The Bonadventure Part 13

It was as certainly good to be here as that spring was here. The chirrup of sparrows, jubilate of larks, noises of poultry, bleating of lambs from an enclosure of young fruit trees close at hand, and the play of children, were all comely and reviving.

Alas! that the Easter gift of the ship's officers should have been so out of tune. An old gentleman of the same outlook as Polonius, the broker, brought a packet of letters aboard at breakfast, and among these were the wrong kind of Easter tidings--statements of their reductions in wages.

They accepted this falling off without murmur, save for a few dry remarks.

A motor-boat came bringing the stores, and, to the disgust of the cook and other watchers, a great stack of long loaves, altogether leathery in external appearance. Most of these were returned. The ship's chandler must have thought we were arriving in force. Our own boat was tied at the foot of the gangway, and the apprentices told off as ferrymen for the time being.

Next day the larks were aloft again, and their melody, marvellous after long absence from it, came dropping from heaven as undiminished, one would say, as raindrops falling. So clear it sounded there even when they were in the clouds. Meanwhile the bosun and party were getting the winches and derricks into trim, with less silver voices: "H-h-hup, H-h-hup: Let go a little: Here, youse...."

It was not unwelcome when the evening came, and Mead, Bicker, and their friend so soon to be returned to duty set out up the cobbled road to Emden; most bitter was the east wind blowing down the long colonnades of trees, and we hastened into the sheltering streets of the little town.

We found it a quiet and beautiful place of ornamentation, and gables and high houses, with a ca.n.a.l in the midst. Masterly seemed its spire, stretching up into the sky with unexpected height and charming ease. It was Easter Monday, and many folks were walking out--we looked curiously about us, and while none were anything but tidy and decent, none had any of the symptoms of much and to spare. They were evidently poor, but far from poor in spirit.

We were puzzled by the Sabbath look of things to find a place to sit down and apply some antidote to the effects of that rawish east wind. We began drifting as usual, when an old fellow in black coat and Homburg hat pushed past us, mumbling something. A light came swiftly into the eyes of Mead and Bicker; the old fellow was fragrant with good beer.

We asked him for directions. He was off at once in a loud, hard voice: "By Jesus Christ and General Jackson," he began (and _da capo_), "the two best men in America. You come to my house." Following him, and coping with his repeated invocations of the Messiah and the General, and requests for an opinion of his English speech, we arrived by and by. He was an innkeeper, and (by Jesus Christ) "an old sailing man himself."

The inn parlour was most excellently warm, free and easy. We set to with hot grog, the brimmer being rebrimmed (if my memory serves me) not once nor twice. The room was not one which depressed. Around it hung daubs of full-rigged ships of Batavia in the fifties and sixties; there was an automatic weighing machine, a most magnificent penny-in-the-slot piano, and another apparatus for extracting copper from the air, dressed up as a blue windmill, but I did not inquire what it was expected to yield. And the wall-paper was tapped with an ample border, in which one saw smooth waters, placid smacks, and more windmills.

The other occupants of the room were the quiet set at the tables, a drunken Finn seaman with one arm in bandages, a dark-haired musician, the landlord and his wife and their good-looking daughter; while from the private house other members of the family came and went at need, as will be seen.

We provided the landlord with grog. He melted with grat.i.tude, rose, and set his horrible piano going, whose wicked hammers champed upon some of the harshest wires outside of the barbed-wire dumps. And what is more, whenever the piano began, our friend the Finn thought his hour had come to shine, and essayed a sort of stamping, stooping dance across the floor. This led to persuasion. The landlord persuaded, the landlady persuaded, uncla.s.sified a.s.sistants persuaded, and presently the dancer was pleased to be seated once more, exclaiming, "When I come aboard he says to me, he says, 'All right, Captain, all right, all right.'" No sooner did the music begin afresh than this enthusiast would rise up relentlessly as though hypnotized (by the paean) and perhaps stamp out a bar or two before being replaced by combined efforts. This kept on happening.

