The Bonadventure Part 2

A swell running in its long undulations accompanied us until we had pa.s.sed Madeira, beyond its horizons. Mugs of tea slid suddenly and swiftly across the saloon table; complaints were made at every meal, and the mate hinted, with dreadful implications for my benefit, that a special memorandum would be presented to Father Neptune, expected on board shortly. Other hints of the pa.s.senger's future trials were made. We were bound for the Plate, but we might be sent thence to Australia. That addition, as a possibility, to my holiday perturbed me somewhat; I envisaged the bailiffs in at home before I got back.

The second mate, Bicker, and the third mate, Mead, invited me to see their observations and their watches. Bicker, a fine audacious spirit, dark-haired, dark-eyed, four-or-five-and-twenty years old, had my company in the afternoon, the days being warm and inviting. The typical scene below the bridge was of Mead in his singlet rigging up a line, whereon towels, socks and other properties were soon in the sun; while mattresses aired over the cargo-hatch tarpaulin. Other toil at this hour, save that of the engines and the man at the wheel, was not noticeable.

The boatswain and his wrinkled party, who actually did leave a sea-salt impression in their stocking-turbans and greasy rags and roomy sea-boots, had left the midships white, and had changed their ground for hose and scrubber to the neighbourhood of the engines and the galley; but the afternoons heard them not. An occasional whistle from the bridge would summon hurrying feet up the ladder; the striking of the bell made Time's pace perceived. Bicker would sometimes interrupt his large stories to show me, or to try to show me, remote or tiny curiosities floating past the ship. Perhaps a shoal of young porpoises bobbing along portended a slight squall, its approach yielding those ever remarkable lights that mark broken rain, lily-of-the-valley green, and on the waters a silver glitter, while a shadow drooped over all. The third mate's drying-ground was speedily cleared at these times.

Mead's watch occupied the four hours before noon, and the four before midnight. At noon he would join with Bicker in "Shooting old Sol," a process which, with its turning-up of pages packed with figures, reminded me of old trouble in a famous mathematical school of severe traditions, where hung on the walls a symbolic picture--a youth swimming for dear life from a gigantic shark. In the evening I would find Mead on the bridge, uttering to himself as likely as not his talismanic motto: _Quo Fata Vocant_. He was a rover; from China he had gone to Australia to join the Army in 1914; thence had seen Gallipoli, Egypt, and, I believe, Palestine; went into the Navy with a commission after that; and now had returned to the life in which he had been apprenticed a dozen years before. As these evening colloquies with Mead became a rule with me, and as it was Mead whom I came to know better than anyone else, other matters relating to him will be found in their places.

There was no lack of good spirits aboard. Reminiscences of a humorous tinge came up in almost every conversation; and conversation was an earnest and frequent affair. Indeed, there was observable a certain rivalry (as with those who supply the fashionable memoirs of the past twenty or thirty years), who should remember the most: and each speaker showed a vigorous faith in his own tale, which he scarcely extended to his predecessor's. The mate, the clear-headed Meac.o.c.k, with his blunt serenity--embodying qualities in which I could not help seeing the English seaman of the centuries--was eloquent one evening about examiners. Examinations lie thick in the navigator's early way. He recalled one well-known figure of these inquisitions, who, at a time when no dinner interval was allowed to the candidates, used to bring out frying-pan, steak and the rest, and tantalize every one by cooking himself his dinner. (I wondered if this suggestion might be pa.s.sed on to the Universities.) Another original, Meac.o.c.k went on, warming himself with the recollection, had a preference for ordinary, that is seafaring, words.

_Examiner._ If I carry this barometer up a mountain, what happens?

_Candidate._ The mercury in the barometer subsides.

_Examiner (purple with disgust)._ You silly idiot, if you were sitting on a table and I knocked you off, would _you_ subside?

Bicker was about to put in a reminiscence of his at this point, but Meac.o.c.k was already giving another instance of this examiner's zeal for pure English.

_Examiner (producing a piece of wood)._ What colour's this?

_Candidate._ Chocolate.

