THE BONADVENTURE

THE WAGGONER
and other poems by
Edmund Blunden

JOHN CLARE
Poems chiefly from MSS.
selected and edited with
a biographical note by
Edmund Blunden
and
Alan Porter

THE SHEPHERD
and other poems of
Peace and War by
Edmund Blunden
awarded the
Hawthornden Prize, 1922
Third Edition

THE
BONADVENTURE

A Random Journal of
an Atlantic Holiday

By EDMUND BLUNDEN

LONDON
RICHARD COBDEN-SANDERSON
17 THAVIES INN

Copyright 1922

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

To
H.W.M.
THIS
“ROUND TRIP”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A few facts are perhaps needed in this place. The autumn of 1921 found me in bad health, which seemed to me to be gaining ground. The Editors for whom it is my privilege to work were of that mind too, and suggested a sea voyage. I am one of that large class who can afford little more than voyages in ships which are hauled over on chains; but this was allowed for in every possible way by my Editors, in consequence of whose active generosity and that of the owners to whom my case was made known, I suddenly found myself bound for the River Plate. I can but say that when my friends expressed their envy I was well able to understand their feelings and my good luck.

For the rest, this little book is not intended for anything beyond the statement on the title page. I am sorry myself that there are no adventures of the blood-curdling sort in it; but I could not go out of my way, nor do tramps find time, it seems, for propitiating cannibals. Of unrehearsed effects on voyages, indeed, my belief is that it is possible sometimes to have too much. Eastward of Madagascar, we read, lies Tromelin Island–a sandbank a mile long. In 1761 the Utile was wrecked there, and eighty blacks were left behind; all died except seven of the women, who clung to life for fifteen years, nourished on shell fish and brackish water, until Captain Tromelin landed and saved them. Now I cannot feel sorry that I was not one of that party.

There is, naturally, some slender disguise of names and so forth through my journal. There may be, it occurs, a S.S. Bonadventure at the present day; if it is so, this is not the ship. My grateful recollections of Captain Hosea, his officers and crew apply to those gentlemen indeed, but they do not sign on by the names which I have for this occasion invented. Thus their own example leads me; how much oftener was I hailed as “Skylark” and “Jonah” than as

EDMUND BLUNDEN.

London,

December 23, 1921.

Dear Blunden,–

There you are, outward bound and southward ho! Here am I, with the newsboys outside shouting the latest imbecility to the murk, trying to get warm and happy by considering a dull electric heater and the faded memory of another ship (she went downstairs in the war) which, years ago, on a December morning, passed through the lock gates at Swansea for Para and all, while I stood by her rail sorry for the people who had not my luck. Now it is your turn. Make the most of it. It will do something to take away the taste of Stuff Trench. You will find me, when you come home, still over the electric stove listening to the newsboys. I shall call for wine, and you must tell me all about the Fortunate Isles. I am sure they are still there, and that you will see them.

O, a Cardiff ship sails down the river

(Blow, boys, blow!)

Her masts and yards they shine like silver

(Blow, my bully boys, blow!)

Sing up, Blunden! And don’t forget to take soap, towels and matches. Do you smoke a pipe? You’ll wish presently you knew how to do it, if you have misspent your time and never learned. But I suppose eighteenth-century literature and the baby have absorbed all your energies. A pipe is only fit for the idle-minded.

There’s another thing. Don’t forget that the ship’s master is a greater man than a colonel. You know colonels, don’t you? (All right, all right!) Well, make no mistake about it, master mariners, as a rule, are different. It is long odds that your new master will know his job. If you are nice to him, he may even confess to a taste for your poetry; ships’ masters are like pie, I have found, to little lost children like ourselves who know nothing about ships, but they are perfectly frightful towards those who know all about ships, and know it all wrong.

A happy Christmas and a lucky New Year.

Yours ever,

H. M. TOMLINSON.

I

On the eleventh of January my uncertainty was ended by the apparition (and in the village of Staizley it is no less) of a girl with a telegram. Her walk of three miles or thereabouts, from our nearest telegraph office, brought her to my gate at three in the afternoon; and with her customary awed speechlessness she gave me her message. It was from “Kingfisher,” the decoded entity of which was the great shipping owner to whom I owed my arrangements; and in response I hastily attempted to leave a semblance of order behind me and to seem unexcited. My luggage, no cumbrous affair, had already been packed. By six, the trap of an ingenious neighbour, who lives by all sorts of traps, was heard at the gate, and Mary and myself got in. Determined protest, not at my departure, but at the apparent departure of her mother, was now raised by the youngest among us. My comforting promises were ignored, and the infant’s cries redoubled. Nevertheless, off we went.

The evening had been pouring out, with the vigour of an elemental Whistler, sleet and hail, and now though the wind was down our drive lay through fields half whitened with the storm; and the air was livid with the clouded moon and as cold as the ebbing light. With its multitude of pollards, its desolate great fields, its chilling breaths, the countryside might have been Flanders. This aspect seemed incidentally to demonstrate the wisdom of going elsewhere for a month or two.

We now came into Slowe, discussing all the time our past, present and future; the chief result of the discussion was the placing of my unanswered letters at Mary’s disposal. The town of Slowe was at peace. Its station wore the familiar air of having nothing to do with the coarse noise of traffic. Here Mary spent some moments in melancholy visions of my funeral at sea. She hoped these were wrong, and I, beginning to be affected also, hoped so equally.

“Good-bye” to Mary! The curve of the track carried her out of sight, and, imagining with resolution that the carriage was comfortably warm, I resigned myself to the journey to Liverpool Street. By way of passing the time, I fell back upon my habit of considering how the Latin poets might render the words, upon which few Englishmen have not been reared:

“The use of this rack for heavy and bulky packages....”

But though the sentiment which they convey is salutary, and though such metrical gifts as “graviora” and “viatores” instantly suggested themselves, the task once again defeated me.

Some such deadening pastime (Tennyson advises it) was necessary. There are many stations between Slowe and Liverpool Street, and the train, the last of the day between those places, stopped at each one. Arrived in London, and shivering with cold, I sought out my relations; reported with a certain amount of pride, which evoked no corresponding admiration at such a late hour, my impending voyage, and was rewarded with a bed.

II

My instructions were to present myself next morning, without fail, at the shipping offices of Messrs. Wright, Style and Storey, in Cardiff. Mary’s double accordingly hurried me through my breakfast and led the way to Paddington. I urged myself to realize that I was going upon holiday; but, it cannot be withheld, the thought of this particular pleasure had a serious tinge. Paddington itself, to such an islander as I am, had some of the credit of this. To me, that large terminus is, as a jumping-off position, less human than, for example, Victoria. From Paddington, with its Western propaganda, it may well seem that humanity is travelling out into the round world’s imagined corners; but Victoria, with its lesser range in sight, leaves a quieter speculation. From Brighton there is no such press of mammoth liners? Even when the destination was the B.E.F., it was comforting to me to set out from Victoria, whence the way led through a compact, placid, formerly uninternational, still un-Atlantic quarter. A Society for the Suppression of Astronomers has been mooted by the lazy-minded. I am not sure that geographers should not be included. Distances, no doubt, are as essential to romance as to Copley Fielding’s water-colours; but they can rouse in some of us troubling thoughts, which, summed up, say “Leave us alone!” Such thoughts had disturbed me when, with farewells from Bess, I retired to the sporting columns of my newspaper, and the train moved out.

