Part 9

My co-tallyman was pleasantly disposed. He asked me if I would give him one of several casks standing near the galley. I referred him to Phillips, who referred him to Meacock, who referred him elsewhere. We disagreed now and then over the tally, but I was able to hold my own. The _lex talionis_ was in force. Sometimes I was induced to accept his surplus over my figure as accurate, but then I would take him back at another opportunity, and ignore his doleful "Make it _threeee_." My imagination lagged behind his, which seemed to see occasional slings put aboard by aerial hands, and aerial coal at that, and these went down in his book. But altogether we "made it." Mutual mistrust served the public good.

The chief lent me a boiler suit, for which I was insufficient, and added an old macintosh presently. I soon grew black; even the tallyman, though he seemed to have some natural gift in his stubbled skin which repelled the grime, grew black. Presently I was disguised in the order of things as a film thug, with waterlogged cap sagging over eyes heavily inlaid in blackness. Tired as the labourers must have been, they went on working as if they liked it, grinning, singing, enjoying comments upon each other, and refreshing themselves with cheroots, cigarettes, peaches, or sups from cans containing a brown decoction like strong tea. They ceased at four.

It was by way of variation in the evening that Bicker and Mead fell upon me, with the idea of shampooing the begrimed tallyman. Zambuk (Hosea's trusted salve), lime cream, and talcum powder were employed. There was a struggle, however, which disturbed Meacock opposite. He came to the rescue, but leaping upon the two barbers, who were holding me down, he forgot that I was underneath. "Rough house," the word went round.

When the stevedore's men arrived the following day, they were almost to a man rigged out in the cleanest of suits, or costumes rather. This was, to the best of my information, not the habit with the British trimmer. Their hats were pleasing to the eye. In his jet-black felt, my poetry-critic looked the picture of a member of the _Athenæum_ staff (lamented _Athenæum_!). Others wore the type of hat but not the manner. A number of matey caps, check and khaki and indigo, then white wideawakes as though for haymaking, and a few pillbox-like creations in crimson and daffodil, made part of the splendour. Some of the coalheavers wore large sashes amidships, sashes of lurid colour also, violet and plum, extra shade. In the shirts, more colour appeared. Here, like Aurora, stepped Antonio in salmon pink; there, was a construction of red and green rings on a white background. The bright-blue cotton suits added to the general effect. Curious that these workers should come so clean, only to be coated with coal-dust in half an hour! It spoke well for their outlook.

The work was much as before. Wheelbarrows had to be got to put the sacks beside other hatches which the winch did not command. The chief had some argument with the Italian foreman about the last two hundred bags, which he wished to be shot into the starboard hatch only, to bring the ship up straight. The foreman asked him to withdraw this. "Damn you!" roared Phillips, and put an end to the matter, "when I say NO I mean NO. Don't you understand plain English?"

So that was that, and my job finished. The bosun and his worthies quickly gathered to remove the disgraceful signs of bunkering; they swept and garnished, the stylish shipping clerk came aboard with his final papers to see Hosea and Phillips. Already the pilot was on the bridge; soon we were slowly backing away from our mooring. The blue peter was hauled down, the gangway got in. The _Bonadventure_ was manoeuvred past the breakwaters and down the marked channel, at whose last buoy, or soon afterwards, the tug to fetch the pilot came alongside. As he withdrew in her she sounded the three blasts or rather hoots meaning a "Bon voyage," and our own burly voice sounded three times in acknowledgment. The many turrets and spires, chimneys and gaunt roofs of Monte Video, distinctly ranged along a rainy sky with shelves of rock-like cloud, lessened duly; the evening came on. Still the coast appeared here and there, its yellow sands, its dark-blue cliffs and hills, and as if shouldering the dull and heavy sky the sun burned out with a golden power before he departed.

