Part 8

Our nights were disturbed by mosquitoes, not so ferocious as formerly, and cats. Aboard, it still seemed cold; but ashore there was little breeze, and my walks round the town were warm work. The outskirts of this ramshackle place were dreary, but I liked them better than city streets. They formed a loose encampment of tin, or plaster, or matchboard, in which one would perhaps notice most the open drains, the chickens, goats (some of them of most sheepish appearance), cows, pigs, cats, dogs of the silly sort, sunflowers, and gentlemen in blue cotton trousers, about the thresholds. Grumble as you may at militarism, most army camps would have been better favoured in some respects: since here, despite the prospects of mud suggested by the dust of the present season, no hut seemed to have a raised approach, whether stone causeway or duck-walk. I never walked into Bahia Blanca, though not far short of its tall spires, but found these habitations a sufficient view; the way back to the _Bonadventure_ might be over a moorish level, thickly grown over with yellow flowering weed, and all sorts of drouthy "flora of the marsh." Marsh, however, it was not, the soil being thoroughly baked and cracked. Here were a few birds, that seemed to me the thrushes of the place; a few butterflies; beetles, lying dead here and there; lizards in greater number. But the fields hereabouts had all a solitary look. Often the track was inches deep in dust.

On one of my walks, the wireless operator being with me, we were seen going up from the wharf by the ship's carpenter, who, it afterwards came out, had tried to attract our attention by shouting. The reason for his attempt is interesting. He was, in fact, at that time in "calaboosh," having been haled thither during the night, according to a prophecy of Mead's. Looking too long on the wine (three glasses, by his reckoning) and the beer (one innocent glass), he had succeeded in arriving abreast of the Brazilian next to us. At this point, he had the misfortune to lose the way to the _Bonadventure_; and presently for his safety the police took him to the cells. Thence, the next afternoon, Chips was released, and that without even a fine. The winter wind is not so unkind as this cadaverous man's ingratitude to the gendarmes for their kindly act. Asked about it, he complained in loud and bitter terms that such things should be, and

with swinish phrase Soiled their addition.

This episode appeared to please the mate, Meacock, in no small degree. He recounted other imprisonments; told of black sheep among crews newly arrived from Sing Sing and similar haunts, for whose arrest a warrant was always handed to the police as soon as the ship arrived in port; described the difficulty of getting these incorrigibles from the ship to the wharf, the police having no sanction to touch them on the ship; and how the Brazilian police got the upper hand of bruisers towering above them by lambasting them with the flat of their swords.

Lethargy and grain dust seemed to hang in our air together. The exploration of Ingeniero White as an amusement became less liked as time went on, and as sometimes the dull sky broke in a drizzle of rain. One hatch was filled with wheat; the gang trimmed it quickly; and the loading of the other hatches continued apace, so that our going to sea again looked close at hand. The sailors and apprentices with pots of paint were perched at various points above and beside the ship; and it was no great surprise to me when one of the boys, much given to recreation, suddenly appeared in a waterlogged state.

The town was not without its Mission to Sailors. It depended upon the energies of a very small English community, of course, but they kept up a comfortable room, where dancing and singing were entered upon in the evenings; the standards of pastime required by Bicker and Mead, however, were not reached. It pleased them to drift about; to call at the refreshment room of the station and throw dice for drinks, to prowl about the town with an independent air. The funds at the disposal of this party were dwindling. It was therefore proposed to take to the vile syrup known as _caña_ instead of whisky, and an ingenious logic was discovered in favour of the plan, apart from the great cheapness of the caña. As thus: Even at B.A. (did you but know it) you often had turpentine sold you for whisky; in fact, here, if you asked for whisky, ten to one that what you received was caña at four times its proper price. Better ask for caña straight away. This reasoning in favour of an adopted plan could not be answered except by sudden wealth. These driftings were mainly spent in wondering what to do next. (The only real prospect was, to get back to the ship.) If any decision was made, it was a picturesque one. For instance, the town being abed, we went into a general stores where there was a light showing the proprietor about to close. Somewhat to his surprise, and after the first few moments to his discontent, supper was taken, dog biscuits and cream cheese, washed down with yellow caña--a more inflammatory distillation even than the white. And so home.

