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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Ocean Tramp, by William McFee
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Ocean Tramp
+
+Author: William McFee
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2009 [EBook #30648]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 further? And yet each is a master of his
+craft, each does his work with skill--with "trade finish," as we say.
+And so it seemed to me that, after all, one might leave the "Romaunt
+of the Rose" side by side with "Three of Them," on condition that each
+is read and re-read, if only for the workmanship.
+
+Cellini, too, draws me as regularly and irresistibly as the moon makes
+our tides. Here is richness. The breathless impetuosity of the whole
+narrative, the inconceivable truculence of the man, fascinates me,
+who am so different. When I looked at that "Perseus" in Florence, when
+I leaned over the medal-cases in South Kensington and stared hard at
+the work of his murderous hands, I felt awed and baffled. How could he
+do it--he with his dagger just withdrawn from some rival's shoulders,
+his fingers just unclasped from some enemy's windpipe? Then, again,
+the virile cheerfulness of the man! God is ever on his side, Justice
+is his guardian angel. And while musing upon him some few days back, I
+fell to wondering if I might not imitate him. I mean, why could not I
+take the life of some such man (and I know one at least who could sit
+for the portrait), and write a fictitious autobiography in that
+truculent, bombastic, interesting style? I have the material, and I
+believe I could do it. What do you think, old friend? It is already
+one of my plans for the future, when I am done wandering.
+
+That last word reminds me of my Borrow. Who can describe the
+bewildering delight when one first plunges into "Lavengro" and the
+"Romany Rye"? To take them from the book-case and carry them out to
+Barnet, where the Kingmaker fell, and read with the wind in your face
+and the Great North Road before your eyes--is that too much to ask of
+mine ancient Londoner? Believe me, the thing is worth doing. No man
+ever put so divine an optimism into his books, so genuine a love of
+"nature." Says Mr. Petulengro: "There's night and day, brother, both
+sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's
+likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would
+wish to die?"
+
+One of the most precious memories of my younger manhood is brought
+back to me as I write those words. It was a Sunday afternoon in late
+autumn, in one of those unfrequented ways which slant off from the
+Great North Road beyond Hadley Heath, where the green turf bordered
+the brown road and the leaves covered the earth beneath the trees with
+a carpet of flaming cloth-of-gold. I had left my book and bicycle to
+one side, and, seated upon a low grey stone wall, I watched the sun go
+down. Behind me, across the intervening meadows, rose clouds of dust,
+redolent of waste gases, where thundered an ever-increasing traffic of
+swift vehicles. In front a vaporous mist was rising from the land; the
+shadows broadened, and the red western glow grew deeper, while in the
+middle distance a tiny child, clad in green cloak and little red hood,
+stood conning her Sunday story--a jewel of quiet colour in the
+gathering autumn twilight. And so, as I listened to the roar from the
+macadamed highway and looked out upon that evening glory, it was as
+though I heard, far off, the throbbing pulse of the great world's
+mighty hand, while I sat still in the heart of it.
+
+"Life is very sweet, brother: who would wish to die?"
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Is all this too bookish for an ocean tramp? Alas! I fear I grow too
+cocksure of my literary attainments out here, with none to check me.
+It is in London where a man finds his true level in the book world, as
+Johnson shrewdly observed. In the evening, when we are gathered over
+the fire, and opinions fly across and rebound, when one hears bookmen
+talk of books, and painters talk of art--that is the time when I feel
+myself so unutterably insignificant. Often I have looked across at
+T----, or G----, or ----, someone I know even better than them, and I
+feel discouraged. You men have _done_ things, while I--well, I talk
+about doing things, and try, feebly enough, to make my talking good;
+but to what end? T---- has his work in many a public building and
+sacred edifice; G---- has his books on our tables and in the
+circulating libraries; and you have done things, too, in dramatic
+literature.
+
+Meanwhile I am an engine-driver on the high seas! I know my work is in
+the end as honourable and more useful than yours, but I cannot always
+keep back a jealous feeling when I think of the years sliding by, and
+nothing done. Nothing ever finished, not even--but there! That chapter
+of my life is finished and done with, incomplete as the story will be
+always. Often and often, under the stars at midnight, I think that if
+she would stand by me, I could be nearer success--I could take hold of
+life and wrench away the difficulties of it. And then again comes a
+more valiant, manly mood. I say to myself, I will do something yet. I
+will reach the heights, and show her that one man at least can stand
+on his own feet. I will show her that she need have no need to be
+ashamed of him, though no carpet-knight, only an engine-driver. And I
+recall that brave song in the "Gay Pretenders":
+
+     "_I am not what she'd have me be,
+     I am no courtier fair to see;
+       And yet no other in the land,
+       I swear, shall take my lady's hand!_"
+
+Well, that is my high resolve sometimes, and I will try to keep it in
+front of me always, and so do something at last.
+
+Well, well, this is sad talk for the day before Christmas! Come away
+from books and trouble, out on deck, where there is a breeze. The
+mighty Norseman is ready to cut my hair, and is waiting abaft the
+engine-room under the awning.
+
+It is the donkeyman's business, aboard this ship, to cut the officers'
+hair. A marvellous man, a good donkeyman. And this one of ours is
+multi-marvellous, for he can do anything. He speaks Swedish, Danish,
+Russian, German, and excellent English. He has been a blacksmith,
+butcher, fireman, greaser, tinsmith, copper-smelter, and now,
+_endlich_, _enfin_, at last, a donkeyman. His frame is gigantic, his
+strength prodigious. On his chest is a horrific picture of the
+Crucifixion in red, blue, and green tattoo. Between the Christ and the
+starboard thief is a great triangular scar of smooth, shiny skin. One
+of his colossal knees is livid with scars. He tells me the story like
+this, keeping time with the click of the scissors.
+
+"When I was a kid I was a wild devil. Why, I ran away with a circus
+that came to Stockholm, and my father he came after me and he nearly
+kill me. Then, one day, I had on--what you call 'em, mister?--long
+shoes, eight, ten feet long--ah! yes, we call 'em _ski_. Well, I go to
+jump thirty, forty feet, and I am only twelve years old. The strap
+come off my foot and I have not time to shift my balance to the other
+foot, and I go over and over, like a stone. I come down on my knee,
+and there are beer-bottles on the rocks. The English and Germans, they
+drink beer on the rocks--beautiful Swedish beer, better than
+Löwenbrau, hein! Well, they take out of my knee fifty pieces of
+glass--you see the marks? And my chest it is smashed bad. They cut off
+three rib and look inside; this is where they look into my chest. All
+right! They put ribs back and box all up. Oh, I was a wild devil when
+I was a kid!"
+
+Such is Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen, with his huge strength, frescoed
+chest, and pasty face with the jolly blue eyes. I think the women like
+him, and, by the hammer of Thor! he can bend a bar of iron across his
+knee!
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+It is Christmas Day, and I begin it with the clock as usual. George
+the Fourth punches me in the ribs, grunts, "Merry new Christmas, Mac,"
+and vanishes. There is not a breath of air stirring. Through the
+sultry night air the stars burn brightly. A cluster of blurred lights
+on the horizon show me where a liner is creeping past us in the
+darkness--a ship passing in the night. Clad only in dungaree trousers
+and singlet, I go below, on watch. The windsail hangs limp and
+breathless, and the thermometer stands at 120° Fah. Christmas Day!
+
+Slowly in the hot air the hours drag on. One, two, three o'clock.
+Then, "one bell." No breeze yet. I finish up, score my log on the
+black-board--Sea water 90°, discharge 116°--and call the Second. He is
+awake, panting in the hot oven of his berth. If I wish him a merry
+Christmas he will murder me. I slink below again, and have a sea bath.
+Even salt water at 90° Fah. is a boon after four hours in that
+inferno.
+
+A mug of cocoa--strange how hot cocoa cools one--and I turn in. I hear
+the Skipper padding up and down in his sandals on the poop, clad only
+in pyjamas. At last, as the stars are paling, I fall asleep.
+
+At seven o'clock I am aroused by the mess-room steward leaning over
+me, closing my ports. They are flooding the decks with sea-water to
+cool them, and if my ports are open I am also flooded.
+
+Still no relief. There is a deathly quiet in the mess-room as we
+assembled to our Christmas breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee, cocoa,
+and marmalade. Imagine such a _menu_ in the tropics! The butter is
+liquid, and from each of us, clad in singlets and white ducks,
+the sweat streams. The day begins unpropitiously. John Thomas,
+the mess-room steward, balancing himself on the top step of our
+companion-way with three cups of boiling cocoa in his hands, slips and
+thunders to the bottom. There is a chaotic mixture of scalded boy,
+broken cups, and steam on the floor, and we giggle nervously in our
+Turkish bath.
+
+George the Fourth goes on watch, and we lie listlessly under our
+awning, praying for a breeze. On the face of the blazing vault there
+is not a single cloud, on the face of the waters not a ripple. The sea
+is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from the funnel rise
+vertically, and the sun quivers behind them. The flaps of the windsail
+hang dead, the sides of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck
+of a skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our heads and the air
+grows hotter and hotter. From the galley come sounds of quacking, and
+a few feathers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized trimmer
+will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the open air, his half-naked
+body black with coal-dust and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big
+straw hat, paces the bridge slowly. The cook emerges from the galley
+and hastens aft for provisions--they are preparing our Christmas
+dinner. Roast duck, green peas, new potatoes, plum pudding--and the
+temperature is 105° Fah. on deck.
+
+One bell. I rise, and go below to change for my watch--12 to 4.
+
+"Will you take any dinner, sir?" John Thomas rubs the sweat from his
+forehead and sets the soup on the table. I ponder on the madness of
+eating Christmas fare in that oven-like mess-room, but sentiment
+wins, and I sit down with the others.
+
+"Hoondred an' twenty oonder t' win's'le," whispers George to me
+huskily.
+
+"What's the sea-water?" asks the Chief.
+
+"Eighty-nine, sir."
+
+We push the soup aside, and John Thomas brings in the roast ducks. How
+appetizing they would be at home! The Chief wrenches them apart in
+perspiring silence, and we fall to. We peck at the food; the sweat
+drops from our faces into the plates, the utensils slide from our
+hands, and so we make the best of it. But when the pudding arrives our
+courage fails us. We _cannot_ face plum pudding, sentiment or no
+sentiment. We gulp down some lime-juice and stagger away like dying
+men--I to four hours' purgatory below.
+
+Slowly (oh, so slowly!) the time drags on. The greaser draws his
+tattooed arm across his eyes and whispers, with the triumph of a lost
+soul bragging of the Circle of Fire, that he has known it "'otter'n
+this in the Red Sea, sir." He is an entertaining man. Often I hear
+tales from the wide world of waters from his lips. This is his last
+voyage, he tells me. He is going "shore donkeyman" in future--what you
+call longshoreman. His wife has a nice little business in Neath now,
+and "she wants 'im 'ome." Have I noticed how that high-press guide is
+leaking? Should he tighten up the tap-bolts in the bottom plate? I
+dissent, because one cannot reach them safely while she is running. It
+is only a trifle; better let it go. He acquiesces doubtfully, and
+resumes greasing. And the hours drift by.
+
+At four o'clock the Second relieves me, looking reproachfully at the
+slackened windsail. Still no breeze. And the greaser, who does not go
+off till six o'clock, observes, "Oh, wot a--'appy Christmas!" Which
+would be profane if the temperature were lower.
+
+I change into white ducks again and saunter up to the bridge to talk
+to my friend the Mate. If I were to paraphrase Johnson's burst of
+energy, I should say, "Sir, I _love_ the Mate!"
+
+"Merry Christmas, Mr. McAlnwick!" he shouts cheerfully from the upper
+bridge, and a chorus of yelping dogs joyfully take up the cry. They
+are the "Old Man's," but they follow the Mate up and down until they
+drop with fatigue. Black silky spaniel, rough-red Irish terrier, black
+and grey badger-toed Scotch half-breed, nameless mongrel--they all
+love the Mate. "Come here," he says, and I climb up to his level.
+
+"The Old Man had a letter this mornin'," he says.
+
+"Eh?" I remark blankly.
+
+"Ah! His wife gave it me before we sailed an' I left it on his table
+this mornin'! Says he, at breakfast, 'Pshaw!' says he, 'it's a waste
+o' paper.'"
+
+"Mr. Honna," I say, "perhaps he'll be sorry for saying that, eh?"
+
+"He will, he will--some day, Mr. Mac," and he walks up and down the
+bridge for a bit, smoking the pipe his children gave him for a present
+last Christmas. I ask him:
+
+"When shall we strike the trade wind, Mr. Honna?"
