Nothing reveals character, the intellectual calibre of the instrumental player, so much as the type of composition that makes up his private repertoire. For in that he only plays the compositions which appeal to him. Some are devoid of personality and only perform the stock pieces that are fashionable. Others revel in melody that tells of the light side of life, its gaiety, or the pathos of dramatic existence on the stage, the tragedian’s mock grief before the footlights ere the curtain falls. Others find their musical heaven vaguely expressed by playing those pieces that seem to murmur, as a sea-shell murmurs of the ocean, that indefinable note of poetry, the voice of the unknown, the intense inner life of our existence. My friend was one of the latter kind. He gave me many useful hints which I profited by, (as I often did in my travels), and so received a free musical education, the only music lessons I ever really had.
But for the throb of the engines and thrashing screw, the vessel’s motion, and the stewards’ sea-legs aslant to the deck’s list as they walk the saloons and cabin alley-ways, you could half think you were in some subterannean hotel. Travel on a liner, and the wild poetry of the sailing ships swerving to the swell of travelling seas, the climbing sailors aloft singing their chanteys among the storm-beaten sails, the flying clouds overhead that race the moon, all seem to be something that you dreamed of, or lived through ages ago.
Sea-boots and oilskins seem mythical things that faintly recall your yellow-backed old buccaneer novels, or the days when Drake sailed down the seas.
Officers on the P. & O. liners speak with university polish. “Ay, ay”, “Hold hard!”, “Look out, you son of a sea-cook!”, “Holy Moses!”, “Up she comes”, “All together!”, “Let go!”, “Haul the mainsail up!”. This is all changed now to “Make haste, Mr Pye-Smith” and “Yes, sir, I beg your pardon. What a draught!”. Or a bell tinkles down in the engine-room, and the mammoth liner, like a mighty iron beast, slows obediently to half-speed, stops, or slashes her tail and goes full speed astern, without one song or oath.
The stormy night and head-wind, the huddled group of sailors in oilskins singing their wild chantey, O, O, for Rio Grande, on deck in the windy dark as they bend together and pull while the vast monotone of the ocean becomes the orchestral accompaniment to voices from strong, open, bearded mouths, and your world of stars suddenly veers as the dark canvas sails and yards swerve round; the chief mate shouting, “What the blazing hell—— Ay, there!” as on the wind comes faintly back, “Ay, ay, sir, all clear!”: this smacks more of the sea. Why, on a sailing ship, the very sea-cook at the galley door, amidships, clutching his pans, gazing across the wild, lonely waters, where the leaping, white-bearded waves seem like old misers’ hands plucking at the sunset’s gold, is sheer downright poetry compared with the electric-lighted saloon crowded with munching, over-fed men and women with moving mouths and pince-nez on their respectable noses.
The sailing ship has its rough, uncomfortable side, for well I remember my last trip from ’Frisco round the Horn, when I stood on deck at night, with deadly cramp gripping my legs, my eyebrows frozen together, my nose pinched and blue with cold, the decks awash and our sea-chests afloat in the fo’c’sle and deck-house. I recollect the cook holding on to his pots and pans and swearing as only an old-time boatswain, and that cook, could swear as we begged for a pannikin of hot coffee: stuff that tasted like heaven-sent life-blood to our frozen lips as we two boys drank it. The weather-beaten boatswain in his oilskins and sea-boots went by us in the dark, as great seas came over, singing a song to himself as though he was soliloquising in some quiet bar off the Mile End Road instead of experiencing the wildest weather I have ever seen, or ever want to see.
How I admired those old seafarers! “Fetch that, matey,” they’d say, and off I’d rush, eager to please and obey the orders of Horatio Nelson and Sir Francis Drake, for such men they seemed to me.
In the fo’c’sle at night they’d say: “Get that fiddle out and play to us.” A thrill of boyish pride would go through me to notice their attention and respect as I played my best. Presently they would join in as I played the chanteys they had taught me, Sailing down to Rio or Blow the Man Down. Without removing their pipes or chewing quids, their cracked, hoarse-throated voices would join in.
Deep bass voices two or three had, and as they sat round me on their old sea-chests, and I scraped away to the tuneless, yelling, bearded mouths beneath the dim light of the fo’c’sle oil lamp, I drank in the last breath of the winds of sea romance. I see them now as I dream. There they sit on their sea-chests, oilskins and sea-boots on, with curios from other lands fastened over their bunks around them, as they open their big bearded mouths and sing. How ghost-like their eyes look by the light of the dim lamp, as the hazy tobacco smoke curls thickly to the low roof! Then their hollow voices fade and the visionary “Old Hands” vanish as the last breath of wind blows them like cobweb-fine things through the fo’c’sle door, along the moonlit deck, away seaward for ever as I dream.
How I recall these lonely nights and the sailors moving across the deck in the dark, or climbing aloft like shadows back to the sky. I used to stand alone and gaze over the ship’s side and suddenly feel the intensity of living, as my thoughts half clung hopefully to the stars, like lost, migrating swallows that cling to the rigging of ships far out at sea; and the mighty, moving water all around me seemed to break with its monotone against eternity. I remember lying in my bunk, and by the oil lamp’s light watching the ship’s cockroaches go filing across the photographs of my parents and relatives which I had tacked on my bunk side to remind me of home, though I required no such reminder. Those silent faces intensified the difference between reality and my boyhood’s dream; as a cold breath out of the grave of my beloved, who slept in the seas outside, blew through the door across my face as I dreamed of her—my beautiful dead romance!