Mead bade good-bye for a short time--in all probability--and myself for a long time, to South America, still symbolized by its lighthouses and the night-glow of a seaside town or two. Once again I felt a regret that I had not seen the elder Buenos Aires, whose extinction was no doubt a wise thing, but which surely must have triumphed as a thing of beauty over the present cubic blocks of utility. Mead was not sentimental about going to sea once more. He was too deeply engaged with devising a piece of invective against an enemy for an alleged injury, and immersed in the troubles of rhyme. I thought he was acquitting himself very well.

XXII

I have mentioned a scarcely concealed feeling in the saloon against the omniscience of the wireless operator. That was not all the opposition to which this youth of the glazed locks was subject. He was understood, while the ship was at sea, to receive news issued daily, and frequently when a subject was being discussed by the ship's officers he sat there in possession of the facts but with serene indifference to the general interest. In this, he was carrying out the regulations, I imagine; but his behaviour resembled that of the dog in the manger. To aggravate this sense of injustice, he rashly told some one that the news might be taken at three guineas.

This in the first place affected the saloon only. But it happened that throughout the ship there was a particular desire for information. At home, the football season was at its zenith. Important matches, in the Leagues and the Cup competition, were known to be playing; and one man on the ship when she was out at sea could, and it was believed did, hear the results. But never a word said he. Looking in at the galley during the evening to brew my cocoa, I would find animated discussion of the favourite teams in progress. Kelly, the "Mess-room," would wipe his fist across his mouth and huskily explain. "It's like this, mister." He had known other wireless operators who gladly announced the football results. But this fellow--he was too b---- stuck-up, mister--"The Marconi," the term which he used for the offending operator, savoured queerly of the phrase "The Bedlam" in _King Lear_.

Such was the background against which Mead's vision of the unfortunate Sparks stood out, and with the particular unfriendliness which I must briefly describe. Earlier in the trip, Sparks had, in Mead's opinion, adopted a tone of equality and then even of command towards him, in the course of the ship's routine. Mead had immediately resorted to warlike acts. Sparks lodged a written complaint with Hosea, who gave both parties the best advice. But it was a false step in Sparks to send in this communication, which would if forwarded have cost Mead, perhaps, his living; and it was made worse by Sparks's glib defence, "I was doing my duty," since he had been at a safe distance from the war when Mead's duty lay on the Gallipoli beaches. And he still affected to think of upholding his letter.

Matters were therefore strained, and the more they were so the more Mead liked it. "Don't let me catch you ashore," had been his way of passing Sparks the time of day in port; at sea, he growled abuse at him whenever he saw him, and if no better occasion offered itself, would suddenly thrust his face in all the semblance of murderous intention through the open porthole of the young man's room and utter calm, deliberate, and unnatural purposes.

In this feud, my position was not comfortable. Unlicked as he was (up to the present) and devoid of fine points, the Marconi, whose cabin was neighbour to mine, wished me no harm, and even sought my esteem. Mead, whom I did esteem, was discontented with any half-measures on my part, and in any case I felt bound to observe neutrality. But the capers of my angry friend were often amusing, the declarations of duty conscientiously executed by his _bête noir_--Mead had a weakness for style--were not. And it is scarcely necessary to repeat, the general view of Sparks was not a moral support to Mead even if he had "no case."

On the occasion that I described, Mead had decided to drive his point well home with the aid of rhyme. I took a copy of his somewhat indecorous production. It had many "spirited couplets," embodying considerable observations:

To see you promenade the deck Gives me a pain in my ruddy neck.

Sparks had been unwise, again, in mentioning his pleasure in the slaughterer's trade, and past experience. Mead did not miss the opportunity.

If the blood of sheep could make you glow Come and dare to make mine flow. I am no hero out for gore, I had the wind up in the war.

Names and menaces came fast and furious.

... Flowers there'll be which you won't smell, You swob, you'll learn a lot in hell. Had I been called half these things Some one or I'd be wearing wings.

This effusion, laboriously printed in CAPITALS so that its effect on the recipient should be the more demoralizing, headed THE ANSWER, and signed in characteristic fashion NULLI SECUNDUS, was to have been handed to its theme in the saloon. Eventually, Mead rejected that as perhaps contrary to tradition, and handed it in at the porthole aforesaid; but its object, the arranging of "a little bout," was not achieved.