In compensation for my experience of the previous evening, the journey went quickly by. A sunny morning, blue and still, lit up the country. So fine was the day, and the country, with its ancient timber, its mole-hilled pastures, its feeding horses and cheerful rooks, appeared so mellow, that the wisdom of leaving it behind was not so conspicuous as, the night before, it had been. Cardiff. I knew nothing about it, except as “Cardiff.” I entrusted myself, therefore, to a taxi-driver, who claimed to know more, even to the whereabouts of the shipping office to which I was bound. After meanderings and advice from the police and the public, he made amends for his inaccuracy by setting me down at the foot of a gloomy staircase leading to the rooms of Messrs. Wright, Style and Storey.

And now for a few moments I was in trouble. Thinking that the telegram which warranted my calling at this Cardiff office of the London Company would best explain my intrusion, I handed it over the fateful counter. The clerk took it, assumed a serious air, avoided looking at me, and referred to a superior. I was puzzled. More so, the superior. A murderer, concerned in the atrocity at Bournemouth, was at that time untraced, and I fancy that the official had the mystery in his mind at this point. At any rate, eyeing the wire with doubt for some time, he suddenly advanced towards me and put the question, in stern accents: “Who are you?”

Who are you?

I feel sure that my explanation was unbusinesslike, but he presently divined the truth. Word of my movement had not been sent him from London. He withdrew to the telephone or time-table; then restoring to me my sibylline leaf, told me to go to Barry Docks, where I should find the Bonadventure, recognizable by a white S painted on the funnel, lying at Tip Eleven or Twelve, and to go aboard and report myself to the captain. I went, fearing lest the captain likewise might know as little in advance about the trembling suspect before him.

Urchins scrambled for my luggage at the Barry Docks Station, an hour or so later, and the two victors hurried it along to Tip Eleven. These coal-tips overhead and the shipping alongside, with knots of workmen passing masked in coal-dust, engaged my mind as we went, and before I was fully aware of it we were aboard a vessel which the boys recognized as the Bonadventure. I paid the carriers, who went away at speed, and asked a wooden-faced seaman, who seemed to be alone, where I could find the captain. He at once cut short my search by the tone in which he observed, “The captain! He’s having his dinner at the present.” I was rebuked, and stood by. (I had still to witness the multitudes who want to find the captain of a ship in port.)

I took a look at the ship, but felt lost as I did so. She was large, and of vague shape. I could not determine where she began and where she left off. A pall of coal covered everything. Heaps of cinders, which a casual glance described as of some seniority, lay against the deck railing. I saw hut-like structures about me where I stood, amidships, as the boys had said; but I feared to explore. At times some one with a plate or a jug was seen stooping swiftly through their doorways–evidence indeed of the captain’s dinner-hour. Inaction, nevertheless, grew unpromising; and at last I asked an officer, as I rightly thought him, who had come out to keep an eye on several blasphemous and strongly individual beings with large spades, whether I might see the captain. When he heard my business, he quickly took me to him. I found myself speaking to a quiet, smiling, and enviably robust man who, to my relief, was not mystified by my arrival. He set me at my ease, told me that I should sign on as a member of the crew to-morrow, and allowed me to stay on the ship meanwhile. I was glad of this, being weary of quests for the time being.

Not quite at home, as may be gathered, I went out on deck, and watched the tips in action; admired the mimic thunder–first the abrupt and rending, shattering crash, then the antistrophe of continued rollings–which each truckful of coal makes as it is tumbled into the shoot and thereby into the ship’s holds. Truck after truck was drawn up, the pin knocked away from the end board and the coal hurled, its dusky clouds fuming out, into the ship: its atmosphere did not seem to strain or irritate the breathing organs of those worthies with the spades, and the pipes, whose vague labouring silhouettes enlivened the gloom. Engines plied constantly beside the docks with long trains of coal. As if expressing itself, one emitted a peculiar twofold groan. All this, of course, ancient history, but I was new to it. It seemed like the beginnings of wisdom.

But the world of iron and smoke could not warm my body as well as it did my mind, and while I was brooding over the increasing bite in the air of that January afternoon, the officer whom I was to know soon as the mate, a young man of clear-cut features and tranquil manner, told me to make use of the saloon. I sat there reading, when another introduction took place. The steward, a weighty old man remarkable at first sight for his brown skull-cap, came in to say he had fitted me up with a cabin. Following him up a staircase, I took over this dugout-like dwelling with no small satisfaction. It was to be my home, he said, for three or four months on this South American run. I unpacked, and washed away the unearned, and unsuspected, film of coal-dust which was to characterize my home for the same length of time.

Tea came, and I was mildly puzzled again, when the steward’s assistant asked me to choose between a bloater, cold meat, and so on. I was deciding on something slenderer, when I realized that tea included supper, and applied for a kipper. The captain’s wife kept conversation alive. The topic, I remember, was the lamented custom which once permitted captains’ wives to make “the round trip” with their husbands.

The coal still rattled into the holds every moment or two, and the same process was going on all round us. The water was bright in the moon, and the reflections of the lamps fastened high over the ships swum like golden serpents in the ripples. In such a light, to such a watcher, there seemed no end to the serried framework and the cordage to the giant sea travellers of steel. The constant clanging and whistling and crash spoke to the work of the machines, an occasional shout to the guiding energies of the men.

III

The shipping office itself left no clear impression upon me, the next morning, when I attended the business of signing on; but the visit gave me my first view of the crew of the Bonadventure, which was welcome. Many of them were coloured men, as ever, dressed in eye-catching smartness. I reflected on the extent to which the market of boots of two colours must depend on these firemen. Among the others, a Cornishman of odd automatic gait, whose small head balanced a squarish black hat, moved about with an inconsequence suggestive of some clever comedian. He gave, however, no evidence of humorous abilities. The wooden-faced man, to whom I have referred, answered the call of “Cook.” Sitting on the bench in the corner, I felt a curious stare upon me, and looking across the room, saw its owner, a tough customer by the expression he wore. For some peculiarity of conduct, this sailor was the next evening removed from the Bonadventure by the police, with no passive resistance, as I vaguely heard. The police recovered.

Two youths sat by me, their good nature showing itself in their talk. They painted my near future. The heat we should soon be feeling, 130 in the shade; the troubled Biscay, where “seven seas meet, which causes a great upheaval,” chequered the vista. The function of crossing the Line was described as bygone, even in its less inconvenient traditions, such as giving the greenhorn binoculars through which a (hair) “Line” was plain enough.

My name was called, and I went to the front. The captain conferred with the clerk. For technical purposes, as I supposed, I was put down “purser.” The rank was given, but not the talents.

Now, the hour of the Bonadventure’s sailing being imminent, the ship’s officers who had been away were returning. The chief engineer, obviously regarded as a wise man; the second mate, full of stories; the wireless operator, youthful and brilliantined, appeared at the cabin table. The captain’s wife drew up matrimonial plans for the third mate, who was not beyond blushing over his late tea–the not impossible, but improbable, She was evidently a recognized memory of Hamburg. The captain was striving to get at the facts when a doctor came in, summoned to see an apprentice; and he left his meal to hear the diagnosis. Reappearing, he said, “The only bit of luck we’ve had. The boy’s got appendicitis.” This was not euphemism; what might have happened had the ship left before the boy’s illness was known for what it was, both to boy and authorities, he went on to hint. This piece of recognition was due to the mate.

We were not leaving that evening, though loading ceased. I walked into Barry, and found its cinematograph programme somewhat worse than is the average. This, and the change of the weather from keen to mizzling, persuaded me back to my cabin for the rest of the evening; and after the night’s rest, broken sometimes by sounds of “mighty workings,” I looked through my porthole to discover that the ship had left the tips. She was now lying, under a cloudy, showery sky, well out to the middle of the water, and the buildings round the Docks Station, dwarfed somewhat by the large sign of “WARD, BUTCHER,” were in sight. We should soon be away.