+
+"Soon, soon. 'T ought to be here in the morning."
+
+I climb down again, and sniff eagerly for the first beginnings of a
+breeze. Nothing, unless you are optimistic and like to stare at a
+brown streak away southward, between sky and sea.
+
+I reach the engineers' awning aft of the engine-room, and see the
+Chief in his chair, the Fourth in his hammock, and the Second just
+come up for tea. I open my mouth and speak, when the regular throb of
+the engines is broken by a scream. Like a flash each one springs to
+his feet and looks at the others. The regular throb goes on as before,
+and George laughs, but the Second disappears through the door, I
+following. I shall not easily forget that scream.
+
+Half-way down, a fireman, his face blanching under the coal-dust and
+sweat, meets us.
+
+"What's up?" snaps the Second.
+
+"Donkeyman, sir. In the crankpit!" He plunges downward again, and we
+do the same. Down into the fierce oily heat illuminated by the
+electrics in front of each engine. The second puts two fingers in his
+mouth and whistles shrilly to those above. And then we fall to work.
+The telegraph is flung over to "Stop," the throttle is closed, ash-pit
+damper put on, and the regular throb slackens, hesitates, stops. With
+a dexterous flick of the reversing engine the Second catches the
+high-press engine on the stop centre and locks her there. And then we
+look.
+
+Far better for him, poor lad, if he had taken my tip and left those
+tap-bolts to leak. The Second says "Hand-lamp," and I give him one.
+People are coming down the stairs in numbers now, and the Chief rushes
+up to us, looks down, and turns away sickened. The ponderous cranks
+have blood dashed across them, the rod is streaked and lathered with
+it. From the bottom of the pit comes no sound, no movement. Lying on
+the plates is the spanner which must have spun from his hand as he
+fell to destruction.
+
+"Now then, how many more?" snarls the Second. Sweat streams from his
+face as he pushes the intruders away and lifts a man-hole plate in
+the platform. I seize the hand-lamp and get down on to the tank, and
+the Second follows. It is not pleasant, understand, down there, where
+bilge collects and rats run riot, and grease is rolled into filthy
+black balls, and the stench is intolerable. I push on towards the pit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A full moon, blood-red and enormous, hangs just above the eastern
+sky-line. In the west still burns the glow of the vanishing sun, and
+the pale sky is twinkling with innumerable stars. The regular throb
+of the engines drives the ship forward again, a sailor is hauling
+down the red ensign from the poop, and another moves to and fro,
+silhouetted against the southern sky, on the foc'sle-head. Just ahead
+of the bridge two more sailors sit busily sewing. The Old Man stands
+by the chart-house door talking to the Mate. The dogs lie quietly on
+the lower deck, their heads between their paws.
+
+In the after-hatch, covered by the flag, lies that which is about to
+be committed to the deep.
+
+The red glow fades from the west, and the moon swings upward, flooding
+the sea with silver light. Away southward lies a black streak on the
+sky-line and the windsail flickers a little. The two sailors have
+finished sewing, and go aft. A fireman breaks the deck silence as he
+hoists two firebars up from the for'ard stokehold and carries them
+aft. Up on the poop, under the awning, the Second Mate has removed the
+hand-rails on the starboard quarter, and the carpenter is lashing some
+hatches in an inclined position.
+
+We by the engine-room door are silent, for there is nothing to say. We
+wait for the _Stand by_ bell in silence. A heavy footfall, and the
+Skipper, his bronzed face hard-drawn, his snowy hair uncovered, passes
+us. I think, even now, he is sorry for that sneer at his wife's little
+trick. He is going to get the Prayer Book that lies close to his
+revolver in his chest.
+
+George and I go below and make all ready. I think the Second is glad
+of our company, in the terrible heat. We potter about in silence: then
+"_Stand by--Half--Slow--Stop_." A few minutes' swift toil, a hurried
+wash, and we climb up on deck again into the moonlight. A white,
+silent world of waters is about us as we join the crew going aft to
+the poop. The awning has been partly folded back, and we see the
+Skipper resting his book on the tiller-gear, while the Steward stands
+by with a lantern. I look curiously into the faces I know so well,
+seeking, in the presence of death, a little more knowledge of life. I
+look at the Skipper, with his white hair and fierce moustache gleaming
+in the silver radiance of the moon, his hands fumbling with the
+leaves of the book. I look at the Chief, fidgeting about in the rear,
+meeting no one's eye, his mouth working nervously. I look at George
+the Fourth; he is staring like a schoolboy at the flag-covered thing
+on the hatch, with the firebars lashed to its sides. And then the
+silence is broken by the harsh, unsteady voice:
+
+"_I am the resurrection and the life._"
+
+The tension is almost unbearable now. We have not been educated to
+this. We are like soldiers suddenly flung into the face of the enemy.
+
+"_We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into
+corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea
+shall give up her dead), and the life of the world to come, through
+our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body
+that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty
+working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself._"
+
+A pause, and he closes the book. Two of the men quietly slacken the
+ropes which hold the body in position, another pulls off the flag, and
+the dark mass on the planks plunges downward into the oily sea.
+Another pause, while I picture it rushing "down to the dark, to the
+utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are," and the Chief
+motions furtively with his fingers.
+
+In a few minutes we are under way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is eight bells, midnight, once more. The sky to the southward is a
+jet-black mass of clouds, and the windsail is yawing in a strong, cool
+breeze. Away to the westward the moon still throws her glory over the
+face of the waters and I go below, thinking of the night coming, when
+no man shall work.
+
+And so ends our Christmas Day.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+It is Sunday, and I lie under the awning by the engine-room door,
+lazily reading "Faust." There is a speck on the sky-line--the
+mail boat, bringing a letter from my friend. I look round at the
+translucent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the
+reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull
+roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the
+bar, and the complaisant "_ah-ha-a-a_" of some argumentative penguin.
+Even the drab-coloured African hills in the distance, and the
+corrugated Catholic church (shipped in sections) with the sun blazing
+on its windows, are beautiful to me to-day, for I am not of those who
+think religion is ugly because it is corrugated, or that hills are
+repulsive because they are not in the guide-book. I am at peace, and
+so are the rest. My friend the Mate is fishing, but that, of course,
+is trite; the Mate is always fishing. I fancy the cod nudge each other
+and wink when they see his old face looking down into those opalescent
+depths, and watch him feeling at his lines for a bite. How they must
+have joked together this morning when he gave a shout and called for
+help, for he could not lift the line! We all responded to the call,
+and the line came up slowly. "Must be a whopper," muttered the Mate,
+and refused my callous suggestion that it was a coal-bag which had got
+entangled in the hook. At last, after an eternity of hauling, came up
+part of an iron bedstead, dropped from some steamer in the long ago.
+But the true fisherman has reserves of philosophy to cope with such
+slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
+
+Meanwhile the speck has enlarged itself into a blot with a tag above
+it and some cotton-woolly smoke. "'Tis the _Nautilas_," observes the
+Mate, and he calls it "Naughty Lass" with hibernian unconsciousness of
+his own humour. I wonder, now, why it is that we sailor-men invariably
+display such frantic _feminine_ interest when another craft heaves in
+sight. The most contemptible fishing boat in the Bay of Biscay, when
+she appears on the horizon, receives the notice of all hands--the old
+as well as the young. And when we pass a sister ship, the _Aretino_ or
+the _Cosimo_ or the _Angelo_; in mid-ocean, we talk about her and
+criticise her, and rake out her past history, for days. I sometimes
+think, from hints the Mate drops, that our own _Benvenuto_ has a past,
+a St. John's Wood past I mean, not a Haymarket past. But he will have
+no talk by others against the ship. "What's the matter with the ship?"
+he will shout. "Damn it all, I like the ship! She's a good old ship,
+an' I glory in her!" So we talk scandal about the others instead.
+
+Here, on the ragged edge of the Empire, things are managed
+expeditiously by the authorities. Scarcely an hour after the
+_Nautilas_ has dropped her pick the tugboat comes out again and flings
+us our mail. Bosun and donkeyman trudge aft and take the letters for
+the foc'sle, the mess-room steward deposits a letter in my lap, and I
+think of my friend. At this moment he is engaged in repartee with the
+housekeeper as she lays the table for tea. The heavy twilight is
+settling down over the river outside; lovers are pacing the walk as
+they return from their Sunday tramp. Possibly, too, that fantastic
+scene which he has described to me is now enacting. He is at the
+piano; the housekeeper, in tears, is on her knees beside him, and they
+raise their melodious voices "_for those in peril on the sea_." How
+affecting, for one to be so remembered! I thank them both with all my
+heart.
+
+And now he tells me that his play goes well, and I am glad. It will
+indeed be a red-letter day when I pay my shilling and climb into the
+gallery to see his work. No, I shall not criticise. Probably I shall
+hardly listen. I shall be thinking many thoughts, dreaming dreams,
+feeling simply very glad and very proud.
+
+I sympathise always with his struggles with his _personnel_, but I
+think, though, he hardly allows enough for the point of view. These
+actors and actresses are not literary. (They _should_ be, I know.)
+They look at an author's work as a man looks at the universe--a small
+part at a time. That trite old paradox that, to the actor, the part is
+greater than the whole, should never be forgotten. Remember, too, how
+"touchy," as he calls it, they _must_ be, in the nature of things.
+Their touchiness, their affectation, their lack of culture--all are
+inherent in them. _Their_ success is always immediate, using the word
+in its literal sense as a metaphysician would use it; the author's
+success is mediate, through time and trial. So one should not be
+discouraged because they fail to appreciate one's efforts to give
+them the atmosphere of the period. They will get the atmosphere
+intuitively, or not at all.
+
+He complains of "loss of time," "thankless task," "inefficiency," and
+the like. Now, I think that is grumbling without cause. Take my own
+case, for example. I have no problems of dramatic art to wrestle with,
+only the problem of coal consumption. But it is ultimately the same
+thing, i.e., energy. My friend mourns the shameful loss of energy
+incident to the production of a decent presentment of his dramatic
+conception. I, as an engineer, mourn over the hideous loss of coal
+incidental to the propulsion of the ship. The loss in his case, I
+suppose, is incalculable: in mine it is nearly seventy per cent. Think
+of it for a moment. The _Lusitania's_ furnaces consume one thousand
+tons of coal per day, seven hundred of which are, in all probability,
+lost in the inefficiency of the steam-engine as a prime mover. It runs
+through the whole of our life, my friend! Waste, waste, waste! What we
+call the perfect cycle, the conversion of energy into heat and heat
+into energy, cannot, in practice, be accomplished without loss. What
+may interest you still more is that we cannot, even in theory,
+calculate on no loss whatever in the progress of the cycle, and by
+this same "entropy loss," as we call it, some of our more reckless
+physicists foresee the running down of the great universe-machine some
+day, and so eliminating both plays and steam-engines from the problem
+altogether. But this is my point. Prodigious loss is the law of
+nature which she imposes both on artist and artisan. Indeed, artist
+and artisan have their reason of being in that loss, as I think you
+will admit.
+
+Again, history will corroborate my contention as to the catholicity of
+this loss. Imagine the French Revolution, the Lutheran Reformation,
+the "Catholic" Reaction, and the like, to be _revolutions_ of the vast
+human engine. Consider then the loss of power. Consider the impulse,
+the enormous impulse, applied to the piston, and then look at
+the result. What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in
+friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) waste gases! Think,
+too, of the loss involved in unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced
+engines, one mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! Oh, my
+friend, my friend, you talk of "losses" as though you playwrights had
+a monopoly of it. Ask men of all trades, of all faiths, and they will
+give you, in their answers, increased knowledge of human life.
+
+Such, at least, is my method--digging into the hearts of men. Take,
+for instance, my friend the Second Officer. A tall, lean young man,
+with an iron jaw under his brown beard. I began to talk to him one
+evening because he said he never had letters from home. He had a
+sister, he told me, but there was no joy in the telling. "We don't
+hit it off," he observed grimly, and I smiled. He has no sweetheart,
+loves nothing but dogs. How he loves dogs! He has two at his heels all
+day long. He loves them almost as much as dogs love the Chief Officer,
+which is to distraction. He will take the solemn English terrier up on
+his knee and give me a lecture thereon. This same pup, I learn, is
+"low"--look at his nose! He is in bad health--just feel his back
+teeth! Saucy? Yes, certainly, but not a thoroughbred hair on him. He
+has worms, too, I understand, somewhere inside, and on several
+occasions during the voyage his bowels needed attention. I, in my
+utter ignorance of dog-lore, begin to marvel that the animal holds
+together at all under the stress of these deficiencies. Perhaps the
+dirt which he collects by rolling about on deck affords a protective
+covering. Once a week, however, his lord and master divests him of
+even this shadowy defence, and he emerges from a bucket, clean, soapy,
+and coughing violently. In all probability he rejoices in consumption
+as well.
