An Ocean Tramp Part 10

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 p.o.r.nography masquerading as literature are priced at "a shilling net," and are avidly purchased and read by the simple, G.o.d-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 "pa.s.sionate love of music" in the heroes and heroines of these stories. I made notes, and, in ten consecutive tales, one or more of the characters "was a pa.s.sionate 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 sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.sociated with a rec.u.mbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive languor. Loss of memory, 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.sical prototype. And so the fiction with which he will pa.s.s 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 s.e.x 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.

XXIII

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 gla.s.ses 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, with whom 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 whom _we_ know 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 his _sanctum sanctorum_ abaft 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, I _can_ dispense 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 mora.s.s.

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 fair _blanchisseuse_ good-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 a.s.sures 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, it _was_ a 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 t.i.tle aboard ship.

"Aw reet, mon," says he with the fiendish apt.i.tude 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 that to 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 the _Benvenuto_ don't suit!" And the Mate pa.s.ses 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 b.u.t.ton 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 pa.s.sion 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 Norseman says 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 s.e.x. 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 pa.s.senger for one quid."

"Donkey, did you ever hear of Ibsen--Henrik Ibsen?"

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

"A ship that pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.sing 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.