The Bonadventure Part 10

This effusion, laboriously printed in CAPITALS so that its effect on the recipient should be the more demoralizing, headed THE ANSWER, and signed in characteristic fashion NULLI SECUNDUS, was to have been handed to its theme in the saloon. Eventually, Mead rejected that as perhaps contrary to tradition, and handed it in at the porthole aforesaid; but its object, the arranging of "a little bout," was not achieved.

XXIII

A literary epoch began. Bicker, our authentic poet, and not an opportunist like Mead, had been proposing a magazine for some little time past. On a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, he decided to produce the first number for the Sunday following. The circulation was to be six: there being no aids aboard such as the clay or hectograph, each copy had to be written by hand throughout. Into this labour I, with the editor's satirical comments upon my profession, was at once pressed. Material in prose and verse was given to me, and filled three foolscap pages in a close handwriting.

I copied out these contributions, which scarcely stood the test of a second reading, six times: and was rewarded with a vile headache. I hoped the magazine would succeed, but only once. Bicker, like a born editor, copied out his portion without feeling any the worse, and his appreciation of the fare which he was providing grew with every copy.

The final details, however, delayed the appearance of the _Optimist_ until Sunday afternoon. Bicker said in self-protection that no Sunday paper is available in the provinces before breakfast. When the _Optimist_ was published, there was no question of its being welcomed. It was of the familiar kind, which seems to satisfy enough readers to satisfy its promoters. A fable in a dialect generally considered a skilful parody of the Old Testament, "Things we want to know," reports of the football season at Buenos Aires, Answers to Correspondents, a poetical libel beginning "It is an ancient Mariner," and much besides, princ.i.p.ally from the editor's pen, formed the bulk of it. There were columns devoted to Amus.e.m.e.nts, and Advertis.e.m.e.nts of the princ.i.p.al business heads aboard. A copy made its way aft to the bosun and his sea-dogs--the gentlemen who were announced in it as the Chain Lightning Gang. Sitting on the p.o.o.p in Sunday neatness, they gave it a good reception. The bosun himself had been ill, but was better after reading it.

With some copies a supplement was issued, and collectors will not need to be advised to acquire these rarities. This supplement was a page of drawings, by Mead, of common objects at Buenos Aires. The obese laundress, Mme. Maria Maggi, was perhaps conspicuous among these (on another page a report was printed that she had died, leaving 300,000 to her lean charioteer). The watchman, with a label giving one of his typical blasphemies, "Got-a-d---- b----" this, that, and the other, was seen at full length. The altercation between the manager of the wharf (attached to a balloon lettered YOU.ARE.USING.MY.BUCKETS. I.AM.THE.BANDOLIERO) and Meac.o.c.k, smoking as always and nevertheless replying YOU.BIG.STIFF _ore rotundo_, was chronicled. And considering who the artist was, and his recent poem, it was not surprising to find a malevolent caricature of one still with us.

One afternoon, sleeping within my cabin, I heard the mate altering the ship's course with "Hard a starboard" and so on, and feeling this to be out of the ordinary I went out to see why. A mile off there was something in the sea, which the apprentices declared to be a small boat with a flag flying. I felt the light of adventure breaking in upon the murky tramp. But as we drew nearer, the castaway proved to be nothing more than a buoy, and visions of picking up a modern Crusoe faded suddenly. The ship was put back to her course.

The breeze ahead grew stronger, and in the early morning, the sky being quite grey, a slate-grey sea was running in sizable crests and valleys and tossing the spray high aboard. "The devil's in the wind already."

"And the bread." The cook's reputation was gone at a blow. He, like a wicket-keeper, did well without any notice taken; lapsed a moment, and every one was barking. It seemed he had been unfortunate in the yeast supplied him. There were sallies of wit: "Now's the time to pave the alley," "Pa.s.s the holystone," over this doughy circ.u.mstance. For some time, in the words of the Cambridge prize poet, the bread "was not better, he was much the same," and ship's biscuits became unexpectedly favourite. They were stiff but excellent eating; would have rejoiced the soul of my late general, the noted "Admiral" H., alias "Monty,"

alias "The Schoolmaster," and other aliases. Can he ever be forgotten for those diurnal and immortal questions of his, "Did your men have porridge this morning?" and "Why did you not order your cook to give your men duff to-day?" It wanted little imagination to picture him under his gold oak leaves nibbling with dignity at a ship's biscuit and saying, "Very good, Harrison, uncommonly tasty--I shall recommend them to Division."

