XVIII

“When there isn’t a girl about,You do feel lonely!When there isn’t a girl aboutTo call your only!You’re absolutely on the shelf,Don’t know what to do with yourself,When there isn’t a girl about!”

“Said good-bye to her, Mac?” he asks. I nod evasively. He has been home to Sunderland since we got in, and I found him asleep on the gallery floor, with his head in the ash-pit, the night of his return. He is better now, and since I know he has brought back a photograph from the north, I am in hopes of his having fallen in love. (Clang! Slow ahead.) It is high time, I think. His constitution won’t stand everything, you know. And it seems such a pity for a fine young chap to——(Clang! Stop.) George is recording the bridge orders on the black-board on the bunker bulkhead, and I wonder——(Clang! Slow ahead.) A pause; then—Clang! FULL AHEAD.

“Let her go away gradually, mister,” says the Second as he goes round to have a look at the pumps. Cautiously the stop-valve is opened out, and the engines get into their sixty-two per-minute stride. Thefiremen are at it now, trimmers are flogging away the wedges from the bunker doors, and the funnel damper is full open. And then, and then—how shall I describe the sensation of that first delicate rise and fall of the plates. I experience a feeling of buoyant life under my feet! It means we are out at sea, that we have crossed the bar. The Chief and Second have gone to get washed for dinner, George is on deck shutting off steam and watching the steering engine for defects, and I am left alone below with a greaser. I experience a feeling of exultation as I watch my engines settle down for their seven-day run to the Canary Islands. How can I explain how beautiful they are?

“All things bright and beautiful,All creatures great and small,All things wise and wonderful,The Lord God made them all!”

Yes, that is how I feel just now as I pace round and round, alert for a leaky joint or a slackened nut. The solemn music of the plunging rods is all the sweeter for that I have not heard it for six weeks. We are out at sea!

And now George comes down again, and I go on deck to get my dinner. We are crossing Swansea Bay, among the brown-sailed trawlers and the incomingsteamships. The sun shines brightly on us as we bear away southward towards Lundy, and I stare out silently across the broad Channel, thinking. Oh, my friend, stand by me now, in this my hour of need! How foolish! I am alone at sea, and my friend is in London, puzzling over my behaviour to him.

The cool breeze against my face arouses me. The mood of exultation in my engines, the mood of blank despair, both have passed, and I am, I hope, myself again. Once more “the kick o’ the screw beneath us and the round blue seas outside.” Once more the wandering fever is in my blood, and, as the winter’s day fades away, I stand against the rail looking eastward at the flashing lights, calmer than I have been since that night—a month ago. I am an ocean tramp once more, and count it life indeed.

“And out at sea, behold the dock-lights die,And meet my mate, the wind that tramps the world.”

I have been looking into some of my books, now that the sea is so calm and the weather so enchantingly fair. I find a pleasurable contrast in dipping into such volumes as Boswell’s “Johnson,” Goldsmith’s“Beau Nash,” and Lady Montague’s “Letters.” The life they depict is so different, the opinions they express so dissimilar from those I have myself gradually grown to affect. And what an amazingfarragois that same Boswell! Surely, if ever a book was writtencon amore, it is that one. Compare it with the “Life of Beau Nash.” Each is the biography of a remarkable man, but what a difference! In every line Goldsmith displays a certain forced interest. I do not know, but I am almost positive he cared very little for his subject; I feel that the work is only being carried on for the sake of gain. Regarded so, it is a masterly little Life. Two hundred small pages—Nash merits no more on the roll of fame.

But the former, twelve hundred closely printed pages. No paltry little anecdote or incident, germane or not, is too contemptible for him. The identity of some obscure school, the mastership of which Johnson never held, is argued about until one is weary of the thing. The illegible note, written for his own eye alone, is construed in a dozen ways, and judgment delivered as though the fate of empires hung thereon. The smug complaisance with which he cites some prayer or comment to illustrate his idol’s religious orthodoxy would have angered me once—didanger me once—but out here, on the broad blueocean, I smile at the toady, and marvel at the wondrous thing he has wrought.

Pleasant, too, to turn the leaves of my Dryden, and glance through some of those admirably composed prefaces, those egotistical self-criticisms so full of literary pugnacity, in an age when pluck in a poet needed searching for. I often say to folk who deplore Bernard Shaw’s prefatory egotism that if they would read Dryden they would discover that Shaw is only up to his own masterly old game of imitating his predecessor’s tactics. But Shaw is quite safe. He knows people do not read the literature of their own land nowadays.

I had a laugh last evening all to myself when I noticed that, in a hasty re-arrangement of my book-shelves,Gorkystood shouldering oldChaucer! Could disparity go further? And yet each is a master of his craft, each does his work with skill—with “trade finish,” as we say. And so it seemed to me that, after all, one might leave the “Romaunt of the Rose” side by side with “Three of Them,” on condition that each is read and re-read, if only for the workmanship.

Cellini, too, draws me as regularly and irresistibly as the moon makes our tides. Here is richness. The breathless impetuosity of the whole narrative, the inconceivable truculence of the man, fascinatesme, who am so different. When I looked at that “Perseus” in Florence, when I leaned over the medal-cases in South Kensington and stared hard at the work of his murderous hands, I felt awed and baffled. How could he do it—he with his dagger just withdrawn from some rival’s shoulders, his fingers just unclasped from some enemy’s windpipe? Then, again, the virile cheerfulness of the man! God is ever on his side, Justice is his guardian angel. And while musing upon him some few days back, I fell to wondering if I might not imitate him. I mean, why could not I take the life of some such man (and I know one at least who could sit for the portrait), and write a fictitious autobiography in that truculent, bombastic, interesting style? I have the material, and I believe I could do it. What do you think, old friend? It is already one of my plans for the future, when I am done wandering.