The solidity of ship’s breakfast was an early fact among those I was gleaning. Yesterday, an ample steak, with potatoes–and onions–had been set before me, after the preparatory porridge; this day, two tough sausages, with potatoes–and onions–were provided. Yet I fell to with an appetite, and only hoped I should feel as able in the days to come.

The inert morning seemed suited to the curious quiet of the ship. That quiet was, however, disturbed in undertone. The incessant tramp of feet and sometimes the banging of gear were echoing. The final period, in the main “all serene,” could not be without its thousand and one adjustments; though the holds, trimmed, I suppose, even to the steward’s satisfaction–he had been in high choler the night before at the attempted delivery of meat to a store just made inaccessible by the delivery of coal–now were covered with tarpaulins. I had time to meditate, and the cold air recommended my cabin as the place.

To the Plate and back again, in a cargo ship! (To the Somme and back again–that had seemed less surprising.) The voyage, no doubt, would be more arduous than that in the leave-boat from Boulogne to Folkestone. Would my resolution be equal to the greater strain on the system? I suspected that the first few days might find me groaning within myself; asking why I had left my draughty study, which was at least stationary? what I had found amiss with the array of books for review–pleasant, unjustly despised labour? Landlord, insurance agent, general dealer, rags-and-bones, watch-and clock-repairer, bricklayer come to fix the chimney, carpenter to take measurements for far-off bookshelves, secretary of football for subscriptions, and many another familiar–in the middle of an attempt to answer the question, “What is Poetry?”–should I be considering them as unhonoured privileges? Repent, repent.

From the mild exercise, and a book, I was aroused by the brown skull-cap of the steward, who in some pain of feature uttered round the door a solemn “Well, I declare!” I had disregarded his bell–Jim had rung it; he had rung it–for dinner.

There were friendly visitors afterwards. I was wished a good voyage, and a better room–one more artistic, I think, was in the speaker’s mind. But comfort was cordially anticipated. The ship was not one of the older sort that roll. The captain, too, said that his ship did not roll. The shore captain grinned, but said nothing, except that, if I had been over to France, I should find the voyage just the same. It was the captain’s turn to grin. Next, the second mate came, book in hand, and entered the name of my next-of-kin.

During the afternoon the funnel of the Bonadventure had sent forth smoke, and the hooter, hoots; the cold increased, and, having heard that we were to go out at about six, for all my apprehensions I felt eager for that hour. The surroundings were gloomy. The Bonadventure lay in a row of coal-carrying steamers, with something grim about their iron flatness; the Phryne, Marie Nielsen, Sandvik, many another, their cold colours reminding me of the huge blue-painted unexploded shell which once I ventured to help remove from a trench at Givenchy. The grey-green pool swilled sulkily about them: and the red bricks in the background offered no relief to an unprogressive eye. Sooty, hard and bleak, the scene itself urged my impatience to be gone.

A call announced the arrival of the pilot; and, at ten minutes to six, in obedience to a process of which I gathered little, the ship began to move gently out of the dock. The shouts of the pilot on the bridge, his “Hard-a-port,” his “Hard-a-starboard,” were taken up from the forepart of the ship, where a number of substantial figures were at work with winch and cable. The Bonadventure was guided with nice gradation into a channel not much exceeding her own width; on the quay beside men were shouting and scampering; the wireless clerk leaning over against all gravity grabbed a bag of “mail” from one of them; and out we passed. The wind livened. The lights of the town slowly dwindled behind us. Into the channel close after the Bonadventure came the green lamp of another ship. Soon the Bonadventure was definitely, at a growing speed, running down the Bristol Channel, under a veiled sky through which the moon always seemed about to emerge, and among the scattered lights of other ships going into Barry, or waiting in readiness to go in.

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

Candidate. The mercury in the barometer subsides.

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

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

Examiner (producing a piece of wood). What colour’s this?

Candidate. Chocolate.

Examiner (purple once more). Chocolate! Chocolate be dam’d. Chocolate’s something to eat–What COLOUR is it?

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

Aston Villa

Celtic

Manchester U,

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

Slow Lethe without coil,

Softly, like a stream of oil

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

And there were other familiar scenes in this phase of nightly alienation. On occasion, though I awoke several times from a haunting, I fell asleep again to return to it. Half-nonsense as these dreams were, there was a persistent force about them. Here was the battalion, expecting to be attacked. Its nerves, and mine, were restive. The attack broke out farther up the line, and we got off with a reaction almost as unwelcome as a battle. Or I was in a town behind the line, into which a number of very small round gas-shells were falling; then, in the cattle-truck for the front; presently, in the wild scenery of great hills and deep curving ravines which I seemed to know so well. (The entrenched ridges in the unnatural light of the flares looked monstrous once.) I was company commander; we were to be relieved; and, God, what had I done? Begun to bring my men out before the other crowd had come up! The mound would be lost, I should be “for it.” The company must be halted in the open; and so we waited for the relief. It never came.

Still the dreams came: the war continued. S. S. was with me, walking up a big cobbled road, muddy as ever, towards the front. On every side lay exhausted men, not caring whether they were in the mud or not. I was not quite sure, but was not this Poperinghe Station? At that station was–I hope is–an hotel, bearing the legend, “Bifsteck à Toute Heure”; was this gaudy-looking place, perhaps, the same? At all events, S. S. said, “Let’s go and have a port.” We did, and the drink appears to have gone to my head, for I now found myself alone, walking across a large common or pasture. Here Mary and another woman went by, but I could not at the moment recognize them. There, beyond the common with its dry tussocks, stood a town, flanked by mountains, which I knew to be–Barry. A cathedral or abbey of white stone rose in gigantic strength into the sunlight. This place, I soliloquized, so near the line, and yet not shelled! But I was not to escape. I proceeded. The screen alongside was blown down. Better slink along these hedges at the double! It was the support line. Some large splinter-proof dugouts came into sight, and some officers, who told me about an attack. We were going over. I recognized my destined end.

However, I woke up alive, having again suffered more from fear and the atmosphere of it–in projection–in a few seconds, than I was ever conscious of suffering in a day of the actual war. With weary and aching head, whether these fantasies were to blame or not, I looked out to ask the wireless expert if there had been a storm in the night. He grinned, and going farther I saw outside a sea of pale glow not a great deal more disturbed than a looking-glass.

The ashen whiteness soon gave place to a deep blue, and our entry into the tropics became plainer and plainer, the sea fluttering with the sun’s blaze. This was unfamiliar also, to be roasting on the water in January. The pith-helmet season began. The third mate could not claim a pith helmet, but he displayed what none of the others could, as he sat washing on the step of the alleyway–a marvellous red and blue serpent tattooed on his arm, by the very Chinaman, he said, who had tattooed King George. It was, I still think, a superfine serpent.

Washing, or “dobing,” was not Mead’s sole recreation. Literature, and even poetry, with limitations, had its power over him. Suspecting me of critical curiosity about his favourite poets, he directly approached the matter. Rudyard Kipling and “A Sentimental Bloke” were satisfactory, but he couldn’t bear the others who gave their views on love. Lawrence Hope had done one or two good things–but the rest, as Keats, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and so forth, might as well be cut out. His approval of Kipling was confirmed by Meacock’s saying in the saloon, where books and authors were a favourite pabulum, “H’m–the third mate seems to be getting very interested in Kipling. He brought me a paper with all he could remember of IF written out on it, and asked me if I could supply any of the rest.”

