The Bonadventure Part 4

"I looked and saw her name, _The Duke of York_. I thought to myself, I'll write to him and tell him about the state of his namesake. She looked like a wreck."

Some, again, like the _Bonadventure_, standard ships, the hasty replacements of submarine wastage. The criticism here, of course, had the severity of domestic familiarity.

"They have these ships made in one piece at the shipyard. When they want one, they just cut off a length, and join the ends."

"Well, I say the man who designed this ship ought to have designed another and pegged out."

"Mister, she's a dirty ship."

I detected--it was not difficult--a vague prejudice against wireless.

The wireless operator was foolish enough to have at his fingers' ends all the tabular details of shipping companies and their vessels, and to display this dry knowledge in the middle of his seniors' recollections.

His seafaring experience, it may be mentioned, was altogether recent, and among the elders he would have done better _not_ to know. It was of course impersonally aired, this prejudice against wireless. First, there was the view that as ships had hitherto, beginning with the Ark, gone to sea without the invention, they could continue to do so. Then, the fact that wireless might save life admitted, the system current was decried.

It seemed that the merchant ships of over 1,600 tons carried wireless operators and sets, but that one operator to a ship was the allowance; now one operator watched eight hours out of the twenty-four, and all were off duty at the same time. So it was believed. "There's nothing in the Bible," the critic would urge, "to say a ship mustn't be wrecked when all the operators are off duty."

I had expected music--chanteys, or at least accordions--aboard a merchantman; but very little was that expectation justified. There had been a gramophone (and step-dancing), but it was out of action after one evening's protracted use. It was not often, yet, that I had heard even a whistled sc.r.a.p; occasionally the coloured firemen would sing in falsetto.

An epidemic of hair-cutting broke out. Every time I saw the process going on, the artist was a fresh one; and I was inclined to think that we are a nation of hair-cutters. Among the pract.i.tioners, the cook, with his usual severe expression, plied a neat pair of scissors. It was a scene which reminded me of old trench life. I thought of a close support trench opposite Auchy, about the month of June, 1916, where a sickly programme of sniping by field guns, rifle grenades, "pineapples,"

and incredible escapes from them did not prevent my being shorn by the steadiest of amateurs. With what outward intrepidity I sat there!

At the captain's request, the cook advanced to cut his hair. That done, he cut mine. Venturing to talk, I was soon exchanging sallies of the British Expeditionary Force, for he had been thereof, a tunneller. Of his being in a countermined shaft at the wrong moment at Vimy, and his luck in being dragged out by the sergeant-major, he gave some details; but the first evident attack of mirth to which I had ever seen him give way came as he mused over rations supplied by the French for a fortnight at St. Quentin under some temporary arrangement. "Wine, beans, and b---- horseflesh," he said, _staccato_, and with a dry laugh like the rattling of beans. "First we'd all get bound up and then we'd all get diarrhoea.

Oh, it was the h.e.l.l of a go." "There," he said, leaving a little tuft over my forehead, "you'll still be able to have a couple of quiffs there."

He was not only cook and hairdresser off duty, I found: he was given to sketching portraits. I went once or twice to talk with him in the galley, where the heat was enough to make the famous Lambert himself turn thin.

And his work, he pointed out, was continuous, with his a.s.sistant's services; he had to put up double meals to suit the watches. "But why do I stick it?" he said, taking a batch of bread from the oven and standing it on end against the others. "A man can stick sh.o.r.e jobs all right when there's five mouths depending on him. There's not a lot of sh.o.r.e jobs now."

His drawings were done in the little corner where he and his mate had their bunks. They were pictures of ladies and seamen of his acquaintance; crude, with lips of a bitter redness, and cheeks faintly pink, staring and disproportioned, yet done with such pains, such strivings after "likeness," that when he requested me to help him to a post as artist to _The Times_, I much wished that I could! I had no sooner made the acquaintance of the cook's portraits than a poem was bashfully brought to me by its author, Bicker. I must say that, although his lines had occasionally been eked out with last resorts, there was a heartiness about them which I liked; and, going down presently to his cabin, I got him to show me more. He had already written several rhyming epistles during the trip, which with the retiring instinct of poets he had left to blush unseen. So we had aboard among a crew of forty or so a painter of portraits and a writer of verse.

We had our philosopher too, Phillips, the chief engineer, veteran of Khartoum, master of machinery, physician less active but more reliable than the steward; but above all, the Diogenes--with a slush-lamp. His philosophy might be no ill store about this time, when in the heat the pitch melted from the seams of his cabin roof and mottled his bed, as he put it: a circ.u.mstance not yet mentioned in sonnets wooing tardy sleep, and which of course called upon that nimble sixpence of _Bonadventure_ conversation, "She _is_ a dirty ship."

