Part 3

The first thing to do is to take a rickshaw. It is fine, but fortunately cloudy; the sun is hidden. In spite of this, it is hot, very hot. The streets are made of red sand, the houses of Venetian red stone. You pass palm trees, and trees which look like acacias, only they have mingled with the intense green of their foliage a quantity of scarlet flowers. I go scudding along the street to the Galleface Hotel. You pass babus in white European clothes, and frail black Cingalese dressed in diaphanous silks, and Anglo-Indians in pith helmets. The world of Kipling is revealed to one in a trice. A long drive along the sea leads to the hotel, This is the fashionable esplanade of Ceylon. Carriages pass up and down full of wealthy natives. The sea throws up a huge long wash of booming surf. The hotel is a large white building, like the section of an exhibition. The bedrooms are high wooden cubicles. As soon as you arrive a tailor springs from somewhere and asks you if you want any clothes--thin clothes--made in the night. I don’t think I do. As soon as I have got a room and disposed of my luggage, I take a rickshaw and drive through the native part of the town. It becomes more and more like Kipling. You pass little bullocks, and natives bathing and washing clothes in a pool; shops full of fruit; natives squatting, natives talking, natives smoking. You hear all manner of cries, and you smell the smell of the East.

I wander about until it is dark and then come back to dinner. The tailor appears again. I don’t want any clothes: but it is no use, one has to order them, so importunate is he. He measures me and promises to have the complete suit ready by the next morning at 6.30.

It is when you are dressed for dinner and you come down into the large high dining-room, full of electric fans, that you realize that it is impossible to be cool. It is an absorbing, annihilating damp heat that saps your very being.

The first thing to do is to eat a mango. Will it be as good as you are told it is? Yes, it is better. At first you think it is just an ordinary apricot, and then you think it is a banana; no, fresher; a peach, a strawberry, and then a delicious, sharp, fresh, aromatic after-taste comes, slightly tinged with turpentine, but not bitter. Then you get all the tastes at once, and you know that the mango is like nothing else but its own incomparable self.

It has all these different tastes at once, simultaneously. In this it resembles the beatific vision as told of by St. Thomas Aquinas. The point of the beatific vision, says St. Thomas, is _its infinite variety_. So that those who enjoy it have at the same time the feeling that they are looking at a perfect landscape, hearing the sweetest music, bathing in a cold stream on a hot day, reaching the top of a mountain, galloping on grass on a horse that isn’t running away, floating over tree-tops in a balloon, reading very good verse, eating toasted cheese, drinking a really good cocktail--and any other nice thing you can think of, _all at once_. The point, therefore, of the taste of the mango is its infinite variety. It was probably mangoes which grew in Eden on the Tree of Knowledge, only I expect they had a different kind of skin then, and were without that cumbersome and obstinate kernel, which makes them so very difficult to eat.

There are a good many people at dinner--Englishmen and Englishwomen. Their faces are washed absolutely chalk-white by the heat, as if every drop of blood had been drained from them. That is what comes from living in such a climate. One thinks of Kipling once more. The room seems to be full of his characters. There is Mrs. Hawksbee; I recognised her at once. There is Otis Yeere and Pluffles, and Churton and Reggie Burke, and Pack, and I believe that conjuror in the verandah is Strickland in disguise. He comes nearer and does the mango trick, and then begins to charm a snake; but we all refuse to see the snake charmed, charm he never so wisely, having a horror of snakes.

It gets hotter and hotter; one feels one’s bones melting.

The next morning punctually at 6.30 the tailor arrives with the suit of clothes finished, as he promised, and by eight we have to be on board the steamer.

To-day the sun is shining with all his might, and one realizes that if one had stayed a few hours longer in this beautiful island, it would have entailed either buying a pith helmet or getting a sunstroke.

The harbour is a lovely sight in the early morning. Church parties from a British man-of-war are on their way to church. The sea is like an emerald to-day. The little narrow native boats, full of gorgeous-coloured fruits, are slipping about round the liner. I am sorry to leave Ceylon.

_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._)

[Illustration: 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.

_Fremantle: July_

Fremantle is the least attractive of ports. You are not meant to stay there. You are meant to go on to Perth. Nevertheless, it was my first sight of an Australian city. It struck me as being in some ways rather like a Russian provincial town; this is not odd, because Russia is a country of colonists. What differentiates a Russian city from an Australian--and indeed from any other city--is the churches with their gilded spires and blue cupolas and their Byzantine shape.

At Fremantle the firemen went on shore--against orders. They drank to their hearts’ content, and came back in a state of truculent inebriation, as did many of the steerage passengers. We left Fremantle in the evening. There was a strong wind blowing. Two little tugs were doing their best to pull us out of the narrow harbour. They could scarcely pull their own weight; and then one of the hawsers broke. We drifted to port where alongside of the wharf some cargo steamers lay at anchor.

“Hullo!” said somebody; “we shall only just do it.”

The passengers became interested.

Then it became evident that we weren’t going just to do it; and we went--_crunch! crunch!_--into the steamers alongside the wharf, carrying away the wooden gear they had to put cattle in.