The sea presently under a brightened sky grew to a rare intensity of blue, that was at its most radiant in the overswirl of water sheered by the bows. Gallant enough the _Bonadventure_ looked in the marvellous expanse, having by dint of much early-morning swilling and swabbing thrown the worst of her nighted colour off; but almost every day I heard bad wishes to the designer of her, though on the score of utility, not the pleasure of the eye. My fancy of a full-rigged ship bowing over these rich seas was usually corrected with reference to "wind-bags"--not folks like me, but ships.

Then there came rain, drizzling on doggedly hour after hour. The drops hung on the railings like autumn dews on meadow fences. One of the effects of such weather was that the cat, who had been induced after all to make the trip, was driven to look about for a quiet, sheltered corner, and having found one, was driven to look again. Finally she chose the chart-room and settled upon the chart. South America was sodden with rain and black with paw-marks when the second mate looked in, and that cat, black or not, would have pa.s.sed over, but for her being shortly to become a mother. That fact also accounted for her worried expression, voice, and manner, which I had misread as symptoms of sea-sickness.

And still the dull and rainy sky. When I went out one morning, the mate leaned over the bridge rail and said, "You're the blooming Jonah! Now look at that d.a.m.n'd smoke." I looked at the customary coaly vapour flying aft, but was unenlightened. "You Jonah," he went on, "you've brought this wind, and it's carrying the cinders all over my new paint." Now, I suspected the cat was the cause of the trouble; but my guilt was urged by the chief also, as a current of a mile an hour was setting us back.

Not only the mariners of the _Bonadventure_ lived in suspense, awaiting the football results.

"That fellow was funny this morning."

"Yes, you could see the excitement in his lamp."

"What was this?"

"Why, about four the So-and-so pa.s.sed us, and the mate on watch signalled us: 'Do you know the result of Tottenham v. Cardiff City?' So we sent back that Cardiff had won but we didn't know the score. This fellow sent back: 'Oh, well done, Cardiff!' but he was that excited, he could scarcely hit out a letter right. His first message had been--well, beautifully sent; now his lamp was all over the place."

"We could almost see him dancing about the bridge!"

Spragg, the a.s.sistant steward, sometimes came to swab my cabin. He had been in a battalion of the 38th Division, when my own Division relieved them in January 1917 on the Ca.n.a.l Bank at Ypres; and he had been like myself a witness and a part of the mammoth preparations of that summer, which ended in such terrible failure. His manner and humorous way of telling tales beside which the "Pit and Pendulum" appears to me an idle piece of pleasantry, unspeakably brought back the queer times and places which we had both seen. I saw him in my mind's eye, keen and frank, standing behind his kit with "headquarters company"--those amiable wits--at Elverdinghe Chateau (Von Kluck's rumoured country seat, for it was never in my time bombarded); or with pick or shovel stooping along in the Indian file of dark forms towards that vaunted, flimsy breastwork, Pioneer Trench at Festubert.

But still my share of Mead's watch was my best recreation. Our talk was disturbed but little; perhaps by the signals of some ship pa.s.sing by, or by some unusual noise, such as one evening we heard with a slight shock. A succession of rifle-shots, it sounded; and the cause was evidently some great fish departing by leaps and bounds from the approach of that greater one the _Bonadventure_. The interruption over, he would go on with plans for a future in Malay. "This life," he would say, "is killing me." He was quite as healthy, mind and body, as any man aboard. I liked his occasional rhapsodies, in which the smell of burning sandalwood and of cotton trees, the clearings in sinister forests with the jewelled birds, the rough huts, the dark ladies with the hibiscus flowers in their hair, and the lone white settler (ex-digger Mead) thinking his thoughts in the evening, all played their part. He wished the world back in 1860; it had outdistanced him.

