VII

It should never be forgotten, in a review of the seafaring life, that these casual and irrelevant encounters with the offscourings of hybrid races, though priceless to the philosopher and the artist, are of no human value to the sailor at all. The jaded landsman imagines that we seamen “see the world” and view “mankind from China to Peru.” He romantically conceives us extracting the fine essences from the crude masses of humanity with whom we are thrown in contact in the seething ports of the Orient. He figures us ecstatically savouring the “unchanging East” and beholding “strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships.” It must be confessed that popular fiction confirms these illusions. We who work in ships are supposed to be prototypes of Mr. Kipling’s “Tramp Royal”—a flattering but untrue assumption.

But while an intelligent person can see readily that, to the unimaginative seafarer, this continual procession of detached images will have no positive significance, very few observers realize how such an environment tends also to indurate the soul. Yet so it is. In our rough, homely way, we are fatigued with distinctions, and reduce the Unknown to common denominators. We call Hindoos “coolies,” Chinamen “Chinks,” Americans “Yanks,” Spaniards “Dagoes,” Italians “Spaghettis,” and we let it go at that. We are majestically incurious about them all. There is no British type so narrow, so dogmatic, so ignorant, so impervious to criticism, so parochial in its outlook, as the seafaring man or officer. You would imagine, from our ideas, that we had remained all our days in our home towns. Indeed most of us have. Our real life beats in the little houses in Penarth, Swansea, Seaforth, White Inch, or South Shields. We have very little passion for the bizarre. We become callous to the impact of the stray alien, and feed our narrow hearts with wistful visions of an idealized suburban existence.

Going on at two is quite a different thing from the ghastly affair of the small hours. Each period of the day has its own subtle quality, which no arbitrary rearrangement of our own hours of work and rest can destroy. And two o’clock in the afternoon is a time of disillusion, a time when a man has neither great faith nor profound convictions. The morning is gone, the evening too far away. Even tea-time seems at an immense and tragic distance. It is the slack-water period of the day. And it is the period when a man may perhaps experience, in the space of a flash, a peculiar sensation of being an impostor! It is, I suppose, in such moments that generals, commanders, chief engineers, and the like jump overboard. It is a sensation extraordinarily vivid and brief. No external evidence is of any avail to neutralize its dire and dreadful omniscience. No personal written record, no esteem of lifelong friends, no permanent and visible accomplishment can shield the sensitive human soul, thus suddenly stripped bare by some devilish cantrip of its own mechanism. One feels a hollow sham.

And the ship, at this hour, is strangely deserted. Those who have work are gone to it, those who are off duty are resting after a hot lunch. The day’s ration of meat is gone; the soldiers are on an upper deck, out of sight. Thomas, stretched to an incredible length on the deck steam-guard, snoozes in gross comfort. Ibrahim-el-Din, an Arab coal-passer, is smoking a meditative cigarette by the after-rail. The faded Irishman is perambulating in his stiff way round the machine, and I take charge for another six hours. A Greek sailor, no doubt a Venizelist, is painting a bulkhead in an amateur fashion. As I look through one of the after-window scuttles I observe our agnostic Second Officer drift past. He is probably going to resume his erotic novel, a species of fiction for which he has a strange passion.

For an hour or so I look out of my machine-room window upon an untidy after-deck, and reflect upon the vicissitudes of War. Visible through the crystalline atmosphere, Salonika, floored with a jade-green sea and domed with dappled azure, resembles the painted curtain of some titanic theatre. It is in fact one of those monstrous “theatres of war” which are now giving a continuous performance to the whole world. But for us on transports that painted curtain is never lifted. We see nothing of the performance. We are mere stage carpenters, or caterers, or perhaps only stray freight wagons which bring some homely necessary material to the grand display.

Such are my thoughts, more or less, when I catch sight suddenly of my friend Tubby, the fat marine, standing on the gun-platform and excitedly waving his arms toward the Vardar Marshes. I run out on deck. Tubby comes hurrying along, shouting in the hoarse voice that goes with immense girth and a short neck:

“See ’im, sir? A Tawb! A Tawb!”

And so it is a Taube. After a momentary search of the upper reaches of the air, I spot him, a far-distant dot. And as we gather in a tense little knot on the after-deck, straining our eyes, clawing tentatively for a peep through the binoculars, the enemy monoplane sails serenely toward us, and the guns begin to go. From the men-of-war near by, from invisible batteries concealed ashore, the sharp cracks echo, and we watch the oncoming dot ten thousand feet above the sea. Tubby says ten thousand feet, and although I don’t believe he knows anything about it, he has been in the Navy and possesses the prestige of the Senior Service. He certainly knows more about it than we do.

