“Then wherefore sully the entrusted gemOf high and noble life with thoughts so sick?Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quickFor nothing but a dream?”
“Then wherefore sully the entrusted gemOf high and noble life with thoughts so sick?Why pierce high-fronted honour to the quickFor nothing but a dream?”
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 keepingitdown 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 aLloyd’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 zeLorenzo, 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 pursedup 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, thoughyoumay 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—hecame to lay down the law to me. There was a spare stateroom for’ard of the alley-way, port side. Thedoor 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 wouldnotbelieve 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’seraglioo’ 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 outof 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 ashriek 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, theLorenzoan’ theJulioan’ theNiccoloan’ theBenvenutohere are insured againsttotal 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. TheLorenzowas 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’ stringersplusa new double bottom to the forehold, an’thenhe 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 nothurther, 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?’ Andwe 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’lllook 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.Lorenzowas to be dry-dockedafter 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 theLorenzo. 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 Iought 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 theGiacopo, 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 theLudovicointo Shields fromNikolaeff, 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.
To-day’s shipping news has it thus:—
Swansea.—Entered inwards,s.s. Benvenuto. From S. Africa. P. W. D.
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 paidoff 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 theBenvenuto’ssailor-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 whensober, 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 theBenvenutohas 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.Webegin again as soon as we have been paid off;theydepart, inebriated and uxorious, to their homes.Theyenjoy what the political economists call “the rewards of abstinence”;weput 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 cravingfor 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 againin 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? Inthe 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 terribleMiddle 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 theClarion?” 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,notmiddle 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.
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 careeris 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,willbe greater than mine—mustbe, if my belief in man be worthanything. 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.
“The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.” Perhaps one may judge of a man’s power by his reception of that aphorism. For me, at any rate, there is but unconditional assent. To live dangerously! How nauseous to me is the maternal anxietyof some of my friends. They are so anxious for me. It is such a dangerous trade. And so on.
I have been scanning a newspaper left in the mess-room, and it has provoked me to further thought. I see, in retrospect, those myriads of nicely dressed, God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local trains, each with his face turned towards his daily sheet, each with his scaly hide of prejudice clamped about his soul, each placidly settling the world’s politics and religion to his own satisfaction, each taking his daily dram of news from the same still. I look into my own copy and read on one page of a society bazaar where Lady So-and-So and the Hon. Alicia So-and-So “presided over a very tasteful stall of dwarf myrtle-trees,” etc.
In another column I am informed that some person or other, of whom I have never heard, has gone to Wiesbaden. The leading article is devoted to a eulogium of some football team, the special article asks, “Can we live on twopence a day?” You cannot imagine how unutterably turbid all this appears to me, out on the green Atlantic. It is Sunday, and so we rest; but yesterday afternoon I was out in one of the lifeboats, line-fishing for cod. The great green rollers came up from the south, and the boat rode the billows like a cockle-shell. How I would like to have had some of those city folk with me inthat up-ended lifeboat, their hands red with the cold sea water and scarred with the line as it ran through their fingers to the pull of a fourteen-pounder. Dwarf myrtle-trees! Wiesbaden! God! Let them come below with me, let me take them into our boilers and crush them down among those furred and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that I did not know I was alive. Do they, I wonder?
