The Bonadventure Part 11

This incident was a welcome verification of some of the saloon's bird anecdotes; and though it was nearly dark and the bird was only aboard for two or three minutes, his release was watched by a very good gathering, representative of engineers, firemen, the galley, sailors, and apprentices.

XXV

_Whilst thou by art the silly Fish dost kill,_ _Perchance the Devils Hook sticks in thy Gill._ Flavel's New Compa.s.s for Sea-men, 1674.

I must have made a good many references here and there to the steward, old Mouldytop, and it occurs to me that he deserves a paragraph to himself. Of this ship, whom her most faithful lovers called a dirty ship, with her short funnel pouring a greasy smoke over her graceless body when even coal-dust rested--of this grimy tramp, playing a sufficient part in the world's daily life, rolling and lurching up and down oceans with fuel or foodstuff, thousands of tons at a time, it may be safely said that the steward was the feature. In the _Optimist_ it was evident that he as an inspiration excluded almost every other. In the round of day and night, should he himself be unseen for a time, his voice would generally claim your notice; if conversation took on dark and prophetic tones, it was, for a ducat, some restatement of the ancient's wickedness, and a realization of the strength of his position against all the world.

For behind Mouldytop was the power of Hosea.

The steward was built somehow after the shape of a buoy. It was Ireland, and not Scotland, that his ancestors had left; but there was a doubt about his own dialect. It was, and it was not, plain English. His bulbous, melancholy face was topped with grey hairs, but those he hid under his faded brown skull-cap. Forty-nine years, one understood, had Mouldytop been at sea; and before that, the veil of mystery was thin enough to show him in his first stage, a batman in the Army. This fact led him to deprecate modern warfare, "It's all science, Mister," and those who fought it; he claimed to have been blooded _fighting_ in some corner of the desert with spear-brandishing mult.i.tudes. At the same time, he reserved his reminiscences; for the refined insult, "You old soldier,"

needed no encouragement.

He seldom grew cheerful. I suppose that he was happiest when some one (no doubt with serpent tongue) asked how his cold was. Then, his roar softened into a resigned murmur, as he recorded that it was as bad as ever; that six bottles of his own medicine taken regularly had not cured him. This was a pleasure that he shared with the author of one of the most melodious English songs, and it seems to be prophetic of his appearance--

Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes, A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that's fastened to the ground, A tongue chained up without a sound,

as of his imaginative affections in his sombre cell--

A midnight bell, a parting groan!

These are the sounds we feed upon; Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley, Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.

Let but a sailor apply to him at the wrong hour--or even the right hour--for tobacco, and his indisposition was gone in a second; his tongue was unchained. The busy mockers grinned. "He'd tell Davy Jones he'd been to sea before him."

In the Argentine ports he was in excellent voice. Did a native shoemaker come aboard with his repair outfit, or a seller of fruit with his panniers, and did any one propose to deal with these "Dagoes," out skipped our old friend, bellowing: "Too much, man; what," (_crescendo_) "d'ye think we pick up money in the streets?--I wouldn't have your blasted country for all the blasted money there is in it." The charges, I am bound to add, fell down quickly, while the old watchman standing by observed with a respectful grin, "You a good man!"

The advance of age was a sore point with Mouldytop. Consequently, it was one that was brought to his notice as often as it could be effective.

One evening, some one told him he was too old to play football. "Too old, mister?" he bawled; "Too old!--why, give me that blasted ball,"

and he stood there in a prodigious rage, his eyes flashing, his fists knotting. "Too old!"--His calenture ceased suddenly; there was a tug on his fishing line. Up came a yellow catfish. Never have I perceived a livelier disgust than the look showed which he cast upon this victim. It seemed to blame the catfish personally for not being a rock salmon.

So Mouldytop regarded animated nature; which regarded him as a man whose duties implied opportunities. "I'm a poor man, mister."--"The old son of a gun says he's a poor man. You old liar, you've got streets of houses, you know you have."

Some one who knew him at home was strongly of opinion that he was less terrible by his own fireside: that there was a fellow creature under whose guidance he roared like any sucking dove. It might be. Indeed, it was my impression that it could hardly be otherwise. I thought I noticed a certain caution even in his att.i.tude to the large-bosomed laundrywoman who took the ship's orders at Buenos Aires; and his comment on _her_ charges had been of the weakest.

XXVI

We crossed the line at six in the morning, and in drizzling rain. There was not much comment, except upon the rain; the good thing about the damp cloudy weather was that we were spared the more furious heat, though the atmosphere had been oily and sultry. With the steamy clouds swarming about us I could picture a past life hereabouts which might justly have aroused man's wrath; the sailing days, when to take advantage of whatever brief breeze might visit the sleepy doldrums, the sailors had to be constantly running aloft in the drenching mist, and afterwards lay down in their sweating glory-holes, in their soaked clothes, week after week.

