From Colombo to Fremantle: July
The Indian Ocean once more. The weather now is pleasant, but it is still very hot. We are in the doldrums. The word “doldrums” conjures up visions of adventure, of pirates, of Spanish galleons, of frigates fighting privateers, and of Marryat’s characters.
I don’t believe a man who is not a sailor can write a really good book about the sea. The knowledge involved is so intimate, and requires years of soaking in. There are, of course, exceptions. Shakespeare has led some people to believe that, besides being a lawyer, a Lord Chancellor, and a woman, he was also a sailor. Rudyard Kipling, I should say, could deceive the elect, and surely “Captains Courageous” is one of the very best sea-stories ever written. “Treasure Island” is an adventure book, and a masterpiece, but then it really deals very little with the sea. Turn to Marryat: what a difference there is between him and the amateur sea-writer! You feel that the sea is his whole life; he lays bare the very pulse of the machine of sea-life. I wish some of the great novelists had spent their early years on a training-ship. I wonder what would have been the result had this been the fate of George Meredith, for instance. I think it would have made his style more lucid; but perhaps not. Can you imagine a ship of whom the skipper was George Meredith, the first mate Henry James, the second mate Thomas Hardy, the purser Bernard Shaw, the ship’s cook G. K. Chesterton, and the steward Max Beerbohm? I can imagine the following conversation taking place:—
Scene: Deck of a Ship in the Indian Ocean
Captain Meredith (to First Mate James): I think we had better fiddle harmonics on the strings of the mainsail.
First Mate James: I mentioned to you, sir, the last time that we somewhat infelicitously met, that I intended to appeal, with a dozen differential precautions, to another and probably more closely qualified meteorologic authority on the subject of the Second Mate’s whimsical, wanton, perhaps fortunate but so far unconfirmed and unqualified change of course, and indeed, if I may venture without presumption, and at the risk of incurring the suspicion of undue parenthesis, and of an almost tremulous desire to say everything, I would, and indeed I had done so already, but for a fugitive shade of displeasure on your eyebrows, I would adumbrate the shadow of a surmise, that, faced as we are—
Captain Meredith (impatiently): The young who fear to enter the forest of advice do so at the cost of losing their way in the lane that knows no ending.
(Enter Ship’s Cook Chesterton)
Cook Chesterton: The Purser complains of the pea-soup. He says it is not fit for a dog. It is true. It is not fit for a dog, but the whole soul and glory of this fast and frantic life is to eat and to enjoy food that a dog rejects. He doesn’t see that it is the dog who is wrong.
Purser Shaw: I never said that the dog was wrong in his choice of food. I have no objection to eating dog biscuit; what I do object to is eating dog soup.... What I do object to is eating a soup which professes to be made of vegetables and in reality is made of dog. I see no moral objection to cannibalism. I have no moral objection to eating shoulder of boatswain; but I do object to the old-fashioned superstition of believing that soup is still made of fresh peas when it isn’t. That soup was made of old flesh. If you don’t believe me, ask the steward. Here, Steward.
(Enter Steward Beerbohm)
Captain Meredith: Our battle is ever between undeserved rewards and stolen fruits. What say you, Steward?
Steward Beerbohm: Let us forget these bickerings and turn ourselves lightly to the thought of home, of Piccadilly, of the artificial haunts and the gaudy hostels, where indifferent cooks and careless waiters proffer inartistically prepared mets to the blasé, the faded and the jaded and the new rich, who partake of it with feigned satisfaction, and pay for it with a faint but exquisite pleasure in knowing that the bill is more than they can afford.
Purser Shaw: Your Piccadilly is here and now. I venture to submit that the Steward is an incurable romantic. Now romance in food is preposterous.
Cook Chesterton: There is nothing so romantic as food, nothing so poetic as roast beef, nothing so fantastic as plum-pudding, nothing so lyrical as eggs and bacon, nothing in cant modern sense so artistic as a mutton chop, nothing so dreamy as toasted cheese.
Purser Shaw: Exactly. You are still infected with the poison of your nurseries and the sentiment of Christmas. I have exploded Christmas. I have annihilated the nursery.
Steward Beerbohm: I think Christmas very quaint and charming, and a nursery, conducted according to the principles of the early years of Victoria the First, a place of dainty manners and delicate precepts and wistful rhymes. I would not forget them for anything.