Yes, the newspaper came to me like a breath of foul city air. Very much in the same way I was affected by a remark made to me by my friend the Mate. “Where I live,” said he, “one child won’t play with another if its father gets five shillings a week more’n t’other’s father.” We were talking Socialism, if I remember rightly, and that was his argument against its feasibility. I did not notice the argument; I fell to thinking how odd it must be to live in such an atmosphere. How is it we never have it in Chelsea? I have never been the less welcome because my host or hostess has as many pounds a week as I have a year. My old friend of my ’prentice days—dear old Tom, the foreman, and Jack Williams, the slinger, they get no colder welcome from us because they live in Hammersmith or Whitechapel. Have we ourselves not seen in our rooms rich and poor, artist and mechanic, writer andlabourer? Nay, have we not had German clerk and Chinese aristocrat, German baron and Russian nihilist? What is it that permits us to dispense with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary of life to the people where the old Mate lives! I think it is lack of imagination in our women-folk, and the fetish of the home. For surely the utter antithesis of “home” is that same “dangerous life.” These young men who economise and grow stingy in their desperate endeavour to establish a “home nest,” some “Acacia Villa” in Wood Green or Croydon—what can they know of living dangerously? Their whole existence is a fleeing from danger. Safe callings, safe investments, safe drainage, safe transit, safe morality, safe in the arms of Jesus.Isit lack of imagination?
So we, who foregathered yesterday afternoon in the shipping office, are lashed together for another four months. A motley group, my friend. Outside I stood, note-book in hand, trying to find a spare fireman who wanted a job. A mob of touts, sharks, and pimps crowded round me, hustling each other, and then turning away from my call, “Any firemen here?” In despair I go over to the “FederationOffice,” where all seamen are registered in the books of life insurance, where they pay their premiums, and await possible engineers. I consult with the grave, elderly man in the office, and he asks for firemen in the bare, cold waiting-room. One man comes up, a pale, nervous chap, clean-shaven and quiet. I take his “Continuous Discharge” book, flick it open at the last entry—trawling! The last foreign-going voyage is dated 1902, “S. Africa,” “Voyage not completed.” I hand it back. “Won’t do,” I remark shortly, and look round for others. The man looks at the grave, elderly person, who takes the book. “Give him a chance,” says the latter, in his low, official voice. “Look—S. Africa. The man’s been serving his country. Give him a chance.” “I would if he’d promise not to get enteric when we reach port,” I say. “Never ’ad it yet, sir,” says the man, and I take his book. “Benvenuto. Hurry up. She’s signing on now.” He runs across the road, and I follow.
When I reach the shipping office they are waiting for me. Behind the counter and seated beside the clerk is the Captain, writing our “advance notes.” The clerk asks if all are present; we shuffle up closer, and he begins to read the articles to which we subscribe—signing our death-warrants, we call it. No one listens to him—he himself is paring his nails, orarranging some other papers as he intones the sentences which are more familiar to him and to us than the Lord’s Prayer to a clergyman. Then, when he has finished, each one comes up for catechism—carpenter, sailors, donkeyman, fireman, all in due order. Then the officers. “Donkeyman!” calls the clerk. A huge, muscular figure with a red handkerchief round his bull throat ceases arguing with a fireman, plunges forward, and seizes the pen. He is my friend of the last voyage, the mighty Norseman.
“What is your name?”
“Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen.”
“Where were you born?”
“Stockholm.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Where do you live?”
“Ryder Street, Swansea.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes.”
And so on with each of us.
“Don’t forget,” says the clerk from the depths of a three-and-a-half-inch collar, “to be on the ship at nine o’clock to-morrow morning.” And we troop out to make room for another crew, meet yet another coming to be paid off at the othercounter, wish we were they, and eventually reach the ship.
Strange scenes sometimes, in that shipping office, or, for that matter, in any shipping office. I shall not forget that forlorn little lad we had once engaged for mess-room steward at two pounds five a month, with his red little nose and the bullied look in his eyes. It was when he went up to sign, and answer the questions given above. What was his name? “Christmas Hedge.” All turned and stared at the snivelling urchin. Where was he born? “In a field.”
The walls, too, interest a man like me. There are notices in all the tongues of Europe on the walls—notices of sunken wrecks, of masters fined for submerging their loaded discs, of white lights in the China seas altered to green ones by the Celestial Government, of transport-medals awaiting their owners, of how to send money home from Salonika or Copenhagen or Yokohama or Singapore. Near the door, moreover, is a plain wooden money-box with no appeal for alms thereon—merely a printed slip pasted along the base of it: “There is sorrow on the sea.” And often and often I have seen grey chief officers and beardless “fourths” drop their sixpences into the box, for the sake of that sorrow on the sea.
