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An Ocean Tramp

by William McFee · English · Gutenberg #30648 · 327,471 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: An Ocean Tramp

Author: William McFee


        
Release date: December 11, 2009 [eBook #30648]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OCEAN TRAMP ***




Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









 An Ocean Tramp

 By
 William McFee

 Garden City    New York
 Doubleday, Page & Company
 1924




 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
 AT
 THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.




_Books by William McFee_

 ALIENS
 AN OCEAN TRAMP
 CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER
 CASUALS OF THE SEA
 PORT SAID MISCELLANY




 TO
 A---- R----

 _"She was lovable, and he loved her. But he
 was not lovable, and she did not love him."_

                         --HEINE'S _Reisebilder_




PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION


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
_rôle_ 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 Älborg 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 coördinate 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 rôle. 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 naïve 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.




PREFACE[A]

[Footnote A: Preface to the first edition.]


As I sit, this hot July day, by my window on the Walk, while the two
streams, of traffic and of Thames, drift past me, I think of the man
who was my friend, the man who loved this scene so well.

And he is dead. In my hand, as I write, lie his last written words, a
hasty scribble ere the steamer left port on her voyage across the
Atlantic. He is busy, as is evident by the greasy thumb-mark on the
corner. He sat down in the midst of his work to send a last line to
his friend. There is the inevitable joke at the expense of "his friend
the Mate," that individual being in a towering passion with a certain
pig which had escaped from his enclosure. This same pig, he declares,
is some previous First Officer, who had been smitten by Circe for
incontinence, and now wanders even from his sty! But I cannot go on in
this way, for he is dead, poor lad, and I shall not see him again.

To those men who have wedded early I can never hope to explain the
deep-rootedness of such a friendship as ours. It was, to me, as though
my own youth were renewed in more perfect design. Never again shall I
experience that exquisite delight with which one sees a youth reach
post after post along the ways of life and thought, reach out eagerly
to field on field of knowledge, through which one has tramped or
scampered so many years before. With something of wonder, too, was I
inspired to see so young a man lead a life so perfectly balanced, so
exquisitely sensitive to every fine masculine influence. Possessing to
an unusual degree that rare temperament which we call culture, he
entered joyously into all that life offered to him, impatient only of
hypocrisy and what he called "the copiously pious." Many misunderstood
this phase of his character, mistaking for coarseness what was really
a very fine love of honesty in thinking.

Of his antecedents I have often wished to know something, but it was
his whim to treat personal details in a very general way. He would
maintain obstinately that he himself was the most interesting person
he had ever met, because, he would add, he knew so little about
himself! When pressed, he would say, "My forefathers plowed the soil,
my father plowed the ocean, I myself am the full corn in the ear." As
to his childhood, he rarely mentioned it save in a cynical manner,
indicating indisputably enough that all had not gone well.

"In the beginning," I heard him tell a religious person, "In the
beginning my mother bore me. When I was a child I was wont to bore my
mother. Now we bore each other." That this was primarily intended to
shock our friend's devotional sensibilities I do not doubt, but I
imagine it contained some small truth all the same. I think he
rather shrank from personalities, resolutely refusing even to be
photographed, hating that process with an unexampled vehemence strange
in one so modern and so versed in mechanical and chemical science.
"I!" he would rage. "What have _I_ done to merit portraiture? Have I
builded a city, or painted a masterpiece, or served my country, or
composed an iliad?" Again, "Better a single faulty _human_ effort than
the most perfect photograph ever developed."

Scanty indeed, therefore, did I find the materials with which to
fashion an introduction to this book. With the exception of one or two
pertinent fragments among his manuscripts, fragments more valuable to
a critic than a biographer, I was unrewarded. One thing, however, was
impressed upon me by my search. Here, at any rate, was a man developed
to the full. Here was a man whose culture was deep and broad, whose
body was inured to toil, whose hands and brains were employed in doing
the world's work. I have read in books vehement denials of such a
one's existence. He himself, in citing Ruskin, seemed to be sceptical
of any one man becoming a passionate thinker and a manual worker. But
I have often heard him in close converse with some old shopmate,
passing hour after hour in technical reminiscences and descriptions;
then, upon the entrance of some artist or _litterateur_, plunge into
the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or
original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some
happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on
either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or the Charybdis of foolish
humility.

I must insist on this fact at all events: he was not merely a clever
young man of modern ideas. "London is paved and bastioned with clever
young men," he would snarl. His aversion to the impossible type of
cultured nonentities was almost too marked. His passion for thinking
as an integral part of life placed him beyond these, among a rarer,
different class of men, the lovers of solitude. It came to view in
various ways, this fine quality of intellectual fibre. And, indeed,
he--who had in him so much that drove him towards the fine Arts, yet
could go out to earn his bread upon the waters, dwelling among those
who had no glimmering of the things he cared for--was no slippered
mouther of Pater and Sainte-Beuve but a strong spirit, confident in
his own breadth of pinion, courageous to let Fate order his destiny.

Another outcome of my search for light was a conviction of the
importance of his theory of art. I might almost say his religion
of art, inasmuch as he had no traffic with anything that was not
spontaneous, effervescing. To him a hammer and a chisel were actual
and very real, and the plastic art appealed especially to him in its
character of _smiting_. To smite from the stone, to finish with all a
craftsman's cunning care--there seemed to him real joy in this; and so
I think he felt the influence of art dynamically, maintaining always
that the life-force is also the art-force, and remains constant
throughout the ages. So, I imagine, he reasoned when he wrote the
following verses, only to fling them aside to be forgotten:

 _An Author, Sitting to a Sculptor, Speaks His Mind._

     And yet you call yourself a sculptor, sir?
       You with your tape a-trailing to and fro,
     Jotting down figures, frowning when I stir,
       Measuring me across the shoulders, so!
     And yet you are an artist, they aver,
       Heir to the crown of Michelangelo?

     I cannot think--eh, what? I ought to think?
       How will you have me? Shall I sit at ease,
     Staring at nothing thro' the eyelids' chink,
       Coining new words for old philosophies?
     Aye, so I sit until the pale stars wink
       And vanish ere the early morning breeze.

     Sculpture is dead, I say! We have no men
       To match the mighty masters of the past:
     I've read, I've seen their works; the acumen
       Of Learning on their triumph I have cast.
     Divine! Colossal! Tongue nor pen
       Can tell their beauty, O Iconoclast!

     Ah, now you're modelling--in the soft clay!
       In that prosaic task where is the glow
     Of genius, as in great Lorenzo's day,
       When, solitary in his studio,
     Buonarotti, in his "terrible way,"
       Smote swift and hard the marble, blow on blow?

     One moment while I ask you, earnestly,
       Where is the splendour of the Dorian gone,
     The genius of him whose mastery
       Outshines the classic grace of Sicyon,
     Whose art can show Death lock'd with Life, the cry,
       The shuddering moan of poor Laocoön?

_The Sculptor continues to model swiftly while the sitter remains
motionless, watching him._

     That's good, sir, good! I'll wait till you have done:
       We men of letters are a crabbéd race;
     Often we're blind with staring at the sun;
       And when the evening stars begin their race,
     We miss their beauty, we, who creep and run
       Like beetles o'er a buried Greek god's face.

I am reluctant to explain one of the main _motifs_ of this young man's
life as "an unfortunate love affair." Indeed, apart from his frank
avowal of the wandering fever in his blood, I am grown to believe that
it was the very reverse of unfortunate for him. It brought him, as
such things do, face to face with Realities, and showed him, sharply
enough, that at a certain point in a man's life there is a Gate,
guarded by the Fates, whose questions he must answer truthfully, or
turn sadly aside into the vague thickets of an aimless existence. And
never did there live a youth more sincere in his thought. I know
nothing more typical of him than his resolute refusal to sit for his
portrait until he had _done_ something memorable. "What!" he would
cry. "Why, the milk-man, who, I heard, has just had twins, is more
worthy of that high honour than I. He has _done_ something in the
world!"

And now he is dead, and doing and not doing are beyond his power. That
the sea whereon he was born should bring him his death was fitting.
Often he would urge his horror, not of death, but of Christian burial.
To be boxed up in the midst of mummeries and lies--he would start up
and pace the floor, the sweat standing on his face. Grimly enough,
Fate took him at his word, flung him suddenly into eternity, the
rushing of the wind his only requiem, the coastwise lights and the
morning star the only watchers of his end.

To the orthodox sentiment sudden death may seem a very horrible sort
of end to a promising life. But, as I sit by my window on the Walk,
while the tides of Thames and traffic flow swiftly by, and the blue
evening mist comes down over the river, transforming dingy wharf and
factory into fairy palace and phantom battlement, it seems to me that
my friend died fitly and well, in the midst of Realities, recking
little that the love he thought secure had passed irrevocably from
him, but never swerving in fidelity to his mistress or devotion to his
friend.

The air grows chilly, and night has fallen over the river.

 _Chelsea._




AN OCEAN TRAMP




I


This evening, as the Italian boatman rowed me across the harbour of
Livorno, and the exquisite loveliness of the night enfolded me, I
thought of you. It may be that the long curving line of lights which
marked the _Molo Nuovo_ reminded me of the Embankment by our windows,
and so carried my mind on to him who waits for his _Vanderdecken_ to
return. Around me loomed the hulls of many steamers, their dark sides
relieved by glowing port-holes, while across the water came the hoarse
calls of the boatmen, the sound of oars, music, and the light laughter
of women. Far down the harbour, near the Castello, a steamer's winches
rattled and roared in irregular gusts of noise. By the Custom House a
steam yacht, gleaming ghostly white in the darkness, lay at rest. And
so, as the boat slipped through the buoys, and the molten silver
dripped from the oars, I thought of you, my friend at home, and of my
promise that I would tell you of the life of men in a cargo-tramp.

I propose, as I go on from sea to sea, to tell, in the simplest
language in my power, of the life that is around me, of the men among
whom I toil. I shall not tell you of these fair towns of the Southern
Sea, for you have travelled in years gone by. I shall not prattle of
the beauties of Nature, for the prattle is at your elbow in books. But
I shall--nay, must, for it is my use and habit--tell you about myself
and the things in my heart. I shall be, not a hero talking about men,
but a man talking about heroes, as well as the astonishing beings who
go down to the sea in ships, and have their business in great waters.

To you, therefore, these occasional writings will be in somewise
addressed. You are my friend, and I know you well. That alone is to me
a mystic thread in the skein of my complex life, a thread which may
not be severed without peril. You, moreover, know me well, or perhaps
better, inasmuch as I am but passing the periods of early manhood,
while you are in the placid phases of an unencumbered middle-age. So,
in speaking of the deep things of life, I may leave much to be taken
for granted, as is fitting between friends.

I offer no apology, moreover, for the form of these Letters from an
Ocean Tramp. Even if I unwisely endeavoured to hide their literary
character under a disguise of colloquialisms and familiar references
to personal intimacies, I should fail, because, as I have just said,
you know me well. In your private judgments, I believe, I am allocated
among those who are destined to set the Thames on fire. In plainer
words, you believe that I have an ambition. This is true, and so I
make no attempt to conceal from you the ulterior design of these
essays. Ere you have read one of them, you will perceive that I am
writing a book.

I shall take no umbrage at the failure of my communications to call
forth replies. I know you to be a bad correspondent, but a valuable
friend. I know that your attitude toward a letter addressed to you is
that of a mediæval prince toward a recalcitrant prisoner--viz., get
all the information possible out of him, and then commit him to the
flames. Possibly, when I have attained to a deeper knowledge of the
spirit of the Middle Ages, I shall also have discovered the motives
for this curious survival of barbarism in your character. I can only
hope humbly that these papers, armed with their avowed literary
import, will not share the fate of the commoner envoys passing through
your hands, but will be treated as noble ambassadors rather than as
hapless petitioners, not merely escaping the flames of oblivion, but
receiving safe conduct, courteous audience, and honourable lodging.




II


I suppose we may say of everyone, that he sooner or later falls a
victim to the desire to travel, with as much truth as we say, far more
often, that he falls a victim to love. However that may be, I claim no
special destiny when I say that I have been mastered by both passions,
except perhaps that they culminated in my case simultaneously.

I must go back to the time when I was some six years old to find the
first faint evidences of the rover in me. At that time we lived almost
at the foot of that interminable thoroughfare, the Finsbury Park Road,
next door to a childless dame whose sole companion was a pug of
surpassing hideousness of aspect, and whose sole recreation was a
morning stroll in Finsbury Park with this pug. How I came to form a
third person in these walks I cannot quite remember but I can imagine.
At the age of six I was a solemn child, unclean in habits, consorting
with "grown-ups," and filled with an unsocial hatred for the baby
whose matutinal ablutions were consummated at the same hour at which
the old lady usually took her walk. I can remember that I was supposed
to assist in some way at those ablutions, probably to hold the
mottled soap, which curiously resembled the infant's limbs when
pinched with cold; and so, I suppose, I would steal out and join the
lady and her dog, walking a little to one side as we drifted slowly up
the dull suburban street into the park. Sometimes we went as far as
the lake, and I have faint memories of a bun, purchased by the dame,
and munched by me as we watched the gardeners trimming the beds. I do
not wish to suggest that this lady was my first love--I have never
carried my senophile proclivities to that extent. She was, to me, the
antithesis of mottled soap and cradle-rocking, and as such she lives
in my memory. I am also grateful to her for giving me my first glimpse
of a world outside the front door; an ugly world, it is true, a world
of raucous bargaining and ill-bred enjoyment, but a world
nevertheless.