_Examiner (purple once more)._ Chocolate! Chocolate be dam'd. Chocolate's something to eat--What COLOUR is it?

The chief engineer, seeing me somewhat handicapped by temperament from wandering about as inquisitively as I ought to have done, came up one afternoon to take me into "_his_ little slice of the ship." I am sorry to think how vague my imagination and how inactive my grat.i.tude had been up to that first descent down the iron stairways and crossings to the engine-room. The stifling air and the throbbing roar, of course, kept my notions vague, but the degree of vagueness was not so disgraceful as it had been. He pointed out all things to one comprehending scarcely anything, except a chalk legend on the wall which ran:

Aston Villa Celtic Manchester U,

and so on, which I noticed for myself. The ruling pa.s.sion--(pa.s.sion at the referee's ruling, says the cynic).

I was aware, meanwhile, of vast steel rods and arms in violent motion, named severally by the chief in a mighty voice, which nevertheless was too much of a whisper for me. The gangways round them, it was easier to learn, were narrow and greasy. The cool skill with which an engineer was anointing these whirling forms, his hand dapping mothlike with the tapering can above them, was enough to amaze me. Under a strange construction like a kiln, by way of a low red door, we went into the vault where the dusky, glowing and actually grinning firemen were tending the furnaces. (It happens all day, every day in thousands of ships!) Above, we had looked in at a dark hole--I rightly thought, over the boilers--and breathed for a moment a most parching element, so that the heat of the stokehold did not frighten me. The chief introduced me to the third engineer, Williams--we roared out cordially; and then he inducted me to the mysteries aft, where, along the shaft which revolves the propeller, a specially greasy pa.s.sage runs. Here, as throughout this cavernous region--I remembered Hedge Street Tunnels, which to the initiated will be a sufficient allusion--might not E. A. Poe, to-day, have set a story to rival the _Cask of Amontillado_? I suggested it to the chief, but he saw no adventurous, unusual quality in his tunnel. Right aft appeared a long vertical ladder, ascending to a manhole--a safety appliance, he explained it, of the war, but to me it resembled a danger appliance.

Having gone as far as we could, we turned back to the engine-room. I was now accustomed enough to notice that the sultry air of the place was occasionally tempered by a draught of the cooler kind. But I found it hard to realize how man could tolerate surroundings so trying as these in order to earn a wage which in a comfortable employment would be nothing out of the way. I pictured myself as an engineer on a steamer. I feared that, in time, the approach of each watch of four hours down among the machinery, fume, sweat and thunder would become a formidable problem.

"Use" no doubt explained the nonchalance of pallid Williams as he groped with his slush-lamp to his work. But I thought of the war, when, after a while, useful "use" began to desert the soldier and to leave him on tenterhooks worse than the apprehensions of the unused.

We were climbing upstairs again--up from the underworld of battle headquarters?

I had appreciated the handful of cotton waste which the chief had given me at the first: and now went off to read poems. The man to whom this "divelish yron yngine"--if I do not misquote Spenser--is given for control (and is controlled), returned to his outstanding labour--that of filing part of a curious patent electric torch which the captain had asked him to restore to life.

VII

The _Bonadventure_ entered the tropics, calm, hot, blue expanse. I do not know why, but our pa.s.sing into that zone was for me contemporary with an access of wild and vivid dreams. These were odd enough to cause me to record what remained of them in the morning, and as they still seem prominent in my recollections of my sea-going, I make a note of some of them. Now, it was no other than the great Lord Byron, pursuing me with a knife, applauded by two ladies. The basis of actuality, at least, was there. Now I was taking my way along weedy rivers, which at first were the innocent shallow streams I once met and knew in Kent. But as the dream progressed a Byronic change came over it; and these streams grew more and more foul with weeds and grotesque in stagnation, until I realized as if with an awakening that they were full of tremendous fish, pike perhaps, often perch, and hybrids of many colours and streakings.

These fish lay watching, stretched from one bank to the other; their number, my loneliness, their immensity, my fixity conspired to frighten me unspeakably.

