Part 2

For me, I was in no mood to discuss whether balm is to be got in Gilead, when we come to the place; but stumbling among the lumber on the deserted deck of the S.S. "Capella," I found a cabin, fell into it, and remember nothing more but the smell of hot bread, eggs and bacon, and coffee, which visited me in a beautiful dream. Then I woke to the reveille of a tin whistle, which the chief engineer was playing in my ear; and it was daylight. The jumble of recollections of the night before were but dark insanities. But the smell of that aromatic food, I give grace, did not pass with the awakening, for next door I heard lively sizzling in the galley. Already Fleet Street was hull down.

* * * * *

If you are used only to the methods of passenger steamers and regular routes, then you know little of travel. You are but carried about. Insistent clocks and schedules keep that way, and the upholstered but rigid routine is a soporific. You never see the hither side of the hedge. The granite countenance of fortune, her eyes filmed like frozen pools, which keeps alert and bright the voyager who is unprotected from her unscheduled and unmoral acts except by his own ready buckler, is watched for you by others. You are never surprised into fear by the unlucky position of the planets, nor moved to sing Laus Deo, when now and then, the stars are propitious. I had been brought hastily to the "Capella," for it was said she was sailing instantly. This morning I learned at breakfast that nobody knew when she could sail. Our steamer sat two feet higher than her capacity. There was some galvanised iron to come from Glascow, some machinery from Sheffield; and owing to labour difficulties we were short of several hundred tons of coal. A little mob of us, all strangers, shuffled after the Skipper's spry heels that morning to the Board of Trade offices, where an official mumbled over the ship's articles, to our shut ears, and we signed where we were told. A more glum and unromantic group of voyagers, each man twirling his shabby hat in his hands as he waited his turn for the corroded pen, was never seen this side of the Elizabethan era. I became the purser of the "Capella," with my wages lawfully recorded at a shilling per month.

I was committed. There was no withdrawal now but desertion. And desertion, at times, I seriously considered, because for a week more the cargo dribbled down to us, while I endured as a moucher about those winter docks with their coal tips, and the muddy streets with their sailors' slop marts, marine stores, and pawnshops having a cankered display of chronometers, telescopes, and other flotsam of marine failure and wreckage. Daily the quays and the dismal waterside ways with their cheap shops were still more depressed by additional snow mush and drives of sleet; and it was no warmth for this idler that he saw the tradesmen, because of the season, putting holly among their oranges and wreathing beer bottles with chains of coloured paper. The iron decks and cabins of my new home were as chill and unfriendly as the empty grate, the marble tables, and the tin advertisements of chemical slops of a temperance hotel. Am I plain? Such are the conditions which compass the wayward traveller. This is what chills one's rapid pulse when pursuing at last the rosy visions of boyhood. The deplorable littoral of our island kingdom is part of a life on the ocean wave, and should help you in coming to a decision when next you see a friendless and bestial sailorman. It becomes necessary to declare that we shall really get down to the tropics presently; have the courage to wait, like the crew of the "Capella." Our ship did sail, when she was ready.

It was the afternoon before we sailed, and having listened long enough to my messmates, who, after dinner, weighed the probabilities of malaria, yellow fever and other alien disasters into our coming strange voyage, that I went into the town to take my last look round a book shop, and to get some marine soap, dungarees, and things. Here was I at last with my heart's desire. On the very next day I should sail, I myself, and no other hero, veritably Me at last, for a place not on the chart, because the place we should find, at the journey's end, the map described with those words of magic: "Forest" and "Unexplored." I made my way round crates and barrels on that untidy deck, which had a thick mud of coal dust and snow, to the ladder overside. Coal dust and melting snow! But where was the uplifted heart, the radiant anticipation, as of one to whom the future was big with treasures to be born, which are the privilege of a young pilgrim, released from his usual obligations to pursue far horizons in the Spanish main, while his envious fellows in the city still cast ledgers under gas lamps? Here was another swindle of the romanticists. You may search their warm and golden pages in vain for coal tips, melting ice, delays, and steam heaters that will not work for cold cabins. Down they go here, though. These gallant affairs, I thought, as I descended the wet and gritty ladder, are much better done before the fire at home, in your slippers; for the large scale map, as you traverse its alluring blank areas, leaves out the conditions which now, when I am on the actual business, precipitate as frozen spicules, as would north winds, my warm, aerial, and cloudy enthusiasms that were wont to be dyed such wonderful hues by sunsets, poems, and tales of old travel. Another of these congealing draughts was now to catch me unbuttoned. Because of our unusual destination, and the wild stories that were told of it, we were a point of interest in Swansea docks, and had many interviewers and curious visitors. Some of them were on the quay then, inspecting our steamer, and as I stepped off the ladder one turned to me.