XX

We did not get away so quickly as had been thought, and as every one seemed to wish. Heavy skies came on, giving the slack waters a leaden look. The air, though it was not hot, was close; and the fine dust from the grain which carpeted all the decks began to sit heavy on the lungs. Among the business outstanding remained that of stowing 7,500 bags in the bunker hatch--slower work, clearly, than the loading in bulk which had until now been the method with the _Bonadventure_. Bicker and Mead, as they supervised the trimming of hatches that had been filled, wore a melancholy look, nor was the entry at breakfast of two young men from the Customs, though pleasant acquaintances, considered a relief. If clouds disappeared, and left the day like a furnace, there was every facility for doing nothing at all. Even at evening the cabins were filled with tepid air and flies: and most of us might be found leaning over the rails in silence, watching sunset's orange red colour to the prime and die away again in the sky and the water below it, scarcely marked with a ripple; and then the moon riding high above our bridge, itself not unexalted, not ungraceful by its proximity to the warehouse. In such a night comes Mead, and a consultation ends in my approaching Mouldytop the steward with respectful petition for ship's biscuits. These soon refreshed in my mind Solomon's choosing a dish of herbs and love over a stalled ox and hatred.

The time now arrived when I was honourably appointed to a job of work. I felt proud indeed when Meacock explained it to me. It was, to keep count of the number of bags of grain shipped for the bunker hatch and another one aft. The tallyman employed by the merchants kept his record, shouting out his "Una, dos, tres" until each tally of bags was complete; the ship's representative looked on at the descending bags and made his oblique strokes in his book accordingly. This work in effect was not so simple as it sounds; sometimes after a pause the bags would be let loose suddenly and in quick succession, nor moreover was it possible to question the other tallyman at the moments of disagreement, since he spoke no English and I no Spanish.

This delivery of some thousands of bags was to be completed in the course of a day, but was not. The arrangement of shoots for the bags to travel down was as neat as a scenic railway: they slid down one, were deflected by a fixed bag at the foot of it to another shoot at right angles to it, and so on down to the caverns and the packers. The day's work ended, but some thousands of bags remained to be put aboard, and I felt that I was growing used to times and seasons nautical, "the ways of a ship," in the cook's phrase. When a sergeant-major says, Parade at 8.30, he is understood to have ordered a parade for 8.15; but I suspect that at sea, should the tramp be expected away this week, next week is the actual time of departure.

Newspapers reached the ship from Buenos Aires, one day old, and by that time having an antiquarian value of twenty centavos, or fourpence. In consequence we generally went without; yet somehow important news, such as the result of Cardiff City versus Tottenham Hotspur, was quickly passed round. Unimportant, such as the latest development in the Anglo-Irish situation, was considered "politics," and its seeker ignored.

The wharves were haunted, it goes without saying, by rats; more publicly, by dogs. One grey giant was regarded, especially by the mess-room boy, with romantic fondness. His history, if his, was current. He was "a Yankee," but had lost his passage in the North American ship to which he belonged; and now, it was maintained, he made a complete round of all the docks, boarded every ship that came in, and looked into the alleyways to try and recognize his own. The dog did, I agree, wear a saddened expression. But, discreetly, I did not feel sure about his sentimental journey. It was "Mess-room" too who encouraged a cat to prepare for the homeward voyage, and I cannot say that he at first appeared likely to persuade the animal, which, shut in for the night, like Chips on a recent occasion, gave vent to piercing miaows. Parrots and monkeys, without which surely no sailor should ever return to his native village, were alike scarce.