That last word reminds me of my Borrow. Who can describe the bewildering delight when one first plunges into “Lavengro” and the “Romany Rye”? To take them from the book-case and carry them out to Barnet, where the Kingmaker fell, and read with the wind in your face and the Great North Road before your eyes—is that too much to ask of mine ancient Londoner? Believe me, the thing is worth doing. No man ever put so divine an optimisminto his books, so genuine a love of “nature.” Says Mr. Petulengro: “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

One of the most precious memories of my younger manhood is brought back to me as I write those words. It was a Sunday afternoon in late autumn, in one of those unfrequented ways which slant off from the Great North Road beyond Hadley Heath, where the green turf bordered the brown road and the leaves covered the earth beneath the trees with a carpet of flaming cloth-of-gold. I had left my book and bicycle to one side, and, seated upon a low grey stone wall, I watched the sun go down. Behind me, across the intervening meadows, rose clouds of dust, redolent of waste gases, where thundered an ever-increasing traffic of swift vehicles. In front a vaporous mist was rising from the land; the shadows broadened, and the red western glow grew deeper, while in the middle distance a tiny child, clad in green cloak and little red hood, stood conning her Sunday story—a jewel of quiet colour in the gathering autumn twilight. And so, as I listened to the roar from the macadamed highway and looked out upon that evening glory, it was as though I heard, far off, the throbbing pulse of thegreat world’s mighty hand, while I sat still in the heart of it.

“Life is very sweet, brother: who would wish to die?”

Is all this too bookish for an ocean tramp? Alas! I fear I grow too cocksure of my literary attainments out here, with none to check me. It is in London where a man finds his true level in the book world, as Johnson shrewdly observed. In the evening, when we are gathered over the fire, and opinions fly across and rebound, when one hears bookmen talk of books, and painters talk of art—that is the time when I feel myself so unutterably insignificant. Often I have looked across at T——, or G——, or ——, someone I know even better than them, and I feel discouraged. You men havedonethings, while I—well, I talk about doing things, and try, feebly enough, to make my talking good; but to what end? T—— has his work in many a public building and sacred edifice; G—— has his books on our tables and in the circulating libraries; and you have done things, too, in dramatic literature.

Meanwhile I am an engine-driver on the high seas! I know my work is in the end as honourable and more useful than yours, but I cannot always keep back ajealous feeling when I think of the years sliding by, and nothing done. Nothing ever finished, not even—but there! That chapter of my life is finished and done with, incomplete as the story will be always. Often and often, under the stars at midnight, I think that if she would stand by me, I could be nearer success—I could take hold of life and wrench away the difficulties of it. And then again comes a more valiant, manly mood. I say to myself, I will do something yet. I will reach the heights, and show her that one man at least can stand on his own feet. I will show her that she need have no need to be ashamed of him, though no carpet-knight, only an engine-driver. And I recall that brave song in the “Gay Pretenders”:

“I am not what she’d have me be,I am no courtier fair to see;And yet no other in the land,I swear, shall take my lady’s hand!”

Well, that is my high resolve sometimes, and I will try to keep it in front of me always, and so do something at last.

Well, well, this is sad talk for the day before Christmas! Come away from books and trouble, out on deck, where there is a breeze. The mighty Norseman is ready to cut my hair, and is waiting abaft the engine-room under the awning.

It is the donkeyman’s business, aboard this ship, to cut the officers’ hair. A marvellous man, a good donkeyman. And this one of ours is multi-marvellous, for he can do anything. He speaks Swedish, Danish, Russian, German, and excellent English. He has been a blacksmith, butcher, fireman, greaser, tinsmith, copper-smelter, and now,endlich,enfin, at last, a donkeyman. His frame is gigantic, his strength prodigious. On his chest is a horrific picture of the Crucifixion in red, blue, and green tattoo. Between the Christ and the starboard thief is a great triangular scar of smooth, shiny skin. One of his colossal knees is livid with scars. He tells me the story like this, keeping time with the click of the scissors.

“When I was a kid I was a wild devil. Why, I ran away with a circus that came to Stockholm, and my father he came after me and he nearly kill me. Then, one day, I had on—what you call ’em, mister?—long shoes, eight, ten feet long—ah! yes, we call ’emski. Well, I go to jump thirty, forty feet, and I am only twelve years old. The strap come off my foot and I have not time to shift my balance to the other foot, and I go over and over, like a stone. I come down on my knee, and there are beer-bottles on the rocks. The English and Germans, they drink beer on the rocks—beautifulSwedish beer, better than Löwenbrau, hein! Well, they take out of my knee fifty pieces of glass—you see the marks? And my chest it is smashed bad. They cut off three rib and look inside; this is where they look into my chest. All right! They put ribs back and box all up. Oh, I was a wild devil when I was a kid!”

Such is Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen, with his huge strength, frescoed chest, and pasty face with the jolly blue eyes. I think the women like him, and, by the hammer of Thor! he can bend a bar of iron across his knee!

It is Christmas Day, and I begin it with the clock as usual. George the Fourth punches me in the ribs, grunts, “Merry new Christmas, Mac,” and vanishes. There is not a breath of air stirring. Through the sultry night air the stars burn brightly. A cluster of blurred lights on the horizon show me where a liner is creeping past us in the darkness—a ship passing in the night. Clad only in dungaree trousers and singlet, I go below, on watch. The windsail hangs limp and breathless, and the thermometer stands at 120° Fah. Christmas Day!

Slowly in the hot air the hours drag on. One,two, three o’clock. Then, “one bell.” No breeze yet. I finish up, score my log on the black-board—Sea water 90°, discharge 116°—and call the Second. He is awake, panting in the hot oven of his berth. If I wish him a merry Christmas he will murder me. I slink below again, and have a sea bath. Even salt water at 90° Fah. is a boon after four hours in that inferno.

