"I asked where we had anch.o.r.ed, seeing no sign of life ash.o.r.e, and they told me it was the Bar. We must wait for high water. Away ahead was the bar buoy, a white blob on the water. I stood leaning against a stanchion trying to sense the atmosphere of the place until the Second called me, for there was something to do. There was always something to do in that terrible old ship. I went down, and together we wrestled with the dynamo-engine, a cheap contraption with a closed crank chamber full of muddy oil which was supposed to splash into all the bearings, and didn"t. We needed a washer, a special sort of thing. The old one was worn out. We needed screws, too, to fasten it with, small bra.s.s screws with flat heads that sank in out of sight. When I asked where these were coming from if we hadn"t got them on the ship, the Second said with some asperity, that it would be my job to make them on my anchor watch that night. I was surprised at this and made some remark about getting them from ash.o.r.e, and it so tickled the poor over-worked Second that he stood up suddenly, spun round towards the reversing engine and broke into peals of hysterical laughter. I shall never forget the sight of him as he stood there in his sodden, filthy singlet and dungarees, his arms knotted and burned and bruised, his common little face twisted into an expression of super-human scorn. For a single moment he was sublime, lifted out of himself, with the mere effort of pouring contempt upon my ignorance. He tried to put it into words, and sputtered. He looked as though in a trance and some stormy spirit was struggling within him. The sweat ran off us in streams as we stood there in the light of a couple of slush-lamps flaring in the draught from the stokehold door. Then he abruptly abandoned his search for vitriolic language and rushed into the store for a piece of bra.s.s rod. It was a curious performance. I was impressed. I realized in a dim way that there was no longer a hardware shop round the corner. The making of those screws was nothing in itself, but it was the principle behind it, the principle of never being stumped. And these rough, uncultured, north-countrymen were my teachers.
The Chief fixed me with his one good eye at lunch. "We don"t get things from ash.o.r.e in this employ," he observed, and left me to soak it in.
"I suppose I ought to have been downhearted at being so ignorant and dirty and tired, but I wasn"t in the least. It was too interesting.
There was a grim irony, to me, in the appalling contrast between the behaviour of that worn-out dynamo and the smug theory in the text-books and trade catalogues I had been used to so long. I had read of the way to detect faults in a circuit, but it seemed to me there was no need to look for faults on the _Corydon_; it was the virtues, the sound places, that needed looking for. And yet, strange to say, out of her decrepitude loyalty was born. I found it growing on me day by day, a jealous regard for her, the pity that becomes a sort of cantankerous affection.
"But to go on with that day, we crossed the bar. It was high water at four in the afternoon and I had to go down again to stand by the telegraph. With my head against the reversing engine wheel I could feel the slow vibration of the anchor coming up, and hear the sough of the exhaust coming back from the windla.s.s. The Second and old Croasan stood near by, their faces blank with waiting and fatigue, like the faces of dead men. Old Croasan"s eyelid would flicker now and then and the tip of his tongue would move stealthily round the inside of his lips. He hadn"t shaved for several days and his face was vague and venerable, glistening grey bristles. When he leaned gently against the vice-bench and folding his arms, closed his eyes, he looked like a hundred-years"-old corpse.
He closed his eyes. It was not interesting to him, this crossing of the bar.
"Suddenly we got an order, and we started. I went along the tunnel to see the bearings were all oiled, and while I stood in the dark gloom at the far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered, broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell, b.u.mp, b.u.mp, b.u.mp. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a pale glint and I could have sworn I saw the whole bag of tricks move slowly up and subside as the keel floundered across that ridge of mud and soft rock. She must be breaking in half, I thought. I had heard of such things. I gathered myself up and hurried back to the engine-room, where I found everybody perfectly calm. The ship, it appeared, was now on the bar and it was our business to keep the engines going at full speed until she was gradually urged over. At intervals she b.u.mped. Some ma.s.s of rock or clay on which she rested would collapse and immediately the propeller would shove her a little further over. Our vacuum almost disappeared, for the injection pipe got blocked with mud. This meant more work for me in starting the ballast pump, and when that got choked too, I had to open it up and clean the valve-boxes. It didn"t seem to matter what happened, there was a new job for me. I wondered with a sort of temporary bitterness whether they would miss me if I dropped suddenly dead. And I was obliged to admit to myself that in all probability they wouldn"t. They would just go ahead and do the job themselves and bury me when they got through.