The subject of my future standing in the village tavern had already been discussed when others failed. It now arose again. The saloon's ideas of rural England were almost as broad as mine of sea life. They could see or affected to see nothing else in agriculture but one large joke; and its communities as so many tribes of gaping lads in smocks, with churchwardens, clustering about the oldest inhabitant. I had told them not once nor twice that no one in my village had any sense of distance, or wish to travel, or to hear of travels. But still it was believed that on my return I should be received at the inevitable "Green Cow" or "Pig and Whistle" with roars of applause, all mouths in the shape of O's, all attentions grappled to my lightest word. More probably, I hinted, if I were to return and mention as a news item a voyage in a tramp to South America, the patronage would preserve a chilling silence, as who should say, "We are too old for these youthful frivolities. We are not amused"; and would then resume the old buzz of 'sheening and jack hares and the riches of the rich'-- But I was not heard.

Lightning, a passion with me, grew bright and furious towards the end of our stay, about the fall of darkness; in its blue flare, it was startling to see how like a wreck a Swedish motor-ship, which had put in because of a fire aboard, lay lonely at some distance from us. Presently the rain came down and cooled the air; the night grew quiet then, the far thunder dying out, or if there was noise, it was the cricket's cry, and the gruff brief conversation of the ship's watchman with his comrade on the wharf as he passed by.

Sunday came again, day of washing for Meacock and others; day of eggs and bacon for the Saloon's breakfast, and with it special duff and crimson sauce for dinner, tinned pineapple and cake for tea. Fortified thus, Bicker and Mead and myself go a-fishing on the opposite quay, where some Argentines have been catching fine fish. Now it is, to the best of my memory, the fact that I have never yet caught one fish on Sunday; and so I should have been wiser than to have joined in this excursion. Luck stopped dead as soon as we began, and to make things worse, through a sleepy reply of Bicker's I imagined the line to be made fast to the jetty, and threw out the sinker with special success "far out at sea." That line was not made fast. It had belonged to the steward. He, when he heard the disaster, stood in a kind of _rigor_, gazing at high heaven as one insensible to misfortune.

And now came our last day at Ingeniero White. Not too soon, it seemed; the scenery of the port having but little of freshness, and the drama of loading again lacking in situations. Mosquitoes here served me well by arousing me in the early morning, as I was instructed to take a hand at six with tallying the bags of grain. I was there to the moment, but my duty proved to be that of standing by, enjoying life. At twelve, all hands were mustered amidships and numbered by the port authority, and one was missing. At length it was found out who, namely, one Towsle the sleepiest of the apprentices, and where--in his bath, dozing unaware of the parade outside the door. The pilot came aboard at three, and the tug _Lydia_ presented herself to guide the _Bonadventure_ out: there was much business with ropes fore and aft, and the ship swinging round was free of the wharf about the top of the tide. The warehouses with their stacks of bags, slippered blue-trousered handymen, surpliced overseers with their sampling hollow bayonets, railway trucks and capstans, ubiquitous dogs and all, began to recede. But we had not come more than a couple of miles from the elevators, nor out of sight of the refugee-like town behind them, when we anchored to await Hosea. At a considerable space from the town, all alone, we saw as we waited the big drab square building euphemistically known aboard as the "variety show." It was a sad sight, and to me in its significance of some people's luck in this world, a challenge to my random cheerful philosophy, which I have not yet been able entirely to dismiss.

Presently from the land a storm began to foreshadow itself, and suddenly there was a burst of wild piping wind, like a spiteful cry, that flung sharp rain over us and in scarcely a minute had died down again. Its short career sent every one interested scampering to take in the canvas awnings, and left a breeze which when the captain arrived in a launch, carrying some newspapers, blew them round him like a garment. He was wearing a straw hat. He jammed it on with a will and hurried up the rope ladder. With his return, we were at sea again, though not yet in the open.

The evening was one of strange majesty. One saw clouds amassing in every similitude of mountainous immensity and ascent, and wild lights everywhere burning among them; but most of all, a tawny lion's colour mantled in a great tract of the sky and below shone dim yet in a manner dazzling from the darkening water. The heat of the day had been oven-like. Lightnings began after a red weeping sunset, sheet lightnings often veined with the fiercest forks of white flame, wreaths of golden fire, volleys, cataracts, serpents; and these danced about the horizon until daybreak, sometimes in silence, sometimes with deep but weary-sounding thunderclaps. The light that these wanderers cast was often of an intensity scarcely credible. A deluge of rain was always imminent, but only towards dawn arrived.

The _Bonadventure_ had been, under these innumerable lights, making quiet way down an avenue of buoys twinkling in their degree, and came into view of the lightship beyond them. The pilot sounded the siren (for he was to leave us here), and in reply to the second call of the siren the lamp of a boat pulling out towards us appeared. It was good-bye to the pilot and his bag, which on the end of a rope now caused a moment's interest; the engines, stopped to let him depart, were started again, and the captain fixed the ship's course. Mead's watch, as usually it was, shared by the purser, engaged us in more recollections of the great war; and in the glitter first of a swarm of dragon-flies, then presently the surly gleam of the lightning, we talked on until midnight. I admired him for having already forgotten all about his disappointment in the lottery, and begun with new hopes according to his motto; _Quo fata vocant_.

XXI

The breakfast steaks were leathery past anticipations. The flies in the cabin were thousands strong. But the _Bonadventure_ was homeward bound, and a general spirit of liveliness prevailed. Conversation was running much upon the value of the mark, for it was to Hamburg that we were believed to be going. Base hopes were expressed that the rate of exchange might be a thousand to the pound. No one imagined that this would some day be surpassed by eleven thousand. The Argentine had been expensive; the cheapness of Germany was thrown up all the clearer. As, however, I had no anxiety to buy a safety razor, mouth-organs, clocks, and pocket manicure sets, to which and other articles like them I imagined the German cheapness would be limited, I was not elated on that score.

At any rate, here we were steaming north at a steady speed, with a light breeze ahead, and the coast of the Argentine slipping past, dimly seen. And everything was bent for England. For weeks the chief had expressed a longing for pancakes at almost every meal; and now, auspicious, they came. On the other hand, the cheese was done. Dark suspicions about a certain cake were also whispered; knowing ones, whose information was that Hosea had sent one aboard from Bahia Blanca for the benefit of the saloon, saw villainy in the delay of its forthcoming. When it did appear its pomp of white icing and green and red crescents, and diamonds of fruit ornaments, certainly warranted an anxiety, as for crown jewels.

Meacock, the ever-busy and never-flustered, about this time showed me his private notebook, in which he had from time to time copied verses and aphorisms, chiefly from _Nash's Magazine_, which he considered worthy. In this anthology of his I might have seen the signs of a literary revival aboard which shortly afterwards befell. I daresay he would have expanded a remark of his, "Novels were untrue to life, but life was not by itself interesting enough" (during the war he had commanded a trawler in the Mediterranean), had not the slow flash of a lighthouse appeared on the port side. He climbed to Monkey Island to take a bearing. The blurred lights of Mar del Plata past, our course was altered to agree with the set-back of the coast. Mead came up for his watch, eight bells went, and Meacock departed. His "Ay, ay" to the retiring steersman's report, the apprentice's reading of the log, and the forward lookout's shout "The lights are bright, sir," always had a handsome resonance and lingering dignity.

Mead was by this time full of Hamburg, and he kept breaking into songs in very low Low German, and memories of one Helen, not without sighs. That romance was not the first, nor the last, which I heard from him. He would show me Hamburg! and by way of a Pisgah look, he drew gay pictures of that town, omitting however its architectural glories. Like critics of nature poetry, he saw the world in terms of men and women: and Hamburg as the location of dancing saloons and a singular exhibition of waxworks.