And now it is night—our last night ashore. The Second Engineer asks me to go up town with him. The Chief has gone to see his wife home to Cardiff, and George goes on watch at eight-bells. So for the last time I don a linen collar and shore clothes, and we go up town. We meet sundry youth from the ship-yard; they are going to that iridescent music-hall into which I plunged six weeks ago when we came in. We pay our sixpences for two hours’ high-speed enjoyment, “early performance”; enjoyment being sold nowadays very much like electricity—at a high voltage but small cost per unit. Scarcely my sort, I fear, but what would you? I cannot be hypercritical on this our last night ashore. And so I strive to feel as if I were sorry to go away, as if parting were indeed that sweet sorrow I have heard it called, as if I really cared a scrap for the things they care for. True, I feel the parting from my friend, and it is no sweet sorrow either. But that is at Paddington, when the train moves, and our hands are gripped tightly—a faint foretaste of that last terror, when he or I shall pass away into the shadows and the other will be left alone for ever. It is when I ponder upon that scene that I realize what our friendship has become, that I realize how paltry every other familiar or even relative appears by comparison. Let metreasure this friendship carefully, healthfully, old friend, for, by my love of life, it is rare enough in these our modern times.
I have been wondering why this is—I think it is money, or rather business. Have you noticed how businessdehumanisesmen? I count over in my mind dozens of men whom I know, men of age, experience, and wealth, who almost demand that I should envy them by the very way they walk the city streets. They are prosperous, they imagine. I, strolling idly through those same city streets, looking at the show, studying their faces, defied them, and said to myself, “You gentlemen are not human beings—you are business men.” Not that I would tell them this; they would not understand, though they are guilty of occasional lucid intervals. They will admit, in a superior tone, that business cuts them off from a great deal. But it is evident they intend sticking to the irrefutable logic of the bank-balance. For them there is no friendship like ours. They could not afford it, bless you. How are they to know that you won’t “do” them or borrow of them? No, no. The world, for them, is a place where they have a chance of besting you and me, of getting more money than you or I, of “prospering,” as they call it, at another’s expense.
If I say to one of these men, “I want no fortune;I have what I need now by working for it,” he looks at me as though I were stark mad. If I say, to poor Sandy Jackson, for instance, who has only one lung and is mad on “getting more business”—if I say to him, “You advise me to go in for business on my own account, Sandy. Very good. What does that mean? It means that I must becomedehumanised, or fail. I must have no friends who are of no use to me. I must waste no time reading or writing or dreaming dreams. I must eat no dinners abroad which are not likely to bring in business. I must toil early and late, go on spare regimen, drink little, dress uncomfortably, live respectably—for what, Sandy? For a few hundreds or thousands of pounds. May I let up then? Oh, no, Sandy, that is the business man’s mirage, that letting up. He never lets up until he is let down—into the tomb. It would be against his principles. Well, Sandy, I see you’re at it and apparently killing yourself by it, but I wish to be excused. It isn’t good enough. I want my friends, my books, my dreams most of all. Take your business; I’ll to my dreams again.”
So, while we sit in the gaudy playhouse, I dream my dreams of the great books I want to write, the orations I want to deliver, the lessons I want to teach, and I wonder how long my time of probation will be.Strange that I should never make any allowance for the dangerous nature of my calling. This may be my last night ashore for ever. What of it? Well, it will be a nuisance to leave those books, lectures, and lessons to be written, given, and taught by somebody else; but I don’t really mind. I only want to go along steadily to the end, and when that comes shake my friend by the hand and say “Farewell.” It is plain, is it not, that I am no business man?
