I was then about twenty-two years of age and had seen much of the world. Very often I would lie awake for hours thinking of things that should have happened, considering the great faith I had in them.
I sometimes thought of going back to England and settling down as a violinist, but then the thought of my country’s terrible decorum quashed my longing. I had been a good deal in Queensland and had several good friends there; sad memories, too, of a bush girl’s grave by the swamp oak gullies. Sometimes I longed for Australian bush scenes as a lad longs for his own country. I had been to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane several times since I first saw them, but things even in one short absence were rapidly changing. As the ships came in crammed with emigrants from all parts of the world the surrounding bush-land of the seaboard cities and towns was cut down and up went thousands of wooden houses. And so old spots disappeared with the bush-land which the Australian hates. If you say to a Colonial “I have been across hundreds of miles of your bush-land with my swag, camping out,” he hangs his head with shame, blushes and says: “I know, I know; but we hope soon to cut it all down. I suppose you’ve seen our towns?”
There is no doubt about it, the majority of Australians born are ashamed of the wild bush-lands, and love the streets and spires and walls of bricks and mortar. Up country it’s all emigrant Englishmen, and a few Australians who were born there and so could not help themselves. As for me, I loved the bush and my memories of the bush, and when I went to the old spots and saw wooden homesteads standing on the slopes where I camped by my bush fire I felt sad about it, even world-weary and old as I looked across the few years and saw the hollows and far-off forest trees waving in the moonlight dusk for miles and miles along the shores of my memory.
So I began to think of Australia again as I lay in bed at the Grand Hotel, Yokohama, and dreamt of my old days there. I could not go back to Tokio, at least anywhere near the mission folk, for I had told them I was going straight back to England. I had really intended doing so, but I thought I could get a berth on a ship and save my few pounds instead of paying for my passage. In the end I was left almost penniless and stranded in Yokohama. I lodged for a while at a European’s house. He had married a Japanese woman and kept a kind of sailors’ lodging-home. I had some strange companions in my rooms; I think they were Moslem, Buddhist and Brahmin men. They were fierce-looking fellows, wore white turbans and had swarthy faces with curly, close-cropped beards. They knelt on little mats and prayed and chanted day and night. I found out after that one or two of them were Mohammedans. Their ancient-looking faces wore an Omar-Khayyám-like expression; from them I heard about Astoreth and Osiris, Allah, Mahomet, and a lot more about Oriental and Eastern creeds. I noticed that they were all very earnest in their prayers, and when I walked suddenly into my room to fetch my violin one evening two of them were kneeling in prayer at the window, worshipping the sunset. They never turned a hair at my interruption, but went on pouring forth solemn, strange words to the dying fires of Japan’s horizon. It seemed to me then and now that all the so-called creeds were but one vast monotheistic cry in various dialects, each creed a different expression only, all of them instruments in the vast orchestra of life’s drama, playing for the same end—universal, hopeful harmony. The stars vary in magnitude and position, but they are all singing the same earnest melody; for they too are finite, and sing on as those strange men did in the Japanese doss-house at Yokohama.
I strolled along the wharfs at Yokohama harbour with a young English sailor whom I met at the lodging-home. We were both extremely hard up. Alongside the wharf lay the s.s. Port Piree, and we resolved to make a dash for it and stow away. She was due to leave at sunset. The funnel was belching forth smoke; the sailors were standing with their friends on deck. With my violin in my hand I walked straight up the gangway, my comrade just behind me. I was well dressed, and the quartermaster bowed as I slipped on deck and asked to see the skipper. “He’s in his cabin, I think, sir!” “All right,” I said, and beckoning my friend as though he were my valet, I walked across the deck and along the starboard alleyway. We stood by the stokehold entrance and waited our chance. The hatchway to the coal bunkers was open. “Now!” I said. In a moment we had taken the final plunge and disappeared in the ship’s bowels. Scrambling across the coal, we huddled close together and waited. It seemed ages before she went, and then we heard the rattling, rusty chain of the anchor coming up and the throb of the winches, and the engines started; we were off. My dear old comrade beside me, breathing in the darkness, was worth his weight in gold. “We’re off now, Jack,” I said, and he answered: “God knows where to, I don’t!” and laughed. We had some boiled eggs and a cooked fowl, so we ate something and then slept. When we awoke the boat was rolling heavily; it was dark, though possibly daylight up on deck. I curled up by my chum and slept again. Three days after we emerged, starving and sweating, choked with coal-dust and looking like two dissipated negroes.
The chief mate said “Hello?” and we gave a grim smile as he said: “I shall have to take you fellows up to the skipper.” Up we went and stood on the bridge. The skipper gazed at us through the hot sunshine for a moment sternly. No land in sight as the boat cut across the Pacific at twelve knots. “Put them in the stokehold,” he said, and then turned on his heel and started tramping the bridge once more.
By heavens! I was not built for stokehold work. For a week we shovelled coal, and became like skeletons, sweating all our vigour away. Then I played the violin to the engineers, and their chief got the head steward to appeal for my services in the saloon. My comrade had to work still in the stokehold, but I took care that he had good food. I commandeered tins of stewed Californian pears and meat, and built his strength up. He swallowed them down with coal-dust and repaid me with grateful eyes.
For out at sea with sailors a fellowship exists that is almost unknown in the cities of the world. I suppose a ray of the illimitable gets into their brains. The vastness of the ocean, its endless sky-lines, and the ships appearing through them with singing sailors aloft, then passing away, just as stars pass singing something in the uncounted ages of God: these things unconsciously influence their souls and they become children again, forgetting the respectability of civilisation and feeling the humanity that makes men die for each other in the desert spaces and oceans of the world.
Men slumbering in affluence and the tribal pride of some dubious ancestry often appear soulless. Suddenly stricken with some grief or poverty, they reveal something really decent in their natures, something that longed for recognition when the body waxed fat on food and pride—pride in the barbarian deeds of their ancestors, deeds which done now would get the doer ten years in Sing Sing or Wormwood Scrubbs. There’s nothing like living on “hard tack” in a tramp steamer’s fo’c’sle, or on crab-apples in the Australian bush, or in cities by playing the violin, to bring out the best or worst in men. Sorrow writes the true Bible of the universe and expresses all the poetry of existence.