And observe how greedily we make the most of this little bit of war which has come to us. Now he is right over us, sailing across a broad shield of speckless blue, and we see the small white plumes of shrapnel suddenly appear, above, below, and around him. He sails on. He must be doing seventy miles an hour. Somebody doubts this. We ignore him, and push the speed up to eighty miles. Say eighty miles an hour. Golly! That was a close one. A white plume appears right in front of him. He sails on. Evidently he has no bombs. Tubby says: “Tawbs don’t carry no bombs.” What a mine of information he is! Again a hit, a palpable hit. But he sails on. There is something sublime about this. Of course he is a German and therefore damnable. But—but—well, he is damnably adventurous. I wonder what he is doing. Has he a sweetheart, a German Mädchen? I am supposed to believe she would not have the wit to love him for this daredevil eagle-swoop over Salonika. I don’t think, however, that patriotism compels me to hate that air-man up there. Crack-crack! go the guns. He sails on. He is, so far, supreme. A dim sporting instinct, which used to have free rein at school, shoots through my mind and I discover in myself no passionate desire to see him hit. He himself seems to have no anxieties whatever. I recall a line from Shelley:

Now he is over Ben Lomond and is turning toward Monastir, whence we suppose he has come. Other batteries behind the town welcome him and the Navy resigns itself, for once, to frustration. Crack after crack, plume after plume. Now he is behind a cloud, and our attention is taken up for a moment by the sight of our own machines manœuvring for position in the offing. And the next time we see him he is coming down. Tubby says so. Personally, I imagined him to be going up; but I never contradict a navy man. Somebody else says he is hit. Our lieutenant, on the upper deck with the commander, looking through his prismatic glasses, says it looks like it. I glance at our group, all eyes raised to the sky, mouths open, emblems of receptive vacuity.

Reluctantly we abandon our precious “Tawb” to the inland ranges and return to the mundane life once more. Tubby walks to and fro, a short man of enormous size, discoursing of “Tawbs.” I call him my mythological monster, for he has served in the “’Ercles,” the “’Ecuba,” the “You roper,” the Endymion and the “Amfi-trite.” When we go to sea, Tubby stands or sits by his gun and keeps a lookout for submarines. He is one of Hardy’s Wessex yokels. When the war came, he was malting at Malmesbury, and doing a small delivery-wagon business for a local hardware store. He looks it. He could pose for John Bull, a beef-eating, ale-drinking, Saxon John Bull. Now he is also an expert on “Tawbs.” What tales he will tell by the malt-house fires in the winters to come! Tales, perhaps, of “Tawbs!”

And so, in idle talk and modest vigilance, the day wears on, until the sun is setting in turbulent reds and purples beyond the Vardar, and the peak of Olympos, showing for a brief moment above the billows of vapour, is flushed an exquisite pale rose colour. Lights begin to twinkle on the shore. Those on day work begin to appear after their wash, loafing about until dinner, smoking cigarettes, arguing after the foolish, dogmatic way of sailors, getting heated over nothing, condemning a nation in a thoughtless phrase. Some are writing home, for a mail goes soon. Some come into the machine-room for a drink of water, or for a chat.

The Fourth Engineer, who had viewed the aeroplane dressed in blue serge trousers and an unbuttoned pajama jacket, now appears in his uniform, still a little drowsy after his day’s sleep, but smiling in his pleasant boyish way. Our conversation is not intellectual. We really have not much to say. It would not bear writing down. Nor would a comic paper take our jokes. Nevertheless, we talk and laugh and pass the time. For myself, I talk to everybody: I talk to the nigger firemen and the Chinese cook, to the dog and the cat, to the canary in my room and the parrot who blasphemes so bitterly on the fore-deck.

So I keep in practice. For some day we shall have Peace, and we shall go home, over the well-remembered road to Malta and Gib, and over the mountainous western-ocean swell that is for ever charging across the Bay. Some day this will happen, and we shall speak the Tuskar once again, tie up in the old dock, and step ashore. And we shall take our way, some of us, through the quiet countryside, where friends await us, friends who will bid us tarry awhile and tell them our tales of foreign parts, as mariners have done and always will do, while ships come home from sea.

THE END

THIS VOLUME WAS PRINTED BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, LONG ISLAND, N. Y. THE PRINTING WAS COMPLETED IN THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER MCMXX