An Ocean Tramp

By

William McFee

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1924

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

Books by William McFee

ALIENS
AN OCEAN TRAMP
CAPTAIN MACEDOINE’S DAUGHTER
CASUALS OF THE SEA
PORT SAID MISCELLANY

Table of Contents

TO
A—— R——

“She was lovable, and he loved her. But he
was not lovable, and she did not love him.”

—Heine’s Reisebilder

PREFACE TO THE 1921 EDITION

In the original preface to the First Edition, it will be seen that by a perfectly justifiable stroke of artistic manipulation, the writer of the letters, the Ocean Tramp himself, is drowned at sea. Neither author nor publisher had offered any guarantee that the book was a record of cold facts, and it was not deemed necessary at that time to disillusion any of the public who saw fit to send in condolences upon the tragic end of a promising career. Nevertheless, the book was faithful enough in a larger sense, for the young man who wrote it had undoubtedly died and buried himself in its pages. His place, it appeared presently, was taken by a cynical person who voyaged all over the seven seas in various steamers, accumulating immense stocks of local colour, passing through the divers experiences which befall sailor-men, reading a good many books, and gradually assuming the rôle of an amused spectator. Of this person, however, there is no need to speak just now, and we must go back to the time when the author, in that condition known to the cloth as “out of a ship,” arrived in London, the following pages tied up in a piece of bunting, in his dunnage, and took a small suite of chambers over the ancient gate of Cliffords Inn. Now it would be easy enough, and the temptation is great, to convey the impression that the writer had arrived in the Metropolis to make his name and win fame and fortune with his manuscript. So runs the tale in many a novel issued during the last twenty-five years. It is time, therefore, to invent something new. The penniless law-student who writes a best seller and wins the love of a celebrated actress must make way for a sea-going engineer with a year’s wages and a volume of essays in his pocket, and who had not succeeded in winning the love of anybody. Indeed the singular moderation of the demands of this young man will be appreciated by any one who has been afflicted with ambition, for he has never at any time desired either to write a play, edit a magazine, or marry a prima-donna. At the particular juncture when he took over the little suite of furnished chambers from a young newspaper man who had received a sudden invitation to visit a rich uncle, his principal preoccupation was to pass his examination for his certificate of competency as a first-class engineer. To this end he began a mysterious existence possible only to the skilled Londoner. For the benefit of those who are not skilled Londoners, the following description may evoke interest.

In the morning on waking, he saw, through the small bowed window which looked out into the Inn, the sunlight shining upon the gilded gothic roof of the Rolls Building and possibly touching the tops of the trees of the grimy enclosure. Stepping through into the front room he could lean out of a mullioned affair below which he could read the date carved in the stone—1472—and looking up a long narrow court he could watch the morning traffic of the Strand passing the farther end like the film of a cinematograph. Down below, a gentleman who sold studs, shoe-laces, and dying pigs on the curb, and who kept his stock in a cupboard under the arch, was preparing to start out for the day. A dying pig, it may be mentioned, was a toy much in demand among stock-broking clerks and other frivolous young gentlemen in the City, and consisted of a bladder shaped like a pig whose snout contained a whistle which gave out on deflation an almost human note of anguish. Should the hour be before eight, which was probable since the author had contracted the habit, at sea, of rising at four, he would be further exhilarated by seeing his landlord, Mr. Honeyball, in a tightly buttoned frock-coat and wide-awake hat, march with an erect and military air to the end of the passage, dart a piercing glance in either direction, and remain, hands behind back and shoulders squared, taking the air. Which meant that Mrs. Honeyball was engaged in the dark and dungeon-like kitchen below the worn flags of the archway, preparing the coffee and bacon for Mr. Honeyball’s breakfast.

Having washed and shaved—and here it may be set down, for the benefit of Americans and others not skilled in metropolitan existence, that when a building bears over its archway the date 1472 the bathing arrangements within will not be of the most modern design—the author then took his pipe, tobacco, and cane and prepared to descend the winding stone stairway which ended in a door of heavy wood. This contrivance opened directly upon the small triangular chamber where Mrs. Honeyball each day laid the meals for herself and husband, transacted her rent-collecting, and received occasional visitors during late afternoon, self-effacing ladies of mature age who seemed to shrink back into the panelling behind them and who assumed the anxious immobility of figures in high relief, if the phrase may be allowed to pass. At this early hour, however, no one is in sight save Mrs. Honeyball herself, a slight elderly person with that look of pink beatification on her face which accompanies some forms of Christianity, emerging from another door which leads down a curved stairway to subterranean regions. Mrs. Honeyball, it may be stated in parenthesis, is of the great family of hero-worshippers, women who are inspired with an indomitable and quite illogical faith in the wisdom and strength of their gentlemen friends. The mere fact of the author being a nautical character is sufficient for Mrs. Honeyball. Beyond going as far as Margate on the Clacton Belle, a fat, squab-shaped side-wheel affair very popular with London folk in that era, Mrs. Honeyball’s acquaintance with the sea is purely theoretical. To her all sea-faring men are courageous, simple-hearted stalwarts having their business in great waters, and she has intimated that she always remembers them in her prayers. The modest breakfast, for two, is spread on one side of the round table which is so much too large for the room. She would be only too pleased if she could board me, but it is not allowed. The Inn, I have been given to understand, has been bought outright by some person of great wealth, whose design is to pull it down and erect a block of apartments. Mrs. Honeyball is somewhat afraid of this person. She gets in a great flutter, about the twentieth of the month, over her accounts. Just now, however, she is placidly benevolent and hopes that author has slept well. He has and says so, and opening the outer door, an immense portal of heavy wood studded with big black nails, he steps down into the archway, where Mr. Honeyball is encountered. Mr. Honeyball has been in the army, has retired on a sergeant-major’s pension after twenty-three years service and he salutes the author in correct military fashion.

These amenities concluded and watches compared with the great clock of the Law Courts visible from the end of the passage, the author turned westward and set off briskly toward Charing Cross, buying a paper on the way, and noting from time to time the attractively attired young ladies who were hurrying to their various employments. At the risk of evoking a certain conventional incredulity in the readers’ bosom, the author is constrained to point out that he harboured only the purest and most abstract sentiments towards these young women. There is a period in the life of the literary artist, unhappily not permanent, when the surface of his mind may be described as absorbent of emotional influences, a period which results in the accumulation of vast quantities of data concerning women without to any degree destroying the authentic simplicity of his heart. And when the point of saturation is reached, to use an engineer’s phrase, the artist, still preserving his own innocence, begins to produce. And this, one may remark in passing, is the happiest time of his life! He combines the felicity of youth, the wisdom of age, and the unencumbered vitality of manhood. He knows, even while in love, as he frequently is at such periods, that there are loftier peaks beyond, mountain-ranges of emotion up which some day he is destined to travel, and he disregards the pathetic seductions of those who would bid him settle in their quiet valleys.

Arriving in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, the author takes an affectionate glimpse into Trafalgar Square, and turns down a steep, narrow street, leading towards the River, where is situated a small eating house. At that time, it should be observed, almost the only way for a stranger to obtain a breakfast in London was to go to a hotel and engage a room. Even at railroad terminals, where the refreshment-rooms were just beginning to be swept and garnished, and the waitresses were yawning behind the big urns, they did not regard the famished traveller with any enthusiasm. It was felt that a stranger wanting food at that hour had been up to no good. The author, being a skilled Londoner, was put to no such inconvenience. It was his habit, at intervals, to write special articles for the London papers, articles which had to be delivered to the night commissionaire on duty in the office of the newspaper. The particular functionary employed by the News was a social being and fond of port, and over a dock-glass at Finches, the celebrated bar in Fleet Street, had recommended a certain chop-house where night-birds ate before retiring to their nests in distant suburbs. To this hostelry the author therefore repairs, down the narrow declivity, in at the door whose brass handles are being vigorously polished by a youth in a green baize apron, and upstairs to a long low chamber furnished with small tables. Here one discovers some half-dozen strays from the millions of Londoners who breakfast in orthodox fashion—in the secrecy and sullen silence of their own homes. And the salient feature of the people in this upstairs room is the inexorable isolation of their souls. No one speaks. One or two look up from their food as the author makes his way to the window from which he commands a glimpse of blue sky, the elevation of an enormous brick wall, and possibly a locomotive having its firebox cleaned on a siding and panting as though afflicted with lung trouble. He takes his seat not far from a young woman who is breakfasting on a bun and a glass of milk. She is reading a book, a fat novel in fine print, the covers soiled with food and the corners grimy with years of friction. She is there every morning eating a bun and drinking a glass of milk. She has a clear, delicate face, blonde hair, and large black eyes. Her hands are fine, too, though they might be better kept. One suspects she does her own washing after she gets home at night.

The reader may possibly wonder why the author should lower himself in the esteem of men by dilating upon the appearance of a stray young woman whom fate had washed up on the shores of time near him and whom the next wave would inevitably bear away again. But the reader must exercise a little patience. Several women appear in this preface, and the author imagines they may reveal to the reader something of the mentality which wrote this book. A mentality somewhat alien to the English, since it was profoundly interested in women without incurring any suspicion of French naughtiness, or endeavouring in any way to make itself pleasing to them. A mentality hampered by an almost hysterical shyness which, however, was capable of swift and complete evaporation in certain circumstances.

So far, let it be premised, the shyness was still in evidence, and the author became as silent and austere as the other members of the company. There was a youth, in trousers obviously pressed under his mattress, and a coat too short for him, whose air of shabby smartness brought tears to the eyes of the author, who had passed through very much the same purgatory years before. Indeed it was very much like a coffee room in purgatory, if the reader can imagine such a thing, for every one of the patrons had this distinguishing trait—they were shackled and tortured and seared by the lack of a little money. The mangy old waif who asked for a cup of tea and furtively fished out of a little black oil-cloth bag a couple of thick sandwiches; the middle-aged person with a fine moustache, frock-coat, and silk-hat, who ordered coffee and bacon and eggs, and forgot to eat while his tired eyes fixed themselves with insane intensity upon a mineral-water advertisement on the opposite wall; the foreign lady (whom the author hastens to record as a virtuous matron) whose bizarre hat and brightly painted cheeks were stowed away in an obscure and lonely corner where she pored over a Greek newspaper; the middle-aged gentleman whose marbled note-book was filled with incredibly fine writing and columns of figures which ought to have meant something substantial, but which were probably only lists of bad debts utterly uncollectable—all these poor people would have been carried up to heaven had they suddenly discovered under their plates a twenty-pound note. And the desire to do this thing, to play the rich uncle for once, was at times so keen that the author felt himself in purgatory, too, in a way, and lost his appetite thinking about it.

The reader may opine that such a meal would be but a poor preliminary for a morning of study, but the fact remains that the contemplation of misery stimulates one’s mental perceptions. Once more out in the Strand, having watched the young woman descend the narrow street and fling a swift glance over her shoulder as she turned into Northumberland Avenue, the author mounted a Barking ’bus and settled himself in the front seat, a gay little Union Jack fluttering just above his head, and gave himself up unreservedly to reflections evoked by a return, after some years at sea, to his native air. Every foot of the way eastward brought up memories long dormant beneath the swarms of alien impressions received since going to sea, impressions that ranged from the songs of an octaroon in a blind-tiger back of Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, to the mellow Boom-cling-clang of temple-bells heard in the flawless dawn from a verandah above the sampan-cluttered canals of Osaka. Between his nostrils and the ancient odours of creosote blocks and of river mud drying at low tide came the heavy scent of Arab quarters, the reek of Argentine slaughter-houses and the subtle pervasions of Singapore. Since he had read with careless neglect the familiar names over familiar shops where he and his father had dealt in the common things of life, his eyes had ached with the glittering hieroglyphics of Chinatown and the incomprehensible futilities of Armenian and Cyrillic announcements. So it came about that he regarded the cheerful, homely, and sun-lit Strand with extraordinary delight, a delight enhanced by the incorrigible conviction that in a few weeks he would quit it once more for distant shores. Yet the charm, evanescent as it was, laid an authentic hand upon his pulse and made it beat more quickly. Here he had bought his first dress-suit. The tailor’s shop was gone and a restaurant with bulging glass windows thrust out a portly stomach into the street. Here again he had lunched in days gone by on Saturdays, and loitered far into the afternoon to flirt with the waitress. Here, where Wellington Street plunged across and flung itself upon Waterloo Bridge, one beheld staggering changes. The mountainous motor bus put on speed and scampered past the churches left like rocky islets in the midst of a swift river of traffic. Once past Temple Bar and in the narrow defile of Fleet Street the author’s thoughts darted up Fetter Lane and hovered around a grimy building where he had pursued his studies with the relentless fanaticism of youthful ambition. There, under the lamp-post at the corner, one keen evening in early spring, he had what was for him a tremendous emotional experience. In the German class (for he was all for Wilhelm Meister, Faust, The Robbers, and Dichtung und Wahrheit in those days) was a German girl learning English, a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart. Often when it came to his turn to read from the set piece of literature, he felt this girl’s eyes upon him and he would raise his own to find her regarding him with a steady, appraising glance. And yet she seemed to vanish effectively enough in the general confusion of departure. Once she picked up his pencil and asked mutely for the use of it, and he assented with what he knew was a fiery blush. She replaced it with a firm nod of the head and her steady glance. For a few days the thought of her bothered his dreams and then, in the fanatical pursuit of knowledge, the mood evaporated. Perhaps she was aware of this and laid her plans accordingly, for on the last evening of the session, as he came down the steps of the college and turned toward Fetter Lane, he saw her standing under the lamp-post at the corner. A frightful predicament! It was one thing to read about Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his free emotional development, about Arthur Schopenhauer living in Venice with his mistress and writing philosophical works, or to approve the newly translated vapourings of Frederick Nietzsche. It was quite another to walk steadily onward and encounter a robust, vital, brown-haired wench from Stuttgart who stood waiting with unmistakable invitation in her pose. When he arrived at the corner he was in a condition bordering on blind panic and he heard, as through a thick wall, a hoarse, musical voice murmur unintelligible words. He heard himself murmur something which brought a look of angry astonishment into her eyes. He heard the words “Don’t you like me?” far off, drowned by a buzzing of the blood in his ear-drums. And then a vicious thrust forward of the blonde head, a show of big white teeth, and the contemptuous phrase “Nassty you are!” as she flung round and hurried down the street.

No doubt she was right. Often, in the night-watches at sea, the author has recalled the vitality of her appeal, the genuine frankness of her character, and wished for an opportunity to express his regret for his gaucherie and offer adequate amends. And as the ’bus lumbers along towards Ludgate Hill he thinks of her and wonders precisely what purpose these fugitive and fortuitous encounters serve. These futile yet fascinating conjectures bring him past Saint Paul’s, in whose shadow he has spent many hours reading old books at the stalls in Holywell Street, and the ’bus races along Cannon Street, is brought up almost on its hind wheels at the Mansion House Corner, and the author gets a brief glimpse of Princes Street and Moorgate Street, where he was once “something in the City” as we used to say, before the policeman’s hand is lowered and the eastbound traffic roars along Threadneedle Street and so down to Aldgate, where the author descends by the famous Pump, to begin the serious business of the day. For it must not be forgotten that this daily ’bus-ride from Charing Cross to Aldgate Pump is not prosecuted in a spirit of sentimental reverie. The author is going to school. Across the road may be seen a building athwart whose topmost window runs a tarnished gold sign Teague’s School of Engineering, only all three ns of the last word are missing, which seems in keeping with the name Teague somehow, and gives the whole affair a touch of Irish dissipation. Nothing, however, could be more misleading. Upstairs, four flights, the last two uncarpeted or linoleumed, one discovers only an austere establishment from which both Teague and his possible dissipation are long since departed. The business is now owned by a dapper young man of pleasing exterior and almost uncanny technical omniscience, who for a lump inclusive fee undertakes to pull the most illiterate of seafarers through the narrow portals of the government examination. He gives that impression as he sits at his desk in his private office, the cuffs of his grey frock-coat and his starched white shirt drawn up out of the way. He has the capable air of a surgeon, the swift, impersonal competence of an experienced accoucheur. His business is to get results. It is not too much to say that he gets them.

In the room beyond, however, in which the author takes his seat in the humble capacity of student, there is the curiously strained atmosphere that is to be found in all companies of disparate personalities intent upon a common end. Seated in rows at a number of pine desks are a score of men whose ages range from twenty-three to forty-five. Some are smoking. Others, with tongue protruding slightly from the corner of the mouth, and head on one side, are slowly and painfully copying the drawing of a pump or a valve-box. Others, again, are in the murky depths of vast arithmetical solutions extracting, with heavy breathings, the cube root from some formidable quantity, and bringing it to the surface exhausted and far from certain as to the ultimate utility of their discoveries. They have come from the far ends of the sea-lanes, these men, from Niger River ports and the coast towns of China, from lordly liners and humble tramps, from the frozen fjords of Älborg and the crowded tideways of the Hooghley. They are extraordinarily unprepossessing, most of them, for the time was not yet when sea-going was considered, save as a last resource, like selling newspapers or going to America. These men were mostly artisans, thick-fingered mechanics who had gone to sea, driven by some obscure urge or prosaic economic necessity, and the sea had changed them, as it changes everything, fashioning in them a blunt work-a-day fatalism and a strong, coarse-fibred character admirably adapted to their way of life. But that way is far from schools and colleges. They lack that subtle academical atmosphere so essential to genuine culture. They have none of them what the educated classes call an examination brain. They resemble a pack of sheep-dogs in a parlour. They accept with pathetic fidelity the dogmas of their text-books, and they submit humbly to incarceration while their heads are loaded down with formulas and theories, most of which they jettison with relief when they feel the first faint lift of the vessel to the ocean swell outside the breakwater.