XXIV

It blew from the north-east strong against us always, and we were travelling more slowly. The sun returned, however, among those ethereal white clouds which to perfection fulfil the poet's word "Pavilions"; we ran on into a dark sea ridged and rilled with glintering silver, yet seemed never to reach it, remaining in a bright blue race of waters scattered, port and starboard, with white wreaths, waters leaping from the heavy flanks of the ship in a seethe of gossamer atoms and gla.s.s-green cascade.

The immediate scene was one of painters and paint-pots, and linen flying on the lines. "This wind's playing h.e.l.l with my curls," said one or two.

The matter with me was, that my room was almost untenable. I opened the port at my peril; to do so was to entertain billows of coal-dust from the bunkers below. White paint, the order of the day, whether flat white or white enamel, made progress about the ship by an amateur dangerous, too.

The apparition of the steward under the evening lamps dressed in a smock--he was of ample make--and brandishing a paint-brush, was generally enjoyed. In fact, several spectators came to take a careful look at one who was too often denominated "the mouldy-headed old b----."

A more tenuous apparition was heard of, as we ran north. Whether a hoax or not, I do not know. My first information of it came in the form of a drawing by the apprentice Tich, showing the ship's bell being struck by a hand who never was on land or sea, and the apprentice Lamb leaving his hold of the wheel in horror, and even Mead shaking all over and gaping. A poem appended said that the facts were what the picture made out. The _Bonadventure_ was so new a ship--her old name, showing her war origin, still stood on the bells and the blue prints in the chart-room and elsewhere--that there seemed every likelihood against the story being the truth. I asked Mead, and he told me what he maintained to be true.

On the first watch, the voyage before this, he had gone into the wheel-house for a word with the apprentice at the wheel. A shadow, indistinct, yet leaving impressed on his recollection a human shape, slipped suddenly past the wheel-house windows, softly rang the bell once, and swiftly departed. The frightened boy drops the wheel, lets the ship swing round completely out of her course: Mead runs out, but there is nothing to be seen. He sends for the two A.B.'s who might have come up on the bridge, but they say that they have not done so, nor indeed would they come without object. The firemen, if they have to communicate with the bridge, never come higher than the stairway to the bridge deck, and it proved that no one of them had been there. By the wheel-house clock, it was noticed that the precise time of the visitation was 10.15, an hour not hitherto regarded by ghosts, I believe, as preferable to midnight.

And more. Still imagining that some practical joker was at work, Mead brought a big stick with him on his watch. This was no remedy. The ghost appeared again, at much the same hour, on several nights; it was remarked, mostly when the apprentice who first saw it had the wheel. Trying to stop so strange a bell-ringer, Mead was met by a sharp flap of wind, from a dead still night, and the glimmering shadow was gone to the air. All this happened north of the line.

This was Mead's story, but the boy's seemed to support it; and when in the shadows of the bridge deck, earnestly and without tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, he told it me, it seemed very true. I glanced about me occasionally after hearing it.

The wind continued, but the heat was becoming intense. Painting went on like the wind. The derricks received a terra-cotta coat and their trellis work looked an amenity, against the general whiteness. The fervour for redecoration even affected me: was not my hutch to share the common lot?

But, though the walls needed it, the matter was postponed, on account of the limited accommodation.

The newspaper was to appear again, but its circulation was being cut down.

One copy only would now have to serve the public. It was pa.s.sed to me, and my aid with paragraphs requested. I could not regret the reduction made in the number, even though if that one copy was lost,

We knew not where was that Promethean torch That could its light relumine.

Bicker, the editor, instead of reviewing his admired literature in his journal, lengthened breakfast by doing so there _viva voce_. He was all for Boeotian situations, and, on occasion, his cold re-dishing was tactfully ended by a relief conversation on religion, the keynote of which was in the unironically meant remark: "He was darned religious, but he was a darned good man." I began to know a certain captain, from talk during the voyage, almost by sight; one who "went in for Sunday Schools, and put on a crown of glory as soon as he reached Wales," but once away again, it appears that "he fell."

Another matter for the columns of the _Optimist_ was obtruded upon the breakfast table. It was a conundrum:

West was the wind, and West steered we, West was the land. How could that be?

The answer, apart from such evasions as "You were entering port," was that West was the name of the helmsman. It was understood that the poem went on in this strain, but the chief's protest came in time.

