struck here again by
the softness and peculiar luminous quality of the atmosphere; by the
size of the city, which seemed quite enormous; a handsome city, with
regular streets, tall buildings, and a multitude of cars.
_Sydney: August 2_
We entered the bay in the dawn--or rather before the dawn; it was very
misty; we moved in a vague twilight of blue shadows. I got up to see
the bay, but you could see nothing distinctly, nothing but mist and
blue shadows; the whole thing very unearthly and beautiful. I went back
to my bunk, intending to get up again in half an hour’s time, when it
was lighter. But I went to sleep, and when I woke up again we were
right against the wharf.
You could hear the bugles from a British man-of-war, the Drake. It was
a brilliant, warm, delicious day.
I spent a whole day in the city of Sydney, exploring the stores, riding
about aimlessly in the cars. I had luncheon at the Australian Hotel.
The waiters were dressed as stewards, and, indeed, many of them are
ex-stewards. I thought the food excellent. I visited two excellent
bookstores.
[Illustration: IN SYDNEY I FOUND THE MEN IN THE BOOKSTORES ABNORMALLY
INTELLIGENT]
When you go to a bookstore in London and ask for any book, you are
told they haven’t got it. Here in Sydney I found the men in the stores
abnormally intelligent. You could even get different kinds of books
written by the same author, which is a difficult feat anywhere. Most
booksellers think that if a man writes a book on, say, poultry, it
is preposterous to ask for a work of his on political economy or
step-dancing. And yet it happens that many writers write books on
different subjects--Andrew Lang, for instance. We received the sad
news of the death of Andrew Lang at Fremantle. Andrew Lang is an
author who spent the large capital of his wit, his learning, his wide
sympathies, royally and generously without stint; he was a master of
English prose, and some of the best pieces of prose he ever wrote were
flung into leaders in the “Daily News.” Those which were afterwards
collected in a book called “Lost Leaders” make the most delightful
reading. He wrote just as well and just as wittily on street noises
or midsummer heat as on Homer, the Young Pretender, or Joan of Arc. He
was profoundly unprovincial; he had a fine and rare quiet appreciation
of French poetry; he could write ghost stories, fairy tales, doggerel;
he was a supreme dialectician, an amusing parodist, a prince of letter
writers, as well as a poet;--perhaps he was above all things a poet.
The following translation of Rufinus’ verses to Rhodocleia, sending her
a wreath, is a good example of his verse. He has turned an exquisite
Greek poem into an exquisite English poem.
“Ah, Golden Eyes, to win you yet,
I bring mine April coronet.
The lovely blossoms of the spring
For you I weave, to you I bring
These roses with the lilies set,
The dewy dark-eyed violet,
Narcissus, and the wind-flower wet:
Wilt thou disdain mine offering?
Ah, Golden Eyes!
Crowned with thy lover’s flowers, forget
The pride wherein thy heart is set,
For thou, like these or anything,
Hast but a moment of thy spring,
Thy spring, and then--the long regret!
Ah, Golden Eyes!”
To go back to Sydney and the stores. The trouble is I cannot remember
either of their names. I had dinner at a restaurant called the Palace
Hotel, and after dinner I visited the office of the Sydney “Herald,”
where I spent a very pleasant time. I had already been met by two
interviewers in the morning, and they asked me whether I was going to
write anything about Australia. I said No, that I had no intention of
so doing, as I did not believe in writing seriously about a country
where one doesn’t make a proper stay. Practically I saw nothing of
Australia; but I suppose there is no harm in writing these notes--the
mere rough impressions of a fugitive traveller.
Although I was only twelve hours in Sydney, I had occasion to notice
the hospitality of the people. What struck me also was the life and
gaiety of the place.
The next morning, which was Saturday, I had to leave the liner, which
had been my home for the last six weeks, and embark on the Maunganui
for Wellington, whither I was bound.
The Maunganui, which belongs to the Union Steamship Company, is a new
vessel, and quite extraordinarily comfortable. The voyage from Sydney
to Wellington takes from Saturday to Wednesday, but sometimes if the
weather is bad it takes longer.
As we steamed out of Sydney, I at last had a view of the famous bay,
and it exceeded all my expectations: the colouring is so rich, the
lines and shape of the coast are so nobly planned, and the sky and the
sea are so intoxicatingly bright, fresh, and dazzling. I am sorry for
people who are disappointed in Sydney.
_On Board the Maunganui: August_
The ship is crowded with passengers. There is a very comfortable
smoking-room on the upper deck. The ship is beautifully clean and
new-looking. She is a new ship. She made her first voyage in February,
1912.
There are on board fifty “boys” who are going to Buenos Ayres. There
are engineers. As for the rest of the passengers, there are many men,
many women, and many children. The sea is unusually smooth--unusually,
that is to say, for this part of the ocean, which I am told is
generally rough.
I settle myself down to read O’Brien’s “Life of Parnell,” one of the
best biographies in the English language.
I think a ship is the pleasantest place to read in in the world. First,
you have the advantages of being indoors and out of doors at the same
time, if you sit on a deck chair, or in a smoking-room near an open
door. Secondly, you are just sufficiently and not too much interrupted.
You can pause and watch the passengers. You overhear scraps of talk.
You engage yourself in desultory conversation.
But during all this first afternoon I am riveted by the doings of
Parnell--the man who, so cold and aloof, exercised an electric power
over the rest of his fellow creatures: the man who smashed the
machinery of the House of Commons, in order to compel the British to
deal with the Irish question.
I was at school when some of the most stirring acts of that drama were
being played. All schoolboys are, of course, “Conservatives,” and our
schoolmaster was a fanatical Tory. The mere mention of Mr. Gladstone’s
name maddened him, and I remember one day his telling the boys that
he had received a circular from some political Liberal association,
and that he intended to send it back to the secretary with a penny
inside it, so that the sender should have to pay eightpence. This was a
good civic lesson for the young! All the boys professed to be staunch
Tories; but if it was discovered that one’s parents were Liberals, one
was labelled Liberal. This was my unfortunate predicament.
The general election of 1885 took place when I was at school. The Head
Master addressed the school when it began, and he prefaced his speech
by saying, “There are only seven Liberals in the school.” This was nice
for the Liberals.
On the 5th of November an effigy of Chamberlain was burned in the
garden. The effigy bore a large cardboard cow with the words “Three
Acres” written on it. Years afterwards I described this incident in
an article for a London daily. In mentioning Chamberlain I added the
words, “who was at that time a radical.” The editor crossed out these
words. The Conservative readers of this daily were not to be reminded
that Chamberlain had ever been a radical. It seemed almost like
blasphemy to hint at such a thing. And yet it was true. Unless history
be suppressed altogether, the fact will have to go down to posterity
that in 1885 Chamberlain was a radical. It seemed a terrible shame in
those days that one’s parents should be on what, in the opinion of
one’s world, was obviously the wrong side.
English private schools are, or were, the most curious institutions
in the world. The parents of to-day say they are entirely changed and
altered. They may be; but one thing is quite certain, the parents don’t
know. The only people who know are the boys, and they don’t reveal the
secrets of the fortress until they are grown up; but, judging by what
grown-up boys of twenty now tell one, they do not seem to me to be
greatly changed.