Part 11

After much criticized anxiety about winches and blocks and guys, our stevedore gangs began their work at good speed. I was again dressed up in a borrowed boiler suit for the duties of tallyman. The weather became burning hot. The coal-dust flew round in copious whirlpool. After an hour I was full of discomfort, and not to be distinguished from any of the coal heavers. Work continued in such hearty fashion that I gathered that it was piece work. The foreman was another giant, with such a belly on him that whenever he gesticulated--that was often--stamping his foot and brandishing his hands, that belly really and truly quaked. His voice was not a success. He would have roared like thunder, but only a feeble croaking left his snapping jaws.

By six our bunker coals had been put aboard, I discarded my honourable discomfort, my mask of grime, and my piratical appearance. The dealers in Constantinople canaries and cork soles withdrew. About the harbour of La Luz, the lights came out in the houses and aboard the shipping; the masts and yards stood out calm against a quiet coloured evening, the water rippled with no skirmish nor much voice to our sides. Beyond the towns, the mountains gloomed with the dreams of romantic journeys.

An hour or so afterwards, the welcome though broken melody of the anchor's uprising heralded our departure. It had been a colourable interlude. I remember it best by a circular handed out by "Gumersindo Alejandro, Bumboat Business." It ran through the rigmarole of desirable articles, a few of which I have named above, and concluded

"and all kinds of silks suitable for presents and use."

A harsh description of presents? Perhaps.

XXVIII

By some mystical means, the mates had charmed away from our Las Palmas visitors at small cost or none an unusual supply of cigars and cigarettes. These brightened up the melancholy purser, who was now approaching the end of his employment. There were still, however, many things to amuse his leisure. How often the table talk had come to the subject of hell and its occupants! The latter seemed to be--after the landlubbers--shipowners, ship's chandlers, ship's tailors, and Customs men. Curious pictures were projected of notorious shipowners of the past, now compelled to wield the shovel next to the firemen late of their employ. As to the unfortunate Customs officials, witness A and B.

A. "... Yes, he quite got pally with this Customs fellow----?"

B (_older than A, hastily interrupting_): "I wouldn't trust any Customs fellow, not if he'd got a pair of b---- wings on."

The _Optimist_ went on its way with the weeks. Mead added "The Vamp" to his cabinet of tales of mystery; but the strain of discovering subjects apart from the steward and the galley was clearly growing. The prominence of food and meal times upon a tramp was described in a ballad published about this time.

THOUGHTS OF A ROMANTIC.

Ten thousand miles from land are we, Hark how the wild winds pipe! What grand reflection swells in me? This morning we'll have tripe.

For ever and evermore These billows rage and swell; O may I, through their angry roar, Not miss the breakfast bell.

Here octopi, here great white whales, Here krakens haunt the Main; Mad mermaids sing--my courage fails-- Here comes Harriet Lane.[1]

There, far far down, what jewels lie, What corals, red enough To make this sauce[2] seem pale, which I Am wolfing with my duff!

To think that one lone ship should thus Ride o'er the greedy seas! Alas! what will become of us Now we've run out of cheese?[3]

The northern spring came into the air. Scraps of the casual verse of one English poet who never tired of the year afield started up in memory now, where the pondered solemn music of others had no reverberation; and so for the rest of my voyage. The sea for a time grew intensely calm, the swell seeming to swim along under a mantle of pearl or quicksilver. The undulating surface stretched to the horizon, unbroken anywhere by restless foam; and over this calm lay the golden track to the setting sun. When presently a breeze ruffled this strange sleep, it was as though shoals of tiny fishes had everywhere risen to the surface; and in one or two places, those bubbling, flickering shoals were actual and not imaginary.