XXIII

A literary epoch began. Bicker, our authentic poet, and not an opportunist like Mead, had been proposing a magazine for some little time past. On a Saturday afternoon, he decided to produce the first number for the Sunday following. The circulation was to be six: there being no aids aboard such as the clay or hectograph, each copy had to be written by hand throughout. Into this labour I, with the editor's satirical comments upon my profession, was at once pressed. Material in prose and verse was given to me, and filled three foolscap pages in a close handwriting. I copied out these contributions, which scarcely stood the test of a second reading, six times: and was rewarded with a vile headache. I hoped the magazine would succeed, but only once. Bicker, like a born editor, copied out his portion without feeling any the worse, and his appreciation of the fare which he was providing grew with every copy.

The final details, however, delayed the appearance of the _Optimist_ until Sunday afternoon. Bicker said in self-protection that no Sunday paper is available in the provinces before breakfast. When the _Optimist_ was published, there was no question of its being welcomed. It was of the familiar kind, which seems to satisfy enough readers to satisfy its promoters. A fable in a dialect generally considered a skilful parody of the Old Testament, "Things we want to know," reports of the football season at Buenos Aires, Answers to Correspondents, a poetical libel beginning "It is an ancient Mariner," and much besides, principally from the editor's pen, formed the bulk of it. There were columns devoted to Amusements, and Advertisements of the principal business heads aboard. A copy made its way aft to the bosun and his sea-dogs--the gentlemen who were announced in it as the Chain Lightning Gang. Sitting on the poop in Sunday neatness, they gave it a good reception. The bosun himself had been ill, but was better after reading it.

With some copies a supplement was issued, and collectors will not need to be advised to acquire these rarities. This supplement was a page of drawings, by Mead, of common objects at Buenos Aires. The obese laundress, Mme. Maria Maggi, was perhaps conspicuous among these (on another page a report was printed that she had died, leaving £300,000 to her lean charioteer). The watchman, with a label giving one of his typical blasphemies, "Got-a-d---- b----" this, that, and the other, was seen at full length. The altercation between the manager of the wharf (attached to a balloon lettered YOU.ARE.USING.MY.BUCKETS. I.AM.THE.BANDOLIERO) and Meacock, smoking as always and nevertheless replying YOU.BIG.STIFF _ore rotundo_, was chronicled. And considering who the artist was, and his recent poem, it was not surprising to find a malevolent caricature of one still with us.

One afternoon, sleeping within my cabin, I heard the mate altering the ship's course with "Hard a starboard" and so on, and feeling this to be out of the ordinary I went out to see why. A mile off there was something in the sea, which the apprentices declared to be a small boat with a flag flying. I felt the light of adventure breaking in upon the murky tramp. But as we drew nearer, the castaway proved to be nothing more than a buoy, and visions of picking up a modern Crusoe faded suddenly. The ship was put back to her course.

The breeze ahead grew stronger, and in the early morning, the sky being quite grey, a slate-grey sea was running in sizable crests and valleys and tossing the spray high aboard. "The devil's in the wind already." "And the bread." The cook's reputation was gone at a blow. He, like a wicket-keeper, did well without any notice taken; lapsed a moment, and every one was barking. It seemed he had been unfortunate in the yeast supplied him. There were sallies of wit: "Now's the time to pave the alley," "Pass the holystone," over this doughy circumstance. For some time, in the words of the Cambridge prize poet, the bread "was not better, he was much the same," and ship's biscuits became unexpectedly favourite. They were stiff but excellent eating; would have rejoiced the soul of my late general, the noted "Admiral" H., alias "Monty," alias "The Schoolmaster," and other aliases. Can he ever be forgotten for those diurnal and immortal questions of his, "Did your men have porridge this morning?" and "Why did you not order your cook to give your men duff to-day?" It wanted little imagination to picture him under his gold oak leaves nibbling with dignity at a ship's biscuit and saying, "Very good, Harrison, uncommonly tasty--I shall recommend them to Division."