"And this, mind you, was no breakdown, no emergency, but just the ordinary day"s work. If the owners didn"t want to risk breaking the ship"s back on the bar there were plenty of others who would. It was like putting a horse at a d.y.k.e, getting his fore-feet across, and then lashing him furiously until he had kicked a lot of earth away and finally got himself over. When I had put the doors on the ballast pump again I noticed the main engines were running normal once more. We were over. We had crossed the bar. My mind was running on the romantic nature of this performance when I went up to get my tea. I recalled Tennyson"s poem and wondered what he would have thought of the old _Corydon_ and her undignified scramble across the bar. The others caught something of this in my face, I suppose, for the Second said to the Chief, "I suppose the Fourth"ll be for the beach to-night, eh?" and they laughed. "Don"t you go ash.o.r.e here then?" I asked, and they laughed again. "No, there"s nothing to go ash.o.r.e for," said the Chief, and he fixed me with his eye. "Why," he added, "don"t you know where you are?
You"re in the middle of all the atrocities here." The others nodded "That"s right. Any amount of atrocities--round here." It seemed a silly way of putting it. Here we"d come thousands of miles just to get into the middle of atrocities! For a moment the word conveyed nothing to me.
I had been getting into the way of thinking the _Corydon_ was by way of being something of an atrocity, but I knew that was not what my shipmates meant. I"m not sure even now that there ever had been any atrocities in that part of the world. I read about them in a book once; but the things that get into books have always eluded me. Already I had laid hold of that cardinal fact in my new life. The old ideas, the old conventional phrases and a.s.sumptions, were c.u.mbersome, inadequate or untrue. Take that word "atrocity." Well enough in a radical leading article; but what core of real truth was there in it when it was used by a living man at a railhead up the Niger River? To anyone with imagination it was comic. But my shipmates were not given to much imagination. In the business of their lives they were alive and original and racy. They used phrases and turns of thought that sometimes thrilled me with their vivid power. But outside of that narrow channel they had nothing but newspaper phrases, like "atrocities," mere catchwords that chill one"s soul with their bald, withered and bloodless pretensions.
The Chief gave me an example of this after tea that night. For a brief spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees, were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth was behind us. In front lay a broad, placid sheet of copper-tinted, forest-rimmed water, the confluence of a number of stagnant creeks and back-streams, a sort of knot in the interminable loops and windings of the delta. Here and there in the line of tree-tops was a gap showing where some waterway came through. Here and there, too, I could descry a tiny beach of mud a yard or two wide, with a hut and a canoe tied to the mangrove roots, and black, naked people crouched on their hams in the shadows cast by the forest, engaged in their--to me--mysterious business of living. They were far-away and more or less picturesque. So, too, were the fishermen a mile away on the shining water silhouetted in solid black against the western glow. At the time I was so full of new impressions that I regarded the scene very much as one turns over the pages of a "book of views" in a friend"s drawing room. I couldn"t take it in. That needs time, and also one must have the Key. I was musing upon the apparent meaninglessness of a life that had thrown me up for a moment at a place I"d never heard of before, thrown me up there to a.s.sist in the astonishing job of transporting nuts, when the Chief remarked, pointing with the stem of his pipe, "Here"s a chief coming." I looked round, expecting to see another stout, middle-aged man in singlet and dungarees, with perhaps an old uniform patrol jacket whose bra.s.s b.u.t.tons were green with verdigris. But it was not so. He was indicating a large canoe emerging rapidly from the waterway astern of us. As it came more into our angle of vision I watched with extraordinary expectancy. I was dazed, not only by the spectacle, but by the aplomb with which my shipmates took these things. Here was a savage chief sitting under an immense parasol in the stern of his state canoe, propelled by a score of naked, black paddlers in white loin-cloths and scarlet cricket-caps, coming to call on us. This was evidently his intention, for the accommodation ladder went down with a rattle, and the canoe with her twenty spear-shaped paddles swung alongside like a naval pinnace, and a fat old chap, dressed in a vast white flannel nightgown with a sort of dress-shirt front pleated on it in blue thread, came slowly up the ladder. Came up and walked past with a heavy, flat-footed tread, and disappeared into the saloon with the Old Man. I was too astonished to speak for some time. That old fellow"s face behind its broad benevolence and its confusing tattooings and mutilations, had an expression of power. It was an expression you do not find in London suburbs. You do not find it in the faces of men who sit at a desk and hire you and fire you. The momentary glimpse I had of that chief"s face made clear to me many pa.s.sages in history, many things in literature, many dark and tortuous riddles in the adventures of my own little tinpot soul. And in the light of this discovery I heard the Chief, our chief, saying, "Yes, these chaps have power of life and death over their people, power of life and death."