First Mate James: The word nursery, now you speak it, throws a curious thrill through the lining, so to speak, of the psychological situation. We might, in fact, in such a case even follow the steward into another and no less refined a speculation, the question of whether the nursery, the sanest seat of moral ethics, might not, after all, be the high final if somewhat narrow circle of all ultimate—that is to say—
Captain Meredith: To have the sense of the eternal in the nursery is nothing. To have had it is the beginning of wisdom. But let us rather put off discussion of the theme, until round the mahogany we can broach a bottle of the Old Widow, nay rather, Hermitage—ah! that was a great wine—
Steward Beerbohm: The suggestion of asceticism in the name, blent with the sensuality of the thing, heightens its charm. Who would not be a hermit, and dwell in one of those rococo palacules built for weary monarchs in an age of scepticism, flute-playing, and minuets?
(Enter Second Mate Hardy)
Second Mate Hardy: The spirit of the years is looking down upon our ship with an ironical smile. O Wessex, Wessex! Would that I could see Stonehenge and a large red moon rising over the plain.
Captain Meredith: I am glad to be away from the island of chills and the informes hiemes.
Purser Shaw: Sir, with all due respect, I cannot allow this digression to continue. No Englishman can talk consecutively for more than two minutes on the same subject.
Cook Chesterton: That is why the Irish have conquered England.
Captain Meredith: Observe the Southern Cross, if indeed that be the Southern Cross, hanging like a jeweled hilt in the spheral blue—
Steward Beerbohm: Pretty little trinket! Is it a brooch or an aigrette? Methinks a device of Cartier—
Captain Meredith: Those stars are pebbles on the silvery wheel-course of the chariot of the moon.
Second Mate Hardy: Pitiless, inflexible stars, thousands and thousands of millions of miles away.
Purser Shaw: Don’t you believe it. That’s one of the lies men of science tell us.
Cook Chesterton: It doesn’t matter if the stars are twenty miles off, or twenty millions of miles off. The point about the stars is that they are stars.
(Enter an Ordinary Seaman)
Ordinary Seaman: Please, sir, the ship is sinking.
Second Mate Hardy: I knew it! O Irony!
Purser Shaw: Then we shall have to eat roast boatswain after all.
First Mate James: If I might hazard a suggestion, without of course trying to grasp any impertinent or rather importunate shadow of a scheme—
Ordinary Seaman: The cabin boy has escaped in the galley.
Captain Meredith: O brave!
Steward Beerbohm: Ouf!
(The ship sinks with all hands.)
******
THERE IS NOTHING SO ROMANTIC AS FOOD
To-night (when is it? I have lost count of time, but I know it is still July) one of the officers told me a yarn. It was his own ghost story, and it was ultimately spoiled for him, just as happened in the case of Kipling, when he heard phantom billiard players playing all night and found out the next day that the noise was caused by a rat and a loose window-sash. This is the story; but I shall spoil it in the telling because to tell a sea-yarn you must be a sailor.
The ship was sailing somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope. It was dirty weather and the sailor who was on watch came and reported to the officer that there was a ghost in the sea, for’ard.
The officer sent him away, but he returned almost immediately and reported that the ghost was still there.
The officer said rude things, and added that he had better go aloft and watch the ghost from there. Another man was sent to replace the craven, and all was calm for a while, when suddenly this second sailor came back, pale with fear, and said that a woman was rising through the mist from the sea. Some one else was sent to replace this man, and the ghost had such an effect upon him that he fell down and broke his leg. Then the captain came on deck and the officer reported the state of affairs to him. He went forward and came back saying, “It is a ghost.” Then, being a religious man, he fetched a Bible and tried to exorcise the ghost by reading the Scripture.
While this was going on, the officer who told me the story went forward, and there, as plain as a pikestaff, in the murky mist, he saw a white woman slowly rise in the swell and then disappear. Paralysed with horror, he stood looking at the sea, and the woman rose once more; and then, his fear left him, and he realized that it was the figurehead of the ship which had got knocked off.
But I have spoiled that story. I have merely told the bare facts; what you want is the whole thing; the dialogue, the details; the technical terms.
From Colombo to Fremantle is probably the most monotonous part of the voyage. The only object of interest is the albatross, but as nobody shot one, with a crossbow, no untoward events happened.