A mug of cocoa—strange how hot cocoa cools one—and I turn in. I hear the Skipper padding up and down in his sandals on the poop, clad only in pyjamas. At last, as the stars are paling, I fall asleep.

At seven o’clock I am aroused by the mess-room steward leaning over me, closing my ports. They are flooding the decks with sea-water to cool them, and if my ports are open I am also flooded.

Still no relief. There is a deathly quiet in the mess-room as we assembled to our Christmas breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee, cocoa, and marmalade. Imagine such amenuin the tropics! The butter is liquid, and from each of us, clad in singlets and white ducks, the sweat streams. The day begins unpropitiously. John Thomas, the mess-room steward, balancing himself on the top step of our companion-way with three cups of boiling cocoa in his hands, slips and thunders to the bottom. There is a chaotic mixture of scalded boy, broken cups, andsteam on the floor, and we giggle nervously in our Turkish bath.

George the Fourth goes on watch, and we lie listlessly under our awning, praying for a breeze. On the face of the blazing vault there is not a single cloud, on the face of the waters not a ripple. The sea is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from the funnel rise vertically, and the sun quivers behind them. The flaps of the windsail hang dead, the sides of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck of a skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our heads and the air grows hotter and hotter. From the galley come sounds of quacking, and a few feathers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized trimmer will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the open air, his half-naked body black with coal-dust and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big straw hat, paces the bridge slowly. The cook emerges from the galley and hastens aft for provisions—they are preparing our Christmas dinner. Roast duck, green peas, new potatoes, plum pudding—and the temperature is 105° Fah. on deck.

One bell. I rise, and go below to change for my watch—12 to 4.

“Will you take any dinner, sir?” John Thomas rubs the sweat from his forehead and sets the soup on the table. I ponder on the madness of eatingChristmas fare in that oven-like mess-room, but sentiment wins, and I sit down with the others.

“Hoondred an’ twenty oonder t’ win’s’le,” whispers George to me huskily.

“What’s the sea-water?” asks the Chief.

“Eighty-nine, sir.”

We push the soup aside, and John Thomas brings in the roast ducks. How appetizing they would be at home! The Chief wrenches them apart in perspiring silence, and we fall to. We peck at the food; the sweat drops from our faces into the plates, the utensils slide from our hands, and so we make the best of it. But when the pudding arrives our courage fails us. Wecannotface plum pudding, sentiment or no sentiment. We gulp down some lime-juice and stagger away like dying men—I to four hours’ purgatory below.

Slowly (oh, so slowly!) the time drags on. The greaser draws his tattooed arm across his eyes and whispers, with the triumph of a lost soul bragging of the Circle of Fire, that he has known it “’otter’n this in the Red Sea, sir.” He is an entertaining man. Often I hear tales from the wide world of waters from his lips. This is his last voyage, he tells me. He is going “shore donkeyman” in future—what you call longshoreman. His wife has a nice little business in Neath now, and “she wants ’im ’ome.” Have Inoticed how that high-press guide is leaking? Should he tighten up the tap-bolts in the bottom plate? I dissent, because one cannot reach them safely while she is running. It is only a trifle; better let it go. He acquiesces doubtfully, and resumes greasing. And the hours drift by.

At four o’clock the Second relieves me, looking reproachfully at the slackened windsail. Still no breeze. And the greaser, who does not go off till six o’clock, observes, “Oh, wot a—’appy Christmas!” Which would be profane if the temperature were lower.

I change into white ducks again and saunter up to the bridge to talk to my friend the Mate. If I were to paraphrase Johnson’s burst of energy, I should say, “Sir, Ilovethe Mate!”

“Merry Christmas, Mr. McAlnwick!” he shouts cheerfully from the upper bridge, and a chorus of yelping dogs joyfully take up the cry. They are the “Old Man’s,” but they follow the Mate up and down until they drop with fatigue. Black silky spaniel, rough-red Irish terrier, black and grey badger-toed Scotch half-breed, nameless mongrel—they all love the Mate. “Come here,” he says, and I climb up to his level.

“The Old Man had a letter this mornin’,” he says.

“Eh?” I remark blankly.

“Ah! His wife gave it me before we sailed an’ I left it on his table this mornin’! Says he, at breakfast, ‘Pshaw!’ says he, ‘it’s a waste o’ paper.’”

“Mr. Honna,” I say, “perhaps he’ll be sorry for saying that, eh?”

“He will, he will—some day, Mr. Mac,” and he walks up and down the bridge for a bit, smoking the pipe his children gave him for a present last Christmas. I ask him:

“When shall we strike the trade wind, Mr. Honna?”

“Soon, soon. ’T ought to be here in the morning.”

I climb down again, and sniff eagerly for the first beginnings of a breeze. Nothing, unless you are optimistic and like to stare at a brown streak away southward, between sky and sea.

I reach the engineers’ awning aft of the engine-room, and see the Chief in his chair, the Fourth in his hammock, and the Second just come up for tea. I open my mouth and speak, when the regular throb of the engines is broken by a scream. Like a flash each one springs to his feet and looks at the others. The regular throb goes on as before, and George laughs, but the Second disappears through the door, I following. I shall not easily forget that scream.

Half-way down, a fireman, his face blanching under the coal-dust and sweat, meets us.

“What’s up?” snaps the Second.

“Donkeyman, sir. In the crankpit!” He plunges downward again, and we do the same. Down into the fierce oily heat illuminated by the electrics in front of each engine. The second puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles shrilly to those above. And then we fall to work. The telegraph is flung over to “Stop,” the throttle is closed, ash-pit damper put on, and the regular throb slackens, hesitates, stops. With a dexterous flick of the reversing engine the Second catches the high-press engine on the stop centre and locks her there. And then we look.

