Chapter 8

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.