Part 5

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous line of taxicabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets pouring in the passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour of the boat trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places. The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands, there were no signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of my existence. For this was the station at which, thirty-six years ago, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the same building, but the same spot. At eighteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft--my first long railway journey in England--to “sign on” for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one’s feelings are simple. I was elated. I was pursuing a clear aim. I was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge. Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort. How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first time.

From that point of view--youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct--it was certainly a year of grace. All the help I had to get in touch with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than the palm of my hand--in which I held it--torn out of a larger plan of London for the greater facility of reference. It had been the object of careful study for some days past. The fact that I could take a conveyance at the station had never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the street and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand cabs. A strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one’s life by means of a hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding. And indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a London hansom.

Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of an obscure agent, was in my pocket. And I needed not to take it out. That address was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its words to myself as I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from any one. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I taken a wrong turn I would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel district, as had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush. But I walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, something of that faculty to absorb and make my own correctly the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground. And the place I was bound to was not so easy to find, either. It was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost amongst the thick growth of houses, like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway, as if by a secret path; a Dickensian nook of London, that wonder-city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy which the great Master knew so well how to bring out by magic of his great and understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The dust of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and broad shoulders. His longish white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the “barocco” style of Italian art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton chop, which had been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the corner.

Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his barocco apostle’s head with an expression of inquiry.

I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech; for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.--“Oh it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”

I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can’t remember a single word of that letter now. It was my very first composition in the English language. And he had understood it; because he spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers. But he gathered that this was not my object. I did not desire to be apprenticed. Was that the case?

It was. He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a gentleman too. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible. Is that it?”

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors. “An Act--of--Parliament. A law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the barocco apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen. And in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin. For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the mid-Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me. For many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. It isn’t such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I am glad to say that its severities have never been applied to me.

In the year 1878, the year of Peace with Honour, I had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendship secured. It was like the closing of a thirty-six years’ cycle.

All unaware of the War Angel already waiting with the trumpet at its lips the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.

I felt, too, that this journey so suddenly entered upon was bound to take me away from daily life’s actualities at every step. I felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship’s passengers. That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name. It had been for a time the schoolroom of my trade. On it, I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that fine, narrow-waters academy of seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide oceans. My teachers had been the coasting sailors of the Norfolk shore. Coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice. Men of very few words, which, at least, were never bare of meaning. Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all as far as I can remember.

That is what years ago the North Sea, I could hear growling in the dark all round the ship, had been for me. And I fancied that I must have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition.

I could not guess that before many days my schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under the waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in drifters under the naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.

III

I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know it in all its parts. My classroom was the region of the English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the shore. On many a night I have hauled at the braces under the very shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people ashore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not one head on these envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to bring to their peaceful shores.

Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day, and the aspects of nature don’t change, unless in the course of thousands of years--or, perhaps, centuries. The Phœnicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light even on that July afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean. For myself, a very late comer into that sea and its former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very scattered, very solid and motionless against an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.

Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the emptiness of the decks favouring my reminiscent mood.

It might have been a day of five-and-thirty years ago, when there was on this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea, I could have given myself up to the illusion bringing the past close to the future, if it had not been for the periodical transit across my gaze of a German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat-deck with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like two small disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He was bringing them home from their school in England for their holiday. What could have induced him to entrust his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and criminal country, I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot, while his breast (and to some extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later, I could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, the first that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian Army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine, active boys are orphans by now. Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of six million of fighting particles, still tossed East or West in the lurid tempest, or already snapped up, an unconsidered trifle, in the jaws of war, his very humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting-cap and a green overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting cloud-horizon of the ashy-green North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one, for far away there to the West, in the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in the winter of 1881, not of war truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements which were very angry indeed.

There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or a night of hate (it isn’t for nothing that the North Sea is also called the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than to float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable manner. There were on board besides myself, seventeen men, all good and true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a long time moved in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses, than the green overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.

“That’s a very nice gentleman.” This information, together with the fact that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship, was communicated to me suddenly by our captain. At intervals through the day he would pop out of his cabin and offer me short snatches of conversation. He owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind, and he was, without malice and, I believe, quite unconsciously, a warm Germanophil. And no wonder! As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that run, and spent almost as much of his life in Germany as in England.

“Wonderful people they are,” he repeated from time to time, without entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy. What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and small merchants, most likely. But I had observed long before that German genius has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted minds. There is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised half Europe? My man was very much under the spell of German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt for France was equally general and unbounded. I tried to advance some arguments against this position, but I only succeeded in making him hostile to myself. “I believe you are a Frenchman yourself,” he snarled at last, giving me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.

Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the eastern board; tops of islands fringing the German shore. While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves--and for all their manifest solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light--another passenger came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap. The yellow leather strap of his binocular-case crossed his chest. His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed, nothing else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. His disposition, unlike the widower’s, appeared to be mild and humane. He offered me the loan of his glasses. He had a wife and some small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought that they were very well where they were. His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.

“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone. He spoke English with the accent of our captain’s “wonderful people,” and proceeded to give me the history of the family’s crossing the Atlantic in a White Star ship. They remained in England just the time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths of the ship, I suppose) were naturally a little tired.

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. “Hurrah!” he cried under his breath, “The first German light! Hurrah!”

And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.

I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The great change of sea-life since my time was brought home to me. I had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head-sea and bound for the gateway of Dover Strait. Singly, and in small companies of two or three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead, as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store, away there, below the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam-vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that this is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a seaway, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.

When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo-tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds.

I remained on deck till we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so over-lighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar, as a working implement, shall become presently as obsolete as the sail. The pilot boarded us in a motor dinghy. More and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. Progress! Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man.

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy, and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance. Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe Lightship floated all dark and silent under its enormous, round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights.

Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace already spread for a flight away from the luckless shores of Europe. Our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over there, that the Elbe Lightship has been towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do. And obviously it must be so.

Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping along cautiously, with the unlighted, war-blighted, black coast close on one, and sudden death on the other hand. For all the space we steamed through on that Sunday evening must be now one great mine field, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot, perhaps, where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy importance. Mines, submarines. The last word in sea warfare! Progress--impressively disclosed by this war.