The evening had at first looked stormy, and sharp fits of lightning lit the low clouds, but all passed by. The clear and cool heaven was left, diamonded with steady constellations, and crowned with the round moon "and a star or two beside"; below like a field of silver lay the sea, and the quiet ship flung by veils of lily foam, and the shadows stealthily counter-changed the glistening decks. In these calm airs and waters, she made such good speed that the next afternoon we came in view of Monte Video. The pilot took over the bridge, and we were soon at anchor in the harbour, which seemed thronged with ships. Our business here was to load bunker coal, and as our coal was at the moment aboard a collier which was to be seen some distance out of the breakwaters, nothing was done this first evening. The news that his coal was yet to arrive at Monte Video was cheerfully imparted to Phillips with the comment, "Well, anyway, chief, you'll get your coal nice and fresh"; but he seemed by no means consoled. Nor did the assurance of the shipping clerk--a somewhat lilified young man in immaculate blue serge--that "Our Cardiff house have let us down badly," act as a charm upon his depression. He told me to stand by for the office of tallying at seven the next morning, and I thanked him. The request implied, perhaps, the paternal anxiety for my avoiding mischievous indolence which he had shown before.

But meanwhile what was there to do? We lay at a distance from the shore, and had therefore no distraction. I watched the lighthouse on the hill, the buoys, the ship's signals, the trams on the quay, the other illuminant causes all round us; I listened to a brass band which, for whatever reason, was playing close to the harbour until late in the evening; and then, driven to extremes, I sat down to write a "novel" which became my refuge from ennui during what remained of my holiday, but which I fear will never be finished. I spoke to Mead about it. He thought little of my hero. I agreed to have the hero killed in a bayonet fight near Alberta pill-box, but he thought I might go still nearer to propriety and have the hero kill his man, and go through his pockets. There did seem something in this suggestion, and a few years ago such an ending as it conjured up would have been popular, I think:

"The battle was over. Whistling 'Tipperary,' and placing the wallet and watch of his prostrate antagonist in the pocket of his body shield, Arthur strode onward to join his comrades at their evening meal in Houthulst Wood. Here let us leave him, calmly facing the morrow as only an Englishman can.

"THE END."

The next day brought the worst weather that we had met since we left the Channel. At first it was merely cool and mild; but that was misleading. Down came the rain, thick, cold, and steady; and there seemed a sufficient supply to last until we left. I noticed it, myself, with more especial observation, at my post of tallyman.

In the drizzle the lighters came alongside bringing the coal in bags. The stevedore's gang and their own overseers arrived aboard. One of these overseers was an Englishman, who by his manner and speech had evidently been brought up in a widely different setting; but it was none of our business, though Bicker and others considered it a disgrace for an Englishman to be so employed. All I heard was that he came from the West of England, and that he was wild (which appeared sufficiently in his countenance); and I admired his intellect, and tried to make him feel that. The other overseer was a fat old Italian, who tallied with me for the lighter on the port side.

As these men and the poor fellows who were emptying the sacks into the hatches or trimming the coal down below had been at work all the night, it was not surprising that our affairs moved slowly. The winch, steaming and thudding and jerking in a mutinous mood, brought up four bags at a time, on my side. The sling that held them was lowered to the deck, the hands rushed to swing them on to the improvised platforms beside the hatches, with a concerted roaring as if over the capture of a tiger. While these bags were being emptied, the sling would be descending into the lighter again; and so it continued, with a fog of coal particles wrapping the neighbourhood. The gang was a mixed multitude. Nationality might have been anything. The prevailing colour was a sable (unsilvered), under which mask might be distinguished Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, West Indian, and other types. Among the most energetic of those who were emptying the bags, the most vocal of the roarers, there was a tall, thin, humorous fellow who reminded me irresistibly of a brilliant poet and miscellanist of the modern school. I thought of that dazzling smile, that æsthetic face transferred to the surroundings of Chelsea, and what a success, if looks meant anything, he ought to be! So strongly did I feel that in his hours of leisure and coallessness he was a critic of verse and _moeurs_ that I almost asked him his name.