Far better for him, poor lad, if he had taken my tip and left those tap-bolts to leak. The Second says “Hand-lamp,” and I give him one. People are coming down the stairs in numbers now, and the Chief rushes up to us, looks down, and turns away sickened. The ponderous cranks have blood dashed across them, the rod is streaked and lathered with it. From the bottom of the pit comes no sound, no movement. Lying on the plates is the spanner which must have spun from his hand as he fell to destruction.

“Now then, how many more?” snarls the Second. Sweat streams from his face as he pushes the intrudersaway and lifts a man-hole plate in the platform. I seize the hand-lamp and get down on to the tank, and the Second follows. It is not pleasant, understand, down there, where bilge collects and rats run riot, and grease is rolled into filthy black balls, and the stench is intolerable. I push on towards the pit.

A full moon, blood-red and enormous, hangs just above the eastern sky-line. In the west still burns the glow of the vanishing sun, and the pale sky is twinkling with innumerable stars. The regular throb of the engines drives the ship forward again, a sailor is hauling down the red ensign from the poop, and another moves to and fro, silhouetted against the southern sky, on the foc’sle-head. Just ahead of the bridge two more sailors sit busily sewing. The Old Man stands by the chart-house door talking to the Mate. The dogs lie quietly on the lower deck, their heads between their paws.

In the after-hatch, covered by the flag, lies that which is about to be committed to the deep.

The red glow fades from the west, and the moon swings upward, flooding the sea with silver light. Away southward lies a black streak on the sky-line and the windsail flickers a little. The two sailors have finished sewing, and go aft. A fireman breaksthe deck silence as he hoists two firebars up from the for’ard stokehold and carries them aft. Up on the poop, under the awning, the Second Mate has removed the hand-rails on the starboard quarter, and the carpenter is lashing some hatches in an inclined position.

We by the engine-room door are silent, for there is nothing to say. We wait for theStand bybell in silence. A heavy footfall, and the Skipper, his bronzed face hard-drawn, his snowy hair uncovered, passes us. I think, even now, he is sorry for that sneer at his wife’s little trick. He is going to get the Prayer Book that lies close to his revolver in his chest.

George and I go below and make all ready. I think the Second is glad of our company, in the terrible heat. We potter about in silence: then “Stand by—Half—Slow—Stop.” A few minutes’ swift toil, a hurried wash, and we climb up on deck again into the moonlight. A white, silent world of waters is about us as we join the crew going aft to the poop. The awning has been partly folded back, and we see the Skipper resting his book on the tiller-gear, while the Steward stands by with a lantern. I look curiously into the faces I know so well, seeking, in the presence of death, a little more knowledge of life. I look at the Skipper, with his white hair and fierce moustache gleaming in the silver radiance of themoon, his hands fumbling with the leaves of the book. I look at the Chief, fidgeting about in the rear, meeting no one’s eye, his mouth working nervously. I look at George the Fourth; he is staring like a schoolboy at the flag-covered thing on the hatch, with the firebars lashed to its sides. And then the silence is broken by the harsh, unsteady voice:

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

The tension is almost unbearable now. We have not been educated to this. We are like soldiers suddenly flung into the face of the enemy.

“We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her dead), and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”

A pause, and he closes the book. Two of the men quietly slacken the ropes which hold the body in position, another pulls off the flag, and the dark mass on the planks plunges downward into the oily sea. Another pause, while I picture it rushing “down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are,” and the Chief motions furtively with his fingers.

In a few minutes we are under way.

It is eight bells, midnight, once more. The sky to the southward is a jet-black mass of clouds, and the windsail is yawing in a strong, cool breeze. Away to the westward the moon still throws her glory over the face of the waters and I go below, thinking of the night coming, when no man shall work.

And so ends our Christmas Day.

It is Sunday, and I lie under the awning by the engine-room door, lazily reading “Faust.” There is a speck on the sky-line—the mail boat, bringing a letter from my friend. I look round at the translucent opal of the bay, the glittering white of the surf on the reef, the downward swoop on an albatross, and I listen to the dull roar of the breakers, to the solemn tang-tang of the bell-buoy on the bar, and the complaisant “ah-ha-a-a” of some argumentative penguin. Even the drab-coloured African hills in the distance, and the corrugated Catholic church (shipped in sections) with the sun blazing on its windows, are beautiful to me to-day, for I am not of those who think religion is ugly because it is corrugated, or thathills are repulsive because they are not in the guide-book. I am at peace, and so are the rest. My friend the Mate is fishing, but that, of course, is trite; the Mate is always fishing. I fancy the cod nudge each other and wink when they see his old face looking down into those opalescent depths, and watch him feeling at his lines for a bite. How they must have joked together this morning when he gave a shout and called for help, for he could not lift the line! We all responded to the call, and the line came up slowly. “Must be a whopper,” muttered the Mate, and refused my callous suggestion that it was a coal-bag which had got entangled in the hook. At last, after an eternity of hauling, came up part of an iron bedstead, dropped from some steamer in the long ago. But the true fisherman has reserves of philosophy to cope with such slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Meanwhile the speck has enlarged itself into a blot with a tag above it and some cotton-woolly smoke. “’Tis theNautilas,” observes the Mate, and he calls it “Naughty Lass” with hibernian unconsciousness of his own humour. I wonder, now, why it is that we sailor-men invariably display such franticfeminineinterest when another craft heaves in sight. The most contemptible fishing boat in the Bay of Biscay, when she appears on the horizon, receives the noticeof all hands—the old as well as the young. And when we pass a sister ship, theAretinoor theCosimoor theAngelo; in mid-ocean, we talk about her and criticise her, and rake out her past history, for days. I sometimes think, from hints the Mate drops, that our ownBenvenutohas a past, a St. John’s Wood past I mean, not a Haymarket past. But he will have no talk by others against the ship. “What’s the matter with the ship?” he will shout. “Damn it all, I like the ship! She’s a good old ship, an’ I glory in her!” So we talk scandal about the others instead.