"And for once the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment, on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps, for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really was a potential African despot. In the midst of my reflections I heard another newspaper phrase, "Not long ago the rivers ran blood." This was the Second, who was fond of stories inside comic supplements, and who was recalling a bygone "atrocity," I suppose. But it was curious to me, to notice how abruptly they all dropped the journalist jargon the moment they spoke of something they really understood. They regaled me with "atrocities,"
with "rivers running blood" and "gold in the forests that no white man had ever penetrated," with "power of life and death" and so on, but when I inquired anxiously what this omnipotent monarch had come aboard of us for, they replied without any hesitation,
""To get a drink."
"It seemed a contemptible diversion for a person inspiring such awe politically. I don"t say, mind you, that such _was_ his object. My shipmates may have been as much in error about his motives as they were about his power. I was too tired, too full of aches and humiliations of my own, to investigate. He pa.s.sed across my field of vision, and being the first of his kind, left an ineffaceable impression. The sun went down suddenly soon after, and the coppery glow vanished from the water, leaving it a grey blur.
""In the middle of all the atrocities"! The flashy, bombastic phraseology came back to me with grim insistence that night when I went down at eight o"clock to look after the boilers and pumps and to make, with entirely inadequate means, those bra.s.s screws for the dynamo-engine. The engine-room was in darkness save for the hand-lamp that hung over the vice-bench. The fat cotton-wick smoked and crackled, the light draught swirling it towards my head at times, singeing my hair and making my eyes water. Behind me the silent, heated engines stood up, stark and ominous like some emblem of my destiny watching me. The white faces of the gauges over the starting handles stared blankly. From the stokehold came the occasional clink of a shovel or the hollow clang of a fire-door flung to. And I worked. I fought with the greasy bra.s.s and the broken, worn-out tools. I made wasters and started again. The sweat poured off me, and I drank thirstily the warm water in the can that hung over my head in the ventilator. It was ten o"clock when I realized I had made but one screw. The fireman on duty came through, and remarking that he thought the wind had gone round, climbed the ladder to change the ventilators. I heard the groan of the cowl as he pulled at it and then my lamp flared gustily in a light breeze that came down. Light as it was it was a blessed relief. It was more. It was a message. There was a strange smell about it that gave a new turn to my thoughts. A smell of the land, of the dark forests and fragrant plantations. Another stock phrase came to me--"spicy breezes." Working there at my miserable task, I wondered if these were the "spicy breezes" of the hymn-books. Of a sudden I threw down my tools and went up the ladder to look round. All day there had been in my mind a sort of undertow of resentment at the tacit decision that I ought not to want to go ash.o.r.e. I did want to. It seemed to me an outrage to come so far and remain a prisoner in bondage on the ship. I leaned on the rail by the gangway and looked along the wooden wharf to where a few lights twinkled in the distance. Higher up, beyond the cutting for the railway, the dark ma.s.s of a big shed loomed up against the lights of what I supposed was Port Duluth. And from where I stood I could hear a steady rhythmic throb, the unmistakable sound of an engine. I wondered what it could be. Was it one of those weird affairs I remembered in our catalogues, colonial engines with grotesque fireboxes and elaborate funnels, for burning wood instead of coal? I looked round. n.o.body in sight. Everybody was below. The Chief and Second were asleep, old Croasan was in his room with a bottle of gin, drinking steadily. In another moment I had gone down the gangway and was making for the shed. Just then I felt if I didn"t speak to somebody who wasn"t under the spell of the _Corydon_, I would go crazy. I slipped into an excavation and skinned my knees. I fell over some stacked rails and barked my shins. I heard something scuttling in the darkness. I saw the night-watchman on the _Corydon_ standing at the galley door, looking out. And then, looking again towards my objective, I saw an open door in the shed with a short, broad figure showing up sharply against a brightly illuminated interior. I scrambled up the little incline and found a path.
"I was suddenly conscious I had no particular reason for calling upon this unknown person in the middle of the night. It is one of the tragedies of human life that while we do most things by instinct or intuition we have to clamp some "particular reason" on our actions before we can secure the approbation either of others or of ourselves.