I am still dreaming when our noisy little crowd elbow their way out and pass up the street into a tavern. Here my friend the Second is known. He pats the fair barmaid on the cheeks, chucks the dark one under the chin, calls the landlady “old dear,” and orders drinksin extenso. I am introduced to one and all, and another girl, neither dark nor fair, emerges from an inner room for my especial regard. We are invited within, and with glass in hand and girl on knee, we toast our coming voyage. One by one the girls are kissed; the landlady jocularly asks why she is left out, and a sense of justice makes me salute her chastely. You see, old man, this is the last night ashore. We bid them “good-bye,” they wish us good luck, and we depart to our own place once more. The Second is silent. He has said good-bye to his girl—he hung back a moment as weleft the tavern. And there is something burning in my brain, just behind the eyeballs. I have not said good-bye to my girl. Or rather I mean—but I cannot formulate to myself just what I do mean at the time. I only feel, as I turn in, that I ought to have told my friend all that happened when I met her, a month ago, and that, after all, nothing really matters, and the sooner I get away to sea again the better.
Cleared for sea.s.s. Benvenuto, for S. Africa.
It is ten-thirty this clear, cold December day; the sun shines on the turquoise patch of open Channel which I can see from the bridge where I am testing the whistle; the tide is rising; the last cases of general cargo are being lowered into Number Two Hold, and from all along the deck rise little jets of steam, for the Mate is already trying the windlass. Once more we are “cleared for sea.” In an hour’s time the tugImplacable, mingling her frenzied little yelp with our deeper note, will pull us out into the middle of the dock, then round, and slowly through the big gates, into the locks. The hatches are already on the after combings, and sailors are spreading the tarpaulincovers over them and battening down with the big wood wedges.
“Steam for eleven o’clock,” said the Chief last night. Right! The gauges are trembling over the 150 mark now—enough to get away with. “Open everything out, Mr. McAlnwick,” says the Second as he strolls round for a last look before going on deck. I carry out the order, glance at the water-level in the boilers, and then go for’ard to see how many of my firemen are missing. They should all be here by now. No, two short still. Old Androwsky rears himself up and points with the stem of his pipe at the quay. The ship has moved away, and the two men with sailors’ bags and mattresses are watching us. They will get aboard in the locks.
The Skipper is in uniform on the bridge, and the Mate is, as usual, in a hurry. The mooring winch is groaning horribly as she hauls on a cable running from the stern to the quay while the tug pulls our head slowly round. Right down to the centre of the loading disc now. The Second Mate rushes to the fiddle-top, and shouts for “more steam”—the winch has stuck—and a howl from below tells him that the donkeyman is doing his best. As I go below again the sharp clang of the telegraph strikes my ear—“Stand by.”
The steam is warming the engine-room, and there is, in the atmosphere down here, a peculiar pungent smell, always present when getting away. It is, I suppose, the smell of steam, if steam has any smell. “Give ’er a turn, Mr. McAlnwick.” The Chief looks down from the deck-door, and I answer “All right, sir.” We are moving into the locks now, and as I start the little high-speed reversing engine the telegraph pointer moves round to “Slow ahead” with a sharp clang. “Ash-pit dampers off!” cries George the Fourth, and runs to close the drain-cocks. There is a sudden loud hammering as I open the throttle, and she moves away under her own steam. Then she sticks on a dead-centre,à point du mort, as the Frenchmécanicienssay, and George rushes to open the intermediate valve, kicking open the water-service cock as he goes past it. At last she goes away, slow, solemn, and steamy, three pairs of eyes watching every link and bar for “trouble.” “All right?” asks the Chief from above, and the Second, standing by the staircase, answers “All right, sir.” Then “clang” goes the telegraph round to “Stop,” and I close the throttle. “We’re in the locks,” says George, fiddling with an oil-cup which is loose on the intermediate pressure rod. “We’re in the locks, and we soon shall cross the bar.” And as he busies himself with one thing and another he hums the tunewhich has swept over Swansea like some contagious disease of late: