Part 2

The thing had never occurred to me before, and I may be pardoned for reflecting, while I stood watching, in a manner somewhat grandiose. The energy of Man, maker of cathedrals, high-roads, aqueducts, railroads, was passing before me; and this one manifestation of it seemed perhaps the most surprising. The millions of times that this restless creature Man had weighed his anchor and in cockle-shell or galleon or clipper or tramp set out to ferry over the seas at his own sweet will! This matter was now put in a more prosaic light by the wireless clerk, who, beckoning me to a place out of the wind, informed me that at a charge he could, as soon as the _Bonadventure_ was out of touch of land, transmit any message I had for home. With this youngster I tried to speak on his own province, in which I had made some elementary excursions in Flanders times: but this intrusion upon his mysteries appeared to affect him, and I learned only that the modern wireless was different.

The doleful tolling of a bell, later on, with its suggestion of the Inchcape Rock, reached me in my bunk, where, noticing the oscillations of the ship, I had early withdrawn.

IV

My theory of repentance during the first few days at sea was to be fact. At the start, I seemed to myself to be perfectly steady. The breeze blew cold; I thought it even pleasant; and without over-exercise, I took my last views of English coasts, and watched ships ahead of us blackly smudging a vaporous sky. I attended dinner, and began to swell with vanity.

By this time the ship was rolling (after all yesterday's kind assurances). There was no mistake about it: and my vanity and observation were at once cut short by a surprise attack of sea-sickness. A dismal cowardice came on me. The wind seemed changing, or perhaps--I inquired but little--the course of the ship; the effect needed no inquiry. Time and again, lowering my _morale_ at each arrival, the seas beat in a great crash upon the ship's sides, and, with the attendant tilt, the scarcely less welcome seethe of the waters flowing down the decks would follow. The ship seemed to be provided with cogs, on which she was raised and lowered with horrible deliberate jolts over a half-circle: then again, the big wave would jump in with a punch like some giant Fitzsimmons. My experience was growing. The sunshine died off the porthole; the breeze was half a gale already, droning and whining louder and louder; and I felt that my breaking-in was to be thorough enough.

Captain Hosea found time, now and then, to look at his passenger. We kept up eloquent discourse, though I was handicapped. The origin of species and the riddle of the universe are topics on which much enlivening debate may occur, and certainly did then; but the floor of the debating society should be made steady and not to lift and lean and recover with a monstrous jerk as a point is being approached. "It's fierce," said he, referring to the idea of infinite abyss. I could agree from the smaller one which I myself seemed to be probing.

Sleep was not easy during these early hours of my holiday. I spent an awkward night or two, listening to rattlings of all sorts, the battering-ram shocks of the seas, and the thump of the engines, watching the sweat on the rivets of my roof roll like the bubble in a spirit-level, and my towel float out to an apparent unperpendicular side to side. In this state of things I easily came to know the features of my cabin, described on the door-key as "spare cabin port." Amidships it was, between the wireless operator's premises and the captain's. The porthole faced the poop, and more immediately, the ship's squat funnel. Beneath the porthole, a padded seat was fixed; and I had on one length of the room a disused radiator, a chest of drawers and a washstand with mirror, where, despite a ventilator above, light rarely seemed to come. On the opposite length there was a tall malodorous cupboard and two bunk beds, of which I chose the lower one from sound instinct at the beginning, keeping to it from force of habit afterwards. Such was my dwelling; but I must not fail to mention the electric light and fan. The place was painted white, but its past use as a store had variegated it.

The steward likewise visited me here, and sympathized. The old fellow talked to me much as if I had known him all my life; he being known well enough, indeed, to the company for whom he was going to sea in his old age. A scarred nose distinguished him for a time. He complained, with a sort of personal visualization of the sea's boorishness, that while attending to some stores he had been blown off a case into a barrel of flour.