As if schooled by misfortune, Sparks now posted up in the port alleyway a statement of football results and tables; so that many bosoms aboard needed no longer to feel a heaving anxiety. A turtle lazily floated by, watched by many who could have welcomed him on deck; a whale passed, shouldering and spouting the brine; and shortly, as the midnight moon had portended, the dark green sea began to run in hilly ridges, sometimes sluicing the decks, and tilting the _Bonadventure_ to one side or the other. Grey rain-squalls flew over us now and then; but, considering our near approach to the redoubtable Bay, we were in excellent weather. The mate, however, was not one to take chances; and certain barrels, an anvil and a few other heavy movables were shifted from the windward side of the engines.

The steward and his adjutant had now little time certain in which to reform my room, so they fell upon it with paint brushes and "flat white" in vigorous style; it had been my hope to be allowed this labour, but I remembered my "Tom Sawyer," where painting as a recreation was so truly valued. Mouldytop was seldom seen in these days without his pot and brush; he went at it from dawn to midnight and then did overtime. My room was turned into a whited sepulchre, which is better than a sooted one, but as it was a sort of receptacle for coal-dust, which was coal grease withal, even when port, ventilator and door were all closed, it was to be feared, _tamen usque recurret_, it would be black again in a week.

We came into a region of ships, tramps like ourselves for the most part, and the less handsome oil-tankers also. Finisterre lighthouse shone kindly upon us. With a fair wind, the concourse of shipping dwindling away somewhat as we went on, we now entered the Bay. Our angles began to be anything but right, but it was much gentler weather than I had any reason to need. Fair as it was for us, save for the cinders that fell in showers amidships, the vessels running in the teeth of the weather were pitching with vigour. Grey and shrouded the sea met us in hills and valleys, with white ridges and flecked with foaming veins; as we went further into the famous corner, the _Bonadventure_ could not but roll and lurch as though she liked it, and the waves were mountainous; yet out there we passed a fishing boat making beautiful weather of it.

The second mate, Bicker, could scarcely get any sleep; but not on any score of weather or discomfort. All his watch below, or most of it, one might see him standing at his sea chest with pen scratching away at the forthcoming _Optimist_. So sweet is journalism when wooed as a casual mistress. Shall I go on? No.

My trouble was not what to write but what to read. Even Young's _Night Thoughts_, buried in annotations reverent and irreverent, began to grow familiar beyond all reason. _Pears' Cyclopædia_, _Brown's Nautical Almanac_, _The South Indian Ocean Pilot_, _Phrenology for All_, and other borrowed books, were all at much the same stage. This ship was not the one recently reported in the newspapers in which the chief read poetry like a passion, the cook chewed Froude with his morning crust, and the cabin-boy needed the help of Hegel. I forget if those were the actual claims, but in any case that was another ship. About now, an accident happened to my Young. It seemed as if a Poltergeist had visited the spare cabin port during the night, for awaking I found my settee, and the _Night Thoughts_ thereon, waterlogged. Perhaps the heavy rain had been answerable for this, but I could not see how--my port was closed. Poltergeist had spared my novel, lying next to Young: evidently he thought that already watery enough. Young, immortal, made a surprising recovery.

Now, we were nearing the one country. It needed no drab island of Ushant with its lighthouse to tell me this; for hardly had I put down in my diary "Much milder," when it became necessary to write "Much colder." The tumults of the Bay were over and gone, and we were under a dun sky dropping rain which obviously belonged to the English Channel.

We swung round Ushant and became more aware of the ups and downs of navigation; these were less noticeable as we ran on. The prospect, or say circumspect of the day was narrowed in by dismal rainstorm, and once more it was a bleak amusement trying to make out the forms of ships through the foggy veils. The wind moaning, the rain splashing, measured out long hours, till all saddened into night with little to notice, save the gulls and divers whom such weather suited well. At any rate we were not unfortunate in our direction. The _Hammonia_ going the other way with passengers showed us that by contrast.

