Chapter 3

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.