Chapter 11

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.