The night elapsed, we came abeam of the Isle of Wight, which showed but indistinctly, though the day was cold and steady. Calm indeed lay the green Channel up which the _Bonadventure_ with speed sufficient to please Phillips was making her way. Ships, or their smoky evidences, made the time pass quickly. It was Good Friday, a great day for my childhood in Kent, land of plum-pudding-dogs and monkey-tail trees, a day when I heard, as indeed my elder companions had long foretold, the church bells rung muffled; although I was disappointed in the purple cassocks which, tradition fabled, would be worn by the choir on that day. Lent (and Advent too for that matter) was solemn then and real, outside of churches; and with Good Friday it appeared undeniable that there had been done some thing at which Nature must go in mourning. The three hours' service, like the watch that rang out the dying year and rang in the new, was in every one's thought that we met; such ceremony was not for nothing. The melancholy hymns of the season were more than sung verses.

To-day, at least, we had hot-cross buns to our breakfast. So is the Lord remembered in these years of discretion. The sailors had the day to themselves.

Our course lay more or less east, and brought us a succession of glimpses of shining cliffs and misty downs. Off Dover we saw both coasts at once. In 1919 I hoped I had seen the last of that piece of France. Running out of this strait into the North Sea under a shrewish though a moderate wind, we passed a number of fishermen, and what struck my mind with the strangeness almost of the Flying Dutchman, a three-masted barque under full sail, at a distance. It was sunset at the time. She caught the light and bowed upon her journey, a sweet sight, too quickly lost in the dark. Soon we picked up the flash of a lightship off the Dutch shore, and soon after that the cold to which my wanderings had not made me careless sent me inside.

Chilly brightness and blue sky saw us making rapidly over the North Sea, visited by thrushes and linnets, while the water seemed crowded with those clever birds, though so gawky upon the wing, the divers. We crossed the wake of an oil-tank, burning the water almost like the witch's oils in "The Ancient Mariner," and scenting the air unlike those abstractions; came to a lightship, where our course was altered; and met the pilot cutter in a calm sea and air vivid with sun and cold about four. The rope ladder went down, the row-boat came alongside, and the pilot was taken up to the bridge. I could not repress odd emotions at thus seeing again "Brother Boche"--he looked a replica of ancient types of my acquaintance--after such a long separation.

The estuary of the Ems received us, a flat sheet of water, with low coastlands only noticed by reason of towers here and there. The tides obliged us to anchor some miles outside Emden at six, and to wait until midnight. The sky darkened and loured into rain. At twelve in a black and gusty night, to the accompaniment of much hooting and shouting, the _Bonadventure_ moved up the river, and in the greyness and chill of daybreak berthed in a quiet basin at Emden.

Through this last movement I had tried to snatch some sleep, but was harassed by the socialism of Bicker and Mead, who considered it but fair that as they were being deprived of their sleep, I should be deprived of mine. They, therefore, visited me at intervals, switched on my fan which was now quite unnecessary, prodded me with toasting-forks, and so saluted the happy morn, like those larks which were now singing and soaring to justify any praise of them that ever was written.

[Footnote 1: "Harriet Lane." The name of that unfortunate lady is often applied to the curious tinned meat provided aboard.]

[Footnote 2: "This sauce." A pink luxury poured over Sunday's duff.]

[Footnote 3: "Cheese." In these closing lines the poet's hope was to record the actual expression of the saloon in general on receipt of the steward's pronouncement: "That there was no more cheese."]

XXIX

On Easter Day the sun--it was an old proverb--will dance; and this time he was in the mood. We lay in a basin like other tramps; beyond, there clustered red roofs with blessed ungainly angles, a pleasing sight after those southern flat ones of grey. Farther off, the church spire climbed above the trees, and though many people in their Sunday dress were walking that way, more were taking their rounds beside these docks.

It was as certainly good to be here as that spring was here. The chirrup of sparrows, jubilate of larks, noises of poultry, bleating of lambs from an enclosure of young fruit trees close at hand, and the play of children, were all comely and reviving.

Alas! that the Easter gift of the ship's officers should have been so out of tune. An old gentleman of the same outlook as Polonius, the broker, brought a packet of letters aboard at breakfast, and among these were the wrong kind of Easter tidings--statements of their reductions in wages. They accepted this falling off without murmur, save for a few dry remarks.