But it should on no account be assumed from the above truthful estimate of their mentality that these men are to be dismissed as mere factory hands or negligible land-failures. The sea has her own way of making men, and informs them, as the years and miles go by, with a species of differential intuition, a flexible mental mechanism which calibrates and registers with astonishing accuracy and speed. They become profound judges of human character within the rough walls of their experience, and for women they betray a highly specialized esteem....

For all that, as they sit here in their extremely respectable blue serge suits, which still show the sharp creases where they were laid away in unskillful folds during the voyage, they give one an impression of lugubrious failure. It must be confessed that simple as the examinations are they are beyond the range of many of us. The habits of study are not easily retained during the long stretches of watch-keeping intermitted with hilarious trips ashore. We find a great difficulty in keeping our minds on the problems set down. Outside is a blue sky, the roar of traffic at the confluence of four great thoroughfares, and the call of London, a very siren among cities, when one knows! Over yonder, a cigarette in his mouth, his head on his hand and his elbow asprawl on the desk, making idle marks with a pencil, is a youth who is nursing a grievance against the government. He has been up eight times and failed every time. He is going up again with us next Tuesday. Yet, as it has been whispered to me during lunch hour by my neighbour, a robust individual just home from Rangoon, he is a first-class man; just the chap in a break-down; always on the job; fine record. There is another, between us and the sectional model of a feed pump valve, who never looks up, but figures unceasingly with elbows close to his sides, his toes turned in, the nape of an obstinate, close-cropped neck glistening pale gold and pink in the morning sun. Without having been to sea with this party or even having seen his face, one is aware that he will always be found with his pale eyes wide open when the light is flicked on at One Bell. He has been sometime in tramp-steamers, who carry no oilers, for there is a hard callous on the knuckle of his right forefinger where the oil-feeder handle has been chafing. Whether he would be a tower of strength in a smash-up is not so easily divined. Next to him a young gentleman is sitting sideways smoking, a pair of handsome cuff-buttons of Indian design flashing at his wrists. He is, my neighbour has informed me during lunch, from the P. & O. and he corroborates this by asking a question of the lecturer concerning a broken valve-spindle of enormous dimensions. He stands for class in our community and gives a certain tone to the group who go up on Tuesday. Unhappily he falls out on the second day, owing to certain defects in his arithmetic, and disappears. No doubt he has gone to another sea-port to try a less austere examiner.

And after lunch, the principal of Teague’s School of Engineering suddenly emerges from his private office, hangs up a card labelled “No Smoking during Lectures” and proceeds to feed us with the irreducible minimum of information necessary for our ordeal. By long practice, astute contriving, and careful cross-examination of successful pupils he has arrived at such a pass that he seems to know more about the examiner’s mind than that gentleman himself. He repeats slowly and deliberately the exact form of answer which is most likely to draw approval from the grand inquisitor, and we copy it down hastily in our notes. The sleeves of his grey frock-coat are pulled back to keep the chalk dust from soiling them as he rapidly sketches on the board for our edification. We listen with respect, for we know he has been through precisely the same mill as ourselves, he has come on watch at midnight with his mouth dry and his eyelids sagging and wishing in his heart he were dead. He has won out and now stands ready to show us the way. We listen to every word. The lecture is short, sharp, apposite, a model of all a lecture should be, stripped to the bare bones of fundamental truth, pared clean of every redundant word. As the clock strikes three he claps his hands to rid them of chalk, pauses for a moment to answer pertinent questions, and vanishes into his office once more.

Most of us go home.

The author now has an assignation with a lady, and the reader who has been patiently waiting for some sort of literary allusions in a preface to a volume of literary essays, is about to be gratified. The scene changes from the vulgar uproar of Aldgate to a flat in Chelsea. Hurrying through Houndsditch, across Leadenhall Street and up St. Mary Axe, the author discovers the right ’bus in Broad Street about to start. They are filling the radiator with water and the conductor is intoning a mysterious incantation which resolves itself into “Benk! Oobun, Benk! Piccadilly, ’Yde Pawk, Sloon Stree’, Sloon Square, Kings Road, Chelsea an’ Walham Green. Here y’ are, lidy.” With long practice he can make the vowels reverberate above the roar of the traffic. The words Benk and Pawk come from his diaphragm in sullen booms. To listen to him is a lesson in prosody. He enjoys doing it. He is an artist. He extracts the uttermost from his material, which is the mark of the supreme artist. He unbends when he comes up to collect the fares from the author and a lady who is probably returning to Turnham Green after a visit to her married daughter at Islington, and he leans over the author’s shoulder to scan the racing news in the Stop Press Column, a courtesy as little likely to be withheld in London as a light for a cigarette in Alexandria. “Hm!” he murmurs, stoically. “Jes’ fancy! An’ I had ’im backed for a place, too. That’s the larst money I lose on that stable.” He clatters down again and one hears his voice lifted once more as he rumbles: “Benk—Ooborn Benk!” with diaphragmatic intensity.

To know London from the top of a ’bus is no doubt a liberal education, but it may be questioned whether the tuition is as extensive and peculiar with a gasoline-driven vehicle as with the old horse-hauled affairs that took all day to jungle along from the North Pole Inn at Wormwood Scrubbs to the Mile End Road, or from the Angel at Islington to Roehampton. Almost before the author has digested a leading article dealing with the Venezuelan Question the ’bus roars down Sloan Street, shoots across the Square, and draws up just where a few people are already collecting by the pit-doors of the Court Theatre for the evening performance of “Man and Superman.” This being the end of a stage, if the pleasantry may be pardoned, the author descends and walks onward to his destination, which is a flat down by the River.

There are certain thoroughfares in London which have always avoided any suspicion of respectable regularity either in their reputation or their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square, for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England and the most disconcerting divarications of design. In it meet democracy, plutocracy, and aristocracy, artist and artisan, trade and tradition, philosophy and philistinism, publicans and publicists, connoisseurs and confidence men, sin and sincerity. It is not proposed to introduce the reader to the whole of this goodly company. The Balzac of Chelsea still tarries in obscurity. By some amazing oversight this street, which has sheltered more artists and authors than any other thoroughfare in the world, seems to have evaded their capture. Chelsea is a cosmos. Cheyne Walk is a world, a world abandoned by genius to the cheap purveyors of second-hand clap-trap and imitators of original minds.

Let us go upstairs.

Miss Flaherty is one of those women who appear from time to time in the newspaper world and who seem to embody in their own personalities the essential differences between journalism and literature. Their equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense they are so prolific that they do not beget; they spawn. They present a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest when they see it, but they are congenitally incapable of describing it correctly. Their conception of art consists of writing a book describing their own sexual impulses. This is frequently so ungrammatical and obscure that even publishers’ readers balk at it, and it goes the rounds. In the meanwhile, they produce an incredible quantity of daily and weekly matter for the press. They wheedle commissions out of male editors by appealing to their sex, and write sprightly articles on Bachelor Girls and their Ideals, and the Economic Independence of the Married Woman. They become hysterically lachrymose, in print, over a romantic love affair, and relapse into sordid intrigues on the sly. They demand political power without intending for a single moment to assume political responsibility. Their days are about equally divided between catching a husband and achieving what they describe as “a scoop.”

To all this Miss Flaherty adds an unusual faculty for spectacular antics. She has dressed in a red sweater and plied her trade, for a day, as a shoe-shine boy. She has dressed in a green cloak and sold shamrock on St. Patrick’s day. She has dressed in rags and sung in the streets for charity. She has hired a van and ridden about the suburbs pretending to sell domestic articles. She has attended revival meetings and thrown herself in a spasm of ecstasy upon what she calls the mercy-seat. She has....

But the author is not absolutely sure whether she has ... after all. He is of the opinion that, like most English women, she has no talent for that sort of thing. Like most young women who babble of emancipation she has an unsuspected aptitude for domesticity. She makes tea far better than she writes articles. She is, under a ridiculous assumption of slangy modernity, oppressively conventional.

However, the author’s immediate concern is not with Miss Flaherty’s destiny at all, but with his manuscript which she has been commissioned to place with a publisher. A writer of dime novels, on being consulted as to the way to get a book published, said he didn’t know, never having had a book to publish save in weekly serial numbers; and that, he hastened to observe, was quite another story. And then suddenly remarked, slapping his thigh and reaching for the makings of a fresh cigarette: “Why not try Imogene Flaherty? She’s anxious to start in as author’s agent.” The author had no objections to raise beyond the fact that he disliked doing business with women and was afraid of anybody named Imogene. The dime-novelist shook his head and said women in business and journalism had come to stay. And seriously, Miss Flaherty might easily be of immense assistance to the author. “Very nice girl, too—h-m—hm!” This reminiscently. “Very decent little woman. Go and see her—take my card—down in Cheyne Walk. She had a flat down there near Church Street. H-m. Yes.”

So it happened. And the result had been an explosion. Miss Flaherty had accepted the commission and had read the manuscript and had, in common parlance, gone up in the air. Her enthusiasm literally knew no bounds. She did not actually foam at the mouth, but she displayed all the symptoms of advanced literary hysteria. Now there is this to be said for the sea—it may not furnish one with universal judgments about women but it does provide the solitude and austere discipline which enable a man to coördinate his hitherto chaotic ideas about them. And women, if they only knew how they appear to the imagination of men on the rolling waters, would undoubtedly modify their own conceptions of life, and possibly profit by the change. Imogene, however, had no such moment of illumination. She lived in an enchanted world of imitation emotion and something in the author’s manuscript had set her off, had appealed to her rudimentary notions of fine writing, and engendered a flame of enthusiasm. It is not too much to say that she believed in that manuscript much more than the author did. That is the correct attitude for a successful agent. Imogene did not “push” the book, as salesmen say, so much as herald it. She entered publishers’ offices like a prophetess or one of the seraphim, panoplied in shining plumage, blinding the poor human eyes with beams of heavenly radiance, the marvellous manuscript, like a roll of lost gospels, held out before her. She blew a blast on her trumpet and the doors of the publishers’ readers swung wide. No knowledge of English literature prevented her from uttering her solemn conviction that here was the greatest book since Geoffrey Chaucer laid down his pen. With intrepid resource she warned the hesitating publisher that he would have none save himself to blame if he missed this chance of immortalizing his house, and eventually a publisher was discovered who was willing to issue the book at the author’s expense. All this, let it be said with regret, did not bring a blush to the author’s sea-tanned cheek. On the contrary, he cherished a secret apprehension that Imogene had gone mad.

The one fly in the ointment at this juncture was the author’s unmannerly attitude towards publishers who issued books at the writer’s expense. He went so far as to characterize them as crooks and declined to have anything to do with them. He had been writing for a good many years of apprenticeship and had arrived at the conclusion that a man might get along in decent comfort all his life without publishing anything at all, if fate so ordered it; and the suggestion that he pay away his hoarded sea-wages just to have his name on a book, clouded a naturally sunny temper for some time.

Here, however, sitting at tea in the intensely artistic flat on the third floor over a grocery-store, and looking out upon the River and the warehouses of the Surrey Side, the author is rapturously apprised that the book is as good as sold. A publisher’s reader, a representative of an important house, has declared that the book has distinction. This is a true record, in the main, and the author is obliged to confess, thirteen years later, that he fell for this. In his simplicity he thought it a fine thing to have distinction. And this is true. It is a fine thing, but the fineness of the bloom is soon licked off by the busy tongues of the Imogenes and their masculine counterparts. The author did not see this so clearly at the time. He felt as a cat feels when stroked. The patrons of distinction were also in a position to make a cash offer for the copyright. In those days, when fifty dollars a month was considered adequate remuneration for his services at sea, the author had modest notions about cash offers. He treated the matter in a sporting spirit and closed.

But it was not consummated in a word and with the gesture of signing one’s name. Things are not done that way when dealing with Imogenes. One has to negotiate a continent of emotional hill-climbing and an ocean of talk. A sea-faring person, schooled to deal with men and things with an economy of effort, is moved to amazement before the spectacle of a “bachelor girl” in action. One assumes, of course, that she intends to remain a “bachelor girl.” There is the solemn initiation into the ranks of her pals. Palship, as she calls it, is something quite different from friendship, and to a man of normal instincts this is an alarming proposition. It is certainly far more exhausting than an intrigue and far less interesting than a rationally controlled friendship with a person of the same sex. And here it is pertinent to put forward what the author conceives to be the fundamental trouble with the Imogenes of both sides of the Atlantic. It is pertinent because he was, at the time of writing this book, under the influence of a very potent and inspiring friendship for a man now dead, a friendship which moulded his ideas and inspired him to hammer out for himself a characteristic philosophy of life. And one of the most important determinations of that philosophy deals with the common errors concerning friendship and love. The mistake of the bachelor girl and her prototypes lies in their failure to recognize the principle of sex as universal. It is not so much that men and women cannot meet without the problem of sex arising between them as that no two human beings can have any interchange of thoughts at all without involving each other in a complex of which masculine and feminine are the opposite poles. The most fascinating of all friendships are those in which the protagonists alternate, each one, owing to freshly revealed depths or shallows in his character, assuming the masculine or feminine rôle. The Latin recognises this by instinct. Just as his nouns are always either masculine or feminine, so are his ideas. And his women, who have never heard of “bachelor girls” or “palship,” have achieved with consummate skill all and more than the Imogenes have ever imagined. Any one who has ever enjoyed the friendship of such women will recall that subtle aroma of sex which informs the whole affair. The coarse-grained northerner is prone to attribute the abundant vitality, the exquisite graces of body and mind to a deftly concealed vampirism or sensuality. Nothing is further from the truth. If you can play up to it, if your emotions and instincts are under the control of a traditional and finely tempered will, a notable experience is yours. Friendship, in fact, is the divinity whose name must not be uttered or he will vanish. She will not inform you, as Imogene does, that you are not in love with her and she is not in love with you and therefore a palship is under way. On the contrary, she will never let you forget that love is a possibility always just out of sight, where it will always remain. She is economically independent because men cannot do without her. She has more rights than the Imogenes will gain in a thousand years; and she is, moreover, something that men would strive to preserve in a world-cataclysm, whereas no one would give Imogene a single panic thought.

Imogene, however, has no inkling of this. She is under the impression that she is one of the world’s cosmic forces. In the rag-bag of her brain whence she fishes out the innumerable formless and gaudy-coloured pilferings from which she fashions her “special articles,” she cherishes an extraordinary illusion that she is a sort of modern Hypatia. She says Aspasia, but that is only because she has confused Kingsley’s heroine with Pericles’ mistress. She talks of “mating with an affinity” of “influencing the lives of the men who do things.” She is very worried about the men who do things. It is a proof of her conventional and Victorian mentality that she imagines men who do things are inspired to do them by women; whereas it is rather the other way round, the men who do things having to avoid the majority of women as they would cholera morbus, if they are ever to get anything done.

Springing up on the impulse of this thought the author makes his excuses to the assembled guests and descends the dark stairway to the street. To tell the truth, these glimpses into the society of literary folk do not inspire in his bosom any frantic anxiety to abandon his own way of life. He had a furtive and foolish notion that these people are of no importance whatever. These coteries, these at-homes, and flat philosophies are not the real thing. It sounds unsocial and unconventional, no doubt, but it is a question so far unsettled in the author’s mind whether any genuine artist loves his fellows well enough to co-habit with them on a literary basis. For some mysterious reason the real men, the original living forces in literature, do not frequent the salons of the Imogenes. They are more likely to be found in the private bars of taverns in the King’s Road, or walking along lonely roads in Essex and Surrey. Indeed, they may be preoccupied with problems quite foreign to the immediate business of literary conversation. They may be building bridges, or sailing ships, or governing principalities. They are unrecognised for the most part. The fact is they are romantic, and it is the hall-mark of the true romantic to do what other men dream of, and say nothing about it.

The motives of the author, however, in deserting the flat in Chelsea, were not entirely due to dreams of lofty achievement, but to the stern necessity to read voraciously on the subject of Heat for his examination. And one of the dominating changes which he discovers in himself after the passage of thirteen years is a sad falling off in brain-power. He is no longer able to read voraciously on the subject of Heat and Heat-engines. His technical library remains packed with grim neatness in his cabin book-case. When his juniors bring problems involving a quadratic equation he is stricken with a horrible fear lest the answer won’t come out. He looks through his old examination papers and echoes Swift’s melancholy sigh “Gad! What a genius I had when I wrote all that!” Most professional men, one is bound to suppose, become aware at periods of the gradual ossification of their intellects. And it is not always easy to retain a full consciousness of the compensating advantages of seniority in the face of this positive degeneration. One begins to watch carefully for errors where one used to go pounding to a finish with a full-blooded rush. One has a feeling of being overtaken; the young people of the next decade can be heard not far behind, and they seem to be offensively successful in business, in friendship, and in love. One has ceased to be interesting to the women of thirty and the men of forty. The achievement of years shrinks to depressing dimensions, and the real test is on. One becomes uncomfortably aware of the shrewd poke of Degas that “any one can have talent at twenty-five. The great thing is to have talent at forty.”

The reader is invited to assume, therefore, that the author, at twenty-five, was sufficiently talented and ambitious to read voraciously on Heat and a great many other subjects. That he did so he calls on Mrs. Honeyball to witness, since that lady was really concerned for his health and urged him not to work too hard “for fear of a break-down.” There was never any danger of a break-down, however. London was outside that window with 1472 carved below it, and at the first warning of fatigue the author would take hat and stick and fare forth in search of recreation and adventure. He would apologize to Mrs. Honeyball and her friends gathered in the little room below, where they were discussing what Mr. Honeyball described as “Christian Work.” Mr. Honeyball used to bring out this phrase with extraordinary vigour and emphasis, as though the very enunciation were a blow to the designs of Satan. The author heard, during a later voyage, that the Honeyballs did eventually give up the mundane job of supervising apartments and retired to a quiet sea-side town where they devoted themselves entirely to “Christian Work.”