Some men, like my young brother, never trouble themselves about it. But all my life I have found myself hesitating upon the edge of actions that might be heroic or fantastic or original or simply desirable, just because I couldn"t square them with a particular reason. It was so in this instance. I came into the light of that doorway, and hesitated. But the short, broad figure was not like me. In the most matter-of-fact fashion he nodded his head and said in a clear voice with a strong foreign accent, "Good evening. How are you?" And I answered at once that I was very well. He gave the cue, the cue which the _Corydon_ had temporarily obliterated from my mind! He stood to one side and let me see into his domain. A large central-draft oil lamp hung in the centre of the roof of a small chamber. There was a door at the back, leading, I surmised, to the boiler room, for in one corner stood the machine that had attracted me from the ship, a curious hunched affair with a violently working apparatus in front and pipes covered with snow curving up and disappearing into the top of it. A small foot-lathe stood by a bench, and on the bench itself was clamped a fret-work table and a partly completed fret-work corner bracket. I wiped my face with my sweat-rag and turned to get a good look at the owner of this variegated display. It seemed to me I was having experiences after all.
"He was young and had never shaved the down which grew on his cheeks and the points of his chin. Young as he was he had the lines of half a century scored under his eyes and on his temples, thin lines on clear, yellow skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow too, as though he had suffered from jaundice. Which he had, as I learned very soon after he opened upon me in a clear, sonorous voice that rolled the r"s and beat like a flail on the l.a.b.i.als and diphthongs. He wore a blue dungaree boiler-suit, which is a combination affair, you know, and on his head he had an old, greasy, red fez. It seemed to me a preposterous piece of fancy dress up a creek on the Niger River. But I found later, to my astonishment, that Moslems were common enough there; that they had soaked through from the Mediterranean littoral and the head-waters of the Nile generations ago. Not that this gentleman had soaked through, or was a Moslem either. He had, as he informed me, been all over the world.
But it was not his fez, or his jaundiced complexion, or his fret-work, or his languages, or his travels that marked him out for me at the time.
It was the simple fact that he was my first foreigner. In spite of my having come in upon him, forced myself upon him as it were, he gave me the impression of being the aggressor. I felt myself throwing up defences against him. It is popular to gibe at the Englishman"s taciturnity abroad. There is a reason. The foreigner, not the best nor the aristocratic foreigner perhaps, but the common run of him, act like amiable invaders. They take possession of us, of our language, our idioms, our games, our clothes, our machinery, ideas, everything. They nod and smile and say knowingly "How are you. All right, eh?" and a.s.sume an intimacy you don"t permit with your own family. This young chap in the fez had other points, but at the outset I had the most extraordinary sensation of leaning against the door of my soul, trying to keep him out. I don"t suppose it struck him that way. I dare say he thought me rather subdued and untidy. He was very hospitable, asking me to "take a seat" at his bench, and showing me his fret-work. He told me he never wasted any time, as that was the way to succeed. "If at first you don"t succeed, try, try again," he sang with the accents all on the wrong syllables. He was very proud of this aphorism, evidently thinking it the secret of our imperial race. And he told me his history. He was born in Damascus, he said, so he knew Arabic. His father emigrated to Bolivia, so he spoke Spanish. Then they pulled up stakes and went to New Zealand, where he learned English. For some mysterious reason they again took ship and came to the Cameroons, where he learned German. His family was now in the Brazils, where no doubt they were learning Portuguese; but he himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any language they really know, which language do they think in? They always seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating gra.s.s one sees in the Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless to the end.
They never seem to do anything with their marvelous acc.u.mulation of languages and knowledge of the world. Perhaps I wrong them. They may have spiritual experiences transcending their gifts of speech. I don"t know.