The sea presently under a brightened sky grew to a rare intensity of blue, that was at its most radiant in the overswirl of water sheered by the bows. Gallant enough the _Bonadventure_ looked in the marvellous expanse, having by dint of much early-morning swilling and swabbing thrown the worst of her nighted colour off; but almost every day I heard bad wishes to the designer of her, though on the score of utility, not the pleasure of the eye. My fancy of a full-rigged ship bowing over these rich seas was usually corrected with reference to "wind-bags"--not folks like me, but ships.

Then there came rain, drizzling on doggedly hour after hour. The drops hung on the railings like autumn dews on meadow fences. One of the effects of such weather was that the cat, who had been induced after all to make the trip, was driven to look about for a quiet, sheltered corner, and having found one, was driven to look again. Finally she chose the chart-room and settled upon the chart. South America was sodden with rain and black with paw-marks when the second mate looked in, and that cat, black or not, would have passed over, but for her being shortly to become a mother. That fact also accounted for her worried expression, voice, and manner, which I had misread as symptoms of sea-sickness.

And still the dull and rainy sky. When I went out one morning, the mate leaned over the bridge rail and said, "You're the blooming Jonah! Now look at that damn'd smoke." I looked at the customary coaly vapour flying aft, but was unenlightened. "You Jonah," he went on, "you've brought this wind, and it's carrying the cinders all over my new paint." Now, I suspected the cat was the cause of the trouble; but my guilt was urged by the chief also, as a current of a mile an hour was setting us back.

Not only the mariners of the _Bonadventure_ lived in suspense, awaiting the football results.

"That fellow was funny this morning."

"Yes, you could see the excitement in his lamp."

"What was this?"

"Why, about four the So-and-so passed us, and the mate on watch signalled us: 'Do you know the result of Tottenham v. Cardiff City?' So we sent back that Cardiff had won but we didn't know the score. This fellow sent back: 'Oh, well done, Cardiff!' but he was that excited, he could scarcely hit out a letter right. His first message had been--well, beautifully sent; now his lamp was all over the place."

"We could almost see him dancing about the bridge!"

Spragg, the assistant steward, sometimes came to swab my cabin. He had been in a battalion of the 38th Division, when my own Division relieved them in January 1917 on the Canal Bank at Ypres; and he had been like myself a witness and a part of the mammoth preparations of that summer, which ended in such terrible failure. His manner and humorous way of telling tales beside which the "Pit and Pendulum" appears to me an idle piece of pleasantry, unspeakably brought back the queer times and places which we had both seen. I saw him in my mind's eye, keen and frank, standing behind his kit with "headquarters company"--those amiable wits--at Elverdinghe Château (Von Kluck's rumoured country seat, for it was never in my time bombarded); or with pick or shovel stooping along in the Indian file of dark forms towards that vaunted, flimsy breastwork, Pioneer Trench at Festubert.

But still my share of Mead's watch was my best recreation. Our talk was disturbed but little; perhaps by the signals of some ship passing by, or by some unusual noise, such as one evening we heard with a slight shock. A succession of rifle-shots, it sounded; and the cause was evidently some great fish departing by leaps and bounds from the approach of that greater one the _Bonadventure_. The interruption over, he would go on with plans for a future in Malay. "This life," he would say, "is killing me." He was quite as healthy, mind and body, as any man aboard. I liked his occasional rhapsodies, in which the smell of burning sandalwood and of cotton trees, the clearings in sinister forests with the jewelled birds, the rough huts, the dark ladies with the hibiscus flowers in their hair, and the lone white settler (ex-digger Mead) thinking his thoughts in the evening, all played their part. He wished the world back in 1860; it had outdistanced him.

XXIV

It blew from the north-east strong against us always, and we were travelling more slowly. The sun returned, however, among those ethereal white clouds which to perfection fulfil the poet's word "Pavilions"; we ran on into a dark sea ridged and rilled with glintering silver, yet seemed never to reach it, remaining in a bright blue race of waters scattered, port and starboard, with white wreaths, waters leaping from the heavy flanks of the ship in a seethe of gossamer atoms and glass-green cascade.