It was on one of these evening strolls that the author became on speaking terms with the girl who ate a bun and a glass of milk for breakfast every morning. It is very easy to get acquainted with a virtuous girl in England—so easy that the foreigner is frequently bewildered or inclined to be suspicious of the virtue. It is a facility difficult to reconcile with our heavily advertised frigidity, our disconcerting habit of addressing a stranger as though some invisible third person (an enemy) just behind him were the object of our dignified disapproval. It may be explained by the fact that, from the middle classes downward, and excluding the swarms of immigrants in the large cities, we are a very old race, with a comprehensive knowledge of our own mentalities. One finds blond, blue-eyed Saxon children in East Anglia, and there are black-haired, brown-skinned people in the West Country who have had no foreign admixture to their Phoenician blood since the Norman Conquest. This makes for a certain solidarity of sentiment and a corresponding freedom of intercourse.

Not that Mabel would understand any of this if she heard it. She has a robust and coarse-textured mind curiously contrasted with her pale, delicate features and sombre black eyes. She was one of those people who seem suddenly to transmute themselves into totally different beings the moment one speaks to them. As the author did one evening, after peering absently through the window of a candy-store down near the railroad arch below Charing Cross, and seeing her sitting pensive behind the stacks of merchandise. She was very glad to see a familiar face and recognised the claim of the breakfast-hour with a tolerant smile and a cheerful nod. It is very easy, while talking to Mabel, to understand why there is no native opera in England, and a very powerful native literature. Opera can only prosper where the emotional strain between the sexes is so heavy that it must be relieved by song and gesture. We have nothing of that in England. Women, more even than men, distrust themselves and eschew the outward trappings of romance. But this makes for character, so that our friends and relatives appear to us like the men and women in novels. Mabel was like that. She walked in and out of half a dozen books which the author had recently read. And her importance in this preface lies in the illumination she shed upon this same subject of literature. The author at that time, as will be seen in the following pages, was addicted to fine writing and he held the view that literature was for the cultured and made no direct appeal to the masses. Mabel unconsciously showed that this was a mistaken view. Mabel was as chock full of literature as a Russian novel. She had adventures everywhere. The author coming in and talking to her, after breakfasting in the same coffee-room, was an adventure. It would make a story, she observed with naïve candour. Only the other night, she remarked, a strange gentleman came, a foreigner of some sort, and asked for chocolates. A very entertaining gentleman with a bag, which he asked her to keep. No fear, she observed; no bombs or things in her shop—take it to the cloak-room in the station. Well, he must have done so, for they got it out of there after his arrest. Here was his photograph in the Sunday paper. Millions of francs he’d stole. Like a novel, wasn’t it? The author said it was, very, and begged for more. He said she ought to write them down. Mabel looked grave at this and said she had a fellow ... splendid education he had had. Was in the Prudential. Her voice grew low and hesitating. He was going to give it up! Give up the Prudential? But that was a job for life, wasn’t it? Ah, but he had it in him.... It appeared that he had won five pounds for a story. It was wonderful the way he wrote them off. In his spare time. And poetry. He was really a poet, but poetry didn’t pay, the author was given to understand. So he wrote stories. Some people made thousands a year.

This was all very well from Mabel’s point of view, but the author did not want to go into the vexed question of royalties. He wanted, on the contrary, to know Mabel’s feelings towards the coming Maupassant of North London. Did she love him? Or rather, to put the matter in another way, did he love her? Was he permitted that supreme privilege? Well, they had been going round together, on and off, this nine months now. As for being engaged ... he only got two pound a week as yet, remember. Yes, that was why she wanted him to go in for this writing and make a hit. She’d take it on and make ends meet somehow, if he did that. She could help him. He said she had some good ideas, only they wanted working out. And here was a secret—he’d written a play! Mabel leaned over the candy jars and whispered this dreadful thing in the author’s ear. A friend of theirs had seen it—he was at one of the theatres in the electrical department and knew all the stars—and he said it was very good but needed what he called pulling together! If only a reliable person in the play-writing line could be found to do this pulling together, there might be a fortune in it.

The reader may be disturbed at Mabel’s insistence upon the financial possibilities of literature, but in this she was only a child of her time. The point worthy of note is not her rapacity but the dexterity with which she utilized literature to further her ambition. She was identifying herself with literature and so fortifying her position. She was really far better fitted to be the wife of a fictionist than Imogene. And she could appreciate poetry addressed to herself. The author eventually saw some of it for a moment, written on sermon paper, but the stanzas shall remain forever vibrating in his own bosom. She is memorable to the author, moreover, in that she brought home to him for the first time the startling fact that every such woman is, in a sense, an adventuress. She never knows what will happen next. She is in the grip of incalculable forces. She has to work with feverish haste to make herself secure and to use even such bizarre instruments as literature in the pursuit of safety. Back in his tiny chambers over the old Gate of Cliffords Inn, the author meditated darkly upon that play that only required “pulling together” to make it the nucleus of a fortune. Evidently, he reflected, there were determined characters about, aided and inspired by equally determined young women, battering upon the gates of Fame, and he felt his own chances of success against such rivals were frail indeed. So he went to sea again.

Here, in one short sentence, is the gist of this book, that the sea is a way of escape from the intolerable burden of life. A cynic once described it as having all the advantages of suicide without any of its inconveniences. To the author it was more than that. It was the means of finding himself in the world, a medium in which he could work out the dreams which beset him and which were the basis of future writings. But ever at the back of the mind will there be the craving to get out beyond the bar, to see the hard, bright glitter of impersonal land-lights die suddenly in the fresh gusts, and to leave behind the importunate demands of business, of friendship, and of love.

“From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free.”

The words hummed in his brain as he ascended the stone stairs of the gaunt building in Mark Lane to face the final ordeal of a viva voce examination before the Head Examiner. There had been a hurried consultation in whispers in the great examination room. In a far corner was a glazed, portioned-off space where sat the regular examiner with a perspiring candidate in front of him, tongue-tied and weary. And there were a dozen more waiting. So the author was informed in a whisper that he had better step upstairs and the Head Examiner would deal with him. And settle his hash quickly enough, thought the author as he sprang nimbly up behind the assistant examiner. He found himself in a large, imposing office where at an immense desk sat a man with a trim beard, rapidly scanning a mass of papers. The author immediately became absorbed in the contemplation of this person, for he bore an extraordinary resemblance to George Meredith. The head in profile was like a Sicilian antique, with the clear-cut candour of a cameo. Memories of Lord Ormont and His Aminta crowded upon the waiting victim and he found himself almost hysterical with curiosity as to what would happen if he claimed to be a distant connection of Sir Willoughby Patterne, but without the historic leg. What if he led the conversation gently towards Richard Feverel’s perfect love-story, or alluded to a lady with whom he will always remain in love—Diana of the Crossways? But nothing of the sort happened. The author was nodded curtly to a seat, the assistant examiner chose another chair close by, cleared his throat, shot his cuffs, and pulled up the knees of his trousers. The Head Examiner, without looking up or desisting from his rapid writing, began to express his deep regret that the author apparently preferred to work an evaporator under a pressure instead of a vacuum. There might possibly be some reason for this which he, the Examiner, had overlooked, and he would appreciate it if the author could so far unbend as to outline his experience in this business. Whereupon the Head Examiner proceeded with his writing and left the author, in a state of coma, facing an expectant assistant examiner, who resembled some predatory bird only waiting for life to be extinct before falling upon the victim. Somewhat to his own surprise, however, the victim showed signs of returning animation, and began to utter strange, semi-articulate noises. The Head Examiner wrote on with increasing speed; the assistant examiner, somewhat disappointed, still preserved an expectant air. The victim became more active, and astounded himself by carrying the war into the enemy’s camp. He announced himself as an adherent of the pressure method. He became eloquent, describing his tribulations working an evaporator on a vacuum. But the aim of examiners apparently is not to hear what one knows but to reveal to a shocked world what one does not know. The subject was immediately changed to the advantages of multi-polar generators and the ethics of the single-wire system. The assistant examiner reluctantly resigned any thoughts of an immediate banquet upon the author’s remains and assumed an attitude of charitable tolerance, much as one watches an insect’s valorous struggles to get out of the molasses. The Head Examiner from time to time interjected a short, sharp question, like a lancet into the discussion, but without looking up or ceasing to write with extreme rapidity. And as time went on and the whole range of knowledge was gone over in the attempt to destroy him, the author began to wonder whether these men thought he had, like Lord Bacon, taken all knowledge for his province, whether tramp steamers carried a crew of technical pundits, and whether there would be so many literary men and women about if they had to go through this sort of thing. And the thought of literature brought back George Meredith to mind again, only to be dismissed. It was much more like being examined by Anthony Trollope or Arnold Bennett, the author decided, than by Meredith. Appearances are misleading. The thin, classical face never roused from its down-cast repose and implacable attention. But at long last the assistant examiner shuffled his papers and remained silent for a moment, as though regretfully admitting that the victim was, within bounds, omniscient, and could not be decently tortured any longer. As an after thought, however, and glancing at the Head Examiner as he did so, he enquired whether the author had experienced any break-downs, accidents, smashes....

The author had. It was a subject upon which he was an authority, having served in a ship twenty-five years old with rotten boilers and perishing frames. And all unwittingly he became reminiscent and drifted into the story of a gale in the Bristol Channel with the empty ship rolling till she showed her bilge keels, the propeller with its boss awash thrashing the sea with lunatic rage, and then the three of us swaying and sweating on the boiler-tops, a broken main-steam pipe lying under our feet. And it had to be done, for the tide and the current were taking us up to Lundy, where half-tide rocks would soon cook our goose, as the saying is. And as he grew absorbed in the tale the author observed out of the corner of his eye that the Head Examiner’s pen paused and then was gently laid down, a new expression of alertness, as though about to deliver judgment, came over the finely cut features. And presently, as it was explained how an iron collar was made and clamped about the broken pipe, and long bolts made to pass into the solid flanges of the valve below, to haul the pipe into its socket and hold it there by main force until we could get in, the Head Examiner turned in his chair, and nodded as he touched his beard lightly with one finger. It was about four in the morning when the job was finished, the author recalled, and he came up on to the wet deck, with low clouds flying past and Lundy an ominous shadow behind, while the dawn lifted beyond the Welsh Mountains and the jolly, homely lights of Swansea shone clear ahead. And as he paused and remarked that the repair proved to be effective, he saw something else in the face of the man watching him, something not seen before, something not very easy to describe. But it may be said to have marked another step in his career. Call it character, and the perception of it. Something, as the reader will see, that is only emerging in the pages of this book. Something harsh and strong-fibred, nurtured upon coarse food and the inexorable discipline of the sea. Something that is the enemy of sloth and lies and the soft languors of love. Indeed, what the author has finally to say after all may be comprised in this—that out of his experience, which has been to a certain degree varied, he has come to the conviction that this same character, the achievement and acceptance of it, stands out as the one desirable and indispensable thing in the world, and neither fame nor wealth nor love can furnish any adequate substitute for it.

S. S. Turrialba, August, 1920.

William McFee.

PREFACE[A]

As I sit, this hot July day, by my window on the Walk, while the two streams, of traffic and of Thames, drift past me, I think of the man who was my friend, the man who loved this scene so well.

And he is dead. In my hand, as I write, lie his last written words, a hasty scribble ere the steamer left port on her voyage across the Atlantic. He is busy, as is evident by the greasy thumb-mark on the corner. He sat down in the midst of his work to send a last line to his friend. There is the inevitable joke at the expense of “his friend the Mate,” that individual being in a towering passion with a certain pig which had escaped from his enclosure. This same pig, he declares, is some previous First Officer, who had been smitten by Circe for incontinence, and now wanders even from his sty! But I cannot go on in this way, for he is dead, poor lad, and I shall not see him again.

To those men who have wedded early I can never hope to explain the deep-rootedness of such a friendship as ours. It was, to me, as though my own youth were renewed in more perfect design. Never again shall I experience that exquisite delight with which one sees a youth reach post after post along the ways of life and thought, reach out eagerly to field on field of knowledge, through which one has tramped or scampered so many years before. With something of wonder, too, was I inspired to see so young a man lead a life so perfectly balanced, so exquisitely sensitive to every fine masculine influence. Possessing to an unusual degree that rare temperament which we call culture, he entered joyously into all that life offered to him, impatient only of hypocrisy and what he called “the copiously pious.” Many misunderstood this phase of his character, mistaking for coarseness what was really a very fine love of honesty in thinking.

Of his antecedents I have often wished to know something, but it was his whim to treat personal details in a very general way. He would maintain obstinately that he himself was the most interesting person he had ever met, because, he would add, he knew so little about himself! When pressed, he would say, “My forefathers plowed the soil, my father plowed the ocean, I myself am the full corn in the ear.” As to his childhood, he rarely mentioned it save in a cynical manner, indicating indisputably enough that all had not gone well.

“In the beginning,” I heard him tell a religious person, “In the beginning my mother bore me. When I was a child I was wont to bore my mother. Now we bore each other.” That this was primarily intended to shock our friend’s devotional sensibilities I do not doubt, but I imagine it contained some small truth all the same. I think he rather shrank from personalities, resolutely refusing even to be photographed, hating that process with an unexampled vehemence strange in one so modern and so versed in mechanical and chemical science. “I!” he would rage. “What have I done to merit portraiture? Have I builded a city, or painted a masterpiece, or served my country, or composed an iliad?” Again, “Better a single faulty human effort than the most perfect photograph ever developed.”

Scanty indeed, therefore, did I find the materials with which to fashion an introduction to this book. With the exception of one or two pertinent fragments among his manuscripts, fragments more valuable to a critic than a biographer, I was unrewarded. One thing, however, was impressed upon me by my search. Here, at any rate, was a man developed to the full. Here was a man whose culture was deep and broad, whose body was inured to toil, whose hands and brains were employed in doing the world’s work. I have read in books vehement denials of such a one’s existence. He himself, in citing Ruskin, seemed to be sceptical of any one man becoming a passionate thinker and a manual worker. But I have often heard him in close converse with some old shopmate, passing hour after hour in technical reminiscences and descriptions; then, upon the entrance of some artist or litterateur, plunge into the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or the Charybdis of foolish humility.

I must insist on this fact at all events: he was not merely a clever young man of modern ideas. “London is paved and bastioned with clever young men,” he would snarl. His aversion to the impossible type of cultured nonentities was almost too marked. His passion for thinking as an integral part of life placed him beyond these, among a rarer, different class of men, the lovers of solitude. It came to view in various ways, this fine quality of intellectual fibre. And, indeed, he—who had in him so much that drove him towards the fine Arts, yet could go out to earn his bread upon the waters, dwelling among those who had no glimmering of the things he cared for—was no slippered mouther of Pater and Sainte-Beuve but a strong spirit, confident in his own breadth of pinion, courageous to let Fate order his destiny.

Another outcome of my search for light was a conviction of the importance of his theory of art. I might almost say his religion of art, inasmuch as he had no traffic with anything that was not spontaneous, effervescing. To him a hammer and a chisel were actual and very real, and the plastic art appealed especially to him in its character of smiting. To smite from the stone, to finish with all a craftsman’s cunning care—there seemed to him real joy in this; and so I think he felt the influence of art dynamically, maintaining always that the life-force is also the art-force, and remains constant throughout the ages. So, I imagine, he reasoned when he wrote the following verses, only to fling them aside to be forgotten:

An Author, Sitting to a Sculptor, Speaks His Mind.

And yet you call yourself a sculptor, sir?
You with your tape a-trailing to and fro,
Jotting down figures, frowning when I stir,
Measuring me across the shoulders, so!
And yet you are an artist, they aver,
Heir to the crown of Michelangelo?
I cannot think—eh, what? I ought to think?
How will you have me? Shall I sit at ease,
Staring at nothing thro’ the eyelids’ chink,
Coining new words for old philosophies?
Aye, so I sit until the pale stars wink
And vanish ere the early morning breeze.
Sculpture is dead, I say! We have no men
To match the mighty masters of the past:
I’ve read, I’ve seen their works; the acumen
Of Learning on their triumph I have cast.
Divine! Colossal! Tongue nor pen
Can tell their beauty, O Iconoclast!
Ah, now you’re modelling—in the soft clay!
In that prosaic task where is the glow
Of genius, as in great Lorenzo’s day,
When, solitary in his studio,
Buonarotti, in his “terrible way,”
Smote swift and hard the marble, blow on blow?
One moment while I ask you, earnestly,
Where is the splendour of the Dorian gone,
The genius of him whose mastery
Outshines the classic grace of Sicyon,
Whose art can show Death lock’d with Life, the cry,
The shuddering moan of poor Laocoön?

The Sculptor continues to model swiftly while the sitter remains motionless, watching him.

That’s good, sir, good! I’ll wait till you have done:
We men of letters are a crabbéd race;
Often we’re blind with staring at the sun;
And when the evening stars begin their race,
We miss their beauty, we, who creep and run
Like beetles o’er a buried Greek god’s face.

I am reluctant to explain one of the main motifs of this young man’s life as “an unfortunate love affair.” Indeed, apart from his frank avowal of the wandering fever in his blood, I am grown to believe that it was the very reverse of unfortunate for him. It brought him, as such things do, face to face with Realities, and showed him, sharply enough, that at a certain point in a man’s life there is a Gate, guarded by the Fates, whose questions he must answer truthfully, or turn sadly aside into the vague thickets of an aimless existence. And never did there live a youth more sincere in his thought. I know nothing more typical of him than his resolute refusal to sit for his portrait until he had done something memorable. “What!” he would cry. “Why, the milk-man, who, I heard, has just had twins, is more worthy of that high honour than I. He has done something in the world!”