Having therefore spent the best part of my first two days at sea in my cabin, which offered no great variety in itself, I was much pleased to find myself able to arise, manfully, the third day. But I avoided breakfast. The morning looked inviting, the black funnel gleaming even richly in the sun, so presently I took the air. First, I had found some difficulty in shaving, even with a safety razor; but it was accomplished.

We were still in the Bay of Biscay, and the _Bonadventure_ had not done lurching and wallowing. To my naïve eye, the sea was in considerable commotion. Like ever-changing rocky coasts, the horizon rose and fell. As unsteady as that, the day left behind its sunny comfort and brought clouds and chillier air. I saw the navigators passing on their business, but I could not emulate their equipoise; I attached myself to a rail or fixture to watch them, this one coiling a rope, that trailing a coco-nut mat in the sea--a capital cleanser; to watch the gulls also, so easily keeping up with the plunging brows, amid all their side-shows of wheeling and darting flights. Inured, I presently joined in at dinner in the saloon; ate, and had no serious trouble. A framework, which was described as a "fiddle," covered the table and checked the more mobile crockery; but it could not prevent an accident in the steward's own department, which caused his tone of private feud with Neptune to sound clearly in the apostrophe, "Break 'em all, then, so we shall have none for the fine weather." But fine weather was expected now.

V

My prospect brightened with the weather. "Things are looking bad," observed the chief engineer with an anxious glance at me. "Why?" I said more anxiously. "There's three teaspoons missing," he answered, satisfied at having played his joke. The morning, though the wind blew hard against us, was sunny and cheerful; the light blue sky flying here and there the streamer of a shining cloud, the moon going down ahead of us, the drove of gulls still pleasing themselves in glistening whims of flight among the waves. Warmer it was, but not yet warm enough for me: and going out on the deck I often sheltered behind the cabins with fingers as of old turning waxen for want of blood. I found the ancient sea a new pleasure in its aspects: I liked to see the wave-tops suddenly become crystalline with a clear green glow. Such a greenness immediately associated itself with, and, I even thought, comprehended, the curious emanation of the old mermaid stories. It is a light wherein the sudden arising of a supernatural might seem natural.

Aboard, less remote interests revealed themselves. The cook, that lean aproned figure, walked slowly between the stores and his stronghold the galley, carrying perhaps a couple of large onions; and the smell of cooking might rise above that of the Atlantic. The tawny firemen emptied their buckets of cinders in long series through the iron chute over the side; or found, by request, work for an oilcan round the funnel. Everything said, in its manner, "No blind hurry, no delay."

Hosea invited me to his ampler room for daily conversations over the friendly glass; we talked much, but not about the sea. His active mind, after searching through the files of recent newspapers saved up during his stay in port, had many an opinion on affairs less adjacent; and he had a curious miscellany of reading at his service. Sir Edwin Arnold was one of his few poets, and for him he spoke out most generously. Here I was obliged to watch my behaviour. As a person engaged in literature, I could not precisely admit the ignorance of the _Light of Asia_ which I have always enjoyed; and I wished I had read it. The conversation should have run upon the sharks, the hula hula, typhoon and the submarine barrage, by rights; not upon the history in blank verse of the founder of Buddhism. It was some relief to find Hosea turning to Tennyson, whose works he had upon his desk. Shakespeare, he said, he had been advised by old captains to leave alone until he had turned forty.

From his book cupboard he lent me several books, of which I only failed to master one. This was _The Lone Star Ranger_, by Zane Grey; a fiction in which beauty was reached through blood, but not in this world. Far more romantic was a large official treatise styled _North Atlantic Directory_, reading which, I determined never again to leave any book about ships and the sea in the threepenny tub.