Here, on the ragged edge of the Empire, things are managed expeditiously by the authorities. Scarcely an hour after theNautilashas dropped her pick the tugboat comes out again and flings us our mail. Bosun and donkeyman trudge aft and take the letters for the foc’sle, the mess-room steward deposits a letter in my lap, and I think of my friend. At this moment he is engaged in repartee with the housekeeper as she lays the table for tea. The heavy twilight is settling down over the river outside; lovers are pacing the walk as they return from their Sunday tramp. Possibly, too, that fantastic scene which he has described to me is now enacting. He is at the piano; the housekeeper, in tears, is on her knees beside him, and they raise their melodious voices “for those in peril on the sea.” How affecting,for one to be so remembered! I thank them both with all my heart.

And now he tells me that his play goes well, and I am glad. It will indeed be a red-letter day when I pay my shilling and climb into the gallery to see his work. No, I shall not criticise. Probably I shall hardly listen. I shall be thinking many thoughts, dreaming dreams, feeling simply very glad and very proud.

I sympathise always with his struggles with hispersonnel, but I think, though, he hardly allows enough for the point of view. These actors and actresses are not literary. (Theyshouldbe, I know.) They look at an author’s work as a man looks at the universe—a small part at a time. That trite old paradox that, to the actor, the part is greater than the whole, should never be forgotten. Remember, too, how “touchy,” as he calls it, theymustbe, in the nature of things. Their touchiness, their affectation, their lack of culture—all are inherent in them.Theirsuccess is always immediate, using the word in its literal sense as a metaphysician would use it; the author’s success is mediate, through time and trial. So one should not be discouraged because they fail to appreciate one’s efforts to give them the atmosphere of the period. They will get the atmosphere intuitively, or not at all.

He complains of “loss of time,” “thankless task,” “inefficiency,” and the like. Now, I think that is grumbling without cause. Take my own case, for example. I have no problems of dramatic art to wrestle with, only the problem of coal consumption. But it is ultimately the same thing, i.e., energy. My friend mourns the shameful loss of energy incident to the production of a decent presentment of his dramatic conception. I, as an engineer, mourn over the hideous loss of coal incidental to the propulsion of the ship. The loss in his case, I suppose, is incalculable: in mine it is nearly seventy per cent. Think of it for a moment. TheLusitania’sfurnaces consume one thousand tons of coal per day, seven hundred of which are, in all probability, lost in the inefficiency of the steam-engine as a prime mover. It runs through the whole of our life, my friend! Waste, waste, waste! What we call the perfect cycle, the conversion of energy into heat and heat into energy, cannot, in practice, be accomplished without loss. What may interest you still more is that we cannot, even in theory, calculate on no loss whatever in the progress of the cycle, and by this same “entropy loss,” as we call it, some of our more reckless physicists foresee the running down of the great universe-machine some day, and so eliminating both plays and steam-engines from the problem altogether.But this is my point. Prodigious loss is the law of nature which she imposes both on artist and artisan. Indeed, artist and artisan have their reason of being in that loss, as I think you will admit.

Again, history will corroborate my contention as to the catholicity of this loss. Imagine the French Revolution, the Lutheran Reformation, the “Catholic” Reaction, and the like, to berevolutionsof the vast human engine. Consider then the loss of power. Consider the impulse, the enormous impulse, applied to the piston, and then look at the result. What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) waste gases! Think, too, of the loss involved in unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced engines, one mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! Oh, my friend, my friend, you talk of “losses” as though you playwrights had a monopoly of it. Ask men of all trades, of all faiths, and they will give you, in their answers, increased knowledge of human life.

Such, at least, is my method—digging into the hearts of men. Take, for instance, my friend the Second Officer. A tall, lean young man, with an iron jaw under his brown beard. I began to talk to him one evening because he said he never had letters from home. He had a sister, he told me, butthere was no joy in the telling. “We don’t hit it off,” he observed grimly, and I smiled. He has no sweetheart, loves nothing but dogs. How he loves dogs! He has two at his heels all day long. He loves them almost as much as dogs love the Chief Officer, which is to distraction. He will take the solemn English terrier up on his knee and give me a lecture thereon. This same pup, I learn, is “low”—look at his nose! He is in bad health—just feel his back teeth! Saucy? Yes, certainly, but not a thoroughbred hair on him. He has worms, too, I understand, somewhere inside, and on several occasions during the voyage his bowels needed attention. I, in my utter ignorance of dog-lore, begin to marvel that the animal holds together at all under the stress of these deficiencies. Perhaps the dirt which he collects by rolling about on deck affords a protective covering. Once a week, however, his lord and master divests him of even this shadowy defence, and he emerges from a bucket, clean, soapy, and coughing violently. In all probability he rejoices in consumption as well.

The Second Officer, I say, teaches me philosophy. He has had a hard life, I think. By sheer industry he has risen from common sailor to his present berth. I say “sheer” because it seems to me that when a man has no friends or relations who care to writeto him, the way of life must be very steep indeed. I was surprised, though, to learn of his loneliness. Had he, then, no kindly light to lead him on? Unconsciously he answered me. Would I come down below and have something to drink? With pleasure; and so we went. The last time I had been in that room was when his predecessor, the little man with four children and a house of his own, had extended hospitality to me. It is not a pleasant room. A spare bunk full of canvas bolts, cordage, and other stores, make it untidy; and the Steward’s stores are just behind the after bulkhead, so that it smells like a ship-chandler’s warehouse. Well, we sit down, and the whiskey passes. We light cigars (magnificent Campania Generals at three farthings each), and then he ferrets about in his locker. I look at the pictures. Almanack issued by a rope-maker in Manchester; photo of an Irish terrier, legs wide part, tail at an angle of forty-five to the rest of him; photo of Scotch terrier, short legs, fat body, ears like a donkey’s; photo of the officers of s.s.Timbuctoo, in full uniform, my friend among them, taken on the upper deck, bulldog in the foreground. By this time the Second Officer has exhumed an oblong wooden case containing a worn violin. Ah! I have his secret. He holds it like a baby, and plucks at the strings. Then he plays.