And now he is dead, and doing and not doing are beyond his power. That the sea whereon he was born should bring him his death was fitting. Often he would urge his horror, not of death, but of Christian burial. To be boxed up in the midst of mummeries and lies—he would start up and pace the floor, the sweat standing on his face. Grimly enough, Fate took him at his word, flung him suddenly into eternity, the rushing of the wind his only requiem, the coastwise lights and the morning star the only watchers of his end.

To the orthodox sentiment sudden death may seem a very horrible sort of end to a promising life. But, as I sit by my window on the Walk, while the tides of Thames and traffic flow swiftly by, and the blue evening mist comes down over the river, transforming dingy wharf and factory into fairy palace and phantom battlement, it seems to me that my friend died fitly and well, in the midst of Realities, recking little that the love he thought secure had passed irrevocably from him, but never swerving in fidelity to his mistress or devotion to his friend.

The air grows chilly, and night has fallen over the river.

Chelsea.

AN OCEAN TRAMP

I

This evening, as the Italian boatman rowed me across the harbour of Livorno, and the exquisite loveliness of the night enfolded me, I thought of you. It may be that the long curving line of lights which marked the Molo Nuovo reminded me of the Embankment by our windows, and so carried my mind on to him who waits for his Vanderdecken to return. Around me loomed the hulls of many steamers, their dark sides relieved by glowing port-holes, while across the water came the hoarse calls of the boatmen, the sound of oars, music, and the light laughter of women. Far down the harbour, near the Castello, a steamer’s winches rattled and roared in irregular gusts of noise. By the Custom House a steam yacht, gleaming ghostly white in the darkness, lay at rest. And so, as the boat slipped through the buoys, and the molten silver dripped from the oars, I thought of you, my friend at home, and of my promise that I would tell you of the life of men in a cargo-tramp.

I propose, as I go on from sea to sea, to tell, in the simplest language in my power, of the life that is around me, of the men among whom I toil. I shall not tell you of these fair towns of the Southern Sea, for you have travelled in years gone by. I shall not prattle of the beauties of Nature, for the prattle is at your elbow in books. But I shall—nay, must, for it is my use and habit—tell you about myself and the things in my heart. I shall be, not a hero talking about men, but a man talking about heroes, as well as the astonishing beings who go down to the sea in ships, and have their business in great waters.

To you, therefore, these occasional writings will be in somewise addressed. You are my friend, and I know you well. That alone is to me a mystic thread in the skein of my complex life, a thread which may not be severed without peril. You, moreover, know me well, or perhaps better, inasmuch as I am but passing the periods of early manhood, while you are in the placid phases of an unencumbered middle-age. So, in speaking of the deep things of life, I may leave much to be taken for granted, as is fitting between friends.

I offer no apology, moreover, for the form of these Letters from an Ocean Tramp. Even if I unwisely endeavoured to hide their literary character under a disguise of colloquialisms and familiar references to personal intimacies, I should fail, because, as I have just said, you know me well. In your private judgments, I believe, I am allocated among those who are destined to set the Thames on fire. In plainer words, you believe that I have an ambition. This is true, and so I make no attempt to conceal from you the ulterior design of these essays. Ere you have read one of them, you will perceive that I am writing a book.

I shall take no umbrage at the failure of my communications to call forth replies. I know you to be a bad correspondent, but a valuable friend. I know that your attitude toward a letter addressed to you is that of a mediæval prince toward a recalcitrant prisoner—viz., get all the information possible out of him, and then commit him to the flames. Possibly, when I have attained to a deeper knowledge of the spirit of the Middle Ages, I shall also have discovered the motives for this curious survival of barbarism in your character. I can only hope humbly that these papers, armed with their avowed literary import, will not share the fate of the commoner envoys passing through your hands, but will be treated as noble ambassadors rather than as hapless petitioners, not merely escaping the flames of oblivion, but receiving safe conduct, courteous audience, and honourable lodging.

II

I suppose we may say of everyone, that he sooner or later falls a victim to the desire to travel, with as much truth as we say, far more often, that he falls a victim to love. However that may be, I claim no special destiny when I say that I have been mastered by both passions, except perhaps that they culminated in my case simultaneously.

I must go back to the time when I was some six years old to find the first faint evidences of the rover in me. At that time we lived almost at the foot of that interminable thoroughfare, the Finsbury Park Road, next door to a childless dame whose sole companion was a pug of surpassing hideousness of aspect, and whose sole recreation was a morning stroll in Finsbury Park with this pug. How I came to form a third person in these walks I cannot quite remember but I can imagine. At the age of six I was a solemn child, unclean in habits, consorting with “grown-ups,” and filled with an unsocial hatred for the baby whose matutinal ablutions were consummated at the same hour at which the old lady usually took her walk. I can remember that I was supposed to assist in some way at those ablutions, probably to hold the mottled soap, which curiously resembled the infant’s limbs when pinched with cold; and so, I suppose, I would steal out and join the lady and her dog, walking a little to one side as we drifted slowly up the dull suburban street into the park. Sometimes we went as far as the lake, and I have faint memories of a bun, purchased by the dame, and munched by me as we watched the gardeners trimming the beds. I do not wish to suggest that this lady was my first love—I have never carried my senophile proclivities to that extent. She was, to me, the antithesis of mottled soap and cradle-rocking, and as such she lives in my memory. I am also grateful to her for giving me my first glimpse of a world outside the front door; an ugly world, it is true, a world of raucous bargaining and ill-bred enjoyment, but a world nevertheless.

Why should I tell of so trivial an incident? Bear with me a moment.

Since I have been at sea I have often reflected upon the fact that many phases of my life are even now going on, quite heedless of my absence, quite apathetic of my very existence, in fact. How marvellous, it seems to me, to know that life at my old school is proceeding upon exactly the same lines as when I was there! At this moment I can see, in imagination, the whole routine; and I can tell at any time what the school is doing. Again, I know precisely the goings-in and the comings-out of all the staff at my old employer’s; picture to myself with ease what is happening at any instant. More wonderful still, I know what my friend is doing at this moment. I know that he is seated in his room at the Institute, talking to our friends (perchance of me), ere they descend to their lectures at seven o’clock. At ten, while I am “turned in,” he will be leaving the Institute, and the ’bus will put him down at his favourite hostelry. At this moment he is smoking a cigarette! But then, of course, he is always smoking a cigarette!

It is a far cry from a stealthy stroll with an old woman in Finsbury Park to a twenty-thousand-mile tramp in a freighter, and yet one is the logical outcome of the other, arrived at by unconscious yet inevitable steps. Listen again.

At a later period, when I had discovered that tools were a necessary complement to my intellectual well-being, I brought my insatiable desire to make something to the assistance of my equally insatiable desire to go somewhere. From a sugar-box and a pair of perambulator wheels I fashioned a cart, between the shafts of which I travelled many leagues into the wilds of Middlesex and Essex. “Leagues” must be understood in the sense in which Don Quixote would have used the word. I do not suppose I ever traversed more than eight or ten miles at a time. But never, while the desire to go out and see is living within me, shall I forget how, one breathless August day, when the air was heavy with the aroma of creosoted sleepers, my small brother and I stared through the gates of a level crossing, and saw Epping Forest in the blue distance! O phantoms of Cortes, Balboa, and De Soto, wert thou there? O Sir Francis, hadst thou that thrill when

“Drake went down to the Horn,
And England was crowned thereby”?

But I grow magniloquent. My object is attained if I can but show that when my friend took me under his wing at the Institute long years agone, when the innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without incongruity, drifted away from text-books of mechanics, and sat down with Schiller, Ducoudray, and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a spirit there boiled under that demure disguise of retiring scholarship—a spirit fired with an untamable passion for looking over the back-garden wall!

Even perambulator wheels give out, however. I forget whether the wheels of my little cart failed before my mother’s patience, or the reverse. I was growing away from those tiny journeys; my head bulged with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish acquired during long hours of unsociable communion with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew the date of Evil Merodach’s accession to the Assyrian throne, but I did not know who killed Cock Robin. I knew more than Keats about the discovery of the Pacific, but I did not know Keats. I knew exactly how pig-iron was smelted, but I did not know the iron which enters into the soul. I knew how to differentiate between living and non-living matter, but I did not know that I was alive. Then a new heaven and a new hell opened before me; I was sent away to school.

Concerning school and, after school, apprenticeship, I shall not speak. Neither mind nor body can wander far in those humane penitentiaries called schools. I had fed myself with History since I had learned, painfully enough, to read, and here at school I found I knew nothing. What did it matter? The joy of knowing the name of the wife of Darius, of Lucan, of Cæsar, was mine alone. I wove stories about Roxana and Polla, but I doubt if any one ever wove stories about the Conventicle Act, or the Petition of Rights, or the Supremacy of the Pope, as told in a school history. I often wonder that boys do not grow up to hate their country, when they are gorged with the horrible trash in those yellow volumes.

I once read of a little boy who killed himself after reading “The Mighty Atom.” I believe many people deplored this, and expressed aversion to the book in consequence. That is proper; but suppose the school history had related the story of “The Little Princes in the Tower” with the same power and intensity which Corelli employs in the “Atom,” and suppose the little boy had been so overwhelmed with the horror and vividness of the historical perspective that he had hanged himself behind the fourth-form classroom door—well, then, I should say the remainder of the boys would have learned the reign of Richard the Third as it has never been learned before or since, and the unhappy suicide would not have died in vain.

But, as I said, one cannot wander far at school. A schoolmaster once advised his colleagues to take up some literary hobby—essay writing, articles for the press, etc.; for, said he, teaching is a narrowing profession. I wonder if any schoolmaster has ever imagined how narrowing it is for the boys? Have they never seen the look of abject boredom creep over the faces of even clever lads as the “lesson” drones on: “At this period the Gothic style of architecture arose, and was much used in Northern Europe for ecclesiastical buildings.” And so on, including dates. Whose spirit would not fail? Why not, oh, my masters, why not use this inborn passion for wandering abroad of which I write? Why not take that jaded band of youths out across yon fields, take them to the village church, and show them grinning gargoyle and curling finial, show them the deep-cut blocks of stone, show them, on your return, a picture of the Rue de la Grosse Horloge at Rouen? Would your trade be narrowing then?

III

But the sea!

My friend asked me once, of the Mediterranean—Is it really blue? And I replied that I could give him no notion of the colour of it. And that is true. From the real “sea-green” of the shallow North Sea to the turquoise-blue of the Bay; from the grey-white rush of the Irish Sea to the clear-cut emerald of the Clyde Estuary; from the colourless, oily swell of the Equatorial Atlantic to the paraffin-hued rollers of the Tropic of Cancer, the sea varies as human nature itself. To the artist, I imagine, no two square miles are alike, no two sunsets, no two sunrises:

“His sea in no showing the same,
His sea, yet the same in all showing.”

As I climbed the steep side of the almost-empty steamer, lying at the Tyne-main Buoys, a keen, alert, bearded face looked over the gunwale above me. I stepped aboard and spoke to the owner of this face. I said, “Is the Chief aboard?”

“He is not.”

“Is the Captain aboard?”

“He is not.”

“Then who is aboard?”

“The Mate’s aboard.”

“Are you the Mate?”

“I am that.”

“My name is McAlnwick. I am signing on with this steamer.”

“Ye’re welcome.” And we shook hands.

He is the very image of my old Headmaster, is this mate of the Benvenuto. The trim beard, the keen, blue, deep-set eyes, the smile—how often have I seen them from my vantage-point at the bottom of the Sixth Form! On his head is an old uniform cap with two gold bands and an obliterated badge. He wears a soiled mess-jacket with brass buttons in the breast-pocket of which I see the mouthpiece of a certain ivory-stemmed pipe. His hands are in his trouser pockets, and he turns from me to howl into the cavernous hold some directions to the cargo-men below. In the gathering gloom of a short January afternoon, with the rush and roar of the winches in my ears, I stumble aft to my quarters, thinking pleasantly of my first acquaintance.

And our friendship grows as we proceed. When we have slipped out of the Tyne one grey evening, when the lights of Shields and Sunderland die away, we are friends. For, as I prophesied, my whiskey would open hearts. It was on a cold, bleak morning, ere we left Newcastle, that I heard a stealthy step down the stairs to my room, and a husky whisper—had I a nip o’ whiskey? Yes, I had a nip. The bottle is opened, and I fill two glasses. Evidently the First Officer is no believer in dilution. With a hushed warning of “Ould Maun!” as a dull snoring comes through the partition, he tosses my whiskey “down his neck,” rubs his stomach, and vanishes like—like a spirit! Later in the day, as I stare across at some huge ships-of-war (for we are opposite Elswick now), I hear a voice, a hearty voice, at my elbow.

“Thank ye, Mister McAlnwick, for the whiskey. ’Twas good!”

I express my pleasure at hearing this. He touches me on the shoulder.

“Come down to me berth this evening,” he says, “an’ we’ll have a nip.” And I promise.

Perhaps it is the sensation of drinking whiskey with my Headmaster’s double, but I enjoy creeping down the companion-way to the Mate’s room. And I, being of the true line of descent, with my father held in memory still, am welcome. I am taken into this old sea-dog’s confidence, and we talk. I have learnt, I think, the delicate art of asking questions of the men who do the world’s work. Perhaps because I have dwelt so long with them, because I love them truly, they tell me the deep things of their lives. And so you must picture me in the Mate’s room, seated on his settee, while he loads my knees with photographs of his wife and children. This is Jack, son and heir, in his Boys’ Brigade uniform. He has a flute, too, which he “plays beautiful, Mr. McAlnwick—beautiful!” Then there is Madge, a sweet little English maid of fourteen, with a violin: “Her mother to the life.” “Dot” follows, with only her big six-year-old eyes looking out of curls which are golden. And the Baby on his mother’s knee—but I cannot describe babies. To me they are not beautiful creatures. They always seem to me, in photographs, to be stonily demanding why they have been born; and I, wretched man that I am, cannot answer them, for I do not know. Calypso, too, not “eternally aground on the Goodwin Sands of inconsolability,” interests me, in that I also was mothered of a sea-wife. A hard life, I imagine, a hard life. I find no delight in the sea in these mariners. “A Life on the Ocean Wave” was not written by one who earned his bread from port to port. My friend the Mate (he has gone on watch now, so I may speak freely) lives for the future. He holds a master’s ticket, yes; but commands do not come to all. He lives for the time when the insurance money falls in, when he will sit down in the little house in Penarth where the sun warms the creeper on the back-garden wall. He will keep chickens, and perhaps there will be a cucumber frame between the peas and the vegetable patch, and he will do a little gardening when the weather is fine, and smoke, and read the shipping news. “And there shall be no more sea.”

Not that I would give you to think that a Chief Officer’s life is one of toil. Indeed, on a steamship, while at sea, he has little to do. His “watch” is a sinecure save in thick weather, and is usually occupied by day with sundry odd jobs, by night with thoughts of home. In port he is busy like everybody else; but at sea, in fine weather, his greatest grievance is the short hours “off” and “on.” Our steamer carries but two deck officers, and these two keep alternate “watch and watch” throughout the twenty-four hours. This means that his watch below is all sleep. The Chief Officer comes off at eight p.m., say, washes himself, smokes a pipe, and “turns in.” At eleven-forty-five the sailor coming on watch at the wheel calls him, and he “turns out.” Nothing can equal the ghastly expression on the faces of men who have been torn from their sleep at an unnaturally premature hour. They move along the iron decks like ghosts, peering into one’s face like disembodied spirits seeking their corporeal correlatives, and avoiding stanchions, chains, and other pitfalls in an uncanny fashion. In the meantime, the Second Officer drifts “aft” to his bunk for another four-hour sleep. And so on, day after day, for weeks.

IV

I have this, at any rate, to say of sea-life: a man is pre-eminently conscious of a Soul. I feel, remembering the blithe positivism of my early note, that I am here scarcely consistent. As I stood by the rail this morning at four o’clock—the icy fingers of the wind ruffled my hair so that the roots tingled deliciously, and a low, greenish cloud-bank, which was Ireland, lay nebulously against our port bow—I felt a change take place. It was almost physical, organic. The dawn grew whiter, and the rose-pink banners of the coming sun reached out across the grey wastes of the St. George’s Channel. I am loth to use the trite metaphor of “a spiritual dawn.” By a strange twist of things, my barest hint of a soul within me, that is to say, the faintest glimmer of the ever-increasing purpose of my being—the moment it showed through, the outer world, including my own self, had always greeted it with inextinguishable laughter. Perhaps because the purpose was always so very immature, so very uncertain. I wanted—I hardly knew what. My ideas of morality were so terrible that I left it alone, on one side, for a time, and charged full tilt at art. I shouted that I thought music a disease, and musicians crushed me. I did not mean that; but I could get no nearer to what I did mean in any other phrase. I told hard, practical business men that they were dreamers and visionaries; and they are still dreaming.

But the Angel of the Spirit does not move in any prescribed path, or make his visits to any time-table. I think I heard the far-off beating of his wings this morning, as we swept up-channel towards the Clyde, and I think I was promised deeper knowledge of Love and Life than heretofore. I know that with the dawn came a sense of infinite power and vision, as though the cool wind were the rushing music of the spheres, and the rosy cloudland the outer portals of the Kingdom of God.

And, indeed, I have had my reward. I had come from Italy, where I had wandered through churches and galleries, and had seen the supreme excellence of a generation whose like we shall not see again, and as we came up that stately firth and discovered a generation as supreme in their art as the Italians of the sixteenth century were in theirs, I held my breath.