"Mister," he whispered, "are you going in her?"

"I am," I said.

"O gord," said he.

That night I met a number of my grave fellow shipmates in the town. The question was, Should we then go back to the ship?

"What," burst out one of us in surprise--his gold-laced cap was already resting on his right eyebrow--"Now? Not me. Boys, don't freeze the Carnival. Follow me!"

We followed him. The rest of the evening is more easily given in dumb show. There was a mechanical piano in a saloon bar, and it steadily devoured pennies, and returned to us automatic joy, fortissimo, over which our conversation strenuously high-stepped and vaulted. Later, there was a search for cabs, and an engineer carried with him everywhere two geese by their necks and sometimes trod on their loose feet. When he did this he snatched a goose from his own grasp, and then roundly abused us for our post-dated frivolity. We learned our steamer was now moored in mid-dock. We found a quay wall, and at the bottom of it, at a great depth in the dark, the level of the water was seen only because shreds of lamp-shine floated there. We understood a boat was below, and found it was, and we loaded it till the water brimmed at the gunwale. As we mounted the "Capella's" rope-ladder only one goose fell back into the dock.

* * * * *

The "Capella" started in her sleep, and she woke me. She was still trembling. Resting my hand on her I felt her heart begin to throb, though faintly. We were off.

It was a bright morning, early and keen. Those habitual quays now were moving past us. The decks were cleared, the carpenter and some sailors were fixing the hatches, and the pilot, muffled in a thick white shawl, was on the bridge with the Skipper. We stopped in the outer lock, the exhaust humming impatiently while a pier-head jumper--for we were a sailor short--was examined by our doctor. The Skipper had some short words for an official who had mounted the bridge, because the third mate had deserted, and had taken his half pay; and the official, who had volunteered to get us a substitute, had failed. There were now but two mates for our big tramp steamer going a long and arduous voyage which included the navigation for some months of narrow inland waterways in the tropics. Our first mate, passing amidships where the Purser was leaning overside, stopped to tell me what this meant for him and the second mate. I was mighty glad it was not the purser's fault. I have never heard a short speech more passionate; and his eyes were feral. Yet it became increasingly clear to me, as the voyage lengthened, that his eyes no more than met the case.

Out we drove at last. It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon morning which had got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your ambassador while you still slept, and betrayed not, I hope, any greyness and bleared satiety of ours to its pure, frail, and lucid regard. That was the last good service I did before leaving you quite. I was glad to see how well our old earth did meet such a light, as though it had no difficulty in looking day in the face. The world was miraculously renewed. It rose, and received the new-born of Aurora in its arms. There was clouds of pearl above hills of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames. The shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we rolled. The breakfast bell rang not too soon. This was a right beginning.

The pilot was dropped, and a course was shaped to pass between Lundy and Hartland. A strong northwester and its seas caught us beyond the Mumbles, and the quality of the sunshine thinned to a flickering stuff which cast only grey shadows. The "Capella" became quarrelsome, and began to strike the seas heavily. You may know the "Capella" when you see her. She is a modern three-thousand-ton freighter, with derrick supports fore and aft, and a funnel; and the three of them are so fearful of seeming rakish that they overdo the effect of stern utility, and appear to lean ahead. She is a three-island ship, the amidships section carrying the second mate's cabin, and the cabins of the four engineers, all of them, excepting the Chief's cabin, looking outwards overseas across a narrow sheltered alleyway; and on a narrower athwartship's alleyway there, and opening astern, are the Chief's place, and the cook's galley, the entrance to the engine-room, and the engineers' messroom. Above this structure is the boat deck. You may reach the poop, which contains the master's and chief mate's quarters, the doctor's and steward's berths, and the saloon, by descending a perpendicular iron ladder to the long main deck, or else, as all did at sea, by a flying trestle bridge, which is dismantled when in port. Her black funnel is relieved by a cryptic design in white, and her bows are so bluff that, as the chief mate put it, "her belly begins there." She might not take your eye, but a shipowner would see her points. She carries a large cargo on a comparatively low registered tonnage. The money that built her went mostly in hull and engines, and the latter do their work as sweetly as an eight-day clock, giving ten and a half knots, weather permitting, on a low coal consumption. There was not much money left, therefore, for balm in the cabins, and that is the reason we do not find it there.