None the less, the landlord, who had apparently spent the day in liquid rejoicings, was swallowing grog and growing taleful. He claimed all sorts of sea service and seemed to know what he was talking about, posed even my expert friends with the sailing-ship question: What's the difference in build between a Scotch ship, a Nova Scotian, and a Yankee? Boxing too was in his line: "Scholar of John L. Sullivan," he a.s.sured us, and directed admiration to his fist, which was normal. From taleful he waxed tuneful. "I'm a chanty-man, y'know," and wiping back his gingery-white whiskers he groaned out "Blow the man down," and "The streams of our native Australia," in dreadful style. After these, finding himself strangely appreciated, he offered and began "a real English song, y'know--exchoose me, y'know, if I don't speak the plain English." It was "The Maid of the Mill." His rendering was a strain on our tact, and too much for one of the young ladies of the house, who was smitten with a fit of giggling most right and justifiable. At that, the old villain flew into a ridiculous pa.s.sion, jumped up, and was for hitting this girl.

He was restrained.

After this unwanted diversion, he returned and (with starts of rage) barked out the rest of his song. His wolfhound began, and we began, to find the vocalist a nuisance; and as the evening wore on, I thought the authentic musician, who played the violin, was beginning to resent our presence and success. The daughter of the house foolishly sat at our table. The musician, however, was soothed with an honorarium, and with much "Auf wieder-sehen!" we went. Even now, however, it was thought unseemly to reach the ship in one journey, so halts were called twice; and once aboard, the usual arguments kept us out of our beds until four or so in the morning.

The two grain-elevators in the port were still busy with a Greek steamer, so that, apart from painting, the _Bonadventure_ was idle, and there was little to do but row over to the canteens and return with undreamed-of quant.i.ties of chocolate and cigarettes. Cigars were, to us, as lightly bought as matches. As to the painting, it was again mysterious that two of the apprentices fell off the stage on which they were working alongside; they were soon dressed in borrowed plumage. Suddenly in the evening our discharge began.

Lighters of the local type, very long and narrow, were already alongside when the tugs swung the first elevator into his place. The huge floating turret looked somewhat like a smock mill. The stevedores quickly made fast their tackle: four large drain-pipe tubes were let down into the chosen hold, and the suckers commenced. There was a drumming boom of machinery, mixed with the swish of the ingulfing of the grain and its disgorging through broader conduits on the other side of the elevator into the river barges. It grew dark, the red and green railway lights burned fiercely in brisk air against the last of an orange sunset. But the elevator was kept at work, and arc lights hung over the hold showed the novel scene of the sliding grain and its trimmers.

One effect of the late-continued drone and thud of the elevator was to torment me with war dreams. First I was in an attack, among great rocks, under a violent barrage; then, on one of those unforgettable raw, dark mornings, I was at the window of a great ruined house behind the line, watching the bleary effulgence of the Very lights starting up here and there and expecting the worst from a nasty silence, only pierced by single sh.e.l.l-bursts. Then, beside the elevator, an infuriated and intoxicated bargee stood on the landing-stage about midnight bawling for a boat which didn't come. His patience was, however, considerable; he bawled for a long hour. In consequence, I suppose, of these matters I arrived very late at breakfast amid the usual cries of "You Jonah, you!"

The second elevator arrived, and, like some great iron insect with many beaks, began to swallow up the grain from the holds aft. The ship shook with the speed and power of the pumping machinery; the long lighters with their great round-table steering wheels filled up, battened down, and swung away. In one of the holds there were the bags put in at Ingeniero White; under them again lay the yellow grain in ma.s.s. The elevator's proboscis dipped into that grain, while the trimmers unstowed, slit and emptied the sacks; so the ship began to lighten, and her bow already stood high out of the water.

The red evening sky was smoky with cold; then the stars sparkled with frost; and a small gathering enjoyed the oil stove in Bicker's room.

The steward, in unusual radiance, came in presently, and sang a long song concerning a tramp who was flung off a freight train by a brakesman.

"Because he was only a tramp" (_dying fall_).

This might have been a comment on Mr. W. H. Davies' Autobiography.

Warmed with his singing and other helps, the steward began to recall his acquaintance (on guard) with Royalty, and spun off at tangents with affairs half a century more recent: "That b---- flaming butcher-- I was going to hit him with a box of matches," and other incidents. I was sorry to hear the lank Chips, the next morning, bawling at the entrance of the saloon a complaint about the toughness of his meat; the steward's new mood deserved anything but that sort of damper.

x.x.x

With little to do, I fought a sort of pillow fight with Meac.o.c.k, our weapons being sacks well stuffed; he won, of course, but it was a popular bout. Then there were acrobatic performances on the stays of the funnel.