From Greenock to Glasgow resounded the clangour of hammers and the thunder of mechanism. Plate by plate, rivet by rivet, and beam by beam, there grew before my very eyes the shapes of half a hundred ships. I see more clearly still, now, what I meant by insisting on the conservation of intellectual energy. My friend points piteously to past periods, and says, “They can’t do it now, old man.” And I smile and point to those steel steamships, growing in grace and beauty as I watch, and I say, “They couldn’t do that then, old man!” Just as the physical energy in this universe is a definite totality, so is the intellectual or spiritual energy. The Da Vinci of to-day leaves his Last Supper undepicted; but he drives a Tube through the London clay. Cellini no longer casts a Perseus and alternates a murder with a Trattato; he builds engines and railroads and ships. Michael Angelo smites no sibyls from the living stone, but he has carved the face of the very earth to his design. And though no fair youth steps forth to paint the unearthly nimbus-light around the brows of his beloved madonna, I count it fair exchange that from every reef and point of this our sea-girt isle there shines a radiance none can watch without a catching of the breath.

V

It is a far call from such musings to the Skipper, whom I encountered as I was in the midst of them. It is only the bald truth to say that I had not then considered him to be a human being. Even now I am uncertain how to describe him, for we do not meet often. He is a tall, powerfully built, slow-moving man, strong with the strength of those who live continually at sea. Something apart from temporary bias made me look distastefully upon his personality. I resolved to fasten it upon my dissecting board, and analyse it, relegating it if possible to its order, genus, and species. Let me try.

A single glance at the specimen before us, gentlemen, tells us that we have to deal with a remarkable case of arrested development. Although inexperienced observers might imagine traces of the British colonel, as found in Pall Mall, in the bristling white moustache, swollen neck, and red gills, we find neither public school education nor inefficiency much in evidence anywhere. On the contrary, education is in a rudimentary condition, though with slightly protuberent mathematical and fictional glands. Inefficiency, too, is quite absent, the organ having had but small opportunity to perform its functions. The subject, we may conclude, gentlemen, has been accustomed to a sort of mathematical progression and having to ascertain its whereabouts in the water by “taking the sun.” It has been fed chiefly on novels, food which requires no digestive organs. It has a horror of land generally, and should never be looked for “on the rocks.” You observe this accumulation of yellow tissue round the heart. The subject is particularly fond of gold, which metal eventually strangles the heart and renders its action ineffective and unreliable.

Longfellow, if I remember rightly, drew a very spirited comparison between the building and launching of a ship and the building and launching of a state. The state, said he, is a ship. M-yes, in a poetical way. But no poetry is needed to say that a ship is a state. I maintain that it is the most perfect state yet conceived; and it is almost startling to think that so perfect an institution as a ship can be run successfully without morality, without honesty, without religion, without even ceremonial—without, in fact, any of those props usually considered by Tories and Nonconformists to be so vital to the body-politic.

For, observe, here on this ship we have some forty human beings, each of whom has certain clearly defined duties to perform, each of whom owes instant and absolute obedience to his superior officer; each of whom receives a definite amount of food, drink, tobacco, and sleep per day; each of whom is bound for a certain period to remain in the state, but is free to go or stay when that period terminates; each of whom is at liberty to be of any persuasion he please, of any political party he please, to be of any nationality he please, provided he speak the language of the state; each of whom is medically attended by the state; and, finally, each of whom can snap his fingers at every Utopia-monger since Plato, and call him a fool who makes paradises for other fools to dwell in. So, I say, the ship is a perfect state, its very perfection being attested by the desire of its inhabitants to end their days elsewhere.

Joking aside, though, I fear my notions of sailor-men have been sadly jarred since I began to study them. Writing with one eye on this master-mariner of ours, I call to mind certain conceptions of the sailor-man which my youthful mind gathered from books and relations. He was an honest, God-fearing man; slightly superstitious certainly, slightly forcible in his language at times, slightly garrulous when telling you about the Sarah Sands; but all these were as spots on the sun. He was just and upright towards all men, never dreamed of making money “on his own,” and read prayers aloud on Sunday morning to the assembled seamen.

Humph! I own I cannot imagine this skipper reading anything aloud to his crew except the Riot Act, and he would not get more than half-way through that if his cartridges were dry. There is a brutal, edge-of-civilization look in his cold blue eye which harmonizes ill with the Brixton address on the letters he sends to his wife.

Ah, well! Sometimes, when I think of this man and his like, when I think of my puny attempts to creep into their skins, I must need laugh, lest, like Beaumarchais, I should weep. What, after all, do I know of him? What is there in my armoury to pierce this impenetrable outer-man? Once, when I was Browning-mad, I began an epic. Yes, I, an epic! I pictured the hordes of civilisation sweeping over an immense and beautiful mountain, crushing, destroying, manufacturing, and the burden of their cry was a scornful text of Ruskin’s—“We do not come here to look at the mountain”; and they shouted, “Stand aside.” And then, when the mountain lay blackened, and dead, and disembowelled, out of the hordes of slaves came a youth who would not work and thereby lose his soul; so he set out on a pilgrimage. And the burden of his song was “the hearts of men.”

“And the cry went up to the roofs again,
Show me the way to the hearts of men.”

But, alas! by the time I had got back into blank verse again, he had fallen in love, and as far as I know he lived happy ever after. But I often think of his clear, boyish voice singing, “Show me the way to the hearts of men.”

Gilbert Chesterton, whose genius I hope my friend will some day appreciate, once wrote a strange “crazy tale,” in which he meets a madman who had stood in a field; and this seemingly silent pasture had presented to his ears an unspeakable uproar. And he says, “I could hear the daisies grow!” Well, I have sometimes thought of that when in some roaring street of London. Could I but hear men and women think as they pass along! To what a tiny hum would the traffic fall when that titanic clangour met my ears! I imagine Walter Pater had this thought in mind when he says, so finely, of young Gaston de Latour: “He became aware, suddenly, of the great stream of human tears, falling always through the shadows of the world.”

How good that is! But, alas! So few read Pater. It is true men cannot possibly read everything. To quote another exquisite thinker, who I fear drops more and more into oblivion: “A man would die in the first cloisters” if he tried to read all the books of the world. But it is strange so few read those eight or nine volumes, so beautifully printed, which are Pater’s legacy to us. How they would be repaid by the delicate dexterity of his art, the wonderful music of his style! But I digress.

I have no doubt that many monarchs would envy the life of a steamship captain at sea. Indeed, his duties are non-existent, his responsibility enormous. He bears the same relation to his company that a Viceroy of India bears to the Home Government. So extended were his powers that he could take the steamer into a port, sell her cargo, sell the vessel herself, discharge her crew, and disappear for ever. It is a sad pill for us sentimentalists that those who live by and on the sea have less sentiment than any others. These masters are wholly intent on the things of which money is the exchange. They have never yet seen “the light that never was, on sea or land.” Their utmost flight above “pickings” and “store commissions” is a morose evangelicalism, a sort of ill-breeding illumined by the smoky light of the Apocalypse. But they never relax their iron grasp on this world. Perhaps because they feel the supernal tugging at them so persistently they hold the tighter to the tangible. They are ashamed, I think, to let any divinity show through. “And ye shall be as gods” was not uttered of them. The romance—that is the word!—the romance of their lives is never mirrored in their souls. And the realisation of this has sometimes led me to imagine that—it was always so! I mean that there was nothing poetic to Hercules about the Augean task, when the pungent smell of ammonia filled his nostrils, and he bent a sweat-dewed face to that mighty scavenging once more: that there was nothing poetic to Cæsar about the Rubicon: nothing poetic to Clive about India. The world seems to have an invincible prejudice against men who see the romance in the work they are doing. The footballing, cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works in an office in Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons’s, and plays football at Shepherd’s Bush, sees no romance in his own life, which is in reality thrilling with adventure, but thinks Captain Kettle the hero of an ideal existence. Captain Kettle, bringing coal from Dunston Staiths to Genoa, suffers day after day of boredom, and reads Marie Corelli and Hall Caine with a relish only equalled by the girl typewriters in the second-class carriages of the eight-fifteen up from Croydon or Hampstead Heath. These people cannot see the sunlight of romance shining on their own faces! I observe in myself a frantic resentment when I fail to convince the other officers that they are heroes. They regard such crazy notions as dangerous and scarcely decent. You can now perceive why religion occasionally gains such a hold upon these men. To be uplifted about work, or nature, or love, is derogatory to their dignity as bond-slaves of the industrial world; but in the realms of the infinite future, in the Kingdom of God, where “there shall be no more sea,” their souls break away from the harbour-mud, and they put out on the illimitable ocean of belief.

VI

It is so long since I set my hand to paper that I am grown rusty! I did not write you from Madeira—that is true. One cannot write from Madeira when “Madeira” means a plunging vortex of coal-dust, a blazing sun, and the unending roar of the winches as they fish up ton after ton of coal. Moreover, I was boarded by a battalion of fleas from the Spanish labourers in my vicinity—fleas that had evidently been apprenticed to their trade, and had been allowed free scope for the development of their ubiquitous genius. I looked at the old rascal who tallied the bags with me, envisaged in parchment, and clothed in picturesque remnants, and heard his croaking “Cincuo saco, Señor,” or “Cuarro saco, Señor,” as he bade me note the varying numbers on the hook, and I wondered inwardly whether the Holy Office had experimented during the sixteenth century with Spanish fleas, and so brought them to such an astonishing perfection in the administration of slow torture. Breeding, I take it, holds good with fleas as with horses, dogs, etc. Those born of parents with thicker mail, longer springs, harder proboscis, and greater daring in initiative, would doubtless be selected and encouraged, if I may say so, to go farther. It is possible that many famous recantations could be accounted for by this hypothesis. Galileo, for instance, probably had a sensitive epidermis which afforded an unlimited field for the exploitation of Spanish fleas, which formed, according to my theory, an indispensable item in the torture chest carried by the fraternity in Tuscany. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, I imagine to have been a dark-skinned heretic, tanned by travel and hardship, and regarding the aphanipterous insect with the sardonic contempt of one who had lived in England in the sixteenth century. His own gown probably contained....

I was roused from these musings by observing four bags come up on the hook, and hearing them saluted by my picturesque vis-à vis with “Cincuo saco, Señor!” I deserted my theory and hastened to point out the error of fact. He bowed his head in submission with all the haughty grace of Old Castile. When out at sea once more, I looked back along his ancestral line; I saw him in the days of old, marching through Italy with the Great Emperor, taking part in some murderous deed that cried to the law for vengeance, flying from Spain in a tall galleon to still more desperate work upon the high seas, settling in these pleasant islands with bloody booty in pieces of eight, drifting down and down to an adobe hut, and an occasional job as sub-deputy assistant stevedore to a British coal factor. Then he faded from my sight, and the life of an ocean tramp closed round me once more.

VII

Sailcloth and coal-dust being our equivalent for sackcloth and ashes, the steamer looks mournful indeed as she drives southward towards the Cape. But with lower latitudes comes warmer weather, and a sea so unutterably smooth that one loses faith in the agony of the Bay or the Gulf of Lyons, while the hellish frenzy of the North Atlantic in winter is a distemper of the brain. It is in such halcyon days that we begin to believe in paint. The decks are methodically chipped and scraped of their corroding rust, ventilators are washed and painted, and all the deck-houses are cleansed of a coating of coal-dust which seems appalling. As the days drone by the filth disappears; pots of red, white, brown, and black paint come out of the Mate’s secret store in the “fore-peak,” and one hears satirical approval from those below. “Like a little yacht, she is,” says one, and the Second Mate is asked if he has a R. Y. S. flag in the chart-room. I fear the wit who called the engine-room a whited sepulchre had some smack of truth in him. The Mate had given it an external coating of paint as white as the driven snow, and it needed no heaven-sent seer to perceive that within it was full of all uncleanness. But what would you? The engines do not run of themselves, though to say so is one of the navigator’s few joys in a world of woe. The ship herself knows better, I think, though perchance she is like us other mortals, and thinks her heart best unattended, and sees no connection between the twenty-five tons of coal she eats per day and the tiny clink which the speed recorder gives every quarter of a mile on the poop. We below, at any rate, know all this, for therein is the justification of our existence. And so our decorations must needs wait till we reach port, when the holds are in travail and the winches scream out their agony to the bare brown hills beyond the town and mingle with the deep, dull roar of the surf on the barrier reef.

And now let me describe my day at sea, as well as I am able. Different indeed from those I was wont to spend at home. No delicious hours in our pet hostelries; no Sundays with music and an open window looking out upon the river; no rollicking evenings in some dear old tumble-down studio; no midnight rambles towards home down the Fulham Road, where the ghostly women walk; no cosy talks round the fire when the fog lies white against the glass, while the candle-light glows on the tall, warm rose-wood book-case, and all is well with us. Nay, as eight-bells strikes ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting, and the hands of the clocks point to twelve midnight, I awake. Ten minutes before, George the Fourth, of whom I may tell more anon, switches on the light and punches me in the ribs. I turn over to sleep again, while he rummages in his berth for soap, towel, and clean shirt, and goes below. A gay, likeable lad is George the Fourth, with bonnie brown hair and steady blue eyes.

Mechanically I rise at twelve, hustle on my “dungarees,” and, sweat-rag in my teeth, I pass along the deck beneath the stars which dust the midnight dome. My friend the Mate is just ahead, as I vanish through a low-arched doorway which shows black against his white paint. Careful now; these stairs are steep, and the upward-rising air is like a gust of the “stormy blast of hell.” Round the low-pressure cylinder, then down again—and we are “below.”

The steady beat and kick has become a thunderous uproar; by the yellow light of the electrics you can see the engines—my engines for the next four hours. George is round by the pumps, stripped to the waist, washing. He has finished; on the black-board he has recorded his steam-pressure, his vacuum, his speed per minute, the temperature of his sea water, his discharge water, and feed water; but he cannot leave till I have thumbed all bearings, noted all water levels, tried the gauges, and see that bilges, pumps, thrust-block, tunnel-shaft, and stern-gland are all right. And while I do all this I try to make out the orchestration of the uproar as my friend would some tremendous Wagnerian clangour. Ah, what would he think of this, the very heart of things, if he were but here?

Does George the Fourth feel the romance of it? Not a bit. George the Fourth was pitch-forked into a marine engineering shop at the ripe age of thirteen. He is twenty-two now, and carnal minded. He wants “siller” for—well, not for the Broomielaw. He wants to go “east” again to Singapore, where the ladies of Japan are so charming and so cheap. The only hope for him is that he may fall in love. I pray without ceasing that he may fall in love. See the young pagan lounging round by the stokehold door. Now you will perceive what I argued as to the heroic nature of their lives.

“L.P. Top end is warm,” I observe reproachfully.

“’Twas red-hot when it came to me,” he exaggerates genially, putting a clay “gun” in his mouth, and adding:

“Chief says, clean Number Four smoke-boxes fore and aft yoore watch, an’ ta trimmers to tak’ nowt fra’ th’ thwart-ship boonkers.”

Then he swings away, climbing the stairs with one eye on the engine. A goodly youth, such as we admire; a magnificent young animal with possibilities.

And then the firemen. I stand under the ventilator—it is cooler—and I watch them toil. Think well upon it, my friend. These were men doing this while you were at your German University, while you were travelling over Europe and storing your mind with the best of all times. They are doing it now, will do it while you are at your work at the Institute. They have their business in the great waters. That little man there, with two fingers of his left hand gone, is Joe, a Welshman from his beloved Abertawe. Beyond him, again, the huge gaunt frame and battered deep-sea cap, the draggled military moustache surmounted by high cheek-bones, the long, thin, sinewy arms tattooed with French dancing-girls—where shall our knowledge of the nations place him? That is Androwsky, from Novorossisk, in South Russia. A vast, silent man, uttering but three or four words a day. His story? I cannot tell it, for he never speaks. In my poor way I have tried to get it in German, but it is no good. In the meantime he is almost the best fireman in the ship. Indeed, all my men are good. Scarcely ever do we have less than full steam at the end of the watch.

And now, my engines! To the uninitiated it is, I suppose, a tiresome, bewildering uproar. And yet every component, every note of this great harmony, has a special meaning for the engineer; moreover, the smallest dissonance is detected at once, even though he be almost ready to doze. So finely attuned to the music does the ear become that the dropping of a hammer in the stokehold, the rattling of a chain on deck, the rocking of a barrel in the stores, makes one jump. It is the same with the eye. It is even the same with the hand. We can tell in an instant if a bearing has warmed ever so slightly beyond its legitimate temperature. And so it is difficult to know “who is the potter and who the pot.” The man and the machine are inextricably associated, and their reflex actions, one upon the other, are infinite. It is this extraordinary intimacy, this ceaseless vigilance and proximity, that gives the marine engineer such a pull over all others where endurance and resource accompany responsibility. In all big power-stations you will find many men with long sea service in charge of the engines.

I remember arguing once with a matter-of-fact apprentice in the shop concerning the suburbs as suitable localities for such as he. He was not convinced. “There!” he said, slapping the shelf above his bench. “That’s where I’d like ter sleep. All yer gotter do at six o’clock is roll off and turn to!” Well, that is just what he would get at sea. In most steamers the engineer walks out of the mess-room, bathroom, or berth, into an alley-way on either side of the engine platform. The beat of the engines becomes part of his environment. He sleeps with it pulsing in his ears, so that if she slows or stops he opens his eyes. When I go up at four o’clock and call the Second Engineer, he will stretch, yawn, half open one eye, and mutter, “What’s the steam?”

To keep him awake I retail some piece of current engine gossip. “After-bilge pump jibbed at three o’clock,” I say. “Aw ri’ now?” he asks. “Yes, aw ri’ now,” I answer. “You’ll have to watch the M.P. guide though—she’s warm.” Then, remarking that the after-well is dry, and that I’ve got plenty of water in the boilers for him, I leave him and go below till he relieves me. It is a point of honour among us to know every kink and crotchet of day-to-day working. If a joint starts “blowing” ever so little away up in some obscure corner of our kingdom, we know of it within an hour or two. One would think we were a mothers’ meeting discussing our babies, to hear the grave tittle-tattle concerning the inevitable weakness of babies and engines which passes over the mess-room table.