This literary halo aroused Bicker, who was already known to me as the ship’s poet, and had unfortunately left his MSS. at home. He now urged his claims. “The gardener called me Poet when I was about seven or eight, and I often get called that now.” The chief, chuckling, brought off his little joke. “I suppose that’s what drove you to sea.”

In connection, no doubt, with poetry, that strange device, the mate looked back to a ship in which he once served, and which was chartered to carry the largest whale ever caught in Japanese waters to New York for the New York Museum. By whale, he said he meant the skeleton, of course; but it had been sketchily cleaned, “and when we got her to New York,” he said with a comical frown, “nobody could get near the hatches”: and, finding the sequence easy, he added that there was often some peculiar cargo on that New York-Hong Kong run–take for instance those rows of dead Chinamen in the ’tween-deck homeward bound.

The face of the sky often held me delighted. There is nothing, I think, of dullness about this world’s weather; and its hues and tones may still be a sufficient testing theme for the greatest artists with pen or pencil. To express the sunset uprising of clouds, many of them in semblance of towering ships under full sail, many more like creatures mistily seen in endless pastures, was an attempt in which my own vocabulary scarcely lasted a moment. One evening, the nonpareil of its race, especially “burned the mind.”

At first the blue temple was hung with plumes of cloud, golden feathers. When these at last were grey, a rosy flush swiftly came along them, like a thought, and passed. It seemed as though the night had come, when the loitering tinges of the rose in a few seconds grew unutterably red, and the spectacle was that of an aerial lattice or trellis among the clouds, overgrown with the heavenly original of all roses. “In Xanadu—” From brightness the amassed cloud-bloom still increased to brightness: then suddenly the flames turned to ember. Even now again a ghost of themselves glowed, until all was gone, and Sirius entered upon his tenancy of another glory, and Orion and Canopus, casting a hoar-frost glimmer ahead of the riding ship.

Hosea agreed this was a remarkable sunset; then took me off to the friendly tot and talk in his room. He loved to discuss all sorts of theory in art and religion, of which he might have been, with a slight change of circumstance in his boyhood, a student and enthusiast: meanwhile, the sailor in him would be rummaging through the makings of a curiosity shop which crowded his official desk, besides the manifests and ship’s articles–his watches, knives, coins and notes of twenty countries, photographs of friends all over the world.

VIII

The flying-fishes could have dispensed with the Bonadventure. During the night, sixteen or so had come aboard, to be seized by the apprentices for breakfast; I saw with surprise how one had been driven and wedged between the steam-pipes. In looks, when they were out of their element, despite their large mild eyes, their long “wings” closed into a sort of spur, being light spines webbed with a filmy skin, despite too the purple-blue glowing from the dark back, they did not seem remarkable. But under the hot and shining morning, where the Bonadventure’s sheering bows alarmed the shoals into flight, they were seen more justly. In ones and twos and crescents and troops they skimmed away, sometimes with their dark backs and white undersides appearing as fishes, sometimes in the sun nothing more than volleys of light-curved silvery darts. They turned in the air at sharp angles without apparently losing their speed, which was such that often one heard the water hiss as they entered it again.

The morning that they first came in numbers, it happened that the salt fish for breakfast was relieved by reminiscences.

“You reminded me of Captain Shank just now, chief.”

“Indeed–why?”

“When you ran your hand along the table for the treacle.... He used to think the treacle was put aboard for him. He told the second mate off for eating too much of it–said it wasn’t really for his use. After that we all began to eat the stuff like blazes.”

“You must have had some funny captains in this line.”

“He was. He’d come up sometimes on the bridge and sit down in the wheel and start making noises to himself. He’d sit there with his old chin drooping and say, ’... I knew it.... Haw, haw.... The silly old b—.... Bless my soul....’ for twenty minutes. I’d go away from the wheel for fear of laughing out–and then he’d go somewhere else and do it.”

“Davy Jones got him at the finish, didn’t he?”

“–And a dam’d fine ship too.”

“It was her maiden trip.”

“What happened to her?”

“Ran ashore.”

“Both the boats capsized.”

“She had the most valuable cargo I ever heard of.” A pause.

“Old Shank used to ask for it, though. Once in the Gulf of Mexico he was down below, and the ship was on the course he’d given. (He never used to take any notice of deviation.) The second mate heard breakers, you could hear them quite plain, and not very far off; so he turns the ship a little, and goes down to tell Shank. Old Shank jumped up and stormed and stamped, and rushed up on the bridge roaring, ’Am I to be taught after forty-eight years at sea by a set of b— schoolboys?’ and had her put back to the old course again. And then he walked off. You could hear him snapping his teeth. Presently he stopped. You could see the breakers now, the phosphorescence of them. ’What’s that?’ he whipped out, ’What’s that? My God.’”

“He was one of the white-haired boys in the office, what’s more.”

“His officers saved him.”

“Well, one night he gave me a course, and the last thing he said to me on the bridge was, ‘It’s up to you to keep her there.’ I soon found we were going to fall on land, and I changed the course. And as it was, we passed three-quarters of a mile inside the lightship. I went down to his room and told him. ‘Why, you damn’d fool,’ he started off; he nearly went mad. ‘But I’ve hauled her out,’ I said, ‘I hauled her out.’ And then he yelled, ‘Changed her course without orders, did you?’ and so on.”

“Well, the office made a pet of him. Some people get away with it.”

“After my trip with him, the whole crew refused to sail with him again. And the mate went up to Shields to join a new ship. And when he got there, he found Shank had joined her as skipper!”

We came into the Doldrums, and I felt none too well. “Cold, worse; heat, worse,” became my diary’s keynote. The steward also complained of a persistent cold. Six bottles–six–of his own medicine since we left Barry had not cured him. This notable Cardiff Irishman was always pleased to answer questions about this cold of his, and they became suspiciously frequent. Then his solemn face would grow still more solemn, his voice of office would take on a pleasing melancholy, and he would shake his grey head with dolorous realizations. Nevertheless, his stores being just below my cabin, I grew accustomed to his morning rejuvenate roarings from the threshold at the avarice of the modern sailor. It seemed that at such times he was momentarily free of his illness.

He, nevertheless, at present, added his good word to the general approval of the cook. The bread was universally admired, the pea-soup also. This popularity did not cause any alteration in the melancholy orientalism of its deserver. He looked forth from his galley with the same wooden countenance. He was the thinnest man I think I ever saw.

His macaroni, however, appeared to fall under a general taboo. It was “eschewed.” Bicker, the most assiduous tale-teller, seized it as the chance for describing an old shipmate’s misfortune. It was in Italy: “He was keen on seeing all the sights, so we asked him if he’d seen the macaroni plantation. He said he’d like to. We told him to take the tram out of the town and walk on another mile or so, when he’d see the trees with macaroni growing on them like lace–natural lace. And he went. But the best of it was that he’d sent a card home the day before to say, ‘To-morrow I am going to see the macaroni plantation.’” This, which if true was stranger than fiction, elicited recollections of fool’s-errands in the shipyards (“Run and get a capful of nailholes,” “Ask the storekeeper for a brass hook and a long stay”), which kept us at table until the steward groaned aloud.

I led a lazy life. There was not much reason for being active. My afternoon walk might reach as far as the fo’c’sle, in which lay a kindly miscellany of wire, hemp and manila ropes in coils, and an aroma of paint and tar was never absent. The heat, however, seemed intenser in this house than in the open. Clouds and a little rain soon vanished, and the sea was one long flame towards the sun. White uniforms were in vogue. For me, the half-closed eye, with a flying-fish or two sometimes glittering to awake its notice, in any corner out of the sun, was an occupation. The unfortunate boatswain and his men were chipping paint, clanging and banging in the heat; or I would see him perching on the bulwarks directing some aerial operation, and a sailor seated in the “bosun’s chair” being hauled up the mast. They rested from Saturday noon until Monday morning. Now, more than ever, the lot of the engineers and firemen seemed unacceptable. The blaze, the fierce blue sea, and a flagging breeze became a routine now. The rains of the Doldrums were not much in evidence; a short shower, flying over the clay-coloured water, might come towards evening.