Well, he knows, by instinct I imagine, that I care nothing for music, as music. So when I ask for hymn-tunes, he smiles soberly and complies. I hear my favourites to my heart’s content—“Hark, Hark, My Soul,” “Weary of Earth,” “Abide With Me,” and “Thou Knowest, Lord.” How glad they must be who believe these words! The red sun was flooding the room with his last flaming signal as the man played:

“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide,When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,Help of the helpless, O abide with me!”

Yes,mon ami, all men know of that tremendous loss inherent in all their labours. And it is, I think, to balance that loss that they have invented religion.

It has suddenly struck me that there are many important things to be found by considering the cheap literature which floods the English and American publics week by week and month by month. I am afraid that, when at home in Chelsea, where even the idlers read Swinburne and Lord de Tabley, I had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view,calling novelettes “trashy” and beneath an intellectual man’s consideration. Well, since this particular trash forms the staple brain food in the Mercantile Marine, I must needs look into it more closely. With results.

There is a question of bulk and output. This is appalling to a laborious writer, a student or a thinker. Week by week there pours forth an unending deluge of love fiction, and week by week this deluge is absorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. We speak glibly of the world-wide fame of some classic, when, in point of fact, the people familiar with that classic are isolated specks in the vast, solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household god. The classic will have, say, one votary in the family, the novelettist will capture the familyen bloc. An engineer will receive a cargo of novelettes, all of which have been digested, or even feverishly devoured, by his mother, wife, or sisters. He will pass them on to the Steward, who will read them and give them to the sailors and firemen. And this obtains in every ship wherever the English language is spoken. What classic can claim a public that does not seem microscopic compared to this?

I cannot but observe, too, that Miss Anonyme often writes exceedingly well. No extraneous vapourings are admitted, and the plot is steadily developedto its inevitable conclusion of “happy ever after.” The metaphors are somewhat stereotyped, and quotations from Tennyson are awkwardly handled, but—what would you for a penny? Johnson’s explanation—that they write well in order to be paid well—is correct. Miss Anonyme knows her “market,” and she writes for it as well as can be expected under the circumstances.

A point worth noting is that this talk about “pernicious literature” is not sincere. Literature cannot be pernicious in itself. At the present time people can get exactly what they desire, because the question of price does not arise. The finest works are to be had at every free library, and for a few pence at every book-shop, and the public carefully avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chapter of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography masquerading as literature are priced at “a shilling net,” and are avidly purchased and read by the simple, God-fearing, sea-faring man.

There is, of course, a tragic side to this question. I mean that, after all, a sublime simplicity of mind is a necessary predicate to the acceptance of this “cheap” fiction. “A penn’orth o’ loove,” George the Fourth calls a novelette, and there’s something very grim to me in that phrase also.

I have already noted the “passionate love ofmusic” in the heroes and heroines of these stories. I made notes, and, in ten consecutive tales, one or more of the characters “was a passionate lover of music.” I do not complain against the genius whose heroine elopes with a clean-shaven villain to Brittany and is married in a Gothic church with frescoed chapels. Neither do I any longer cry out when I read that “the light that never was lay over the land.” I am grown callous with a course of light fiction such as I have never taken before. And I hope I shall not be misunderstood and numbered with the prigs when I say that never did literature seem to me more lovely and alluring than when I had finished my task and had opened my “Faust” once more, feeling the magic of the master beckoning “to far-off shores with smiles from other skies.”

What we clearly comprehend we can clearly express. That, I think, is Boileau, though I cannot remember where I read it. The baffling thing about this fiction is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not really a part of literature. The features of my colleagues when absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally associated with a recumbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive languor. Loss ofmemory, too, is only one of the consequences of reading a dozen novelettes in a week’s run.

There is another possibility. I must not forget that in one point I found myself in error. In the case especially of engineers, this intellectual drug-taking has no effect upon their interest in professional literature. When George the Fourth goes up for his “tickut” he will be as keen about the theory of steam and the latest researches in salinometry as any of the aristocratic young gentlemen who haunt the precincts of Great George Street and Storeys Gate. This leads me to imagine that in the future there will be a vast mass of highly trained mechanicians to whom literature will be non-existent, but whose acquaintance with written technics will be enormous. Like our scientific men, perhaps. I am uneasy at the prospect, because this conception of uncultured omniscience, the calm eyes of him shining with the pride of Government-stamped knowledge, is inseparable from an utter lack of reverence for women. Neither Antony nor Pericles, but Alcibiades is his classical prototype. And so the fiction with which he will pass the time between labour and sleep will have none of the subtlety of Meredith, none of the delicate artistry of Flaubert, but rather the fluent obviousness of Guy Boothby, stripped as bare as possible of sex romance.

I am anxious to convince myself of all this, because I want so much to divorce this tremendous flood of machine-made writing from genuine literary activity. That, too, will evolve and evolve and evolve again; but with such a theme I am not genius enough to cope.

I am grown tired of books. It is a fact that protracted manual toil strikes a shrewd blow at one’s capacity for thought, and at times I turn from the fierce intellectual life with a weariness I never knew in the old days. How my friend would smile at such a confession. I, who have thumped the supper-table until three in the morning, until our eyelids were leaden with fatigue, growing weary of the strife! Yet it is sometimes true.