The painting epidemic was not abated. Meac.o.c.k and Mead camped out while they made their rooms as white as ivory. Mead looked charming in a round white cap, which he said a V.A.D. had given him. The steward, with his experience of every sort of ship under the sun, had developed an artistic eye: and, perhaps to relieve the whiteness, he decided upon a dado for the saloon, which hitherto had been from ceiling to floor done in white enamel. The dado was to be grained, in imitation of an actual wainscot.

He began his solemn task, applying by way of groundwork a brimstone yellow and other sickly yellows which disturbed us at meals.

Meac.o.c.k and Phillips varied these days with a discussion of firemen, whether white or coloured firemen were the more difficult to manage?

Phillips was for his Africans, the excellent selection aboard at present forming a contrast with his memories of ne'er-do-wells, "doctors, remittance-men and all sorts," of English birth. Meac.o.c.k was soon hard at work describing with amusing mimicry a refractory negro, one of a number of Somalis who, hearing of labour troubles in England, did their best to be paid off in Africa. If they had succeeded, the ship would have been without firemen for her return voyage; so their efforts were resisted. The particular genius played the hand of "suicidal tendency."

Choosing a time when there were several people about the deck, he climbed somewhat slowly up the bulwarks and prepared with gestures to leap over the side. Meac.o.c.k was a spectator of this piece of acting. The actor was pulled back with some violence, and "about half-past four we got the handcuffs on him. We would have had to turn the cook out of his room aft to lock this fellow up, but I didn't want to do that, so I fastened him up with the handcuffs round a stanchion in the p.o.o.p. I said, 'And the rats will probably eat you before the morning'; and I really did expect to find him eaten by the morning; for there were some monsters in the p.o.o.p.

"Next day, he began saying 'Sick.'--'Sick? Where are you sick?'--'Sick all over.' I had enough of this after a bit, and went and got the strongest black draught I've yet known. He didn't want to drink it, and I said to him, 'Now drink this up as quick as you can.' And so he did. After that, whenever I looked in at the p.o.o.p, this fellow would start waving his arms and hollering out. In fact, he was mad; every time I got near him, he was mad. That black draught was not popular, I think. When we got to Cuxhaven, the medical authority put this man through a careful examination. 'He's no more mad,' he said, 'than you or I. He's got a slight touch of rheumatics in the arm. But,' he said, 'when you get to Hamburg, you can satisfy yourself by sending this man to the asylum.' We did. Two days--and he was back."

Meac.o.c.k's laconic phrases were accompanied with grimaces which told the tale to perfection.

The atmosphere had grown so literary that Mead now took pencil and paper with him to his day watch as a matter of course. The pages of the _Optimist_ were beginning to look somewhat laboured. He determined to infuse a new vein. So a series of vividly coloured hoaxes came into existence, the first of which, a harem story, was too much in its full bloom for the editor's acceptance. Not surprised, and not dejected, Mead offered "The Pirate," and it duly appeared. These fictions ended, as did their successors, with a disillusionment:

"And then what happened?"

"The film broke."

It was about the period of hoaxes--April 1 arrived. Bicker appeared at my cabin, where I was reading. "Meac.o.c.k wants to see you." I went.

Bicker triumphed, and went his way convinced that he could beat the intellectual at his own game, as the _Optimist_ had already shown him he could.

A brighter sky and cooler wind came on. We were soon expected at Saint Vincent. The new moon and calmer waters brought one evening of strange watery beauty. Towards his setting the sun had hidden himself in black clouds, whence he threw a silver light over sea s.p.a.ces where sea and sky were meeting: he sank, and left the heavens like green havens, with these clouds slowly sailing through their utmost peace. The change soon came; the head wind brought pale grey turbulent days, with the ship playing at rocking-horses; over the head wind and rousing sea, the healthy sun at length dawned on the Sunday of our arrival at Saint Vincent.

Sunday, without the voice of church bells or the sight of people going to worship, seemed no Sunday despite its idle hours: at least, the mood sometimes took me so.

The third engineer was acquiring no mean name as a cutter of hair, and I felt the cold after I had been to his open-air chair, near the engine-room staircase. While I sat to him, a characteristic of the mess-room boy was borne on the air from the chief's room. It was his habit of replying hastily to any observation, "Yes, yes," and this time the chief's voice was heard: "Curse you, John, for a blasted nuisance." "Yes, yes, sir."

