Part 12

With little to do, I fought a sort of pillow fight with Meacock, our weapons being sacks well stuffed; he won, of course, but it was a popular bout. Then there were acrobatic performances on the stays of the funnel. The need I had for training appeared on our last night in Emden Port, when my sleep was nipped in the bud by the entry of Bicker and Mead. Both had the clear spirits raised, in two senses; both thickened voices already thick enough. They were disguised (Mead's fancy, I warrant) as members of the Ku-Klux-Klan; and besides their costume one bore a revolver, the other an air gun impounded from an apprentice. I was ordered out of bed, but wished to stop; we argued about it and by good luck I hung on. After this, insidious, they declared that a lady who knew me and wished to see me had come aboard. This flight of fancy and flow of language went on until they sought variety, which they found in painting the unfortunate Tich in the alley below in several colours.

The German police, green men and true, watched the ship closely. It was rumoured that a shipping clerk and a young woman had eloped and were aboard one of the tramps. "Love in a foc'sle," especially ours, was considered no bad joke.

One more home circle was held in the starboard alleyway towards midnight; gin very prevalent, and the steward also. He fell into a sequence of army recollections, which (as the glass was thrust replenished into his hand) began on this pattern, "Well, I'm telling you, Mister, at three in the afternoon of March the twelfth 1873, we was parading outside the Queen's pavilion...." Once more also Mead and myself made our way into Emden. The old nooks of buildings and the vistas of narrow thoroughfares and lazy waterways, the shops and the folk, all made a kindly picture; after supper, we avoided a downpour of sleet in a café with an orchestra, whose repertory of 4,000 pieces included two by English composers, and his name was Sullivan. On our midnight way home, we stopped at a Dutchman's bar and asked for and got a dozen hard-boiled eggs for a second supper aboard. I was carrying a parcel in hand and two bottles, or rather gas-cylinders, of gin in the lining of my mackintosh when we reached the German sentry-box beside the Quay. He puffed at his pipe as he felt the parcel and saw that all was well.

The iron in the ship began to sweat great drops, and the walls of one's bunk glistened with damp. The glass was falling; the water of the basin no longer lay smooth as oil but beat against the ship grudgingly. In short, excellent Flanders weather ensued the old-established weather, guaranteed to cure rabid individuals of war cant after one hour's trial (unshelled) on sentry-go or at the ration dump. For the worst and even hopeless cases, half an hour's trial on the banks of the Steenbeck was confidently recommended--I was lucky now to have a roof leaking but little. Phillips showed me the one dry corner in his room--a portion of the settee about a foot square.

Hosea's wife joined us in the saloon, and not only by her genial presence itself merited our best thanks, but also by her influence on the steward. As if by magic, Ideal milk was added to our tinned pears (usually, apricots); and the jam changed to strawberry.

At length the elevators ceased from troubling, and the supervisors from dilating in _Platt Deutsch_ over the damage in the bilges. The bosun's strangled noise timed the hoisting of the ship's boat, which had had a busy holiday, to its normal place. The little broker made his last appearance round the steward's precincts; and with the heaving up of the gangway, the arrival of the tugs, the return of the wireless aerial to its heights and the smoking funnel--it, no doubt, never looked better--we were ready to depart.

It was twilight when our ropes fore and aft were loosed from the dolphins, and the _Bonadventure_ slowly moved into the lock. Here while the port authorities made a swift inspection for stowaways and concluded their arrangements, we stopped a time, listening to the odd mixture of noise from bleating of sheep and hooting of our whistle. Then we moved out to sea, not without bumping into the lock wall and gashing the bow. The air was intensely cold, and the iron frameworks against the last tinges of sunset and the red and white lights were now all there was to see of our port of discharge. That episode was over; after midnight, the ship stopped at Borkum to put down the pilot, and then, on again. My voyage was hurrying into memory.

XXXI

Short seas running and a squally wind abeam made the light ship jerk and roll. The early sun was hidden in the dull purple of a racing sleet-cloud, which passed over the _Bonadventure_ and swept on to lash the dunes of Holland lying dim blue along the yellow horizon. The engines beat out a cheerful tattoo and sent the ship, wobbling as she went, at eleven knots through the green water. The wind grew westerly but not sisterly; the melancholy began to expatiate on the short text, "The Longships," but the profusion of fishing smacks out around us seemed to show that no tempestuous weather was at hand.