Why should I tell of so trivial an incident? Bear with me a moment.

Since I have been at sea I have often reflected upon the fact that
many phases of my life are even now going on, quite heedless of
my absence, quite apathetic of my very existence, in fact. How
marvellous, it seems to me, to know that life at my old school is
proceeding upon exactly the same lines as when I was there! At this
moment I can see, in imagination, the whole routine; and I can tell
at any time what the school is doing. Again, I know precisely the
goings-in and the comings-out of all the staff at my old employer's;
picture to myself with ease what is happening at any instant. More
wonderful still, I know what my friend is doing at this moment. I know
that he is seated in his room at the Institute, talking to our friends
(perchance of me), ere they descend to their lectures at seven
o'clock. At ten, while I am "turned in," he will be leaving the
Institute, and the 'bus will put him down at his favourite hostelry.
At this moment he is smoking a cigarette! But then, of course, he is
always smoking a cigarette!

It is a far cry from a stealthy stroll with an old woman in Finsbury
Park to a twenty-thousand-mile tramp in a freighter, and yet one is
the logical outcome of the other, arrived at by unconscious yet
inevitable steps. Listen again.

At a later period, when I had discovered that tools were a necessary
complement to my intellectual well-being, I brought my insatiable
desire to _make_ something to the assistance of my equally insatiable
desire to _go_ somewhere. From a sugar-box and a pair of perambulator
wheels I fashioned a cart, between the shafts of which I travelled
many leagues into the wilds of Middlesex and Essex. "Leagues" must be
understood in the sense in which Don Quixote would have used the word.
I do not suppose I ever traversed more than eight or ten miles at a
time. But never, while the desire to go out and see is living within
me, shall I forget how, one breathless August day, when the air was
heavy with the aroma of creosoted sleepers, my small brother and I
stared through the gates of a level crossing, and saw Epping Forest in
the blue distance! O phantoms of Cortes, Balboa, and De Soto, wert
thou there? O Sir Francis, hadst thou that thrill when

     "_Drake went down to the Horn,
     And England was crowned thereby_"?

But I grow magniloquent. My object is attained if I can but show that
when my friend took me under his wing at the Institute long years
agone, when the innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might
have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without incongruity,
drifted away from text-books of mechanics, and sat down with Schiller,
Ducoudray, and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a spirit
there boiled under that demure disguise of retiring scholarship--a
spirit fired with an untamable passion for looking over the
back-garden wall!

Even perambulator wheels give out, however. I forget whether the
wheels of my little cart failed before my mother's patience, or the
reverse. I was growing away from those tiny journeys; my head bulged
with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish acquired during long hours of
unsociable communion with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew
the date of Evil Merodach's accession to the Assyrian throne, but I
did not know who killed Cock Robin. I knew more than Keats about the
discovery of the Pacific, but I did not know Keats. I knew exactly how
pig-iron was smelted, but I did not know the iron which enters into
the soul. I knew how to differentiate between living and non-living
matter, but I did not know that I was alive. Then a new heaven and a
new hell opened before me; I was sent away to school.

Concerning school and, after school, apprenticeship, I shall
not speak. Neither mind nor body can wander far in those humane
penitentiaries called schools. I had fed myself with _History_ since I
had learned, painfully enough, to read, and here at school I found I
knew nothing. What did it matter? The joy of knowing the name of the
wife of Darius, of Lucan, of Cæsar, was mine alone. I wove stories
about Roxana and Polla, but I doubt if any one ever wove stories about
the Conventicle Act, or the Petition of Rights, or the Supremacy of
the Pope, as told in a school history. I often wonder that boys do not
grow up to hate their country, when they are gorged with the horrible
trash in those yellow volumes.

I once read of a little boy who killed himself after reading "The
Mighty Atom." I believe many people deplored this, and expressed
aversion to the book in consequence. That is proper; but suppose the
school history had related the story of "The Little Princes in the
Tower" with the same power and intensity which Corelli employs in the
"Atom," and suppose the little boy had been so overwhelmed with the
horror and vividness of the historical perspective that he had hanged
himself behind the fourth-form classroom door--well, then, I should
say the remainder of the boys would have learned the reign of Richard
the Third as it has never been learned before or since, and the
unhappy suicide would not have died in vain.

But, as I said, one cannot wander far at school. A schoolmaster once
advised his colleagues to take up some literary hobby--essay writing,
articles for the press, etc.; for, said he, teaching is a narrowing
profession. I wonder if any schoolmaster has ever imagined how
narrowing it is for the boys? Have they never seen the look of abject
boredom creep over the faces of even clever lads as the "lesson"
drones on: "At this period the Gothic style of architecture arose, and
was much used in Northern Europe for ecclesiastical buildings." And
so on, including dates. Whose spirit would not fail? Why not, oh, my
masters, why not use this inborn passion for wandering abroad of
which I write? Why not take that jaded band of youths out across yon
fields, take them to the village church, and _show_ them grinning
gargoyle and curling finial, show them the deep-cut blocks of stone,
show them, on your return, a picture of the Rue de la Grosse Horloge
at Rouen? Would your trade be narrowing then?




III


But the sea!

My friend asked me once, of the Mediterranean--Is it really blue? And
I replied that I could give him no notion of the colour of it. And
that is true. From the real "sea-green" of the shallow North Sea to
the turquoise-blue of the Bay; from the grey-white rush of the
Irish Sea to the clear-cut emerald of the Clyde Estuary; from the
colourless, oily swell of the Equatorial Atlantic to the paraffin-hued
rollers of the Tropic of Cancer, the sea varies as human nature
itself. To the artist, I imagine, no two square miles are alike, no
two sunsets, no two sunrises:

     "_His sea in no showing the same,
     His sea, yet the same in all showing._"

As I climbed the steep side of the almost-empty steamer, lying at the
Tyne-main Buoys, a keen, alert, bearded face looked over the gunwale
above me. I stepped aboard and spoke to the owner of this face. I
said, "Is the Chief aboard?"

"He is not."

"Is the Captain aboard?"

"He is not."

"Then who _is_ aboard?"

"The Mate's aboard."

"Are you the Mate?"

"I am that."

"My name is McAlnwick. I am signing on with this steamer."

"Ye're welcome." And we shook hands.

He is the very image of my old Headmaster, is this mate of the
_Benvenuto_. The trim beard, the keen, blue, deep-set eyes, the
smile--how often have I seen them from my vantage-point at the bottom
of the Sixth Form! On his head is an old uniform cap with two gold
bands and an obliterated badge. He wears a soiled mess-jacket with
brass buttons in the breast-pocket of which I see the mouthpiece of a
certain ivory-stemmed pipe. His hands are in his trouser pockets, and
he turns from me to howl into the cavernous hold some directions to
the cargo-men below. In the gathering gloom of a short January
afternoon, with the rush and roar of the winches in my ears, I stumble
aft to my quarters, thinking pleasantly of my first acquaintance.

And our friendship grows as we proceed. When we have slipped out of
the Tyne one grey evening, when the lights of Shields and Sunderland
die away, we are friends. For, as I prophesied, my whiskey would open
hearts. It was on a cold, bleak morning, ere we left Newcastle, that
I heard a stealthy step down the stairs to my room, and a husky
whisper--had I a nip o' whiskey? Yes, I had a nip. The bottle is
opened, and I fill two glasses. Evidently the First Officer is no
believer in dilution. With a hushed warning of "Ould Maun!" as a dull
snoring comes through the partition, he tosses my whiskey "down his
neck," rubs his stomach, and vanishes like--like a spirit! Later in
the day, as I stare across at some huge ships-of-war (for we are
opposite Elswick now), I hear a voice, a hearty voice, at my elbow.

"Thank ye, Mister McAlnwick, for the whiskey. 'Twas good!"

I express my pleasure at hearing this. He touches me on the shoulder.

"Come down to me berth this evening," he says, "an' we'll have a
_nip_." And I promise.

Perhaps it is the sensation of drinking whiskey with my Headmaster's
double, but I enjoy creeping down the companion-way to the Mate's
room. And I, being of the true line of descent, with my father held
in memory still, am welcome. I am taken into this old sea-dog's
confidence, and we talk. I have learnt, I think, the delicate art of
asking questions of the men who do the world's work. Perhaps because I
have dwelt so long with them, because I love them truly, they tell me
the deep things of their lives. And so you must picture me in the
Mate's room, seated on his settee, while he loads my knees with
photographs of his wife and children. This is Jack, son and heir, in
his Boys' Brigade uniform. He has a flute, too, which he "plays
beautiful, Mr. McAlnwick--beautiful!" Then there is Madge, a sweet
little English maid of fourteen, with a violin: "Her mother to the
life." "Dot" follows, with only her big six-year-old eyes looking out
of curls which are golden. And the Baby on his mother's knee--but I
cannot describe babies. To me they are not beautiful creatures. They
always seem to me, in photographs, to be stonily demanding why they
have been born; and I, wretched man that I am, cannot answer them, for
I do not know. Calypso, too, _not_ "eternally aground on the Goodwin
Sands of inconsolability," interests me, in that I also was mothered
of a sea-wife. A hard life, I imagine, a hard life. I find no delight
in the sea in these mariners. "A Life on the Ocean Wave" was not
written by one who earned his bread from port to port. My friend the
Mate (he has gone on watch now, so I may speak freely) lives for the
future. He holds a master's ticket, yes; but commands do not come to
all. He lives for the time when the insurance money falls in, when he
will sit down in the little house in Penarth where the sun warms the
creeper on the back-garden wall. He will keep chickens, and perhaps
there will be a cucumber frame between the peas and the vegetable
patch, and he will do a little gardening when the weather is fine, and
smoke, and read the shipping news. "And there shall be no more sea."

Not that I would give you to think that a Chief Officer's life is one
of toil. Indeed, on a steamship, while at sea, he has little to do.
His "watch" is a sinecure save in thick weather, and is usually
occupied by day with sundry odd jobs, by night with thoughts of home.
In port he is busy like everybody else; but at sea, in fine weather,
his greatest grievance is the short hours "off" and "on." Our steamer
carries but two deck officers, and these two keep alternate "watch and
watch" throughout the twenty-four hours. This means that his watch
below is all sleep. The Chief Officer comes off at eight p.m., say,
washes himself, smokes a pipe, and "turns in." At eleven-forty-five
the sailor coming on watch at the wheel calls him, and he "turns out."
Nothing can equal the ghastly expression on the faces of men who have
been torn from their sleep at an unnaturally premature hour. They move
along the iron decks like ghosts, peering into one's face like
disembodied spirits seeking their corporeal correlatives, and avoiding
stanchions, chains, and other pitfalls in an uncanny fashion. In the
meantime, the Second Officer drifts "aft" to his bunk for another
four-hour sleep. And so on, day after day, for weeks.




IV


I have this, at any rate, to say of sea-life: a man is pre-eminently
conscious of a Soul. I feel, remembering the blithe positivism of my
early note, that I am here scarcely consistent. As I stood by the rail
this morning at four o'clock--the icy fingers of the wind ruffled my
hair so that the roots tingled deliciously, and a low, greenish
cloud-bank, which was Ireland, lay nebulously against our port bow--I
felt a change take place. It was almost physical, organic. The dawn
grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the coming sun reached out
across the grey wastes of the St. George's Channel. I am loth to use
the trite metaphor of "a spiritual dawn." By a strange twist of
things, my barest hint of a soul within me, that is to say, the
faintest glimmer of the ever-increasing purpose of my being--the
moment it showed through, the outer world, including my own self, had
always greeted it with inextinguishable laughter. Perhaps because the
purpose was always so very immature, so very uncertain. I wanted--I
hardly knew what. My ideas of morality were so terrible that I left it
alone, on one side, for a time, and charged full tilt at art. I
shouted that I thought music a disease, and musicians crushed me. I
did not mean that; but I could get no nearer to what I did mean in
any other phrase. I told hard, practical business men that they were
dreamers and visionaries; and they are still dreaming.

But the Angel of the Spirit does not move in any prescribed path, or
make his visits to any time-table. I think I heard the far-off beating
of his wings this morning, as we swept up-channel towards the Clyde,
and I think I was promised deeper knowledge of Love and Life than
heretofore. I know that with the dawn came a sense of infinite power
and vision, as though the cool wind were the rushing music of the
spheres, and the rosy cloudland the outer portals of the Kingdom of
God.

And, indeed, I have had my reward. I had come from Italy, where I had
wandered through churches and galleries, and had seen the supreme
excellence of a generation whose like we shall not see again, and as
we came up that stately firth and discovered a generation as supreme
in their art as the Italians of the sixteenth century were in theirs,
I held my breath.

From Greenock to Glasgow resounded the clangour of hammers and the
thunder of mechanism. Plate by plate, rivet by rivet, and beam by
beam, there grew before my very eyes the shapes of half a hundred
ships. I see more clearly still, now, what I meant by insisting on the
conservation of intellectual energy. My friend points piteously to
past periods, and says, "They can't do it now, old man." And I smile
and point to those steel steamships, growing in grace and beauty as I
watch, and I say, "They couldn't do _that_ then, old man!" Just as the
physical energy in this universe is a definite totality, so is the
intellectual or spiritual energy. The Da Vinci of to-day leaves his
Last Supper undepicted; but he drives a Tube through the London clay.
Cellini no longer casts a Perseus and alternates a murder with a
_Trattato_; he builds engines and railroads and ships. Michael Angelo
smites no sibyls from the living stone, but he has carved the face of
the very earth to his design. And though no fair youth steps forth to
paint the unearthly nimbus-light around the brows of his beloved
madonna, I count it fair exchange that from every reef and point of
this our sea-girt isle there shines a radiance none can watch without
a catching of the breath.