+
+The Second Officer, I say, teaches me philosophy. He has had a hard
+life, I think. By sheer industry he has risen from common sailor to
+his present berth. I say "sheer" because it seems to me that when a
+man has no friends or relations who care to write to him, the way of
+life must be very steep indeed. I was surprised, though, to learn
+of his loneliness. Had he, then, no kindly light to lead him on?
+Unconsciously he answered me. Would I come down below and have
+something to drink? With pleasure; and so we went. The last time I had
+been in that room was when his predecessor, the little man with four
+children and a house of his own, had extended hospitality to me. It is
+not a pleasant room. A spare bunk full of canvas bolts, cordage, and
+other stores, make it untidy; and the Steward's stores are just behind
+the after bulkhead, so that it smells like a ship-chandler's
+warehouse. Well, we sit down, and the whiskey passes. We light cigars
+(magnificent Campania Generals at three farthings each), and then he
+ferrets about in his locker. I look at the pictures. Almanack issued
+by a rope-maker in Manchester; photo of an Irish terrier, legs wide
+part, tail at an angle of forty-five to the rest of him; photo of
+Scotch terrier, short legs, fat body, ears like a donkey's; photo of
+the officers of s.s. _Timbuctoo_, in full uniform, my friend among
+them, taken on the upper deck, bulldog in the foreground. By this time
+the Second Officer has exhumed an oblong wooden case containing a worn
+violin. Ah! I have his secret. He holds it like a baby, and plucks at
+the strings. Then he plays.
+
+Well, he knows, by instinct I imagine, that I care nothing for music,
+as music. So when I ask for hymn-tunes, he smiles soberly and
+complies. I hear my favourites to my heart's content--"Hark, Hark, My
+Soul," "Weary of Earth," "Abide With Me," and "Thou Knowest, Lord."
+How glad they must be who believe these words! The red sun was
+flooding the room with his last flaming signal as the man played:
+
+     "_Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
+     The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide,
+     When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,
+     Help of the helpless, O abide with me!_"
+
+Yes, _mon ami_, all men know of that tremendous loss inherent in all
+their labours. And it is, I think, to balance that loss that they have
+invented religion.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+It has suddenly struck me that there are many important things to be
+found by considering the cheap literature which floods the English and
+American publics week by week and month by month. I am afraid that,
+when at home in Chelsea, where even the idlers read Swinburne and Lord
+de Tabley, I had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view,
+calling novelettes "trashy" and beneath an intellectual man's
+consideration. Well, since this particular trash forms the staple
+brain food in the Mercantile Marine, I must needs look into it more
+closely. With results.
+
+There is a question of bulk and output. This is appalling to a
+laborious writer, a student or a thinker. Week by week there pours
+forth an unending deluge of love fiction, and week by week this deluge
+is absorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. We speak
+glibly of the world-wide fame of some classic, when, in point of fact,
+the people familiar with that classic are isolated specks in the vast,
+solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household god. The classic
+will have, say, one votary in the family, the novelettist will capture
+the family _en bloc_. An engineer will receive a cargo of novelettes,
+all of which have been digested, or even feverishly devoured, by his
+mother, wife, or sisters. He will pass them on to the Steward, who
+will read them and give them to the sailors and firemen. And this
+obtains in every ship wherever the English language is spoken. What
+classic can claim a public that does not seem microscopic compared to
+this?
+
+I cannot but observe, too, that Miss Anonyme often writes exceedingly
+well. No extraneous vapourings are admitted, and the plot is steadily
+developed to its inevitable conclusion of "happy ever after." The
+metaphors are somewhat stereotyped, and quotations from Tennyson are
+awkwardly handled, but--what would you for a penny? Johnson's
+explanation--that they write well in order to be paid well--is
+correct. Miss Anonyme knows her "market," and she writes for it as
+well as can be expected under the circumstances.
+
+A point worth noting is that this talk about "pernicious literature"
+is not sincere. Literature cannot be pernicious in itself. At the
+present time people can get exactly what they desire, because the
+question of price does not arise. The finest works are to be had at
+every free library, and for a few pence at every book-shop, and the
+public carefully avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chapter
+of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography masquerading as literature
+are priced at "a shilling net," and are avidly purchased and read by
+the simple, God-fearing, sea-faring man.
+
+There is, of course, a tragic side to this question. I mean that,
+after all, a sublime simplicity of mind is a necessary predicate to
+the acceptance of this "cheap" fiction. "_A penn'orth o' loove_,"
+George the Fourth calls a novelette, and there's something very grim
+to me in that phrase also.
+
+I have already noted the "passionate love of music" in the heroes and
+heroines of these stories. I made notes, and, in ten consecutive
+tales, one or more of the characters "was a passionate lover of
+music." I do not complain against the genius whose heroine elopes with
+a clean-shaven villain to Brittany and is married in a Gothic church
+with frescoed chapels. Neither do I any longer cry out when I read
+that "the light that never was lay over the land." I am grown callous
+with a course of light fiction such as I have never taken before. And
+I hope I shall not be misunderstood and numbered with the prigs when I
+say that never did literature seem to me more lovely and alluring than
+when I had finished my task and had opened my "Faust" once more,
+feeling the magic of the master beckoning "to far-off shores with
+smiles from other skies."
+
+What we clearly comprehend we can clearly express. That, I think, is
+Boileau, though I cannot remember where I read it. The baffling thing
+about this fiction is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not
+really a part of literature. The features of my colleagues when
+absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the
+symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine
+which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally
+associated with a recumbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive
+languor. Loss of memory, too, is only one of the consequences of
+reading a dozen novelettes in a week's run.
+
+There is another possibility. I must not forget that in one point I
+found myself in error. In the case especially of engineers, this
+intellectual drug-taking has no effect upon their interest in
+professional literature. When George the Fourth goes up for his
+"tickut" he will be as keen about the theory of steam and the latest
+researches in salinometry as any of the aristocratic young gentlemen
+who haunt the precincts of Great George Street and Storeys Gate. This
+leads me to imagine that in the future there will be a vast mass of
+highly trained mechanicians to whom literature will be non-existent,
+but whose acquaintance with written technics will be enormous. Like
+our scientific men, perhaps. I am uneasy at the prospect, because this
+conception of uncultured omniscience, the calm eyes of him shining
+with the pride of Government-stamped knowledge, is inseparable from an
+utter lack of reverence for women. Neither Antony nor Pericles, but
+Alcibiades is his classical prototype. And so the fiction with which
+he will pass the time between labour and sleep will have none of the
+subtlety of Meredith, none of the delicate artistry of Flaubert, but
+rather the fluent obviousness of Guy Boothby, stripped as bare as
+possible of sex romance.
+
+I am anxious to convince myself of all this, because I want so much to
+divorce this tremendous flood of machine-made writing from genuine
+literary activity. That, too, will evolve and evolve and evolve again;
+but with such a theme I am not genius enough to cope.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+I am grown tired of books. It is a fact that protracted manual toil
+strikes a shrewd blow at one's capacity for thought, and at times I
+turn from the fierce intellectual life with a weariness I never knew
+in the old days. How my friend would smile at such a confession. I,
+who have thumped the supper-table until three in the morning, until
+our eyelids were leaden with fatigue, growing weary of the strife! Yet
+it is sometimes true.
+
+After all, though, my real study nowadays is on deck and below, where
+Shakespeare and the musical glasses are beyond the sky-line, and one
+can talk to men who have never in their lives speculated upon life,
+have never imagined that life could possibly be arraigned and called
+in question, or that morality could ever be anything but "givin' the
+girl her lines, like a man." My friend the Mate is a compendium of
+humanism, the Chief provides me with curious researches in natural
+history. Even the Cook, with whom I have been conversing, presents
+new phases of life to me, and brings me into touch with the poor, the
+ignorant, and the prolific. The poor whom _we_ know at home are only
+poor in purse. These men are poor in everything save courage and the
+power to propagate their kind. The Cook has received a letter from his
+sister-in-law to the effect that he is now the father of twins, and he
+looks at me and smiles grimly. Under the pretence of obtaining hot
+water for shaving, I am admitted to his _sanctum sanctorum_ abaft the
+funnel, and we talk. It is hardly necessary to say that the Malthusian
+doctrine receives cordial approbation from my friend the Cook, when I
+have expounded it to him.
+
+"Certainly, Mr. McAlnwick," he observes, "but 'ow are you goin' to
+start?"
+
+"You see," I reply, "it isn't a question of starting, but a question
+of stopping."
+
+"Well," he says stolidly, rolling a cigarette, "'ow are you goin' to
+start stoppin'?"
+
+"You," I answer, "might have dispensed with these twins."
+
+"Lord love yer, mister, I _can_ dispense with 'em easy enough. That's
+not the question. The question is, 'ow am I to feed 'em, now I've got
+'em? An' 'ow am I to avoid 'em, me bein' a man, mind, an' not a lump
+o' dry wood?"
+
+Like all theorists, I am hard put for an answer. I look round me, and
+watch my interlocutor preparing to make bread. There is a mammoth pan
+on the bench beside me containing a coast-line of flour with a lake of
+water in the middle. Cook is opening the yeast-jar, an expression of
+serious intent on his face. Some cooks sing when they make bread; the
+Scotchman I told you of in a previous letter invariably trilled "Stop
+yer ticklin', Jock," and his bread was invariably below par. But this
+cook does not warble. He only releases the stopper with a crack like
+a gun-shot, flings the liquid "doughshifter" over the lake in a
+devastating shower, and commences to knead, swearing softly. Anon the
+exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend
+their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass.
+For five pounds a month this man toils from four a.m. to eight p.m.,
+and his wife can find nothing better to do than present him with
+twins!
+
+I look into the glowing fire and think.
+
+I feel this is delicate ground, even allowing for the natural warmth
+of a man who has twins, so I am silent.
+
+"Sometimes," Cook continues, growing pensive as the dough grows stiff,
+"sometimes I feel as though I could jump over the side with a ''ere
+goes nothink' and a bit of fire-bar in me 'ip-pocket. Same blasted
+work, day after day. Monday curry an' rice, fresh meat an' two veg.,
+''arriet lane' and spuds. Toosday, salt meat ditto. Wednesday, bully
+soup an' pastry. Thursday, similar. Friday, kill a pig an' clean the
+galley. Sat'day, ''arriet lane' an' spuds, fresh meat, two veg., an'
+tart. Sunday, similar with eggs an' bacon aft. What good do it do?
+Who's the better for it all? Not me. ''Ere goes nothink!'"
+
+He stabs the fire savagely through a rivet-hole in the door, and
+pushes his cauldrons about. To one who knows Cook all this is merely
+the safety-valve lifting. The ceaseless grind tells on the hardest
+soul, and you behold the result. In an hour or so he will be smiling
+again, and telling me how nearly he married a laundryman's daughter in
+Tooley Street, a favourite topic which he tries to invest with pathos.
+It appears that, after bidding the fair _blanchisseuse_ good-night, he
+chanced one evening to take a walk up and down Liverpool Street, where
+he fell into conversation with a girl of prepossessing appearance.
+Quite oblivious of the fact that Mademoiselle Soap-Suds had followed
+him, "just to see if he was as simple as he looked," he enjoyed
+himself immensely for some twenty minutes, and then ran right into
+her. He assures me he was "'orror-struck." Like a man, he admitted
+that he was conversing with "that--that there." I always like this
+part of the tale. His confession seems to him to have been the
+uttermost depths of mortal self-abnegation. Alas, the heiress of
+Soap-Suds Senior had no appreciation of the queenly attribute of
+forgiveness. She boxed his ears, and he never saw her again. "She was
+allus a spiteful cat," he observes pensively; "so p'raps the wash 'us
+'ud ha' been dear at the price. Still, it _was_ a nice little
+business, an' no kid."
+
+As I raise my pot of shaving-water a huge head and shoulders fill up
+the upper half of the galley doorway. The mighty Norseman has come for
+some "crawfish legs." Like Mr. Peggotty and the crustacea he desires
+to consume, he has gone into hot water very black, and emerges very
+red. His flannel shirt only partially drapes his illuminated chest--I
+see the livid scar plainly. He beams upon me, and asks for a match.