Meals, the important thing in the trenches, began to impress me as furnishing the incidents of seafaring life. They seldom came too soon. Their atmosphere puzzled me in a minor way, until I was acclimatized to the habits of the saloon. Little would be said at them for a long time; then some one would quietly mention some occurrence of technical bearings in the first place, and so educed, a few anecdotes would follow. Phillips, the chief engineer, with his seasoned air and dry ironical ease of speech, was perhaps the narrator of the saloon. I remember his first tale that I heard: it was simple, yet picturesque. "Once we were running in the banana trade. We went to Labrador for some fish. The captain was putting in to Cape Sidney, and he didn't like the look of some of the lights. So he went down to the bottle and got blotto. The second mate--a little Greek, he was--was on the bridge, and he found the captain was blotto, and he'd never been to Cape Sidney before, and he was worried out of his wits. So he came down and asked me what he should do. 'I can't tell you,' I said. 'But if I were you, I should bring her round in circles outside here until daylight comes.' And there he stayed, steering round in circles all night."

The ship was reckoned, by those in higher authority, to do ten knots to the hour, but for a week or so her average was no more than eight. This circumstance was never far away from our table-talk. The playful interrogative "Ten?" would welcome Phillips to his place at dinner, as the second mate handed him the slip giving the results of the midday observations.

As the ship's officers and the sailors became better used to me, and I to them, my voyage began to assume its intended holiday character. The southward progress of the _Bonadventure_, disappoint her chief engineer as she might, was felt in the improving weather; and as sea weather was still a new world to me, I was never for long without some variation of amusement. The colours of the rainbow in the waves leaping up at the ship's side and in the veils of spray that they flung to the whisking wind were soon reflecting themselves in my remembrance. On dark blue ridge of surly water and on snowy coronal, the broken arc of the rainbow was for ever flickering, just beyond the uncertain shadow of the ship. The lively wind, meanwhile, as if by a sudden stronger impulse, would whirl the green toppling seas over the lower deck, and the light cold spray as high as the bridge. Here, I thought, was a lyric indeed; and so, it looked, thought the gulls that disported about the ships, and the shoals that, I fancied, like those of any small stream, would be up to enjoy the sun.

Swabbing was going on aboard at a great pace. The boatswain, a sort of combined walrus and carpenter, seldom allowed his swabbers and his hosepipe to rest. The flow of dirty water from the cabin roofs made the deck dangerous ground. So perish all accumulated dust! The _Bonadventure_ began to look clean, even resplendent.

When Hosea joined the merchant service, he tells me, old hands would often make a disparaging comment upon the decline of sailing days. "I'm giving up going to sea. I'm going in steamers." True, in the very names of the old sails, up to their skyscrapers and their moonrakers, there lingers yet the elemental dignity of the earlier sort of argosy. Even the same metaphorical fountain of description seems to have ceased to flow with the falling asleep of the famous clippers: and I doubt whether the author of _London River_, that rich reverie, kindred with an essay which has weathered a hundred years' storms--Charles Lamb's _South-Sea House_--would write of the sea to-day in his translucent classical revivings:

"The model of this Russian ship was as memorable as a Greek statue."

And yet, once or twice already, I was indistinctly aware of an antique look about the ship forward, with her dark beak and all her shrouds and spars and winches; as I watched her at twilight ploughing a grey sea and still driving afield towards a horizon of sad vapours, braided with the sunset's waning red, and, from time to time until darkness settled, creviced with a primrose gleam, calm, clear and sweet amid its shadows.

VI

A swell running in its long undulations accompanied us until we had passed Madeira, beyond its horizons. Mugs of tea slid suddenly and swiftly across the saloon table; complaints were made at every meal, and the mate hinted, with dreadful implications for my benefit, that a special memorandum would be presented to Father Neptune, expected on board shortly. Other hints of the passenger's future trials were made. We were bound for the Plate, but we might be sent thence to Australia. That addition, as a possibility, to my holiday perturbed me somewhat; I envisaged the bailiffs in at home before I got back.