Incidents were few. The sight of the flying-fishes still starting up and skimming, veering and spurting into a safe distance from the intruder, was no longer one for my absorbed watch. I woke up, heavy-headed, one morning to find that Meacock had suspended one of these poor creatures from my roof; there he hung swaying in the little breeze that there was, in parched and doleful manner, and ever and anon turning upon me, who felt much in his condition, his mild and magnificent eye. I threw him out with sympathy. At night the boobies shrieked round the lights on the masts, and appeared at morning flying over the water. Once the sleep of the just was broken by profane language and scuffling in the passage outside–a rat hunt. Boat drill took its turn one afternoon, the siren summoning all hands available to their posts. I was questioned about Colonel Lawrence, at intervals, having seen him in the flesh; and the publisher of his Life was expected to be named by me. I said that I believed he himself would write his Memoirs. But this was not the thing. A book about him by some one who knew how to paint the lily and improve on possibility was what was sought. I think I could design a satisfactory coloured cover.

The morning bucket was a transient happiness. To disturb the “gradual dusky veil” now unescapable, since the bunkers were now chiefly filled with coal-dust, was not too simple in a limited space, with limited hot water. My porthole, looking over those fuming bunkers, had to be shut at all hours. According to everybody, the Bonadventure was “a dirty ship”; although it seemed unlikely that a carrier of coal by thousands of tons should be clean.

She at least began to please the chief with his coveted “Ten knots”; and at dinner on the seventeenth day out, he asked whether anyone had seen a disturbance in the water. The old gentleman was expected. I was sorry that he did not come, after all, with his “baptism,” shave, and medicine (and I believe other rites), when at about four in the afternoon the Bonadventure crossed the Equator; but old customs can scarcely be eternal. The steward’s cough mixture was the only medicine I got that day. Neptuneless, the ship furrowed a sea almost silent, and evening came on tranquilly among woolpacks of warm-kindled colouring.

IX

Mary, what news?–

The lands, as I suppose,

Are drenched with sleet or drifted up with snows,

The east wind strips the slates and starves the blood,

Or thaws and rains make life a sea of mud.

You close each door, draw armchairs nigh the fire,

But draughts sneak in and make you draw ’em nigher–

No matter: still they come: play parlour gales

And whisk about their hyperboreal tails;

Bed’s the one hope, and scarcely tried before

Next morning’s postman thunders at the door.

Meanwhile–if I may gently hint–I wear

But scanty clothes, though all the sun will bear;

A red-hot sun smiles on a hot blue sea

And leaves my bunk to laziness and me:

I read, until a lethargy ensues,

Tales of detectives frowning over clues

And last month’s papers; then the strain’s too strong,

Man wants but little, nor that little long,

The deck-chair in the shadow now appeals,

Until the next hash-hammer rings to meals.

But not alone in climate may I claim

Advantage; while you feel the slings of fame,

Beset at all hours by the shapes of those

Who volunteer your wants to diagnose,

Who come with merchandise and go with cheques;

No licensed interrupter haunts these decks,

No vans of wares along these highways clatter.

None urges to insure, buy broom or platter.

There is no sheaf of letters every day,

Regretting, and so forth: no minstrel’s lay:

Proofs, none: reminders, none–while daily you,

Poor creature, tear your hair and struggle through,

And darken paper till you light the lamps,

And the last shilling disappears in stamps.

Nor weightier cares you lack, it is decreed;

The clock won’t go, the chickens will not feed,

The pump, always a huffy ancient, swears,

“Water? if you wants water, try elsewheres”:

The infant wonder, she who must inquire,

Investigates herself into the fire,

The playful snowball whizzes through the pane,

In brief, you try to kick the cat: in vain.

Here no such troubles blot the almanac

For me; no day is marked with red or black:

Events–eventicles–are few, as these,

The sighted school of bobbing porpoises,

The flying-fish when first I saw them leap

And flash like swallows over the blue deep;

The rose-red sunset, or the Sunday duff,

Or–but enumeration cries “Enough.”

There is no Mary in the Atlantic, true,

Nor cellared bookshop to be foraged through.

But as I said, at least I’ve found the sun

And idle times–even this will soon be done;

A corner where no rags-and-bones apply,

Nor postman comes, nor poultry droop and die.

X

The South-East Trade was blowing fresh next day, if a damp clammy rush of hot air deserves the term. The threatened heavy rains of the Doldrums had not come; the heavy heat subdued talk at table. Cloud and sultry steamy haze had hung about us during the morning; at two or thereabouts the first land seen by the Bonadventure since her first day’s stubborn entry into the English Channel came into view. My view was at first none at all; but encouraged by Bicker and with his glasses I could make out the island of Fernando Noronha, twenty miles away to the south-east. A tall peak and the high ground about it for a space gave the illusion of some great cathedral, a Mont St. Michel seen by Cotman faintly forthshadowed; then, the willing fancy rebuked, I discerned its low coasts of rock, inhospitable and mist-haunted.

This singular crag breaking out of the mid-ocean, I knew, was a convict settlement. “Life sentences” were safely mewed up here. At length we were abeam of this melancholy place, while the sun seemed to make a show of its white prison camp, at a distance of twelve or thirteen miles. It would have been hard not to imagine the despair of men condemned to such a prison. The peak’s stern finger might have struck with awe the first navigators to approach it. To see the immutable pillar in every sunset and at every sunrise, surveying all the drudgery, the emblem of perpetual soullessness, must be an unnerving punishment. The constant processions of ships, to whom Fernando Noronha is a welcome mark, with their smoke vanishing swiftly to north or south, could scarcely tantalize more?

The rough overhanging pinnacle faded again, and evening fell. Leaning with the third mate over the bridge canvas, while the moon, now waxing, riding through the frontiers of a black cloud, cast a dim avenue over the sea, and from other dishevelled clouds a few quiet drops came down, was a most peaceful luxury. About the bows the water was lit up by sudden flashes gone too soon. These travelling lights–akin to the gem of the glow-worm seen close–were, according to Mead, the Portugee men-of-war which I had seen by day. No name could be less descriptive. These small creatures, at night living lamps of green, by day with their glassy red and blue like the floating petals of some sea-rose, were worthy of some gentler imagist. When, Mead said, you take them from the water, they are nothing but a little slime; evanescent as the rainbow on the spray.

Splendour and fiery heat marked the day still. I had discarded jacket and socks, enjoying the soothing gush of air about the ankles; otherwise even reading was made unprofitable by the drug-like heat. The same sky and seascape, the same condemnations of “a dirty ship” recurred day by day. “The worst ship I ever sailed on, mister. You turn in washed and you wake up black.” The bath was still an enjoyable interlude, despite mechanical drawbacks. The bath proper was out of order, owing tosome deficiency of the water-pipes. At one end, in substitution, you lodged your bucket in a board with a hole in it. At the other end a crossbar offered the bather a seat. Much splashing transferred the water from the bucket to your coal-dust surface; while, there being little air in the bathroom, you breathed sparingly. Yet how well off was the acrobat with his sponge, compared with the fireman who just then was taking bucket after bucket of ashes from the stokehold hoist and tipping them overboard–a job that was never done until the engines rested in port; that punctuated our progress, as did the morning hosepipe on the cabins and the bridge deck.