"At that time, too, I was not seeking spiritual communion. The moment I had caught sight of that little lathe I wanted to ask if he could make screws. I wanted screws, bra.s.s ones with flat heads. As soon as I could I explained this to him. Yes, he replied, with his smile of supreme intelligence, he could make screws. How many? And the washer, could he make that? Had he the material? I had the dimensions of that washer burned into my brain and I made a little sketch of it on the bench. But his education hadn"t run to scale drawings, so I drew it in perspective and repeated the figures with many gestures indicating roundness and thickness and other properties. He began to make the screws, copying the one I had made laboriously by hand. I offered to a.s.sist by putting my foot on the treadle, but he said it was not necessary. "Too many cooks spoil the broth," he added, and I felt disconcerted. He didn"t mean anything offensive, you know; he was only proud of his English. So I sat watching him, or walked over to the little refrigerating plant thundering away in the corner, with its shining oil cups and its pipes covered with snow or glazed with ice. And while I stood looking at it, a tall, bony native, a dirty loin-cloth wrapped about his middle, his ribs and back all gashed with tribal scars and scaly with skin trouble, came in and laid his corrugated forehead for a moment against the snow on the pipes. He made an astonishing picture, with his thin arms outstretched in support, as though he were supplicating the white man"s G.o.d. It must have been a confusing phenomenon to his simple mind, that fierce, hot, galloping devil that made ice. And then he gathered a little of the soft snow in his fingers and rubbed it over his face and lips and limped out again. And every little while he or another bony creature very like him would come in and go through the same performance. My friend at the lathe never looked up, not caring to waste any of his precious time, I suppose, but he observed, when I spoke of it, that the "ignorant animals liked the taste of snow." I went back to the bench again and looked at his fret-work. Goodness only knows why he was doing it. It was a meaningless design of dots and wriggles. When I asked him he said he was doing it for a Christmas present for his mother in Pernambuco. He added that she was a Maltese and he had learned Italian from her. I was so oppressed by this amazing knowledge of languages that I couldn"t say a word in any language. It seemed silly for us to spend years sc.r.a.ping together a few French words at school when a foreigner like this could gather a dozen tongues in less time. And yet, when you go about the world you will find such people by the score, and you will find them working for and being governed by Englishmen who know no language but their own and not always a great deal of that. I sat there running my fingers over the fret-work bracket that was designed for the Maltese lady in Pernambuco and trying to focus all these novel and conflicting ideas when I suddenly recollected I was on watch. What if something went wrong? I was new to watch-keeping then and had no subconscious sense of responsibility to keep me on the alert. The sudden recollection was like an electric shock. I jumped up, and saying "I"ll be back in a minute,"
ran down to the ship and so into the engine room, my heart in my mouth.
It was half-past eleven! But there was nothing wrong. I looked at the gauge-gla.s.ses on the boilers, peered into the bilges, and found the fireman at his post in the stokehold. And then I took the old washer and went back to my friend in the fez. Mister George, he called himself. "My name is English," he boomed in his reverberating voice. "George, Mister George." I never knew his other name, if he had one. There you had the invading quality I have spoken of. He seemed to think he was raised above the common herd of foreigners by having an English name. Mister George had made my screws, with one extra in case of need. And he found a piece of bra.s.s that had in it a possible washer. I stood like one in a trance watching him as he fixed it in his little lathe and adjusted the tool-rest and took the first harsh chattering cuts. He was wonderfully efficient. An English mechanic would have jeered at his crazy machine and contemptible bits of tools, and he had an amateurish, ladylike air of flinching from the chips. But he did it much more quickly than I could have done it, I felt humbly. I only wished he would not smile in such a detestable fashion and suddenly a.s.sault me with "How are you now?
All right, eh?" I suppose he was practising his English. And as the finishing touch was put on the washer with a thin, snaky file, he asked suddenly if I had any books.
""Books!" I repeated, surprised; "what kind of books?" I had an idea he could take no interest in anything save grammars and dictionaries.
Somehow, in spite of all his acquirements, one didn"t a.s.sociate that transitory creature with books at all. "Eh?" he said, harshly, "I don"t understand. You understand, I wish for books." "Yes, what sort?" I asked again. "It doesn"t matter," he muttered, calmly, taking the finished article from the lathe and putting it beside the screws, "all books are the same. It doesn"t matter at all. You have books, eh?" I said I had one or two, but I needed them. As a matter of fact, I had only brought one or two engineering works with me and a funny old leather-bound Norie"s Navigation of my father"s. My mother didn"t know whether I"d need it or not. I didn"t. I had plenty to do without going into navigation. It was a queer old thing, though, designed for men of the old school who came aft from the forecastle and had to learn the three Rs. "You need them, eh? Ah, well, that is all right. I read many books, yes. Plenty English books." I saw light all at once. "How much for these?" I asked Mister George. He turned to look at the gauges of the freezing plant and then glanced back at me over his shoulder. "I care nothing for money," he said. "It is the root of evil. But books!
Knowledge is power, yes."