After all, though, my real study nowadays is on deck and below, where Shakespeare and the musical glasses are beyond the sky-line, and one can talk to men who have never in their lives speculated upon life, have never imagined that life could possibly be arraigned and called in question, or that morality could ever be anything but “givin’ the girl her lines, like a man.” My friend the Mate is a compendium of humanism, the Chief provides me with curious researches in natural history. Even the Cook, withwhom I have been conversing, presents new phases of life to me, and brings me into touch with the poor, the ignorant, and the prolific. The poor whomweknow at home are only poor in purse. These men are poor in everything save courage and the power to propagate their kind. The Cook has received a letter from his sister-in-law to the effect that he is now the father of twins, and he looks at me and smiles grimly. Under the pretence of obtaining hot water for shaving, I am admitted to hissanctum sanctorumabaft the funnel, and we talk. It is hardly necessary to say that the Malthusian doctrine receives cordial approbation from my friend the Cook, when I have expounded it to him.

“Certainly, Mr. McAlnwick,” he observes, “but ’ow are you goin’ to start?”

“You see,” I reply, “it isn’t a question of starting, but a question of stopping.”

“Well,” he says stolidly, rolling a cigarette, “’ow are you goin’ to start stoppin’?”

“You,” I answer, “might have dispensed with these twins.”

“Lord love yer, mister, Icandispense with ’em easy enough. That’s not the question. The question is, ’ow am I to feed ’em, now I’ve got ’em? An’ ’ow am I to avoid ’em, me bein’ a man, mind, an’ not a lump o’ dry wood?”

Like all theorists, I am hard put for an answer. I look round me, and watch my interlocutor preparing to make bread. There is a mammoth pan on the bench beside me containing a coast-line of flour with a lake of water in the middle. Cook is opening the yeast-jar, an expression of serious intent on his face. Some cooks sing when they make bread; the Scotchman I told you of in a previous letter invariably trilled “Stop yer ticklin’, Jock,” and his bread was invariably below par. But this cook does not warble. He only releases the stopper with a crack like a gun-shot, flings the liquid “doughshifter” over the lake in a devastating shower, and commences to knead, swearing softly. Anon the exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass. For five pounds a month this man toils from four a.m. to eight p.m., and his wife can find nothing better to do than present him with twins!

I look into the glowing fire and think.

I feel this is delicate ground, even allowing for the natural warmth of a man who has twins, so I am silent.

“Sometimes,” Cook continues, growing pensive as the dough grows stiff, “sometimes I feel as though I could jump over the side with a ‘’ere goes nothink’and a bit of fire-bar in me ’ip-pocket. Same blasted work, day after day. Monday curry an’ rice, fresh meat an’ two veg., ‘’arriet lane’ and spuds. Toosday, salt meat ditto. Wednesday, bully soup an’ pastry. Thursday, similar. Friday, kill a pig an’ clean the galley. Sat’day, ‘’arriet lane’ an’ spuds, fresh meat, two veg., an’ tart. Sunday, similar with eggs an’ bacon aft. What good do it do? Who’s the better for it all? Not me. ‘’Ere goes nothink!’”

He stabs the fire savagely through a rivet-hole in the door, and pushes his cauldrons about. To one who knows Cook all this is merely the safety-valve lifting. The ceaseless grind tells on the hardest soul, and you behold the result. In an hour or so he will be smiling again, and telling me how nearly he married a laundryman’s daughter in Tooley Street, a favourite topic which he tries to invest with pathos. It appears that, after bidding the fairblanchisseusegood-night, he chanced one evening to take a walk up and down Liverpool Street, where he fell into conversation with a girl of prepossessing appearance. Quite oblivious of the fact that Mademoiselle Soap-Suds had followed him, “just to see if he was as simple as he looked,” he enjoyed himself immensely for some twenty minutes, and then ran right into her. He assures me he was “’orror-struck.”Like a man, he admitted that he was conversing with “that—that there.” I always like this part of the tale. His confession seems to him to have been the uttermost depths of mortal self-abnegation. Alas, the heiress of Soap-Suds Senior had no appreciation of the queenly attribute of forgiveness. She boxed his ears, and he never saw her again. “She was allus a spiteful cat,” he observes pensively; “so p’raps the wash ’us ’ud ha’ been dear at the price. Still, itwasa nice little business, an’ no kid.”

As I raise my pot of shaving-water a huge head and shoulders fill up the upper half of the galley doorway. The mighty Norseman has come for some “crawfish legs.” Like Mr. Peggotty and the crustacea he desires to consume, he has gone into hot water very black, and emerges very red. His flannel shirt only partially drapes his illuminated chest—I see the livid scar plainly. He beams upon me, and asks for a match.

“Well, Donkey,” says Cook, “’ow goes it?”; “Donkey” is the mighty Norseman’s professional title aboard ship.

“Aw reet, mon,” says he with the fiendish aptitude of his race for idiom. “How is the Kuck?”

“Oh, splendid. Stand out o’ the way, and let me make thy daily bread.”

“Daily!” screams the Donkeyman. “Tell thatto the marines. I have one loaf sof’ bread three times a week, an’ there are seven days to a week. Daily! Tell that——”

“Find another ship, me man, find another ship if theBenvenutodon’t suit!” And the Mate passes on to the chart-house, where are many dogs.

“Ay, will I, when we get to Swansea,” says the Donkey man to me, beaming. “There are more ships than parish churches, eh? Mister, I want to speak to you. Come out here.” I go outside in the moonlight, and the mighty Norseman takes hold of the second button of my patrol-jacket.

“Well, Donkey?”