The need I had for training appeared on our last night in Emden Port, when my sleep was nipped in the bud by the entry of Bicker and Mead.

Both had the clear spirits raised, in two senses; both thickened voices already thick enough. They were disguised (Mead's fancy, I warrant) as members of the Ku-Klux-Klan; and besides their costume one bore a revolver, the other an air gun impounded from an apprentice. I was ordered out of bed, but wished to stop; we argued about it and by good luck I hung on. After this, insidious, they declared that a lady who knew me and wished to see me had come aboard. This flight of fancy and flow of language went on until they sought variety, which they found in painting the unfortunate Tich in the alley below in several colours.

The German police, green men and true, watched the ship closely. It was rumoured that a shipping clerk and a young woman had eloped and were aboard one of the tramps. "Love in a foc'sle," especially ours, was considered no bad joke.

One more home circle was held in the starboard alleyway towards midnight; gin very prevalent, and the steward also. He fell into a sequence of army recollections, which (as the gla.s.s was thrust replenished into his hand) began on this pattern, "Well, I'm telling you, Mister, at three in the afternoon of March the twelfth 1873, we was parading outside the Queen's pavilion...." Once more also Mead and myself made our way into Emden. The old nooks of buildings and the vistas of narrow thoroughfares and lazy waterways, the shops and the folk, all made a kindly picture; after supper, we avoided a downpour of sleet in a cafe with an orchestra, whose repertory of 4,000 pieces included two by English composers, and his name was Sullivan. On our midnight way home, we stopped at a Dutchman's bar and asked for and got a dozen hard-boiled eggs for a second supper aboard. I was carrying a parcel in hand and two bottles, or rather gas-cylinders, of gin in the lining of my mackintosh when we reached the German sentry-box beside the Quay. He puffed at his pipe as he felt the parcel and saw that all was well.

The iron in the ship began to sweat great drops, and the walls of one's bunk glistened with damp. The gla.s.s was falling; the water of the basin no longer lay smooth as oil but beat against the ship grudgingly. In short, excellent Flanders weather ensued the old-established weather, guaranteed to cure rabid individuals of war cant after one hour's trial (unsh.e.l.led) on sentry-go or at the ration dump. For the worst and even hopeless cases, half an hour's trial on the banks of the Steenbeck was confidently recommended--I was lucky now to have a roof leaking but little. Phillips showed me the one dry corner in his room--a portion of the settee about a foot square.

Hosea's wife joined us in the saloon, and not only by her genial presence itself merited our best thanks, but also by her influence on the steward.

As if by magic, Ideal milk was added to our tinned pears (usually, apricots); and the jam changed to strawberry.

At length the elevators ceased from troubling, and the supervisors from dilating in _Platt Deutsch_ over the damage in the bilges. The bosun's strangled noise timed the hoisting of the ship's boat, which had had a busy holiday, to its normal place. The little broker made his last appearance round the steward's precincts; and with the heaving up of the gangway, the arrival of the tugs, the return of the wireless aerial to its heights and the smoking funnel--it, no doubt, never looked better--we were ready to depart.

It was twilight when our ropes fore and aft were loosed from the dolphins, and the _Bonadventure_ slowly moved into the lock. Here while the port authorities made a swift inspection for stowaways and concluded their arrangements, we stopped a time, listening to the odd mixture of noise from bleating of sheep and hooting of our whistle. Then we moved out to sea, not without b.u.mping into the lock wall and gashing the bow. The air was intensely cold, and the iron frameworks against the last tinges of sunset and the red and white lights were now all there was to see of our port of discharge. That episode was over; after midnight, the ship stopped at Bork.u.m to put down the pilot, and then, on again. My voyage was hurrying into memory.

x.x.xI

Short seas running and a squally wind abeam made the light ship jerk and roll. The early sun was hidden in the dull purple of a racing sleet-cloud, which pa.s.sed over the _Bonadventure_ and swept on to lash the dunes of Holland lying dim blue along the yellow horizon. The engines beat out a cheerful tattoo and sent the ship, wobbling as she went, at eleven knots through the green water. The wind grew westerly but not sisterly; the melancholy began to expatiate on the short text, "The Longships,"

but the profusion of fishing smacks out around us seemed to show that no tempestuous weather was at hand.

