“Why, about four the So-and-so passed us, and the mate on watch signalled us: ‘Do you know the result of Tottenham v. Cardiff City?’ So we sent back that Cardiff had won but we didn’t know the score. This fellow sent back: ‘Oh, well done, Cardiff!’ but he was that excited, he could scarcely hit out a letter right. His first message had been–well, beautifully sent; now his lamp was all over the place.”
“We could almost see him dancing about the bridge!”
Spragg, the assistant steward, sometimes came to swab my cabin. He had been in a battalion of the 38th Division, when my own Division relieved them in January 1917 on the Canal Bank at Ypres; and he had been like myself a witness and a part of the mammoth preparations of that summer, which ended in such terrible failure. His manner and humorous way of telling tales beside which the “Pit and Pendulum” appears to me an idle piece of pleasantry, unspeakably brought back the queer times and places which we had both seen. I saw him in my mind’s eye, keen and frank, standing behind his kit with “headquarters company”–those amiable wits–at Elverdinghe Château (Von Kluck’s rumoured country seat, for it was never in my time bombarded); or with pick or shovel stooping along in the Indian file of dark forms towards that vaunted, flimsy breastwork, Pioneer Trench at Festubert.
But still my share of Mead’s watch was my best recreation. Our talk was disturbed but little; perhaps by the signals of some ship passing by, or by some unusual noise, such as one evening we heard with a slight shock. A succession of rifle-shots, it sounded; and the cause was evidently some great fish departing by leaps and bounds from the approach of that greater one the Bonadventure. The interruption over, he would go on with plans for a future in Malay. “This life,” he would say, “is killing me.” He was quite as healthy, mind and body, as any man aboard. I liked his occasional rhapsodies, in which the smell of burning sandalwood and of cotton trees, the clearings in sinister forests with the jewelled birds, the rough huts, the dark ladies with the hibiscus flowers in their hair, and the lone white settler (ex-digger Mead) thinking his thoughts in the evening, all played their part. He wished the world back in 1860; it had outdistanced him.
XXIV
It blew from the north-east strong against us always, and we were travelling more slowly. The sun returned, however, among those ethereal white clouds which to perfection fulfil the poet’s word “Pavilions”; we ran on into a dark sea ridged and rilled with glintering silver, yet seemed never to reach it, remaining in a bright blue race of waters scattered, port and starboard, with white wreaths, waters leaping from the heavy flanks of the ship in a seethe of gossamer atoms and glass-green cascade.
The immediate scene was one of painters and paint-pots, and linen flying on the lines. “This wind’s playing hell with my curls,” said one or two. The matter with me was, that my room was almost untenable. I opened the port at my peril; to do so was to entertain billows of coal-dust from the bunkers below. White paint, the order of the day, whether flat white or white enamel, made progress about the ship by an amateur dangerous, too.
The apparition of the steward under the evening lamps dressed in a smock–he was of ample make–and brandishing a paint-brush, was generally enjoyed. In fact, several spectators came to take a careful look at one who was too often denominated “the mouldy-headed old b—.”
A more tenuous apparition was heard of, as we ran north. Whether a hoax or not, I do not know. My first information of it came in the form of a drawing by the apprentice Tich, showing the ship’s bell being struck by a hand who never was on land or sea, and the apprentice Lamb leaving his hold of the wheel in horror, and even Mead shaking all over and gaping. A poem appended said that the facts were what the picture made out. The Bonadventure was so new a ship–her old name, showing her war origin, still stood on the bells and the blue prints in the chart-room and elsewhere–that there seemed every likelihood against the story being the truth. I asked Mead, and he told me what he maintained to be true.