XI

A note of a train of thought forced upon me hereabouts may find a place here, as it was set down.

(_Feb. 4._) It was nothing more nor less than the appearance at dinner to-day of a bully stew and a sort of ration lime juice, which drove my thoughts, always willing to be driven in that direction, towards a nervous period of 1916, my initiation into trench warfare. The meal was something of a facsimile; and soon after it, by a coincidence, I was sitting under the scissors of a volunteer barber much as once after such a dinner I sat in the alleyway by company headquarters, opposite the red roofs of Auchy. The _Bonadventure's_ bridge, I meditated as I endured the shears of a B.E.F. man again, looked not unlike those so-called "communication trenches" in the Richebourg district, those make-believes; and, as the steam-valve suddenly made me jump with its thudding volley of minor explosions, I experienced an echo of the ancient terrors in those same scantily covered ways when cross-firing machine-guns opened upon my working-party.

The lime juice, in the present case, was of a milder disposition than that to which we were accustomed. Yet there was perceptible in it that uncivilized strength which proved it to come of the same honest origin. We were, I must confess--it is not too late--much lacking in our appreciation of that uncompromising, biting liquid which circulated in the trenches, carried in jars which should have been, it was felt, carrying rum. In itself a sort of candid friend, that lime juice lacked advancement through faults not its own. I mean, there was the chlorinated water, which for all its virtues was hardly popular, and there was the sugar, which was half-and-half, a.s.sociating, very friendly, with tea dust.

Moreover, this same _sugar_, in its nocturnal progress at the bottom of a sandbag, while its carrier now stepped into an artificial lake and now lay down for the bullets of Quinque Jimmy to pa.s.s by unimpeded, had acquired an interspersion of hairy particles; as generally did our loaves of bread, which in some cases might easily be supposed to be wearing wigs. In this manner, the germ-destroyer, the intrusion of tea dust and the moulted coat of sandbags, combined to prevent the lime juice, like crabbed poet, "from being as generally tasted as he deserved to be."

At Company Headquarters, too, there was often in those easy times a rival beverage. Here and there a messenger might be sent back to an estaminet and return to the war with comforts within a couple of hours.

Yet I myself did my best to cultivate the "lime-juice habit," and to me it remains an integral part of the interiors, gone but not forgotten, of many a Rotten Row in the Bethune Sectors. I see its gloomy and mottled surface, in the aluminium tumbler, besides my platter of "meat and vegetable" or (as to-day) of bully rehabilitated by the smoky cooks; and about me the shape of the lean-to dugout rises sufficiently high for a tall man to enter without going on all fours. Here, is the earth settee, running round three sides of the table, there, the glory hole in which, one at a time, we crawl to sleep, with a fine confused bedding of British Warms and sandbags. The purple typescript of _Comic Cuts_,[4]

in which what imagination and telescope has striven to reveal of the "other fellow," mind, body and soul, is set in military prose, flaps neglectedly from its nail. In their furious tints, the ladies of the late Kirchner beam sweetly upon him who sets put on patrol and him who returns; while in the convenient niches between the walls and the corrugated iron roof above, which as a protection might perhaps amount to the faith of the ostrich, Mills bombs and revolvers and ammunition nestle.

There, given the noise of sh.e.l.ls travelling over, trench mortar bombs dropping short, machine guns firing high--or of sh.e.l.ls alighting abruptly on the parados, trench mortar bombs thundering into the next traverse, machine guns in spitfire temper stripping the top layer of sandbags--the boyish gay P. would with his subalterns pore over the maps, receive with sinking heart the ominous "secret and confidential" and "very secret" messages brought in by those fine youths the runners; fill in, not without murmurings, those _pro forma's_ which at one time seemed likely to turn fighting into clerkship, or "censor" those long pages of homely scrawl in copying pencil which were to keep up yet a day more the spirits of sweethearts, mothers and wives.

Thus the particular memories of trenches and our times and seasons in them, roused by such a light matter as this which has aroused them now, pa.s.s with the greatest emotion before the mind. It is not fashionable to talk of the war. Is the counsel, then, to follow the Psalmist:

I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue....

I held my tongue, and spake nothing. I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.

One has not to follow him very long in that.

My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue.