+
+"Well, Donkey," says Cook, "'ow goes it?"; "Donkey" is the mighty
+Norseman's professional title aboard ship.
+
+"Aw reet, mon," says he with the fiendish aptitude of his race for
+idiom. "How is the Kuck?"
+
+"Oh, splendid. Stand out o' the way, and let me make thy daily bread."
+
+"Daily!" screams the Donkeyman. "Tell that to the marines. I have one
+loaf sof' bread three times a week, an' there are seven days to a
+week. Daily! Tell that----"
+
+"Find another ship, me man, find another ship if the _Benvenuto_ don't
+suit!" And the Mate passes on to the chart-house, where are many dogs.
+
+"Ay, will I, when we get to Swansea," says the Donkey man to me,
+beaming. "There are more ships than parish churches, eh? Mister, I
+want to speak to you. Come out here." I go outside in the moonlight,
+and the mighty Norseman takes hold of the second button of my
+patrol-jacket.
+
+"Well, Donkey?"
+
+"I 'ave had a letter from Marianna," he whispers.
+
+"Ah! And so she is----"
+
+"She is Marianna, always Marianna now. A good letter--two and a half
+page. See, in German, mister. She write it very well, Marianna." And I
+behold a letter in German script.
+
+Tastes differ. I am compelled to believe that passion can flow even
+through German script--aye, when it is written by a Swedish maiden of
+uncertain caligraphy. Heavenly powers! I turn the sheet to the light
+from the galley. Surely no mortal can decipher such a farrago of
+alphabetical obscurity. And I do so want to know what Marianna says
+for herself. I love Marianna, for the mighty Norseman says she
+is small and dainty, and her eyes are grey, and--and--well, the
+resemblance doesn't end there; so when I tell my friend, he may laugh
+as much as he pleases. But there had been a quarrel (in German
+script), and the mighty Norseman had grown mightily misogynistic. His
+jolly pasty face had been as long as my arm most of the way out, and
+his sentiments, confided to me each day at seven bells, were
+discourteous to the sex. But now, behold the cloud lifted: German
+script has undone its own villainy, and Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen
+beams.
+
+"I will go 'ome this time, mister," he says, folding up the
+reconciling hieroglyphics.
+
+"How, Donkey--work it?"
+
+"Not much, you bet. I go to London and take a Swedish boat from
+Royal Albert Docks to Gothenburg, train from Gothenburg to Marianna.
+Seventeen knots quadruple twin screw. I will be a passenger for one
+quid."
+
+"Donkey, did you ever hear of Ibsen--Henrik Ibsen?"
+
+"Ibsen? Noa. What ship is he Chief of, mister?"
+
+"A ship that passes in the night, Donkey."
+
+"What's that, mister?"
+
+How small a thing is literary fame, after all! When one considers the
+density of the human atmosphere, the darkness in which the millions
+live, is not Ibsen to them a ship passing in the night indeed, a
+mysterious light afar off, voyaging they know not where? Perhaps that
+is what I meant.
+
+"He wrote plays, Donkey--_Schauspielschreiber_, you know."
+
+"_Oa! Ich hatte nicht daran gedacht!_ 'Ave you a bit of paper and
+envelope, mister, please? I will write to Marianna."
+
+"Give her my love, Donkey."
+
+"Oh-a-yes, please! I'll watch it! What? You cut me out?" A rumbling
+laugh comes up from that mighty chest, he beams upon me, and plunges
+into the galley for his crawfish legs.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Mug of hot water in hand, I pick my way aft among the derrick chains,
+and descend to my room. Have I yet described it? Nine feet six by
+seven wide by seven high At the for'ard end a bunk overtopped by two
+ports looking out upon the main deck. At the after end a settee over
+which is my book-case. A chest of drawers, a shelf, a mirror, a framed
+photograph, a bottle-rack, and a shaving-strop adorn the starboard
+bulkhead. A door, placed midway in the opposite side, is hung with
+many clothes. A curtain screens my slumbers, and a ventilator in the
+ceiling chills my toes when turned to the wind. Ceiling and walls are
+painted dead white, with red wainscotting round the settee. Two
+engravings grace the only vacant spots on my walls--one a wild piece
+of wood and moorland, the road shining white after a late-autumn rain,
+with a gypsy van showing sharp against the lowering sky; the other a
+wintry lane with a waggon labouring in the snow. A patrol-jacket and a
+uniform cap hang over a pillow-case half full of dirty clothes. Such
+is my home at sea.
+
+Look round while I shave. Quite possibly some may wonder that I should
+affect such commonplace pictures. They cost me threepence each, in
+Swansea. Well, I am not concerned with their merit as pieces of
+decorative art. When I look at that wet road and rainy sky, I go back
+in thought to the days when I lived near Barnet, and the world was
+mine on Sunday. I recall how I was wont to throw off my morning
+lethargy, get astride my bicycle, a pipe in one pocket and a book in
+the other, and plunge into the open country beyond Hadley Heath. It
+had rained, very likely, in the morning, and the roads were clean and
+fresh, and the trees were sweet after their bath. And as the afternoon
+closed in I would sit on a gate in some unfrequented lane and watch
+the red fog darken over London town. I was happy then, as few lads
+are, I think. Those long silences, those solitary communings; were
+_mind-building_ all the time. So, when I came away from home and
+settled in Chelsea, and heard men talk, I felt that I, too, had
+something to say.
+
+In like manner my snowscape takes me back to the time when I was a
+mechanic, engine-building near Aylesbury. We lived half a mile from
+the works, at an old inn, and we began at six o'clock. In winter time,
+I remember, we would snuggle into the big back kitchen, with its huge
+cauldron of pig-meat swinging over the open fire, and its barrels
+containing evil things like stoats and ferrets, to put on our boots;
+and when we opened the door, two feet of snow would fall in upon the
+floor. How well I remember that silent trudge up the bleak Birmingham
+Road to the works! There were always two broad ruts in the white
+roadway--the mail-coach had passed silently, at two o'clock. Cold,
+cold, cold! A white silence, save for our dark figures shuffling
+softly through the snow. And then a long eleven-hour day.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+I have occasionally mentioned my friend the Second. A keen,
+dark-skinned, clean-shaven face, with small blue eyes and regular
+white teeth. There are no flies on him. His is one of those minds
+which can grasp every detail of a profession and yet remain very
+ignorant indeed, a mind which travel has made broader--and shallower.
+He is a clever, courteous, skilful, well-bred, narrow-minded
+Broad-Churchman. He is a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a
+frequenter of houses of fair reception. If anomaly can go further, I
+can declare to you that he is engaged to a clergyman's daughter. When
+he is angered, his face grows as thin as a razor, the small blue eyes
+diminish to glittering points, and the small white teeth close like a
+vise. It is then that I am sorry for the clergyman's daughter. We do
+not understand each other, I fear, because I am so unsentimental. He
+believes in unpractical things like Money, Success, Empire, Home Life,
+Football, and Wales for ever. How can a man who puts faith in such
+visionary matters understand one who builds on the eternal and
+immovable bedrock of literature and art? He has sober dreams of
+following in his father's steps and making a fortune for himself, and
+he considers me weak in the head when I explain that I have made _my_
+wealth and am now enjoying it. Would he _ever_ understand, I wonder?
+
+     "_Yes, there are some from whom our Lady flies,
+       Whose dull, dead souls, rise not at her command,
+     And who, in blindness, press back from their eyes
+       'The light that never was on sea or land._'"
+
+In fact, I should say he is one of those same mechanicians of whom I
+spoke, in whose lives literature will have no place, and the desire
+for a private harem supplant the _grande passion_. This may sound
+absurd when one remembers their love of home; but I speak with
+knowledge. It is easy enough to make a man out to be a patriot, or a
+humanitarian, or a home-lover, if you pick and choose from his
+complicated mentality just what suits that particular label. To know a
+man as he is, you must be shipmates with him, quarrel with him, mess
+with him week after week until you are sick of the sight of him. Then,
+if you are sufficiently sensitive to personality, you will divine his
+spiritual bedrock beneath all the superimposed recencies, and you will
+know whether he be "a mere phosphatous prop of flesh" or whether he
+have in him some genuine metallic rock, from which the fabric of the
+distant world-state may be fashioned.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+Once more I am writing "homeward bound." Homeward bound! Outside the
+Channel fog is coming down to enfold us, the wind is cold, my stock of
+fruit, laid in at Las Palmas is done, and George the Fourth is
+growling through the ventilator, "T' Longships, mister!"
+
+Longships--that's twelve hours' run from the Mumble Head, the great
+white lenticular lenses of which fling wide-sweeping spokes of light
+across the tumbling waters of the Channel. The Skipper is cautious,
+has been twenty-two hours on bridge and in chart-room; refuses to go
+ahead until he can locate Lundy. We heard, in Grand Canary, that the
+big White Star _Satanic_ is lying near the Lizard, back broken, total
+loss, heroic passengers all safely landed. Wonderful people,
+passengers. If they keep hysteria at a distance for a few hours, they
+are bravoed from one end of the Empire to the other. The _Satanic's_
+engineers? The Empire has overlooked them, I suppose, which is their
+own peculiar glory.
+
+Homeward bound! "Finishing," too, for three of us. Chief, Second, and
+Fourth are leaving when we get in, and I shall be alone for a few
+days. That means work, I fear, and no joyful run up to Paddington this
+time. Well, well, next time _I_ finish, and we shall foregather in the
+Walk once more. I was thinking, only a day or two back, that Chelsea
+Embankment must be in its glory now, glory of early spring. That noble
+line of granite coping and twinkling lights. How often have we walked
+down past the Barracks from Knightsbridge, taken pot-luck at the
+coffee-stall at the corner, and then fared homeward between the river
+and the trees! Ah, me! To do it once again--that is what I long for.
+
+In the meanwhile, the Longships are away astern, the Skipper has found
+Lundy, a grey hump on the port bow in the morning light, and we are
+"full ahead" for the Mumbles. Sailors' bags are drying on the
+cylinder-tops, Chief, Second, and Fourth are fixing up a "blow-out" up
+town to-morrow night; mess-room steward is polishing the brasswork
+till it shines like gold; and I am writing to my very good friend. We
+are all very cheerful, too; no "sailors' gloom" in our faces as we go
+on watch. George the Fourth (I cannot imagine what the ship will be
+like without him) is making himself ridiculous by doing everything for
+"t' last time." "T' last time!" he mutters as he starts the evaporator
+and adjusts the vapour-cock. He is taking the temperatures for the
+last time. He is going up to South Shields for his "tickut," by which
+he means a first-class certificate of competency issued by the Board
+of Trade. That is George the Fourth's utmost ambition. He is a man
+then; he is licensed to take any steamer of any tonnage into any sea
+on the chart. He has, moreover, a certain prestige, has this skylarky
+youth, when he gets his "chief's tickut." Ladies who preside over
+saloon bars will try to lure him into matrimony. He will grow (I
+hope) a little steadier, and fall really and truly in love.
+
+My colleague the Second, he intends to work ashore and sleep at home.
+The clergyman's daughter, I imagine, will come more and more into the
+scheme of things, and the mother he loves so well will give him her
+blessing. So each, you see, has a clearly defined plan, while I drift
+along, planless, ambitionless, smoking many pipes. I have been trying
+to think out something practicable. Am I to drift always about the
+world, a mere piece of flotsam on Swansea tide? Or am I to sit down
+once more in Chelsea, hand and brain running to seed, while the world
+spins on outside? I must think out a plan. And I must school myself to
+cancel all plans beginning "If she will--if only." Why cannot I rise
+to some decent sense of self-respect, to say, as says the man in "The
+Last Ride Together":
+
+     "_Take back the hope you gave,--I claim
+     Only a memory of the same._"
+
+That's manly--pre-eminently English, in fact. But, meanwhile, I drift
+planless.
+
+The mighty Norseman, too, in his own sinewy Hyperborean style, is full
+of joy. His jolly pasty face beams joyously upon me. He will be
+"a passenger for one quid" from London to Gothenburg, thence to
+Stockholm, and Marianna. The engine-room is bulging, in places, with
+the contraband goods he is bringing home for Marianna. Pieces of silk
+"for the Signorina," as the handsome old huxter-lady at Canary purrs
+in our ears; bottles of Florida water, mule canaries, and Herrick's
+own divine Canary Sack, to which he so often bade "farewell." All
+these for the dainty maiden who indulges in German Script. God speed
+you, oh, mighty Norseman! May your frescoed bosom never prove
+unfaithful to your grey-eyed maiden. I, at least, have been the better
+for having known you--a ship passing in the night.