At sundown the sky cleared. The wind, increased in violence, had swept it of the last feather. Lundy was over our starboard bow, a small dark blot in a clear yellow light which poured, with the gale and the rising seas, from the west. The glass was falling. Now, the Skipper has often told me how his "Capella" had faced hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, when laden with ore, and had kept her decks dry. There are other stories about her surprising buoyancy, when deeply laden, and I have heard them all at home, and they are fine stories. But what lies they are! For there below me, with Lundy not even passed, and the Bay of Biscay to come (Para not to be thought of yet) were tons and tons of salt wash that could not get time to escape by the scuppers, but plunged wearily amongst the hatches and winches.

"I've never seen her as dirty as this," grumbled the chief engineer apologetically, peeping from his cabin at cold green water lopping over casually on to the after deck. "It's that patent fuel--its stowed wrong. Now she'll roll--you can feel it--the cat she is, she's never going to stop. It's that patent fuel and her new load line."

Certainly she sat close to the sea. I had never seen so much lively water so close. She wallowed, she plunged, she rolled, she sank heavily to its level. I looked out from the round window of the Chief's cabin, and when she inclined those green mounds of the swell swinging under us and away were superior, in apparition, to my outlook.

"Listen to it," said the Chief. He stopped triturating some shavings of hard tobacco between his huge palms, and sat quietly, hands clasped, as though in prayer. The surge mourned over the deck. The day, too, was growing towards the dusky hours of retrospection. That sombre monody outside was like the tremor and boom of the drums funebre. "That chap some of you talk about--Lloyd George!"--said the Chief, suddenly rubbing his tobacco again with energy. (Good God, I thought, and here we are at sea too. Now what has the misguided man done.) "If I had him here I'd hold him down in that wash on deck till it cleared. Then he'd know. He put it there, to break sailors' legs. This steamer, she had dry decks till her load line was altered. She carries more now than she was built for, two hundred tons more. If I had him here--but there you are! Popularity! There's a fine popular noise for you, isn't it? Sailors growled for better food. 'What about this improved food scale?' says Mr. Lloyd George to the shipowners. 'Oh,' said they, 'we'll give 'em better food, the drunken insubordinate dogs, if you'll make overloading legal.' 'Why,' says Lord George, 'then it wouldn't be illegal, would it?' So it was done. What does the public know about a ship's buoyancy? Nothing. But it understands food. So the clever man heightens the Plimsoll mark, adds a million or so to shipowners' capital by dipping his pen in the ink, and gives Jack more jam. What you want ashore," the Chief added bitterly, "is not more voters, as some say, but more lunatic asylums."

Though I had left politics at home, to be settled by others, like the trouble with the drains, the dog licence, and the dispute about the garden fence, I glanced with interest at the Chief. I know him well. Not only is he a kindly man, but he himself is also a philosophic rebel. But his eye was hard, and he still ground the tobacco with forgetful energy, us though an objectionable thing were between his strong hands. Then impatiently he threw the tobacco loose on his log book, which was open on his deck, paused, and said, "Ah, maybe the man thought a little freeboard the less didn't matter. God give him grace," and picked his flute out of a bookshelf which was fastened above his bunk; sat down over the steam heater, and broke out like a blackbird. Yet was it a well-remembered air he fluted so well. I listened so long as respect for the artist demanded, then rose, filled my pipe from the fragrant grains on the log book, and left him. Presently I would listen to such airs; but this was too soon.

I repeat I had confidence in the "Capella" to gain. I went forward to get it, mounting the bridge, where my cabin mate, the youthful second officer, was in charge, in his oilskins. A cheerful sight he looked. "I think," said he briskly, "we're going to catch it." He was puckering his face over our course. Lundy was looming large--even Rat Island was plain--but it looked so frail in that flood of seas, wind, and wild yellow light streaming together from the evening west, that I looked for the unsubstantial island to spring suddenly from its foundations, and to come down on us a stretched wisp of thinned and ragged smoke. The sea was adrift from its old confines. The flood was pouring past, and the wind was the drainage of interstellar space. Lundy was the last delicate fragment of land. It still fronted the upheaval and rush of the ungoverned elements, but one looked for it to be swept away.

Yet that wild and scenic west, of such pallor and clarity that one shrank from facing its inhospitable spaciousness, with each shape of a wave there, black against the light as it reared ahead, a distinct individual foe in the host moving to the attack, was but the prelude. Night and the worst were to come. Just then, while the last of the light was shining on the officer's oilskins, I was only surprised that our bulk was such a trifle after all. Our loaded vessel looked so bluff and massive when in dock. She began to attempt, off Lundy, the spring and jauntiness of a trawler. The bows sank to the rails in an acre of white, and the spume flew past the bridge like rain. The black bows lifted and swayed, buoyant on submarine upheavals, to cut out segments of the sunset; then sank again into dark hollows where the foam was luminous. The cold and wind were bitter dolours.