Now come with me along the tunnel, then, to the end of the world. A narrow, sliding water-tight door in the bulkhead here, under the shadow of the thrust-block—elegance in design, you will observe, being strictly subordinated to use. Follow carefully now, and leave that shaft alone. It will not help you at all if you slip. The music has died away, only a solemn clonk-clonk—clonk-clonk reverberates through this narrow, Norman-arched catacomb. At length we emerge into a larger vaulted chamber, where the air is singularly fresh—but I forgot. I am not writing a smugglers’ cave story. We are under an air-shaft running up to the poop-deck, and we may go no further. The fourteen-inch shaft disappears through a gland, and, just beyond that is the eighteen-foot propeller whirling in the blue ocean water. Here, for us, is the great First Cause. Of the illimitable worlds of marine flora and fauna outside these riveted steel walls the sailor-man knows nothing and cares less. What are called “the wonders of the deep” have no part in the life of the greatest wonder of the deep—the seaman.

And when the propeller drops away, as it does sometimes—drops “down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are”—there goes out from that ship all life, all motion. Even as the mass of metal plunges downward and as the frenzied engineer rushes through blinding steam and water to stop the engines in their panic rush, the spirit of the vessel goes out of her in a great sigh. With dampered ash-pits her fires blacken and go out, the idle steering-engine clanks and rattles as the useless rudder tugs at her chains, and the crew tell in whispers how it happened just like that on the Gipsy Queen, out of Sunderland, or the Gerard Dow, out of Antwerp. All of which is not to be learned in the study at home. Let us get back to the engine-room.

I am curious to know how all this would strike my friend at home. Would it not, as Henley used to say, give him much to perpend? I hear him mutter that phrase we talked out once, at the tea-table—“The Age of Mechanism.” But why not an Age of Heroism? Mind, I use this latter word in its true sense as I use the word Hero. For some occult reason, known only to Brixton and Peckham Rye, a hero is the person who jumps into the Thames and pulls a woman out, or the interesting inanity of a popular serial. There is nothing essentially heroic in life-saving. Indeed, all the old heroes of Norseland, Rome, and Greece regarded the saving of life with a contempt that was only natural when we consider the utter lack of board schools and their frantic belief in a hereafter. I imagine the Norse Sea-kings who pushed out to Vine-land—aye, even down to Cape Cod—would have been puzzled to hear an undersized clerk who had saved a man from a watery grave described as a hero. Their method was to pull the drowning wretch out with a boat-hook, and curse him for being so clumsy as to fall in. Eric the Red never worried about a sailor who had the bad judgment to be washed overside during the night. Hercules would have felt outraged had the Royal Humane Society of the period loaded him down with their medals. Achilles would as soon have thought of committing the interminable catalogue of the Grecian Ships to memory as of associating the saving of life with the heroic. I am not suggesting that these heroes are more worthy of emulation than a life-saver; I only want to explain that there is, in our day, a race of beings, half-man, half-god, who correspond, in all broad characteristics, to those rather indecent heroes of early imaginative literature. They do with ease those deeds which would have appalled the mailed monsters of chivalry; they regard the other sex as being created solely for their use in port; they love life dearly, but they leave the saving of it, like the heroes of old, to the gods.

One has only to listen (in the galley) to their nonchalantly narrated tales of mystery and horror to realize the truth of that argument. A steady monotone is the key of their telling, their voices rising only to hammer home some particularly horrific detail. Sometimes, in the clangour of the engine-room, they will relate perilous misadventures at sea, or ludicrous entanglements in sunny southern ports. But they never waste breath in elaboration or “atmosphere.” They leave that to the nervous listener. They know nothing of the artistic values of their virile tales. They do not know they are only carrying on the tradition of the men of all time since Homer. They fling you the fine gold of their own lives, and wallow in the tittle-tattle of lady-novelists and Reynolds’s. They seethe with admiration for Captain Kettle’s amazing manœuvres, while the shipping offices are papered with lists of those who are too indolent or too forgetful to claim their service medals from the Government.

VIII

I remember, in the grey dawn one day last week, my relief sang in my ear as he wiped his hands after “feeling round,” “Deutschland’s astern, goin’ like fury.” “Sure?” I asked. “Only boat with four funnels in the line,” he said. Four funnels! I raced up and aft, and saw her. Some three miles astern going westward, going grandly. From each of her enormous funnels belched vast clouds of black smoke till she looked like some Yorkshire township afloat. Through glasses I could see the dome of the immense dining saloon, and the myriad port-holes in her wall-like side. I could see her moving fast, though so far away. As the head sea caught the massive bows, she never waited. Her 35,000 h.p. drove her crashing through them, and they broke high in air in clouds of foam. Splendid! I thought. But my heart was with those “below.” Think of the toil! Six or seven hundred tons of coal per day is flung into her dozens of furnaces, against our twenty-five tons. Think of the twenty-odd engineers who scarcely see their bunks from the Elbe to the Hudson. And, in that cool, grey, pearly dawn, think of those passengers sleeping in their palatial state-rooms, with never a thought of the slaves who drive that monstrous ship across the Atlantic at such an appalling speed. I say “appalling” because I know. The smoking-room nuisance will say, “Pooh! My dear fellow, the Lusitania licks us clean with her twenty-five knots.” He is coldly critical because he does not know.

But I digress.

Look around now. You observe we lose very little space in gangways. Even in front of the engines, where we are walking to and fro, the space is perilously narrow between the fly-wheel of the reversing engine and the lathe. Some thirty feet long, this engine-room, bulkhead to bulkhead, and, save for a recess or two extending to the ship’s skin, penned in between bunkers. Twelve hundred tons of coal, distributed like a thick wall round us, make the place warm in the tropics. Forward, the stokeholds, dimly enough lit save when a furnace door opens and a fiery glow illuminates the bent back and soot-blurred face of some cosmopolitan fireman. Overhead, each lit by a single lamp, are the water-gauges—green glass tubes in which the water ebbs and flows with the motion of the ship.

Well, the time is going fast—’twill soon be four o’clock, eight bells, and I am relieved. What do I think of on “watch”? That’s a question! The engines chiefly, with an under-current of “other things.” Often and often, in the dark nooks of my dominions, will I see the glimmering, phantom light-o’-love. Sometimes it will come and sit beside me if all runs smooth, and then I fly across the broad blue floors of the tropic night sky towards England. Not that my fairy elf is a fair-weather friend. Through blinding oil and sweat I have seen grey eyes smile and a white hand beckon. In times of trial and sore need I have turned desperately towards that faery glimmer, and never have I come back unencouraged or unrefreshed.

Of my friend, too, I think often, as I know he thinks of me. Of our dear old rooms on the Walk; of our cosy evenings alone; of our rambles in search of the Perfect Pub (where, he told me, they sold hot rum up to 3 a.m.); of the Chelsea Freaks, who add so unconsciously to the gaiety of the nations—how I have laughed incontinently, and how some fireman’s face would brighten when I laughed, though he knew not the reason!

Of books, too, I have many thoughts; which reminds me that one cannot imagine how different are the “values” of books, out here at sea, to their values at home in the metropolis. To steal a phrase from chemistry, their “valency” alters. Their relative “combining weights” seem to vary; by which I mean, their applicability to life, their vital importance to me as a man, changes. This change, moreover, is all in favour of the classics. One sees through shams more quickly—at least, I think so. Books which I could always respect, yet never touch, now come forth and show their glories to me. My own past work, too, drops pathetically into its own place. And that is? Spare me this confession!

One night, one star-light night, when the dark blue heaven, slashed across with the pale immensity of the Milky Way, watched me with its million winking eyes, I stole out on the poop with some stories in my hand, and dropped them into the creamy rush of the wake. As the poor little bits of paper swayed and eddied and drowned in the foaming vortex, I felt, deep down in that heart which some say I do not possess, a vague tremor of unrest. I felt, somehow, close to Eternity. And then, as I went below once more, I wondered, “Will they all go like that?” “Shall I live to do any good work?” Oh, the terrible sadness of Noble Attempts! How I toiled at those stories! And all for nothing. Flung, like the ashes from our furnaces, like the rubbish from our larders, into the cruel oblivion of the unheeding sea.

IX

Such is the mood which comes over me at times when the pettiness of the past starts up in the presence of these immensities of sea and sky. M., you know, when he would come back to his studio from some yachting cruise in the Channel, and find me in his armchair, would drag me out to look at the ceaselessly changing glories of the river at sunset, and tell me how the vastness of the sea always communicated to him an overwhelming sense of the Power of God.

“You can’t get away from it, old man,” he would say. “Out there alone, man is nothing, God is everything.” Why could I never assent to that? Why, when people ask me if I love the sea, am I silent? Well, have you ever heard the sudden yapping of a puppy at night? Imagine it, then, at sea. The two Immensities between which we creep: the sea flashing with her own secret glory of phosphorescent fire, the sky emblazoned with her countless diadems, and then—yap-yap-yap! That is how the pestilent cackle of many people affects me when they rave about the sea. Why do they not keep silent, like the stars? God! These fools, I think, would clatter up the steps of the Great White Throne, talking, talking, talking! When the pearly gates swing wide to let us in, when we pace the burnished vistas towards the Presence, when the measureless music of the Most High God fills our hearts—yap-yap-yap!

Music, I said! I think I stand towards music as I stand towards sea and sky. Oh, I could squirm when I think of the bickerings I have had with music-lovers. And yet with you, my friend, prince of music-lovers, I have had no quarrel. Because, I think, you let me alone. When you feel in the mood, when the moon is on the river, and the warm breeze gently sways the curtains by the open window, you will sit down and improvise, and I will lie in my deep chair, and smoke and dream. You cease, and say “Do you like it?” and I am silent.

Then you laugh and go on again. You understand. But what maniacal frenzy is this which demands a vociferous “passionate love of music” from everyone? Watch the current dish-water fiction. Every character, male and female, is “passionately fond of music.” Which means? That the readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! a lover of music. Yap-yap-yap!

With all this, I know, you agree, but you ask yourself, as you read, what has this to do with a marine engineer’s working day? It has everything to do with it. It has everything to do with the working day of every man. For this indiscriminate belauding of the love of music leads to an almost unimaginable hypocrisy among those who do not think. Certainly, Music is the highest of the Arts, and the oldest, just (I presume) as Astronomy is the highest and most ancient science. One is pure form, the other pure mathematics. And so, I may conclude, the “Music of the Spheres” comprises all that is highest and purest and truest within our comprehension. But this fashionable, open-mouthed delirium is no more a worship of music than star-gazing is serious astronomy. These hypocrites are sailing under false colours. I noticed, when I once suggested at a dinner-table the cultivation of the tin whistle, amusement among the men, and titters among the women. When I asked why old Pan’s instrument should be so bespattered with ridicule, they were instantly serious, as is their habit when you mention any one who has passed away. You see my point? I protest against this nasty slime of hypocrisy which is befouling every part of our intellectual and national life. We love the sea, we old sea-dogs, descendants (we proudly think) of the mighty Norsemen—we love it from Brighton Beach. We love Sport, do we who sneer at Frenchmen because they cannot play football—we love it from the closely packed amphitheatres of the race-course and footer-field, as spectators. We love War—with a penny flag and a yell in front of the Mansion House. We love Children, for we leave them to dwell in slums. And we love Music with all our hearts, because we were told that we did, and the wise repeat that it elevates and refines the soul.

X

I am disappointed with the meagre letter my friend sends me, “in haste”! Disappointed and surprised withal, inasmuch as he finds time to say, hastily enough, “Give me of your best; describe, toujours, describe!” To which I can only reply, “Humph!” Mon ami, I do not write for the sake of showing off my penmanship, nor my authorship. When I have time, I lie down, on my stuffed-seaweed bed, and write my thoughts leisurely and enjoyably. A letter is something which would not be set down if the two persons concerned were within speaking distance. The mere fact that I endeavour to give my jottings some rude literary finish proves nothing to the contrary. When we are gathered together round the fire or the tea-table, the same thing obtains. The difference between conversation and tittle-tattle lies in the participants of the former giving a finish to their contributions, watching for points, keeping the main channel of conversation clear of the lumber of extraneous witticism and personalities, gradually leading the timid to think and, later, to express their thoughts, using the learning which they have acquired in secret for the edification or building-up of us all.

I remember how, when young H—— visited our anchorage, he sat silent and abashed while we thundered and declaimed about his bewildered head. And then, when the conversation moved, naturally enough, from education to religion, from religion to science, and from science to evolution, I noticed how, so to speak, he pricked up his ears. He was thinking then, trying to realize, however faintly, that inside him was something different to anything inside us. His Catholic training, his sequestered up-bringing, his entomological studies, his intellectual resiliency, so deftly utilized by the Society of Jesus—all these came gradually into view, and we found truth, which is perfected praise, emanating from the babe by whom, I had been assured, we were to be bored to distraction.

We realize only too little what has been lost through the decay of conversation. “Come, let us reason together.” And “letters” are only a form of reasoning together adapted to our special needs, gaining perhaps some added pathos from the implied separation of kindred souls, and a further value from the permanence and potential artistry of the form itself. It is not incumbent upon us to be very deep in the eighteenth century to remark that, with conversation, letter-writing dwindles and dies before the rush of mechanism and trade. It is easy to see the reason of this. Mechanism and trade are expressions of dissatisfaction with one’s circumstances. Men used machines to make and carry commodities, not because they felt the exquisite joy of making, or the still higher joy of giving, but because they, or their wives, wanted larger houses, more splendid equipages, more sumptuous provender. Conversation, on the other hand, implies leisure and contentment of mind. I do not mean idlers and persons of no ambition. Neither of these classes ever wrote letters or shone in conversations.

So, musing upon my friend’s hasty screed, I wonder how I am, in very truth, to give him of my best. True, I know from that hint that he is fighting with beasts at Ephesus to get his play into working, or rather playing order. This is sufficient to make me forgive my friend. But consider in future, mon ami, that your letters are the only conversation I can enjoy out here, for the heroes with whom I toil know not the art.

XI

The transition of a great nation from barbarism to an elementary form of culture is always interesting. So, too, is the same transition in the case of a “great profession.” In 1840, when the propulsion of ships by means of a steam-driven screw opened a new era in maritime history, the “practical man” in the engineering trade was an uneducated savage. Possessing no trade union, no voice in Parliament, no means of educating himself in the intricate theory of the machinery he helped to build, the mechanic of sixty years ago was regarded by those above him in the social scale merely as a “hand.” When, therefore, steamships became common, and men were needed to operate and care for the propelling mechanism, they were naturally drawn from the ranks of mechanics who were employed in the works to construct it. Stokers were enlisted, in a similar way, from those working on land-boilers. Here, then, were two new classes of seamen, corresponding very largely to the officers and sailors of a sailing-ship. To the unbiassed judgment, it went without saying that the engineer on watch would take rank with the navigating officer on watch; but the old school of mariners, the school whose ideas of progress are crystallised for all time in the historic report of certain Admiralty Lords that “steam power would never be of any practical use in Her Majesty’s Navy,” thought differently. In their opinion, the engineer was the same as a stoker, and from that day almost to this the deck-officer who served his time in a sailing-ship secretly regards the engineers of his steamer as upstarts more or less, whose position and pay are a gross encroachment upon his own more ancient privileges.

A little consideration will show that there was some reason for this feeling in the beginning. In the case of the Royal Navy, the aggravation was particularly acute. The deck-officers, then as now, were sons of gentlemen, were members of an ancient and honourable service, a service included among that select quaternity, to be outside of which was to be a nonentity—the Navy, the Army, the Church, and the Bar. The naval officer, then as now, did not soil his hands, wore a sword, and was swathed in an inextricable meshwork of red tape, service codes, and High Toryism. He had his own peculiar notions of studying a profession, looked askance at the new-fangled method of driving a ship, honestly thinking, with Ruskin, that a “floating kettle” was a direct contravention of the laws of God. Imagine, then, the aristocratic consternation of these honourable gentlemen when the care and maintenance of propelling machinery, auxiliary mechanism, and also guns and gun-mountings, were gradually transferred to a body of men of low social extraction, uncultured and unpolished land-lubbers and civilians! Only within the last twenty years have naval engineer officers, now drawn from the same social strata as the navigating officers, won official recognition of their importance in the personnel of a ship.

In the case of the engineers of the Mercantile Marine the struggle has been the same, though by no means so bitter or so sustained. The reasons for this are two.

In the first place, the navigating officers of a merchantman are merely the employees of civilians—the shipowners. In the second place, the Board of Trade, by compelling shipowners to carry a certain number of navigators and engineers holding certificates of competency, have placed them on one professional level. Nevertheless, the animosity between the mates and the shrewd, greasy, sea-going engineer was keen enough, sharpened no doubt by the preponderating wages of the latter. Again, the former’s habits of deference and mute obedience to the master, at once navigator, agent, and magistrate of the ship, were not readily assimilated by the engineer, whose democratic consciousness was just then rising into being, and whose mechanical instincts were outraged by the sailor’s ignorant indifference to the knowledge and unremitting vigilance demanded by the machinery in his care.