"It was confusing. Here was another victim of words, words he didn"t even clearly understand. He lived apparently in a copy-book world, full of shining maxims and idiotic generalities. For an instant I had a queer feeling of talking to one of those automatons one sees on the stage--figures with gramaphones in their interiors, and who utter strange, disconcerting sounds.
""I will give you a book," I said at last, taking up the things, "and many thanks for these. They said we couldn"t get them made here, but you see they were wrong."
"He didn"t understand a word of this explanation, I believe. He smiled, moved his fez round and round his head as if on a socket, and remarked, "Yes, you all right now, eh?"
""Yes," I said, patiently, "but if you want a book on navigation, mathematics and so on, I can let you have it."
"He nodded, but I don"t think he followed me. So I took my screws and washer, and telling him I would return, hurried back to the ship. You know, I felt triumphant. I had scored, not only over my shipmates, but over him, over Africa, over the whole of the universe that wasn"t Me, myself. I had taken a step forward. It is curious how difficult it is to describe the simplest evolutions of the soul. But I was no longer oppressed by Mister George and his languages. I had accomplished something far beyond the most abstruse philologies--I had got what I wanted.
"And I took him his book, a big obsolete tome bound in hide. He was rapturous, wiping his hands on some waste and opening it upside down.
"Ah, yes, very good, very good!" he said. "I read plenty English books, yes. Thank you, I am very much obliged. Knowledge is power, eh?" I smiled, I suppose, for he leaned toward me eagerly. "No? You think not, eh? Ah, when I had the jaundice, I read many books." He waved his arms to indicate long galleries of libraries. "Plenty, plenty, books. Oh, yes." Once again I had the feeling of listening to an automaton. It seemed so futile talking to such a being. Indeed, that is why I tell you about him. He was my first foreigner. I had always been able to get into some sort of touch with the people I had met. I knew how they lived and loved and thought. But him! He had dressed his mind up in the showy rags and remnants of our speech as a savage will dress his body in incongruous clothing, and of what he was, inside, I could form no conjecture. Between us was an impa.s.sable barrier. I was trying to realize what made me so silent before his volubility, when the bell on the forecastle of the _Corydon_ struck eight times. It was midnight and my watch was over. I said good-bye. "I will visit your ship," said my friend, Mister George. "I have been on plenty ships. Oh, yes, plenty...."
"I ran away at last. I daresay he would have practised his English on me till daybreak if I hadn"t run away. I went down and found things all quiet, and then I came up and roused old Croasan. He was lying on the settee and the gin-bottle stood on the chest-of-drawers, empty. He raised himself on his elbow and looked at me gloomily. I was so glad to get back and talk to a real human being, drunk as he was, that I patted him on the shoulder and told him we would have the dynamos fixed up in the morning. He blinked, and fell back exhausted. I hoisted him up again and he looked round resentfully. "Aren"t you going to turn out?" I asked him. "Come on, Mister." "Is she all right?" he growled. "Yes, of course!" I answered, rashly, and he promptly lay down again and declined to move. I was in a hole, but not downhearted. I couldn"t turn in unless he turned out, you know. I walked along the alleyway with a crazy idea of calling the Chief half formed in my mind. But that seemed to clash with the school-boy code that forbids sneaking. Poor old chap! I thought. And yet I couldn"t keep his watch. I had to get my sleep if I was to be any good next day. I went back and lifted him, snoring, to his feet. "Come on, Mister," I said, "it"s your watch." And I heaved him gently through the doorway and along the alleyway. I was nearly carrying him. I don"t know what my intention really was, whether I had a notion the outside air would brace him up or whether I was going to tumble him down the engine-room ladder. Anyhow, we were staggering about the dark alleyway when we both fell with a crash against the Chief"s door. It was the most effectual thing I could have contrived. There was a growl of "what"s that?" from the Chief and he suddenly sprang out in his pyjamas.
Seeing only me, he shouted, "What you making all this row about?" And then he stumbled over old Croasan. I laughed. I couldn"t help it. All the while I was explaining to that indignant Chief how we came to be there I was uttering cries of joy in my heart over the rich humanity of it all. It was sordid and silly and wrong, but it was real. The Chief lit his lamp and I saw his one bright eye and the empty, blood-red socket glittering in the radiance. To think that I had been mad enough to feel sick of the _Corydon_! I felt as if I had suddenly got home again. And, just as suddenly, old Croasan had vanished. I looked at the Chief in bewilderment. He eyed me solemnly, but without disfavour, and strode along to our cabin. Throwing the empty bottle through the port-hole, he said briefly, "Get yourself turned in, Mister," and went back to his own room. I turned in quick, you can imagine. It had been a great day for me. You may think it strange, but I look back at it as one of the happiest in my life. Work! Work! It is the only thing that keeps us sane when we"re young. All else is only bladder--nonsense. Work and the knowledge of it, and the planning of it. Work, and its failures, its bitter anxieties, its gleams of inspiration, its mellow accomplishment, and then the blessed oblivion!