+
+And so we come to the Mumble Head.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Paid off, free for the afternoon, with overcoat buttoned up and collar
+about my ears, I stroll aimlessly through the town. It has often been
+my ambition to emulate those correct creatures who, when they come to
+a place, study maps, read guide-books, and "do" the sights one by one.
+But, so far, I am a dead failure. Even my own dear London is known to
+me by long-continued pedestrianism. When I reach a town I put up by
+chance, I see things by chance, leave on an impulse, and carry away
+precious glimpses of nothing in particular that I can piece together
+at leisure into a sort of mnemonic mosaic. Well, so I stroll through
+Swansea, trying to forget the only two facts which I know concerning
+it--that Beau Nash was born here and Savage died here. They are like
+bits of grit in the oyster of my content. I will turn aside and see
+life.
+
+I enter one of my favourite taverns. I am surrounded by maidens,
+barmaidens, and a fat landlady. Amy, Baby, Starlight, Chubby--all
+are here, clamorous for the baubles I had promised them four months
+before. My friend would be shocked at their familiarity; I admit, from
+a certain point of view, it is scandalous. But, then, all things are
+still forgiven to sailors. And so, business being slack, I am dragged
+into the bar-parlour and commanded to disgorge. I produce bottles of
+perfume, little buckhorns, ostrich feathers, flamingo wings, and bits
+of silk. The big pocket of my overcoat is discharged of its cargo. I
+am suffocated with salutes of the boisterous, tom-boy kind, and am
+commanded to name my poison.
+
+As a reward, Chubby promises to go with me to that iridescent
+music-hall up the street. Chubby's appearance is deceptive. She is
+diminutive, with a Kenwigs tail of plaited hair down her straight
+little back. But she is almost twenty; she is amazingly swift behind
+the bar, and no man has yet bilked her of a penny. There is a Spartan
+courage about the small maiden, too, which I cannot but admire. Her
+parents are dead; her sisters both died the same week a year ago; she
+must earn her living; but--"No use mopin', is it?" she inquires as she
+fingers a locket containing photographs which hangs around her neck.
+That is her philosophy, couched in language that resembles herself.
+I should be only too delighted to take her. But--there is my
+incorrigible habit of reading a book or lapsing into intellectual
+oblivion while at the play. How many comedies have I "seen" without
+hearing a single word! So, when I go to the iridescent music-hall,
+something in the programme, or the audience, will set me musing, and
+Chubby will be neglected. I think I shall buy two tickets, and let
+Chubby take someone else--George the Fourth, say!
+
+And Baby, fingering the silk I have brought her--Baby personifies for
+me that terrible problem which women and men treat so callously. Baby
+has already passed several milestones on the road to Alsatia and we
+shall meet her some day, somewhere between Hyde Park Corner and
+Wardour Street.
+
+But that is far away yet. The glamour of the thing, its risk, its
+pleasantness, are over her as yet. Officers of the Mercantile Marine
+are not squeamish in a home port, nor are they scarce. Baby's rings
+are worth good money. The sordid bickerings of the trade are in the
+future, the callous calculations, the indispensable whiskey.
+
+Now, while Baby is bending the violet eyes of hers upon a piece of
+Moorish silk, let me clear my mind of humbug. I am no sentimentalist
+in this matter. I am not certain, yet, that "my lady" of to-day is
+the sole repository of every virtue; neither am I dogmatic about
+"necessary vice," the "irreducible minimum," and such-like large
+viewpoints. I have, indeed, nursed a theory that our floating
+population might be induced to receive a certain percentage of these
+adjuncts to civilisation, one or two on each ship, say, with results
+satisfactory to all concerned. Everyone knows that, in towns, the
+demand is grotesquely disproportionate to the supply. The Board of
+Trade could deal with the question of certificates of competency.
+
+As I sit in this bar-parlour, it seems to me that an inextinguishable
+howl of horror is rising from the people of England. And as I desire
+to be honest, I admit that I am overawed by that same tumult--a sort
+of singing in my ears--and so leave the problem to Mr. H. G. Wells, or
+someone else who deals habitually in social seismics.
+
+After all, descriptions of sea-port barmaids can scarcely be
+interesting to my friend. If she lose no time in providing him with
+hot rum and water (not ungenerous with the sugar), she can rival
+either Pompadour or La Pelletier--he cares not which. Which is the
+callous regard of the whole business to which I have referred.
+
+Once more adrift, I wend my way dockwards, pause at the Seamen's
+Mission, hesitate, and am lost. I enter a workhouse-like room, and a
+colourless man nods good-afternoon. Conveniences for "writing home,"
+newspapers, magazines, flamboyant almanacks of the _Christian Herald_
+type, Pears' Soap art, and "_Vessels entered inwards_." For the asking
+I may have back numbers of the _Christian Herald_. Mrs. Henry Wood's
+story-books are obtainable by the cubic foot. As the colourless man
+opens his mouth to address me, I shudder and back out. Give me vice,
+give me boredom, give me anything in the world but this "practical
+religion" and smug futility of ignoble minds.
+
+I fear my philosophy has broken away and I am misanthropic. Possibly
+because I shall not see my friend this home-coming. Moreover, I am due
+on the ship even now, for the others are going off to their triumphal
+"finish" up town. Faring back, then, I come to the dock-head at
+sunset, and it is my hour. Darkness is rushing down upon the shipping
+as I watch. In the distance hill piled on hill, blue dome upon blue
+dome, spangled with myriad firefly lights, backed by the smoky red of
+winter sunset; and here the shipping, ghostly now in the darkness,
+exquisitely beautiful in the silence. From out at sea comes a faint
+"_ah-oo-oo-oo_"--one more toiler coming in to rest. And it is night.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+My friend the Chief Officer is putting fresh clothes on his bed. Clean
+sheets and blankets and a snowy counterpane ("All sorts o' people come
+in to have a chat, Mr. McAlnwick") are arranged with due care. He is
+brisk to-night, is my good friend, having no log to modify this time,
+and nothing else on hand for a day or two. Photos dusted, ports
+opened, tobacco and whiskey duly placed between us, he climbs into his
+nest and proceeds to converse. A sort of "_Tabagie_" or tobacco
+parliament, such as was once in force at Potsdam.
+
+"Sure," he snorts, "'twas blackmail the baggage was after, ye can take
+it from _me_, and--keep the door open when she's sorting the things."
+
+Being a young man, I wait, seated sedately on the settee, to hear more
+concerning "the baggage," who is, let me explain, an itinerant
+_blanchisseuse des équipages_ of equivocal repute. The Mate reaches
+for his pipe.
+
+"Would ye believe it, Mr. McAlnwick? She comes in here, while I'm
+lying in me bunk, closes the door, and comes up to me. Says she, 'Oh,
+Mr. Mate, I'm very unhappy!' and puts her arms round me neck, in
+spite--in spite of all I could do, and falls to screamin'!"
+
+"'Slack back,' says I, 'or ye'll be the most unhappy woman in this
+town.' An' then Nicholas he puts his head in."
+
+"The Steward!" I ejaculate.
+
+"The same. Ye see, mister, the baggage, she thought the Old Man was
+aboard, and--she was goin' to make out a case! Says Nicholas, 'Oh, my
+words! I'll fetch police!' An' away he cuts."
+
+"How embarrassing!"
+
+The blue eyes of my friend the Mate are twinkling, his face is screwed
+up, and his nose is wrinkled all the way up. He is more like my old
+Headmaster than ever.
+
+"'Twas so, Mr. McAlnwick--'twas so. Ye see, my besettin' sin is
+sympathy. I feel sorry for the baggage. She has a har-rd time of it,
+and the ends don't meet--won't meet, nohow. But, as I said, 'Consider
+the situation, Mrs. Ambree.' 'Oh, Mr. Mate,' says she, 'will he fetch
+the police?' 'Possibly,' says I, 'if he finds one on the quay.' And
+she began cryin' fit to break me heart."
+
+To my surprise, the nose is still wrinkled; he breathes through his
+nose in a way that means "Ye don't know what's comin'."
+
+"'Oh, I hope he won't be so cruel, Mr. Mate,' says she, cryin' as I
+said. 'For why?' says I, speakin' stern. 'You are an immoral wumman,
+Mrs. Ambree.' 'Yes,' says she, 'I know that, Mr. Mate, I know that;
+but it would be har-rd on me if he was to fetch Jim aboard for me.'
+'Jim?' says I. 'Who in thunder's Jim, Mrs. Ambree?' ''Tis my husband,'
+she sobs. 'He's on night duty in this dock, an' I'm a ruined soul if
+he finds out.' And she set down there, Mr. McAlnwick, just where
+you're settin' and burst into floods o' tears."
+
+"Dear me!" I observe. And the nose is one mass of humoursome
+corrugations.
+
+"Aye, 'tis so," continues the Chief Officer, pouring out "Black and
+White" for two. "An' at that moment in comes Nicholas, his face
+serious-like, and says he, 'Mrs. Ambree, ye're wanted.' An' she goes
+out wi' him, like Mary Queen o' Scots to the block!"
+
+"Mr. Honna, I'm surprised!"
+
+"Not a bit of it, McAlnwick, not a bit of it! At first I thought
+Nicholas had been a fool and fetched a policeman, but Nicholas is no
+fool, as ye've no doubt observed. Still, I got out an' put on me pants
+and went into the cabin. Passin' the Steward's door I heard voices.
+Enterin' the Steward's room, I saw him an' the baggage splittin' a
+Guinness and carryin' on! 'Twas scandalous, Mr. McAlnwick. To be done
+by a wire-haired, leather-skinned old reprobate like Nicholas. 'Twas a
+clear case, for his wife does all his washin' up at Bridgend."
+
+"I am shocked, Mr. Honna."
+
+"Ye may well be. I was too. Pass the water-bottle, Mr. McAlnwick."
+
+"I hear," I observe, "I hear Alexander the Great is to have the
+_Petruchio_ next time she comes in."
+
+"That's the rumour, Mr. McAlnwick. _I_ think there's something in it,
+for me wife tells me that Mrs. Alexander was lookin' at a house in
+Cathay only last week. 'A house,' says she, 'that will be not less
+than thirty pounds a year.' That means _Petruchio_, a big ship."
+
+The above personage, you see, is the Chief, the man who wore elevators
+in his boots.
+
+"But why should he move into a larger house, Mr. Honna?"
+
+"To keep up his position in the world, Mr. McAlnwick. 'Tis a big
+responsibility, ye see. His youngster will now go to a--a scholastic
+academy while mine remain on the rates."
+
+"How are they, Mr. Honna?"
+
+"Fine, Mr. McAlnwick, fine! Jacko passed I don't know how many exams.,
+and he's teaching the curate to play the organ. Hallo!"
+
+There is a knock at the door, and I rise to lift the hook which holds
+it. A stout man with a short moustache and a double chin--Tenniel's
+Bismarck to the life--touches his cap. It is the night watchman.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir, Mr. Honna, but I don't feel well, sir, and I wanted
+to know, sir, if you'd mind my goin' to get a drop o' brandy, sir?"
+
+"Away ye go, then."
+
+"Thank you, sir. Shan't be long, sir. Only----"
+
+"Have ye any money?"
+
+"Oh, _yes_, sir. Thank you all the same, sir."
+
+I close the door, Bismarck hastens away for brandy, and the Mate's
+nose is covered with wrinkles. Whereby I am at liberty to conclude
+that there is _bunkum_ in the air. I cough.
+
+"See that man?" he says. I nod.
+
+"Skipper of a three-masted bark once."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"He was!"
+
+"What brought him down to night watchman at thirty shillings a week?"
+
+"Bad health. He was always feelin' unwell, and he was tradin' between
+Liverpool and Bordeaux."
+
+The Mate nods at me to emphasise his words, while I look at him
+gravely.
+
+"An' now," adds my friend the Mate, "I must turn out and see he comes
+back."
+
+"I'll do that--don't bother. So he's one of the derelicts?"
+
+"His brother was another. Died mad, over at Landore. Ever hear of Mad
+Robin? Well, he was Chief of a boat carryin' cotton to Liverpool.
+Comin' home from Savannah, dropped her propeller in mid-ocean."
+
+"Shipped his spare one?" Mr. Honna laughs shortly.
+
+"Didn't carry spares in that company, Mr. McAlnwick. No, he made one."
+
+"Made one! How?"
+
+"Out of a block of hornbeam and the plates of one of his bulkheads.