A motor-boat came bringing the stores, and, to the disgust of the cook and other watchers, a great stack of long loaves, altogether leathery in external appearance. Most of these were returned. The ship's chandler must have thought we were arriving in force. Our own boat was tied at the foot of the gangway, and the apprentices told off as ferrymen for the time being.

Next day the larks were aloft again, and their melody, marvellous after long absence from it, came dropping from heaven as undiminished, one would say, as raindrops falling. So clear it sounded there even when they were in the clouds. Meanwhile the bosun and party were getting the winches and derricks into trim, with less silver voices: "H-h-hup, H-h-hup: Let go a little: Here, youse...."

It was not unwelcome when the evening came, and Mead, Bicker, and their friend so soon to be returned to duty set out up the cobbled road to Emden; most bitter was the east wind blowing down the long colonnades of trees, and we hastened into the sheltering streets of the little town. We found it a quiet and beautiful place of ornamentation, and gables and high houses, with a canal in the midst. Masterly seemed its spire, stretching up into the sky with unexpected height and charming ease. It was Easter Monday, and many folks were walking out--we looked curiously about us, and while none were anything but tidy and decent, none had any of the symptoms of much and to spare. They were evidently poor, but far from poor in spirit.

We were puzzled by the Sabbath look of things to find a place to sit down and apply some antidote to the effects of that rawish east wind. We began drifting as usual, when an old fellow in black coat and Homburg hat pushed past us, mumbling something. A light came swiftly into the eyes of Mead and Bicker; the old fellow was fragrant with good beer. We asked him for directions. He was off at once in a loud, hard voice: "By Jesus Christ and General Jackson," he began (and _da capo_), "the two best men in America. You come to my house." Following him, and coping with his repeated invocations of the Messiah and the General, and requests for an opinion of his English speech, we arrived by and by. He was an innkeeper, and (by Jesus Christ) "an old sailing man himself."

The inn parlour was most excellently warm, free and easy. We set to with hot grog, the brimmer being rebrimmed (if my memory serves me) not once nor twice. The room was not one which depressed. Around it hung daubs of full-rigged ships of Batavia in the fifties and sixties; there was an automatic weighing machine, a most magnificent penny-in-the-slot piano, and another apparatus for extracting copper from the air, dressed up as a blue windmill, but I did not inquire what it was expected to yield. And the wall-paper was tapped with an ample border, in which one saw smooth waters, placid smacks, and more windmills.

The other occupants of the room were the quiet set at the tables, a drunken Finn seaman with one arm in bandages, a dark-haired musician, the landlord and his wife and their good-looking daughter; while from the private house other members of the family came and went at need, as will be seen.

We provided the landlord with grog. He melted with gratitude, rose, and set his horrible piano going, whose wicked hammers champed upon some of the harshest wires outside of the barbed-wire dumps. And what is more, whenever the piano began, our friend the Finn thought his hour had come to shine, and essayed a sort of stamping, stooping dance across the floor. This led to persuasion. The landlord persuaded, the landlady persuaded, unclassified assistants persuaded, and presently the dancer was pleased to be seated once more, exclaiming, "When I come aboard he says to me, he says, 'All right, Captain, all right, all right.'" No sooner did the music begin afresh than this enthusiast would rise up relentlessly as though hypnotized (by the pæan) and perhaps stamp out a bar or two before being replaced by combined efforts. This kept on happening.