The second mate, Bicker, and the third mate, Mead, invited me to see their observations and their watches. Bicker, a fine audacious spirit, dark-haired, dark-eyed, four-or-five-and-twenty years old, had my company in the afternoon, the days being warm and inviting. The typical scene below the bridge was of Mead in his singlet rigging up a line, whereon towels, socks and other properties were soon in the sun; while mattresses aired over the cargo-hatch tarpaulin. Other toil at this hour, save that of the engines and the man at the wheel, was not noticeable. The boatswain and his wrinkled party, who actually did leave a sea-salt impression in their stocking-turbans and greasy rags and roomy sea-boots, had left the midships white, and had changed their ground for hose and scrubber to the neighbourhood of the engines and the galley; but the afternoons heard them not. An occasional whistle from the bridge would summon hurrying feet up the ladder; the striking of the bell made Time's pace perceived. Bicker would sometimes interrupt his large stories to show me, or to try to show me, remote or tiny curiosities floating past the ship. Perhaps a shoal of young porpoises bobbing along portended a slight squall, its approach yielding those ever remarkable lights that mark broken rain, lily-of-the-valley green, and on the waters a silver glitter, while a shadow drooped over all. The third mate's drying-ground was speedily cleared at these times.

Mead's watch occupied the four hours before noon, and the four before midnight. At noon he would join with Bicker in "Shooting old Sol," a process which, with its turning-up of pages packed with figures, reminded me of old trouble in a famous mathematical school of severe traditions, where hung on the walls a symbolic picture--a youth swimming for dear life from a gigantic shark. In the evening I would find Mead on the bridge, uttering to himself as likely as not his talismanic motto: _Quo Fata Vocant_. He was a rover; from China he had gone to Australia to join the Army in 1914; thence had seen Gallipoli, Egypt, and, I believe, Palestine; went into the Navy with a commission after that; and now had returned to the life in which he had been apprenticed a dozen years before. As these evening colloquies with Mead became a rule with me, and as it was Mead whom I came to know better than anyone else, other matters relating to him will be found in their places.

There was no lack of good spirits aboard. Reminiscences of a humorous tinge came up in almost every conversation; and conversation was an earnest and frequent affair. Indeed, there was observable a certain rivalry (as with those who supply the fashionable memoirs of the past twenty or thirty years), who should remember the most: and each speaker showed a vigorous faith in his own tale, which he scarcely extended to his predecessor's. The mate, the clear-headed Meacock, with his blunt serenity--embodying qualities in which I could not help seeing the English seaman of the centuries--was eloquent one evening about examiners. Examinations lie thick in the navigator's early way. He recalled one well-known figure of these inquisitions, who, at a time when no dinner interval was allowed to the candidates, used to bring out frying-pan, steak and the rest, and tantalize every one by cooking himself his dinner. (I wondered if this suggestion might be passed on to the Universities.) Another original, Meacock went on, warming himself with the recollection, had a preference for ordinary, that is seafaring, words.

_Examiner._ If I carry this barometer up a mountain, what happens?

_Candidate._ The mercury in the barometer subsides.

_Examiner (purple with disgust)._ You silly idiot, if you were sitting on a table and I knocked you off, would _you_ subside?

Bicker was about to put in a reminiscence of his at this point, but Meacock was already giving another instance of this examiner's zeal for pure English.

_Examiner (producing a piece of wood)._ What colour's this?

_Candidate._ Chocolate.

_Examiner (purple once more)._ Chocolate! Chocolate be dam'd. Chocolate's something to eat--What COLOUR is it?

The chief engineer, seeing me somewhat handicapped by temperament from wandering about as inquisitively as I ought to have done, came up one afternoon to take me into "_his_ little slice of the ship." I am sorry to think how vague my imagination and how inactive my gratitude had been up to that first descent down the iron stairways and crossings to the engine-room. The stifling air and the throbbing roar, of course, kept my notions vague, but the degree of vagueness was not so disgraceful as it had been. He pointed out all things to one comprehending scarcely anything, except a chalk legend on the wall which ran:

Aston Villa Celtic Manchester U,

and so on, which I noticed for myself. The ruling passion--(passion at the referee's ruling, says the cynic).

