We both thanked him, and half-an-hour after the chief mate came up to us, and saying, “Here you are,” handed us ten shillings each. They do not always do that when you stowaway, but that was my lucky experience. I can assure you that seafaring men are the bravest and kindest in the world; they know it and its ways by instinct. Whenever I hear of a captain going down with his ship a lump comes up in my throat.
CHAPTER XX
Bombay—My Brother’s Grave—London Streets—Outward Bound—I play at Government House—Ballarat—Mosquitoes—Sightseeing in New Zealand—A Maori Dance
MY next trip took me to Bombay, where I stayed for a few days at the English hotel by Fort Hill. The tropical scenery struck me as very similar to that which I had seen at Colombo, and the heat as terrific, though feathery tamarisks and palms shaded the tracks. The white population were waited on by the natives. My father was correspondent for The Indian Times and my parents had lived in Bombay before I was born. They knew a great many people there. In my pocket I had a letter from home. “If you go to Bombay do go and see Mr and Mrs C——, and whatever you do, dear, be well dressed.” I had heard a lot about those great people when I was a schoolboy, so I did as I was bid and dressed up like a prince. When I arrived at the aristocratic, verandahed building I carefully dusted my boots with my handkerchief and knocked. When the door opened, and I gave my name to the native servants, an old man, the great C—— himself, came forward. He was polite to me, and I was the best-dressed man in the house, so I did not begrudge the money I had paid for the loan of the suit at the Bombay tailor’s!
Before I left Bombay I went to see my little brother’s grave, Gerald Massey S. Middleton. He was buried at Colabba Point, and I discovered his grave at last. A tamarisk tree was growing on it and a few strange flowers. I felt the kinship of that little grave in a strange land; the earth did not hide from imagination’s eyes the little dust beneath, which would have been my big brother if he had lived. I remembered my mother and father saying how they had felt when their ship went by Colabba Point, homeward bound for England, and they stood on deck and gazed inland and thought of their child being left behind. I knew how they must have felt as I stood there alone and gazed upon the little stone set between two large vaults. I felt intensely lonely. The Indian bees moaned in the flowers and palms. I saw my mother, a girl in years that day, standing weeping by her lost child; she still stood there in the sunset and shadow as I dreamed. I kissed her, picked a flower and then walked away, the one solitary mourner that had come after many years, and probably the last.
Next day I joined my ship and arrived in London six weeks later, only again to get a berth and go seaward, for the grim respectability of the city soon haunted me with its stony, nightmare eyes. The very atmosphere seemed to whisper: “Englishman, Englishman, are you respectable? Where’s your Bible, your rent-book and your marriage certificate?” I seemed to hear that humming in my ears as I walked through London’s streets, miserably cold. I shivered, and jumped into a cab at Waterloo and rushed off to Poplar. There was a man who lived there, in Abbot’s Road, who was a crack hand at getting berths on the ships for us.
In a week I was off down Channel, on a Shaw-Saville boat, bound for New Zealand and Australia, as happy as a swallow flying South. The music of the sails, bellowing out and flopping to rest, the rattling rigging, the sailors talking and singing on deck, made me feel intensely happy, and yet half miserable as I thought of the ship sailing across the world to a civilised port. I stood on deck wishing there were undiscovered shores where waves sang, never seen by human eyes, and dreaming of old pioneers and heroes of far-off ages. I seemed to realise at a very early age that the light of the Universe, the sun and stars were my religion, and their mystery my unfathomable mistress with divine eyes.
When the tramp steamer, after toiling along for weeks at sea, sighted land I stood on her deck the longest, as the far-off shores shaped themselves, and fancied I could see the old wooden pioneer ships and galleons that discovered them still hugging the misty shore as sunset died. Often when far out at sea I would stand on the poop by night for hours, gazing astern, watching the star-like eyes of the albatrosses, flitting on the restless winds, till they seemed old heroes, my comrades out of their graves, on beautiful wings following the new ships. Then the mate would touch me on the shoulder and say: “Now then, young man, you didn’t come to sea to dream.” The crew holystoned the decks, the cook swore in the galley as only a sea-cook can swear, and the cabin-boy, who had never been to sea before, said, “Is that New Zealand?” and pointed shoreward. As we rolled along, with all sails set, he stood on his head as soon as my back was turned, for I saw him in the glass of the saloon port-holes. I knew how he felt.
I returned to England on the same ship and then got a berth on the Seneska and went to America. A few years later, and I was again in Australia, on the P. & O. liner Britannia.