None the less, the landlord, who had apparently spent the day in liquid rejoicings, was swallowing grog and growing taleful. He claimed all sorts of sea service and seemed to know what he was talking about, posed even my expert friends with the sailing-ship question: What's the difference in build between a Scotch ship, a Nova Scotian, and a Yankee? Boxing too was in his line: "Scholar of John L. Sullivan," he assured us, and directed admiration to his fist, which was normal. From taleful he waxed tuneful. "I'm a chanty-man, y'know," and wiping back his gingery-white whiskers he groaned out "Blow the man down," and "The streams of our native Australia," in dreadful style. After these, finding himself strangely appreciated, he offered and began "a real English song, y'know--exchoose me, y'know, if I don't speak the plain English." It was "The Maid of the Mill." His rendering was a strain on our tact, and too much for one of the young ladies of the house, who was smitten with a fit of giggling most right and justifiable. At that, the old villain flew into a ridiculous passion, jumped up, and was for hitting this girl. He was restrained.

After this unwanted diversion, he returned and (with starts of rage) barked out the rest of his song. His wolfhound began, and we began, to find the vocalist a nuisance; and as the evening wore on, I thought the authentic musician, who played the violin, was beginning to resent our presence and success. The daughter of the house foolishly sat at our table. The musician, however, was soothed with an honorarium, and with much "Auf wieder-sehen!" we went. Even now, however, it was thought unseemly to reach the ship in one journey, so halts were called twice; and once aboard, the usual arguments kept us out of our beds until four or so in the morning.

The two grain-elevators in the port were still busy with a Greek steamer, so that, apart from painting, the _Bonadventure_ was idle, and there was little to do but row over to the canteens and return with undreamed-of quantities of chocolate and cigarettes. Cigars were, to us, as lightly bought as matches. As to the painting, it was again mysterious that two of the apprentices fell off the stage on which they were working alongside; they were soon dressed in borrowed plumage. Suddenly in the evening our discharge began.

Lighters of the local type, very long and narrow, were already alongside when the tugs swung the first elevator into his place. The huge floating turret looked somewhat like a smock mill. The stevedores quickly made fast their tackle: four large drain-pipe tubes were let down into the chosen hold, and the suckers commenced. There was a drumming boom of machinery, mixed with the swish of the ingulfing of the grain and its disgorging through broader conduits on the other side of the elevator into the river barges. It grew dark, the red and green railway lights burned fiercely in brisk air against the last of an orange sunset. But the elevator was kept at work, and arc lights hung over the hold showed the novel scene of the sliding grain and its trimmers.

One effect of the late-continued drone and thud of the elevator was to torment me with war dreams. First I was in an attack, among great rocks, under a violent barrage; then, on one of those unforgettable raw, dark mornings, I was at the window of a great ruined house behind the line, watching the bleary effulgence of the Very lights starting up here and there and expecting the worst from a nasty silence, only pierced by single shell-bursts. Then, beside the elevator, an infuriated and intoxicated bargee stood on the landing-stage about midnight bawling for a boat which didn't come. His patience was, however, considerable; he bawled for a long hour. In consequence, I suppose, of these matters I arrived very late at breakfast amid the usual cries of "You Jonah, you!"

The second elevator arrived, and, like some great iron insect with many beaks, began to swallow up the grain from the holds aft. The ship shook with the speed and power of the pumping machinery; the long lighters with their great round-table steering wheels filled up, battened down, and swung away. In one of the holds there were the bags put in at Ingeniero White; under them again lay the yellow grain in mass. The elevator's proboscis dipped into that grain, while the trimmers unstowed, slit and emptied the sacks; so the ship began to lighten, and her bow already stood high out of the water.

The red evening sky was smoky with cold; then the stars sparkled with frost; and a small gathering enjoyed the oil stove in Bicker's room. The steward, in unusual radiance, came in presently, and sang a long song concerning a tramp who was flung off a freight train by a brakesman. "Because he was only a tramp" (_dying fall_).

This might have been a comment on Mr. W. H. Davies' Autobiography. Warmed with his singing and other helps, the steward began to recall his acquaintance (on guard) with Royalty, and spun off at tangents with affairs half a century more recent: "That b---- flaming butcher-- I was going to hit him with a box of matches," and other incidents. I was sorry to hear the lank Chips, the next morning, bawling at the entrance of the saloon a complaint about the toughness of his meat; the steward's new mood deserved anything but that sort of damper.

XXX