Tilbury: June 21
There is a dock-strike going on: but the leaders say this has been defeated; the newspapers say it is over. I reach Tilbury Docks by noon of Friday, June 21. There, evidences of a strike are manifest in the shape of a local body of special police. The porter who wheels my luggage points them out and alludes to them in vivid and disrespectful terms. He says they are a pack of—you know the rest.
I am sailing in one of the Orient ships: one of the big ones, twelve thousand tons or so.
As soon as I get on board the lift-boy assures me that there are only eight old hands on board—all the rest have struck.
“But who are the new hands?” I ask. “Casual amateurs?”
“Oh! just any one we would get,” he says.
It turns out that five hundred members of the police have been on board the ship for a week. Coaling has been carried out with the utmost difficulty. Most of the new stewards have never been to sea. Nobody knows where anything is. The steward in the smoking-room doesn’t know where the materials for liquid refreshment are concealed.
“But will they be found before the end of the voyage?” I hear a man inquire in some trepidation.
The steward says they will. There is a sigh of relief, and soon we are steaming down the Thames. I shall be in the ship till we reach Australia. My ticket is for New Zealand.
There is a sense of delicious independence and freedom from the fretting ties of everyday life when one starts on a long journey in a big liner. And, watching the lights of Brighton flashing in the night, I murmur to myself the words of the hymn:—
Somebody ought one day to write the epic of Brighton, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett has written the epic of the Five Towns. Arnold Bennett has given us pictures of Brighton, it is true; and as for Sussex, no county has such a crowd of enthusiastic poets to sing its praise. But when I hear the word Sussex spoken, the picture it evokes for me has nothing to do with any of that lyrical enthusiasm.
THE STEWARDS
I see a third-class railway carriage on a Monday morning full of bluejackets. They are travelling to London from Portsmouth. We have just left Horsham. One of them is looking out of the window; he observes a man sitting on a stile. “Nice easy job that bloke’s got,” the sailor observes, “watching the tortoises flash by.”
All this is suggested by the sight of Brighton where, at this very moment, while I am setting out to wander with the antipodes (the expression is Shakespeare’s), I know that two friends of mine are dining in that most comfortable of inns, the Royal York Hotel. I wish I were there....
While thus meditating on absent friends, somebody asks me if I play bridge. I say Yes. “Why did you say Yes?” I say to myself, groaning inwardly as I sit down to play. “You know you can’t play properly and that you’ll spoil the game.”
Sure enough I revoke in the first game. However, in my prophetic soul the comforting thought arises that I shan’t be asked to play again.
The next morning by breakfast time we have almost reached Plymouth. I know the coast we are passing between Bolt Head and Wembury Point, having been brought up in that little corner of land. I played on those beaches as a child, picnicked on those cliffs, played at robbers and smugglers in those caves. It is like a piece of a dream to see these familiar, these intimate rocks and cliffs, after so many years.
The sea has that peculiar glitter as of a million golden scales, and the sky has something peculiar in the quality of its azure, something luminous, hazy, and radiant which seems to me to belong to the seas of South Devon, and to the seas of South Devon alone.
Is this really so? Does it, I wonder, strike other people in the same way? Or is the impression I receive due to the unfading spell and the old glamour of childhood.
There is a ruined church nestling in the rocks right down by the waves; there are the paths, and the pools, which were the playground of hundreds of games, and the battlefields of mimic warfare, and the temples of the long thoughts of boyhood.
There are the spots which to childhood’s eye seemed one’s very own, a sacred and permanent possession, part and parcel of that larger entity of home which was then the centre of one’s universe, and seemed to be indestructible and everlasting.
And now! Thirty years after, I have no more to do with it than any of my fellow passengers in this ship. The place is there, the place is the same, but I am divorced from it. There it is, in sight and almost within reach, but I no longer belong to it. It is far away, a part of the past, a part of the irrevocable, a fugitive facet in a kaleidoscope of memories and dreams.
******
If the world of romance be divided into provinces, each having its capital, Plymouth is certainly the capital of that region in the romantic world of England which concerns the sea. And the last twenty years, which have made such fearful havoc among so much which was characteristically English, have spared Plymouth. Plymouth still smiles over the Sound—between the luxuriant wooded hills of Mount Edgecombe and the forts of Statton Heights, crowned in the distance by the blue rim of Dartmoor. Little cutters, with their spotless sails, are racing in the Sound; two torpedo destroyers are dressed because it is Coronation Day; a German liner has arrived from New York. Everything is just the same as it used to be thirty years ago.
Just before sunset a real Devonshire shower comes on, veiling the hills in a gray mist, but the sun, only half hidden, silvers the waters. Then the rain drifts away, and the sun sets in a watery glory of gold and silver, and as the twilight deepens, threatening and cloudy, all the lights begin to twinkle on the Hoe.
There are always a lot of lights in Plymouth, but there are more than usual to-night, because the city is illuminated. We steam past the breakwater. The Eddystone Light appears and vanishes intermittently far ahead, and behind us Plymouth is twinkling and gleaming and flashing.
These lines of Newbolt’s, from his poem, “Drake’s Drum,” ring in my memory and seem now and to-night intolerably appropriate. It begins to drizzle once more, and I feel the well-known smell of the West Country rain all about me, and the years slip by, and the past rises from its tomb, sharp and vivid as the present.... I see it all so plainly as I saw it long ago.
All at once forward in the steerage, a party of Welsh emigrants start singing a wailing Celtic chorus, piercingly melancholy, alien and strange, and this chases away the dream, and reminds me that I am on a liner bound for Australia, and that it’s raining, and I determine to seek the smoking-room.