+Knocked about for a month waitin' for fine weather, tipped the ship,
+fixed his tin-pot screw on, and started 'slow ahead.' Came in under
+her own steam, Second Engineer in command, Chief under restraint in
+his berth. Died over at Landore--D.T."
+
+With which abrupt epitaph the Mate reaches for his pants, while I,
+knocking out my pipe, go away to turn in.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+But I cannot sleep. Something lies at the back of my brain--a dull
+anxiety, hardly definable to myself. It is possible that I may see her
+again, when I come home once more. I shall know for certain in the
+morning. And yet it may so happen that it is indeed finished. Nay,
+nay, my friend, have patience. I can see you as you read this,
+storming about the room, dropping red cigarette ash on the carpet,
+visibly perturbed in your mind at my madness.
+
+Yes, yes, I know I forswore it all in a moment of bitter cynicism.
+But, _mon ami_, I am a man--a very irregularly balanced man, too,
+I often think--and there rises from my soul an exceeding bitter
+cry sometimes. You see here my life--barmaid society, ship's
+tittle-tattle, unending rough toil. To have but one hold, one haven,
+one star to guide--canst blame me, _mon ami_, if I hold desperately to
+a tiny hope?
+
+Thinking this out, I walk far out to the pier-head, beneath the
+harbour light, and look earnestly into the darkness covering the sea.
+Have pity, at least, old friend, when I write in pain.
+
+     "_Worth how well, those dark grey eyes,
+       That hair so dark and dear, how worth,
+     That a man should strive and agonise,
+       And taste a very hell on earth
+     For the hope of such a prize!_"
+
+To which your much-tried patience replies merely, "Humph!" I suppose?
+But, old friend, is it not true? Have I not heard your own voice give
+way a little, your own hand falter with the eternal cigarette as some
+long-hidden memory swept across your mind? So I believe, and so I
+understand the terse silence when you rise abruptly from the piano
+in the middle of some sad, low improvisation, and I lose you in
+the smoke-laden darkness of the room. Life for us moderns has its
+difficulties at times, life being, as it were, anything but modern. We
+have so many gods, not all of them false, either; but the Voice of the
+Dweller in the Innermost brings their temples crashing about our ears,
+and we are homeless, godless, atheists indeed.
+
+I do not think this problem has been solved for us yet. It is all very
+well for the orthodox to say sneeringly, "Why not believe, like us?
+Why stand outside the pearly gates, while Love and Lovers pace beneath
+the trees that grow by the River of Life? So easy, _mes amis_! Only
+believe. Do not delay, but come. Why not to-night?" We are further
+from yon purple-crowned heights than you wot of, good friends. Between
+us and that golden radiance lie many miles of dusty road, lies even
+the Valley of the Shadow, through which we have passed. And now, as we
+are emerging from that same Valley, out upon the broad high tablelands
+of Understanding, we turn and see the distant loveliness, and we halt
+and stumble, and (sometimes) lose our way.
+
+     "_She should never have looked on me,
+       If she meant I should not love her!
+     There are plenty--men, you call such,
+       I suppose--she may discover
+     All her soul to, if she pleases,
+       And yet leave much as she found them:
+     But I'm not so, and she knew it
+       When she fixed me, glancing round them._"
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+Chains rattling, winches groaning, sun shining, longshoremen shouting,
+breezes blowing.
+
+     "_God's in His heaven--
+     All's right with the world._"
+
+And the dock postman (dear old Postie, who cadges sticks of hard
+tobacco and cigars from us when he brings good news) is standing on
+the quay while the ship is being moved into her new berth, and he
+waves a batch of letters when he sees me looking towards him. So! I
+have been burrowing in our boilers, testing the scale, inspecting
+stays and furnace crowns, and the joy of working has come back to me.
+I was solemn last evening, melancholic and somewhat metaphysical it
+seems; but let it stand. 'Tis morning, and Postie's on the quay.
+
+I breakfast alone. The others are ashore, but they will appear during
+the day to finish up and to bestow mementoes on the wretched one they
+leave behind. And so I sit smoking my pipe by the mess-room fire;
+Postie descends, beaming expectantly. He hands me two letters, one
+from my friend, one from----
+
+There was a thick mist before my eyes, the fire seemed an infinitely
+distant red blur, and Postie, several continents away, was burbling
+about possible promotions, good voyage, fine weather, tobacco, and the
+like. Forgive me, old man, but your letter lay unopened for a while. I
+poured tobacco and cigars into Postie's pockets, and sat down to think
+things out. Was it foolish of me to sit down to think? To set down
+the problem thus: Here am I, a man of infinite, almost unknowable
+latent possibilities, suddenly repossessed of the supreme power and
+glory of life. How can I, by taking thought, bring out those same
+possibilities, make them actual and patent to the world, apply them to
+the highest and noblest uses, and so justify myself before men? In
+some such manner did I put to my own soul the position, trying ever to
+keep in view the sanctity, the holiness of life, and the preciousness
+of its holiest of holies, where dwell, as I have said, the power and
+the glory.
+
+It is late in the evening of this most momentous day, and I must put
+down my pen, but there is one thought which perhaps may serve as
+answer to the scepticism so often expressed when I asserted my belief
+in this world after all. I mean if a man, when he experiences some
+transcendent joy, is prompted to express that joy in terms of nobler
+effort and sterner consecration to the welfare of others--does not
+this fact lead him to infer that happiness is, at least, more natural
+than unhappiness? that the universe does indeed exist, in Emerson's
+phrase, "hospitably for the weal of souls"? That, in fine, when the
+majority turn their faces this way, first keeping the houses of their
+souls swept and garnished for the love they are awaiting, then will
+the mountain of our misery be levelled, our valleys of despair filled
+up, and the rough places of life made plain?
+
+So, at least, it seems to me just now as I sit and write. How I long
+for a talk with my friend!
+
+     "_You're my friend!
+     What a thing friendship is, world without end!_"
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+I was awakened by something rattling outside my open window-port,
+wakened to a small tragedy. A circular wire rat-trap, depending from a
+line held by someone on the poop, and containing two frantic rats,
+dangled against the opening. Alas! how they ran round and round and
+round! The cause of all their agony, a piece of decayed fish and a
+fragment of mouldy cheese, was left untouched as they dangled before
+me. The voice of my friend the Mate is audible down my ventilator. He
+is arguing with the Steward, one Nicholas, of whom you have heard.
+Said Nicholas is protesting in his clickety Graeco-English fashion,
+that the pelt of a drowned rat (_dronded raht_, Nicholas loquitur) is
+worth less than that of one skinned alive. To which horrible doctrine
+my friend the Mate opposes a blustering Irish humaneness issuing in
+"Dammit, ye shan't!" Rats, meanwhile dangling, they as well as their
+fate hanging uncertain. At last they are lowered. (The Mate talking,
+I think, over his shoulder at Nicholas, who stands, probably in
+contemplative fashion, legs apart, face serious, brain calculating
+income derivable from rats skinned alive.) The line rising in a
+minute, I turn on my elbow to witness the end. Alas! _Hélas!! Ach
+Himmel!!!_ How are the mighty fallen! Two grey shining lumps, each
+with tapering tail dropped limply through the bottom; fish, cheese,
+and rodents all on one dead level now, given over to corruption. Up,
+up--I hear the trap grounded on the poop over my head. I sigh as I
+climb out and wash. I rather like rats. The Grey One in the tunnel is
+an old chum of mine. I have never killed one yet, though often even
+Grey One has been chased up and down, in fun. He, sitting on a
+stringer and twirling his whiskers, has "views," I think, about Men
+with Sticks, _his_ conception of the Devil and all his angels.
+
+John Thomas, bursting in with hot water for shaving and information
+concerning breakfast in the cabin, interrupts my rat-reverie. It is
+Sunday morning.
+
+"Eight o'clock, sir. Steward say, sir, will you have breakfast with
+the Chief Officer?"
+
+"No one else aboard?"
+
+"Second Officer's in the galley, sir."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Galley, sir." A snigger from John Thomas. "Come aboard early, sir."
+
+"Oh! Tell the Steward 'Yes, with pleasure.'"
+
+So! I finish dressing leisurely, donning patrol-jacket and uniform
+cap, and "turn out." It is a calm Sabbath morning. Not yet have the
+mists rolled from the heights which frown upon us all around, but the
+sun glitters on the docked shipping, silent save for the flapping of
+sea gulls and the clank of some fresh-water pump. With a glance of
+homage towards the sun, I go below for my inspection. Boilers, fires
+banked in the donkey-boilers over weekend, bilges, sea-cocks all in
+order; I am at liberty to enjoy my day of rest. Nicholas, in white
+drill coat, shining silver buttons, and shore-boots of burnished
+bronze hue, glides aft with a dish (held high, in the professional
+manner) covered with a dome of gleaming pewter. Two youths on the
+quay, fishing hopelessly for insignificant dock carp, watch with
+open-mouthed awe. My own buttons of yellow metal, linen collar, and
+badge _de rigueur_, pass a similar scrutiny as I follow him to the
+saloon.
+
+The saloon, compared with our own quarters, is sumptuously furnished.
+Panelled in hard woods, white ceiling with shining nickel rods and
+brackets, carpeted floor and ruby-plush upholstering--into such a
+palace I step to take breakfast with my friend the Mate. He is already
+entrenched behind the pewter dome, Nicholas gliding round giving the
+final touch of art to the preparations. The subject of skinned rats
+has vanished to make room for the serious business of his life.
+
+"Good-mornin', Mr. McAlnwick. Sit there! We are alone to-day, as ye
+see. Nicholas!"
+
+Nicholas is a believer in ritual. He is tolling his little brass
+hand-bell just as though everyone was here. In a minute he reappears.
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"Is Mr. Hammerton aboard?" A snigger from John Thomas, installed _pro
+tem._ in the pantry as the Steward's aide-de-camp.
+
+"'S in de galley, mister."
+
+"Does he want any breakfast?"
+
+"No, sir. 'S 'sleep in de galley." Another snigger.
+
+"What's the matter with that boy?" thunders my friend the Mate,
+lifting the dome from ham and eggs.
+
+"He is merely cursed with a sense of humour, Mr. Honna," I observe,
+and we avoid conversational rock and shoals until we are ensconced in
+his private berth.
+
+"The fact is, Mr. McAlnwick, Mr. Hammerton's a very foolish young
+feller. Help yourself to some tobacco. Knowin' as I do that when he
+went ashore last night he had twenty-six pounds ten in his cash
+pocket, I wonder he isn't lyin' at the bottom o' the dock instead of
+in the galley. He will not bank his surplus. And he _will_ get drunk."
+
+"What's at the bottom of it all, Mr. Honna?"
+
+"I'll show ye!" With a hoarse whisper he rises, tip-toes swiftly along
+the corridor to the Second Officer's room, and returns with a
+photograph.
+
+Baby! Is she another milestone nearer to Alsatia, then? My pipe
+remains unlit as I gaze at the cheap provincial photograph of a girl
+with large eyes and a sensuous mouth.
+
+Mr. Honna pushes his cap back and stares at me.
+
+"What! D'ye know her?"
+
+"It's Baby," I answer, laying the thing down. "Baby!"
+
+"He's engaged to her."
+
+"Since when?"
+
+"Since--Gawd knows--last Monday, I believe."
+
+I reach for the matches, and recount to the Mate my knowledge of Baby.
+His nose wrinkles up, his eyes diminish to steel-blue points of fire,
+and he nods his head slowly to my tale.
+
+"Same old yarn. Oh, Mr. McAlnwick, are there not queer things come in
+with the tide? Now listen, while I tell ye. 'Tis what they all do.
+They dangle round bars, all at loose ends, they get their master's
+tickets, and they marry barmaids. Then when the command comes along,
+the woman keeps the man down in the mud. 'Twas with me, too. I was
+engaged to a Nova Scotia girl--two Nova Scotia girls--different times.
+I'd roll round town, givin' 'em to understand I was master, take 'em
+out drivin' in a buggy Sunday evenin', makin' a fool o' meself fine.
+When the crash came--oh, Mr. McAlnwick, make use of your advantages
+now yer're at sea!--when the crash came, we were just ready to sail,
+an' I stayed by the ship. But next time 'twould be the same. I
+couldn't be acquainted with a girl for a week without proposin'
+matrimony! Mr. McAlnwick, ye mustn't laugh. 'Tis the truth. Even
+now--but why talk? Ye know my sympathetic nature. But this seems to be
+serious. So she's the barmaid at the Stormy Petrel, is she? Humph!"