Not much was said of the country to which we were going. Englishmen were definitely unpopular there, said some one; English sailors, on the slightest pretext, taken off by the police to the “calaboosh.” “You only want to look like an Englishman.” “Well, what about trying to look like a German?” The chief engineer rarely missed a chance to rub in his politics, and he jumped at this one–“Doesn’t the same thing apply at home?”–with eager irony.

Ships were discussed and compared at almost every meal. Some, luxurious.

“But that yacht she was pretty, there’s no getting away from it.”

“That was my yacht.”

“They must employ quite a lot of shore labour to keep these yachts from looking like ships.”

“Well, they couldn’t very well make them look like standard ships, if they wanted to.”

“Oh, I don’ know–get the second mate and the chief to co-operate–saw off the funnel halfway, and throw a few ashes about the decks.”

Some, ideal.

“She looked just like the model of a ship–and she was spotless.”

Some, not what they ought to be.

“I looked and saw her name, The Duke of York. I thought to myself, I’ll write to him and tell him about the state of his namesake. She looked like a wreck.”

Some, again, like the Bonadventure, standard ships, the hasty replacements of submarine wastage. The criticism here, of course, had the severity of domestic familiarity.

“They have these ships made in one piece at the shipyard. When they want one, they just cut off a length, and join the ends.”

“Well, I say the man who designed this ship ought to have designed another and pegged out.”

“Mister, she’s a dirty ship.”

I detected–it was not difficult–a vague prejudice against wireless. The wireless operator was foolish enough to have at his fingers’ ends all the tabular details of shipping companies and their vessels, and to display this dry knowledge in the middle of his seniors’ recollections. His seafaring experience, it may be mentioned, was altogether recent, and among the elders he would have done better not to know. It was of course impersonally aired, this prejudice against wireless. First, there was the view that as ships had hitherto, beginning with the Ark, gone to sea without the invention, they could continue to do so. Then, the fact that wireless might save life admitted, the system current was decried. It seemed that the merchant ships of over 1,600 tons carried wireless operators and sets, but that one operator to a ship was the allowance; now one operator watched eight hours out of the twenty-four, and all were off duty at the same time. So it was believed. “There’s nothing in the Bible,” the critic would urge, “to say a ship mustn’t be wrecked when all the operators are off duty.”

I had expected music–chanteys, or at least accordions–aboard a merchantman; but very little was that expectation justified. There had been a gramophone (and step-dancing), but it was out of action after one evening’s protracted use. It was not often, yet, that I had heard even a whistled scrap; occasionally the coloured firemen would sing in falsetto.

An epidemic of hair-cutting broke out. Every time I saw the process going on, the artist was a fresh one; and I was inclined to think that we are a nation of hair-cutters. Among the practitioners, the cook, with his usual severe expression, plied a neat pair of scissors. It was a scene which reminded me of old trench life. I thought of a close support trench opposite Auchy, about the month of June, 1916, where a sickly programme of sniping by field guns, rifle grenades, “pineapples,” and incredible escapes from them did not prevent my being shorn by the steadiest of amateurs. With what outward intrepidity I sat there!

At the captain’s request, the cook advanced to cut his hair. That done, he cut mine. Venturing to talk, I was soon exchanging sallies of the British Expeditionary Force, for he had been thereof, a tunneller. Of his being in a countermined shaft at the wrong moment at Vimy, and his luck in being dragged out by the sergeant-major, he gave some details; but the first evident attack of mirth to which I had ever seen him give way came as he mused over rations supplied by the French for a fortnight at St. Quentin under some temporary arrangement. “Wine, beans, and b— horseflesh,” he said, staccato, and with a dry laugh like the rattling of beans. “First we’d all get bound up and then we’d all get diarrhœa. Oh, it was the hell of a go.” “There,” he said, leaving a little tuft over my forehead, “you’ll still be able to have a couple of quiffs there.”

He was not only cook and hairdresser off duty, I found: he was given to sketching portraits. I went once or twice to talk with him in the galley, where the heat was enough to make the famous Lambert himself turn thin. And his work, he pointed out, was continuous, with his assistant’s services; he had to put up double meals to suit the watches. “But why do I stick it?” he said, taking a batch of bread from the oven and standing it on end against the others. “A man can stick shore jobs all right when there’s five mouths depending on him. There’s not a lot of shore jobs now.”

His drawings were done in the little corner where he and his mate had their bunks. They were pictures of ladies and seamen of his acquaintance; crude, with lips of a bitter redness, and cheeks faintly pink, staring and disproportioned, yet done with such pains, such strivings after “likeness,” that when he requested me to help him to a post as artist to The Times, I much wished that I could! I had no sooner made the acquaintance of the cook’s portraits than a poem was bashfully brought to me by its author, Bicker. I must say that, although his lines had occasionally been eked out with last resorts, there was a heartiness about them which I liked; and, going down presently to his cabin, I got him to show me more. He had already written several rhyming epistles during the trip, which with the retiring instinct of poets he had left to blush unseen. So we had aboard among a crew of forty or so a painter of portraits and a writer of verse.

We had our philosopher too, Phillips, the chief engineer, veteran of Khartoum, master of machinery, physician less active but more reliable than the steward; but above all, the Diogenes–with a slush-lamp. His philosophy might be no ill store about this time, when in the heat the pitch melted from the seams of his cabin roof and mottled his bed, as he put it: a circumstance not yet mentioned in sonnets wooing tardy sleep, and which of course called upon that nimble sixpence of Bonadventure conversation, “She is a dirty ship.”

XI

A note of a train of thought forced upon me hereabouts may find a place here, as it was set down.

(Feb. 4.) It was nothing more nor less than the appearance at dinner to-day of a bully stew and a sort of ration lime juice, which drove my thoughts, always willing to be driven in that direction, towards a nervous period of 1916, my initiation into trench warfare. The meal was something of a facsimile; and soon after it, by a coincidence, I was sitting under the scissors of a volunteer barber much as once after such a dinner I sat in the alleyway by company headquarters, opposite the red roofs of Auchy. The Bonadventure’s bridge, I meditated as I endured the shears of a B.E.F. man again, looked not unlike those so-called “communication trenches” in the Richebourg district, those make-believes; and, as the steam-valve suddenly made me jump with its thudding volley of minor explosions, I experienced an echo of the ancient terrors in those same scantily covered ways when cross-firing machine-guns opened upon my working-party.

The lime juice, in the present case, was of a milder disposition than that to which we were accustomed. Yet there was perceptible in it that uncivilized strength which proved it to come of the same honest origin. We were, I must confess–it is not too late–much lacking in our appreciation of that uncompromising, biting liquid which circulated in the trenches, carried in jars which should have been, it was felt, carrying rum. In itself a sort of candid friend, that lime juice lacked advancement through faults not its own. I mean, there was the chlorinated water, which for all its virtues was hardly popular, and there was the sugar, which was half-and-half, associating, very friendly, with tea dust. Moreover, this same sugar, in its nocturnal progress at the bottom of a sandbag, while its carrier now stepped into an artificial lake and now lay down for the bullets of Quinque Jimmy to pass by unimpeded, had acquired an interspersion of hairy particles; as generally did our loaves of bread, which in some cases might easily be supposed to be wearing wigs. In this manner, the germ-destroyer, the intrusion of tea dust and the moulted coat of sandbags, combined to prevent the lime juice, like crabbed poet, “from being as generally tasted as he deserved to be.”