We rolled. I grasped the rail of the weather cloth, in the drive of wind and spume, and rode down on our charger like a valiant man; like a valiant man who is uncertain of his seat. Something like a valiant man. We advanced to the attack, masts and funnel describing great arcs, and steadily our bows shouldered away the foe. I think sailors deserve large monies. Being the less valiant--for the longer I watched, the more grew I wet and cold--it came to my mind that where we were, but a few weeks before, another large freighter had her hatches opened by the seas, and presently was but a trace of oil and cinders on the waters. You will remember I am on my first long voyage. The officer was quite cheerful and asked me if I knew Forest Gate. There were, he said, some fine girls at Forest Gate.

We rounded Hartland. It was dusk, the weather was now directly on our starboard beam, and the waves were coming solidly inboard. The main deck was white with plunging water. We rolled still more.

"I can't make out why you left London when you didn't have to," said the grinning sailor. "I'd like to be on the Stratford tram, going down to Forest Gate."

This was nearly as bad as the Chief's flute. I held up two fingers over those hatches of ours, called silently on blessed Saint Anthony, who loves sailors, and went down the ladder; for night had come, and the prospect from the "Capella" was not the less apprehensive to the mind of a landsman because the enemy could not be seen, except as flying ghosts. The noises could be heard all right.

I shut my heavy teak door amidships, shut out the daunting uproar of floods, and the sensation that the night was collapsing round our heaving ship. There was a home light far away, on some unseen Cornish headland, rising and falling like a soaring but tethered star. Nor did I want the lights of home.

"I love the sea," a beautiful woman once said to me. (We, then, stood looking out over it from a height, and the sea was but the sediment of the still air, the blue precipitation of the sky, for it was that restful time, early October. I also loved it then.)

I was thinking of this, when the concrete floor of the cabin nearly became a wall, and I fell absurd-wise, striking nearly every item in the cabin. Was this the way to greet a lover? Sitting on a sea-chest, and swaying to and fro because the ship compelled me to a figure of woe, I began to consider whether it was only the books about the sea which I had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself. Perhaps it is better not to live with it, if you would love it. The sea is at its best at London, near midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before a glowing fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It is wiser not to try to realise your dreams. There are no real dreams. For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behaviour are hidden. The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune, and drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. Yet, thought I, that night off Cornwall, if I pray now as one of the privileged and lucky foolish, this very occasion may prove to be set apart for the sole use of the calculating wise. Because that is the way things happen at sea. What else may we expect from It, the nameless thing, new-born with each dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me had it degenerated into its mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mudbank.

Here, you see, is the whole trouble in appealing to Omnipotence. Picture me entering the wide western ocean at night, an inconspicuous but self-important morsel sitting on a sea-chest, at a time when it was perhaps ordained that hundreds of ships should have anxious passages. (Afterwards I learned very many ships did have anxious passages.) How could I expect to be spared, even though somewhere the hairs of my head were all numbered? It is plain that to spare me would be to extend beneficence to all. There only remained to me my liberty to hope that our particular steamer might miss all seventh waves, by luck. I was free to do that.

I turned up the dull and stinking oil lamp, and tried to read; but that fuliginous glim haunted the pages. That black-edged light too much resembled my own thoughts made manifest. There were some bunches of my cabin mate's clothes hanging from hooks, and I watched their erratic behaviour instead. The water in the carafe was also interesting, because quite mad, standing diagonally in the bottle, and then reversing. A lump of soap made a flying leap from the washstand, and then slithered about the floor like something hunted and panic-stricken. I listened to numerous little voices. There was no telling their origins. There was a chorus in the cabin, rustlings, whispers, plaints, creaks, wails, and grunts; but they were foundered in the din when the spittoon, which was an empty meat tin, got its lashings loose, and began a rioting fandango on the concrete. Over the clothes chest, which was also our table and a cabin fixture, was a portrait of the mate's sweetheart, and on its frame was one of my busy little friends the cockroaches; for the mate and I do not sleep alone in this cabin, not by hundreds. The cockroach stood in thought, waving his hands interrogatively, as one who talks to himself nervously. The ship at that moment received a seventh wave, lurched, and trembled. The cockroach fell. I rose, listening. I felt sure a new clamour would begin at once, showing we had reached another and critical stage of the fight. But no; the brave heart of her was beating as before. I could feel its steady pulse throbbing in our table. We were alive and strong, though labouring direfully.

It was when I was thinking whether bed would be, as I have so often found it, the best answer to doubt, that I heard a boatswain's pipe.