+
+"His brains must be addled," I observe, "not to see----"
+
+"Ah! but ye're young, Mr. McAlnwick! _That's_ no hindrance in the
+worrld to--to such as him. _Oh_, dear no!"
+
+"Then such as he have a very low standard of morality."
+
+"Mr. McAlnwick, now listen. When ye've been sent to sea at twelve year
+old as apprentice, an' ploughed the oceans of the worrld for five
+years in the foc'sle, when ye've been bullied an' damned by fifty
+different skippers on fifty different trades as third and second mate,
+when ye've split yer head studyin' for yer ticket, when ye've got it
+and ye're glad to go second mate at seven pounds ten a month, when ye
+see men o' less merit promoted because they marry skippers' daughters
+while you are walkin' the bridge--what 'ud ye do?"
+
+"I don't know, mister." I am taken aback by the velocity of the
+question, by the Mate's earnestness.
+
+"Ye'd turn callous or religious, or go mad! Ye see, Mr. McAlnwick,
+there's a lot ye miss, though ye won't admit it. Ye come to sea and ye
+meet the cloth, but ye don't realise their trainin'. Ye laugh at us
+for our queer ways, such as never walkin' on the poop over the
+Skipper's head, never askin' for another helpin', never arguin' the
+point, an' such like. But consider that man's trainin'! Ye cannot?
+Ye've been brought up ashore, ye've had opportunities for studyin' and
+conversin' with edyecated people, an' ye're frettin' for some young
+lady, as I can see--don't deny it, I saw Postie bring the letter--and
+ye wouldn't touch the likes o' _this_ with a pair o' tongs. But with
+Mr. Hammerton 'tis different, do ye not see?"
+
+"Yes, I see, a little. But you yourself, now----"
+
+"Me? Oh, 'twas a special providence preserved me, Mr. McAlnwick. I was
+waitin' for a command at the time, and I was unable to get out o' the
+bargain. But ye know my wife."
+
+Now, there is no doubt in my mind, after some thought, that the Chief
+Officer was right in insisting on the unspanned gulf between the old
+style officer and the men of our sphere. Heavenly powers! What have I
+not seen, now that the Mate has reminded me? The fatuous ignorance,
+the bigoted conceit, the nauseous truckling to "the Old Man," the
+debased intellect. And yet the Second Officer does not always lie in
+drunken stupor on the galley bench. I call to mind a time when he took
+a violin and played to me as the sun went down across the foam-flecked
+sea. Let us remember him by that rather than by his present state, and
+leave the rest to God.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+It is, I think, an inestimable privilege to claim the friendship of a
+man whose life and letters are a perpetual stimulus to action, an
+invariable provocative of thought. I have just had a letter from my
+friend, telling me that he is in despair of the stage. His play is a
+thing of the past, and he vows that he has done with dramatic art for
+ever.
+
+Now being, like Goldsmith, a person who spends much time in taverns
+and coffee-houses, where one can study every conceivable shade of
+character, I took my friend's letter up town with me, and sat down to
+muse over it and a tankard of ale. It was a cosy bar, cosier than the
+Cheshire Cheese, if more modern; I sank back in a deep lounge and
+watched the world go round.
+
+To commence, I thought to myself, these people here constitute a
+potential public for a play. Therefore, supposing it were _my_ play,
+my attitude towards them is a factor in the dramatic problem. What is
+my definition, my analysis of this potential public?
+
+Well, they are all engaged in a terrific struggle for _safety_. They
+have no social instinct apart from the instinct to combine for
+_safety_. Their ideal is a tradesman, a pedlar, who has accumulated
+sufficient wealth to be safe from poverty. Their ideal of religion is
+one which guarantees safety from hell. They do not believe, and they
+tell you bluntly they do not believe, any man who claims to be an
+altruist. They do not believe any man who protests that he does not
+worship wealth--_i.e._, safety.
+
+By this time I was puzzled to know how to answer my friend's
+complaints. All I knew was that, to strike one blow on the metal and
+drop the hammer because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the
+"artistic temperament." Oh, _mon ami_, that "artistic temperament."
+"Is this all? Up again!" If you are discouraged I can only suggest a
+course of reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few
+offhand--Lessing, Molière, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, these will suffice.
+When did _they_ stop and fold their hands in despair? As for the
+Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention,
+their exuberance under difficulties is devastating. That, however, is
+not your problem. Your drama of to-day is an old bottle with no wine
+in it. You fail because words have ceased to have any definite
+meaning. The words in a man's mouth bear as little relation to his
+emotions as the architecture of his house bears to his ideas. Words
+like Love, God, Faith, and Soul are mere coloured balloons floating
+about the modern West End stage. It is easy to be horrified at such a
+view, but men like me, who deal with _things_, are not to be
+humbugged. You put a man in a commonplace predicament, and you make
+him say tragically, "The die is cast," or "I will see him hanged
+first," or "All is over between us." That is not drama; it is
+nonsense. Dies are rarely cast nowadays, public hangings have been
+abolished, and salaries rule too low to risk breach of promise
+actions. There's your dilemma. Write me a play in which every word is
+_meant_--the drama will look after itself. But, if you will allow a
+young man to suggest a point, I say that you are all working in the
+dark; you are groping blindly forward when you might rejoice in the
+sunlight. And now, with my colleagues as texts, I shall read a homily
+on the conditions of modern dramatic art.
+
+The division of biped mammalia into merely men and women is of
+comparatively recent date. In very early times, however, when wisdom
+was commoner than now, the classification began with gods and
+goddesses, heroes, men and women, with lower types like fauns and
+satyrs. I venture to think that this nomenclature might with advantage
+be revived. From time to time, in the history of the human mind since
+_Anno Domini_, one sees efforts to differentiate, generally with scant
+success. The Roman Catholic Church, with her elaborate canonising
+machinery, stands as the most prosperous example of this, though with
+the vital fault of postponing the sanctifying till after death. She,
+again, is responsible for another attempt, viz., the infallibility of
+her ministers, a promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The Stuart
+_régime_, urging with unpleasant vigour the divinity of kingship and
+the corresponding caddishness (or decadence) of much of the rest of
+mankind, is a signal example of how my plan should not be carried out.
+Carlyle's heroes are mostly supermen; individuals, not types.
+
+Now, I suggest to you that we agree to classify my colleagues,
+the masters of the mighty vapour, the beings who are the real
+cloud-compellers of our day, as heroes. If I mistake not, I have a
+prior claim to the word, too, in that Hero's engine is the type of all
+our modern prime movers, the supreme type to which we are ever
+striving to approximate. Masters of the vapour-driven sphere! Not men,
+but heroes, having their own thoughts, their own joys and sorrows,
+their own gods; more than men, in that they need less than men, less
+than gods, in that they owe allegiance to them.
+
+Well, then, here is your dramatic problem. Until you recognise the
+fact that such beings as I have indicated do actually inhabit the
+earth and cover the sea with their handiwork, until you consider the
+tremendous fact that your world's work is done by heroes, and not
+by politicians and commercial travellers, that, in short, your
+intellectual Frankensteins have made a million-brained monster whom
+you cannot, dare not destroy, your drama will not be a living force. I
+hold out no hope that the problem is easy of solution; I only know it
+exists. You will first of all become as little children, and learn, as
+best you may, what makes the wheels go round. Learn, that you may
+teach, by your creative art. Above all, remember, when you rise to
+protest that I am forgetting Nature, that together with "the way of
+an eagle in the air, and the way of a serpent upon a rock," the Hebrew
+poet has joined "the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the
+way of a man with a maid."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+I have been up town "to meeting," as my father used to say. The air
+was clear and warm when my friend the Mate appeared on deck in all the
+splendour of "shore gear." He affects a material which never wears
+out. "Mr. McAlnwick, these here are the pants I was married in!" He
+reserves his serious thoughts for underwear, of which he carries a
+portentous quantity to last a voyage. Smart young cadets, who never
+wear the same collar twice, and sport white shirts and soiled souls in
+seamen's missions, are the Mate's aversion. He has severe censures for
+"gallivantin'" and "dressin' for show." He approves of my own staid
+habits of life, after the fashion of those elderly folk who admire in
+others what they so sadly lacked in their own spring-time. He forgets
+that perhaps even I have trembled with rage because there was a spot
+on my collar, that even I may have spent precious moments folding and
+pressing a favourite pair of trousers.
+
+The Mate does not often go ashore nowadays, even to missions, and so
+the lavendery smell which exhales from the historic pants scarcely
+has time to dissipate before they are back in the chest. Different
+now, from his young days, when the vessel lay alongside the _Quai de
+la Bourse_ in Rouen City, and my friend stepped across each evening to
+the Café Victor to drink _crème de menthe_ and feel that listening to
+the band was rather wicked and altogether Continental. Indeed, his
+attachment to the ship is now proverbial, the prevailing feeling
+having been brilliantly epitomised by himself. "If I wash me face,"
+he snapped to me one day; "If I wash me face, they think I'm goin'
+ashore!" But now the decent double-breasted blue serge, the trim beard
+and black bowler hat are in evidence; my friend the Mate is about to
+attend divine service at the Seamen's Mission. My own appearance in
+_mufti_ causes excitement.
+
+"Ye're comin', Mr. McAlnwick?"
+
+"As far as the door," I reply.
+
+The Chief Officer's blue eyes glint as he wrinkles his nose.
+
+"'Tis my opinion, Mr. McAlnwick, that ye've a young woman in the town
+yerself."
+
+And we go forth into the town. At the door of the Mission I bid the
+Mate farewell, and I catch a last glimpse of him as he removes his hat
+and wipes his boots with the diffidence apparently interwoven in
+the fibre of all mariners ashore. He is not of a proselytising
+disposition. Strong Orangeman, an Ulster Protestant, and--the rest.
+So, thinking of him, I fare onward, watching the show. Men and maidens
+idly saunter along, or hasten to the house of God. Why, I wonder, do
+girls of religious disposition allow themselves so little time to
+dress? Two or three have passed me; one had a button loose at the back
+of her dress; another's "stole" of equivocal lace was unsymmetrically
+adjusted to her shoulders; and so on. I know that God looketh not on
+the outward semblance, but I am also painfully aware that young men
+are not fashioned after their Creator in that respect, and my desire
+to see everybody married is outraged by these omissions. And looking
+into the faces of my fellow-passengers this Sunday evening, I am led
+to think that, as a class, girls are not very beautiful objects when
+they lack refinement. I see much raw material around me which might
+possibly be hewn into lovely shape--but----To my friend, with his
+intellectual Toryism, this hiatus is quite reasonable. These lower
+classes, he will observe sublimely, have their functions; refinement
+is not for all. And the _St. James's Gazette_ rustles comfortably as
+he sinks back into the saddle-bags again!
+
+Well, let me be honest in this matter. My mind is still in a fluid
+state concerning theories of society. I can only generalise. I
+believe, with Emerson, that the world exists ultimately for the weal
+of souls; I believe, also, the spiritually correlative truth, the
+ultimate probity of those same souls, but--I have not yet discovered
+why I abhor contact with those who hold the same political faith. Am
+I misanthropic? Or unsocial? Why, when I sit resolutely down to hear
+my own beliefs preached, do I silently contest each point, adopt the
+contrary view? Why do I avoid "active propaganda," "working for
+the cause," and such like? Is it because I disbelieve utterly in
+preaching? I do that, anyway. I often think how much farther ahead we
+should be if no one ever preached. I do not condemn lecturing by any
+means. I dislike the packed audience of the conventional preacher,
+socialistic or otherwise. My ideal is the heterogeneous assembly,
+hearkening to the words of a man skilled in oratory, profound in
+thought, a genius in the art of the suggestive phrase. The audience in
+all probability would be far from clear as to his intentions; they
+would grow clearer as time went on and the suggestions ripened into
+independent speculation. If they could understand at once what he
+intends, they would stand in no need of his ministry.
+
+You will perceive how unfitted I was for the meeting I attended
+to-night. The uppermost thought in mind as I left was, "I do not
+believe in bloodless revolutions." You cannot have a revolution of
+society without turning part of it upside down. And I am half afraid
+that a good deal of what I value most in this world will be turned
+upside down by a socialistic revolution. Add the sad, indisputable
+fact that if everyone were a Socialist I should, by natural law, be a
+Tory, and you will see, more or less accurately, how I stand. You will
+see, too, the cause of my belief in heroes and gods, which latter you
+call natural laws. I look upon myself as a man working among gods and
+heroes, and I am beginning to think that the question of revolutions
+rests always ultimately with them, while I, a man, can but look on and
+marvel.