At Company Headquarters, too, there was often in those easy times a rival beverage. Here and there a messenger might be sent back to an estaminet and return to the war with comforts within a couple of hours.

Yet I myself did my best to cultivate the “lime-juice habit,” and to me it remains an integral part of the interiors, gone but not forgotten, of many a Rotten Row in the Béthune Sectors. I see its gloomy and mottled surface, in the aluminium tumbler, besides my platter of “meat and vegetable” or (as to-day) of bully rehabilitated by the smoky cooks; and about me the shape of the lean-to dugout rises sufficiently high for a tall man to enter without going on all fours. Here, is the earth settee, running round three sides of the table, there, the glory hole in which, one at a time, we crawl to sleep, with a fine confused bedding of British Warms and sandbags. The purple typescript of Comic Cuts,[^[1]] in which what imagination and telescope has striven to reveal of the “other fellow,” mind, body and soul, is set in military prose, flaps neglectedly from its nail. In their furious tints, the ladies of the late Kirchner beam sweetly upon him who sets put on patrol and him who returns; while in the convenient niches between the walls and the corrugated iron roof above, which as a protection might perhaps amount to the faith of the ostrich, Mills bombs and revolvers and ammunition nestle.

There, given the noise of shells travelling over, trench mortar bombs dropping short, machine guns firing high–or of shells alighting abruptly on the parados, trench mortar bombs thundering into the next traverse, machine guns in spitfire temper stripping the top layer of sandbags–the boyish gay P. would with his subalterns pore over the maps, receive with sinking heart the ominous “secret and confidential” and “very secret” messages brought in by those fine youths the runners; fill in, not without murmurings, those pro forma’s which at one time seemed likely to turn fighting into clerkship, or “censor” those long pages of homely scrawl in copying pencil which were to keep up yet a day more the spirits of sweethearts, mothers and wives.

Thus the particular memories of trenches and our times and seasons in them, roused by such a light matter as this which has aroused them now, pass with the greatest emotion before the mind. It is not fashionable to talk of the war. Is the counsel, then, to follow the Psalmist:

I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue....

I held my tongue, and spake nothing. I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.

One has not to follow him very long in that.

My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue.

One wonders, though, how the Psalmist himself, had he been one of us, would have found means to communicate his strange undertones of experience, according to their significance for himself? To whom would it be of interest, if he described such a particle as St. Vaast Keep on the Richebourg road, though he saw daily again in some odd way its sandbagged posts with the fine wood panels from the shell-like house beside built in?–seen once, for a lifetime. Or Port Arthur, that wreckage of a brewery near Neuve Chapelle–why should every yard of its flimsy fortification be coexistent with me? I could lead the hearer through its observation-posts, its emplacements, its warrens for human beings, its relics of other days, with practical and geographical accuracy; but the words would not contain my own sense of the place, which from the very first I never needed nor endeavoured to put into words. And yet it is intense and instant. The reflection of the crazy stronghold as it was, and with what it meant for me, comes in a second when my thoughts lie that way, and it is but one of a series of equal insistency. It is no question, this, of looking back on such a past as in any degree glorious, of shirking the anguish that overcast any adventurous gleam that these scenes awakened. Their memory is as sombre and as frightening as they were themselves in their aspect and their annals.

They come unbidden,

and when they will come, the mind is led by them as birds are said to be lured by the serpent’s eye. A tune, a breath of sighing air, an odour–and there goes the foolish ghost back to Flanders.

Even here, I suppose, in the Atlantic’s healthy blue, I am at the mercy of a coincidence in lime-juice.

[1]

Divisional Intelligence Report.

XII

Following a roaster of day, with a slack wind astern covering the deck forward with showers of cinders like shot, I admired the moonlight and the sweet night air before I turned in to sleep soundly. I woke thinking I heard the usual swabbing of decks beginning, but this was incorrect. It was quite dark, and I began to think with gratitude of a second innings of sleep; but when I looked at my watch it was after seven. The din of water outside, mingled with the rushing of a mighty wind, persuaded me to go to the door. In a few moments the storm was at its height, the sea shrouded in a thick deluge almost to the ship’s side, and its waves beaten down by the rain into pallid foam-veined inertia. An ashen grey light was about us, but the clouds of rain veiled the poop from one’s eyes amidships, and the siren trumpeted out its warnings; while sheet-like lightning flamed through the vapours, and bursts of deeper thunder than I had ever heard followed hard upon them. The decks were racing with water from overhead covers and stairways, and in each lifting of the storm the awning over the sailors’ quarters aft could be seen tearing at its tethers.

This fury soon slackened, and green and blue, pale as yet, returned to the seas as they leapt away from the bows. Breakfast intervened. Attention was requested from the storm by the appearance of a new and experimental kind of ham.

“Yes. What d’ye think of the ham–tinned boneless smoked ham?”

“Well, I like it well enough; but it’s boneless. If you take the bone away from ham, you take away the nature of it.”

This ham later on became much esteemed, but the ingenious mind was for dissembling the fact: “We’d better not give a too enthusiastic report on it or they’ll only give it to the passenger boats” of the same company.

It was blowing still, from the coast of South America. “Smell the mould?” asked Hosea, and I did; a strange frightening fragrance, of the earth earthy, a heavy and swooning smell. It was so strong as to puzzle Bicker even, in his watch; and its most unpleasant manifestation caused him to look about for the carcass of a rat on the bridge deck.

We had come by this time into a highway of ships. The first that passed us, a small steamer, was not much noticed; nor the next, which passed in the night. “Her lamp gave a blink and then went out,” said Bicker, and wished he could have emulated a mate of his acquaintance who likewise signalled to a passer-by in vain. “If you damn’d foreigners can’t answer,” he sent out as she came alongside presently, “why the hell don’t you keep out of sight? Good night!” But, on being pressed, he admitted that the “foreigner” replied: “Thank you. And you’re a lady.”

Then, however, another ship belonging to the same company with the Bonadventure was seen afar through the afternoon. As the two drew level, ceremony took place. The houseflag was dipped and raised and dipped again by both; the red ensign was dipped; and the homeward-bound sounded her monosyllable three times, to which our own whistle replied in equal number. This, as old-fashioned a courtesy as could be wished, excited several others aboard the Bonadventure besides the tyro; and as the chief engineer began his tea, he thus referred to the prevailing spirit.

“–Well, so we passed one of our ships again to-day! I was lying in my hammock asleep, when the mess-room boy came running up, panting out: ‘Sir, here’s one of our ships!’ And I mumbled out something like, ‘All right, John, there’s room enough for us to pass, isn’t there?’ Everybody was seemingly out on deck, peering up at the mate to see if he had forgotten the flags; everybody was staring at the funnel with the eye of expectancy, wondering ‘When the hell’s that damn’d whistle going?’–I didn’t get up for it. I suppose that’s equivalent to contempt of court or high treason.”

The bland face of the sage lighted up with pleasure as he carefully gave us this impression of his.

After the storm, the air was thunder-heavy all that day. Great dragon-flies, and butterflies in sultry brown and red, and that must have been borne out to sea on the strong breeze, were fluttering over the decks and the water. At night, there was abundant lightning in the distance: most of all on the eastern horizon, with its world of waters, the flashes were of a dusky redness, and of vague mountainous outline. They came fast and furious, until the moon at last seemed to overawe such wild carouse, and in good earnest to govern the night; while in a deep blue darkness, among the folds of white cloud, stars shone with new clearness. Under this celestial content, the Bonadventure moved over a gleaming sea.