V


It is a far call from such musings to the Skipper, whom I encountered
as I was in the midst of them. It is only the bald truth to say that
I had not then considered him to be a human being. Even now I am
uncertain how to describe him, for we do not meet often. He is a tall,
powerfully built, slow-moving man, strong with the strength of those
who live continually at sea. Something apart from temporary bias made
me look distastefully upon his personality. I resolved to fasten it
upon my dissecting board, and analyse it, relegating it if possible to
its order, genus, and species. Let me try.

A single glance at the specimen before us, gentlemen, tells us that we
have to deal with a remarkable case of arrested development. Although
inexperienced observers might imagine traces of the British colonel,
as found in Pall Mall, in the bristling white moustache, swollen
neck, and red gills, we find neither public school education nor
inefficiency much in evidence anywhere. On the contrary, education
is in a rudimentary condition, though with slightly protuberent
mathematical and fictional glands. Inefficiency, too, is quite absent,
the organ having had but small opportunity to perform its functions.
The subject, we may conclude, gentlemen, has been accustomed to a sort
of mathematical progression and having to ascertain its whereabouts in
the water by "taking the sun." It has been fed chiefly on novels, food
which requires no digestive organs. It has a horror of land generally,
and should never be looked for "on the rocks." You observe this
accumulation of yellow tissue round the heart. The subject is
particularly fond of gold, which metal eventually strangles the heart
and renders its action ineffective and unreliable.

Longfellow, if I remember rightly, drew a very spirited comparison
between the building and launching of a ship and the building and
launching of a state. The state, said he, is a ship. M-yes, in a
poetical way. But no poetry is needed to say that a ship is a state. I
maintain that it is the most perfect state yet conceived; and it is
almost startling to think that so perfect an institution as a ship can
be run successfully without morality, without honesty, without
religion, without even ceremonial--without, in fact, any of those
props usually considered by Tories and Nonconformists to be so vital
to the body-politic.

For, observe, here on this ship we have some forty human beings, each
of whom has certain clearly defined duties to perform, each of whom
owes instant and absolute obedience to his superior officer; each of
whom receives a definite amount of food, drink, tobacco, and sleep
per day; each of whom is bound for a certain period to remain in the
state, but is free to go or stay when that period terminates; each of
whom is at liberty to be of any persuasion he please, of any political
party he please, to be of any nationality he please, provided he speak
the language of the state; each of whom is medically attended by the
state; and, finally, each of whom can snap his fingers at every
Utopia-monger since Plato, and call him a fool who makes paradises for
other fools to dwell in. So, I say, the ship is a perfect state, its
very perfection being attested by the desire of its inhabitants to end
their days elsewhere.

Joking aside, though, I fear my notions of sailor-men have been sadly
jarred since I began to study them. Writing with one eye on this
master-mariner of ours, I call to mind certain conceptions of the
sailor-man which my youthful mind gathered from books and relations.
He was an honest, God-fearing man; slightly superstitious certainly,
slightly forcible in his language at times, slightly garrulous when
telling you about the _Sarah Sands_; but all these were as spots on
the sun. He was just and upright towards all men, never dreamed of
making money "on his own," and read prayers aloud on Sunday morning to
the assembled seamen.

Humph! I own I cannot imagine this skipper reading anything aloud
to his crew except the Riot Act, and he would not get more than
half-way through that if his cartridges were dry. There is a brutal,
edge-of-civilization look in his cold blue eye which harmonizes ill
with the Brixton address on the letters he sends to his wife.

Ah, well! Sometimes, when I think of this man and his like, when I
think of my puny attempts to creep into their skins, I must need
laugh, lest, like Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I
know of him? What is there in my armoury to pierce this impenetrable
outer-man? Once, when I was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an
epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping over an immense
and beautiful mountain, crushing, destroying, manufacturing, and the
burden of their cry was a scornful text of Ruskin's--"We do not come
here to look at the mountain"; and they shouted, "Stand aside." And
then, when the mountain lay blackened, and dead, and disembowelled,
out of the hordes of slaves came a youth who would not work and
thereby lose his soul; so he set out on a pilgrimage. And the burden
of _his_ song was "the hearts of men."

     "_And the cry went up to the roofs again,
     Show me the way to the hearts of men._"

But, alas! by the time I had got back into blank verse again, he had
fallen in love, and as far as I know he lived happy ever after. But I
often think of his clear, boyish voice singing, "Show me the way to
the hearts of men."

Gilbert Chesterton, whose genius I hope my friend will some day
appreciate, once wrote a strange "crazy tale," in which he meets a
madman who had stood in a field; and this seemingly silent pasture had
presented to his ears an unspeakable uproar. And he says, "I could
hear the daisies grow!" Well, I have sometimes thought of that when in
some roaring street of London. Could I but hear men and women think as
they pass along! To what a tiny hum would the traffic fall when that
titanic clangour met my ears! I imagine Walter Pater had this thought
in mind when he says, so finely, of young Gaston de Latour: "He became
aware, suddenly, of the great stream of human tears, falling always
through the shadows of the world."

How good that is! But, alas! So few read Pater. It is true men cannot
possibly read everything. To quote another exquisite thinker, who I
fear drops more and more into oblivion: "A man would die in the first
cloisters" if he tried to read all the books of the world. But it
is strange so few read those eight or nine volumes, so beautifully
printed, which are Pater's legacy to us. How they would be repaid by
the delicate dexterity of his art, the wonderful music of his style!
But I digress.

I have no doubt that many monarchs would envy the life of a steamship
captain at sea. Indeed, his duties are non-existent, his XXXX
responsibility enormous. He bears the same relation to his company
that a Viceroy of India bears to the Home Government. So extended were
his powers that he could take the steamer into a port, sell her cargo,
sell the vessel herself, discharge her crew, and disappear for ever.
It is a sad pill for us sentimentalists that those who live by and on
the sea have less sentiment than any others. These masters are wholly
intent on the things of which money is the exchange. They have
never yet seen "the light that never was, on sea or land." Their
utmost flight above "pickings" and "store commissions" is a morose
evangelicalism, a sort of ill-breeding illumined by the smoky light of
the Apocalypse. But they never relax their iron grasp on this world.
Perhaps because they feel the supernal tugging at them so persistently
they hold the tighter to the tangible. They are ashamed, I think, to
let any divinity show through. "And ye shall be as gods" was not
uttered of them. The _romance_--that is the word!--the _romance_ of
their lives is never mirrored in their souls. And the realisation of
this has sometimes led me to imagine that--it was always so! I mean
that there was nothing poetic to Hercules about the Augean task, when
the pungent smell of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he bent a
sweat-dewed face to that mighty scavenging once more: that there was
nothing poetic to Cæsar about the Rubicon: nothing poetic to Clive
about India. The world seems to have an invincible prejudice against
men who see the romance in the work they are doing. The footballing,
cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works
in an office in Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons's, and plays
football at Shepherd's Bush, sees no romance in his own life, which is
in reality thrilling with adventure, but thinks Captain Kettle the
hero of an ideal existence. Captain Kettle, bringing coal from Dunston
Staiths to Genoa, suffers day after day of boredom, and reads Marie
Corelli and Hall Caine with a relish only equalled by the girl
typewriters in the second-class carriages of the eight-fifteen up from
Croydon or Hampstead Heath. These people cannot see the sunlight of
romance shining on their own faces! I observe in myself a frantic
resentment when I fail to convince the other officers that they are
heroes. They regard such crazy notions as dangerous and scarcely
decent. You can now perceive why religion occasionally gains such a
hold upon these men. To be uplifted about work, or nature, or love,
is derogatory to their dignity as bond-slaves of the industrial world;
but in the realms of the infinite future, in the Kingdom of God, where
"there shall be no more sea," their souls break away from the
harbour-mud, and they put out on the illimitable ocean of belief.




VI


It is so long since I set my hand to paper that I am grown rusty! I
did not write you from Madeira--that is true. One cannot write from
Madeira when "Madeira" means a plunging vortex of coal-dust, a blazing
sun, and the unending roar of the winches as they fish up ton after
ton of coal. Moreover, I was boarded by a battalion of fleas from the
Spanish labourers in my vicinity--fleas that had evidently been
apprenticed to their trade, and had been allowed free scope for the
development of their ubiquitous genius. I looked at the old rascal who
tallied the bags with me, envisaged in parchment, and clothed in
picturesque remnants, and heard his croaking "_Cincuo saco, Señor_,"
or "_Cuarro saco, Señor_," as he bade me note the varying numbers on
the hook, and I wondered inwardly whether the Holy Office had
experimented during the sixteenth century with Spanish fleas, and so
brought them to such an astonishing perfection in the administration
of slow torture. Breeding, I take it, holds good with fleas as with
horses, dogs, etc. Those born of parents with thicker mail, longer
springs, harder proboscis, and greater daring in initiative, would
doubtless be selected and encouraged, if I may say so, to go farther.
It is possible that many famous recantations could be accounted for by
this hypothesis. Galileo, for instance, probably had a sensitive
epidermis which afforded an unlimited field for the exploitation of
Spanish fleas, which formed, according to my theory, an indispensable
item in the torture chest carried by the fraternity in Tuscany.
Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, I imagine to have been a XXXX
dark-skinned heretic, tanned by travel and hardship, and regarding the
aphanipterous insect with the sardonic contempt of one who had lived
in England in the sixteenth century. His own gown probably
contained....

I was roused from these musings by observing four bags come up on the
hook, and hearing them saluted by my picturesque _vis-à vis_ with
"_Cincuo saco, Señor!_" I deserted my theory and hastened to point out
the error of fact. He bowed his head in submission with all the
haughty grace of Old Castile. When out at sea once more, I looked back
along his ancestral line; I saw him in the days of old, marching
through Italy with the Great Emperor, taking part in some murderous
deed that cried to the law for vengeance, flying from Spain in a tall
galleon to still more desperate work upon the high seas, settling in
these pleasant islands with bloody booty in pieces of eight, drifting
down and down to an adobe hut, and an occasional job as sub-deputy
assistant stevedore to a British coal factor. Then he faded from my
sight, and the life of an ocean tramp closed round me once more.




VII


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.




VIII


I remember, in the grey dawn one day last week, my relief sang in my
ear as he wiped his hands after "feeling round," "_Deutschland's_
astern, goin' like fury." "Sure?" I asked. "Only boat with four
funnels in the line," he said. Four funnels! I raced up and aft, and
saw her. Some three miles astern going westward, going grandly. From
each of her enormous funnels belched vast clouds of black smoke till
she looked like some Yorkshire township afloat. Through glasses I
could see the dome of the immense dining saloon, and the myriad
port-holes in her wall-like side. I could see her moving fast, though
so far away. As the head sea caught the massive bows, she never
waited. Her 35,000 h.p. drove her crashing through them, and they
broke high in air in clouds of foam. Splendid! I thought. But my heart
was with those "below." Think of the toil! Six or seven hundred tons
of coal per day is flung into her dozens of furnaces, against our
twenty-five tons. Think of the twenty-odd engineers who scarcely see
their bunks from the Elbe to the Hudson. And, in that cool, grey,
pearly dawn, think of those passengers sleeping in their palatial
state-rooms, with never a thought of the slaves who drive that
monstrous ship across the Atlantic at such an appalling speed. I say
"appalling" because I know. The smoking-room nuisance will say, "Pooh!
My dear fellow, the _Lusitania_ licks us clean with her twenty-five
knots." He is coldly critical because he does not know.

But I digress.

Look around now. You observe we lose very little space in gangways.
Even in front of the engines, where we are walking to and fro, the
space is perilously narrow between the fly-wheel of the reversing
engine and the lathe. Some thirty feet long, this engine-room,
bulkhead to bulkhead, and, save for a recess or two extending to the
ship's skin, penned in between bunkers. Twelve hundred tons of coal,
distributed like a thick wall round us, make the place warm in the
tropics. Forward, the stokeholds, dimly enough lit save when a furnace
door opens and a fiery glow illuminates the bent back and soot-blurred
face of some cosmopolitan fireman. Overhead, each lit by a single
lamp, are the water-gauges--green glass tubes in which the water ebbs
and flows with the motion of the ship.

Well, the time is going fast--'twill soon be four o'clock, eight
bells, and I am relieved. What do I think of on "watch"? That's a
question! The engines chiefly, with an under-current of "other
things." Often and often, in the dark nooks of my dominions, will I
see the glimmering, phantom _light-o'-love_. Sometimes it will come
and sit beside me if all runs smooth, and then I fly across the broad
blue floors of the tropic night sky towards England. Not that my fairy
elf is a fair-weather friend. Through blinding oil and sweat I have
seen grey eyes smile and a white hand beckon. In times of trial and
sore need I have turned desperately towards that faery glimmer, and
never have I come back unencouraged or unrefreshed.

Of my friend, too, I think often, as I know he thinks of me. Of our
dear old rooms on the Walk; of our cosy evenings alone; of our rambles
in search of the Perfect Pub (where, he told me, they sold hot rum up
to 3 a.m.); of the Chelsea Freaks, who add so unconsciously to the
gaiety of the nations--how I have laughed incontinently, and how some
fireman's face would brighten when I laughed, though he knew not the
reason!

