Lighters of the local type, very long and narrow, were already alongside when the tugs swung the first elevator into his place. The huge floating turret looked somewhat like a smock mill. The stevedores quickly made fast their tackle: four large drain-pipe tubes were let down into the chosen hold, and the suckers commenced. There was a drumming boom of machinery, mixed with the swish of the ingulfing of the grain and its disgorging through broader conduits on the other side of the elevator into the river barges. It grew dark, the red and green railway lights burned fiercely in brisk air against the last of an orange sunset. But the elevator was kept at work, and arc lights hung over the hold showed the novel scene of the sliding grain and its trimmers.
One effect of the late-continued drone and thud of the elevator was to torment me with war dreams. First I was in an attack, among great rocks, under a violent barrage; then, on one of those unforgettable raw, dark mornings, I was at the window of a great ruined house behind the line, watching the bleary effulgence of the Very lights starting up here and there and expecting the worst from a nasty silence, only pierced by single shell-bursts. Then, beside the elevator, an infuriated and intoxicated bargee stood on the landing-stage about midnight bawling for a boat which didn’t come. His patience was, however, considerable; he bawled for a long hour. In consequence, I suppose, of these matters I arrived very late at breakfast amid the usual cries of “You Jonah, you!”
The second elevator arrived, and, like some great iron insect with many beaks, began to swallow up the grain from the holds aft. The ship shook with the speed and power of the pumping machinery; the long lighters with their great round-table steering wheels filled up, battened down, and swung away. In one of the holds there were the bags put in at Ingeniero White; under them again lay the yellow grain in mass. The elevator’s proboscis dipped into that grain, while the trimmers unstowed, slit and emptied the sacks; so the ship began to lighten, and her bow already stood high out of the water.
The red evening sky was smoky with cold; then the stars sparkled with frost; and a small gathering enjoyed the oil stove in Bicker’s room. The steward, in unusual radiance, came in presently, and sang a long song concerning a tramp who was flung off a freight train by a brakesman. “Because he was only a tramp” (dying fall).
This might have been a comment on Mr. W. H. Davies’ Autobiography. Warmed with his singing and other helps, the steward began to recall his acquaintance (on guard) with Royalty, and spun off at tangents with affairs half a century more recent: “That b— flaming butcher– I was going to hit him with a box of matches,” and other incidents. I was sorry to hear the lank Chips, the next morning, bawling at the entrance of the saloon a complaint about the toughness of his meat; the steward’s new mood deserved anything but that sort of damper.
XXX
With little to do, I fought a sort of pillow fight with Meacock, our weapons being sacks well stuffed; he won, of course, but it was a popular bout. Then there were acrobatic performances on the stays of the funnel. The need I had for training appeared on our last night in Emden Port, when my sleep was nipped in the bud by the entry of Bicker and Mead. Both had the clear spirits raised, in two senses; both thickened voices already thick enough. They were disguised (Mead’s fancy, I warrant) as members of the Ku-Klux-Klan; and besides their costume one bore a revolver, the other an air gun impounded from an apprentice. I was ordered out of bed, but wished to stop; we argued about it and by good luck I hung on. After this, insidious, they declared that a lady who knew me and wished to see me had come aboard. This flight of fancy and flow of language went on until they sought variety, which they found in painting the unfortunate Tich in the alley below in several colours.
The German police, green men and true, watched the ship closely. It was rumoured that a shipping clerk and a young woman had eloped and were aboard one of the tramps. “Love in a foc’sle,” especially ours, was considered no bad joke.
One more home circle was held in the starboard alleyway towards midnight; gin very prevalent, and the steward also. He fell into a sequence of army recollections, which (as the glass was thrust replenished into his hand) began on this pattern, “Well, I’m telling you, Mister, at three in the afternoon of March the twelfth 1873, we was parading outside the Queen’s pavilion....” Once more also Mead and myself made our way into Emden. The old nooks of buildings and the vistas of narrow thoroughfares and lazy waterways, the shops and the folk, all made a kindly picture; after supper, we avoided a downpour of sleet in a café with an orchestra, whose repertory of 4,000 pieces included two by English composers, and his name was Sullivan. On our midnight way home, we stopped at a Dutchman’s bar and asked for and got a dozen hard-boiled eggs for a second supper aboard. I was carrying a parcel in hand and two bottles, or rather gas-cylinders, of gin in the lining of my mackintosh when we reached the German sentry-box beside the Quay. He puffed at his pipe as he felt the parcel and saw that all was well.