Mead, on his watch, was troubled. He sought in his mind a life better paid and more exciting. Every few moments, he would add some detail aloud to a scheme for piracy in these waters, which he thought might be made a profitable occupation. He pictured a coaster, duly registered, running with ordinary cargo to and fro, but on the lines of a “Q” boat, a sort of marine wolf in sheep’s clothing, armed with torpedo tubes. In all respects, himself being already chosen as captain, its crew should form a co-operative society. The pirate should carry a wireless installation of the noisiest sort. In brief, the whole scheme appealed to him so warmly that he was ready, apart from details to be arranged, especially a financier, to put it into practice. Me he would accept as purser, not so much because I showed any promise as a book-keeper, as that I had been in an infantry battalion in the Line.

The ship was slowing down, and the chief was worried. One morning he offered me employment, “cleaning the tubes. You come round to my place.” I went round at about nine, when the ship’s engines were stopped, and found that he had as ever been amusing himself in his quiet way. He himself, with the firemen, was now ready to act as the ship’s chimney-sweeps. After a full morning’s work, masked in sweat and soot, they came up on deck again from the job. I did not regret my earlier “disappointment.” Relieved of the clogging soot, the Bonadventure ran with fresh speed, against a tough head wind. For the first time for some days, one heard the harsh drumming of the excess of steam escaping through its valve. The wind drove the water, hereabouts of a jade green colour, into long waves and their fine manes of spray, upon which the sun made many a small and fleeting rainbow. With this head wind piping, and the cargo, it seemed, having shifted lately, the ship had an uncomfortable list to port and swayed as she went. “Here, you,” cried Meacock to me, “your extra weight on the port side’s doing this.” “Yes, it’s perfectly plain he is the Jonah of the voyage.”

A dozen big black birds appeared as travelling companions, white-breasted and easy-going. At a closer view, I found that they were not properly black but of that dingy russet grey towards which old mushrooms grow. They seemed never to clap their wings, but sailed as our gulls do on the wind, wheeling and looping with a leisurely grace, and patrolling the sea as closely as an owl beats a meadow without wetting a wing-tip.

Nor was this the only token of our nearing our first destination. Shore-going suits and boots were out in the sun already. The steward’s usual attitude became that of a priest, as he carried the captain’s suits gingerly here and there.

But there was still time for trouble. A relapse in the sainted manner of the old fellow occurred one day at breakfast. The most tremendous roarings, himself and the offending donkeyman in turn or in chorus, suddenly broke out, and ended in the steward’s ascent with a complaint to Hosea. Then, one evening, after my quiet enjoyment of the pure blue sky after a shower, with its Southern Cross and the false cross and other stars strange to me glittering marvellously keen, I went in to my cabin to write, when I instantly perceived something in the air. A most pungent aroma, indeed, had been instilled through the house; and going to inquire I found Cyrano of Cardiff kneeling on the saloon floor, applying a special kind of red paint. Properly, he said, it was used for the keels of ships. I thought too that that was its proper application.

At dinner, too, events took a serious turn. When I had in previous days heard spaghetti hailed as Wind-pipes, for instance, I had realized the phrase as a humorous hyperbole. But now the tinned meat problem presented itself to me in a more sinister light–I was not so sure! There before me was a godless lump of briny red fat and stringy appendages floating more or less in a thick brown liquid which demanded the spectacles of optimism. A reinforcement of stony beans did not mend the matter. The meat, as it fell out, wore a portion of skin, remarkable for prickly excrescences, and hinting that I was about to batten on the relics of a young porcupine, or at least peculiar pork. Presently I asked Meacock what sort of flesh this was. He answered: “O Lord, I don’t know–it’s–well, I don’t think you can get beyond tinned meat.”

Another incident affected the administration. An apprentice, whose stature brought him, beyond the chance of escape, the nickname Little Tich, and who was generally being bantered by someone or other, was cleaning the brasswork of the compass in the wheel-house. Meacock went in to take a bearing. The bearing he got nonplussed him, and he got Mead to try. Mead also found the needle giving strange evidence. Suddenly it dawned upon them that its delusion was due to a tremendous dagger worn by the very small and keenly occupied Tich.

The Bonadventure maintained her mended pace, and also her awkward list, which conspired with a strong swell; thus it was that the “fiddle” so necessary to the safety of cups and plates in the Bay of Biscay reappeared at this late stage. The nights were beautiful, with their white moon and moonlight far over the water, their stars, few, and of the moon’s glowing whiteness, the light veilings of cloud blown in silence about the sky, and little else heard except the subdued measure of the ship’s engines, the lapping repulse of waves from the bows, and the sharp call of birds ahead and astern. Well might Mead be glad of his roving temperament, as on his watch we talked and smoked above the expanse of rimpled water, and looked towards the sword-like lightnings in the south.

XIII

We came into grey waters, and also into a grey sort of day, overcast and moody. In the evening the wind was strong from the land, and laden with that earthy scent which had so surprised me when I first encountered it; a languid, rich and beguiling perfume, that is tomb-like and unnerving in its suggestion, rising over us. It made out for me the spirit of Tom Hood’s last song, if it was his last song; the one beginning “Farewell, life, my senses swim”; its first verse ending “I smell the Mould above the Rose,” and its second, “I smell the Rose above the Mould.”

Hosea engaged me in discussion of Tennyson and Edwin Arnold. He had been carrying out a lively campaign in his room, where an unwelcome insect had appeared lately; one would have doubted whether any insect, however irrepressible, could have existed in the atmosphere of cigar smoke which he daily thickened in that room of his. But there it was, the bug had been seen, and the whole room was overhauled.

This did not in any way deflect him from his evening pursuit of the abstract. His resolution in following a problem through its own difficult aspects, combined with his control of the Bonadventure, often made me wonder whether he was typical of his fellow-captains. Though, as he said, the roaring-bull style of master mariner was almost extinct, I could not help thinking him singular.

I woke at about four, following an inquiry into some remote subject, from a dream of roaring thunderbolts, out of whose red and whizzing track I was crouching on the lee side of barns and cowsheds. I looked out; there was a loud wind much like that which brought the storm of the other Sunday. I went back to bed a little disappointed. This squall left the makings of a very good breeze blowing and moreover lowered the temperature. The mate complained of his khaki shorts; the second mate had had to bring out another blanket, although it was a sunny morning. The colour of the sea was changing as we went at a striking rate; but prevailing, in those shallower roads turbid with silt or sand was a greenness as of horse-chestnut leaves at their prime. Here and there were dark acres of discoloured water drifting by, contrasting magnificently with the green and its bright white-crested waves. The afternoon brought into sight the dim shapes of coastline with those now less familiar things trees and houses. This advance was welcomed by Mead and the apprentices who lived in his alleyway with spirited but not spiritual songs.

The next day, Hosea was very early at the door of the wireless operator’s cabin, endeavouring to get a reply from the ship’s agents in Monte Video, to questions sent some days before. I do not think he succeeded. There was, however, much buzzing, and I got up to enjoy the time of day. It was still keen outside–“a nipping and an eager air”–the sky being blue and the sun unclouded none the less; over the drab green sea, a seagull or two in their lordly fashions flapping against the wind; to starboard, in a gentle haze, a view of rugged shore. This point was one of mountainous eminences, rolling like larger Downs, with white cliffs or sandy beaches under their light red masses. Other steamers were in our neighbourhood, on the same course out or home, some bright with new paint, others scarred and rusty. Probably they were having tripe in batter for breakfast like ourselves, the prose part of me suggested; and I felt with gratitude that I must have become a new and better man, who could now face and even look forward to a food which had hitherto only interested me as a favourite with C. Lamb.

The continued cold caused me to return to socks; but I delayed the reinstatement of the collar, which I had found no such necessity to human happiness.