It is in this fashion that a class of men like my Chief have developed. Born of the lower middle class, the artisan class, apprenticed to their trade at twelve or thirteen years of age, and, on going to sea, suddenly finding themselves in possession of a definite uniform and rank with a fixed watch and routine, their natural instinct leads them to do their utmost to “live up” to their new dignity. In course of time, after a certain minimum of sea service, and an unbroken record of efficiency and good behaviour, the Board of Trade examiner affixes his stamp on the finished product, and the youth ventures on matrimony and indulges in dreams of rising in the world. His travelling has given his mind a certain shallow breadth of outlook; he will discuss Italian art with you, although his knowledge of Italy is confined to the low parts of Genoa and Naples, with perhaps a visit to the Campo Santo of the former. He has acquired the reading habit, perforce, at sea, though his authors would be considered dubious by the educated; and a smattering of some other language, generally Spanish, is, in his own opinion, good reason for holding himself above the common mechanic ashore. His salary as a chief engineer enables his wife to keep a servant and buy superior garments; he puts money by, and in the course of time solidifies his position as a genuine bourgeois. In the meantime he exhales Smiles. He believes in Rising in the World. He would blot out a perfectly inoffensive, if ignoble, ancestry, and he would also, if he could, make friends with English Grammar. But how can I hope for his success in the latter struggle when the books he borrows from my little store are returned uncut. Possibly the colourless eyes, which survey me over the retroussé nose and deceptive moustache, are capable of gathering wisdom from the uncut fields of learning. And yet, and yet, have I not unintentionally surprised him in his cabin devouring “The Unwritten Commandment” or “The Lady’s Realm,” while my Aristophanes is on the settee? I do not blame a sea-going engineer for disliking Aristophanes. Many agricultural labourers would find him uninforming. But why borrow him and simulate a cultured interest in his plays?

My friend, I think, abhors blatant uxoriousness. So do I. And I fear the Most Wonderful Man on Earth is blatantly uxorious. I honour him for a certain sadness in his voice when he speaks of unrequited love. But his constant reference to Ibsen’s motif in the “Wild Duck,” though it fails in its primary object of convincing me that he is familiar with Ibsen’s plays, does in truth tell me that some fair one gave him sleepless nights.

Of course, this amusing assumption would not stand a single hour in a cultured circle. Some periodicals of the day foster the fallacy in many an unfortunate mind that to read about a book is really quite as good as actually to read it. Their readers are led to infer that learning is quite a spare-time affair. I once assured a victim of this delusion that in true culture there was no threepence-in-the-shilling discount; and he wrinkles his brows yet, I believe, wondering what I meant. How many years of close study, my friend, are required to enable one to stroll through a second-hand book-shop, pick up the one treasure from the shelves, and walk out again?

It may be, perchance, that I labour this trait in the character of one who would be great but for his disabilities. Which thought recalls to my mind a suspicion that intermittently haunts me—that, living as we do here on this ocean tramp, “thrown together,” as the phrase goes, so constantly, faults in another man grow more and more apparent; social abrasions which would be smoothed down and forgotten ashore are roughened at each fresh encounter, until the man is hidden behind one flaming sin. Especially is this to be expected when mind and body are worn, the one with responsibility, the other with rough toil. Who am I that I should claim cultured intercourse from these heroes? Have I not shared their agony and bloody sweat in times of storm and stress? Have I not seen this same wearer of elevators in his engine-room, a blood-stained handkerchief across his head where he has been “smashed,” the sweat running from his blackened features, watching his engines with an agony no young mother ever knew?

What of the time when our main steam pipe burst in the Irish Sea in a fog? Read in the Chief Mate’s log an entry, “Delayed 2 hrs. 40 min., break-down in engine-room.” Simple, isn’t it? But behind those brief words lies a small hell for the Chief Engineer. Behind them lies two hours and forty minutes’ frenzied toil in the heat of the boiler-tops, where the arched bunkers keep the air stifling; two hours and forty minutes’ work with tools that race and slither to the rolling of the ship, with bolts that burn and blister, with steam that knows no master when she’s loose. Literature? Art? Old friend, these gods seem very impotent sometimes. They seem impotent, as when, for instance, my first gauge-glass burst. Pacing up and down in front of my engines, there is a hiss and a roar, and one of my firemen rushes into the engine-room, his right hand clasping the left shoulder convulsively. He has been cut to the bone with a piece of the flying glass. Men of thirty years’ sea-time tell me they never have got used to a glass failing. And then the fight with the water and steam in the darkness, the frenzied groping for the wires to shut the cocks, the ceaseless roar of water and steam! A look at the engines, an adjustment of the feed-valves, lest the water get low while I am fitting a new glass, and then to work. How glad one is when one sees that luminous ring, which denotes the water-level, rise “two-thirds glass” once more! And how far from the fine arts is he whose life is one long succession of incidents like these? Can they blame us if we look indulgently upon mere writers and painters? Surely, when the books are opened and the last log is read, when the overlooker calls our names and reads out the indictment “Lacking culture,” we may stand up manfully and answer as clearly as we can, “Lord, we had our business in great waters.”

XII

In such wise, I imagine, will George the Fourth reply. He is an admirable foil to the Most Wonderful Man on Earth. He regales you with no false sentiment; he is five feet ten in his socks, and he is clamorously indignant when you suggest that he will one day “get married.” He considers love to be “damned foolishness,” and despises “womanisers.” He likes “tarts,” has one in most ports of the Atlantic sea-board, and even writes to a certain Mexican enchantress, who lives in a nice little room over a nice little shop in a nice little street in the nice little town of Vera Cruz. What does he write? Frankly I don’t know. What does he say, when he has dressed himself in dazzling white raiment and goes ashore in Surabaya or Singapore, and sits down to tea with Japanese girls whose eyes are swollen with belladonna and whose touch communicates fire? How can I answer?

“George,” I say, “what would your mother think?”

George is not communicative. He flicks ash from his cigarette and picks up a month-old Reynolds’s. And that is a sufficient answer to my accusations, though he does not realize it. I, at any rate, have not the face to upbraid a lonely youth, without home or girl friends from one year’s end to another, when in that same Reynolds’s I see page after page of “cases.” If these people swerve, if they break the tables of the law every week, surely George the Fourth may hold up his head. You see, in Geordie-land, in the ports of Tyne and Wear, where George the Fourth was bred, there are many engineers who have been out in steamers working up and down the China coast, who have had nice little homes in Hankow, Hong-Kong, or Shanghai, with Japanese wives all complete. Then when the charter was up, and the steamer came home, these practical men left homes and wives behind them, and all was just as before. That is George’s dream. “China or Burma coast-trade. That’s the job for me when I get ma tickut.” It is useless for a stern moralist like me to argue, because I feel certain that, being what he is, he would be entirely wise and right.

What an utter futility is marriage to a sea-going engineer! Here is my friend McGorren, a hard-working and Christian man. He is chief of a boat in the Burmese oil trade. His wife is dead; he has three children, who are being brought up with their cousins in North London. McGorren has been out East two years. It will be another two years before he can come home. Where is the morality of this? He has no home. His little ones grow up strangers to him; they are mothered by a stranger. He is voteless, yet subject to income tax. He can have no friendships, no society, no rational enjoyment save reading. Nothing! And what is his return? Four hundred a year and all found. I look into the frank eyes of George the Fourth and I am mute. In no philosophy, in no “Conduct of Life,” in no “Lesson for the Day” which I have read can I discover any consolation or sane rule of living for such as he. Is not this a terrible gap in Ruskin, Emerson, and Co.? I take up the first and I ask George to listen. He is perfectly willing, because, he says with reverence, I am “a scholar,” and I have read to him before.

“... There must be work done by the arms, or none of us could live. There must be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. And the same men cannot do both. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of manual labour and the dignity of humanity. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier’s helm in a gale on a lee shore, or whirling white-hot metal at a furnace mouth, is not the same man at the end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or painting pictures.”

George nods. He understands exactly what is meant. His father is skipper of a collier, his brother is in a steel works. Probably he and I know, better than John Ruskin, how rough work “takes the life out of us.” But when I continue, and read to him what the wise man teaches concerning justice to men, and never-failing knight-errantry towards women, and love for natural beauty, even awe-struck George becomes slightly sardonic, and his mouth comes down at the corners. Let me formulate his thoughts. He is asking how can one be just when the work’s got to be done, and blame must fall on somebody’s shoulders? How can one feel and act rightly towards women when one is young, yet compelled to live a life of alternate celibacy and licence? How can one love nature, even the sea, when the engine-room temperature is normally 90° F., and often 120° F., when the soul cries out against the endless rolling miles? Wise of the world, give answer! We two poor rough toilers sit at your feet and wait upon your words.

You will see, now, why I want George the Fourth to fall in love. But with whom is he to fall in love? Who courts the society of a sailor in a foreign port? Seamen’s bethels? Ah, yes! The gentle English ladies in foreign ports are very sympathetic, very kind, very pleasant, at the Wednesday evening concert in the rebuilt Genoese palace or the deserted Neapolitan hotel, or the tin tabernacle amid the white sand and scrub; but they take good care to keep together at the upper end of the room, and the audience is railed off from them if possible, while the merry girls outside, who live shameful lives, and whose existence is ignored by the missionary, link their arms in George’s and take him to their cosy little boxes high up behind those beautiful green blinds....

“It’s a hell of a life, but we’ve just got to mak’ the best of it,” says George, and he lounges off to join the talk in the Second’s room.

I, too, sigh when he is gone. The best of it! Are these heroes of mine right after all?

“Then wherefore sully the entrusted gem
Of high and noble life with thoughts so sick?
Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quick
For nothing but a dream?”

XIII

It is an hour since George the Fourth left me, and I have been discussing the matter with the Mate. It is a habit of mine to discuss matters with the Mate. Here is a man with no theories of life, no culture, as we understand the term, no touch of modern life at all; a man of apostolic simplicity, having gone down to the sea in ships since 1867. You can depend on the practicability of his conclusions, because he has dealt with facts—since 1867. “For,” to quote Carlyle, “you are in contact with verities, to an unexampled degree, when you get upon the ocean, with intent to sail on it ... bottomless destruction raging beneath you and on all hands of you, if you neglect, for any reason, the methods of keeping it down and making it float you to your aim!”

“’Tis a hard life, Mr. McAlnwick, an’ we’ve just got to make the best of it.”

“But, Mr. Honna, what is the best of it?”

“This! Give us your glass. One more, an’ Nicholas is makin’ a Stonewall Jackson in the panthry. He’ll be in in a minute.”

In a minute Nicholas arrives with a jug. Nicholas is the Steward, at sea since ’69, a bronzed Greek from Salonika, a believer in dreams and sound investments at six per cent. He brings in a Lloyd’s News, arrived by the last mail.

“Ah!” The Mate is certainly making the best of it. What are the exact components of the drink I cannot determine, but the resultant is without blemish; eggs, milk, brandy, rum—all these are in it, and the Mate’s tongue loosens.

“Have you seen this about ze Lorenzo, mister?” asks Nicholas.

“What’s that?”

Nicholas (reading): “‘Ze s.s. Lorenzo, bound from New Yawk to Cuba with coke, met with heavy gales off Cape Hatteras, and has put back into Norfolk in a disabled condition. Two blades of her propeller are broken, and she is leaking badly amidships. She is to undergo a special survey before proceeding further.’”

The Mate’s visage is wrinkled, his mouth is pursed up as he sets down his glass and adjusts his spectacles to read, and he nods his head.

“See, now, ’tis two years, two years an’ a half, since I left her. Nicholas, you were there then, were ye not?”

“Ess, mister. She was on the Western Ocean trade then, too.”

“Aye! Lumber out o’ St. John’s to Liverpool.” He lays down the paper. “Mr. McAlnwick, now wait while I tell ye. Ye talk of honesty at sea? I joined that ship in Glasgow, an’ we signed on for the voy’ge, winter North Atlantic. General cargo for St. John’s, Newf’unlan’, with deals to bring back to Liverpool. And, though you may consider me superstitious, not havin’ been long at sea” (Nicholas stands, legs apart, glass in hand, head nodding sagely), “not havin’ been long at sea, I say, ’twas the Second and Fourth engineers who brought us black luck!”

“How, Mr. Honna?”

“This way. Nicholas, sit ye down and listen. I was Mate, as I am here. I went up from London and joined her, an’ the Chief, who’s here now, was thick as thieves with the old man, an’ was courtin’ the youngest daughter, tho’ he never married her—he came to lay down the law to me. There was a spare stateroom for’ard of the alley-way, port side. The door was locked, an’ I wanted it open. Ses he, ‘’Tis locked.’ Ses I, ‘I want it open.’ Ses he, ‘Who are you?’ Ye know his way, Mr. McAlnwick? Ses I, ‘I’m the Mate o’ this ship, an’, by Gawd, if that door isn’t opened smart, ye’re a better man than I am.’ And I took off me coat. ‘Oh,’ ses he, ‘’tis all right, mister, I’ll have it opened.’ Ye see, there was women aboard, an’ the Second and Fourth were responsible.”

“They were inside!” snickers Nicholas, looking at his cigar reminiscently.

“They was, Mr. McAlnwick. ’Twas scandalous—that Chief, too, trapesin’ away out to Scotstoun Hill every evenin’ to play cards an’ shilly-shally, while his juniors had loose females aboard the ship. Well, we put out, made St. John’s in sixteen days, and discharged in a fortn’t. ’Twas there the Second an’ Fourth began again, but they took me in. I came on deck one Saturday afternoon, the old man being ashore, and saw two females, with sealskin muffs and furred spats, lookin’ roun’ the poop an’ liftin’ their skirts over the ropes, for all the world like real ladies. An’ I treated them as such, never thinkin’ what they were, for to me a lady’s a lady, an’ I know how to behave to them. But the Second Mate stopped me as I was showin’ ’em over all, and ses he, ‘D’yer know what she is, Mr. Honna?’ pointin’ to the one with a heliatrope blouse under her jacket.”

There is another snicker from Nicholas, and the Mate goes on:

“I would not believe it, Mr. McAlnwick. I’ve had my weaknesses, I have some now, or I would not be Mate of this ship. But I’ve never insulted my employers by makin’ a—a bloomin’ seraglio o’ the ship, nor have I ever seen it done without bringin’ black luck. Now, wait till I tell ye. The nex’ mornin’, being on deck at seven o’clock, I saw the Second and Fourth racin’ up the dock. Their collars were loose at the back, an’ their waistcoats were all out o’ gear, an’ they’d made hat-bands o’ their ties. Mr. McAlnwick, ye may laugh, but they were a disgrace to the ship!

“Well, we put out o’ St. John, deck-loaded with deals, in a fog, and we stayed in a fog for three days. We were all among the ice, too, an’ that afternoon I came on deck to relieve Mr. Bruce, the Second Mate. The old man had her in an ice-lane, goin’ full speed. Ses I, ‘She’s goin’ fast, sir.’ ‘Oh,’ ses he, ‘she steers better so.’ ‘Ay,’ ses I, ‘but if she hits anything, she will—hit it.’ A minute after, he come up out o’ the fog, an’ ses he, ‘Stop her, Mr. Honna, stop her!’ I’d me hand on the telegraph and me eye on the foc’sle head when she struck—bang! An’ all the canvas caps on the foc’sle ventilators blew up an’ went overboard. We’d hit a cake. The Second Mate ran out of his berth in his shirt-sleeves, and went for’ard, an’ I followed him. There she was, her nose crunched into a low-lyin’ cake not two feet above the waterline. I kept all my spare gear in the fore-peak, an’ the Second Mate went down to—to reconnoitre. ‘’Tis all right, mister,’ ses he. ‘’Tis all right here.’ Ses I, ‘I don’t think, Mr. Bruce, I don’t think!’ An’ when I went down an’ put me foot on those piles of rope an’ bolts of canvas, they went down, all soft, under me. Ye understand? Oh, I knew there was somethin’, rememberin’ those flighty women, an’ the foc’sle bonnets blowin’ off. The water had rushed into the fore-peak, an’ had driven the air up, ye see.

“Well, we put her full astern and drew away, and then we put back into St. John, slow, dead slow, all the way. An’ there the Second Engineer saw a doctor, an’ the one in the heliatrope blouse saw a ghost!”

“Ess, ’e come up be’ind ’er, an’——”

“Now, hold yer horses, Nicholas, hold yer horses! Ye see, Mr. McAlnwick, when a woman has seen a man aboard of a ship, an’ she’s seen that ship hull down, or, what’s the same thing, swallowed up in the fog, she writes him off, so to speak. ‘Poor feller,’ ses she, ‘he’s at sea,’ just as we say, ‘Poor feller, he’s in the churchyard.’ An’ so, when that woman felt someone touch her on the arm in Main Street, and turned an’ found it was the Second Engineer, she gave a shriek like a lost soul, an’ fainted on the sidewalk. So it happened. Now listen. Help yourself, Nicholas.

“We had a wooden bow put on, which took a week, an’ we started again. Two days out it fell off, and we went back into St. John for the third time, an’ had another fitted. I took the opportunity then of havin’ a word with the Second, while we were makin’ her fast. ‘Mr. Carson,’ ses I, ‘air ye satisfied?’ He knew what I meant, for he came from Carrickfergus, an’ the Lady’s Fever had him hard. ‘Aye, mister,’ ses he. ‘’Tis all right; I’ll see her no more,’ ses he. An’ our luck turned. We had another bow fitted, an’ we came across the Western Ocean, half-speed, an’ made her fast in the Canada Dock.”

“Is that all, Mr. Honna?”

“No, no,” says Nicholas, with another reminiscent giggle. “No, mister, the Super, ’e comes down, an’ ’e——”

“Hold yer horses, now, Nicholas; hold yer horses, and let Jack Honna tell this yarn. Mr. McAlnwick, I said I’d show ye honesty as practised in the Mercantile Marine. Now listen. The Super—that’s Mr. Fallon, as ye know—came down into my berth. ‘Mornin’, Honna’—ye know his way; but he seemed anxious an’ fidgety. Of course, I knew without tellin’ how she was insured. Ye see, mister, the Lorenzo an’ the Julio an’ the Niccolo an’ the Benvenuto here are insured against total loss, an’ if we went on that reef to-night, Messrs. Crubred, Orr, and Glasswell ’ud drink champagne to it an’ book our half-pay in tobacco and stamps. But then—ah, Mr. McAlnwick, then it was different. The Lorenzo was insured against accidents to the tune o’ three thousand pound sterling, provided—provided, ye understand, that repairs came up to that figure. An’ that was why Mr. Fallon looked worried.”

“Why, Mr. Honna?” The Mate’s voice drops to a whisper.