At other times the river was in flood, and I, as before, compelled by the secret of the matter to walk along its towpath, in danger of its torrents; the path itself became unknown, or lay between two huge channels choking with muddy torrents. Ever expecting the worst, I was suddenly at an ancient mill, watching

Slow Lethe without coil, Softly, like a stream of oil

gliding under the footbridge. This was sickly phantasm, the very waters breathing decay. The scene swiftly changed. Paddington! and you, dear old friend C., racing with me across the metals to catch a train, and---- Then C. is in his grave again, and I am in a trap outside my old home; a stranger stands in the road, cuts his throat; I look on, smile, and shudder, for he races after the trap with his knife; but I outstare his Malayan eyes, and he gives up the chase. By way of respite, I now walked at leisure into a bookshop, and my hand fell upon rarities indeed. _The Church_, by Leigh Hunt--I had never seen that before! "We don't have much time for dinner," said the bookseller, and I took the hint and went out.

And there were other familiar scenes in this phase of nightly alienation.

On occasion, though I awoke several times from a haunting, I fell asleep again to return to it. Half-nonsense as these dreams were, there was a persistent force about them. Here was the battalion, expecting to be attacked. Its nerves, and mine, were restive. The attack broke out farther up the line, and we got off with a reaction almost as unwelcome as a battle. Or I was in a town behind the line, into which a number of very small round gas-sh.e.l.ls were falling; then, in the cattle-truck for the front; presently, in the wild scenery of great hills and deep curving ravines which I seemed to know so well. (The entrenched ridges in the unnatural light of the flares looked monstrous once.) I was company commander; we were to be relieved; and, G.o.d, what had I done? Begun to bring my men out before the other crowd had come up! The mound would be lost, I should be "for it." The company must be halted in the open; and so we waited for the relief. It never came.

Still the dreams came: the war continued. S. S. was with me, walking up a big cobbled road, muddy as ever, towards the front. On every side lay exhausted men, not caring whether they were in the mud or not. I was not quite sure, but was not this Poperinghe Station? At that station was--I hope is--an hotel, bearing the legend, "Bifsteck a Toute Heure"; was this gaudy-looking place, perhaps, the same? At all events, S. S.

said, "Let's go and have a port." We did, and the drink appears to have gone to my head, for I now found myself alone, walking across a large common or pasture. Here Mary and another woman went by, but I could not at the moment recognize them. There, beyond the common with its dry tussocks, stood a town, flanked by mountains, which I knew to be--Barry.

A cathedral or abbey of white stone rose in gigantic strength into the sunlight. This place, I soliloquized, so near the line, and yet not sh.e.l.led! But I was not to escape. I proceeded. The screen alongside was blown down. Better slink along these hedges at the double! It was the support line. Some large splinter-proof dugouts came into sight, and some officers, who told me about an attack. We were going over. I recognized my destined end.

However, I woke up alive, having again suffered more from fear and the atmosphere of it--in projection--in a few seconds, than I was ever conscious of suffering in a day of the actual war. With weary and aching head, whether these fantasies were to blame or not, I looked out to ask the wireless expert if there had been a storm in the night. He grinned, and going farther I saw outside a sea of pale glow not a great deal more disturbed than a looking-gla.s.s.

The ashen whiteness soon gave place to a deep blue, and our entry into the tropics became plainer and plainer, the sea fluttering with the sun's blaze. This was unfamiliar also, to be roasting on the water in January. The pith-helmet season began. The third mate could not claim a pith helmet, but he displayed what none of the others could, as he sat washing on the step of the alleyway--a marvellous red and blue serpent tattooed on his arm, by the very Chinaman, he said, who had tattooed King George. It was, I still think, a superfine serpent.

Washing, or "dobing," was not Mead's sole recreation. Literature, and even poetry, with limitations, had its power over him. Suspecting me of critical curiosity about his favourite poets, he directly approached the matter. Rudyard Kipling and "A Sentimental Bloke" were satisfactory, but he couldn't bear the others who gave their views on love. Lawrence Hope had done one or two good things--but the rest, as Keats, Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x, and so forth, might as well be cut out. His approval of Kipling was confirmed by Meac.o.c.k's saying in the saloon, where books and authors were a favourite pabulum, "H'm--the third mate seems to be getting very interested in Kipling. He brought me a paper with all he could remember of _IF_ written out on it, and asked me if I could supply any of the rest."