One wonders, though, how the Psalmist himself, had he been one of us, would have found means to communicate his strange undertones of experience, according to their significance for himself? To whom would it be of interest, if he described such a particle as St. Vaast Keep on the Richebourg road, though he saw daily again in some odd way its sandbagged posts with the fine wood panels from the sh.e.l.l-like house beside built in?--seen once, for a lifetime. Or Port Arthur, that wreckage of a brewery near Neuve Chapelle--why should every yard of its flimsy fortification be coexistent with me? I could lead the hearer through its observation-posts, its emplacements, its warrens for human beings, its relics of other days, with practical and geographical accuracy; but the words would not contain my own sense of the place, which from the very first I never needed nor endeavoured to put into words. And yet it is intense and instant. The reflection of the crazy stronghold as it was, and with what it meant for me, comes in a second when my thoughts lie that way, and it is but one of a series of equal insistency. It is no question, this, of looking back on such a past as in any degree glorious, of shirking the anguish that overcast any adventurous gleam that these scenes awakened. Their memory is as sombre and as frightening as they were themselves in their aspect and their annals.

They come unbidden,

and when they will come, the mind is led by them as birds are said to be lured by the serpent's eye. A tune, a breath of sighing air, an odour--and there goes the foolish ghost back to Flanders.

Even here, I suppose, in the Atlantic's healthy blue, I am at the mercy of a coincidence in lime-juice.

[Footnote 4: Divisional Intelligence Report.]

XII

Following a roaster of day, with a slack wind astern covering the deck forward with showers of cinders like shot, I admired the moonlight and the sweet night air before I turned in to sleep soundly. I woke thinking I heard the usual swabbing of decks beginning, but this was incorrect. It was quite dark, and I began to think with grat.i.tude of a second innings of sleep; but when I looked at my watch it was after seven. The din of water outside, mingled with the rushing of a mighty wind, persuaded me to go to the door. In a few moments the storm was at its height, the sea shrouded in a thick deluge almost to the ship's side, and its waves beaten down by the rain into pallid foam-veined inertia. An ashen grey light was about us, but the clouds of rain veiled the p.o.o.p from one's eyes amidships, and the siren trumpeted out its warnings; while sheet-like lightning flamed through the vapours, and bursts of deeper thunder than I had ever heard followed hard upon them.

The decks were racing with water from overhead covers and stairways, and in each lifting of the storm the awning over the sailors' quarters aft could be seen tearing at its tethers.

This fury soon slackened, and green and blue, pale as yet, returned to the seas as they leapt away from the bows. Breakfast intervened. Attention was requested from the storm by the appearance of a new and experimental kind of ham.

"Yes. What d'ye think of the ham--tinned boneless smoked ham?"

"Well, I like it well enough; but it's boneless. If you take the bone away from ham, you take away the nature of it."

This ham later on became much esteemed, but the ingenious mind was for dissembling the fact: "We'd better not give a too enthusiastic report on it or they'll only give it to the pa.s.senger boats" of the same company.

It was blowing still, from the coast of South America. "Smell the mould?"

asked Hosea, and I did; a strange frightening fragrance, of the earth earthy, a heavy and swooning smell. It was so strong as to puzzle Bicker even, in his watch; and its most unpleasant manifestation caused him to look about for the carca.s.s of a rat on the bridge deck.

We had come by this time into a highway of ships. The first that pa.s.sed us, a small steamer, was not much noticed; nor the next, which pa.s.sed in the night. "Her lamp gave a blink and then went out," said Bicker, and wished he could have emulated a mate of his acquaintance who likewise signalled to a pa.s.ser-by in vain. "If you d.a.m.n'd foreigners can't answer,"

he sent out as she came alongside presently, "why the h.e.l.l don't you keep out of sight? Good night!" But, on being pressed, he admitted that the "foreigner" replied: "Thank you. And you're a lady."

Then, however, another ship belonging to the same company with the _Bonadventure_ was seen afar through the afternoon. As the two drew level, ceremony took place. The houseflag was dipped and raised and dipped again by both; the red ensign was dipped; and the homeward-bound sounded her monosyllable three times, to which our own whistle replied in equal number. This, as old-fashioned a courtesy as could be wished, excited several others aboard the _Bonadventure_ besides the tyro; and as the chief engineer began his tea, he thus referred to the prevailing spirit.

"--Well, so we pa.s.sed one of _our_ ships again to-day! I was lying in my hammock asleep, when the mess-room boy came running up, panting out: 'Sir, here's one of our ships!' And I mumbled out something like, 'All right, John, there's room enough for us to pa.s.s, isn't there?' Everybody was seemingly out on deck, peering up at the mate to see if he had forgotten the flags; everybody was staring at the funnel with the eye of expectancy, wondering 'When the h.e.l.l's that d.a.m.n'd whistle going?'--I didn't get up for it. I suppose that's equivalent to contempt of court or high treason."