"Well, four voyages I made in that old packet, each one worse than the last, I believe--four voyages after nuts, and palm-oil, and enormous square logs of mahogany, and cages of snarling leopards and screaming parrots, and tanks of stealthy serpents. I used to wonder who found it worth while to hire us to bring such bizarre and useless things into England. Once one of the twenty-five hundred weight barrels of palm oil slipped from the slings and fell on the deck with a soft crash. It smashed like an egg, of course. Indeed, as the mess burst and splashed all over everybody on the after-deck, it was not unlike an enormous yolk in its brilliant gamboge colour, with the split and dismembered staves lying radially round it like dirty white of egg. And someone muttered that "there was twenty quid gone." The leopards, too, struck me on the homeward trip. Anything less like the traditional wild beast of the jungle you couldn"t imagine. Most of them were mangy and had eye-trouble of some sort. They would stare with a sort of rigid horror and indignation at the dancing blue waves over side for hours, their blank, topaz eye-b.a.l.l.s never moving unless you poked with a stick, when the brute would utter a cry of what seemed to me utter despair and settle down once more to keep the ocean under observation.
"We did not always go to the same place. In fact, I saw very little of Mister George. Railheads advance with our sphere of influence. But I stuck it, and put in my year of service for my license. I was saving money and looking forward to a spell in London. All the other people I knew I let go. I realized I had been all the time an alien in that genteel professional world.
"And so, one day, a year after I"d set foot on the deck of that old ship, I said good-bye to the men I"d sailed with and took the train to Paddington. How strange I felt I can"t explain. As the cab took me down the familiar streets and I saw the old familiar sights, I felt--well, you"ll know when you go back! Something had snapped. I was in it, but not of it. I saw the young men walking in the streets, with their high collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and gloves. What did they know? I"d been like that, just as ignorant, just as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the _Corydon_ and the blue tropic sea!
"I took a room at a hotel and went out to see my mother. I did this as a duty, mind you. If my brother was there still I had no intention of staying long. There was no room for the two of us in the same house. And of course, I had a great desire to know if they were married. Humph!
"I found my mother living alone. He was gone again! She, Gladys, was gone too. They hadn"t been married, not a bit of it. He never had any intention of marrying her. It was very difficult to get the actual story out of my mother. She didn"t know much, and she was reluctant to tell me even that. But I found out at last that she, Gladys, had followed him.
n.o.body knew where. He had given up his agency and started on a tour for some patent tyre company. And she, at the lifting of his finger, had gone after him."
Mr. Carville paused and looked towards a figure coming into view on the path. It was Miss Fraenkel. I looked at my watch. It was twelve o"clock.
"Miss Fraenkel is coming up to lunch," I said to Bill. "Will you join us, Mr. Carville?"
He stood up shaking his head and brushing the tobacco ash from his vest.
"I"ll look in afterwards," he said, "but I told the wife I"d be back to dinner."
"Where was she, all the time, Mr. Carville?" asked Bill.
He laughed and stepped down from the porch.
"I will tell you this afternoon," he said, and reached the sidewalk as Miss Fraenkel crossed the street. He lifted his hat absently and pa.s.sed on, and she, pausing for a moment, gave him one of those swift and searching glances with which her countrywomen are wont to appraise us.
She came on up to us.
"Why didn"t you come sooner?" said Bill, "we"ve been expecting you."
"I"ve been getting signatures," she replied. "Is that him?"
"Yes. He"s coming back after lunch."
"Did you tell him that I want to get his wife to join?"
We were silent. We had forgotten all about Miss Fraenkel"s suffrage. She scanned our faces with an eager look in her hazel eyes. I made an effort.
"We thought," I said, "we thought that perhaps you would be able to explain better than we could how----"
"Why, what have you been talking about, then?" she asked.
"We haven"t been talking," I replied, looking at the little bra.s.s pilgrim on the door. "We"ve been listening."