This literary halo aroused Bicker, who was already known to me as the ship's poet, and had unfortunately left his MSS. at home. He now urged his claims. "The gardener called me Poet when I was about seven or eight, and I often get called that now." The chief, chuckling, brought off his little joke. "I suppose that's what drove you to sea."

In connection, no doubt, with poetry, that strange device, the mate looked back to a ship in which he once served, and which was chartered to carry the largest whale ever caught in j.a.panese waters to New York for the New York Museum. By whale, he said he meant the skeleton, of course; but it had been sketchily cleaned, "and when we got her to New York,"

he said with a comical frown, "n.o.body could get near the hatches": and, finding the sequence easy, he added that there was often some peculiar cargo on that New York-Hong Kong run--take for instance those rows of dead Chinamen in the 'tween-deck homeward bound.

The face of the sky often held me delighted. There is nothing, I think, of dullness about this world's weather; and its hues and tones may still be a sufficient testing theme for the greatest artists with pen or pencil.

To express the sunset uprising of clouds, many of them in semblance of towering ships under full sail, many more like creatures mistily seen in endless pastures, was an attempt in which my own vocabulary scarcely lasted a moment. One evening, the nonpareil of its race, especially "burned the mind."

At first the blue temple was hung with plumes of cloud, golden feathers.

When these at last were grey, a rosy flush swiftly came along them, like a thought, and pa.s.sed. It seemed as though the night had come, when the loitering tinges of the rose in a few seconds grew unutterably red, and the spectacle was that of an aerial lattice or trellis among the clouds, overgrown with the heavenly original of all roses. "In Xanadu----" From brightness the ama.s.sed cloud-bloom still increased to brightness: then suddenly the flames turned to ember. Even now again a ghost of themselves glowed, until all was gone, and Sirius entered upon his tenancy of another glory, and Orion and Canopus, casting a h.o.a.r-frost glimmer ahead of the riding ship.

Hosea agreed this was a remarkable sunset; then took me off to the friendly tot and talk in his room. He loved to discuss all sorts of theory in art and religion, of which he might have been, with a slight change of circ.u.mstance in his boyhood, a student and enthusiast: meanwhile, the sailor in him would be rummaging through the makings of a curiosity shop which crowded his official desk, besides the manifests and ship's articles--his watches, knives, coins and notes of twenty countries, photographs of friends all over the world.

VIII

The flying-fishes could have dispensed with the _Bonadventure_. During the night, sixteen or so had come aboard, to be seized by the apprentices for breakfast; I saw with surprise how one had been driven and wedged between the steam-pipes. In looks, when they were out of their element, despite their large mild eyes, their long "wings" closed into a sort of spur, being light spines webbed with a filmy skin, despite too the purple-blue glowing from the dark back, they did not seem remarkable. But under the hot and shining morning, where the _Bonadventure's_ sheering bows alarmed the shoals into flight, they were seen more justly. In ones and twos and crescents and troops they skimmed away, sometimes with their dark backs and white undersides appearing as fishes, sometimes in the sun nothing more than volleys of light-curved silvery darts. They turned in the air at sharp angles without apparently losing their speed, which was such that often one heard the water hiss as they entered it again.

The morning that they first came in numbers, it happened that the salt fish for breakfast was relieved by reminiscences.

"You reminded me of Captain Shank just now, chief."

"Indeed--why?"

"When you ran your hand along the table for the treacle.... He used to think the treacle was put aboard for him. He told the second mate off for eating too much of it--said it wasn't really for his use. After that we all began to eat the stuff like blazes."

"You must have had some funny captains in this line."

"He was. He'd come up sometimes on the bridge and sit down in the wheel and start making noises to himself. He'd sit there with his old chin drooping and say, '... I knew it.... Haw, haw.... The silly old b----....