Then began a slow battle of the tugs against the wind; whenever we seemed to be moving to starboard, the wind brought us back again to the wharf. It looked at one moment as if we were going to be there all night. Two of the firemen were fighting forward. Then the wind dropped a little, our own engines began to work, and we steamed safely out of the harbour.

We did hardly any damage to the ship against which we crunched, except carrying away that wooden gear; but the moment any little incident of that kind happens in a ship, it makes you realize instantly how disagreeable a real accident would be. These large ships look so helpless under such circumstances: and after all, when accidents happen, they happen, whether a ship is in harbour or in midocean, whether she is large or small: witness the Royal George and the Titanic.

_Adelaide: July_

We reached Adelaide on a Saturday night, and on Sunday morning I went on shore and saw for the first time the dark-brown colouring, the scrub, and the gum-trees of Australia. It was supposed to be winter; but it was what we call in England early spring, because the almond trees were in full bloom. The atmosphere was dazzingly clear but cold. The whole colour and nature of the place, with its dark evergreens, brown earth, luxuriant winter vegetation, and its blue and lilac hills in the distance, and its limpid sky, reminded me of the south of France in winter; but Australia has a peculiar atmosphere of its own which, if properly painted, ought to make the fortune of a painter. There are some very clever Australian painters.

Adelaide is called the “Garden City” of Australia. It deserves the name, for it looks like a garden even in winter. The hotels are good, the streets spacious and wide boulevards, and there is the most beautifully situated steeplechase course I have ever seen. It being Sunday, everything was shut: this made occupation in the city less interesting than it might have been, and it was too cold to motor into the hills.

At Adelaide fourteen firemen left the ship forever. The trouble about firemen on the mail steamers that go to Australia is that they are white men. They cannot stand the heat of the tropics and they do not earn a living wage.

“Who,” as the chief engineer said to me, “would not be a fireman in the Red Sea in July, when the temperature is 120 in the shade? And who would not be a man who has to look after firemen?”

One cannot travel on a big liner without being amazed, or rather aghast, at the conditions under which the crew and the stewards live in the merchant service, and the terms under which the officers serve, so that one wonders how it happens that any one goes to sea; and one is inclined almost to agree with Dr. Johnson’s opinions on the subject.

“A ship,” he said, “is worse than a gaol. There is in a gaol better air, better company, better conveniences of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger. When men come to like a sea-life they are not fit to live on land.”

“Then,” said Boswell, “it would be cruel in a father to breed his son to the sea.”

“It would be cruel,” said Johnson, “in a father who thinks as I do. Men go to sea before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose another profession; as, indeed, is generally the case with men when they have once engaged in any particular way of life.”

But what is wrong with the officer’s life in the merchant service? it will be asked.

The answer is that he is miserably underpaid. In some cases he gets less than an able seaman gets in Australia. He has to buy linen, his uniform, many pairs of whites. His work is one of great responsibility. A captain when he has worked for twenty years gets no pension. Talk with any officer in the merchant service and his advice to any one who thinks of going to sea is, “Don’t.”

As to the men, a sailor’s life in a liner is about the same as a sailor’s life anywhere, but the accommodation of the stewards is miserable. The “glory-hole” where they sleep crowded together has an almost incredible insufficiency of space and air. And a first-class steward has to keep himself neat and clean: besides which he is extremely hard-worked.

Talking of the recent dock strike in London with one of the stewards, he told me they didn’t want to come out in sympathy with the strikers, because they got absolutely nothing by it. They were most of them made to come out on strike, with no prospect of any betterment in matters which concerned them.

I don’t believe the stewards’ accommodation in a ship is a bit better than it was forty years ago.

_Melbourne: July_

I practically only had a glimpse of Melbourne; a drive through the city, a visit to a newspaper office and to some of the shops, a walk through the park in the twilight, a dinner with a friend, and a drive in a taxi back to the harbour.

I was struck by the mildness of the climate; but I was told that up till then the weather had been very cold. I was struck here again by the softness and peculiar luminous quality of the atmosphere; by the size of the city, which seemed quite enormous; a handsome city, with regular streets, tall buildings, and a multitude of cars.

_Sydney: August 2_

We entered the bay in the dawn--or rather before the dawn; it was very misty; we moved in a vague twilight of blue shadows. I got up to see the bay, but you could see nothing distinctly, nothing but mist and blue shadows; the whole thing very unearthly and beautiful. I went back to my bunk, intending to get up again in half an hour’s time, when it was lighter. But I went to sleep, and when I woke up again we were right against the wharf.

You could hear the bugles from a British man-of-war, the Drake. It was a brilliant, warm, delicious day.

I spent a whole day in the city of Sydney, exploring the stores, riding about aimlessly in the cars. I had luncheon at the Australian Hotel. The waiters were dressed as stewards, and, indeed, many of them are ex-stewards. I thought the food excellent. I visited two excellent bookstores.

[Illustration: IN SYDNEY I FOUND THE MEN IN THE BOOKSTORES ABNORMALLY INTELLIGENT]