The immediate scene was one of painters and paint-pots, and linen flying on the lines. "This wind's playing hell with my curls," said one or two. The matter with me was, that my room was almost untenable. I opened the port at my peril; to do so was to entertain billows of coal-dust from the bunkers below. White paint, the order of the day, whether flat white or white enamel, made progress about the ship by an amateur dangerous, too.

The apparition of the steward under the evening lamps dressed in a smock--he was of ample make--and brandishing a paint-brush, was generally enjoyed. In fact, several spectators came to take a careful look at one who was too often denominated "the mouldy-headed old b----."

A more tenuous apparition was heard of, as we ran north. Whether a hoax or not, I do not know. My first information of it came in the form of a drawing by the apprentice Tich, showing the ship's bell being struck by a hand who never was on land or sea, and the apprentice Lamb leaving his hold of the wheel in horror, and even Mead shaking all over and gaping. A poem appended said that the facts were what the picture made out. The _Bonadventure_ was so new a ship--her old name, showing her war origin, still stood on the bells and the blue prints in the chart-room and elsewhere--that there seemed every likelihood against the story being the truth. I asked Mead, and he told me what he maintained to be true.

On the first watch, the voyage before this, he had gone into the wheel-house for a word with the apprentice at the wheel. A shadow, indistinct, yet leaving impressed on his recollection a human shape, slipped suddenly past the wheel-house windows, softly rang the bell once, and swiftly departed. The frightened boy drops the wheel, lets the ship swing round completely out of her course: Mead runs out, but there is nothing to be seen. He sends for the two A.B.'s who might have come up on the bridge, but they say that they have not done so, nor indeed would they come without object. The firemen, if they have to communicate with the bridge, never come higher than the stairway to the bridge deck, and it proved that no one of them had been there. By the wheel-house clock, it was noticed that the precise time of the visitation was 10.15, an hour not hitherto regarded by ghosts, I believe, as preferable to midnight.

And more. Still imagining that some practical joker was at work, Mead brought a big stick with him on his watch. This was no remedy. The ghost appeared again, at much the same hour, on several nights; it was remarked, mostly when the apprentice who first saw it had the wheel. Trying to stop so strange a bell-ringer, Mead was met by a sharp flap of wind, from a dead still night, and the glimmering shadow was gone to the air. All this happened north of the line.

This was Mead's story, but the boy's seemed to support it; and when in the shadows of the bridge deck, earnestly and without trimming, he told it me, it seemed very true. I glanced about me occasionally after hearing it.

The wind continued, but the heat was becoming intense. Painting went on like the wind. The derricks received a terra-cotta coat and their trellis work looked an amenity, against the general whiteness. The fervour for redecoration even affected me: was not my hutch to share the common lot? But, though the walls needed it, the matter was postponed, on account of the limited accommodation.

The newspaper was to appear again, but its circulation was being cut down. One copy only would now have to serve the public. It was passed to me, and my aid with paragraphs requested. I could not regret the reduction made in the number, even though if that one copy was lost,

We knew not where was that Promethean torch That could its light relumine.

Bicker, the editor, instead of reviewing his admired literature in his journal, lengthened breakfast by doing so there _viva voce_. He was all for Boeotian situations, and, on occasion, his cold re-dishing was tactfully ended by a relief conversation on religion, the keynote of which was in the unironically meant remark: "He was darned religious, but he was a darned good man." I began to know a certain captain, from talk during the voyage, almost by sight; one who "went in for Sunday Schools, and put on a crown of glory as soon as he reached Wales," but once away again, it appears that "he fell."

Another matter for the columns of the _Optimist_ was obtruded upon the breakfast table. It was a conundrum:

West was the wind, and West steered we, West was the land. How could that be?

The answer, apart from such evasions as "You were entering port," was that West was the name of the helmsman. It was understood that the poem went on in this strain, but the chief's protest came in time.