The cat (last heard of in disgrace), which was under the especial care of the mess-room boy, was no doubt pleased hereabouts by our reaching the regions of flying-fishes; but nevertheless continued, on the gospel truth of Kelly, to take a chair in the engineer's mess at the critical hours of twelve and five. I myself saw her there at twelve once or twice, judging the time, no doubt, by the parade of table-cloth and cutlery.

Without any abatement of the stuffy heat inside our cabins, we ran into a rainy area. The sea was overcast, and the showers splashed us well.

Meanwhile, the wind had veered round more to the east, and besides bringing the grey vapours of rain tumultuously towards us thence, set the spray flying over the lower decks and kept us on the roll. Blowing on the beam, however, it seemed to please Phillips, ever anxious about the hourly ten knots, which seemed too high an expectation. Squalls threatened; it was a tropical April mood. The rolling influenced my sleep, in which I fancied myself manipulating the airiest pleasure-boats, overcrowded with pa.s.sengers who refused to sit down, on an angry flooded river.

The peaceful disposition of the four apprentices began to weigh upon Mead's mind. A very happy and orderly set they were, although the current _Optimist_ contained an ill.u.s.trated article on the bosun's tyranny, as:

"YOUSE take them two derricks for'ard."

"YOUSE jes' pick up that ventilator, you flat-nosed son of a sea-cook."

The drawings of the well-known walrus head under the antique, unique grey (_ne_ white) one-sided sugar-loaf hat, were admirable. But to proceed.

The four boys were of the best behaviour, occasionally, indeed, laughing or playing mouth-organs at unpopular hours, or even after the nightly exit of the cook making flap-jacks, otherwise pancakes, from his properties in the galley. When I joined Mead on his watch, one Sunday evening, he began to "wonder what the boys are coming to." They were not like the boys of his time. He delved into his own apprentice autobiography, and rediscovered an era, a blissful era of whirling fists, blood, and b.o.o.by traps.

A day followed remarkable for the weather. A swell caused the ship to roll with a will all day, but, as was expected in the doldrums, the wind slackened. After a few hours of this lull, there was a piping and groaning through all the scanty rigging that the steamer owned, and from farther out to sea the grey obscurity of violent rainstorm, much as it had done on our way south, bore down upon us. Soon the ship was cloaked close in a cloud of rain pale as snow, which flecked the icy-looking sea, veined white alongside us, with dark speckling bubbles. Then it was time to sound the whistle, and its doleful groan went out again and again (the wind still varying its note from a drone to a howl) until the fiercer sting of the rain was spent, and distance began to grow ahead of the ship. This storm lacked thunder and lightning; and yet, when Sparks invited me to listen to his "lovely X-s," there was a continuous and furious rolling uproar in the phones. Then, as strange again, as if at a nod that din came to a sudden stop, leaving in the phones a lucid calm in which ship-signals rang out clear.

At sunset of a day which washed off the new paint as soon as (in the intervals) it had been put on, a thin red fringe glowed along the horizon, making me long for green hills and white spires; at night, the stars from Southern Cross to Charles's Waggon were gleaming, but the sea lay profoundly black, and upon it all round us came and went glory after glory of water-fire. The next day, however, it rained in the same dismal style, and the sun's eclipse and the pa.s.sing of Fernando Noronha were but little heeded. I was called a Jonah by every one.

A mollyhawk, that evening, created some excitement. He first spent some time in flying on an oval course round the ship, for his recreation, it looked. His beautiful curves must have pleased him as they did me, for he persuaded (or so it appeared) another mollyhawk to make the circuit with him. Meac.o.c.k and myself heard one of these strike against the wireless aerial, and thought that it would have scared them away; but no, a few minutes later we heard a croaking and a flapping while we stood in the lee of the wheel-house, and there was a mollyhawk. He had struck some low rope or fixture. He was prevented by his webbed feet from rising again, and I had fears for his future which were by no means necessary; for Meac.o.c.k followed him, an awkward but speedy walker, down to the lower bridge deck, and, fearing the swift white stabbing bill, waiting his chance, suddenly caught at his nearest wing and launched him into the air. If his speed could show it, that bird was relieved.