“Why, don’t ye see, mister? But ye’ve not been long at sea. Because he’d totted up all the indents, an’ added all he reasonably could on the bow plates an’ stringers plus a new double bottom to the forehold, an’ then he could only make it come to about twenty-four hundred pound. ‘What’s to be done, Honna?’ ses he, rappin’ it out. ‘What’s to be done?’ ses I, as if I was astonished. ‘What d’ye mean, Mr. Fallon?’ Ses he, ‘’Tis a dead loss—a dead loss, Honna.’ Ses I, ‘I don’t understand, sir.’ And I looked him in the eye. ‘She’s not hurt,’ ses he, snappin’. ‘She’s not hurt at all.’ ‘Oh,’ ses I, ‘is that all? Why not hurt her, then—hurt her?’ An’ I got up to go out. ‘Oh,’ ses he, ‘we can’t have that—we can’t have that. Where’s that indent?’ And we went on deck. Well, I went up to the office that afternoon he came over, an’ he ses in a hurry, ‘Honna, yer wife’s comin’ up to-night, ye said?’ (The little man never forgets anythin’, as perhaps ye’ve noticed.) ‘Yes,’ ses I, ‘she is.’ ‘Then go an’ meet her,’ ses he. ‘Go an’ meet her.’ ‘What?’ ses I. ‘Leave the ship, with her goin’ into dry-dock to-morrer an’ no cap’en aboard?’ ‘Damn the ship,’ ses he. ‘Damn the ship! I’ll look after the ship. Go an’ see yer wife.’ Mr. McAlnwick, when I got outside I laughed. An’ when I got to Lime Street, and told my girl about Fallon damnin’ the ship, she laughed too. It must have been eleven o’clock when I left the hotel an’ went down to the docks. When I got there she was in dry-dock. The Super had issued orders that s.s. Lorenzo was to be dry-docked after dark, an’ I saw that our luck was in. The Second Engineer was standin’ by the ladder as I climbed over the side, an’ ses he, solemn-like, ‘Mr. Honna, I’ve been to see a doctor this night, an’ I’m all right now. I’ll see her no more.’ ‘Of course ye’re all right!’ ses I, chucklin’, ‘an’ so’s the Lorenzo. Come down an’ have somethin’.’ ‘What are they doin’?’ ses he. ‘I was below this five minutes, an’ I thought the bottom was comin’ in.’ ‘Repairs,’ ses I, wavin’ me hand. ‘Repairs. Come down.’ An’ we went. ’Twas half-past one when we got down on the dock side an’ peeped under. An’ when we’d done laughin’ we turned in.

“Well, I went down into the dock nex’ mornin’, an’ the Surveyor was there with Mr. Fallon. He was a youngish man, an’ probably he’s learnt a good deal since that day, but he was just the feller for us. The Super introduced us, an’ ses he, ‘Mr. Honna will corroborate what I say, Mr. Blythe.’ The Surveyor turned to look at the ship’s bottom, and it was lucky he did, for me jaw was hangin’. Mr. McAlnwick, they’d had the hydraulic jacks under her, an’ they’ pushed her to kingdom come! She was bent to the very keelson. Not a straight plate from stem to stern. ‘It’s marvellous, Mr. Honna!’ ses the Surveyor. ‘It’s marvellous! How in the worrld did ye come home?’ ‘How?’ ses I, laughin’. ‘On our hands and knees, to be sure, mister.’ ‘Dear me!’ he ses. ‘Dear me!’ ‘Aye,’ ses I. ‘An’ she steered to a hair, too!’ And I went for’ard to look at her bows. He was a young man, an’ I felt sorry for him, but our luck was in. Mr. Fallon came down into my room that afternoon, as I was puttin’ on me shore clothes, an’ ses he, ‘Honna, did ye see yer wife?’ ‘I did, sir,’ ses I. ‘Is she all right?’ ses he. ‘No,’ ses I; ‘she’s frettin’.’ ‘What’s the matter wi’ her?’ he snaps, sittin’ down where you are now. ‘What?’ ses I, an’ I stopped as I was fixin’ me collar. ‘She thinks I ought to have a new hat, Mister Fallon.’ An’ I looked him in the eye. ‘Oh!’ ses he in his sharp way. ‘Get five new hats—get five new hats. Have the ship ready to be moved to-morrow night. She will be discharged, and redocked for—extended repairs. Good-day,’ ses he, an’ he went out. An’ when I looked where he’d been sittin’ there was a five-poun’ note in an envelope, stickin’ in the cushion.”

“Did you see your wife again, Mr. Honna?”

“I did, Mr. McAlnwick, an’ she pinched me black an’ blue! An’ when we were walkin’ through the city that evenin’ I saw the Second Engineer followin’ a sealskin jacket along Paradise Street, and I felt glad he was leavin’ to go up for his ticket.”

“Is that all, Mr. Honna?” The Chief Officer’s face is screwed up, his glasses are on the end of his nose (how like my old Headmaster he looks now!), and he scrutinizes the Steward’s newspaper once more.

“All, Mr. McAlnwick? Apparently not, by this. Mr. Fallon’ll be down to see her, for he’s goin’ across to see the Giacopo, I know, an’, by thunder, he’ll fix her! Never seen him in a fix yet. Eh, Nicholas?”

“Ah, he’s a sharpun, by God!” This from the fervent Nicholas.

“Ses he, first thing when he put his fut on the deck when we brought the Ludovico into Shields from Nikolaeff, ses he, ‘Honna, look at them slack funnel stays; Honna, look at that spare propeller shaft, not painted; Honna, don’t keep pigs on the saddle-back bunker-hatch—’tis insanitary.’ Honna this, that, and the other all in one breath. And we’d had the blessed stern torn out of her, runnin’ foul o’ the breakwater, to say nothin’ of pickin’ up the telegraph cable with our anchor outside Constant!”

“Mr. Honna, tell me——”

“To-morrow, mister, to-morrow. ’Tis late, and I would turn in.”

And so we end our day.

XIV

To-day’s shipping news has it thus:—

Swansea.—Entered inwards, s.s. Benvenuto. From S. Africa. P. W. D.

Which cryptic item covers much joy, much money, and an irrepressible consumption of strong drink. O ye rabid total-abstinence mongers! If I could only lure you away on a six-thousand-mile voyage, make you work twelve hours a day, turn you out on the middle watch, feed you on bully beef and tinned milk! Where would your blue ribbons be then? My faith, gentlemen, when once you had been paid off at the bottom of Wind Street, I warrant me we should not see your backs for dust as you sprinted into the nearest hostelry!

And the joy, moreover, of receiving three months’ pay in one lump sum! Ah! one is rich as he pushes past the green baize swing-door, and through the crowd of seamen and sharks who cluster like flies round that same green door. To the married sailor, however, that joy is chastened by the knowledge that his “judy” has been drawing half-pay all the time, and to say nothing of the advance note of two-pound-ten which he drew on joining, to buy clothes. But Jack Tar or Jack Trimmer knows well how to drown such worries. He possesses an infinite capacity for taking liquor, which inevitably goes, not to his head, but to his feet. Six of the Benvenuto’s sailor-men, two firemen, and the carpenter enter our private bar as we sit drinking. An indescribable uproar invades the room immediately. They are in their best clothes—decent boots, ready-made blue serge, red tie with green spots over a six-penny-halfpenny “dickey,” and a cap that would make even Newmarket “stare and gasp.” Nothing will pacify them short of drinks at their expense. A sailor with yellow hair and moustache curled and oiled insufferably, insists on providing me with a pint of rum. The carpenter, a radical and Fenian when sober, sports a bowler with a decided “list.” He embraces my yellow-haired benefactor, and now, to the music of “Remember Me to Mother Dear,” rendered by the electric piano behind the bar, they waltz slowly and solemnly around. The landlady implores them to stop, and the carpenter bursts into tears. It really is very much like the “Hunting of the Snark.” They are so unaffectedly wealthy, so ridiculously happy, so unspeakably vulgar! They batter their silver and gold upon the bar; they command inoffensive strangers to drink monstrous potations; they ply their feet in unconscious single-steps; they forget they have not touched the last glass, and order more; they put cataclysmal questions to the blushing lassie who serves them; they embrace one another repeatedly with maudlin affection, and are finally ejected by main force from the premises. All the world—below Wind Street—knows that the Benvenuto has been paid off.

And we? We drink soberly to England, home, and beauty, bank our surpluses, and scuttle back to the ship. Past interminable rows of huge hydraulic cranes, over lock-gates, under gigantic coal-shoots which hurl twenty tons of coal at once into the gaping holds of filthy colliers, we stumble and hurry along to where our own steamer is berthed. That is one of the hardships of our exalted position as officers. We begin again as soon as we have been paid off; they depart, inebriated and uxorious, to their homes. They enjoy what the political economists call “the rewards of abstinence”; we put on our boiler suits and crawl about in noisome bilges, soot-choked smoke-boxes, and salt-scarred evaporators.

Nevertheless, when five o’clock strikes and work is done for the day, we put on our “shore clothes” (the inevitable blue serge of the seamen), light our pipes, and go into the town again. Ah! How good it is to see people, people, people! To see cars, and shops, and girls again! How wondrously, how ineffably beautiful a barmaid appears to us, who have seen no white woman for nearly four months! And book-shops! Dear God! I was in the High Street for half an hour to-night, and I have already bagged a genuine “Galignani” Byron, calf binding, yellow paper, and suppressed poems, all complete, for three shillings. It will go well in our book-case beside our Guiccioli Recollections. For myself I have a dear little “Grammont” with notes, a fine edition of Bandello’s “Novelle,” and a weird paper-covered copy of “Joseph Andrews,” designed, presumably, to corrupt the youthful errantry of Swansea, and secreted by the vendor of Welsh devotional literature at the very bottom of the tuppenny box. In spite of Borrow’s enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym, I have no craving for Welsh Theology, mostly by Jones and Williams, which is to be had by the cubic ton. No one buys it, I fear. The little lass who sold me the Fielding and the “Novelle” looked pale and hungry behind the stacks of books, and I am shamed, speaking merely as a thorough-paced buyer of second-hand books, that I paid more for the latter than she would have asked. But the blue-grey eyes, the nervous poise of the head, the pride in the sensitive nostrils, reminded me of someone.... A horrible life for a young girl, my friend, a horrible life.

I took my treasures along the brilliantly lighted streets. I walked on air, happy with a mysterious happiness. I looked at myself as I passed a shop mirror, and saw a face with a cold, cynical expression, the soul intrenched behind inscrutable, searching eyes. “You do not look happy,” I said to myself as I passed on, and I smiled. I thought again of those gaudily dressed sailors; I thought of their inane felicity, and smiled again. “De chacun selon que son habilleté, à chacun selon que ses besoins,” I muttered as I turned into an iridescent music-hall.

And now I reached the summit of experience. All the morning I was toiling in the engine-room as we ploughed across the Channel, past Lundy, and up to the Mumbles Head. I had played my part in that strange comedy of “paying off.” I had toiled again in the afternoon in a dry-docked steamer, making all safe after shutting down. I had scoured the shelves of a tiny shop for books. And now I sat in the fauteuils of a modern music-hall, beholding the amazing drama of “The Road to Ruin.”

Verily, as Sainte-Beuve says, “Au théâtre on exagère toujours.” Not that I would accuse the constructors of the piece of any lack of skill. Indeed, Scribe himself never displayed more consummate stage-craft or a greater sense of “situation,” than they. As one gazes upon the spectacle of the impossible undergraduate’s downfall, he loses all confidence in the impossibility; he believes that here indeed lies the road to ruin; he feels inexpressibly relieved when the young man thanks Heaven for his terrible dream of the future, and sits down to Conic Sections, his head between his hands. You notice this latter touch. The playwright knows his audience. He knows they think that an influx of Conic Sections strains the cerebral centres, and that study is always carried on with the head compressed between the hands. Thus the sermon reaches the hearts of those who still have occasional nightmares of the time when they conned “Parallel lines are those which, if produced ever so far both ways, will not meet.” Alas! I fear our conceptions of art are in the same predicament.

Is it not strange, though, how customs vary? In the Middle Ages one went to church to see the mystery play; now one goes to the music-hall to hear a sermon. “Pronounced by clergymen and others to be the most powerful sermon ever preached from the stage,” etc. I wonder, as I scan my programme, whether the monastic playwrights of old ever published encomiums on their weird productions by prominent highwaymen. I say highwaymen because I can think of none who had a better right to criticise dramatic performances from the practical and moral standpoints. But the noise of the undergraduate as he goes crashing through his ruinous nightmare recalls me. I proceed to examine my companions in distress. All are engaged in the Road to Ruin. I think they like stage ruin—it is so thrilling. Moreover, it leaves out all that is at all middle class. Even our wicked undergraduate never falls as low as the middle class. He starts as a university man, and ends in a slum, but he is saved from the second-class season ticket. I am still puzzling with this question of the middle class as I quit the theatre and make my way down to the docks. There is a mild, misty rain falling, and I turn into my favourite tavern in Wind Street for a glass of ale. The Middle Class! Why, I ask myself, are they so strange in their intellectual tastes? The wealthy I understand; the workmen I understand; but O this terrible Middle Class! I sit musing, and four men come in upon my solitude. Obviously they are actors, rushing in for a “smile” between the acts. Obviously, I say, for their easy manners, savoir faire, and good breeding stamp them men of the world, and their evening dress does the rest.

“Ah, you read the Clarion?” observes one. I start guiltily. Yes, I had bought a copy, and I have unconsciously spread it on the table by my side. “Will you drink with us, sir?” adds another. He is not of the Middle Class.

“Thank you, I will,” I answer, and my first interlocutor glances over the paper.

“Are you a Socialist?” he inquires. “Yes,” I reply. “So am I.” I rise, and we shake hands. This, my friend, was beyond all my imagining. It is, moreover, not middle class. I have ridden in a suburban train day after day for years, with people who lived in the same street, without exchanging a word. Here, in this tavern, convention dares not to show her head. And I am warmed as with the cheerful sun.

“Have you been in?” asks the man who hands me my beer, and he flings his head back to indicate the theatre.

“Not yet,” I answer. “What have you on this week?”

“A Sister’s Sin. You should see it. Come to-morrow.”

“A Sister’s Sin!”

I shall not go to see it. I dare not. I had intended to ask my Socialist whether he could solve the problem of the Middle Class for me, but he has done it. “Au théâtre on exagère toujours.” I hardly know which are the more baffling—the Middle Ages or the Middle Classes.

XV

I have just been looking through an old, old note-book of mine, the sort of book compiled, I suppose, by every man who really sets out on the long road. I remember buying the thing, a stout volume with commercially marbled covers, at a stationer’s shop in the Goswell Road. I wonder if the salesman dreamed that it would be used by the grimy apprentice to transcribe extracts from such writers as Kant and Lotze, Swinburne and Taine, Emerson and Schopenhauer? How strong, how dear to me, was all that pertained to Metaphysic in that long ago! Often, too, I see original speculations, naïve dogmatism, sandwiched between the contextual excerpts.

Worthless, of course—it should be hardly necessary to say so. And yet, as I turn the leaves, I get occasional glimpses of real thought shining through the overstrained self-consciousness, illuminating my youthful priggishness of demeanour. For instance, how could I have been so prescient to have coupled Emerson and Schopenhauer together so persistently? Here, smudged and corrected to distraction, is a passionate defence of the former, occasioned by some academical trifler dubbing him a mere echo of Carlyle and Coleridge. I almost lived on Emerson in those days, to such good purpose, indeed, that I know him by heart. And, if I mistake not, he will come to his own again in the near future, when there will be no talk of Carlylean echoes.

All alone, sharing its page with no other thought, is this, to me, characteristic phrase: “Mental Parabolism, N. B.” It was like a shock to see it once more after all these years, and I have been trying to understand it. It was born, I think, of my frenzy for analogizing. I wanted some analogy, in physical phenomena, for everything in my mental experience. Professor Drummond was to be left infinitely in the rear. And by parabolism, it seems according to a later note, I meant that a man’s intellectual career is a curve, and that curve is a parabola, being the resultant of his mental mass into his intellectual force. The importance of this notion impresses me more now than then. It will explain how men of indubitable genius stop at certain points along the road. They can get no further, because their mental parabola is complete. All that has happened since is to them unreal and unimportant. One man I know exemplifies this to a remarkable degree. His parabola starts at the seventeenth century, rises to its maximum somewhere about the Johnsonian period, continues with scarcely abated vigour as far as Thackeray and Carlyle, declines towards Trollope and—ends. To speak of Meredith and Tolstoi, Ibsen and Maeterlinck, is to beat the air. The energy is exhausted, the mind has completed its curve; the rest is a quiet reminiscence of what has been.

It pleases me to think that there may be some grain of truth in all this, though I am not unmindful of the inevitable conclusion, that my own parabola will some day take its downward course, and I shall sit, quiescent, while the younger men around will demand stormily why I cannot see the grandeur, the profundity, of their newer gods. There lies the tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, will be greater than mine—must be, if my belief in man be worth anything. Yes, that is the tragedy. I shall be at rest, and the youths of the golden future will be seeing visions and dreaming dreams of which I have not even the faintest hint.

I feel this most keenly, when reading Nietzsche, that volcanic stammerer of the thing to come. I feel, “inside,” as children say, that my parabola will be finished before I can win to the burning heart of the man. It frightens me (a sign of coming fatigue) to launch out on one of his torrents of thought—veritable rushing rivers of vitriol, burning up all that is decaying and fleshly, casting away the refined, exhausted, yet exultant spirit on some lonely point of the future, where he can see the illimitable ocean of race-possibilities.

“Oh, noon of life! Delightful garden land! Fair summer Station!”

So, writing (steadying myself against the Atlantic roll) one fresh thought in the blank left for it in the long ago, I close the book, and take up my present life once more.