The next morning, a spiritual Beachy Head was glittering like crystal in the distance; while the head wind fell upon us, and momently a great thud like the impact of a great shell shook the ship's sizable frame and lifted her in see-saw style. I watched the south coast sliding by with as much excitement as if I had been coming home on leave again. Meacock was at his most picturesque with his reminiscences of a hard-case ship called the _Guildhall_, but I could not retain what he told me, with this distraction of English shores and skies about us. The general scene recorded itself; of all the magnificent evenings which my voyage had brought forth this was perhaps the nonpareil. The skies were of tumultuous colour, requiring one of the old Dutch masters to observe, let alone to reproduce. A bright brazen sun, throwing at his whim (as it were) his vesture of clouds about him, burnt out below a pavement of light ever seething with the leaping waves, and sometimes hidden, sometimes emerging, lit the sky astern to a tawny glow, or left it sullen as clay. Here, the horizon was an olive green, there, a blue girdle; ships in stippled blackness tilted this way and that against it, or nearer ploughed grey expanses; and above pillars and cliffs of rocky cloud lifted themselves enormously into a firmament purpled or kindled into wild flame.

So we hurtled along, the wind flawing, abeam, ahead. The great prow mounted high against the sunset, or thrust like the head of a porpoise down again into the onslaught of rolling waters. The hand on the lookout paced up and down the foc'sle head in loneliness, the officer on the bridge answered his call as ever, the seagulls followed the ship with their unvarying calm and pride of wing. Presently the fine light of Eddystone was our solace.

The last day of my pursership dawned, a day I welcomed and yet was sorry to find come. How swiftly it stole by! At seven that morning we were midway between the Longships lighthouse and that yet lonelier one the Wolf, with Land's End white with snow to feast the eye. The sun was a Jolly Bacchus, the waves dancing as green as the young leaves sacred to that god, and the happy porpoises ambled among them. Yet still, as we swung round the corner, in a veritable procession of funnels and smoke trails, a squall came down, heralded by a half-seen rainbow, threw us rudely off the poise and chilled the air to winter again. But round went the _Bonadventure_ and coasted beneath moors and tors sullenly green into the Bristol Channel.

The heavy rolling died away as we passed from the Cornish shore (where they are said to eat strangers), and my Emden chilblains felt the weather growing much warmer. Indeed, we had not had so mild a day since we left Las Palmas. Towards three we came abreast of Lundy Island's bluff, and Hartland opposite, a sturdy cliff likewise. The tide helped us well, but the wind was veering. Urged by those officers and engineers whose wives would be at Barry Docks this evening to greet them, and by his own wishes, the chief had promised to bring the _Bonadventure_ to the tier in Barry Docks by seven.

Ilfracombe nestling happily under the moors was quickly passed; the _Bonadventure_ could move when she had a mind; the mellow green country of Somerset parcelled in such English fashion with such straight hedgerows, faded astern. The coast of Wales revealed the twin lighthouses called the Nash Lights, and still the ship raced on. Then, as if before the time, we were entering the locks at Barry, in a smoky twilight, after an evening shower; were inside, and tied up to the tier.

Not much remains to add. The next day I scrambled down the rope ladder, and bade farewell to the _Bonadventure_, that "dirty ship," not unbeloved; and Mead came next. The boat below carried us to the quay, under the red hulls of ships gleaming with the light from the dancing ripples; then came paying off, a most unpunctual and irritating performance, and good-byes to the old friends, from Hosea to Kelly, of the last few months; and most of all, perhaps, to that gay spirit Mead. My good-bye to these might be, I hoped, no such final one; but my round trip was accomplished and I felt that for me "there would be no more sea," so that the actual signing off of the purser seemed to me a point in my life's course. Then presently, after a hearty last word with Mead--kind be the dog-watch stars to him, wherever his ship carry him--I departed; the last train for Slowe having, naturally, gone out, I made for the nearest town to Slowe, and finishing my journey part on foot, part on a borrowed bicycle, was enabled to awaken Mary while the rest of the parish of Staizley slept the sleep of the just.