I was aware, meanwhile, of vast steel rods and arms in violent motion, named severally by the chief in a mighty voice, which nevertheless was too much of a whisper for me. The gangways round them, it was easier to learn, were narrow and greasy. The cool skill with which an engineer was anointing these whirling forms, his hand dapping mothlike with the tapering can above them, was enough to amaze me. Under a strange construction like a kiln, by way of a low red door, we went into the vault where the dusky, glowing and actually grinning firemen were tending the furnaces. (It happens all day, every day in thousands of ships!) Above, we had looked in at a dark hole--I rightly thought, over the boilers--and breathed for a moment a most parching element, so that the heat of the stokehold did not frighten me. The chief introduced me to the third engineer, Williams--we roared out cordially; and then he inducted me to the mysteries aft, where, along the shaft which revolves the propeller, a specially greasy passage runs. Here, as throughout this cavernous region--I remembered Hedge Street Tunnels, which to the initiated will be a sufficient allusion--might not E. A. Poe, to-day, have set a story to rival the _Cask of Amontillado_? I suggested it to the chief, but he saw no adventurous, unusual quality in his tunnel. Right aft appeared a long vertical ladder, ascending to a manhole--a safety appliance, he explained it, of the war, but to me it resembled a danger appliance.

Having gone as far as we could, we turned back to the engine-room. I was now accustomed enough to notice that the sultry air of the place was occasionally tempered by a draught of the cooler kind. But I found it hard to realize how man could tolerate surroundings so trying as these in order to earn a wage which in a comfortable employment would be nothing out of the way. I pictured myself as an engineer on a steamer. I feared that, in time, the approach of each watch of four hours down among the machinery, fume, sweat and thunder would become a formidable problem. "Use" no doubt explained the nonchalance of pallid Williams as he groped with his slush-lamp to his work. But I thought of the war, when, after a while, useful "use" began to desert the soldier and to leave him on tenterhooks worse than the apprehensions of the unused.

We were climbing upstairs again--up from the underworld of battle headquarters?

I had appreciated the handful of cotton waste which the chief had given me at the first: and now went off to read poems. The man to whom this "divelish yron yngine"--if I do not misquote Spenser--is given for control (and is controlled), returned to his outstanding labour--that of filing part of a curious patent electric torch which the captain had asked him to restore to life.

VII

The _Bonadventure_ entered the tropics, calm, hot, blue expanse. I do not know why, but our passing into that zone was for me contemporary with an access of wild and vivid dreams. These were odd enough to cause me to record what remained of them in the morning, and as they still seem prominent in my recollections of my sea-going, I make a note of some of them. Now, it was no other than the great Lord Byron, pursuing me with a knife, applauded by two ladies. The basis of actuality, at least, was there. Now I was taking my way along weedy rivers, which at first were the innocent shallow streams I once met and knew in Kent. But as the dream progressed a Byronic change came over it; and these streams grew more and more foul with weeds and grotesque in stagnation, until I realized as if with an awakening that they were full of tremendous fish, pike perhaps, often perch, and hybrids of many colours and streakings. These fish lay watching, stretched from one bank to the other; their number, my loneliness, their immensity, my fixity conspired to frighten me unspeakably.

At other times the river was in flood, and I, as before, compelled by the secret of the matter to walk along its towpath, in danger of its torrents; the path itself became unknown, or lay between two huge channels choking with muddy torrents. Ever expecting the worst, I was suddenly at an ancient mill, watching

Slow Lethe without coil, Softly, like a stream of oil

gliding under the footbridge. This was sickly phantasm, the very waters breathing decay. The scene swiftly changed. Paddington! and you, dear old friend C., racing with me across the metals to catch a train, and---- Then C. is in his grave again, and I am in a trap outside my old home; a stranger stands in the road, cuts his throat; I look on, smile, and shudder, for he races after the trap with his knife; but I outstare his Malayan eyes, and he gives up the chase. By way of respite, I now walked at leisure into a bookshop, and my hand fell upon rarities indeed. _The Church_, by Leigh Hunt--I had never seen that before! "We don't have much time for dinner," said the bookseller, and I took the hint and went out.