“I ’ave had a letter from Marianna,” he whispers.

“Ah! And so she is——”

“She is Marianna, always Marianna now. A good letter—two and a half page. See, in German, mister. She write it very well, Marianna.” And I behold a letter in German script.

Tastes differ. I am compelled to believe that passion can flow even through German script—aye, when it is written by a Swedish maiden of uncertain caligraphy. Heavenly powers! I turn the sheet to the light from the galley. Surely no mortal can decipher such a farrago of alphabetical obscurity. And I do so want to know what Marianna says for herself. I love Marianna, for the mighty Norsemansays she is small and dainty, and her eyes are grey, and—and—well, the resemblance doesn’t end there; so when I tell my friend, he may laugh as much as he pleases. But there had been a quarrel (in German script), and the mighty Norseman had grown mightily misogynistic. His jolly pasty face had been as long as my arm most of the way out, and his sentiments, confided to me each day at seven bells, were discourteous to the sex. But now, behold the cloud lifted: German script has undone its own villainy, and Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen beams.

“I will go ’ome this time, mister,” he says, folding up the reconciling hieroglyphics.

“How, Donkey—work it?”

“Not much, you bet. I go to London and take a Swedish boat from Royal Albert Docks to Gothenburg, train from Gothenburg to Marianna. Seventeen knots quadruple twin screw. I will be a passenger for one quid.”

“Donkey, did you ever hear of Ibsen—Henrik Ibsen?”

“Ibsen? Noa. What ship is he Chief of, mister?”

“A ship that passes in the night, Donkey.”

“What’s that, mister?”

How small a thing is literary fame, after all! When one considers the density of the human atmosphere, the darkness in which the millions live,is not Ibsen to them a ship passing in the night indeed, a mysterious light afar off, voyaging they know not where? Perhaps that is what I meant.

“He wrote plays, Donkey—Schauspielschreiber, you know.”

“Oa! Ich hatte nicht daran gedacht!’Ave you a bit of paper and envelope, mister, please? I will write to Marianna.”

“Give her my love, Donkey.”

“Oh-a-yes, please! I’ll watch it! What? You cut me out?” A rumbling laugh comes up from that mighty chest, he beams upon me, and plunges into the galley for his crawfish legs.

Mug of hot water in hand, I pick my way aft among the derrick chains, and descend to my room. Have I yet described it? Nine feet six by seven wide by seven high At the for’ard end a bunk overtopped by two ports looking out upon the main deck. At the after end a settee over which is my book-case. A chest of drawers, a shelf, a mirror, a framed photograph, a bottle-rack, and a shaving-strop adorn the starboard bulkhead. A door, placed midway in the opposite side, is hung with many clothes. A curtain screens my slumbers, and a ventilator in theceiling chills my toes when turned to the wind. Ceiling and walls are painted dead white, with red wainscotting round the settee. Two engravings grace the only vacant spots on my walls—one a wild piece of wood and moorland, the road shining white after a late-autumn rain, with a gypsy van showing sharp against the lowering sky; the other a wintry lane with a waggon labouring in the snow. A patrol-jacket and a uniform cap hang over a pillow-case half full of dirty clothes. Such is my home at sea.

Look round while I shave. Quite possibly some may wonder that I should affect such commonplace pictures. They cost me threepence each, in Swansea. Well, I am not concerned with their merit as pieces of decorative art. When I look at that wet road and rainy sky, I go back in thought to the days when I lived near Barnet, and the world was mine on Sunday. I recall how I was wont to throw off my morning lethargy, get astride my bicycle, a pipe in one pocket and a book in the other, and plunge into the open country beyond Hadley Heath. It had rained, very likely, in the morning, and the roads were clean and fresh, and the trees were sweet after their bath. And as the afternoon closed in I would sit on a gate in some unfrequented lane and watch the red fog darken over London town. I was happy then, as few lads are, I think. Those long silences, thosesolitary communings; weremind-buildingall the time. So, when I came away from home and settled in Chelsea, and heard men talk, I felt that I, too, had something to say.

In like manner my snowscape takes me back to the time when I was a mechanic, engine-building near Aylesbury. We lived half a mile from the works, at an old inn, and we began at six o’clock. In winter time, I remember, we would snuggle into the big back kitchen, with its huge cauldron of pig-meat swinging over the open fire, and its barrels containing evil things like stoats and ferrets, to put on our boots; and when we opened the door, two feet of snow would fall in upon the floor. How well I remember that silent trudge up the bleak Birmingham Road to the works! There were always two broad ruts in the white roadway—the mail-coach had passed silently, at two o’clock. Cold, cold, cold! A white silence, save for our dark figures shuffling softly through the snow. And then a long eleven-hour day.

I have occasionally mentioned my friend the Second. A keen, dark-skinned, clean-shaven face, with small blue eyes and regular white teeth. There are no flies on him. His is one of those minds which cangrasp every detail of a profession and yet remain very ignorant indeed, a mind which travel has made broader—and shallower. He is a clever, courteous, skilful, well-bred, narrow-minded Broad-Churchman. He is a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a frequenter of houses of fair reception. If anomaly can go further, I can declare to you that he is engaged to a clergyman’s daughter. When he is angered, his face grows as thin as a razor, the small blue eyes diminish to glittering points, and the small white teeth close like a vise. It is then that I am sorry for the clergyman’s daughter. We do not understand each other, I fear, because I am so unsentimental. He believes in unpractical things like Money, Success, Empire, Home Life, Football, and Wales for ever. How can a man who puts faith in such visionary matters understand one who builds on the eternal and immovable bedrock of literature and art? He has sober dreams of following in his father’s steps and making a fortune for himself, and he considers me weak in the head when I explain that I have mademywealth and am now enjoying it. Would heeverunderstand, I wonder?

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