Of books, too, I have many thoughts; which reminds me that one cannot
imagine how different are the "values" of books, out here at sea, to
their values at home in the metropolis. To steal a phrase from
chemistry, their "valency" alters. Their relative "combining weights"
seem to vary; by which I mean, their applicability to life, their
vital importance to me as a man, changes. This change, moreover, is
all in favour of the classics. One sees through shams more quickly--at
least, I think so. Books which I could always respect, yet never
touch, now come forth and show their glories to me. My own past work,
too, drops pathetically into its own place. And that is? Spare me this
confession!

One night, one star-light night, when the dark blue heaven, slashed
across with the pale immensity of the Milky Way, watched me with its
million winking eyes, I stole out on the poop with some stories in my
hand, and dropped them into the creamy rush of the wake. As the poor
little bits of paper swayed and eddied and drowned in the foaming
vortex, I felt, deep down in that heart which some say I do not
possess, a vague tremor of unrest. I felt, somehow, close to Eternity.
And then, as I went below once more, I wondered, "Will they _all_ go
like that?" "Shall I live to do _any_ good work?" Oh, the terrible
sadness of Noble Attempts! How I toiled at those stories! And all for
nothing. Flung, like the ashes from our furnaces, like the rubbish
from our larders, into the cruel oblivion of the unheeding sea.




IX


Such is the mood which comes over me at times when the pettiness of
the past starts up in the presence of these immensities of sea and
sky. M., you know, when he would come back to his studio from some
yachting cruise in the Channel, and find me in his armchair, would
drag me out to look at the ceaselessly changing glories of the river
at sunset, and tell me how the vastness of the sea always communicated
to him an overwhelming sense of the Power of God.

"You can't get away from it, old man," he would say. "Out there
alone, man is nothing, God is everything." Why could I never assent
to that? Why, when people ask me if I love the sea, am I silent? Well,
have you ever heard the sudden yapping of a puppy at night? Imagine
it, then, at sea. The two Immensities between which we creep: the sea
flashing with her own secret glory of phosphorescent fire, the sky
emblazoned with her countless diadems, and then--yap-yap-yap! That
is how the pestilent cackle of many people affects me when they
rave about the sea. Why do they not keep silent, like the stars?
God! These fools, I think, would clatter up the steps of the Great
White Throne, talking, talking, talking! When the pearly gates swing
wide to let us in, when we pace the burnished vistas towards the
Presence, when the measureless music of the Most High God fills our
hearts--_yap-yap-yap!_

Music, I said! I think I stand towards music as I stand towards sea
and sky. Oh, I could squirm when I think of the bickerings I have
had with music-lovers. And yet with you, my friend, prince of
music-lovers, I have had no quarrel. Because, I think, you let me
alone. When you feel in the mood, when the moon is on the river, and
the warm breeze gently sways the curtains by the open window, you will
sit down and improvise, and I will lie in my deep chair, and smoke and
dream. You cease, and say "Do you like it?" and I am silent.

Then you laugh and go on again. You understand. But what maniacal
frenzy is this which demands a vociferous "passionate love of music"
from everyone? Watch the current dish-water fiction. Every character,
male and female, is "passionately fond of music." Which means? That
the readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of music to be
fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need
to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An
inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a
quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any
knowledge of either, and behold! a lover of music. _Yap-yap-yap!_

With all this, I know, you agree, but you ask yourself, as you read,
what has this to do with a marine engineer's working day? It has
everything to do with it. It has everything to do with the working day
of every man. For this indiscriminate belauding of the love of music
leads to an almost unimaginable hypocrisy among those who do not
think. Certainly, Music is the highest of the Arts, and the oldest,
just (I presume) as Astronomy is the highest and most ancient
science. One is pure form, the other pure mathematics. And so, I may
conclude, the "Music of the Spheres" comprises all that is highest
and purest and truest within our comprehension. But this fashionable,
open-mouthed delirium is no more a worship of music than star-gazing
is serious astronomy. These hypocrites are sailing under false
colours. I noticed, when I once suggested at a dinner-table the
cultivation of the tin whistle, amusement among the men, and titters
among the women. When I asked why old Pan's instrument should be so
bespattered with ridicule, they were instantly serious, as is their
habit when you mention any one who has passed away. You see my point?
I protest against this nasty slime of hypocrisy which is befouling
every part of our intellectual and national life. We love the sea,
we old sea-dogs, descendants (we proudly think) of the mighty
Norsemen--we love it from Brighton Beach. We love Sport, do we who
sneer at Frenchmen because they cannot play football--we love it from
the closely packed amphitheatres of the race-course and footer-field,
as spectators. We love War--with a penny flag and a yell in front of
the Mansion House. We love Children, for we leave them to dwell in
slums. And we love Music with all our hearts, because we were told
that we did, and the wise repeat that it elevates and refines the
soul.




X


I am disappointed with the meagre letter my friend sends me, "in
haste"! Disappointed and surprised withal, inasmuch as he finds time
to say, hastily enough, "Give me of your best; describe, _toujours_,
describe!" To which I can only reply, "Humph!" _Mon ami_, I do not
write for the sake of showing off my penmanship, nor my authorship.
When I have time, I lie down, on my stuffed-seaweed bed, and write my
thoughts leisurely and enjoyably. A letter is something which would
not be set down if the two persons concerned were within speaking
distance. The mere fact that I endeavour to give my jottings some rude
literary finish proves nothing to the contrary. When we are gathered
together round the fire or the tea-table, the same thing obtains. The
difference between conversation and tittle-tattle lies in the
participants of the former giving a finish to their contributions,
watching for points, keeping the main channel of conversation clear of
the lumber of extraneous witticism and personalities, gradually
leading the timid to think and, later, to express their thoughts,
using the learning which they have acquired in secret for the
_edification_ or building-up of us all.

I remember how, when young H---- visited our anchorage, he sat silent
and abashed while we thundered and declaimed about his bewildered
head. And then, when the conversation moved, naturally enough, from
education to religion, from religion to science, and from science to
evolution, I noticed how, so to speak, he pricked up his ears. He was
thinking then, trying to realize, however faintly, that inside him was
something different to anything inside us. His Catholic training, his
sequestered up-bringing, his entomological studies, his _intellectual
resiliency_, so deftly utilized by the Society of Jesus--all these
came gradually into view, and we found truth, which is perfected
praise, emanating from the babe by whom, I had been assured, we were
to be bored to distraction.

We realize only too little what has been lost through the decay of
conversation. "_Come, let us reason together._" And "letters" are only
a form of reasoning together adapted to our special needs, gaining
perhaps some added pathos from the implied separation of kindred
souls, and a further value from the permanence and potential artistry
of the form itself. It is not incumbent upon us to be very deep in the
eighteenth century to remark that, with conversation, letter-writing
dwindles and dies before the rush of mechanism and trade. It is easy
to see the reason of this. Mechanism and trade are expressions of
dissatisfaction with one's circumstances. Men used machines to make
and carry commodities, not because they felt the exquisite joy of
making, or the still higher joy of giving, but because they, or their
wives, wanted larger houses, more splendid equipages, more sumptuous
provender. Conversation, on the other hand, implies leisure and
contentment of mind. I do not mean idlers and persons of no ambition.
Neither of these classes ever wrote letters or shone in conversations.

So, musing upon my friend's hasty screed, I wonder how I am, in very
truth, to give him of my best. True, I know from that hint that he is
fighting with beasts at Ephesus to get his play into working, or
rather playing order. This is sufficient to make me forgive my friend.
But consider in future, _mon ami_, that your letters are the only
conversation I can enjoy out here, for the heroes with whom I toil
know not the art.




XI


The transition of a great nation from barbarism to an elementary form
of culture is always interesting. So, too, is the same transition in
the case of a "great profession." In 1840, when the propulsion of
ships by means of a steam-driven screw opened a new era in maritime
history, the "practical man" in the engineering trade was an
uneducated savage. Possessing no trade union, no voice in Parliament,
no means of educating himself in the intricate theory of the machinery
he helped to build, the mechanic of sixty years ago was regarded
by those above him in the social scale merely as a "hand." When,
therefore, steamships became common, and men were needed to operate
and care for the propelling mechanism, they were naturally drawn
from the ranks of mechanics who were employed in the works to
construct it. Stokers were enlisted, in a similar way, from those
working on land-boilers. Here, then, were two new classes of
seamen, corresponding very largely to the officers and sailors of a
sailing-ship. To the unbiassed judgment, it went without saying that
the engineer on watch would take rank with the navigating officer on
watch; but the old school of mariners, the school whose ideas of
progress are crystallised for all time in the historic report of
certain Admiralty Lords that "steam power would never be of any
practical use in Her Majesty's Navy," thought differently. In their
opinion, the engineer was the same as a stoker, and from that day
almost to this the deck-officer who served his time in a sailing-ship
secretly regards the engineers of his steamer as upstarts more or
less, whose position and pay are a gross encroachment upon his own
more ancient privileges.

A little consideration will show that there was some reason for
this feeling in the beginning. In the case of the Royal Navy, the
aggravation was particularly acute. The deck-officers, then as now,
were sons of gentlemen, were members of an ancient and honourable
service, a service included among that select quaternity, to be
outside of which was to be a nonentity--the Navy, the Army, the
Church, and the Bar. The naval officer, then as now, did not soil his
hands, wore a sword, and was swathed in an inextricable meshwork of
red tape, service codes, and High Toryism. He had his own peculiar
notions of studying a profession, looked askance at the new-fangled
method of driving a ship, honestly thinking, with Ruskin, that a
"floating kettle" was a direct contravention of the laws of God.
Imagine, then, the aristocratic consternation of these honourable
gentlemen when the care and maintenance of propelling machinery,
auxiliary mechanism, and also guns and gun-mountings, were gradually
transferred to a body of men of low social extraction, uncultured and
unpolished land-lubbers and civilians! Only within the last twenty
years have naval engineer officers, now drawn from the same social
strata as the navigating officers, won official recognition of their
importance in the _personnel_ of a ship.

In the case of the engineers of the Mercantile Marine the struggle has
been the same, though by no means so bitter or so sustained. The
reasons for this are two.

In the first place, the navigating officers of a merchantman are
merely the employees of civilians--the shipowners. In the second
place, the Board of Trade, by compelling shipowners to carry a certain
number of navigators and engineers holding certificates of competency,
have placed them on one professional level. Nevertheless, the
animosity between the mates and the shrewd, greasy, sea-going engineer
was keen enough, sharpened no doubt by the preponderating wages of the
latter. Again, the former's habits of deference and mute obedience to
the master, at once navigator, agent, and magistrate of the ship,
were not readily assimilated by the engineer, whose democratic
consciousness was just then rising into being, and whose mechanical
instincts were outraged by the sailor's ignorant indifference to the
knowledge and unremitting vigilance demanded by the machinery in his
care.

It is in this fashion that a class of men like my Chief have
developed. Born of the lower middle class, the artisan class,
apprenticed to their trade at twelve or thirteen years of age, and,
on going to sea, suddenly finding themselves in possession of a
definite uniform and rank with a fixed watch and routine, their
natural instinct leads them to do their utmost to "live up" to their
new dignity. In course of time, after a certain minimum of sea
service, and an unbroken record of efficiency and good behaviour, the
Board of Trade examiner affixes his stamp on the finished product, and
the youth ventures on matrimony and indulges in dreams of rising in
the world. His travelling has given his mind a certain shallow breadth
of outlook; he will discuss Italian art with you, although his
knowledge of Italy is confined to the low parts of Genoa and Naples,
with perhaps a visit to the Campo Santo of the former. He has acquired
the reading habit, perforce, at sea, though his authors would be
considered dubious by the educated; and a smattering of some other
language, generally Spanish, is, in his own opinion, good reason for
holding himself above the common mechanic ashore. His salary as a
chief engineer enables his wife to keep a servant and buy superior
garments; he puts money by, and in the course of time solidifies his
position as a genuine bourgeois. In the meantime he exhales Smiles. He
believes in Rising in the World. He would blot out a perfectly
inoffensive, if ignoble, ancestry, and he would also, if he could,
make friends with English Grammar. But how can I hope for his success
in the latter struggle when the books he borrows from my little store
are returned uncut. Possibly the colourless eyes, which survey me over
the _retroussé_ nose and deceptive moustache, are capable of gathering
wisdom from the uncut fields of learning. And yet, and yet, have I not
unintentionally surprised him in his cabin devouring "The Unwritten
Commandment" or "The Lady's Realm," while my Aristophanes is on
the settee? I do not blame a sea-going engineer for disliking
Aristophanes. Many agricultural labourers would find him uninforming.
But why borrow him and simulate a cultured interest in his plays?

My friend, I think, abhors blatant uxoriousness. So do I. And I fear
the Most Wonderful Man on Earth is blatantly uxorious. I honour him
for a certain sadness in his voice when he speaks of unrequited love.
But his constant reference to Ibsen's _motif_ in the "Wild Duck,"
though it fails in its primary object of convincing me that he is
familiar with Ibsen's plays, does in truth tell me that some fair one
gave him sleepless nights.

Of course, this amusing assumption would not stand a single hour in a
cultured circle. Some periodicals of the day foster the fallacy in
many an unfortunate mind that to read about a book is really quite
as good as actually to read it. Their readers are led to infer that
learning is quite a spare-time affair. I once assured a victim of this
delusion that in true culture there was no threepence-in-the-shilling
discount; and he wrinkles his brows yet, I believe, wondering what I
meant. How many years of close study, my friend, are required to
enable one to stroll through a second-hand book-shop, pick up the
_one_ treasure from the shelves, and walk out again?

It may be, perchance, that I labour this trait in the character of one
who would be great but for his disabilities. Which thought recalls to
my mind a suspicion that intermittently haunts me--that, living as we
do here on this ocean tramp, "thrown together," as the phrase goes,
so constantly, faults in another man grow more and more apparent;
social abrasions which would be smoothed down and forgotten ashore are
roughened at each fresh encounter, until the man is hidden behind one
flaming sin. Especially is this to be expected when mind and body are
worn, the one with responsibility, the other with rough toil. Who am I
that I should claim cultured intercourse from these heroes? Have I not
shared their agony and bloody sweat in times of storm and stress?
Have I not seen this same wearer of elevators in his engine-room,
a blood-stained handkerchief across his head where he has been
"smashed," the sweat running from his blackened features, watching
his engines with an agony no young mother ever knew?

What of the time when our main steam pipe burst in the Irish Sea in a
fog? Read in the Chief Mate's log an entry, "_Delayed 2 hrs. 40 min.,
break-down in engine-room._" Simple, isn't it? But behind those brief
words lies a small hell for the Chief Engineer. Behind them lies two
hours and forty minutes' frenzied toil in the heat of the boiler-tops,
where the arched bunkers keep the air stifling; two hours and forty
minutes' work with tools that race and slither to the rolling of the
ship, with bolts that burn and blister, with steam that knows no
master when she's loose. Literature? Art? Old friend, these gods seem
very impotent sometimes. They seem impotent, as when, for instance, my
first gauge-glass burst. Pacing up and down in front of my engines,
there is a hiss and a roar, and one of my firemen rushes into the
engine-room, his right hand clasping the left shoulder convulsively.
He has been cut to the bone with a piece of the flying glass. Men of
thirty years' sea-time tell me they never have got used to a glass
failing. And then the fight with the water and steam in the darkness,
the frenzied groping for the wires to shut the cocks, the ceaseless
roar of water and steam! A look at the engines, an adjustment of the
feed-valves, lest the water get low while I am fitting a new glass,
and then to work. How glad one is when one sees that luminous ring,
which denotes the water-level, rise "two-thirds glass" once more! And
how far from the fine arts is he whose life is one long succession of
incidents like these? Can they blame us if we look indulgently upon
mere writers and painters? Surely, when the books are opened and the
last log is read, when the overlooker calls our names and reads out
the indictment "_Lacking culture_," we may stand up manfully and
answer as clearly as we can, "Lord, we had our business in great
waters."




XII


In such wise, I imagine, will George the Fourth reply. He is an
admirable foil to the Most Wonderful Man on Earth. He regales you with
no false sentiment; he is five feet ten in his socks, and he is
clamorously indignant when you suggest that he will one day "get
married." He considers love to be "damned foolishness," and despises
"womanisers." He likes "tarts," has one in most ports of the Atlantic
sea-board, and even writes to a certain Mexican enchantress, who lives
in a nice little room over a nice little shop in a nice little street
in the nice little town of Vera Cruz. What does he write? Frankly I
don't know. What does he say, when he has dressed himself in dazzling
white raiment and goes ashore in Surabaya or Singapore, and sits down
to tea with Japanese girls whose eyes are swollen with belladonna and
whose touch communicates fire? How can I answer?

"George," I say, "what would your mother think?"

George is not communicative. He flicks ash from his cigarette and
picks up a month-old _Reynolds's_. And that is a sufficient answer to
my accusations, though he does not realize it. I, at any rate, have
not the face to upbraid a lonely youth, without home or girl friends
from one year's end to another, when in that same _Reynolds's_ I see
page after page of "cases." If these people swerve, if they break the
tables of the law every week, surely George the Fourth may hold up his
head. You see, in Geordie-land, in the ports of Tyne and Wear, where
George the Fourth was bred, there are many engineers who have been out
in steamers working up and down the China coast, who have had nice
little homes in Hankow, Hong-Kong, or Shanghai, with Japanese wives
all complete. Then when the charter was up, and the steamer came home,
these practical men left homes and wives behind them, and all was just
as before. That is George's dream. "China or Burma coast-trade. That's
the job for me when I get ma tickut." It is useless for a stern
moralist like me to argue, because I feel certain that, being what he
is, he would be entirely wise and right.

What an utter futility is marriage to a sea-going engineer! Here is
my friend McGorren, a hard-working and Christian man. He is chief
of a boat in the Burmese oil trade. His wife is dead; he has three
children, who are being brought up with their cousins in North London.
McGorren has been out East two years. It will be another two years
before he can come home. Where is the morality of this? He has no
home. His little ones grow up strangers to him; they are mothered by a
stranger. He is voteless, yet subject to income tax. He can have no
friendships, no society, no rational enjoyment save reading. Nothing!
And what is his return? Four hundred a year and all found. I look into
the frank eyes of George the Fourth and I am mute. In no philosophy,
in no "Conduct of Life," in no "Lesson for the Day" which I have read
can I discover any consolation or sane rule of living for such as he.
Is not this a terrible gap in Ruskin, Emerson, and Co.? I take up the
first and I ask George to listen. He is perfectly willing, because, he
says with reverence, I am "a scholar," and I have read to him before.

"... There _must_ be work done by the arms, or none of us could live.
There _must_ be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not
be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. There is rough work
to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done,
and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one
class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use
to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to
the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and the dignity
of humanity. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us;
and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or
driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding
a collier's helm in a gale on a lee shore, or whirling white-hot metal
at a furnace mouth, is not the same man at the end of his day, or
night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything
comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or
painting pictures."

George nods. He understands exactly what is meant. His father is
skipper of a collier, his brother is in a steel works. Probably he and
I know, better than John Ruskin, how rough work "takes the life out of
us." But when I continue, and read to him what the wise man teaches
concerning justice to men, and never-failing knight-errantry towards
women, and love for natural beauty, even awe-struck George becomes
slightly sardonic, and his mouth comes down at the corners. Let me
formulate his thoughts. He is asking how can one be just when
the work's _got_ to be done, and blame _must_ fall on somebody's
shoulders? How can one feel and act rightly towards women when one
is young, yet compelled to live a life of alternate celibacy and
licence? How can one love nature, even the sea, when the engine-room
temperature is normally 90° F., and often 120° F., when the soul cries
out against the endless rolling miles? Wise of the world, give answer!
We two poor rough toilers sit at your feet and wait upon your words.

You will see, now, why I want George the Fourth to fall in love. But
with whom is he to fall in love? Who courts the society of a sailor in
a foreign port? Seamen's bethels? Ah, yes! The gentle English ladies
in foreign ports are very sympathetic, very kind, very pleasant, at
the Wednesday evening concert in the rebuilt Genoese palace or the
deserted Neapolitan hotel, or the tin tabernacle amid the white sand
and scrub; but they take good care to keep together at the upper end
of the room, and the audience is railed off from them if possible,
while the merry girls outside, who live shameful lives, and whose
existence is ignored by the missionary, link their arms in George's
and take him to their cosy little boxes high up behind those beautiful
green blinds....

"It's a hell of a life, but we've just got to mak' the best of it,"
says George, and he lounges off to join the talk in the Second's room.

I, too, sigh when he is gone. The best of it! Are these heroes of mine
right after all?

     "_Then wherefore sully the entrusted gem
     Of high and noble life with thoughts so sick?
     Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quick
     For nothing but a dream?_"




XIII


It is an hour since George the Fourth left me, and I have been
discussing the matter with the Mate. It is a habit of mine to discuss
matters with the Mate. Here is a man with no theories of life, no
culture, as we understand the term, no touch of modern life at all; a
man of apostolic simplicity, having gone down to the sea in ships
since 1867. You can depend on the practicability of his conclusions,
because he has dealt with facts--since 1867. "For," to quote Carlyle,
"you are in contact with verities, to an unexampled degree, when
you get upon the ocean, with intent to sail on it ... bottomless
destruction raging beneath you and on all hands of you, if you
neglect, for any reason, the methods of keeping _it_ down and making
it float you to your aim!"

"'Tis a hard life, Mr. McAlnwick, an' we've just got to make the best
of it."

"But, Mr. Honna, what is the best of it?"

"This! Give us your glass. One more, an' Nicholas is makin' a
Stonewall Jackson in the panthry. He'll be in in a minute."

In a minute Nicholas arrives with a jug. Nicholas is the Steward, at
sea since '69, a bronzed Greek from Salonika, a believer in dreams and
sound investments at six per cent. He brings in a _Lloyd's News_,
arrived by the last mail.

"Ah!" The Mate is certainly making the best of it. What are the exact
components of the drink I cannot determine, but the resultant is
without blemish; eggs, milk, brandy, rum--all these are in it, and the
Mate's tongue loosens.

"Have you seen this about ze _Lorenzo_, mister?" asks Nicholas.

"What's that?"

Nicholas (reading): "'Ze _Lorenzo_, bound from New Yawk to Cuba with
coke, met with heavy gales off Cape Hatteras, and has put back into
Norfolk in a disabled condition. Two blades of her propeller are
broken, and she is leaking badly amidships. She is to undergo a
special survey before proceeding further.'"

The Mate's visage is wrinkled, his mouth is pursed up as he sets down
his glass and adjusts his spectacles to read, and he nods his head.

"See, now, 'tis two years, two years an' a half, since I left her.
Nicholas, you were there then, were ye not?"

"Ess, mister. She was on the Western Ocean trade then, too."

"Aye! Lumber out o' St. John's to Liverpool." He lays down the paper.
"Mr. McAlnwick, now wait while I tell ye. Ye talk of honesty at sea? I
joined that ship in Glasgow, an' we signed on for the voy'ge, winter
North Atlantic. General cargo for St. John's, Newf'unlan', with deals
to bring back to Liverpool. And, though _you_ may consider me
superstitious, not havin' been long at sea" (Nicholas stands, legs
apart, glass in hand, head nodding sagely), "not havin' been long at
sea, I say, 'twas the Second and Fourth engineers who brought us black
luck!"

"How, Mr. Honna?"

"This way. Nicholas, sit ye down and listen. I was Mate, as I am here.
I went up from London and joined her, an' the Chief, who's here now,
was thick as thieves with the old man, an' was courtin' the youngest
daughter, tho' he never married her--_he_ came to lay down the law to
me. There was a spare stateroom for'ard of the alley-way, port side.
The door was locked, an' I wanted it open. Ses he, ''Tis locked.' Ses
I, 'I want it open.' Ses he, 'Who are you?' Ye know his way, Mr.
McAlnwick? Ses I, 'I'm the Mate o' this ship, an', by Gawd, if that
door isn't opened smart, ye're a better man than I am.' And I took off
me coat. 'Oh,' ses he, ''tis all right, mister, I'll have it opened.'
Ye see, there was women aboard, an' the Second and Fourth were
responsible."

"They were inside!" snickers Nicholas, looking at his cigar
reminiscently.

"They was, Mr. McAlnwick. 'Twas scandalous--that Chief, too,
trapesin' away out to Scotstoun Hill every evenin' to play cards an'
shilly-shally, while his juniors had loose females aboard the ship.
Well, we put out, made St. John's in sixteen days, and discharged in a
fortn't. 'Twas there the Second an' Fourth began again, but they took
me in. I came on deck one Saturday afternoon, the old man being
ashore, and saw two females, with sealskin muffs and furred spats,
lookin' roun' the poop an' liftin' their skirts over the ropes, for
all the world like real ladies. An' I treated them as such, never
thinkin' what they were, for to me a lady's a lady, an' I know how to
behave to them. But the Second Mate stopped me as I was showin' 'em
over all, and ses he, 'D'yer know what she is, Mr. Honna?' pointin'
to the one with a heliatrope blouse under her jacket."

There is another snicker from Nicholas, and the Mate goes on:

"I would _not_ believe it, Mr. McAlnwick. I've had my weaknesses, I
have some now, or I would not be Mate of this ship. But I've never
insulted my employers by makin' a--a bloomin' _seraglio_ o' the ship,
nor have I ever seen it done without bringin' black luck. Now, wait
till I tell ye. The nex' mornin', being on deck at seven o'clock, I
saw the Second and Fourth racin' up the dock. Their collars were loose
at the back, an' their waistcoats were all out o' gear, an' they'd
made hat-bands o' their ties. Mr. McAlnwick, ye may laugh, but they
were a disgrace to the ship!

"Well, we put out o' St. John, deck-loaded with deals, in a fog, and
we stayed in a fog for three days. We were all among the ice, too, an'
that afternoon I came on deck to relieve Mr. Bruce, the Second Mate.
The old man had her in an ice-lane, goin' full speed. Ses I, 'She's
goin' fast, sir.' 'Oh,' ses he, 'she steers better so.' 'Ay,' ses I,
'but if she hits anything, she will--hit it.' A minute after, he come
up out o' the fog, an' ses he, 'Stop her, Mr. Honna, stop her!' I'd
me hand on the telegraph and me eye on the foc'sle head when she
struck--bang! An' all the canvas caps on the foc'sle ventilators blew
up an' went overboard. We'd hit a cake. The Second Mate ran out of
his berth in his shirt-sleeves, and went for'ard, an' I followed him.
There she was, her nose crunched into a low-lyin' cake not two feet
above the waterline. I kept all my spare gear in the fore-peak, an'
the Second Mate went down to--to reconnoitre. ''Tis all right,
mister,' ses he. ''Tis all right here.' Ses I, 'I don't think, Mr.
Bruce, I don't think!' An' when I went down an' put me foot on those
piles of rope an' bolts of canvas, they went down, all soft, under me.
Ye understand? Oh, I knew there was somethin', rememberin' those
flighty women, an' the foc'sle bonnets blowin' off. The water had
rushed into the fore-peak, an' had driven the air up, ye see.

"Well, we put her full astern and drew away, and then we put back into
St. John, slow, dead slow, all the way. An' there the Second Engineer
saw a doctor, an' the one in the heliatrope blouse saw a ghost!"

"Ess, 'e come up be'ind 'er, an'----"

"Now, hold yer horses, Nicholas, hold yer horses! Ye see, Mr.
McAlnwick, when a woman has seen a man aboard of a ship, an' she's
seen that ship hull down, or, what's the same thing, swallowed up in
the fog, she writes him off, so to speak. 'Poor feller,' ses she,
'he's at sea,' just as we say, 'Poor feller, he's in the churchyard.'
An' so, when that woman felt someone touch her on the arm in Main
Street, and turned an' found it was the Second Engineer, she gave a
shriek like a lost soul, an' fainted on the sidewalk. So it happened.
Now listen. Help yourself, Nicholas.

"We had a wooden bow put on, which took a week, an' we started again.
Two days out it fell off, and we went back into St. John for the third
time, an' had another fitted. I took the opportunity then of havin' a
word with the Second, while we were makin' her fast. 'Mr. Carson,' ses
I, 'air ye satisfied?' He knew what I meant, for he came from
Carrickfergus, an' the Lady's Fever had him hard. 'Aye, mister,' ses
he. ''Tis all right; I'll see her no more,' ses he. An' our luck
turned. We had another bow fitted, an' we came across the Western
Ocean, half-speed, an' made her fast in the Canada Dock."

"Is that all, Mr. Honna?"

"No, no," says Nicholas, with another reminiscent giggle. "No, mister,
the Super, 'e comes down, an' 'e----"

"Hold yer horses, now, Nicholas; hold yer horses, and let Jack Honna
tell this yarn. Mr. McAlnwick, I said I'd show ye honesty as practised
in the Mercantile Marine. Now listen. The Super--that's Mr. Fallon, as
ye know--came down into my berth. 'Mornin', Honna'--ye know his way;
but he seemed anxious an' fidgety. Of course, I knew without tellin'
how she was insured. Ye see, mister, the _Lorenzo_ an' the _Julio_
an' the _Niccolo_ an' the _Benvenuto_ here are insured against _total
loss_, an' if we went on that reef to-night, Messrs. Crubred, Orr, and
Glasswell 'ud drink champagne to it an' book our half-pay in tobacco
and stamps. But then--ah, Mr. McAlnwick, then it was different. The
_Lorenzo_ was insured against accidents to the tune o' three thousand
pound sterling, provided--_provided_, ye understand, that repairs came
up to that figure. An' that was why Mr. Fallon looked worried."

"Why, Mr. Honna?" The Mate's voice drops to a whisper.

"Why, don't ye see, mister? But ye've not been long at sea. Because
he'd totted up all the indents, an' added all he reasonably could on
the bow plates an' stringers _plus_ a new double bottom to the
forehold, an' _then_ he could only make it come to about twenty-four
hundred pound. 'What's to be done, Honna?' ses he, rappin' it out.
'What's to be done?' ses I, as if I was astonished. 'What d'ye mean,
Mr. Fallon?' Ses he, ''Tis a dead loss--a dead loss, Honna.' Ses I, 'I
don't understand, sir.' And I looked him in the eye. 'She's not hurt,'
ses he, snappin'. 'She's not hurt at all.' 'Oh,' ses I, 'is that all?
Why not _hurt_ her, then--hurt her?' An' I got up to go out. 'Oh,' ses
he, 'we can't have that--we can't have that. Where's that indent?' And
we went on deck. Well, I went up to the office that afternoon he came
over, an' he ses in a hurry, 'Honna, yer wife's comin' up to-night, ye
said?' (The little man never forgets anythin', as perhaps ye've
noticed.) 'Yes,' ses I, 'she is.' 'Then go an' meet her,' ses he. 'Go
an' meet her.' 'What?' ses I. 'Leave the ship, with her goin' into
dry-dock to-morrer an' no cap'en aboard?' 'Damn the ship,' ses he.
'Damn the ship! _I'll_ look after the ship. Go an' see yer wife.' Mr.
McAlnwick, when I got outside I laughed. An' when I got to Lime
Street, and told my girl about Fallon damnin' the ship, she laughed
too. It must have been eleven o'clock when I left the hotel an' went
down to the docks. When I got there she was in dry-dock. The Super had
issued orders that s.s. _Lorenzo_ was to be dry-docked _after dark_,
an' I saw that our luck was in. The Second Engineer was standin' by
the ladder as I climbed over the side, an' ses he, solemn-like, 'Mr.
Honna, I've been to see a doctor this night, an' I'm all right now.
I'll see her no more.' 'Of course ye're all right!' ses I, chucklin',
'an' so's the _Lorenzo_. Come down an' have somethin'.' 'What are they
doin'?' ses he. 'I was below this five minutes, an' I thought the
bottom was comin' in.' 'Repairs,' ses I, wavin' me hand. 'Repairs.
Come down.' An' we went. 'Twas half-past one when we got down on the
dock side an' peeped under. An' when we'd done laughin' we turned in.

"Well, I went down into the dock nex' mornin', an' the Surveyor was
there with Mr. Fallon. He was a youngish man, an' probably he's learnt
a good deal since that day, but he was just the feller for us. The
Super introduced us, an' ses he, 'Mr. Honna will corroborate what I
say, Mr. Blythe.' The Surveyor turned to look at the ship's bottom,
and it was lucky he did, for me jaw was hangin'. Mr. McAlnwick, they'd
had the hydraulic jacks under her, an' they'd pushed her to kingdom
come! She was bent to the very keelson. Not a straight plate from stem
to stern. 'It's marvellous, Mr. Honna!' ses the Surveyor. 'It's
marvellous! How in the worrld did ye come home?' 'How?' ses I,
laughin'. 'On our hands and knees, to be sure, mister.' 'Dear me!' he
ses. 'Dear me!' 'Aye,' ses I. 'An' she steered to a hair, too!' And I
went for'ard to look at her bows. He was a young man, an' I felt sorry
for him, but our luck was in. Mr. Fallon came down into my room that
afternoon, as I was puttin' on me shore clothes, an' ses he, 'Honna,
did ye see yer wife?' 'I did, sir,' ses I. 'Is she all right?' ses he.
'No,' ses I; 'she's frettin'.' 'What's the matter wi' her?' he snaps,
sittin' down where you are now. 'What?' ses I, an' I stopped as I was
fixin' me collar. 'She thinks I ought to have a new hat, Mister
Fallon.' An' I looked him in the eye. 'Oh!' ses he in his sharp way.
'Get five new hats--get five new hats. Have the ship ready to be moved
to-morrow night. She will be discharged, and redocked for--extended
repairs. Good-day,' ses he, an' he went out. An' when I looked where
he'd been sittin' there was a five-poun' note in an envelope, stickin'
in the cushion."

"Did you see your wife again, Mr. Honna?"

"I did, Mr. McAlnwick, an' she pinched me black an' blue! An' when we
were walkin' through the city that evenin' I saw the Second Engineer
followin' a sealskin jacket along Paradise Street, and I felt glad he
was leavin' to go up for his ticket."

"Is that all, Mr. Honna?" The Chief Officer's face is screwed up, his
glasses are on the end of his nose (how like my old Headmaster he
looks now!), and he scrutinizes the Steward's newspaper once more.

"All, Mr. McAlnwick? Apparently not, by this. Mr. Fallon'll be down to
see her, for he's goin' across to see the _Giacopo_, I know, an', by
thunder, he'll fix her! Never seen him in a fix yet. Eh, Nicholas?"

"Ah, he's a sharpun, by God!" This from the fervent Nicholas.

"Ses he, first thing when he put his fut on the deck when we
brought the _Ludovico_ into Shields from Nikolaeff, ses he, 'Honna,
look at them slack funnel stays; Honna, look at that spare propeller
shaft, not painted; Honna, don't keep pigs on the saddle-back
bunker-hatch--'tis insanitary.' Honna this, that, and the other all in
one breath. And we'd had the blessed stern torn out of her, runnin'
foul o' the breakwater, to say nothin' of pickin' up the telegraph
cable with our anchor outside Constant!"

"Mr. Honna, tell me----"

"To-morrow, mister, to-morrow. 'Tis late, and I would turn in."

And so we end our day.




XIV


To-day's shipping news has it thus:--

     _Swansea._--_Entered inwards_, _s.s. Benvenuto_. From S.
     Africa. P. W. D.

Which cryptic item covers much joy, much money, and an irrepressible
consumption of strong drink. O ye rabid total-abstinence mongers! If I
could only lure you away on a six-thousand-mile voyage, make you work
twelve hours a day, turn you out on the middle watch, feed you on
bully beef and tinned milk! Where would your blue ribbons be then? My
faith, gentlemen, when once you had been paid off at the bottom of
Wind Street, I warrant me we should not see your backs for dust as you
sprinted into the nearest hostelry!

And the joy, moreover, of receiving three months' pay in one lump sum!
Ah! one is rich as he pushes past the green baize swing-door, and
through the crowd of seamen and sharks who cluster like flies round
that same green door. To the married sailor, however, that joy is
chastened by the knowledge that his "judy" has been drawing half-pay
all the time, and to say nothing of the advance note of two-pound-ten
which he drew on joining, to buy clothes. But Jack Tar or Jack Trimmer
knows well how to drown such worries. He possesses an infinite
capacity for taking liquor, which inevitably goes, not to his head,
but to his feet. Six of the _Benvenuto's_ sailor-men, two firemen,
and the carpenter enter our private bar as we sit drinking. An
indescribable uproar invades the room immediately. They are in their
best clothes--decent boots, ready-made blue serge, red tie with green
spots over a six-penny-halfpenny "dickey," and a cap that would make
even Newmarket "stare and gasp." Nothing will pacify them short of
drinks at their expense. A sailor with yellow hair and moustache
curled and oiled insufferably, insists on providing me with a pint of
rum. The carpenter, a radical and Fenian when sober, sports a bowler
with a decided "list." He embraces my yellow-haired benefactor, and
now, to the music of "Remember Me to Mother Dear," rendered by the
electric piano behind the bar, they waltz slowly and solemnly around.
The landlady implores them to stop, and the carpenter bursts into
tears. It really is very much like the "Hunting of the Snark." They
are so unaffectedly wealthy, so ridiculously happy, so unspeakably
vulgar! They batter their silver and gold upon the bar; they command
inoffensive strangers to drink monstrous potations; they ply their
feet in unconscious single-steps; they forget they have not touched
the last glass, and order more; they put cataclysmal questions to the
blushing lassie who serves them; they embrace one another repeatedly
with maudlin affection, and are finally ejected by main force from the
premises. All the world--below Wind Street--knows that the _Benvenuto_
has been paid off.

And we? We drink soberly to England, home, and beauty, bank our
surpluses, and scuttle back to the ship. Past interminable rows of
huge hydraulic cranes, over lock-gates, under gigantic coal-shoots
which hurl twenty tons of coal at once into the gaping holds of filthy
colliers, we stumble and hurry along to where our own steamer is
berthed. That is one of the hardships of our exalted position as
officers. _We_ begin again as soon as we have been paid off; _they_
depart, inebriated and uxorious, to their homes. _They_ enjoy what the
political economists call "the rewards of abstinence"; _we_ put on our
boiler suits and crawl about in noisome bilges, soot-choked
smoke-boxes, and salt-scarred evaporators.

Nevertheless, when five o'clock strikes and work is done for the day,
we put on our "shore clothes" (the inevitable blue serge of the
seamen), light our pipes, and go into the town again. Ah! How good it
is to see people, people, people! To see cars, and shops, and girls
again! How wondrously, how ineffably beautiful a barmaid appears to
us, who have seen no white woman for nearly four months! And
book-shops! Dear God! I was in the High Street for half an hour
to-night, and I have already bagged a genuine "Galignani" Byron, calf
binding, yellow paper, and suppressed poems, all complete, for three
shillings. It will go well in our book-case beside our Guiccioli
Recollections. For myself I have a dear little "Grammont" with notes,
a fine edition of Bandello's "Novelle," and a weird paper-covered copy
of "Joseph Andrews," designed, presumably, to corrupt the youthful
errantry of Swansea, and secreted by the vendor of Welsh devotional
literature at the very bottom of the tuppenny box. In spite of
Borrow's enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym, I have no craving for Welsh
Theology, mostly by Jones and Williams, which is to be had by the
cubic ton. No one buys it, I fear. The little lass who sold me the
Fielding and the "Novelle" looked pale and hungry behind the stacks of
books, and I am shamed, speaking merely as a thorough-paced buyer of
second-hand books, that I paid more for the latter than she would have
asked. But the blue-grey eyes, the nervous poise of the head, the
pride in the sensitive nostrils, reminded me of someone.... A horrible
life for a young girl, my friend, a horrible life.

I took my treasures along the brilliantly lighted streets. I walked on
air, happy with a mysterious happiness. I looked at myself as I passed
a shop mirror, and saw a face with a cold, cynical expression, the
soul intrenched behind inscrutable, searching eyes. "You do not look
happy," I said to myself as I passed on, and I smiled. I thought again
of those gaudily dressed sailors; I thought of their inane felicity,
and smiled again. "_De chacun selon que son habilleté, à chacun selon
que ses besoins_," I muttered as I turned into an iridescent
music-hall.

And now I reached the summit of experience. All the morning I was
toiling in the engine-room as we ploughed across the Channel, past
Lundy, and up to the Mumbles Head. I had played my part in that
strange comedy of "paying off." I had toiled again in the afternoon
in a dry-docked steamer, making all safe after shutting down. I had
scoured the shelves of a tiny shop for books. And now I sat in the
fauteuils of a modern music-hall, beholding the amazing drama of "The
Road to Ruin."

Verily, as Sainte-Beuve says, "_Au théâtre on exagère toujours._" Not
that I would accuse the constructors of the piece of any lack of
skill. Indeed, Scribe himself never displayed more consummate
stage-craft or a greater sense of "situation," than they. As one gazes
upon the spectacle of the impossible undergraduate's downfall, he
loses all confidence in the impossibility; he believes that here
indeed lies the road to ruin; he feels inexpressibly relieved when the
young man thanks Heaven for his terrible dream of the future, and sits
down to Conic Sections, his head between his hands. You notice this
latter touch. The playwright knows his audience. He knows they think
that an influx of Conic Sections strains the cerebral centres, and
that study is always carried on with the head compressed between the
hands. Thus the sermon reaches the hearts of those who still have
occasional nightmares of the time when they conned "Parallel lines are
those which, if produced ever so far both ways, will not meet." Alas!
I fear our conceptions of art are in the same predicament.

Is it not strange, though, how customs vary? In the Middle Ages one
went to church to see the mystery play; now one goes to the music-hall
to hear a sermon. "Pronounced by clergymen and others to be the most
powerful sermon ever preached from the stage," etc. I wonder, as
I scan my programme, whether the monastic playwrights of old
ever published encomiums on their weird productions by prominent
highwaymen. I say highwaymen because I can think of none who had a
better right to criticise dramatic performances from the practical and
moral standpoints. But the noise of the undergraduate as he goes
crashing through his ruinous nightmare recalls me. I proceed to
examine my companions in distress. All are engaged in the Road to
Ruin. I think they like stage ruin--it is so thrilling. Moreover,
it leaves out all that is at all middle class. Even our wicked
undergraduate never falls as low as the middle class. He starts as
a university man, and ends in a slum, but he is saved from the
second-class season ticket. I am still puzzling with this question of
the middle class as I quit the theatre and make my way down to the
docks. There is a mild, misty rain falling, and I turn into my
favourite tavern in Wind Street for a glass of ale. The Middle Class!
Why, I ask myself, are they so strange in their intellectual tastes?
The wealthy I understand; the workmen I understand; but O this
terrible Middle Class! I sit musing, and four men come in upon my
solitude. Obviously they are actors, rushing in for a "smile" between
the acts. Obviously, I say, for their easy manners, _savoir faire_,
and good breeding stamp them men of the world, and their evening dress
does the rest.

"Ah, you read the _Clarion_?" observes one. I start guiltily. Yes, I
had bought a copy, and I have unconsciously spread it on the table by
my side. "Will you drink with us, sir?" adds another. He is not of the
Middle Class.

"Thank you, I will," I answer, and my first interlocutor glances over
the paper.

"Are you a Socialist?" he inquires. "Yes," I reply. "So am I." I rise,
and we shake hands. This, my friend, was beyond all my imagining. It
is, moreover, _not_ middle class. I have ridden in a suburban train
day after day for years, with people who lived in the same street,
without exchanging a word. Here, in this tavern, convention dares not
to show her head. And I am warmed as with the cheerful sun.

"Have you been in?" asks the man who hands me my beer, and he flings
his head back to indicate the theatre.

"Not yet," I answer. "What have you on this week?"

"_A Sister's Sin_. You should see it. Come to-morrow."

       *       *       *       *       *

"_A Sister's Sin_!"

I shall not go to see it. I dare not. I had intended to ask my
Socialist whether he could solve the problem of the Middle Class for
me, but he has done it. "_Au théâtre on exagère toujours._" I hardly
know which are the more baffling--the Middle Ages or the Middle
Classes.




XV


I have just been looking through an old, old note-book of mine, the
sort of book compiled, I suppose, by every man who really sets out on
the long road. I remember buying the thing, a stout volume with
commercially marbled covers, at a stationer's shop in the Goswell
Road. I wonder if the salesman dreamed that it would be used by the
grimy apprentice to transcribe extracts from such writers as Kant and
Lotze, Swinburne and Taine, Emerson and Schopenhauer? How strong, how
dear to me, was all that pertained to Metaphysic in that long ago!
Often, too, I see original speculations, naïve dogmatism, sandwiched
between the contextual excerpts.

Worthless, of course--it should be hardly necessary to say so. And
yet, as I turn the leaves, I get occasional glimpses of real thought
shining through the overstrained self-consciousness, illuminating my
youthful priggishness of demeanour. For instance, how could I have
been so prescient to have coupled Emerson and Schopenhauer together
so persistently? Here, smudged and corrected to distraction, is a
passionate defence of the former, occasioned by some academical
trifler dubbing him a mere echo of Carlyle and Coleridge. I almost
lived on Emerson in those days, to such good purpose, indeed, that I
know him by heart. And, if I mistake not, he will come to his own
again in the near future, when there will be no talk of Carlylean
echoes.

All alone, sharing its page with no other thought, is this, to me,
characteristic phrase: "_Mental Parabolism_, _N. B._" It was like a
shock to see it once more after all these years, and I have been
trying to understand it. It was born, I think, of my frenzy for
analogizing. I wanted some analogy, in physical phenomena, for
everything in my mental experience. Professor Drummond was to be left
infinitely in the rear. And by parabolism, it seems according to a
later note, I meant that a man's intellectual career is a curve, and
that curve is a parabola, being the resultant of his mental mass into
his intellectual force. The importance of this notion impresses me
more now than then. It will explain how men of indubitable genius stop
at certain points along the road. They can get no further, because
their mental parabola is complete. All that has happened since is to
them unreal and unimportant. One man I know exemplifies this to a
remarkable degree. His parabola starts at the seventeenth century,
rises to its maximum somewhere about the Johnsonian period, continues
with scarcely abated vigour as far as Thackeray and Carlyle, declines
towards Trollope and--ends. To speak of Meredith and Tolstoi, Ibsen
and Maeterlinck, is to beat the air. The energy is exhausted, the mind
has completed its curve; the rest is a quiet reminiscence of what has
been.

It pleases me to think that there may be some grain of truth in all
this, though I am not unmindful of the inevitable conclusion, that my
own parabola will some day take its downward course, and I shall sit,
quiescent, while the younger men around will demand stormily why I
cannot see the grandeur, the profundity, of their newer gods. There
lies the tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, _will_ be greater than
mine--_must_ be, if my belief in man be worth anything. Yes, that is
the tragedy. I shall be at rest, and the youths of the golden future
will be seeing visions and dreaming dreams of which I have not even
the faintest hint.

I feel this most keenly, when reading Nietzsche, that volcanic
stammerer of the thing to come. I feel, "inside," as children say,
that my parabola will be finished before I can win to the burning
heart of the man. It frightens me (a sign of coming fatigue) to launch
out on one of his torrents of thought--veritable rushing rivers of
vitriol, burning up all that is decaying and fleshly, casting away the
refined, exhausted, yet exultant spirit on some lonely point of the
future, where he can see the illimitable ocean of race-possibilities.

"_Oh, noon of life! Delightful garden land! Fair summer Station!_"

So, writing (steadying myself against the Atlantic roll) one fresh
thought in the blank left for it in the long ago, I close the book,
and take up my present life once more.

"The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously." Perhaps one may
judge of a man's power by his reception of that aphorism. For me, at
any rate, there is but unconditional assent. To live dangerously! How
nauseous to me is the maternal anxiety of some of my friends. They
are so anxious for me. It is such a dangerous trade. And so on.

I have been scanning a newspaper left in the mess-room, and it has
provoked me to further thought. I see, in retrospect, those myriads
of nicely dressed, God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local
trains, each with his face turned towards his daily sheet, each with
his scaly hide of prejudice clamped about his soul, each placidly
settling the world's politics and religion to his own satisfaction,
each taking his daily dram of news from the same still. I look into my
own copy and read on one page of a society bazaar where Lady So-and-So
and the Hon. Alicia So-and-So "presided over a very tasteful stall of
dwarf myrtle-trees," etc.

In another column I am informed that some person or other, of whom I
have never heard, has gone to Wiesbaden. The leading article is
devoted to a eulogium of some football team, the special article asks,
"Can we live on twopence a day?" You cannot imagine how unutterably
turbid all this appears to me, out on the green Atlantic. It is
Sunday, and so we rest; but yesterday afternoon I was out in one of
the lifeboats, line-fishing for cod. The great green rollers came up
from the south, and the boat rode the billows like a cockle-shell. How
I would like to have had some of those city folk with me in that
up-ended lifeboat, their hands red with the cold sea water and scarred
with the line as it ran through their fingers to the pull of a
fourteen-pounder. Dwarf myrtle-trees! Wiesbaden! God! Let them come
below with me, let me take them into our boilers and crush them down
among those furred and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They
used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that I did not know I
was alive. Do they, I wonder?

Yes, the newspaper came to me like a breath of foul city air. Very
much in the same way I was affected by a remark made to me by my
friend the Mate. "Where I live," said he, "one child won't play with
another if its father gets five shillings a week more'n t'other's
father." We were talking Socialism, if I remember rightly, and that
was his argument against its feasibility. I did not notice the
argument; I fell to thinking how odd it must be to live in such an
atmosphere. How is it we never have it in Chelsea? I have never been
the less welcome because my host or hostess has as many pounds a week
as I have a year. My old friend of my 'prentice days--dear old Tom,
the foreman, and Jack Williams, the slinger, they get no colder
welcome from us because they live in Hammersmith or Whitechapel. Have
we ourselves not seen in our rooms rich and poor, artist and mechanic,
writer and labourer? Nay, have we not had German clerk and Chinese
aristocrat, German baron and Russian nihilist? What is it that permits
us to dispense with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary of
life to the people where the old Mate lives! I think it is lack of
imagination in our women-folk, and the fetish of the home. For surely
the utter antithesis of "home" is that same "dangerous life." These
young men who economise and grow stingy in their desperate endeavour
to establish a "home nest," some "Acacia Villa" in Wood Green or
Croydon--what can they know of living dangerously? Their whole
existence is a fleeing from danger. Safe callings, safe investments,
safe drainage, safe transit, safe morality, safe in the arms of Jesus.
_Is_ it lack of imagination?




XVI


So we, who foregathered yesterday afternoon in the shipping office,
are lashed together for another four months. A motley group, my
friend. Outside I stood, note-book in hand, trying to find a spare
fireman who wanted a job. A mob of touts, sharks, and pimps crowded
round me, hustling each other, and then turning away from my call,
"Any firemen here?" In despair I go over to the "Federation Office,"
where all seamen are registered in the books of life insurance, where
they pay their premiums, and await possible engineers. I consult with
the grave, elderly man in the office, and he asks for firemen in the
bare, cold waiting-room. One man comes up, a pale, nervous chap,
clean-shaven and quiet. I take his "Continuous Discharge" book, flick
it open at the last entry--trawling! The last foreign-going voyage is
dated 1902, "S. Africa," "Voyage not completed." I hand it back.
"Won't do," I remark shortly, and look round for others. The man looks
at the grave, elderly person, who takes the book. "Give him a chance,"
says the latter, in his low, official voice. "Look--S. Africa. The
man's been serving his country. Give him a chance." "I would if he'd
promise not to get enteric when we reach port," I say. "Never 'ad it
yet, sir," says the man, and I take his book. "_Benvenuto_. Hurry up.
She's signing on now." He runs across the road, and I follow.

When I reach the shipping office they are waiting for me. Behind
the counter and seated beside the clerk is the Captain, writing
our "advance notes." The clerk asks if all are present; we shuffle
up closer, and he begins to read the articles to which we XXXX
subscribe--signing our death-warrants, we call it. No one listens to
him--he himself is paring his nails, or arranging some other papers
as he intones the sentences which are more familiar to him and to us
than the Lord's Prayer to a clergyman. Then, when he has finished,
each one comes up for catechism--carpenter, sailors, donkeyman,
fireman, all in due order. Then the officers. "Donkeyman!" calls the
clerk. A huge, muscular figure with a red handkerchief round his bull
throat ceases arguing with a fireman, plunges forward, and seizes the
pen. He is my friend of the last voyage, the mighty Norseman.

"What is your name?"

"Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen."

"Where were you born?"

"Stockholm."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-two."

"Where do you live?"

"Ryder Street, Swansea."

"Any advance?"

"Yes."

And so on with each of us.

"Don't forget," says the clerk from the depths of a
three-and-a-half-inch collar, "to be on the ship at nine o'clock
to-morrow morning." And we troop out to make room for another crew,
meet yet another coming to be paid off at the other counter, wish we
were they, and eventually reach the ship.

Strange scenes sometimes, in that shipping office, or, for that
matter, in any shipping office. I shall not forget that forlorn little
lad we had once engaged for mess-room steward at two pounds five a
month, with his red little nose and the bullied look in his eyes. It
was when he went up to sign, and answer the questions given above.
What was his name? "_Christmas Hedge_." All turned and stared at the
snivelling urchin. Where was he born? "_In a field_."

The walls, too, interest a man like me. There are notices in all the
tongues of Europe on the walls--notices of sunken wrecks, of masters
fined for submerging their loaded discs, of white lights in the
China seas altered to green ones by the Celestial Government, of
transport-medals awaiting their owners, of how to send money home
from Salonika or Copenhagen or Yokohama or Singapore. Near the
door, moreover, is a plain wooden money-box with no appeal for alms
thereon--merely a printed slip pasted along the base of it: "_There is
sorrow on the sea._" And often and often I have seen grey chief
officers and beardless "fourths" drop their sixpences into the box,
for the sake of that sorrow on the sea.

And now it is night--our last night ashore. The Second Engineer
asks me to go up town with him. The Chief has gone to see his wife
home to Cardiff, and George goes on watch at eight-bells. So for the
last time I don a linen collar and shore clothes, and we go up town.
We meet sundry youth from the ship-yard; they are going to that
iridescent music-hall into which I plunged six weeks ago when we
came in. We pay our sixpences for two hours' high-speed enjoyment,
"early performance"; enjoyment being sold nowadays very much like
electricity--at a high voltage but small cost per unit. Scarcely my
sort, I fear, but what would you? I cannot be hypercritical on this
our last night ashore. And so I strive to feel as if I were sorry to
go away, as if parting were indeed that sweet sorrow I have heard it
called, as if I really cared a scrap for the things they care for.
True, I feel the parting from my friend, and it is no sweet sorrow
either. But that is at Paddington, when the train moves, and our hands
are gripped tightly--a faint foretaste of that last terror, when he or
I shall pass away into the shadows and the other will be left alone
for ever. It is when I ponder upon that scene that I realize what our
friendship has become, that I realize how paltry every other familiar
or even relative appears by comparison. Let me treasure this
friendship carefully, healthfully, old friend, for, by my love of
life, it is rare enough in these our modern times.

I have been wondering why this is--I think it is money, or rather
business. Have you noticed how business _dehumanises_ men? I count
over in my mind dozens of men whom I know, men of age, experience, and
wealth, who almost demand that I should envy them by the very way they
walk the city streets. They are prosperous, they imagine. I, strolling
idly through those same city streets, looking at the show, studying
their faces, defied them, and said to myself, "You gentlemen are not
human beings--you are business men." Not that I would tell them this;
they would not understand, though they are guilty of occasional lucid
intervals. They will admit, in a superior tone, that business cuts
them off from a great deal. But it is evident they intend sticking to
the irrefutable logic of the bank-balance. For them there is no
friendship like ours. They could not afford it, bless you. How are
they to know that you won't "do" them or borrow of them? No, no. The
world, for them, is a place where they have a chance of besting you
and me, of getting more money than you or I, of "prospering," as they
call it, at another's expense.

If I say to one of these men, "I want no fortune; I have what I need
now by working for it," he looks at me as though I were stark mad. If
I say, to poor Sandy Jackson, for instance, who has only one lung and
is mad on "getting more business"--if I say to him, "You advise me to
go in for business on my own account, Sandy. Very good. What does that
mean? It means that I must become _dehumanised_, or fail. I must have
no friends who are of no use to me. I must waste no time reading or
writing or dreaming dreams. I must eat no dinners abroad which are not
likely to bring in business. I must toil early and late, go on spare
regimen, drink little, dress uncomfortably, live respectably--for
what, Sandy? For a few hundreds or thousands of pounds. May I let up
then? Oh, no, Sandy, that is the business man's mirage, that letting
up. He never lets up until he is let down--into the tomb. It would be
against his principles. Well, Sandy, I see you're at it and apparently
killing yourself by it, but I wish to be excused. It isn't good
enough. I want my friends, my books, my dreams most of all. Take your
business; I'll to my dreams again."

So, while we sit in the gaudy playhouse, I dream my dreams of the
great books I want to write, the orations I want to deliver, the
lessons I want to teach, and I wonder how long my time of probation
will be. Strange that I should never make any allowance for the
dangerous nature of my calling. This may be my last night ashore for
ever. What of it? Well, it will be a nuisance to leave those books,
lectures, and lessons to be written, given, and taught by somebody
else; but I don't really mind. I only want to go along steadily to the
end, and when that comes shake my friend by the hand and say
"Farewell." It is plain, is it not, that I am no business man?

I am still dreaming when our noisy little crowd elbow their way out
and pass up the street into a tavern. Here my friend the Second is
known. He pats the fair barmaid on the cheeks, chucks the dark one
under the chin, calls the landlady "old dear," and orders drinks _in
extenso_. I am introduced to one and all, and another girl, neither
dark nor fair, emerges from an inner room for my especial regard. We
are invited within, and with glass in hand and girl on knee, we toast
our coming voyage. One by one the girls are kissed; the landlady
jocularly asks why she is left out, and a sense of justice makes me
salute her chastely. You see, old man, this is the last night ashore.
We bid them "good-bye," they wish us good luck, and we depart to our
own place once more. The Second is silent. He has said good-bye to his
girl--he hung back a moment as we left the tavern. And there is
something burning in my brain, just behind the eyeballs. I have not
said good-bye to my girl. Or rather I mean--but I cannot formulate to
myself just what I do mean at the time. I only feel, as I turn in,
that I ought to have told my friend all that happened when I met her,
a month ago, and that, after all, nothing really matters, and the
sooner I get away to sea again the better.




XVII


     _Cleared for sea._
        _s.s. Benvenuto, for S. Africa._

It is ten-thirty this clear, cold December day; the sun shines on the
turquoise patch of open Channel which I can see from the bridge where
I am testing the whistle; the tide is rising; the last cases of
general cargo are being lowered into Number Two Hold, and from all
along the deck rise little jets of steam, for the Mate is already
trying the windlass. Once more we are "cleared for sea." In an hour's
time the tug _Implacable_, mingling her frenzied little yelp with our
deeper note, will pull us out into the middle of the dock, then round,
and slowly through the big gates, into the locks. The hatches are
already on the after combings, and sailors are spreading the tarpaulin
covers over them and battening down with the big wood wedges.

"Steam for eleven o'clock," said the Chief last night. Right! The
gauges are trembling over the 150 mark now--enough to get away with.
"Open everything out, Mr. McAlnwick," says the Second as he strolls
round for a last look before going on deck. I carry out the order,
glance at the water-level in the boilers, and then go for'ard to see
how many of my firemen are missing. They should all be here by now.
No, two short still. Old Androwsky rears himself up and points with
the stem of his pipe at the quay. The ship has moved away, and the two
men with sailors' bags and mattresses are watching us. They will get
aboard in the locks.

The Skipper is in uniform on the bridge, and the Mate is, as usual,
in a hurry. The mooring winch is groaning horribly as she hauls on a
cable running from the stern to the quay while the tug pulls our head
slowly round. Right down to the centre of the loading disc now. The
Second Mate rushes to the fiddle-top, and shouts for "more steam"--the
winch has stuck--and a howl from below tells him that the donkeyman is
doing his best. As I go below again the sharp clang of the telegraph
strikes my ear--"_Stand by._"

The steam is warming the engine-room, and there is, in the atmosphere
down here, a peculiar pungent smell, always present when getting away.
It is, I suppose, the smell of steam, if steam has any smell. "Give
'er a turn, Mr. McAlnwick." The Chief looks down from the deck-door,
and I answer "All right, sir." We are moving into the locks now, and
as I start the little high-speed reversing engine the telegraph
pointer moves round to "Slow ahead" with a sharp clang. "Ash-pit
dampers off!" cries George the Fourth, and runs to close the
drain-cocks. There is a sudden loud hammering as I open the throttle,
and she moves away under her own steam. Then she sticks on a
dead-centre, _à point du mort_, as the French _mécaniciens_ say, and
George rushes to open the intermediate valve, kicking open the
water-service cock as he goes past it. At last she goes away, slow,
solemn, and steamy, three pairs of eyes watching every link and bar
for "trouble." "All right?" asks the Chief from above, and the Second,
standing by the staircase, answers "All right, sir." Then "clang" goes
the telegraph round to "Stop," and I close the throttle. "We're in the
locks," says George, fiddling with an oil-cup which is loose on the
intermediate pressure rod. "We're in the locks, and we soon shall
cross the bar." And as he busies himself with one thing and another he
hums the tune which has swept over Swansea like some contagious
disease of late:

     "_When there isn't a girl about,
       You do feel lonely!
     When there isn't a girl about
       To call your only!
     You're absolutely on the shelf,
     Don't know what to do with yourself,
       When there isn't a girl about!_"

"Said good-bye to her, Mac?" he asks. I nod evasively. He has been
home to Sunderland since we got in, and I found him asleep on the
gallery floor, with his head in the ash-pit, the night of his return.
He is better now, and since I know he has brought back a photograph
from the north, I am in hopes of his having fallen in love. (_Clang!
Slow ahead._) It is high time, I think. His constitution won't stand
everything, you know. And it seems such a pity for a fine young chap
to----(_Clang! Stop._) George is recording the bridge orders on the
black-board on the bunker bulkhead, and I wonder----(_Clang! Slow
ahead._) A pause; then--_Clang! FULL AHEAD._

"Let her go away gradually, mister," says the Second as he goes round
to have a look at the pumps. Cautiously the stop-valve is opened out,
and the engines get into their sixty-two per-minute stride. The
firemen are at it now, trimmers are flogging away the wedges from the
bunker doors, and the funnel damper is full open. And then, and
then--how shall I describe the sensation of that first delicate rise
and fall of the plates. I experience a feeling of buoyant life under
my feet! It means we are out at sea, that we have crossed the bar. The
Chief and Second have gone to get washed for dinner, George is on deck
shutting off steam and watching the steering engine for defects, and I
am left alone below with a greaser. I experience a feeling of
exultation as I watch my engines settle down for their seven-day run
to the Canary Islands. How can I explain how beautiful they are?

     "_All things bright and beautiful,
     All creatures great and small,
       All things wise and wonderful,
     The Lord God made them all!_"

Yes, that is how I feel just now as I pace round and round, alert for
a leaky joint or a slackened nut. The solemn music of the plunging
rods is all the sweeter for that I have not heard it for six weeks. We
are out at sea!

And now George comes down again, and I go on deck to get my dinner. We
are crossing Swansea Bay, among the brown-sailed trawlers and the
incoming steamships. The sun shines brightly on us as we bear away
southward towards Lundy, and I stare out silently across the broad
Channel, thinking. Oh, my friend, stand by me now, in this my hour of
need! How foolish! I am alone at sea, and my friend is in London,
puzzling over my behaviour to him.

The cool breeze against my face arouses me. The mood of exultation in
my engines, the mood of blank despair, both have passed, and I am, I
hope, myself again. Once more "the kick o' the screw beneath us and
the round blue seas outside." Once more the wandering fever is in my
blood, and, as the winter's day fades away, I stand against the rail
looking eastward at the flashing lights, calmer than I have been since
that night--a month ago. I am an ocean tramp once more, and count it
life indeed.

     "_And out at sea, behold the dock-lights die,
     And meet my mate, the wind that tramps the world._"




XVIII


I have been looking into some of my books, now that the sea is so calm
and the weather so enchantingly fair. I find a pleasurable contrast in
dipping into such volumes as Boswell's "Johnson," Goldsmith's "Beau
Nash," and Lady Montague's "Letters." The life they depict is so
different, the opinions they express so dissimilar from those I have
myself gradually grown to affect. And what an amazing _farrago_ is
that same Boswell! Surely, if ever a book was written _con amore_, it
is that one. Compare it with the "Life of Beau Nash." Each is the
biography of a remarkable man, but what a difference! In every line
Goldsmith displays a certain forced interest. I do not know, but I am
almost positive he cared very little for his subject; I feel that the
work is only being carried on for the sake of gain. Regarded so, it is
a masterly little Life. Two hundred small pages--Nash merits no more
on the roll of fame.

But the former, twelve hundred closely printed pages. No paltry little
anecdote or incident, germane or not, is too contemptible for him. The
identity of some obscure school, the mastership of which Johnson never
held, is argued about until one is weary of the thing. The illegible
note, written for his own eye alone, is construed in a dozen ways, and
judgment delivered as though the fate of empires hung thereon. The
smug complaisance with which he cites some prayer or comment to
illustrate his idol's religious orthodoxy would have angered me
once--_did_ anger me once--but out here, on the broad blue ocean, I
smile at the toady, and marvel at the wondrous thing he has wrought.

Pleasant, too, to turn the leaves of my Dryden, and glance through
some of those admirably composed prefaces, those egotistical
self-criticisms so full of literary pugnacity, in an age when pluck in
a poet needed searching for. I often say to folk who deplore Bernard
Shaw's prefatory egotism that if they would read Dryden they would
discover that Shaw is only up to his own masterly old game of
imitating his predecessor's tactics. But Shaw is quite safe. He knows
people do not read the literature of their own land nowadays.

I had a laugh last evening all to myself when I noticed that, in a
hasty re-arrangement of my book-shelves, _Gorky_ stood shouldering old
_Chaucer_! Could disparity go f

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