During the afternoon the funnel of the Bonadventure had sent forth smoke, and the hooter, hoots; the cold increased, and, having heard that we were to go out at about six, for all my apprehensions I felt eager for that hour. The surroundings were gloomy. The Bonadventure lay in a row of coal-carrying steamers, with something grim about their iron flatness; the Phryne, Marie Nielsen, Sandvik, many another, their cold colours reminding me of the huge blue-painted unexploded shell which once I ventured to help remove from a trench at Givenchy. The grey-green pool swilled sulkily about them: and the red bricks in the background offered no relief to an unprogressive eye. Sooty, hard and bleak, the scene itself urged my impatience to be gone.
A call announced the arrival of the pilot; and, at ten minutes to six, in obedience to a process of which I gathered little, the ship began to move gently out of the dock. The shouts of the pilot on the bridge, his “Hard-a-port,” his “Hard-a-starboard,” were taken up from the forepart of the ship, where a number of substantial figures were at work with winch and cable. The Bonadventure was guided with nice gradation into a channel not much exceeding her own width; on the quay beside men were shouting and scampering; the wireless clerk leaning over against all gravity grabbed a bag of “mail” from one of them; and out we passed. The wind livened. The lights of the town slowly dwindled behind us. Into the channel close after the Bonadventure came the green lamp of another ship. Soon the Bonadventure was definitely, at a growing speed, running down the Bristol Channel, under a veiled sky through which the moon always seemed about to emerge, and among the scattered lights of other ships going into Barry, or waiting in readiness to go in.
The thing had never occurred to me before, and I may be pardoned for reflecting, while I stood watching, in a manner somewhat grandiose. The energy of Man, maker of cathedrals, high-roads, aqueducts, railroads, was passing before me; and this one manifestation of it seemed perhaps the most surprising. The millions of times that this restless creature Man had weighed his anchor and in cockle-shell or galleon or clipper or tramp set out to ferry over the seas at his own sweet will! This matter was now put in a more prosaic light by the wireless clerk, who, beckoning me to a place out of the wind, informed me that at a charge he could, as soon as the Bonadventure was out of touch of land, transmit any message I had for home. With this youngster I tried to speak on his own province, in which I had made some elementary excursions in Flanders times: but this intrusion upon his mysteries appeared to affect him, and I learned only that the modern wireless was different.
The doleful tolling of a bell, later on, with its suggestion of the Inchcape Rock, reached me in my bunk, where, noticing the oscillations of the ship, I had early withdrawn.
IV
My theory of repentance during the first few days at sea was to be fact. At the start, I seemed to myself to be perfectly steady. The breeze blew cold; I thought it even pleasant; and without over-exercise, I took my last views of English coasts, and watched ships ahead of us blackly smudging a vaporous sky. I attended dinner, and began to swell with vanity.
By this time the ship was rolling (after all yesterday’s kind assurances). There was no mistake about it: and my vanity and observation were at once cut short by a surprise attack of sea-sickness. A dismal cowardice came on me. The wind seemed changing, or perhaps–I inquired but little–the course of the ship; the effect needed no inquiry. Time and again, lowering my morale at each arrival, the seas beat in a great crash upon the ship’s sides, and, with the attendant tilt, the scarcely less welcome seethe of the waters flowing down the decks would follow. The ship seemed to be provided with cogs, on which she was raised and lowered with horrible deliberate jolts over a half-circle: then again, the big wave would jump in with a punch like some giant Fitzsimmons. My experience was growing. The sunshine died off the porthole; the breeze was half a gale already, droning and whining louder and louder; and I felt that my breaking-in was to be thorough enough.
Captain Hosea found time, now and then, to look at his passenger. We kept up eloquent discourse, though I was handicapped. The origin of species and the riddle of the universe are topics on which much enlivening debate may occur, and certainly did then; but the floor of the debating society should be made steady and not to lift and lean and recover with a monstrous jerk as a point is being approached. “It’s fierce,” said he, referring to the idea of infinite abyss. I could agree from the smaller one which I myself seemed to be probing.
Sleep was not easy during these early hours of my holiday. I spent an awkward night or two, listening to rattlings of all sorts, the battering-ram shocks of the seas, and the thump of the engines, watching the sweat on the rivets of my roof roll like the bubble in a spirit-level, and my towel float out to an apparent unperpendicular side to side. In this state of things I easily came to know the features of my cabin, described on the door-key as “spare cabin port.” Amidships it was, between the wireless operator’s premises and the captain’s. The porthole faced the poop, and more immediately, the ship’s squat funnel. Beneath the porthole, a padded seat was fixed; and I had on one length of the room a disused radiator, a chest of drawers and a washstand with mirror, where, despite a ventilator above, light rarely seemed to come. On the opposite length there was a tall malodorous cupboard and two bunk beds, of which I chose the lower one from sound instinct at the beginning, keeping to it from force of habit afterwards. Such was my dwelling; but I must not fail to mention the electric light and fan. The place was painted white, but its past use as a store had variegated it.