The next morning, a spiritual Beachy Head was glittering like crystal in the distance; while the head wind fell upon us, and momently a great thud like the impact of a great sh.e.l.l shook the ship's sizable frame and lifted her in see-saw style. I watched the south coast sliding by with as much excitement as if I had been coming home on leave again. Meac.o.c.k was at his most picturesque with his reminiscences of a hard-case ship called the _Guildhall_, but I could not retain what he told me, with this distraction of English sh.o.r.es and skies about us. The general scene recorded itself; of all the magnificent evenings which my voyage had brought forth this was perhaps the nonpareil. The skies were of tumultuous colour, requiring one of the old Dutch masters to observe, let alone to reproduce. A bright brazen sun, throwing at his whim (as it were) his vesture of clouds about him, burnt out below a pavement of light ever seething with the leaping waves, and sometimes hidden, sometimes emerging, lit the sky astern to a tawny glow, or left it sullen as clay. Here, the horizon was an olive green, there, a blue girdle; ships in stippled blackness tilted this way and that against it, or nearer ploughed grey expanses; and above pillars and cliffs of rocky cloud lifted themselves enormously into a firmament purpled or kindled into wild flame.

So we hurtled along, the wind flawing, abeam, ahead. The great prow mounted high against the sunset, or thrust like the head of a porpoise down again into the onslaught of rolling waters. The hand on the lookout paced up and down the foc'sle head in loneliness, the officer on the bridge answered his call as ever, the seagulls followed the ship with their unvarying calm and pride of wing. Presently the fine light of Eddystone was our solace.

The last day of my pursership dawned, a day I welcomed and yet was sorry to find come. How swiftly it stole by! At seven that morning we were midway between the Longships lighthouse and that yet lonelier one the Wolf, with Land's End white with snow to feast the eye. The sun was a Jolly Bacchus, the waves dancing as green as the young leaves sacred to that G.o.d, and the happy porpoises ambled among them. Yet still, as we swung round the corner, in a veritable procession of funnels and smoke trails, a squall came down, heralded by a half-seen rainbow, threw us rudely off the poise and chilled the air to winter again. But round went the _Bonadventure_ and coasted beneath moors and tors sullenly green into the Bristol Channel.

The heavy rolling died away as we pa.s.sed from the Cornish sh.o.r.e (where they are said to eat strangers), and my Emden chilblains felt the weather growing much warmer. Indeed, we had not had so mild a day since we left Las Palmas. Towards three we came abreast of Lundy Island's bluff, and Hartland opposite, a st.u.r.dy cliff likewise. The tide helped us well, but the wind was veering. Urged by those officers and engineers whose wives would be at Barry Docks this evening to greet them, and by his own wishes, the chief had promised to bring the _Bonadventure_ to the tier in Barry Docks by seven.

Ilfracombe nestling happily under the moors was quickly pa.s.sed; the _Bonadventure_ could move when she had a mind; the mellow green country of Somerset parcelled in such English fashion with such straight hedgerows, faded astern. The coast of Wales revealed the twin lighthouses called the Nash Lights, and still the ship raced on. Then, as if before the time, we were entering the locks at Barry, in a smoky twilight, after an evening shower; were inside, and tied up to the tier.

Not much remains to add. The next day I scrambled down the rope ladder, and bade farewell to the _Bonadventure_, that "dirty ship," not unbeloved; and Mead came next. The boat below carried us to the quay, under the red hulls of ships gleaming with the light from the dancing ripples; then came paying off, a most unpunctual and irritating performance, and good-byes to the old friends, from Hosea to Kelly, of the last few months; and most of all, perhaps, to that gay spirit Mead. My good-bye to these might be, I hoped, no such final one; but my round trip was accomplished and I felt that for me "there would be no more sea," so that the actual signing off of the purser seemed to me a point in my life's course. Then presently, after a hearty last word with Mead--kind be the dog-watch stars to him, wherever his ship carry him--I departed; the last train for Slowe having, naturally, gone out, I made for the nearest town to Slowe, and finishing my journey part on foot, part on a borrowed bicycle, was enabled to awaken Mary while the rest of the parish of Staizley slept the sleep of the just.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Welcome Sailor!]