As the sun was stooping under the sea once more, land grew into sight far ahead; mountain or cloud? The mountainous coast was mocked indeed by great continents of cloud above, of its own grey hue. The wind blew hard, but at ten o'clock we were running in under the rocky pinnacles of Saint Vincent, against the bl.u.s.tering wind and the black racing sea. A light or two, chiefly from other steamers, told something of the port. The crescent moon, cloaked in a circling golden mist, was now near setting.

We anch.o.r.ed and spent the night in quiet.

A mile or so from our anchorage, in the morning's clear air, huddled the pink unsightly little town. At distance the heights of rock looked as unsubstantial as Prospero's magic; the clouds that swam over them and across their steeps might have been solid, so phantasmal were those rocks. Not so with the stony ma.s.ses overpeering the town; those in their iron-brown nakedness had the aspect of eternal immobility. The air was cold and lucent; the water halcyon blue. Several tramps with rusty black and red, and a sailing ship or two, lay around the _Bonadventure_; barges of a rough old make cl.u.s.tered closer in to sh.o.r.e.

The invasion by natives began early. A dozen boats were tossing on the waves alongside, with woolly heads and upward eyes seeking what or whom they might devour, and quiet-footed rogues here and there on the decks were trying to sell matches, cigarettes, and red bead handbags. To their attempts, the politest answer was "No good." "No caree?" n.o.body seemed to care. Some of our firemen whose homes were here had gone ash.o.r.e, with the air of men allowing their old haunts to share their glory.

Two lighters, coppered below, bearded with dark green weed, blundered alongside with bags of coal, and soon the gangs, a grimy and ragged collection, were getting the bags aboard, and the winch grumbling away. Yet it was now made known that we were not to pick up much coal here, but to proceed to Las Palmas for the bulk of our wants. This was unfortunate for the firemen who had gone home. All too soon the blue peter at half-mast and the blowing of the hooter recalled them.

Now, too, it was rumoured that our port of discharge was to be Emden, in Hanover: but of such arrangements it became more difficult to feel a.s.surance.

At midday we left. The most valued effect of our call at Saint Vincent was the receipt of some giant flying-fishes, which we got, one apiece, at tea. It was only by virtue of perseverance that a man could consume his ration. They were good, if dry.

If I were a Bewick, I have in mind a little tailpiece for this chapter.

It would display, for the careful eye, the hatless Kelly filleting a flying fish, against the bunker hatch, for his friend the cat, who should be gazing up with cupboard love at her unshaven protector. The direction of the wind, in true Bewick style, should be implied in a sprinkling of coal-dust settling on the new paint of the "House."

XXVII

Glittering bright, northern weather outside. "Channel weather," as it was described at breakfast. Whatever it might be, I was Jonah; fine, Jonah bringing a head wind; wet, Jonah bringing the wet; the ship rolling, it was Jonah's additional weight on the port side that was doing it; and so on. The suggestion arose that the villain should be offered to the first whale sighted; but "We should have more respect for the whale," said Phillips. Nor could I be sure that I was not blamed for all finger marks on the new paint. Meac.o.c.k had been the eye-witness of one crime of mine of the sort. "If you touch that new enamel, your name's mud"--and then the _Bonadventure_ obliged with a lurch sideways which left the impression of my hand in a most prominent place.

A more serious disgrace even befel me. Bicker and Meac.o.c.k involved me in an argument, which was very quickly twisted into the direct question. "Who was England's greatest man?" Some wretched ghost whispered Shakespeare, and Shakespeare I named. There was derision. Shakespeare! Nelson was the man. I was obliged to stick to my choice. "We're talking about fellows that DID something for their country," said Meac.o.c.k, and I gave up.

Bicker was once agaia _in excelsis_ at this evidence of his superior understanding, which he seemed about to back up with physical argument.

The shade of Nelson was vindicated; and then, I was informed that the second greatest man was Kitchener. I asked with innocent ignorance what he had effected of particular significance to our own lives? A photograph was produced of the earlier, more Achillean Kitchener, by way of settling _that_ point.

Meeting Kelly in the galley one evening as I went along to make my cocoa, I was detained to hear of the wonders of Hamburg; and to watch Tich making a Cornish cake with ingredients mysteriously come by. Kelly was also of opinion that Hamburg's high place among towns was due to a dancing saloon, where birthday suits were the fashion. "Flash society,"

he said with admiration. I was sorry to hear that in the argument over great men I had missed the sight of one whale. Thus it is with the conversationally inclined: pursuing minnows of our opinion, we miss the leviathans of fact.