+
+Well, I am tired with my jaunt. One's feet are not inured to walking
+after months at sea. And I hear my friend the Mate overhead.
+
+"Mr. McAlnwick, ye should have been there! The _élite_ o' the Mission
+was on show. An' we had an anthem. 'Twas good!"
+
+I slip ashore with my letter before turning in.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+Though I had no intention of buying many books, the dreary loneliness
+of the tavern where I supped drove me out upon the streets, and
+insensibly I drifted towards my favourite second-hand book-shop, where
+the little maiden behind the mountains of Welsh theology reminds me of
+someone I know. My Welsh Divinity I call her, hovering bright-winged
+above the dust-clouds of old literature, with clear grey eyes and
+nervous mouth. Not "the heir of all the ages," I fear, though the
+potentiality in her must be infinite and beyond my ken. "What do you,
+oh, young man?" So I seem to read the query in her eyes. "Are you only
+a hodman in this book-yard, then? Where is _she_? What is _she_? Who
+is _she_?" As I stand and thumb the serried ranks of corpses, I feel
+her gaze upon me. Quite inarticulate, both of us, you understand--I as
+shy as she.
+
+I must seem extraordinarily sensitive to you, I think. Merely the
+presence of this child stirs my soul to nobler ideals. I feel
+invigorated and refreshed. So my lady stirs me; so even the mere
+presence of some men we know. In like manner, I imagine, is my friend
+influenced by superb music. They affect me like an essay by Pater, a
+Watts portrait, or a Dulwich Cuyp, a feeling which I can only call a
+passionate intellectualism, a loosening of corporeal encumbrances. My
+friend will not carp because I seem to place my love for my mistress
+in a category with a Dutch landscape and an aesthetic essay--he will
+understand.
+
+I have no desire to be proud, but I confess I have never appreciated
+that amorousness which prompts the lovers to exchange hats as well as
+vows. Indeed, I scarcely understand what the older poets mean by vows
+even. What are these vows? By whom are they kept? Of what avail are
+they when they are most needed? Nearly as useless as marriage vows,
+these of the trysting-place, I fancy. You hold up your hands in horror
+at this, not because you disagree, but because of my audacity in
+applying general modernisms to myself. Well, I am tired of people who
+pose as advanced thinkers and remain as conventional as ever. We have
+outgrown so much of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed
+moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. The keynote of
+everything worthy in modern life and art and philosophy is--restraint.
+I decline to regard ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan
+ranted well, and I decline also to accept the Shakesperian conception
+of Love, viz., physical satiety, as the very latest thing in ideals.
+
+Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably
+puts it, a passionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is
+therefore a compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who have my
+ways far from feminine influence, tend to place women in a rarer and
+purer atmosphere than most of them breathe, and that this tendency
+unfits me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let my Welsh
+Divinity watch me from beyond the dust-clouds of learning with her
+grey eyes, while I pray never to lose my reverence for the quiet
+loveliness of which she is, so unconsciously, the type.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+Once more I am out at sea. I have stowed away my "shore gear," slipped
+the movable bar across my book-shelf, screwed up my windows, and made
+all snug against the wind blowing up-channel. There is a gentle roll;
+she is in ballast, for the Western Ocean, and the Mate does not smile
+when we discuss the probable weather. He would like a little more
+ballast, I know, and he thinks she "draws too much forrard." Well, I
+am minded to go on deck for a smoke before I turn in. And the Third
+Officer is on watch.
+
+I call him the Innovation. There is to be much tallying on this
+charter, and there is a happy rumour that the _Benvenuto_ will pay in
+future. "I hear," said my friend the Mate, "I hear, Mr. McAlnwick,
+that she has been reconstructed." By which he means that certain
+financial props have been introduced into her economy, and she is no
+longer in liquidation. The Mate glories in a four-hour watch, and the
+Innovation takes the eight to twelve.
+
+He walks across the bridge with a dozen swift strides. Then a peculiar
+slew of his active little frame, and he whirls back to starboard. His
+keen, clean-shaven face, hardened prematurely into an expression of
+relentless ferocity, looks out from the peak of his badge-cap, the
+strap cramming the crown against his bullet head. He is twenty-two,
+and pure Liverpool. He served his apprenticeship in sail on the
+Australian and Western American coasts. A middle class education is
+submerged beneath seven years at sea, seven years of unbridled lust,
+seven years of the seven deadly sins, seven years of joyous and
+impenitent animalism.
+
+There is no break in his voice when he speaks of "his old lady"--she
+is religious. His "old man" is "a hard case," another name for a
+Liverpool skipper. He met his brother this time at home--"didn't
+know him, mister. Hadn't seen him for six years." His knowledge of
+some things extends from Sydney and Melbourne to Marseilles and
+Hamburg, from Amsterdam to Valparaiso; he drinks Irish neat, and his
+conversation is blistered from end to end with blasphemous invocations
+of the name of the Son of God.
+
+I do not overdraw this picture of one who is only a type of
+thousands. It is impossible to give any adequate specification of him.
+He takes me, metaphorically, by the throat, and I am helpless. With
+vivid strokes he paints me scene after scene, episode after episode,
+of his life in "a windbag," and I see that he exaggerates not at all.
+He candidly admits that, in his opinion, Marseilles is heaven and
+Georgia the other extreme. He passed for second mate a month ago,
+collected half a dozen shipmates, and terminated the orgies in the
+police-court.
+
+The psychology of such a soul fascinates me. I hold to my cardinal
+doctrine of the illimitable virtue latent in all men; and I am right.
+The unspeakable anathemas he pronounces on a certain skipper, who let
+one of his apprentices die in a West Coast "hospital," his own
+terrific descent into the Chilean "common grave," groping for the body
+among the rotten corpses, feeling for the poor lad's breast, where
+hung a broken rouble, token of some bygone Black Sea passion--all this
+tells me that I am right. Stark materialist though he is, he looks
+with scared awe upon the mysteries of religion, and the denunciations
+of the Dream on Patmos make him hope and pray that his own end may
+come in a deep sleep.
+
+We are out beyond the Scillies now, and the Atlantic stretches before
+us in a grey, ominous immensity. The wind is rising steadily as I turn
+in, and the ship is rolling deep. The waves loom up, white-crested,
+snap sullenly, and surge away aft. A deeper roll, the sea crashes
+against my ports, and I screw them tighter. I think we are to have a
+bad night of it. As I draw my curtain I catch sight of a letter on my
+drawer-top, and I sink back with a sigh of content. "A grey eye or
+so!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+I feel strangely to-night, and I cannot sleep. As I woke, Six Bells,
+eleven o'clock, was striking, half carried away by the wind. For the
+storm is rising, and a beam sea sends wave after wave against my
+ports. Now and then, in the lulls, I feel the race of the propeller as
+she rises from the water, sending vast tremors through the frame of
+the empty ship. How she rolls! In my thwart-ship bunk I slide up and
+down, and the green seas thunder over my head repeatedly. As I turn
+out I feel excited. North Atlantic, light ship.
+
+The mess-room is silent, dark. To and fro on the floor there washes a
+few inches of water. The stove-pipe has been carried away, and the sea
+has flooded the stove. The solid teak door at the top of the companion
+groans as the tons of water are hurled against it. The brass lamp
+glimmers in the darkness, creaking as it swings. Against the white
+wall the Steward's whiter apron sways like a ghost, fluttering in some
+eddy of draught. In the tiny pantry the cups clink softly on their
+hooks. And outside the storm-wind whistles in demoniac fury.
+
+Across the room a narrow slit of light shows where the Fourth's room
+is hooked ajar. I go across and peer in. He is on watch, of course,
+and there is no one there. But all round I see littered the belongings
+of George's successor. A quiet, likeable Glasgow laddie, as I know him
+yet. He has put up his bunk curtains, and as they sway I catch a
+glimpse of a portrait. And so? Who can blame me if I look searchingly
+into the eyes of the girl with ribbon in her hair and a silver cross
+on her breast? And just beneath the narrow gold frame, swinging on a
+screw, there is a coloured paper design, which I know emanates from
+the Order of the Sacred Heart. It is an indulgence for one hundred
+days, and it has been blessed by the Vicar of Christ. Yes, and the
+laddie will have one on his breast, next the skin, as he stands by the
+throttle down below. And when we are half a world away from the parish
+church, he will be mindful of the tonsured man who gave him these; he
+will read the little red Prayer Book, and he will be ill at ease on
+Friday when we pass him the salt fish.
+
+Glancing at an old cigar-box full of letters, I go out softly and hook
+the door.
+
+For all the darkness and the rushing water it is close, and I go up
+and struggle desperately with the teak door, biding my time until the
+waters surge back to the rail. The door crashes to again, and I
+struggle on to the poop. To my amazement there are men here, four of
+them at the wheel. And my friend the Mate, in oilskins and sou'wester,
+walking back and for'ard. I cry his name, but my voice is swept into
+the void. He sees me, but does not speak, only walks to and fro. To
+me, strung up to a tautness of sensation that almost frightens me,
+this silence of the Mate is horrible. I feel a pain in my chest like
+the pressure of a heavy weight as I look at him. And the four men toil
+at the wheel, for the steering chains have been carried away.
+
+Looking for'ard, I see on the well-deck the white wreckage of a boat,
+and I begin to tremble with excitement. If the Mate would only speak!
+A thought strikes me--that he will never speak to me again; then the
+sea comes. As she rolls to starboard, the great wave lifts his head
+and springs like a wild beast at the rail. A hoarse roar, a rending,
+splitting sound of gear going adrift, and the sea strikes the poop
+with terrific impact. Then the water soughs away through the scuppers.
+And athwart the blackened sky there darts a dazzling flash of
+lightning. As I hold to my stanchion, soaked to the skin, I watch the
+wrath of God on the face of the waters.
+
+Making a rush, I gain the shelter of the canvas screen round the cabin
+companion, and I bump into the Innovation. From beneath the dripping
+sou'wester his small, keen face peers up at me, and he utters his
+inevitable blasphemy. He hugs his left hand to his side. "Mister!" he
+hisses in my ear, "for the love of Christ get me a scarf out o' me
+berth. It's a blue one, in the top drawer." Then, darting out for a
+moment, he yells "Ai!" boiling over into asterisks. He darts in again,
+hugging his hand. My foot is in the door, and together we wrench it
+open. I drop down the companion and turn into his berth for the scarf.
+
+It is while coming back that I see into the cabin, and I halt. The
+Skipper is standing under the lamp holding out his hand for a cup of
+coffee. And Nicholas, the fears and imaginings of a volatile race
+blanching his wizened features, rocks unsteadily across the floor. The
+big man with the white hair, red face, and cold blue eyes, towers over
+him, those same eyes snapping with something that has nought to do
+with money-making or Brixton, something not mentioned in any Board of
+Trade regulations. And Nicholas, holding by the table, looks like a
+rat in a trap, shaking with the fear of sudden death. A word from the
+Skipper, and he turns and runs a zig-zag course for the door. He
+cannot see me in the darkness, but I hear him whinnying a song to
+steady his nerves:
+
+     "_Ess, a young maid's broken-'earted
+       When a ship is outward bound._"
+
+His face is pinched and drawn, his beady eyes move unceasingly, and I
+think of one who said, "His nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'e babbled
+of green fields."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I go below to my berth again, striving with the door as with a
+strong man, there crackles and hisses a forked glare of lightning, an
+enormous whip driving the great white horses of the sea to madness.
+Onward they spring, phalanx after phalanx, while above the riot of
+their disintegration glints the faint yellow light of Fastnet. Far off
+to nor'ard, guarding Cape Clear, hidden at times by the mountainous
+water, veiled almost to obscurity by the flying spume, it flashes, a
+coastwise light. And on the eastern horizon--O wondrous sight to
+me!--the black pall has lifted a little from the tumbling waters,
+leaving a band of yellow moonlight with one green-flashing star.
+
+Reaching my berth once more, the terror and delight of that last
+glimpse is upon me. In that strange yellow rift at midnight, backing
+the world of dark chaos, that star of palest green, I feel a thrill of
+the superhuman sense which renders Turner inexplicable to Balham, and
+stabs the soul with demoniac joy in the Steersman's Song.
+
+One Bell, and the pen drops from my fingers. And so, until the day
+break and the shadows flee away, I shall be at my post. And in the
+morning there will be more to tell.
+
+                         THE END
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
+
+Minor changes have been made to correct typesetter errors; otherwise,
+every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
+intent.
+
+
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+
+
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